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3. Literary Achievement
Regarded as a
preeminent poet and a teller of tales, Chaucer shows his artistic talent
outstandingly in his The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer displays his
humour and irony as he condemns the vicious characters and the culpable
deeds.
The framework he created in the book well reveals his
talent as a excellent story-teller. The framework refers to a narrative
which is composed for the purpose of introducing and connecting a series of
tales. Collections of stories linked by such a device are not uncommon in
the Middle Ages. The Thousand and One Nights is a good example in
which stories are told in order to postpone the execution of a condemned
person. Gower’s Confessio Amantis is also a collection of stories
which consists of a prologue, an epilogue, and a number of stories told by
one narrator who confesses his sin to the priest of Venus and is warned
against each sin by lessons drawn from the tales. Ovid’s Metamorphoses
is a collection with stories told by members of a group; while Boccaccio in
his Decameron places his hundred tales in the mouths of ten
characters, each telling a tale a day for ten days.
In planning The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer might have
got the idea of framing his stories from some previous literary sources,
especially from Boccaccio, but when he was living in Greenwich, he might,
from his house, have ample opportunities to ob serve the Canterbury
pilgrimage for himself, which may well have suggested to him the idea of a
pilgrimage as a framework for a number of stories. Chaucer’s work consists
of three parts: The General Prologue; 24 tales, two of which left
unfinished; and separate prologues to each tale with links, comments,
quarrels, etc. in between.
Chaucer is also a great master of the English language. It
has generally been conceded by literary historians that in his hand the
London dialect of his day was crystallized into an effective weapon for
satire and humour and for poetry. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer’s
language becomes a most supple means of communication. With it he not only
could at one moment be quite serious and at another be light-hearted and
full of fun but he was able to produce at will truly poetic passages or
lapse into a very intimate conversational style to suit an easy-going
narrator of familiar stories. And his heroic couplet was employed in the
poem with true ease and the charm for the first time in the history of
English literature.
The Canterbury Tales as the crowning glory
of Chaucer’s poetic career elevates the poet to the almost unquestioned
foremost position among the host of the poets and raconteurs in the whole
period of Middle English literature.
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