The six short texts that comprise the basic curriculum for beginning students (the collections of proverbs, beast fables, mini-epics, and elegies that made up what is sometimes called the Libri catoniani) are still shaping the poetry Chaucer writes at the end of his life. In the 1360s Chaucer translated the Old French Romance of the Rose (1230 and 1275), an allegory describing the wooing of a lady by her lover, and its themes and many aspects of its structure substantially influence the style and genre of Chaucer’s early work. Two of the romance’s most striking figures (‘False Seeming’ and ‘The Old Woman’) are the basis of Chaucer’s most memorable and vivacious pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales (the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath). Chaucer must have read Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308–21) in the late 1370s since the House of Fame offers a delightful parody of some of its key elements, while also offering a searching exploration of how any poet can hope to succeed in the face of great predecessors such as Dante. Chaucer also read a number of works by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) in this period, and as his poetry grew increasingly ambitious he turned to Boccaccio again and again for source material and inspiration: Palamon and Arcite (later incorporated into the Canterbury Tales as the Knight’s Tale) is based on Boccaccio’s Teseida (1340–1) and Troilus and Criseyde is based on Boccaccio’s Filostrato (1335–40). In the middle of the 1380s, Chaucer also decided to translate Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a sixthcentury treatise (mixing sections of poetry and prose) that draws on the whole tradition of ancient philosophy in order to explain the nature of misfortune so that it might be more easily endured. Chaucer internalized the Consolation so deeply that whole passages from it turn up as the very words and thoughts of his most important characters.

The Plan of the Canterbury Tales

At some point in the late 1380s Chaucer conceived the idea of the Canterbury Tales and, perhaps because his career in the civil service had earned him sufficient wealth and position—or perhaps because he finally wanted to devote himself exclusively to writing poetry—this idea gradually grew until it absorbed all of his attention. Chaucer probably derived the structure of the Tales from Boccaccio, whose Decameron (1350–3) also creates a frame-tale to surround a sequence of narratives. But where Boccaccio’s collection is rigorously ordered (ten tales per day are told over ten days, in a fixed place, with each day of tales involving a particular theme) Chaucer’s frame is not only loose, but disordered by design. Despite the Host’s attempt to organize proceedings, the Miller and the Reeve quickly take matters into their own hands, and, as the pilgrims spill out into and along the road to Canterbury, it is the drama of their interactions that dictates what tales will get told, by whom, and when. Some tales (the Monk’s and the Tale of Sir Topaz) are begun but never finished (they are interrupted because the pilgrims find them either unpleasant or bad). The Canon’s Yeoman joins the group after they are well under way and then tells a tale of his own. A storytelling contest that moves further and further away from its initial plan has an inherent liveliness, but it is also a very convenient structure for a poet like Chaucer who clearly had a drawer full of unfinished or unsatisfactory poems which could be inserted, without alteration, so that they could be interrupted or decried by the pilgrims as ‘bad’. Because Chaucer refers to them in the Legend of Good Women as free-standing poems, it is also clear that the fully finished poems, the Knight’s Tale and the Second Nun’s Tale, existed long before Chaucer had conceived the idea of the Tales. And because Chaucer seems to draw on it for language and ideas in a large number of other tales it is equally likely that he had already written the treatise that would become the Parson’s Tale.

The Canterbury Tales is not only incomplete by design, however, it is unfinished by accident. The two facts are surprisingly related because, even though the Host proposes a scheme in which each pilgrim will tell more tales than they ever actually tell, by the end of the Tales it is clear that Chaucer’s plan is much simpler (rather than two tales in each direction, each pilgrim tells only one tale and only on the way to Canterbury); since it is most likely that the beginning of the Tales was written later, Chaucer must have been revising the Tales to make them more ambitious and more difficult to finish as he went along. Chaucer must also have died suddenly, either after a short illness or a catastrophic accident, but he also never took the opportunity to reconcile many loose ends of the most minor sort (the Shipman’s Tale uses a few pronouns which suggest it is being told by a woman; the Second Nun’s Tale uses a phrase that suggests it is being told by a man; the Man of Law says that he will speak in prose when he delivers a tale in verse). Chaucer also failed to write many of the passages linking the tales he had written, begun, or simply earmarked for final inclusion in the collection, and so the Tales not only falls into ten distinct pieces (usually called ‘fragments’), but, with the exception of the first and last of these, it is difficult to know what order Chaucer intended for the whole. The scribe who made the first complete copies of the Tales (by hand, since the printing press would not arrive in Britain for eighty-five years) did the best that really could be done, and his scheme is followed in most editions and in this translation. This deep uncertainty about the order of the Canterbury Tales presents an even larger interpretative challenge for anyone trying to assign larger meaning to the whole, however, since any perception of cumulative meanings may simply be an illusion born out of the particular order in which the Tales are being read.

Gender and Power

One of the earliest and most persuasive readings derived from the modern printed order of the Tales was the suggestion, by George Kittredge (1860–1941), that, at the ‘centre’ of the collection, was something that should be understood as the ‘Marriage Group’. Kittredge was referring to the explosive quality of the Wife of Bath’s prologue, which is so provocative that the Wife has been interrupted twice before she has even begun her tale. But he was also thinking of the Tales in their standard order as a work akin to a novel (with continuous characters and a developing plot), so that, once a provocative idea is introduced it is ‘developed’ over the course of a number of tales. The Wife of Bath is designed with the strongest of personalities and, to an audience comprised almost entirely of men (the only other female pilgrims are the Prioress and the nun attending her), she claims to have taken advantage of her five husbands. It is therefore inevitable that the other tales that focus on the issue of marriage will seem in some way to respond to her views, particularly since those tales seem to describe a very neatly schematic set of complementary scenarios, one in which the wife is completely subservient (the Clerk’s Tale), another in which the husband thinks he is in control but is being duped (the Merchant’s Tale), and a marriage of such successful mutuality that it seems capable of surviving a betrayal (the Franklin’s Tale). It helps that the standard sequence unfolds these tales with the successful marriage ‘last’, as if the extremes must be examined before the ‘plot’ of the Tales as a whole can move to a fitting ‘conclusion’. But of course we have no idea in what order these tales were written, and, in fact, in what may be the oldest copy of the Canterbury Tales we have, this ‘group’ is broken up and the Clerk’s Tale follows the Franklin’s Tale anyway.

Kittredge’s failure to take in such uncertainties about the order of the Tales does not invalidate his insight that the collection has distinct centres, but these ‘centres’ are not spatial—they are not ‘grouped’ together physically—but are, rather, centres of meaning, concerns so important to such a number of tales that they become fundamental to the meaning of the collection as a whole. Kittredge was also right that the dynamics of power between men and women was one of these (although ‘marriage’ is not the only form in which that dynamic matters); in fact, the subject was so important to Chaucer that it not only extends to many more parts of the Tales than Kittredge identified, but is basic to much of Chaucer’s other poetry. Troilus and Criseyde (1381–6), for example, while deeply influenced by the Consolation of Philosophy, finds the grounds for its philosophical explorations in the difficulties faced by a man and a woman trying to forge a successful relationship. Since Troilus is a Trojan and the son of the king, and Criseyde’s father is a traitor who has defected to the Greeks besieging Troy, the fate of a whole civilization and the pressures of a great war are brought to bear on these two people and their search for a way to declare their love honestly. That the war itself has been caused by the abduction of a Greek woman (Helen) by the Trojan who fell in love with her (Paris) is no accident, and suggests at a different level that the relationship between a man and a woman can be so important as to be a political problem.