User:Israr Ahmed Tanoli

Literature and language.history of English literature.phonetics and phonologyhistoryworld.net	Menu > HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Search

Page 1 of 5  Next >

Middle Ages Alliterative verse Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain Chaucer at court Troilus and Criseyde The Canterbury Tales 16th century Shakespeare 17th century 18th century Early 19th century Alliterative verse: 8th - 14th century

The story of English literature begins with the Germanic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon settlers. Beowulf stands at its head.

This epic poem of the 8th century is in Anglo-Saxon, now more usually described as Old English. It is incomprehensible to a reader familiar only with modern English. Even so, there is a continuous linguistic development between the two. The most significant turning point, from about 1100, is the development of Middle English - differing from Old English in the addition of a French vocabulary after the Norman conquest. French and Germanic influences subsequently compete for the mainstream role in English literature.

The French poetic tradition inclines to lines of a regular metrical length, usually linked by rhyme into couplets or stanzas. German poetry depends more on rhythm and stress, with repeated consonants (alliteration) to bind the phrases. Elegant or subtle rhymes have a courtly flavour. The hammer blows of alliteration are a type of verbal athleticism more likely to draw applause in a hall full of warriors.

Both traditions achieve a magnificent flowering in England in the late 14th century, towards the end of the Middle English period. Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain are masterpieces which look back to Old English. By contrast Chaucer, a poet of the court, ushers in a new era of English literature. Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain: 14th century

Of these two great English alliterative poems, the second is entirely anonymous and the first virtually so. The narrator of Piers Plowman calls himself Will; occasional references in the text suggest that his name may be Langland. Nothing else, apart from this poem, is known of him.

Piers Plowman exists in three versions, the longest amounting to more than 7000 lines. It is considered probable that all three are by the same author. If so he spends some twenty years, from about 1367, adjusting and refining his epic creation.

Piers the ploughman is one of a group of characters searching for Christian truth in the complex setting of a dream. Though mainly a spiritual quest, the work also has a political element. It contains sharply observed details of a corrupt and materialistic age (Wycliffe is among Langland's English contemporaries).

Where Piers Plowman is tough and gritty, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (dating from the same period) is more polished in its manner and more courtly in its content. The characters derive partly from Arthurian legend. A mysterious green knight arrives one Christmas at the court of King Arthur. He invites any knight to strike him with an axe and to receive the blow back a year later. Gawain accepts the challenge. He cuts off the head of the green knight, who rides away with it.

The rest of the poem concerns Gawain, a year later, at the green knight's castle. In a tale of love (for the green knight's wife) and subsequent deceit, Gawain emerges with little honour. The green knight spares his life but sends him home to Arthur's court wearing the wife's girdle as a badge of shame. Geoffrey Chaucer at court: 1367-1400

In 1367 one of four new 'yeomen of the chamber' in the household of Edward III is Geoffrey Chaucer, then aged about twenty-seven. The young man's wife, Philippa, is already a lady-in-waiting to the queen.

A few years later Chaucer becomes one of the king's esquires, with duties which include entertaining the court with stories and music. There can rarely have been a more inspired appointment. Chaucer's poems are designed to be read aloud, in the first instance by himself. Their range, from high romance to bawdy comedy, is well calculated to hold the listeners spellbound. Courtly circles in England are his first audience. Chaucer's public career is one of almost unbroken success in two consecutive reigns. He undertakes diplomatic missions abroad on behalf of the king; he is given administrative posts, such as controlling the customs, which bring lodgings and handsome stipends. Even occasional disasters (such as being robbed twice in four days in 1390 and losing £20 of Richard II's money) do him no lasting harm.

A measure of Chaucer's skill as a courtier is that during the 1390s, when he is in the employment of Richard II, he also receives gifts at Christmas from Richard's rival, Bolingbroke. When Bolingbroke unseats Richard II in 1399, taking his place on the throne as Henry IV, Chaucer combines diplomacy and wit to secure his position. Having lost his royal appointments, he reminds the new king of his predicament in a poem entitled 'The Complaint of Chaucer to his Empty Purse'. The last line of each verse begs the purse to 'be heavy again, or else must I die'. Henry IV hears the message. The court poet is given a new annuity.

Henry is certainly aware that he is keeping in his royal circle a poet of great distinction. Chaucer's reputation is such that, when he dies in the following year, he is granted the very unusual honour - for a commoner - of being buried in Westminster abbey. Troilus and Criseyde: 1385

Chaucer's first masterpiece is his subtle account of the wooing of Criseyde by Troilus, with the active encouragement of Criseyde's uncle Pandarus. The tender joys of their love affair are followed by Criseyde's betrayal and Troilus's death in battle.

Chaucer adapts to his own purposes the more conventionally dramatic account of this legendary affair written some fifty years earlier by Boccaccio (probably read by Chaucer when on a mission to Florence in 1373). His own very long poem (8239 lines) is written in the early 1380s and is complete by 1385. Chaucer's tone is delicate, subtle, oblique - though this does not prevent him from introducing and gently satirising many vivid details of life at court, as he guides the reader through the long psychological intrigue by which Pandarus eventually delivers Troilus into Criseyde's bed.

The charm and detail of the poem, giving an intimate glimpse of a courtly world, is akin to the delightful miniatures which illustrate books of hours of this period in the style known as International Gothic. Yet this delicacy is only one side of Chaucer's abundant talent - as he soon proves in The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales: 1387-1400

Collections of tales are a favourite literary convention of the 14th century. Boccaccio's Decameron is the best-known example before Chaucer's time, but Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales outshines his predecessors. He does so in the range and vitality of the stories in his collection, from the courtly tone of 'The Knight's Tale' to the rough and often obscene humour of those known technically as fabliaux.

He does so also in the detail and humour of the framework holding the stories together. His account of the pilgrims as they ride from London to Canterbury, with their constant bickering and rivalry, amounts to a comic masterpiece in its own right. The pilgrims, thirty of them including Chaucer himself, gather one spring day at the Tabard in Southwark. The host of the inn, Harry Bailly, is a real contemporary of Chaucer's (his name features in historical records). He will act as their guide on the route to Canterbury and he proposes that they pass the time on their journey by telling stories. Each pilgrim is to tell two on the way out and two on the way back. Whoever is judged to have told the best tale will have a free supper at the Tabard on their return.

Of this ambitious total of 120 stories, Chaucer completes only 24 by the time of his death. Even so the collection amounts to some 17,000 lines - mainly of rhyming verse, but with some passages of prose. The pilgrims represent all sections of society from gentry to humble craftsmen (the only absentees are the labouring poor, unable to afford a pilgrimage of this kind). There are respectable people from the various classes - such as the knight, the parson and the yeoman - but the emphasis falls mainly on characters who are pretentious, scurrilous, mendacious, avaricious or lecherous.

The pilgrims are vividly described, one by one, in Chaucer's Prologue. The relationships between them evolve in the linking passages between the tales, as Harry Bailly arranges who shall speak next. The pilgrims for the most part tell tales closely related to their station in life or to their personal character. Sometimes the anecdotes even reflect mutual animosities. The miller gives a scurrilously comic account of a carpenter being cuckolded. Everyone laughs heartily except the reeve, who began his career as a carpenter. The reeve gets his own back with an equally outrageous tale of the seduction of a miller's wife and daughter.

But the pilgrim who has most delighted six centuries of readers is the five-times-married Wife of Bath, taking a lusty pleasure in her own appetites and richly scorning the ideals of celibacy.

Page 1 of 5  Next >

Search

List of subjects | Sources

Homea-bc-de-gh-lm-op-rst-zAttribution and CopyrightOpen main menu Wikipedia Search You have no notifications. Search results Conterbury tales Results 1 – 20 of 2,518 Showing results for canterbury tales. No results found for Conterbury tales. The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales (Middle English: Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by 58 KB (7,531 words) - 02:09, 9 April 2020 A Canterbury Tale novelists and film-makers from the 1960s onwards. A Canterbury Tale takes its title from The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, and loosely uses Chaucer's 21 KB (2,573 words) - 23:42, 28 February 2020 The Canterbury Tales (film) The Canterbury Tales (Italian: I racconti di Canterbury) is a 1972 Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and based on the medieval narrative poem 13 KB (1,643 words) - 03:33, 19 March 2020 The Canterbury Tales (disambiguation) Theatre in 2003 The Canterbury Tales (attraction), a 14th-century medieval living history attraction in Canterbury, Kent Canterbury Tales, a 1797-1805 novel 1 KB (157 words) - 19:04, 12 April 2019 Order of The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories, mostly in verse, written by Geoffrey Chaucer chiefly from 1387 to 1400. They are held together in a frame 9 KB (815 words) - 03:30, 19 December 2019 The Squire (Canterbury Tales) Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury The Squire is a fictional character in the framing narrative of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He is squire to (and 9 KB (1,133 words) - 02:02, 18 December 2019 List of The Canterbury Tales characters The Pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer are the main characters in the framing narrative of the book. In addition, they can be considered 5 KB (137 words) - 20:39, 16 December 2019 General Prologue (redirect from General Prologue (Canterbury Tales)) 15th-century addition to the Canterbury Tales Prologue and Tale of Beryn, a 15th-century addition to the Canterbury Tales which tells of the epilogue after 15 KB (1,448 words) - 11:03, 14 March 2020 The Canterbury Tales (TV series) The Canterbury Tales is a series of six single dramas that originally aired on BBC One in 2003. Each story is an adaptation of one of Geoffrey Chaucer's 11 KB (380 words) - 08:40, 18 March 2020 The Knight's Tale "The Knight's Tale" (Middle English: The Knightes Tale) is the first tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The Knight is described by Chaucer 12 KB (1,647 words) - 19:40, 18 February 2020 Canterbury as the frame for Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century classic The Canterbury Tales. Canterbury is a popular tourist destination: consistently one of the most-visited 84 KB (8,566 words) - 10:43, 1 April 2020 Canterbury Tales (musical) Canterbury Tales is a musical originally presented at the Oxford Playhouse in 1964, conceived and directed by Martin Starkie and written by Nevill Coghill 7 KB (1,031 words) - 18:18, 3 November 2019 The Best of Caravan – Canterbury Tales Canterbury Tales: The Best of Caravan is the 1976 compilation album released by Caravan. It was expanded, repackaged and released in 1994. Original release 8 KB (247 words) - 05:29, 29 October 2018 The Wife of Bath's Tale The Wife of Bath's Tale (Middle English: the Tale of the Wyf of Bathe) is among the best-known of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It provides insight 26 KB (3,810 words) - 18:47, 23 February 2020 A Knight's Tale Chaucer. The film takes its title from Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" in his The Canterbury Tales, though the plot is not similar. It received mixed reviews 15 KB (1,735 words) - 19:18, 7 April 2020 The Miller's Tale "The Miller's Tale" (Middle English: The Milleres Tale) is the second of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1380s–1390s), told by the drunken miller 13 KB (1,796 words) - 21:06, 9 April 2020 Romantic Warriors III: Canterbury Tales Romantic Warriors III: Canterbury Tales (2015) is the third in a series of feature-length documentaries about Progressive rock written and directed by 12 KB (1,269 words) - 16:34, 12 May 2019 Summary of Decameron tales of the pear tree, best known to English-speaking readers from The Canterbury Tales, also originates from Persia in the Bahar-Danush, in which the husband 64 KB (9,951 words) - 09:32, 8 April 2020 The Handmaid's Tale Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories ("The Merchant's Tale", "The Parson's Tale", etc.). The Handmaid's Tale is structured 95 KB (11,912 words) - 14:59, 8 April 2020 The Franklin's Tale "The Franklin's Tale" (Middle English: The Frankeleyns Tale) is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It focuses on issues of providence, truth 13 KB (1,771 words) - 17:42, 27 January 2020 View (previous 20 | next 20) (20 | 50 | 100 | 250 | 500)

Wikipedia Content is available under CC BY-SA 3.0 unless otherwise noted. Terms of UsePrivacyDesktop