Review on the Canterbury Tales (Essay Sample)

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The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales refer to a series of 24 stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer between the years 1386 to 1389 (Chaucer 12). The stories present a story-telling contest amongst pilgrims on their way from London to Canterbury to visit the Saint Thomas Shrine at the Canterbury Cathedral. Chaucer uses the stories to present the ironical nature of English Society back then especially when it came to dealing with church matters. Chaucer includes characters from all social classes in the society then. The pilgrims were on a spiritual mission but their conversations show that they were more concerned with worldly things. This is made clear by type of award that they were contesting about which was a plate of free meal. This paper analyses Chaucer's work in terms of its historical background, its content, its importance to literature and its reception in the literature world.
HISTORY AND BACKGROUND OF THE LITERARY WORK
Chaucer started writing the stories when he became the Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace in 1386 (Rigby and Minnis 26). Chaucer intended to pass the ironic message of church-goers being possessed by material worldly things rather the spiritual goodness that they claim to pursue. The tales are written mostly in verse format although some are written in prose. The language used to write the poems was the Middle English. Many of the poems have addressees but a number do not have specific audience causing varying beliefs among the lovers of literature. Some believe that because Chaucer was a courtier, he largely wrote for nobility and not necessarily for any particular audience. Nevertheless, it is difficult to accurately determine the target audience for his poems.
The completeness of Chaucer's work is still uncertain. This is because in the prologue some thirty pilgrims were introduced and Chaucer intended to write four poems for each pilgrim to cover the journey to and from the shrine (Chaucer 105). Eighty-three manuscripts were discovered as a whole while twenty-eight were highly fragmented further raising the question of completeness of the tales (Rigby and Minnis 58). Some manuscripts vary from each other which is attributed to either errors during copying or probable additions to the work by Chaucer himself. The earliest print edition of Chaucer's work was by William Caxton in 1478 (Rigby and Minnis 155).
CONTENT OF THE TALES
The tales comprise of 24 stories written in 17,000 lines most of which are verses while some are in prose (Chaucer 13). The work is divided into ten fragments with each fragment comprising closely related tales. The language used is the Middle English spellings and pronunciation. There are no manuscripts available which are written in Chaucer's own hand but there are those that are believed to have been copied before his death by his close associate, Adam Pinehurst (Chaucer 162). Although Chaucer's work has been credited as original, it is evident that he borrowed heavily from works of previous literal pieces and that his work was greatly inspired by the happenings in the English society back then. For example, having story-telling contests was a practice prevalent among the English people during his time (Chaucer 88). He has focused more on the stories that the pilgrims were sharing rather than the progress of the pilgrimage itself.
IMPORTANCE OF THE TALES
The tales helped to increase the use of English in the world of literature more than other languages such as French, Italian, and Latin (Walts 17). The innovations by the Court of Chancery when Chaucer was in charge greatly influenced the modern English spellings