Name: The Canterbury Tales
Uploaded: 2016-12-06T00:49:25.000Z
Duration: 43 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales is a collection of over

20 stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century, during

the time of the Hundred Years' War. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest

by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine

of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal

at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. After a long list of works written earlier

in his career, including Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame, and "Parliament of Fowls",

The Canterbury Tales was Chaucer's magnum opus. He uses the tales and the descriptions

of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, and

particularly of the Church. Structurally, the collection resembles The Decameron, which

Chaucer may have read during his first diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372.

It is sometimes argued that the greatest contribution that this work made to English literature

was in popularising the literary use of the vernacular, English, rather than French or

Latin. English had, however, been used as a literary language for centuries before Chaucer's

life, and several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet—also

wrote major literary works in English. It is unclear to what extent Chaucer was responsible

for starting a trend rather than simply being part of it.

While Chaucer clearly states the addressees of many of his poems, the intended audience

of The Canterbury Tales is more difficult to determine. Chaucer was a courtier, leading

some to believe that he was mainly a court poet who wrote exclusively for nobility.

Text The question of whether The Canterbury Tales

is finished has not yet been answered. There are 83 known manuscripts of the work from

the late medieval and early Renaissance period, more than any other vernacular literary text

with the exception of The Prick of Conscience. This is taken as evidence of the tales' popularity

during the century after Chaucer's death. Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought

to have been complete at one time, while 28 are so fragmentary that it is difficult to

ascertain whether they were copied individually or as part of a set. The Tales vary in both

minor and major ways from manuscript to manuscript; many of the minor variations are due to copyists'

errors, while others suggest that Chaucer added to and revised his work as it was being

copied and (possibly) distributed. Even the earliest surviving manuscripts are

not Chaucer's originals, the oldest being MS Peniarth 392 D (called "Hengwrt"), compiled

by a scribe shortly after Chaucer's death. The most beautiful of the manuscripts of the

tales is the Ellesmere Manuscript, and many editors have followed the order of the Ellesmere

over the centuries, even down to the present day. The first version of The Canterbury Tales

to be published in print was William Caxton's 1478 edition. Since this print edition was

created from a now-lost manuscript, it is counted as among the 83 manuscripts.

Order No authorial, arguably complete version of

the Tales exists and no consensus has been reached regarding the order in which Chaucer

intended the stories to be placed. Textual and manuscript clues have been adduced

to support the two most popular modern methods of ordering the tales. Some scholarly editions

divide the Tales into ten "Fragments". The tales that comprise a Fragment are closely

related and contain internal indications of their order of presentation, usually with

one character speaking to and then stepping aside for another character. However, between

Fragments, the connection is less obvious. Consequently, there are several possible orders;

the one most frequently seen in modern editions follows the numbering of the Fragments (ultimately

based on the Ellesmere order). Victorians frequently used the nine "Groups", which was

the order used by Walter William Skeat whose edition Chaucer: Complete Works was used by

Oxford University Press for most of the twentieth century, but this order is now seldom followed.

An alternative ordering (seen in an early manuscript containing the Canterbury Tales,

the early-fifteenth century Harley MS. 7334) places Fragment VIII before VI. Fragments

I and II almost always follow each other, as do VI and VII, IX and X in the oldest manuscripts.

Fragments IV and V, by contrast are located in varying locations from manuscript to manuscript.

Language Although no manuscript exists in Chaucer's

own hand, two were copied around the time of his death by Adam Pinkhurst, a scribe with

whom he seems to have worked closely before, giving a high degree of confidence that Chaucer

himself wrote the Tales. Chaucer's generation of English-speakers was among the last to

pronounce e at the end of words (so for Chaucer the word "care" was pronounced, not /ˈkɛər/

as in modern English). This meant that later copyists tended to be inconsistent in their

copying of final -e and this for many years gave scholars the impression that Chaucer

himself was inconsistent in using it. It has now been established, however, that -e was

an important part of Chaucer's morphology (having a role in distinguishing, for example,

singular adjectives from plural and subjunctive verbs from indicative). The pronunciation

of Chaucer's writing otherwise differs most prominently from Modern English in that his

language had not undergone the Great Vowel Shift: pronouncing Chaucer's vowels as they

would be pronounced today in European languages like Italian, Spanish or German generally

produces pronunciations more like Chaucer's own than Modern English pronunciation would.

In addition, sounds now written in English but not pronounced were still pronounced by

Chaucer: the word less than knightgreater than for Chaucer was, not. The pronunciation

of Chaucer's poetry can now be reconstructed fairly confidently through detailed philological

research; the following gives an IPA reconstruction of the opening lines of The Merchant's Prologue;

it is likely, moreover, that when a word ending in a vowel was followed by a word beginning

in a vowel, the two vowels were elided into one syllable, as seen here (with care and...):

Sources No other work prior to Chaucer's is known

to have set a collection of tales within the framework of pilgrims on a pilgrimage. It

is obvious, however, that Chaucer borrowed portions, sometimes very large portions, of

his stories from earlier stories, and that his work was influenced by the general state

of the literary world in which he lived. Storytelling was the main entertainment in England at the

time, and storytelling contests had been around for hundreds of years. In 14th-century England

the English Pui was a group with an appointed leader who would judge the songs of the group.

The winner received a crown and, as with the winner of the Canterbury Tales, a free dinner.

It was common for pilgrims on a pilgrimage to have a chosen "master of ceremonies" to

guide them and organise the journey. Harold Bloom suggests that the structure is mostly

original, but inspired by the "pilgrim" figures of Dante and Virgil in The Divine Comedy.

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio contains more parallels to the Canterbury Tales than

any other work. Like the Tales, it features a number of narrators who tell stories along

a journey they have undertaken (to flee from the Black Plague). It ends with an apology

by Boccaccio, much like Chaucer's Retraction to the Tales. A quarter of the tales in Canterbury

Tales parallel a tale in the Decameron, although most of them have closer parallels in other

stories. Some scholars thus find it unlikely that Chaucer had a copy of the work on hand,

surmising instead that he must have merely read the Decameron at some point. Each of

the tales has its own set of sources which have been suggested by scholars, but a few

sources are used frequently over several tales. These include poetry by Ovid, the Bible in

one of the many vulgate versions it was available in at the time (the exact one is difficult

to determine), and the works of Petrarch and Dante. Chaucer was the first author to utilise

the work of these last two, both Italians. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy appears

in several tales, as do the works of John Gower, a known friend to Chaucer. A full list

is impossible to outline in little space, but Chaucer also, lastly, seems to have borrowed

from numerous religious encyclopaedias and liturgical writings, such as John Bromyard's

Summa praedicantium, a preacher's handbook, and Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum. Many scholars

say there is a good possibility Chaucer met Petrarch or Boccaccio.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Canterbury Tales

journey

structure

destination

audience