The Canterbury Tales

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

THE CANTERBURY TALES

GEOFFREY CHAUCER (1340–1400), the son of a London wine-merchant, was sponsored into courtly circles from a young age, beginning his career as a page in the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, wife of Edward III’s son Lionel, Duke of Clarence. As a squire serving in Edward III’s army when the king invaded France in 1359, he was captured at the siege of Rheims, and subsequently ransomed. A few years later he married Philippa de Roet, a lady-in-waiting to Constance of Castile, the second wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. At some time, in his steady association with powerful men and women, Chaucer began to write poetry for their entertainment. His earliest work seems to have been a translation of at least the beginning of the popular French poem, The Romance of the Rose. His earliest independent work was The Book of the Duchess, composed in 1369 on the first anniversary of the death of John of Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche. He served in various campaigns in France and Spain, and twice visited Italy as a negotiator on important diplomatic missions. By the age of 31 he was working in the civil service as a clerk, but at a very advanced level, in the employ of the king, overseeing the very delicate and important collection of the important duties charged on the ‘Wools, Skins, and Hides’ in the port of London. During this period his poetry grew more ambitious, with wide-ranging explorations of literary tradition and authority (The House of Fame), love and marriage (The Parliament of Fowls), and the human condition in the face of inevitable and immeasurable loss (Troilus and Cressida). In 1386 he became a Justice of the Peace and Knight of the Shire to represent Kent in Parliament. Soon afterwards his wife died, and he seems to have devoted the rest of his life to composing the Canterbury Tales. A certain number of his earlier works were taken up into this ambitious and extraordinarily varied collection, but, as a scheme for new writing, it also seems to have grown ever more elaborate and was far from finished when Chaucer died (it would appear, suddenly) in 1400.

DAVID WRIGHT was Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds. Besides his collected poems, To the Gods the Shades, he has published an autobiography, Deafness, edited the poems of Hardy and Edward Thomas, and translated Beowulf into modern English prose. He died in 1994.

CHRISTOPHER CANNON is Professor of English at New York University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He has written The Making of Chaucer’s English (1998), The Grounds of English Literature (2004), and Middle English Literature: A Cultural History (2008).

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

The Canterbury Tales

A verse translation by

DAVID WRIGHT

With an Introduction and Notes by

CHRISTOPHER CANNON

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Verse translation © David Wright 1985 Translations of The Tale of Melibee and The Parson’s Tale, editorial material © Christopher Cannon 2011

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First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998

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ISBN 978–0–19–959902–8

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For
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CONTENTS

Introduction

Note on the Translation

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of Geoffrey Chaucer

THE CANTERBURY TALES

Fragment I (Group A)

General Prologue

The Knight’s Tale

The Miller’s Prologue

The Miller’s Tale

The Reeve’s Prologue

The Reeve’s Tale

The Cook’s Prologue

The Cook’s Tale

Fragment II (Group B1)

Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale

The Man of Law’s Prologue

The Man of Law’s Tale

The Epilogue of the Man of Law’s Tale

Fragment III (Group D)

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue

The Wife of Bath’s Tale

The Friar’s Prologue

The Friar’s Tale

The Summoner’s Prologue

The Summoner’s Tale

Fragment IV (Group E)

The Clerk’s Prologue

The Clerk’s Tale

The Merchant’s Prologue

The Merchant’s Tale

Epilogue to the Merchant’s Tale

Fragment V (Group F)

The Squire’s Prologue

The Squire’s Tale

The Franklin’s Prologue

The Franklin’s Tale

Fragment VI (Group C)

The Physician’s Tale

The Pardoner’s Prologue

The Pardoner’s Tale

Fragment VII (Group B2)

The Shipman’s Tale

The Prioress’s Prologue

The Prioress’s Tale

The Prologue to Sir Topaz

Sir Topaz

The Prologue to the Tale of Melibee

The Tale of Melibee (abridged and translated by Christopher Cannon)

The Monk’s Prologue

The Monk’s Tale

The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

Epilogue to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale

Fragment VIII (Group G)

The Second Nun’s Prologue

The Second Nun’s Tale

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale

Fragment IX (Group H)

The Manciple’s Prologue

The Manciple’s Tale

Fragment X (Group I)

The Parson’s Prologue

The Parson’s Tale (abridged and translated by Christopher Cannon)

Chaucer’s Retractions

Explanatory Notes

INTRODUCTION

THE ‘tales of Canterbury’, as Chaucer refers to his last and most ambitious poem, describe a fictional journey from the Tabard Inn in Southwark, just outside London, to Canterbury, sixty miles away. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 to 1170, had been brutally murdered in his cathedral over a disagreement with Henry II (1133–89), and, after Becket was canonized (in 1173), Canterbury became one of the most important sites for pilgrimage in the Christian West. The group assembled in the Tabard have a very serious purpose, then, and the Canterbury Tales is, at root, an equally serious exploration of social life (in what good and bad ways people may live together) and human purpose (as a character in the Knight’s Tale puts it, ‘What is this life? What should men wish to have?’). But it is also a poem that is equally serious about noticing and appreciating the comedy that comes from human foibles.