Disorganized Series of Fragments?
The structure of the Canterbury Tales has been debated for ages. Is there even a known or obvious structure, or was Chaucer just rambling on? Many scholars and critics feel these ways and try to organize the tales
A little Backround
It is also known that he did not complete the entire tales as he designed it. Chaucer structured the tales so that each pilgrim would tell four tales, leading to a total over one hundred tales. Unfortunately, Chaucer only completed twenty-four tales, not even completing one tale for each pilgrim.
Most people know all or most of the characters in the tales. Not many know that The Manciple’s Tale and The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale were not originally added by Chaucer. A few authors of manuscripts, following Chaucer’s death, added them in.
The two most common versions used today come from two different Middle English manuscripts known as the Ellesmere and the Hengwrt manuscripts. The Ellesmere is more famous because it contains miniature pictures of the pilgrims based on Chaucer’s descriptions. The Hengwrt manuscript differs from the Ellesmere because it lacks the Canon’ Yeoman’s Prologue and tale, part of the Parson’s Tale, and several of the tales’ prologues.
The structure of the Tales is indebted to Boccaccio’s Decameron. (The Knight’s Tales was an English version of a tale by Boccaccio.) We know of six tales that have possible sources in the Decameron: the Miller’s, the Reeve’s, the Clerk’s, the Merchant’s, the Franklin’s, and the Shipman’s.
Some Suggestions of Order
There is a new proposed order for the Tales. It looks at the transformation of natural change in: human society (Knight’s to Cook’s), magic (Second Nun’s to Pardoner’s), moral transformation (Man of Law’s to Shipman’s), and spiritual change (Prioress’s to Parson’s).
Some believe the order should be geographical, as to wear the stories take place or where the story teller is from. Others believe it should be structured according to the nature and relationship of the six characters:
The Knight is first and tells an honorable tale. Next is the Miller, who tells a bawdy tale that is completely opposite and has no obvious connection to the Knight’s. The Miller makes is “disparaging” older men. After the Miller, we have the Reeve’s (the Reeve is an older man). He takes offensive and tells a tale of a dishonest Miller. These two tales have a visible connection. The Cook is to follow but is only 50 lines. Following this is the Man of Law’s which speaks of the glory of marriage. Following him is the Wife of Bath and she complains of marriage and contradicts the Man of Law’s tale. Next we have the Friar who exposes the Summoner as a fraud and in turn the Summoner tells about a Friar going to hell and that’s where all the Friars go. The Clerk’s and the Merchant contradict each other with the honesty of women. The tales go on.
Summing it up
An important early plea for caution when discussing the issues of order among the Canterbury Tales: the textual fragments may never be resolved into “organic unity.” Chaucer, at his death, left a group of fragments that better reflect the stages in a developing plan than a unified work.
Boccaccio's Decameron
Is a work in which ten nobles from Florence, to escape the plague, stay in a country villa and amuse each other by each telling tales.
Is Chaucer ready for the 21st Century?
He’d better be. Technology today is trying to unite the original Canterbury Tales, with original translation, to today’s society. The project, known as The Canterbury Tales Project, plans to attempt this. This project plans to recreate Chaucer’s original Canterbury Tales, in Middle English, and place it on CD Roms and the Internet. This will help scholars and others with any research.
The Canterbury Tales Project (The CTP)
The CTP has two major aims. Their first aim is to find out, as closely as they can, what Chaucer actually wrote. The second aim is to arrive at a history of the whole textual tradition.
With the first aim, they begin with a large and complex textual tradition: establish a narrative history of the textual tradition. This entails collecting every manuscript ever created. Once they have a clear sense of the order that the manuscripts were written, they can see which ones appear to be the closet to the original. This will then in turn help to filter out Chaucer’s own text from the manuscripts.
The second aim incorporates an evolutionary biology called PAUP. This is an acronym for the impressive-sounding Phylogenetic Analysis using Parsimony. This analysis takes the mass of regularised words in each manuscript, which gives an indication of the manuscripts that share similar patterns of regularised words and the manuscripts that have significant deviations.
The manuscripts can be best shown in a tree diagram. The two well known manuscripts are the Ellesmere (El) and the Hengwrt (Hg). These two manuscripts are found at the base of the tree which indicates that they are the closest manuscripts to Chaucer’s original. The manuscripts that follow then go from how close they are to the above stated manuscripts.
Now as for the regularized words, they are what the The CTP look for to find similarities. In The General Prologue, the first line reads, “When that Auevell wt his shoures soote,” according to the Oxford. Now of all the manuscripts, 34 of them use this line. Since this sentence appears in 34, the words that create it become regularized. Once a word is regularized, its subtly realigned to reflect its presence in a larger family or words. With this in mind, there are 7,000 words in The General Prologue, produced around 16,000 regularized variants.
What does it all mean?
Scholars believe that Chaucer meant most of what we do have of the Canterbury Tales to assume the order of the Ellesmere order and look at how the Ellesmere does the following:
Junctures, headlinks, and abrupt beginnings much as we have
them.
This story of a pilgrimage has some textual implications:
We recall a whole book with beginning and end.
We see a highly structured, symmetrical whole.
The idea of a whole implicates ideas of order and time, of
Creator and created, of eternity and change ideas recalled
through the opening images.
This whole with its cosmic implications is expressed
paradoxically as unfolding in time, in a state.
The tales told in the Canterbury Tales, concern the world in time and its ways, as relevant to at least 3 domains of life:
The public, the domestic, and the private.
"When that Auevell wt his shoures soote."
Although 35 manuscripts use this line, the word "Auevell" appears in several different forms which as follows:
Aprillis April Aprylle Aueryll Aprill Apirles Aprilles
In all there were 19 variations in the 35 relevant manuscripts. After researching the manuscripts and the possible variants, the variants were reduced to the follwoing 2 spellings (along with the one in the line above):
Aprill Aueryll
The manuscript, produced on vellum at a London scriptorium about 1410, takes its name from the Ellesmere collection, established by lawyer, Sir Thomas Egerton, in the late sixteenth century, who was Solicitor General and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth I as well as Baron Ellesmere under James I. The manuscript is believed to have entered the collection while in the care of Egerton's son, the first Earl of Bridgewater, for whom John Milton wrote Comus. It remained in the Ellesmere collection until 1916, when it was sold to book collector, Henry E. Huntington. It remains in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
http://www.uwm.edu/Library/special/exhibits/clastext/clspg075.htm
I figured a story titled "Cathedral" would be about a church, but this story was alittle different. The image of a church didn't appear until the end. I'm not sure if the Cathedral played a big part with the view that I took with this story
This story, my class approximated, had been written during the late 60's or early 70's. This struck me as odd. The woman in this story, known only as wife, was dominate over her husband, which is also the narrator. She has a guest Robert, a blindman which whom she worked for in her youth, coming to visit. She instructs her husband on how to behave, and to keep his mouth shut for the most part. When he does speak, she gives him a disapproving look. This can be seen when the wife goes upstairs to change into her pink robe and slippers. She comes back down stairs and says "What's that smell?" Her husband replies, "We thought we'd have us some cannabis." The wife then gives her husband "a savage look."
At this point the wife sits inbetween the two men. A woman during this time would not sit with her husband between another man. She has a few drinks with the guys and smokes some weed with them also. She is equal to her husband.
The wife also wants to know what is going on. At the end, we find the husband and Robert drawing a Cathedral. The husband is drawing and Robert is following his hand. The wife wakes up and states, "What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know." Men during that time didn't anwer to women. Women had to anwer to them. The husband though is starting to stand up to her by not answering her.
This story does not appear to be gender role correct with the time. I think that this was a way for women to take a stand and be equal with men. Women were on their way and this author was just helping them along.
I'm Rachel and this is my cat house. I'm a Secondary English Education major, with Literature and Inclusion Certification. I am a "Shakespearian" at heart and I love poetry (especially the Reniessance and Romantic poets.) :) I'm sure that these areas will come out in my blogs.