Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer - "the father of English poetry" - lived in the XIV century, when his homeland was very far from the Renaissance, which in England was long in coming for almost two more centuries. Until Spencer and Marlowe, there was nothing in English poetry not only equal, but simply commensurate with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Reflecting its age, this book, for a number of reasons, still does not fit into the framework of its time. It can be said that Chaucer, living in the middle of the century, anticipated the realism of the English Renaissance, and wrote his Canterbury Tales for all ages.
Until the 14th century, England lagged far behind other European countries, especially Italy. Located on the outskirts, far from the main Mediterranean routes, at that time it was a poor country of hunters, shepherds and tillers, a country that had not yet accumulated future material wealth and cultural traditions, a country without developed crafts and guild crafts, without large urban centers. Chaucer's London had no more than forty thousand inhabitants, and the second largest city, York, less than twenty thousand, while in Paris of that time, according to very conservative estimates, lived over eighty thousand. The 14th century was a period of rapid and difficult growth for England, which had a painful effect on the people of that time. They, including Chaucer, had a chance to become contemporaries and witnesses of great social upheavals, of which the most formidable were: the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), the Black Death - the plague (1348 and following years) and the peasant uprising of 1381 of the year. England, like all of Europe, was already on the verge of a great turning point, which cleared the way for the new and made possible great social shifts that hastened the collapse of the feudal system and hastened the beginning of the English Renaissance. The 14th century was the time of unity of the English nation, the formation of a single common English language and the birth of original English literature.<...>
We know very little about the life of Geoffrey Chaucer, and this information for the most part unimportant. Chaucer was born around 1340 to a wealthy London vintner. The writer's father, John Chaucer, appointed his son to the court for the modest position of a page. As a page, and then as a squire, Geoffrey twice participated in campaigns in France, and in his first campaign, in 1359, he was not lucky: he was captured by the French, but was ransomed by the king. Upon his return to court, he was entrusted with the duty to entertain the wife of Edward III with his stories. To the Queen, and later to the first wife of Richard II - Anna of Bohemia - Chaucer first read or retold other people's works, translated The Romance of the Rose, and then began to compose his own "poems in case." Around 1359, he wrote the poem "On the Death of the Duchess Blanche", the wife of his patron and patron John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, then the poem "Bird Parliament" (circa 1382) - about the courtship of Richard II to Anna of Bohemia. All this did not go beyond ordinary courtly poetry, but already the following works of Chaucer revealed an uncommon erudition for a self-taught person and a great poetic talent. Chaucer's library contained sixty books, a considerable figure for the fourteenth century, when the price of one book was sometimes equal to the cost of building an entire library. Among his favorites were the French poets of his time, the early poems of Boccaccio, Virgil, Statius, Lucan, and especially Ovid, Dante, and the philosopher Boethius. As a "knowledgeable and reliable" person, in the rank of Esquire, he repeatedly carried out responsible and secret diplomatic missions of the king in France and Italy in the 70s. Chaucer's two visits to Italy left a particularly significant mark: in 1373 and 1378. These travels broadened his horizons. In addition to the direct influence that the country of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio undoubtedly had on Chaucer, he met first-hand with the best works these authors. Echoes of acquaintance with " Divine Comedy» Dante is found many times in Chaucer, starting with the Parliament of the Birds and the poem The Temple of Glory (1384), up to a number of places in the Canterbury Tales. Boccaccio's "Glorious Women" served as a prototype for his "Legend of Good Wives" (mid-80s). Boccaccio's Tezeida was compressed by Chaucer into a knight's story of Palamon and Arcites, and Petrarch's translation into Latin of Boccaccio's Griselda, transcribed into Chaucer's Stanzas, became Chaucer's Oxford student's story. From all his teachers Chaucer looked for and took what he could already consider his own. In this regard, the poem "Troilus and Chryseis" (late 70s - early 80s) is especially indicative. Both in content and in form, this is such an independent and subtle development of Boccaccio's Filostrato that it far surpasses its model. Troilus and Chryseis, the only complete of Chaucer's major works, can rightly be called a psychological novel in verse. In Chaucer's time, the poor poet lived on handouts from patrons and was entirely dependent on his patrons. The king redeemed Chaucer from captivity by paying sixteen livres, but "every thing has its price," and fifty and seventy livres were paid for the two royal horses redeemed at the same time. He was sent on responsible assignments, but even having succeeded in them, he remained in the shadows. In 1374, as a great royal favor, Chaucer received for his service the post of customs overseer of the port of London for wool, leather and furs. It was far from a sinecure: the position was granted to Chaucer with a strict order "to write all accounts and reports with his own hand and to be inseparably on the spot", and only in 1382 did Chaucer receive the right to entrust his duties to a deputy, and before that he spent all day in London port, recording coolies of wool, bales of leather and furs, inspecting goods, collecting duties and fines, and meeting with all kinds of people. In the evening he would go to the quarters allotted to him in the tower above the city gates of Aldgate, and, straightening his back from working on the account book, until dawn he would work his eyes over his other favorite books. In the poem "Temple of Glory" the eagle of Jupiter reproached Chaucer for being heavy on his feet and not interested in anything but books:
As soon as, summing up, You finish your day's work, Not entertainment calls You then and not peace, - No, returning to your home, Deaf to everything, you sit down Read half-blindly Another book by candlelight; And lonely, like a monk, You live, subduing the ardor of passions, Having fun and avoiding people, Although you are always happy with the sun And you are not rich in abstinence.
Fate did not indulge Chaucer. Today in mercy, tomorrow in disgrace, at times in abundance, and sometimes in poverty. From the rank of royal ambassador, he fell into the customs guards, and then from a wealthy official he became bankrupt, who was saved from a debt prison only by the intercession and new favors of the king. The ups and downs of Chaucer were all the more abrupt and unexpected because, by his very position, Chaucer was involved in court intrigues. Already under Edward III, after the death of the heir - the "Black Prince", the second son of the king, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, took power. However, after the death of Edward III, he had to wage a continuous struggle with his brother the Duke of Gloucester for influence on the infant king Richard II. Chaucer had been associated with John of Gaunt for many years both by his literary debut, and through Wycliffe, and by joint participation in French campaigns, and by the fact that Chaucer's wife was the maid of honor of the second Duchess of Lancaster, and by the fact that Chaucer's sister-in-law became Gaunt's third wife. Chaucer remained faithful to his patrons even in difficult times. He soon paid the price for it. After the victory of the supporters of Gloucester, he was removed from all positions and deprived of any means of subsistence. Only in 1389, when the matured Richard II finally took power into his own hands, did Chaucer receive some compensation and was granted by the king the position of caretaker of the royal estates and keeper of the pantries and sheds with worthless "royal junk". Then in 1391, after another deposition, Chaucer could not pay his debts and was declared bankrupt. He was made a forester, made an overseer of "walls, ramparts, ditches, sewers, ponds, roads and bridges" along the Thames - in a word, last years He lived his life by occasional handouts and commissions. Chaucer loved and appreciated good book. During his reclusive years in Aldgate Tower, he read a lot, and later, in lonely old age, the book replaced his family and few friends. For many years his companion was Boethius' treatise On the Consolation of Philosophy, which he not only read, but also translated. However, books could not obscure life from Chaucer. There were days when he cheated on books.
Although in science I am very weak. But there is no force that could tear me away from a new book - I love reading most of all. But May will come, the trees will bloom, I will hear the nightingales sing - Farewell, books! There is a stronger love, I'll try to tell you about it.
("Legend of the Good Wives")
Chaucer had been meaning to tell this for a long time. Concluding his "little tragedy" (of eight thousand lines) about Troilus and Chryseis, Chaucer wrote:
I part with my little tragedy Without regret, not in the least Not deceived by what I see in it. Go, little book, go! And someday you will meet the Poet that Dantom was once crowned, Homer, Ovid, Statius or Lucan - Do not dare to compete, be modest, Kiss the ashes at these feet with humility, Be true to the memory of teachers, Repeat the lesson you have learned by heart. There is only one hope glimmering in me, That, perhaps - even hunched and frail, - In a comedy I will try my strength.
In essence, such a "comedy", such a bright story about love for the earthly, for life, was the Canterbury Tales, the main tone of which is extremely cheerful and optimistic, and to which nothing earthly is alien. Their best characterization is one stanza from Chaucer's poem "Parlement of Birds". This is an inscription on the gate, but not at the entrance to the prison, at the threshold of which all hope must be abandoned. This is not Dante's inscription over the gates of hell. Chaucer's Gate leads to a flowering garden - this is the gate of life, and the inscription reads as follows:
Through me you will penetrate into a wonderful garden, Giving healing to the wounds of the heart; Through me you will come to the key of delights, Where young May blooms, not knowing corruption, And where adventures are full of fun. My reader, forget all your worries And joyfully embark on this path.
(Translated by O. Rumer.)
The main core of The Canterbury Tales was created by Chaucer in the late 80s, quickly, over several years. And then, by the mid-1990s, work on the book was interrupted, and all of Chaucer's work began to fade. More and more sparingly, he added separate strokes to his huge canvas. In the late story of the canon's servant, in the priest's sermon, traces of creative fatigue are felt. Difficult and lonely was the last decade of Chaucer's life, which fell on the last decade of his century. Chaucer's poems "The Great Reeling" and "The Old Age" show how soberly and desolately he assessed the general situation. He, apparently, has moved away from the court and is alienated from his former friends and patrons. However, soft and not prone to extremes, he did not follow his other friends to the end - reformers, followers of the famous English theologian - John Wycliffe, Bible translator and teacher of "poor priests", from whose midst came the "rebellious priest" John Ball, ideologue of the peasant uprising of 1381. It was they, the associates of John Ball, who were beheaded along with the rebels of 1381. It was them, as heretics, who were now sent to the stake by the enlightened Bishop Thomas Arundel. The year 1381 saw the suppression of the economic demands of the rebels and the heads of Wat Tyler and John Ball on stakes. The year 1401 will see the suppression of freedom of thought and conscience and the Lollard heretics at the stake. Chaucer was now equally far from those who cut off heads, and from those whose heads flew from their shoulders. Self-restraint was the tragedy of his old age. Creative loneliness has become their woeful lot. Around Chaucer there was no that literary and general cultural environment that surrounded Boccaccio and Petrarch, which was found in France of the times of Marguerite of Navarre and Clement Marot, and Rabelais, - an environment that singled out Shakespeare from its ranks, "the first among equals", - a brilliant Elizabethan in galaxy of talented Elizabethans. Disappointing was the state in which Chaucer left English literature. It was difficult for Chaucer in everyday life as well. Apparently, during these years he lived alone, his financial situation was unenviable, otherwise the “Complaint to an empty purse” would not have developed under his pen. Shortly before his death, in 1399, fortune last time smiled at him. The throne was seized by the son of his former patron Lancaster - Henry Bolinbroke. Henry IV remembered Chaucer and took care of him. But life was already over. In October 1400, Chaucer died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Just in the most difficult years for him, Chaucer creates his brightest, most cheerful book. True, almost everything that Chaucer wrote before is also warmed by humor, but in The Canterbury Tales laughter is the main, all-conquering force. Here Chaucer more readily appeals to the common sense of the people, the folk fable, the folk mockery of the fat-bellies. At the same time, Chaucer did not abandon what his great teachers taught him, and all together made The Canterbury Tales his main contribution to world literature . The idea of the book is very simple. Having gathered those who made up "his" England in pilgrimage from all parts of the country, and having briefly outlined their general appearance in the prologue, Chaucer further leaves each of them to act and tell in his own way. He himself, as the author, slowly tells how they agreed to go to Canterbury, to the relics of Thomas Becket, and together while away the boredom of the road, telling each other all sorts of entertaining stories; how they carried out their plan; how on the road they got to know each other better, sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they joked; how they argued about the merits and demerits of stories, revealing in the process all their ins and outs. It is difficult to determine the genre of this book. If we consider separately the stories of which it is composed, then it may seem like an encyclopedia of the literary genres of the Middle Ages. However, the essence and foundation of the book is its realism. It includes portraits of people, their assessment, their views on art, their behavior - in a word, a living picture of life. Unlike other collections of short stories, even the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales is far from mechanically held together. Chaucer's idea was not completed by him, but from what he managed to do, it is clear that the book has a movement of the theme and an internal struggle, as a result of which new goals are outlined and clarified, perhaps not completely clear even to Chaucer himself. However, it is clear to everyone that everything in this book is about man and for man; mainly about the man of his time, but to create a new man. Therefore, she survived her life. The book consists of a general prologue, over two dozen short stories, and an equal number of connecting interludes. The prologue occupies a little more than eight hundred lines, but in it, as in an overture, all the main motifs of the book are outlined, and all of its seventeen-odd thousand verses serve to reveal and develop the characteristic images outlined in the prologue. The connecting part, the so-called framing novella, shows the pilgrims in motion and in action. In their bickering about who, when and what to tell, in their tragicomic clashes and quarrels, an internal development has already been outlined, which, unfortunately, was not resolved in Chaucer's unfinished book. It is here, in the connecting part, that the dramatic element is concentrated. So, for example, the figure of the innkeeper Harry Bailey, the chief judge of this competition of storytellers, is, as it were, a stage role. It is all made up of replicas scattered throughout the book. Introductions to individual stories often grow into monologues, in which the autocharacteristics of the narrator are given. Such are the prologues of the pardoner, the weaver of Bath, the servant of the canon and, in part, the miller, the majordomo, and the merchant. The stories of the book are very heterogeneous, and for convenience of review they can be grouped in different sections. A very large group in terms of volume is “ancient stories, noble tales, holy traditions, a precious treasure.” These are Chaucer's borrowed or imitative stories of a lawyer, a monk, a doctor, a student, a squire, abbess, a second nun. Chaucer's story about Sir Topas, the stories of a knight, a chaplain, a weaver are parodic and pointed, like a weapon in the struggle against the past. Many figures of the general prologue are satirically given, especially the servant of the feudal church and the miller; satirical are the prologues of the pardoner and the bailiff, the stories of the canon's servant, the Carmelite and the bailiff. The parable of the three rake in the story of the seller of indulgences, the story of the steward, has the character of moralizing. Often these edifications also take on a parodic and satirical tone in the teachings of the bailiff, Carmelite, in the tragedies of the monk, or in the story of Melibea. The four stories of the so-called marriage group are like a debate in which old views on unequal marriage are discussed and revised. This dispute is opened by the weaver of Bata, preaching in her prologue the complete subordination of the husband to his wife and illustrating this with her story. The stories of the student about Griselda and the merchant about Januarius and the beautiful May approach the question from a different angle, while in Franklin's story the same question is resolved in a new way, on the basis of mutual respect and trust of the spouses. This dispute had been brewing before - already in the miller's story about the old husband's young wife, in the skipper's story about a betrayed trust, in Harry Bailey's lamentations. And it does not subside until the very end of the book, flaring up in the steward's story as a theme of remorse for hasty punishment for infidelity. Most original, freer in interpretation, brighter and closest to folk life is the main group of independent stories by Chaucer. Although in some ways the stories of the miller, the butler, the skipper, the carmelite, the bailiff are indebted to the walking stories of the fablio, their main value lies in the fact that these are realistic short stories masterfully developed by Chaucer. Chaucer learned the art of storytelling from the French trouvères. But fablio, these funny, cruel and sometimes cynical anecdotes, become unrecognizable under his pen. Fablio Chaucer is no longer an anecdote, but a short story of characters. Chaucer humanizes the cruel French anecdote and populates the fablio with living people, in whom, for all their rudeness, he is happy to note everything human. Chaucer's democratic humanism is not Gelerter's cabinet humanism of an aristocrat of science, but a simple and cordial love for a person and for the best manifestations of the human soul, which are able to ennoble the most unattractive phenomena of life. Many lofty and true thoughts about the "natural man," about nobility not inherited, but taken from the battle, about a new sense of human dignity, Chaucer cites in the story of the Bath weaver, and in the story of Franklin, and in the priest's sermon, and in the special ballad "Nobility ”, but these thoughts have repeatedly arisen both before and after Chaucer. Such declarations have not yet been found in art. artistic expression, "a word without deed is dead." But the living, creative work of Chaucer created that by which English literature is alive to this day, that in which its originality was especially pronounced. Chaucer's knowledge of life is not the indifferent observation of a researcher. His love for man is neither sentimental nor tearful. His laugh is not soulless mockery. And from the combination of such knowledge of life, such love for man, and such laughter, Chaucer develops a sympathetic, all-understanding smile. “Understand everything - forgive everything,” says the saying. In this sense, Chaucer is indeed very forgiving. In this sense, the prologue of the Bath weaver, like the tragedy of an aging, life-loving woman, and the stories of the miller and the merchant about the young wife of an old husband are humanistic, although Chaucer in these stories does not close his eyes to the harsh truth of life. Putting into the mouth of an Oxford student a very suitable story about the uncomplaining passion-bearer Griselda, Chaucer questions the act of a mother who sacrifices children for the sake of marital obedience. He does this in his own name. special afterword, while remembering the Bat weaver:
Griselda died, and with her into the darkness of the grave descended her humility. I warn loudly all husbands: Do not test your wives' patience. No one will find a second Griselda In his wife - there is no doubt about it.
All medieval ideas about marriage, humility, divine retribution, rights, duties and dignity of a person - everything is turned inside out and thoroughly shaken up. The confession of a Batian weaver is written in the tones of a rough farce, and at the same time, it is essentially tragic, such a confession could not have been created by any medieval author. Fablio situations are often perilous and require "mean language," but in Chaucer all this is bathed in the naive and fresh coarseness of the popular mores of his age. “At that time it was the custom in Albion to call all things by name,” Voltaire said, and for those who are still jarred, Chaucer bluntly declares: “There is a whole load of goodness here; // But don't take those jokes seriously." In another place, he appeals to his reader with an appeal: "Keep the grain, and throw away the husk." The husk of Chaucer's fablios - some of their anecdotal and rudeness - is a tribute to the genre and a tribute to the century. A healthy grain is the new thing that we find in them: a well-aimed and vigorous folk language; common sense balanced by sober, mocking criticism; bright, lively, assertive presentation; a salty joke that came to the place; sincerity and freshness; an all-justifying sympathetic smile and a victorious laugh. The easily falling husk cannot hide the mischievous, cheerful enthusiasm and good-natured mockery of what is worthy of ridicule. And all this serves Chaucer as a means of depicting the earthly man of his time, who has already breathed in the first breaths of the approaching Renaissance, but who is not yet always able to realize and consolidate his characteristic “cheerful free-thinking” in abstract terms and concepts. Everything in Chaucer is given in the contradiction of contrast. The rudeness and dirt of life emphasize the emerging love, withering - craving for life, life's ugliness - the beauty of youth. All this happens on the very edge of the ridiculous. The laughter does not yet have time to subside, the tears do not have time to well up, thus evoking that mixed and good feeling, which was later defined in England as humor.
The compositional mastery of Chaucer is manifested primarily in his ability to connect, as it were, incompatible. With magnificent ease, he depicts his diverse companions, and gradually a living image of a person arises from individual strokes, and from the accumulation of individual portraits - a picture of the entire medieval society of England. The Canterbury Tales is colorful and multicolored, like life itself, sometimes bright, sometimes dull and unsightly. Many stories, in themselves of little value, acquire meaning in the general context and find their place precisely through contrasting juxtaposition. It was this compositional innovation of Chaucer that allowed him to resolve in a realistic dominant all the contradictory sounds of the book. That is why even fantastic, allegorical and moralistic stories are realistically justified as completely, and sometimes the only ones possible in the mouth of a given narrator. Chaucer sets out the main plot of the story accurately, concisely, lively and swiftly. An example of this is the end of the pardoner's story about the three rake, the end of the chaplain's story about chasing the fox, all the complicated plot fabric and the swift ending of the miller's story. Chaucer is restrained and stingy as a storyteller, but when it is necessary to depict his characters, he skillfully draws both the chamber of Dushka Nicholas, and the shack of the widow, the mistress of Chanticleer, and an excellent genre scene of the arrival of a monk-gatherer at the house of his spiritual son Thomas. Chaucer generally avoids long, self-sufficient descriptions. He fights them with the weapon of parody, or he himself pulls himself up: “But it seems that I got distracted a little,” or he gets rid of them with a joking excuse:
What is the use of dwelling on what dishes were served Or how horns and trumpets sounded. After all, this is how every story ends. There were dishes, mash, songs, dance.
But when it is necessary to understand the character of the narrator, Chaucer, for the sake of this main goal, gives up everything, even the laconicism he loves. In the spirit of the Middle Ages, Chaucer surrounds the main plot, laconic and impetuous, with an endless tie of unhurried reasoning and teachings and a ragged motley of playful parodic-moralizing or satirical interludes. He subordinates all this to the character of the narrator, and includes the story itself in the frame of a large epic form. Chaucer's narration flows with ease, freedom and naturalness unheard of at that time. As a result, Chaucer's book as a whole is singled out even among his own works exceptional brightness and realism of the image, richness and expressiveness of the language, when necessary - laconism, and when necessary - purely Rabelaisian excess and courage. “Read Shakespeare,” Pushkin wrote to N. Raevsky. “Remember - he is never afraid to compromise his character, he makes him speak with all the ease of life, because he is sure that in due time and in his place he will force this person to find a language corresponding to his character.” So did Shakespeare and Chaucer. The famous English historian John Robert Green, in his assessment of Chaucer, says the following about him: “For the first time in English literature we meet with a dramatic force that not only creates a separate character, but also combines all the characters in a certain combination, not only adapts each story, each word to the character of this or that person, but also merging everything in poetic unity. It was this broad, truly poetic attitude to reality that allowed Chaucer to become, according to Gorky's definition, "the founder of realism." Born of his turbulent and ebullient age, Chaucer never claimed the role of a chronicler, did not intend to write the history of his time; and yet, from the Canterbury Tales, as from the Vision of Peter the Plowman by Chaucer's contemporary, William Langland, historians study the era. Having survived war, plague and rebellion, Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales reluctantly and briefly recalls them - these are events that are still too fresh in everyone's memory and threaten to return every hour. But on the other hand, already from the general prologue, one can get an accurate idea of \u200b\u200bhow they dressed, what they drank and ate, what they were interested in and how the English of the 14th century lived. And this is not an indifferent accumulation of random details. Not! Chaucer unerringly selects the most characteristic household items, in which the tastes, habits and habits of the owner are fixed. Worn with chain mail, pierced and patched with a knight's camisole - one detail immediately defines this slightly archaic figure, as if descended from the pages of a heroic epic. After all, this experienced and skillful military leader is at the same time a knight-monk, combining modesty by vow with a certain sly eccentricity, which also affected the subtle irony of his story. And the magnificent attire of a squire is an attribute of a new court-tournament, gallant knight, no longer Roland, but Lancelot, affected by new education and cultural polish. And then the clasp with the motto "amor vincit omnia" of the abbess' cassock, the longbow of the yeoman - in a word, those things through which Chaucer shows a man and his place in history. Further we learn what these people were doing, and again this is a sparing and accurate description of the most essential features of their professional work. Such are the portraits of the doctor and the skipper, the lawyer and the seller of indulgences. What did not fit in the prologue, Chaucer draws in the stories about the alchemist, about the monk-collector or the bailiff of the church court. Having briefly outlined the merchant in the prologue, Chaucer, in the story of the skipper, shows the merchant's preparations for the fair and his views on the "hard trade" of trade. Thus, through the profession, Chaucer again draws the appearance of the whole person. Already in some portraits of the prologue, the behavior and character of a person are found. We well imagine the knight and the priest as people of duty and feat of life, and the Benedictine and Franklin - as zhuyers and life-burners; lawyer, housekeeper and doctor - as dodgers and businessmen. And then the behavior of Zadira Simkin significantly complements and deepens only the outwardly colorful image of the miller in the general prologue. The subtle and complex psychological pattern of the Bath Weaver's prologue makes this boi-baba one of Chaucer's most vivid and truthful images. Thus, through behavior and actions, Chaucer completes the appearance of a person. Chaucer never schematizes or generalizes. However, his exhaustive and precise knowledge of the people and events of his time allowed him to accurately find exactly the right feature, exactly the exact word he needed, which sometimes successfully replaces lengthy descriptions. When a knight, a yeoman, a squire, a merchant and a skipper gathered at the table of the Tabard tavern, they turned out to be the living embodiment of the Hundred Years War. A humble knight led them to victory. Endurance, stamina and the powerful bow of the yeoman decided the outcome of the battles. The squire, fighting valiantly under his father, at the same time wasted his knightly glory in predatory raids on the rich cities of Flanders and squandered spoils of war on expensive French outfits. After all, unlike the old knight, he is a profitable client of the merchant. The merchant himself is the true inspirer of campaigns: in an effort to secure trade with Flanders, he pays taxes to the king, but would like to regard this as a salary to the watchman, from whom he demands that the waters be "protected" on the main road of maritime trade. Finally, the skipper is a thief and privateer who throws prisoners overboard and trades in captured goods. By doing this, he only does the will of the sender, the order of the venerable merchant-armor, who is not averse to keeping such a robber skipper in the service, turning a blind eye to his exploits and trading his booty with a profit. The roles were clearly established and divided already in Chaucer's time. A knight with a squire and a yeoman conquered the markets, the merchant seized these markets, the skipper carried the goods of the merchant, and, on occasion, obtained them by force for his master. So a few strokes in the five portraits of the prologue give a very accurate idea of the characteristic features of a large historical process.
As a man of the turning point of the era, Chaucer could not help thinking about what was happening. Even in the objective and smiling "Canterbury Tales" we now and then meet mournful and indignant words about violence and self-interest reigning everywhere. Violence is a terrible legacy of the past, self-interest is a new plague of a corrupt and shameless age. We read about the extortions of the monk-gatherer and bailiff of the church court, perpetrated with the blessing of his patron vicar. We read cautious but transparent allusions to the arbitrariness and lawlessness of those whom Chaucer, in the bailiff's story, calls the crowned anger. The call in the chaplain's story: "Fear, lord, bring flatterers closer!" - or such identifications in the story of the economist:
A warlike tyrant or an emperor With a robber, like a dear brother, is similar, After all, their temperament is essentially the same ... Only from a robber is less evil, - After all, the gang of a robber is small, -
finally, the warning to tyrants in the monk's tragedies that the fate of Croesus or Nebuchadnezzar awaits them - in the mouth of a very mild and tolerant Chaucer, all this is quite unambiguous. The “poor priest” in the Canterbury Tales calls in his sermon to follow the natural law, according to which both masters and servants are equal before the Lord and bear different, but equally inevitable obligations towards each other. And in the ballad "The Great Reeling", written many years after the defeat of the popular uprising and in the midst of feudal strife and all kinds of lawlessness, Chaucer himself says that the source of troubles is self-interest and violence, and calls on the lord to fulfill his duty - to protect his servants from self-serving rapist-feudal lord and not lead them into temptation, subjecting their devotion to excessive tests. Someone, but not the creator of the Canterbury Tales, can be reproached for grumbling and pessimism. And indeed, he had quite enough objective grounds to call what was happening in these years the "Great vacillation." By the end of the 14th century, the negative consequences of the upheavals experienced by England had already fully affected. The devastation caused by the plague and the defeat of the peasant uprising had not subsided yet. The short heroic period of the first period of the Hundred Years War is over. Despite some brilliant victories, the British did not fare well in France. Separate French detachments, led by the talented organizer of the resistance, Bertrand Dugueclin, in places have already beaten the conquerors, who were not able to keep the unsubdued country in submission for decades. For the British, the war lost all purpose and meaning, except for robbery and enrichment: English privateers robbed at sea, and the “free companies” that fought off the troops on land, but the recently achieved military power of England was already shaken. Breton and Norman corsairs began to threaten the sea lanes of England, the lifeblood of her nascent wool trade. Moreover: the enemies threatened to land on the English coast. In the early 1970s, with the mere news of the gathering of a French landing, confusion swept over all of England, and it is not known how the matter would have ended if the priority tasks in Flanders had not diverted the attention of the French. A general moral decline deepens within the country. Everything was dominated by "Mrs. Bribe". Court intrigues flared up - the beginning of that struggle for power, which in the 15th century led to the fratricidal dynastic war of the Scarlet and White Roses. The kings executed the feudal lords. The feudal lords overthrew the kings. The "Black Prince" - the winner of the French - was replaced by the "Kingmaker" Earl of Warwick. Edward III and Henry V - Richard III. One could truly say in the words of Shakespeare's Richard II: "Murder everywhere... Death reigns in the crown of kings."
Soberly and bleakly assessing the present in The Great Reeling, Chaucer from the abomination of the selfish age in the poem "The Past Age" is carried away by thought in "Aetas Prima", in the "golden age" serenely patriarchal relations when peace and justice reigned on earth, man followed natural law, and when the source of self-interest, the precious metal, had not yet been mined from the depths. Everything said in The Past Century resonated with reality in Chaucer's time as personally experienced and suffered. Moreover, many lines of The Old Age almost textually coincide with the rebellious folk songs of 1381, the songs of John Ball, "Jack the Carter", "Jack the Miller", "Jack the Swede" about the fact that "envy rules, pride and deceit, and idleness has now come into the kingdom”, that “deceit and violence rule around, but truth and conscience are under lock and key”. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer nowhere directly reveals his relationship to historical events , but here, too, one can determine his own position by his attitude towards people. The legacy of the past for Chaucer is, first of all, the brazen violence and tyranny of the robber barons and their overlords, this is an ascetic deadly scheme, the ego inert thought of the scholastic pseudoscience of alchemists and astrologers-healers, this is a gang of parasites and slurps clinging to the church. But he is touched in the best people of the past by their bright faith and tenderness, their moral firmness and purity. He idealizes the unselfishness and simple cordiality of a knight and a clerk, a plowman and a poor priest. He wants to keep these people for the present as he would like them to be. He likes these eccentric righteous people, but the whole trouble is that the logic of artistic truth reveals their lifelessness and lifelessness. Next in line were people not of this type, but a thief-miller, a usurer-merchant, a rogue-lawyer, a rogue-economist, a rogue-manager, a weaver-woman-woman and other money-grubbers of the Canterbury Tales. All of them are chasing, first of all, material goods and achieve them by any means. All of them grew and developed even before Chaucer, but only now, at the time of devastation, having freed themselves from the tight bridle of the Middle Ages, from any moral restraint and unbelted, they take away their strength and become menacingly active. They become typical (“after all, an honest miller, where can I find him?”) And do not bode well for the future. Speaking about the “actual course of development”, in the conditions of which the feudal system was replaced by the capitalist system, Marx writes in the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” that at this historical stage “movement ... over immobility ...” inevitably had to take over, “ acquisitiveness - over the thirst for pleasure ... "," ... the dodgy egoism of enlightenment ... over ... the prudent, rustic, lazy and fantastic egoism of superstition ". Who could be preferred by the people of the 14th century? Who is better: a robber feudal lord or a bloodsucker merchant? In fact, both are worse, but the robber was a recidivist, and the bloodsucker has not yet shown himself to the fullest. For all their vileness, the money-grubbers then had, if not the truth, then a historical justification: objectively, it was they, as representatives of tomorrow, who, in Chaucer's time, did the vitally necessary sanitary work, like ants, clearing the land of feudal garbage. But even in the image of Chaucer, they did it with far from clean hands, in order to soon litter the earth even more than before. Here are the roots of the realistically truthful inconsistency of Chaucer's characterizations with their sharp chiaroscuro. His knight is a righteous rapist - he is a crusader who exterminates the infidels; the merchant is a practical rogue; the skipper is a thief and a pirate, but he is also a brave and experienced sailor; plowman - a human soul, but a dumb horse; the priest is a righteous soul and an ascetic, but he is a heretic, devoid of the militant spirit of future Puritans. The distribution of colors and the general tone indicate that often, even if reluctantly, Chaucer recognizes the need, but he cannot reconcile himself with unscrupulousness and shamelessness. In places it seems that Chaucer, in painting his money-grubber, senses a new real threat, but in both The Past Age and The Great Reel he emphasizes the need to shake off feudalism as a top priority. In understanding how to achieve this goal, Chaucer was not ahead of his time, did not develop any coherent positive program, did not create an integral image of a new man. He, along with his “poor priest,” shares the naive aspirations of Peter Plowman, that you just need to remove the feudal lords, overcome self-interest and work tirelessly - and everything will be fine. The only difference with Langland's views is that Chaucer does not wait for a heavenly deliverer and puts all his hopes on the innate sense of justice and common sense of a simple earthly person who must himself understand what is good and what is bad. Chaucer is not a fighter by nature, if he fights, then with the weapon of laughter. He does not call for a struggle, but this struggle goes on implicitly on every page of his Tales, just as it imperceptibly flowed throughout England throughout the XIV-XV centuries. As a result, the feudal lords and ascetics, hypocrites and predators were weakened, and the cheerful free-thinking, vitality and confidence of the people were strengthened - in a word, everything that nourished Chaucer's optimism. Despite everything heavy and formidable, worthy of ridicule and disgusting, everything that Chaucer experienced and saw around him, everything that he denounced in his satirical images, above all the trials and tribulations that his country was subjected to and that Chaucer repeatedly mentions - Above all this unattractive reality, Chaucer's cheerful, life-affirming creativity arises, generated by faith in the vitality, strength and talent of his people. With this character of Chaucer's historicism, it is in vain to look for a consistent and direct depiction of events or a reasonable analysis of that complex and contradictory historical process, which is indirectly shown in the Canterbury Tales. And yet, they became a mouthpiece that preserved for us the voice of the people of his time, and a mirror that reflected their appearance. We will not find this in any of Chaucer's contemporary English writers. "The founder of realism," Chaucer carries his wonderful mirror along the high roads of England, and it accurately and truthfully reflects everything that falls within its reach. Chaucer's mirror does not reflect historical cataclysms, it would crack and fall out of his trembling hand, but, to the best of his ability, it does more: it reflects the people whose hands history was made.
Joyful, full of light and movement, Chaucer's work reveals in him great vitality and vigor, which did not allow him to break in the trials and tribulations of his stormy and terrible age. However, from the contradictions and chaos of the pre-rebirth, the complex and contradictory image of Chaucer himself arises. He is generally characterized by the duality of a man of a turning point, who wants to combine the best moral foundations of yesterday with inner emancipation, energy and breadth as the property of the future. Still unable to make an irrevocable choice, he at the same time cannot overcome these contradictions, which only Shakespeare's mighty synthesis proved capable of. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer read, as it were, the waste of feudal England, while not hiding his sadness for individual righteous people of the past. At the same time, his "Canterbury Tales" was, as it were, a welcoming word to the people of modern times, and Chaucer did not hush up their weaknesses and vices. The disparate features are also doubled, from which the positive images of Chaucer are still only being added. Of the people of modern times, Chaucer most often encounters sancho panzas, like the merry innkeeper Bailey. Of the good people of the past, people most readily remembered are not of this world - Don Quixote in the guise of a student or even a righteous knight. Only in the idealized figure of the "poor priest" is the active feat of Chaucer's contemporaries and Wycliffe's followers reflected. Chaucer often denounces married wrathful people, as well as their flatterers and servants, but nevertheless he is well aware that under the given conditions of denunciation these are futile: “Beware of instructing kings, even if they were later baked in hell.” Chaucer could not but see the true and very unattractive face of the Duke of Lancaster, but in relation to him he shared the illusions and short-sightedness of Wycliffe, further aggravated by the inexhaustible feudal loyalty to his patron. He is drawn to the knowledge of the world, but, as for any person of the Middle Ages, this rests on astrology and alchemy. True, he ridicules the astrology of charlatans, soothsayers and healers, and in his Treatise on the Astrolabe he himself engages in practical instrumental astronomy, naively flaunting his knowledge in this area, and in the Canterbury Tales he now and then gives complex astronomical definitions of time. From astrological medicine, he seeks to isolate the healthy grain of the old Hippocratic teaching on temperaments. He denounces charlatans-alchemists, but reveals a deep interest in that technique of alchemical experiment, which has completely passed into modern science and contributed to the knowledge of matter. A sincere and deeply religious person, a knightly passionate admirer of the Virgin Mary and an admirer of Francis of Assisi, he is at the same time a free-thinking lover of life, condemning monastic asceticism, and a mocking skeptic when it comes to dogmas that kill living faith. All his work is imbued with the "cheerful free-thinking" of the Renaissance. But Chaucer's freethinking is an almost instinctive indignation against asceticism and dogma, it is a naively optimistic denial of darkness in the name of light, it is above all a love of life and life-affirmation. Only much later, “cheerful freethinking,” deepened by a new humanistic content, appeared as Rabelais’ convulsive laughter, Cervantes’ bitter grin, Marlowe’s titanic impulses of thought and feelings, and Shakespeare’s mighty, all-encompassing and mournful insights. unfinished past, which caused Rabelais's despondency, Marlowe's rage, Shakespeare's meditation. Moreover, the possibilities of a man of the High Renaissance, who found himself and realized his power in an open struggle against the inert forces of the feudal past and hand in hand with friends and like-minded people, were far from fully revealed. But it was precisely such communication and such an environment that Chaucer lacked. And yet, with all the reservations, Chaucer was a new type of artist for his time. In his work, the ossified class isolation and schematism of the medieval worldview have already been violated. They are replaced by a struggle with inert tradition, a critical approach to the feudal past and present, and an anxious look into the still unclear future.
Those qualities that were previously considered an inalienable property of the upper class - the feudal lords: valor, nobility, self-sacrifice, self-esteem, good breeding, developed mind - in Chaucer become available to everyone. good man. Self-esteem is possessed not only by a wise commander-knight, but also by Harry Bailey, who knows his own worth. In Franklin's story, not only the well-born Arviragus and Aurelius are endowed with inner nobility, but also the rootless sorcerer and philosopher.
Even earlier, in the art of the Middle Ages, the inner world of a person was revealed, but most often it was passive contemplation, the fulfillment of God's will, its predestination, or at least the dictates of fate. In Chaucer, man is the master of his destiny and fights for it. His inner world is revealed not in reflection, but in effective communication with other people.
Chaucer's man is not a one-dimensional scheme, not a bearer of abstract qualities. And the appearance, and thoughts, and behavior, and everything that happens to a person serves Chaucer to reveal his character in all its versatility and inconsistency, and his people are dynamic, lively characters. Like Shakespeare, Chaucer did not invent something abstractly new, but distinguished much of what was inherent in the character of his people and what was revealed later in his history. Chaucer struggles with the medieval tradition, but takes from it, in the order of succession, certain obligatory elements of historical and cultural necessity. Enriched with elements of a new ideological and artistic freedom, they enter his work in a new capacity and lay the foundation for a new, Chaucerian tradition.
This tradition did not develop immediately and quite organically, since in his work Chaucer expressed some of the essential aspects national character: craving for a sober reality, unbending strength and self-confidence, optimism and self-esteem - qualities that were especially hardened in the successful struggle against feudalism. In the field of artistic mastery, this manifested itself in the free use of material, in the daring combination of terrible and funny, sad and cheerful, low and high, poetic and ordinary, and finally, in the peculiar character of the grotesque and in purely English humor. After Chaucer, these features were ingeniously developed by Shakespeare, especially in the bright, comedic way, which is an integral part of his tragedies and makes up their earthly, Falstaffian background.
And following Shakespeare, the same features appear in Fielding in the contrasting depiction of people and in the contrasting construction of the novel, as well as in the comic adventures of his heroes on the high roads of life.
Chaucer inspired Walter Scott when he resurrected the people and customs of the English Middle Ages in Ivanhoe. Smollett and Dickens inherited Chaucer's outward character, sometimes narrowing Chaucer's living images to the grotesque masks of their eccentrics. Of course, Chaucer does not exhaust all the origins and paths of English realism. This is not where Milton's work comes from. Defoe and Swift. This is only the beginning of one of the paths along which democratic everyday realism developed in England. Here are the origins of the "comic epic" and the beginning of the "epic of the high road", from here there is a turn to the novel and the comedy of characters, here are the prototypes of people typical of one of the faces of Chaucer's homeland, for "green England", for Dickens's "old, cheerful England" and Shakespeare.
With all the corrections for the time and for the not at all tragic worldview of Chaucer, it must be admitted that the English researcher Coulton had grounds when he argued that "after Shakespeare, Chaucer is the most Shakespearean figure in English literature." And it's not for nothing that when you think of Chaucer, the words from Hamlet come to mind: "Scientist, courtier, fighter-eye, sword, tongue." But even this capacious definition does not cover all of Chaucer. A court poet and a customs officer, a bookworm and a lover of life, a participant in wars and peace negotiations, a frequenter of fairs and pilgrimages, and above all a sharp-sighted artist, he knows folk life not as a scientist, not as a courtier. He looks at life not from a narrow class point of view, not only as an esquire of Edward III and a citizen of the City of London. At the same time, he is the son of his country, a cultured European, standing at the level of his era, and an artist who was far ahead of his time in England.
He can rightfully be considered the first realistic writer in England and the first, and perhaps the only, representative of the initial stage of the English Renaissance, which only in the work of Marlowe and Shakespeare reached maturity and full bloom.
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF BELARUS EE "VITEBSK STATE UNIVERSITY them. P. M. MASHEROV"
COURSE WORK ON THE TOPIC:
"WAYS OF CHARACTERISTICS OF HEROES INCANTERBURYSTORIES J. CHAUCERA"
- Work completed
- Ershova Ekaterina Vladimirovna
- student of the 2nd year of the 205th group
- Faculty of Philology
- Scientific adviser:
- Belskaya Olga Viktorovna
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
3
5
II. CLASSIFICATION OF HEROES.
10
2.1 POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE HEROES.
10
2.2 SOCIAL CLASSES.
12
CONCLUSION.
24
List of used literature.
26
Bibliography.
26
INTRODUCTION
The work of Geoffrey Chaucer is unanimously considered by scholars to be the pinnacle of English literature of the period commonly referred to as the "High or Mature Middle Ages". In an era when a remarkable classic of English literature lived and worked, a truly English culture was emerging. Chaucer is considered one of the creators of the English poetic language, the founder of the literary traditions of this country. Of course, the process of literary development was complex; Chaucer could not help relying on his predecessors. And since in his native culture there were practically no examples worthy of imitation (in the good sense of the word), the poet borrowed poetics, traditions, plots from the ancient classics - the creators of ancient times.Chaucer's main work, The Canterbury Tales, is still popular today. It is included in the study programs of both English and foreign literature. Many literary scholars have addressed the study of this work at different times. The problem of genre specificity of the "Canterbury Tales" by J. Chaucer at different times was addressed by such literary scholars as Kashkin I., Mikhalskaya M., Meletinsky E., Matuzova V., Podkorytova N., Belozerova N., Popova M., etc. .d. Among domestic studies of Chaucer's work, one can note:
- I. Kashkin. Geoffrey Chaucer // Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. M., 2007.
Popova M. K. Literary and philosophical origins of the "Canterbury Tales" by J. Chaucer. Voronezh, 2003.
- Furnivall, "The six text edition of Canterbury Tales" (Oxford, 1868) and "Life records of Chaucer" (1875);
Koch, "Chronology of C."s writings" (1890);
Skeat, "Legend of good women" (1889);
Skeat, "S."s minor poems" (1888);
"Originals and analogues of Canterbury Tales
J. Fleury, "Guide to Chaucer" (1877), etc.
The purpose of the work is to study the ways of characterizing the characters in the Canterbury Tales. In connection with the purpose of the study, we set ourselves the following tasks:
- Follow the author's character description system;
Find the connection between the characters of the heroes and their stories;
Highlight possible classifications of heroes;
Group the heroes according to the classes of medieval society;
Compare depicted classes with real classes of the Middle Ages;
Analyze the specifics of medieval society.
In this work, comparative-historical and analytical methods were used.
The scientific novelty of the work is due to the lack of special works devoted to this problem.
I. THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF THE CANTERBURY STORIES.
The Canterbury Tales is the most famous work of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Little is known about his life, however, some facts have been preserved. Chaucer was born in the early forties of the fourteenth century in London. He was the only child in the family. Chaucer's father, a merchant, became wealthy when he inherited the property of relatives who died of the plague in 1349. Chaucer's father could now afford to send his son as a page to the Countess of Ulster, which means that Geoffrey did not have to follow his parents' path and become merchant. Eventually, Chaucer began serving the countess' husband, Prince Lionel, son of King Edward III. Chaucer served during the Hundred Years' War between England and France as a soldier and later as a diplomat, as he was fluent in French and Italian and well-versed in Latin and other languages. His diplomatic activity twice took him to Italy, where he may have met Boccaccio and Petrarch, whose work influenced his work.Around 1378 Chaucer began to develop his understanding of English poetry. Chaucer wrote in the English that was spoken on the streets of London at the time. Undoubtedly, he was influenced by the works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, who wrote in popular Italian.
The nobles and kings Chaucer served were impressed with his negotiating skills and rewarded him for his success. Money, provisions, high positions and land holdings - all this allowed him to go on a royal pension. In 1374 the king appointed Chaucer to the civil service in the port of London. He worked with clothing importers. Perhaps because of his work experience, his works describe in detail the outfits and fabrics in which the characters are dressed. Chaucer held this position for 12 years, after which he left London and went to Kent, where Canterbury was located. There he served as a justice of the peace while living in debt, and was later appointed as a clerk. After he retired in the early nineties, he worked on The Canterbury Tales, which he began around 1387. By the time of his resignation, he had already written a significant amount of poetry, including the famous novel Troilus and Cressida.
The original plan for The Canterbury Tales called for four stories from each character, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. But instead of a hundred and twenty stories, the work ends after twenty-four, and the characters are still on their way to Canterbury. Chaucer either planned to recheck the structure of these twenty-four stories or did not have time to finish them (he died on October 25th, 1400).
Although Chaucer's work was influenced by the works of the great French and English writers of the century (such as Boccaccio's Decameron), the works of these authors were unknown to English readers, thus the format of the Canterbury Tales and the realistic portrayal of the characters were unfamiliar to readers before Chaucer.
The book was created, one might say, spontaneously. Its spacious frame easily absorbed all the suitable epic material from the old one. Of the twenty-four plots, many are borrowed from books: the stories of a knight, a lawyer, stories of a monk, a doctor, a student, a second nun, a landowner, abbess, and a housekeeper. Others are well-known then oral wandering stories: the stories of a miller, a steward, a skipper, a chaplain, a seller of pardons, a weaver from Bath, a bailiff, a merchant, a squire. For his realistic pattern to fit well, Chaucer needs a strong and frequent plot line; and where the plot is not finished in the source, he abandons even a well-begun thing, like the history of Cambuscan (the story of the squire). Thus, almost one "Topaz" remains to the share of Chaucer's own invention, and even that one is a parody, that is, it assumes the existence of a close plot on a serious plane.
The systematic selection of plots gave the Canterbury Tales an extraordinary variety of genres. Here is everything that a not too rich assortment of literary genres of that time could give: a chivalric romance (stories of a knight and a squire), a pious legend (a story of an abbess and a second nun), a moral story (a story of a pardoner), biographies of great people (a monk's story) , historical story (doctor's story), short story (student and skipper stories), fablio (miller's, majordomo's stories), animal epic (chaplain's story), mythological story (housekeeper's story), pious reasoning in the form of a sermon (priest's story), parody of chivalric romance ("Sir Topaz" and the story of a weaver from Bath).
Chaucer wanted to make each story as convincing as possible, which is why elements of everyday and psychological realism are so strong in them. Or he achieved the same persuasiveness in the opposite way, showing the improbability of the situation through parody, as in the tale of the rejuvenated old woman told by the Bat weaver. To enhance the sense of reality of his characters, Chaucer resorts to a method that is still largely new in fiction. It is quite clear that if several stories are pulled together by a common frame with the narrators appearing in it, then the narrators must appear to the reader as characters more real than the heroes of their stories. Framing, therefore, creates, as it were, two levels of reality. In this form, it does not represent a new literary device. Its use was new. Chaucer deliberately blurs the line between characters he considers real and characters he portrays as fictional. He depicts the abbess in the general prologue, the woman from Bath in the prologue to her story, and, for example, the beautiful carpenter Alison in the miller's story with exactly the same colors. In this way, a fictional image takes on flesh and blood. In exactly the same way, the image of the living student from the general prologue is completed in the portrait of the student Nicholas, transferred to the everyday atmosphere of Oxford in the same miller's story.
Everyone knows the plot that underlies the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer once stayed overnight at an inn on the southern outskirts of London in order to go on a pilgrimage early in the morning. People gathered in the same hotel from different parts of England, who set themselves the same goal. Chaucer immediately got to know everyone, became friends with many, and they decided to leave London together under the leadership of their master Harry Bailey. As they thought, so they did. Let's go. The path was long. Harry Bailey suggested that each of the 29 pilgrims should tell two stories on the way there and two on the way back. What Chaucer allegedly managed to write down became the content of The Canterbury Tales.
This is why Chaucer's general prologue to the Canterbury Tales is of great importance. Formally, he, along with prologues and afterwords to individual stories, is assigned the modest role of framing the book, moreover, purely external. But Chaucer very soon abandoned the idea of giving a bare frame: precisely because he had a strong connecting thread between the characters of the general prologue and stories. And this, in turn, turned the frame into some kind of independent everyday poem.
A broad picture of English life was given. Before us is the division of New England society. In the prologue, the characters are arranged according to social groups and professions: aristocracy (knight, squire, yeoman), clergy (abbess, monk, priest, Carmelite, bailiff of the church court, seller of indulgences), bourgeois (merchant, student, lawyer, Franklin, dyer, carpenter , hatmaker, weaver, cook, skipper, doctor, Batsk weaver, plowman, miller, housekeeper, majordomo). If we add the characters of the stories to these characters, then the picture of English life and its representatives will be quite saturated. She is amazingly persuasive. The whole of England, new England, is shown here juicy, colorful, full-blooded.After Dante discovered the art of everyday and psychological portraiture, no one, not even Boccaccio, gave such a gallery of living characters.Of course, Chaucer's poem is far from the laconic insipidness of the Comedy. Chaucer's is not graphics, like Dante's, but rather the painting of a contemporary multi-color miniature, which loves details and is not afraid of variegation, which dwells long and lovingly on the outside: on the figure, face, clothes, furniture, utensils, weapons, horse decoration. And Chaucer's verse, with all the variety of meters, fits this manner unusually. It flows slowly, easily and generously.
Among the humorists of world literature, Chaucer is one of the largest. His humor is soft, not evil. He rarely turns into sarcasm, in his humor there is a great understanding of human weaknesses, a willingness to condescend to them and forgive. But he uses the tool of humor skillfully. Humor is an organic part of his literary talent, and sometimes it seems that he himself does not notice how humorous and ironic strokes are pouring from under his pen.
However, one should not think that Chaucer was strong only in the depiction of comedic and farcical situations. There are both romantic dramas and real tragedies in The Canterbury Tales. The most heartfelt gloomy tragedy was told to the pilgrims by a pardoner, who made it the subject of the aphorism: "Radix malorum est cupiditas" (the root of evil is greed).[ 1 , c.259] Tragic persuasiveness here is given to the plot by the setting. Chaucer gives a picture of a double betrayal against the backdrop of a pestilence raging in Flanders, and the first scene - unbridled drunkenness in a tavern - a real feast during the plague. 1, p.18]
The innovation and originality of The Canterbury Tales was appreciated only in the era of romanticism, although the successors of Chaucer's traditions appeared already during his lifetime (John Lydgate, Thomas Hawkleave, etc.). The English printer William Caxton published The Canterbury Tales in 1470. Since then, this book has been reprinted many times.
II. CLASSIFICATION OF HEROES.
2.1 POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE HEROES.
In The Canterbury Tales, one can see the division of heroes into negative and positive.The positive heroes include a priest, a plowman, a knight, a 2nd nun, a student, a squire, an abbess, a monk, a doctor, a lawyer, a Bath weaver, a canon's servant. I have listed them in order from best to worst. By the same principle, I will list the negative characters: the miller, the housekeeper, the major-domo, the skipper, the cook, the bailiff of the church court, the seller of indulgences.
The most correct and ideal heroes are the priest and the plowman. They are two brothers and travel together. The description of their portraits is completely devoid of any ironic shades. The priest is really virtuous, pious, honest, diligent, patient. Chaucer says this priest is the best. This priest is a model for what the clergy should be. And the plowman is just as upright and honest as his brother.
The knight is also an idealized character. From his description it is clear that the author admires the knight. The author shows that the knight has all the qualities necessary for the knights of that time: honor, freedom, valor and devotion. And in the knight's story one can see true knightly love, gallant attitude towards ladies and all the best that is in chivalry.
The second nun is not mentioned in the general prologue, but her story about Saint Cicilia suggests that she is an honest representative of the clergy who leads a righteous life.
The student is also positive; he is not interested in anything except knowledge. Chaucer praises the student for exchanging worldly pleasures for intellectual enrichment. In his story, faith in goodness is encouraged despite all the misfortunes. This is a cautionary tale that teaches wives to be submissive.
The squire is also positive, but he is lower than his father, because. he is driven to a greater extent not by valiant knightly goals, but by the desire to win the favor of the ladies and be accepted for his most part of the arrestocracy.
The Batsk weaver can be attributed to both positive and negative characters. The positive thing about her is that she is a master of her craft, quite experienced and in general this is a very charming, lively and energetic character. And the negative thing is that she was cheeky, and if someone did not please her, furious pride flared up in her. She is frank in her story and says without shame that she married the first three husbands because of their wealth. The Weaver of Bath is the very first feminist hero. She fights for the freedom of married women.
The abbess and the monk continue to live an aristocratic life, despite their place in the church. But a monk is worse than an abbess, because openly disregards church rules and breaks many covenants, moreover, he condemns them.
A doctor and a lawyer are on the same level, because both of them are good in their professions and help their clients regularly. But these characters also have their downsides. They do their job well, not in order to help people better, but in order to make their work more expensively paid. Everything they do is for their own gain.
Canon's Servant positive hero because he wants to reform and stop cheating with the canon. But it cannot be completely positive, because from his story it is clear that he is quite greedy and was an accomplice in all the dishonest actions of the canon.
At the top of the negative heroes is the miller and the housekeeper, because they are both professional crooks. Their stories speak of unfaithful wives. They both put their own profit above all else.
The majordomo knew how to steal, to flatter, to profit. The majordomo's tale involves a double deception (both on the part of the miller and on the part of the students). Also in his story there is a decline in noble morals and ideals of behavior.
The skipper was an ordinary pirate who robbed other people's ships, and thus easily profited from the labor of others.
The character of the cook is not drawn to the end, but judging by the description of his appearance and the beginning of his story, it is clear that something dirty and vile is hidden in him. His story is not finished. Perhaps the cook's story was meant to be dirtier than the majordomo's, and through it Chaucer wanted to show the bottom of London life.
And at the bottom of the negative characters are the bailiff of the church court and the seller of indulgences. Both characters represent evil. They are not interested in anything except money, for the sake of which they are ready for anything, even for the meanest deeds and sins.
2.2 SOCIAL CLASSES.
During the Middle Ages, society was divided into three classes: the clergy (those who pray), the townspeople (those who work), the aristocracy (those who fight). In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer showed with his penetrating eye this structure and the types of people in these classes through a description of their clothes, their preferences and interactions with each other. In the main prologue, you can already notice different classes of people, thanks to the detailed description of the pilgrims. Also, this pattern can be traced in the order in which the characters are presented in the general prologue. First, the author describes the representatives of the aristocracy, then the clergy and the townspeople. But the clergy is divided into three parts, the criterion for this division is the presence of moral qualities in these heroes.Aristocracy.
Upper class in medieval society. Only one percent of the population belonged to this class. They were members of royal families, nobles, knights, squires. Chaucer shows three representatives of the aristocracy: a knight, a squire, a yeoman. It is through these characters that one can learn about the life of the aristocracy of that time.
Knight. This hero is an exemplary representative of the aristocracy, because. he has all her good features: gallantry, truthfulness, honor, generosity, courtesy. He has an impressive military career. He participated in the battles that took place in different parts: Alexandria, Lithuania, Russian land, Andalusia, Layas, Satalia, Belmaria, Tremissen. And wherever the knight went, he was revered and respected. Although he was dressed in a doublet, shabby chain mail, in a holey hem, and not in fashionable aristocratic robes, his appearance suggests that he is a real knight.
Squire. He is the son of a knight and, accordingly, belongs to the class of aristocrats from birth. He is dressed in more elaborate clothes than his father. His appearance and kinship with a knight indicate his belonging to the aristocratic class.
By the efforts of skillful ladies' hands
His outfit was embroidered like a meadow,
And all sparkled with marvelous colors,
Emblems, overseas animals. 1, c.31]
Chaucer says that the squire will also soon become a knight, but it seems that the chivalry interests the young man less than his father. He is more interested in love affairs.
He was a squire and fought there,
Than he sought favors from his beloved. 1, c.31]
He also possessed all the skills that were needed by aristocratic youth.
All day he played the flute and sang,
He knew how to put together songs,
He could read, draw, write,
Fight on spears, deftly dance. 1, c.31]
That. the knight is shown gallant and courteous, while his son represents a different shade of aristocratic life - love affairs, fashion, festivities, cheerful leisure. The squire is not the kind of person who will run to fight with a terrible dragon, he will prefer to just take part in jousting tournaments for the sake of glory and honor.
Yeoman. By definition, a yeoman is a person hired by the nobles to serve them. But Chaucer describes him more as a soldier than as a servant. It focuses on his attire and weapons rather than his personality and place in society.
Yeoman was with him, in a caftan with a hood;
Behind the sash, like the outfit, green
Sticking out a bunch of long, sharp arrows,
Whose feathers the yeoman knew how to save -
And the arrow of nimble hands obeyed.
With him was his great mighty bow,
Polished like new.
There was a thick-set yeoman, shaven-headed,
Cold wind, scorched by the sun,
Forest hunting he knew the law.
A lush bracer tightened the wrist,
And on the road from military gear
There was a sword and a shield and a dagger on the side;
On the neck barely shimmered with silver,
Green bandage hidden from view,
The worn face of Saint Christopher.
A turium horn hung on a sling -
Was a forester, must have been that shooter.[ 1, p.31-32]
Clergy.
Chaucer shows the representatives of the clergy in the light in which they were perceived by the people of that time. The following heroes belong to this class: the abbess, the monk, the Carmelite, the priest, the seller of indulgences and the bailiff of the church court.
Abbess. She was the head of the monastery. Most often in the Middle Ages, this position was occupied by wealthy people from aristocratic families. The description of the abbess makes it clear that she also came from an aristocratic family. This is evident in her education.
And fluent French
Like they teach in Stratford, not funny
Parisian hurried accent. 1, c.32]
But her origin becomes more obvious after a description of her manners and habits.
She kept herself dignified at the table:
Do not choke on strong liquor,
Slightly dipping your fingers in the gravy,
He will not wipe them on his sleeve or collar.
Not a speck around her device.
She wiped her lips so often
That there was no trace of fat on the goblet.
Waiting your turn with dignity
I chose a piece without greed. [ 1, c.32]
All this gives us the opportunity to understand why Chaucer described her immediately after the representatives of the aristocracy. From her description it is clear that of all the representatives of the clergy, she is closest to the aristocracy.
Monk. He is another example of clergymen living the life of aristocrats. He was passionately fond of hunting and could not stand the monastic charters. they ban it favourite hobby- hunting.
Cheerful disposition, he could not stand
Monastic languishing prison,
Charter of Mauritius and Benedict
And all sorts of prescripts and edicts.
But in fact, because the monk is right,
And this harsh charter is outdated:
He forbids hunting for something
And teaches us too cool:
A monk without a cell is a fish without water.[ 1, c.33]
Monastic life is boring for him and he likes ladies, kennels, revels. He does not like work, he spends all the money of the chapel as his own.
And although such monks are reproached,
But he would be an excellent abbot:
The whole district knew his stable,
His bridle jangled with buckles,
Like the bells of that chapel
The income from which he spent as his own. [ 1, c.33]
etc.................
Introduction
Chapter 1 female images in Chaucer's stories
Chapter 2. Marriage in the Canterbury Tales
Chapter 3
Conclusion
Introduction
The study of matrimonial relations in a certain cultural space is impossible without knowledge of the historical and cultural identity of the era under study, as well as the specifics of the normative perception of these relations. As for other European countries, medieval Britain of the 14th century is characterized by a combination of several, sometimes contradictory, trends in the assessment of matrimony.
Courtly culture forms a completely new look at the nature of the relationship between a woman and a man. An idealized, largely invented system of relations dictated a different attitude towards a woman and love. The usefulness of a knight was determined not only by his valor, but also by his feeling for a woman. The understatement and potentiality of relations of this kind destroyed the usual perception, but at the same time, the prohibition and conflict inherent in this feeling did not allow going beyond the ethical ideas of this society. The beauty and artificiality of literary images and the ideal nature of love relationships contrasted sharply with the real prose of life. But the creation of this model presupposes a person's inner desire for such relationships.
It was during these difficult times for the British writer Geoffrey Chaucer (Geoffrey Chaucer, between 1340 and 1345 - 1400) around 1380 that he matured greatest work, which introduces the poet into the ranks of the most remarkable writers in England and from which, in fact, the new - Renaissance - British literature begins. This is a collection of poetic short stories "The Canterbury Tales", fanned by the spirit of the Renaissance love of life. Earthly life appears in it as the highest good of man. True, Chaucer pays tribute to the religious views of the Middle Ages. This is evidenced at least by the life of St. Kekilia included in the book. Also, Chaucer never questions the necessity of the religious institutions themselves, although he sharply criticizes the contemporary practice of the Catholic Church - the influence of time affects. One gets the impression that Chaucer is worried about the fate of Christianity and the personal fate of a person in connection with the dogma, and not outside of it.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is an extremely important source for the study of the ethics of family relations in different strata of society in medieval Britain. They reflect the combination of life practice, ideal ideas and personal characteristics of the author. The Canterbury Tales were written by Chaucer under the direct influence of G. Boccaccio's Decameron, when Chaucer was already a well-known and popular writer. Under the influence of regional dominants and nationally determined worldview, the form, content, ideas and images of The Canterbury Tales acquired a specifically British flavor.
Using the heritage of French literature, especially fablio, Chaucer's interpretation of the theme of love does not coincide with his sources. In most cases, love is presented in the Canterbury Tales in a more socially significant sense, the interpretation of family relations acquires a social sharpness. Still, Chaucer is trying to find the deep sources of the problems he posed.
The Canterbury Tales takes the form of a collection of short stories, characteristic of its time. They are grouped either by topic or by function. In general, despite the presence of the most diverse topics, The Canterbury Tales can be described as a book containing a public orientation. The importance of socially significant topics is one of the features of the British worldview.
Chaucer wrote only the prologue and part of the journey to Canterbury, the return journey remained unwritten. But in the extensive prologue, Chaucer gives an extensive gallery of masterfully executed portraits of pilgrims - these are people from different parts of England, representatives of various professions and social status, with different interests, tastes, manners and aesthetic predilections. They are united by a purely external motive: they all go to Canterbury to worship the coffin of St. Thomas Becket and, to speed up the journey, each tell two short stories on the way there and back. The whole of medieval Britain appears before us, and the very frame of the short stories - the journey of pilgrims to Canterbury - is a characteristic household detail drawn from the everyday life of England at that time.
Chaucer simply could not show his pilgrims without describing their vivid individual qualities; I wanted to convey living ideas to the reader, and for this we needed living people. Chaucer's people are emotionally wider, more independent, their world is multifaceted, constrained not by the mask of their "type", but only by their personal character. Chaucer shows: the world is imperfect, it happens in different ways, people behave differently, there are many reasons for this, both objective and subjective. Each hero of Chaucer has his own destiny, which he cannot overcome. But at the same time, they choose their own path on their own, and each of them carries some kind of social burden. Some of the characters are moral, others are immoral.
Despite the fact that Chaucer used borrowed sources in composing his work, he constantly informs the reader of his own reasoning that arose in the process of writing. Chaucer thinks all the time, and then issues his verdict. Apparently, Chaucer is not entirely satisfied with the interpretation of events provided by his source-hero - his interest is in the field of psychological portrayal of characters, his heroes are consistent with the circumstances, and with the movements of their souls, and with their special, often complex personal disposition.
Interpretation by J. Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales necessarily entails a transformation towards greater drama of the action and character, greater vitality, showing the tragedy of ongoing events and human actions.
Mainly in the "Canterbury Tales" we are talking about people who own real estate in the city, as well as professionally associated with the city: first of all, these are merchants, artisans, officials, and less often - knights. The study of family and marriage relations is one of the most relevant areas in the Canterbury Tales. In the traditional way of medieval society, the family was one of the main microstructures that determined the status of a person, the form of his behavior, the system of personal relationships. The study of traditional family ways in various social strata provides an opportunity, indirectly, through the moral and ethical attitudes of each group, to understand the specifics of their corporate and individual ideas. The study of the family also provides an opportunity to look into the inner world of a person, to explore his most intimate and hidden side of life. It becomes possible to determine the behavioral norms in which the individual exists, his needs and the possibility of going beyond these norms.
Chapter 1. Love and female images in Chaucer's stories
Based on the image of women in the Canterbury Tales and the attitude of the characters towards them, one can conclude that, despite the numerous monologues of women in the first person, one can trace a pronounced attitude towards a woman from a male point of view, from the position of an observer of what is happening. Admiration for some women, contempt and indignation towards others, ironic indulgence towards others, etc. are in the nature of social interest in the development of the image, all problems are presented by Chaucer from a socially significant position.
The humanistic view of the nature of the relationship between a man and a woman in The Canterbury Tales is a completely new perception of the feeling of love. Love becomes an integral feature of a full-fledged human life, it fills it with colors and a hitherto unknown meaning.
Love appears in Chaucer both as a simple carnal attraction, usually associated with trickery (the stories of a miller, a majordomo, a skipper, and a merchant using a popular frivolous episode) or even with a crime (a doctor's story), and as an all-consuming passion (a knight's story). She experiences human nobility (Franklin's story about a faithful wife whom a page in love wants to possess with the help of magic - by the way, the story includes a long list of persistent maidens and wives who have gained fame and who sought salvation from shame in death). Thus, for example, in the doctor's story one can see the same connection between love and suffering that runs through other "moral stories". Referring to Titus Livius, this educated physician tells of the virtuous Virginia, who decided to die rather than fall prey to the voluptuous scoundrel Appianus and Claudius' assistant. Virginia loves God and her purity (as can be seen from her name) and suffers for this love. Her father Virginius is faced with a choice: kill his daughter or give her to dishonor (he chooses the first).
As mentioned above, Chaucer in the General Prologue warns the reader that the stories of the characters can be ambiguous or immodest, but he justifies this by the desire to convey everything as it was, to tell the truth. In this context, attention is drawn to the expressive portrait of a broken weaver from Bath, a woman no longer her first youth, but still very energetic. She is rich and enjoys weight in her city. None of the local women dares to enter the parish church before her, because everyone knows that she will not go into her pocket for a word. She was already married five times, but she buried all her husbands (and no less number of lovers) and now dreams of a sixth.
Nevertheless, in the story of the Weaver of Bath, the problem of the connection between beauty and the wife's infidelity is touched upon. The Batskaya weaver - the "merry widow" - sets out her views on family and marriage life, and also very frankly tells about how deftly she managed with her husbands. Thus, the Weaver of Bath literally rejected the then religious and moral doctrine, on which the social structure of the medieval British family was based. By the way, Chaucer, without directly condemning the behavior of the Bath weaver, nevertheless mentions that the color of her youth has passed, she is deaf, ugly, and it is unlikely that something good awaits her in old age, although she swaggers, and this expresses the author’s craving for justice, to moralizing.
Knowing how to appreciate strength, unceremonious dexterity and material gain, the skipper from the breed of sea wolves brings Fablio's attention to the merchant's wife, who, for the hundred francs she needs to pay for the outfits, is given to a quick-witted monk who receives this money from her merchant husband.
Unlike the Bath weaver and the merchant's wife in the "moral" stories (knight, Franklin, etc.), the outer beauty of a woman is equal to her inner beauty, i.e. chastity.
The characters of the pilgrims are usually associated with their stories drawn from a wide variety of sources, whether they are edifying collections of the Middle Ages, fablios, adventurous chivalric stories, ancient literature, works of Italian humanists of the 14th century. or incidents taken directly from life. Thus, having valued books above all else and, of course, speaking Latin, a student from Oxford retells the final short story of the Decameron about the long-suffering Griselda, known to him from Latin translation Petrarch. At the end of the Student's story and in Chaucer's conclusion to this story, one can see that change of points of view, which is characteristic of all Gothic art. The pathetic story about the patient Griselda has just ended, an allegorical interpretation of this story is given, and suddenly the student declares that now you will not find a single Griselda, and in his song advises the wives to have fun and torment their husbands in every possible way. On the other hand, the story of the landowner says: "She agreed to recognize him as her husband and master, Since husbands can be masters of their wives."
Thus, Chaucer summarizes a happy marriage, provided, however, that the man renounces the dominant position in the family (it is not difficult to guess that the story with a similar tendency belongs to the Weaver of Bath). As for Chaucer himself, he avoids the flat moralization characteristic of medieval didactics. After all, for each story, the narrator, endowed with certain views and tastes, is responsible in each case. Chaucer seems to step aside and simply observe the course of life in medieval Britain.
Sometimes Chaucer deployed (but very secretive at the same time) ironic. So, in the story of the steward, he lists cases of windiness and inconstancy in the animal world, which are always shown by females - a she-wolf and a cat, and then summarizes:
“All these examples refer to men who have become unfaithful, and not to women at all. For men always have more desire to satisfy their thirst for base things than their wives.
A certain nobleman tells in a short story about a lady who, in the absence of her beloved husband, promised to answer the passion of a page in love with her if he cleared the coast of Brittany from underwater rocks. Promising this, she was sure of the impossibility of such a task. Meanwhile, her admirer, with the help of a sorcerer, did what was required, and the lady found herself faced with the need to fulfill the promise. The need for this was recognized by the husband who returned home, although, according to him, he would prefer to fall with a heart pierced in battle. Touched by the enormity of the sacrifice, the page “decided to renounce his lust so that the knightly law would not be offended by a vile act,” and freed the object of his love from fulfilling the promise, although the services of the sorcerer cost him 1,000 pounds of gold. But with such general generosity, the sorcerer was at his best: he refused the payment, having learned that the page was ruined in vain. Far from rhetorically, Chaucer asks: which of them do you think is more generous? The husband who sent his beloved wife to her admirer, so as not to dishonor her by not keeping this word? Or a page in love who renounced his rights? Or, finally, that philosopher who owned the secrets of magic, who did not agree to accept payment for his work?
Chapter 2. Marriage in the Canterbury Tales
“Wait a minute, my story has not yet begun.
When you hear it, you will sing differently.
In that barrel there will be bitterer ale,
than everything I've said so far.
Oh, I know, hardly anyone knows better
what a scourge matrimony takes
My taxes - I myself am that scourge.
And you call caution to yourself,
And consult, then decide
sip the horn. And then do not repent
That the ale of matrimony is not painfully sweet;
I will give examples, how nasty he is.
The study of normative behavior and the declared perception of marriage must have a clear relationship with reality, only in this case we can count on an adequate understanding of the specifics of matrimonial relations in the era of Chaucer.
Realizing all the difficulties of extracting the material of family and marriage relations from a literary source, it is possible to draw on the material of the Canterbury Tales when we find clear parallels in plots and characters with documentary material. What is of interest is Chaucer's own vision of the problem, for example, his attitude towards marriage or his ideas about possible family relationships.
Chaucer was able to reflect the main trends in family and marriage relations in Britain in the mid-14th century: ridiculing the simpleton of a man, exposing the vices of a woman, prejudice to marriage, the traditional view of marriage, where a woman and a man a priori received their qualitative personifications.
At the very end of the Knight's Tale, the marriage of Palamon and Emilia is mentioned. This allows, to some extent, to compare the Knight's Tale with the stories of the so-called "Marriage Group".
Franklin's story shows the ideal marriage, the one hinted at at the end of the Knight's story and the Bath Weaver's story. It is based on mutual trust and freedom. Although some researchers find, on the basis of a study of medieval marriage contracts, contradictions in this marriage.
This method made it possible to consider the traditional divorce practice in England in the 14th-15th centuries, as well as to look at matrimonial problems through the eyes of contemporaries themselves. Drawing a number of parallels with the traditions of other European states, we resort to comparative research methods. This allows us to identify both common and unique trends in the development of the British urban family.
The story is based on a rash promise by Dorigena. According to D. Brewer, “Chaucer reveals the ambivalence of deep values, or that values good in themselves may be incompatible with each other - a good Gothic point illustrated again in the Clerk s Tale and in Troilus". “What is more attractive in life than marriage? Especially when you are old and your wife should be young, and then you will give birth to an heir with her: life will be sweet to you. And look at the life of a bachelor: He often complains of boredom, he is tired of love fuss. And it is fair that a bachelor lead a life devoid of joys and blessings. He builds on sand, and therefore only failure is destined for him. He lives freely, like game in the forest, knowing nothing about coercion. A married man, on the contrary, always leads a measured life, He is tied tightly to the marriage yoke, and life is sweet and joyful to him. Who can be more tender than a wife? Who with more diligence than she, When you are sick, goes after you? She is ready to serve you as a faithful servant, even if you go to bed so that you don’t get up until death.” “A number of scientists think otherwise, including Theophrastus. Let him inappropriately teach - what is it to me, right? If you want to keep the house in order, So he teaches - do not rush to marry, for this even the servants are good. Before a faithful servant, what is a wife? After all, she takes half the good for herself. And if, having fallen ill, you suddenly lie down, you will find a share with your friends and servants rather than with your wife: your goodness is dearest to her. Chaucer deliberately contrasts a man with a woman in marriage, and in favor of the latter. Melnik's story literally sounds like an apotheosis to a woman: “The wife, on the contrary, - believe me, - Enters the house for a long time, for a longer period than you, perhaps, could wish. Marriage is a great sacrament, and the one who is not married lives helplessly, And all his hopes are fleeting (I'm talking about men, of course). And why? Yes, because it was pleasing to God to create a woman to help Us. When Adam was molded from clay by him, the creator himself, Seeing how naked and lonely he was, could not help but feel sorry for him in his soul And gave him support in the form of Eve. From here it is clear, - you all will agree, - that a woman is given to our joy and to help; She is an earthly paradise With her soul, affectionate and tender. Life with her is a boundless ocean of happiness. Having become one flesh, the wife and husband are sealed by the union of souls to the grave. Wife! Is it possible that trouble befalls someone who is married? No never. I swear by you, O Holy Virgin! Between spouses - love is such that it can not be expressed in any way. Your wife is a giver of blessings And a disinterested mistress of the house; she is unfamiliar with self-will, Always humble gives an answer; You said yes, she won't say no. Marriage life! You, like the garden of Eden, are full of splendor and delights; Everyone gives you such an honor that everyone in whom there is at least a drop of sense, Until the grave, if he is married, should thank the creator all the days in a row. And if he is single, then pray to God to send his wife to help him. Having entered into marriage, he will protect himself from all deceit and insults. Whoever follows a woman in her path, He can boldly carry his head, - Her advice is so full of wisdom. If you want to succeed in this life, Do not forget to listen to the words of your wife. After all, his mother advised Jacob that he should come to Isaac in a goat's skin to bow, - And his father gave him a blessing. Judith's mind saved the chosen people from extermination when the tyrant's head was blown off her shoulders by her fearless sword. Navala's life hung in the balance, and yet her wife managed to save her with Her mind. Esther was saved from adversity by God's chosen people, For which the dignitary of Ahasuerus, Mordecai, bowed before her. Seneca says: in the whole universe there is no being more valuable than a humble wife. Kato tells his wife to be obedient. Submit to her - then she will doubly show her humility before you. The wife manages our household wisely. A wife who is especially ill, so that the house does not fall into decay, is needed. What a church is to Christ, let your wife be to you. Loving wisdom, Consider your wife as the highest of blessings. After all, no one is an enemy to your own flesh, Therefore, cherish your wife: you can doom bliss only with her. Husband and wife - I'm not kidding at all - calmly go through life, the Union is not afraid of their threats, especially from the wife. He who has gone through many schools is learned immensely. Contact your wife - and you will say: this is true. Despite such a long quoted passage, this was done in order to make it clear that Chaucer still looks at a woman from a purely male point of view. “And the girl in your hands is like wax: her heart and brain are fresh. So know in advance, friends: I will not lead the old woman to the crown. After all, if the ill-fated fate had made it so that I could not enjoy it with her, On the side I would begin to seek pleasure and thereby doom myself forever to hell, Yes, and this marriage would be childless. And I prefer to be a pack of dogs Torn apart, than for strangers to get what I myself have accumulated. In turn, the tipsy miller, who is very far from “high” matters, tells the story of how a cunning schoolboy cuckolded a rustic carpenter who, despite his advanced age, risked marrying a young beauty. Miller's story goes like this: there lived a carpenter in Oxford. He was a master of all trades and had a well-deserved reputation as a craftsman. He was rich and allowed freeloaders into his house. Among them lived a poor student who was well versed in alchemy, remembered theorems and often surprised everyone with his knowledge. For his kind disposition and friendliness, everyone called him Dushka Nicholas. The carpenter's wife died, and he, grieving, married again to the young black-browed beauty Alison. In The Miller's Tale, Chaucer gives a charming, earthy, far from the world of pure idealism description of Alison: “She was slim, flexible, beautiful, lively, like a squirrel, and like a loach, playful ... Her eyes shone with living fire; so that the eyebrows of the eyes arch around, She plucked her hair and behold, like strings, they are narrow And they became cool. She was so elegant which was a joy to look at. Tender as fluff, transparent in the light, For connoisseurs, she was a delicious piece, Could easily outshine the baron's daughters, A bed of shame to share with the lord, could she be an exemplary wife Some yeoman who she would have been her age.” (Translated by Kashin). Those. she was so attractive and sweet that there were no number of people in love with her, and among them was the student darling Nicholas. Suspecting nothing, the old carpenter was still very jealous and looked after his young wife. The retelling of this story is beyond the scope of the work, but in in general terms it turns out that the clever schoolboy manages to deceive the old carpenter and cuckold him with his young wife. Chaucer continues: “I don't talk like an empty fool; I know why I'm getting married And I also know that there are many people marriage is often judged at random, No more understanding of it than my servant. To whom the reward of heaven is dear, And chastity is unbearable, let him marry, so that with a beloved woman To produce children for the glory of God, and not for carnal pleasures alone. You have to use them in moderation just to do your duty. Then they take their spouse, to help, like brother and sister, to each other And keep the law clean with her. Thus, here we see the recognition of the need for marriage and the development of ideal role functions for man and woman. The variability was also manifested in the declared distribution of the role functions of a woman and a man in marriage, as well as in their direct relationship. The position of a woman was determined based on her essential characteristics. On the one hand, female nature is weak and sinful. It followed from this that a woman, as the main culprit of original sin, in real life had to completely obey the will of her husband. On the other hand, the recognition of the equality of women and men before God. So, in the "Canterbury Tales" there is variability in the perception of marital relations. On the one hand, marriage is a sin, on the other, salvation. On the one hand, marital relations are subjected to caustic ridicule, on the other hand, love and tenderness (and especially fidelity) between a man and a woman are sung. Chapter 3
It is no coincidence that in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, it is the urban family that becomes the main subject of study. It should be noted that Chaucer's researchers, when studying the medieval British family, focused on a general analysis of the family and marriage sphere, the study of its regional and social specifics. In addition, in the field of view of scientists were, first of all, noble, as well as peasant families. As a rule, the urban family was considered in the Canterbury Tales (and in the stories of that time in general) in the context of the socio-cultural life of the city as a whole and did not act as an independent object. However, the diversity of urban lifestyles, social mobility, the level of economic and cultural development, and receptivity to the new create a unique opportunity for research in the field of matrimonial relations. "The Canterbury Tales" allows you to expand your understanding of the family people of medieval Britain, making it possible to see them in volume, to discern the diversity and variability of relationships, behavior, and perception. In this way, it is possible to achieve a concretization of ideas about the characteristics of the people of the studied era. Interest in the Canterbury Tales family with modern needs for self-realization and self-determination in society. In The Canterbury Tales, a love story does not always end happily, not because of a combination of circumstances, but because love can be illegal or even immoral. There is in this some hint of the future emergence of Puritanism. In Chaucer - family values are considered in the whole complex. Thus, the entire work of Chaucer can be characterized as having a social character. In The Canterbury Tales, attempts are everywhere to find out: what is happening, why, how to live in family life, which path to choose, which is also a distinctive feature of the English worldview of the 14th century. Chaucer took people as he saw them. He believed in their healthy earthly instincts, in their right to happiness, although he did not indicate the ways in which humanity could come to the realm of joy. But he believed that joy is the natural lot of man. First of all, it is in family life that Chaucer is ready to look for the source of human happiness. Conclusion chaucer novella love family Chaucer's speech, so decisive and promising, still did not lead to a rapid flowering of British Renaissance literature. In the 15th century, the author of the Canterbury Tales had no worthy successors. The poets who, in one way or another, adjoined the Chaucerian school, were inferior to him not only in talent, but also in the ability to look at things in a new way. In British literature of the 15th century. the sprouts of the Renaissance were weak and sparse. Basically, it continued to be medieval. Chaucer was not a supporter of the "emancipation" of women, but the fact that for him the topic of love and family relationships is burning is undeniable. The "Marriage Group" in The Canterbury Tales testifies to this. In relation to the “new” position of a woman, to her “recognition as a human being” and even access to a dominant position in family life, Chaucer is more of an observer, he states these facts, but his mentality does not make it possible to unambiguously and unconditionally accept these realities. Chaucer was a skilled storyteller. In his book, a British novel was born. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, everything is surprisingly specific and typical: people, environment, objects, and situations. It becomes clear why A.M. Gorky called Chaucer "the founder of realism." List of used literature
1.Chaucer G. The Canterbury tales. P.166. 2.Brewer D. A New Introduction to Chaucer Longman 1998. P. 366. .Chaucer G. The Canterbury tales. P. 228. .Chaucer G. The Canterbury tales. P. 386. .Brewer D. A New Introduction to Chaucer. Longman 1998. P. 338. 6.All the masterpieces of world literature in summary. Plots and characters. Foreign Literature of Ancient Epochs, Middle Ages and Renaissance: Encyclopedic Edition. M. 1997. .Features of the spiritual life of England in the second half of the XIV century. (based on the work of J. Chaucer "The Canterbury Tales") // Collection of materials of the VII-th Intern. scientific conference "Russia and the West: Dialogue of Cultures". Issue. 8. Vol. II. Moscow, Moscow State University, 2000. .Ideas about marriage and the relationship of spouses in the XIV century. in England based on the work of J. Chaucer "The Canterbury Tales" // Vestnik Mosk. university Ser. 19. Linguistics and intercultural communication. Issue. 3. M., Moscow State University, 2002. .Creating an image " real person in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Abstracts. // Materials of the international scientific conference of students, graduate students and young scientists "Lomonosov". Issue. 4, Moscow, Moscow State University, 2000.
The greatest English writer of the 14th century was Chaucer(1340-1400), author of famous "Canterbury Tales". Chaucer simultaneously ends the era of Anglo-Norman and opens the history of new English literature.
To all the richness and variety of thoughts and feelings, the subtlety and complexity of spiritual experiences that characterize the previous era, he gave expression in English, completing the experience of the past and capturing the aspirations of the future. Among the English dialects, he established the dominance of the London dialect., the language spoken in this large shopping center, where the residence of the king and both universities were located.
In the next century, there is a great interest in living folk poetry, which already existed in the 13th and 14th centuries. But in the 15th century, this poetry shows a particularly active life, and the oldest examples of it, which have survived to our time, belong to this century. Ballads about Robin Hood were very popular.
"The Canterbury Tales"(Eng. The Canterbury Tales) - a work of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, written in late XIV centuries in Middle English; not completed. Represents a collection of 22 poems and two prose short stories, united by a common frame: stories are told by pilgrims on their way to venerate the relics of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury and are described in the author's prologue to the work. According to Chaucer's plan, each of them had to tell four stories (two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back). The Canterbury Tales, which are predominantly in verse, do not use a uniform articulation of verse; the poet freely varies stanzas and meters. The predominant size is iambic 5-foot with a pair of rhymes (“heroic couplet” - heroic couplet).
Storytellers belong to all strata of medieval English societies a: among them there are a knight, a monk, a priest, a doctor, a sailor, a merchant, a weaver, a cook, a yeoman, etc. Their stories partially go back to traditional novelistic plots (used, in particular, in Juan Ruiz’s “Book of Good Love” and “The Decameron » Boccaccio), are partly original. The stories of the pilgrims are very diverse in subject matter, often associated with the theme of love and betrayal; some of them satirically portray the abuses of the Catholic Church. Chaucer's literary skill is also manifested in the fact that the short stories reflect the individual traits and manner of speech of the narrators.
Innovation and the originality of The Canterbury Tales was appreciated only in the era of romanticism, although the successors of the traditions of Chaucer appeared already during his lifetime (John Lydgate, Thomas Hawkleave, etc.), and the work itself was published by William Caxton at the earliest time of English printing. Researchers note the role of Chaucer's work in the formation of the English literary language and in increasing its cultural significance (as opposed to Old French and Latin, which were considered more prestigious).
Under the Comstock Act, The Canterbury Tales was banned from distribution in the United States, and is even now printed with abridgements for obscenity reasons.
The merits of Chaucer in the history of English literature and language are very great. He was the first among the English to give examples of true artistic poetry where taste, a sense of proportion, elegance of form and verse reign everywhere, the hand of an artist is visible everywhere, controlling his images, and not submitting to them, as was often the case with medieval poets; everywhere you can see a critical attitude to the plots and characters. In the works of Chaucer there are already all the main features of English national poetry: a wealth of fantasy, combined with common sense, humor, observation, the ability to vivid characteristics, a penchant for detailed descriptions, a love of contrasts, in a word, everything that we later meet in an even more perfect seen in Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens and other great British writers. He gave completeness to English verse and brought the literary language to a high degree of elegance. Regarding the purity of speech, he always showed special care and, not trusting the scribes, he always personally looked through the lists of his works. In creating a literary language, he showed great moderation and common sense, rarely used neologisms and, not trying to revive obsolete expressions, used only those words that were in common use. The brilliance and beauty which he imparted to the English language gave the latter a place of honor among the other literary languages of Europe; after Chaucer, adverbs had already lost all significance in literature. Chaucer was the first to write in his native language and prose, and not in Latin (for example, "The astrolab" - a treatise he wrote in 1391 for his son). He uses the national language here consciously in order to express his thoughts better and more accurately, and also out of patriotic feeling. Chaucer's worldview is completely imbued with the pagan spirit and cheerfulness of the Renaissance; only some medieval features and expressions like “St. Venus", which, however, come across in Chaucer's earlier works, indicate that he has not yet completely freed himself from medieval views and confusion of concepts. On the other hand, some of his thoughts about nobility, about the upbringing of children, about the war, the nature of his patriotism, which is alien to any national exclusivity, would do honor even to a person of the 19th century.
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is a collection of short stories written towards the end of the writer's life, written in Middle English. This collection of short stories is not completed. In literary criticism, The Canterbury Tales is called a cyclical collection of short stories.
Any national literature begins its formation with samples of small prose - a story, an essay, a story and, of course, a short story.
Modern researchers of the literary process are not unanimous in defining the concept of a short story. Some limit themselves to an inductive description of short stories and a statement of brevity as its main genre feature, analyzing the number of words contained in a particular work. Others take as a basis not the volume of the work as a whole, but the volume of its plot. At the same time, the issue of the origin of the short story is of increased interest, since in the historical projection, as a rule, the dominant features of the genre are revealed. However, many researchers speak of a long and continuous tradition of the novelistic genre, which makes it possible to trace its features at all stages of its development.
It should be noted that English researchers of the phenomenon of short fiction and its varieties use in their monographic works a whole set of concepts and terminological designations - story, short story, long short story novella, novellette, tale, brief tale, fragment, abbreviated fiction - between which sometimes it is difficult to draw a clear line. The very concept of "short story" as a designation literary genre It was established at the end of the 19th century in connection with the flourishing of short stories. Nevertheless, the question of the ambiguity and ambiguity of this term was raised already in the 30s of the 20th century. So, for example, Henry Seidel Canby points out the vagueness of the concept of "short story".
In Russian literary criticism, the question of the genre distinction between a short story and a short story is relevant: a short story is characterized by an attraction to unusual situations, a rapid development of the action, an unexpected denouement, the integrity of the impression, formal accuracy and conciseness. On the contrary, the story is distinguished by the simplicity of the plot, the slowness of the action, the greater descriptiveness and the variety of forms.
The priority in creating the theory of the English-language short story belongs to E. Poe, an American literary theorist and author of a number of Gothic short stories and poetic works. According to his concept, the starting point is the principle of "unity of effect or impression", to which all the structural elements of the work, including the organization of the text, are subject. Thus, the American classic laid the foundations for the subsequent short story theory. However, there is another point of view: the English researcher G. Orel is convinced that British authors created their short stories without taking into account the concept put forward by the American writer.
At the end of the 19th century, a detailed description of the short story as a special literary genre was offered by the English critic B. Matthews. The principle of the unity of impression, put forward by E. Poe, is retained by Matthews as one of the defining features of the short story. However, with this requirement, he not only connects brevity and laconism as features inherent in the poetics of a small genre, but also introduces a significant addition: the integrity of the impression is achieved due to the fact that the short story depicts only one event, one character, one feeling or a series of sensations caused by one event. Another achievement of Matthews is the recognition, along with the event novel, of another type of small genre, in which one could limit oneself to describing the character of the hero or even a picture of moods and impressions.
Thus, according to the definition of a short story, The Canterbury Tales is a collection of short stories. It consists of twenty-two poems and two prose novels, which are united by a common frame: stories told by pilgrims going to Canterbury to worship the relics of St. Thomas Becket. Pilgrims are described in detail in the Prologue written by the author. In accordance with the plan of Chaucer himself, all the characters described by him were to tell four stories, two stories
At the beginning of the journey, and two - on the way home from the pilgrimage.
For the most part, the Canterbury Tales are in verse, they do not use a uniform articulation of verse. In Chaucer's work, stanzas and meters vary freely, with iambic pentameter with paired rhyming, the so-called heroic couplet, being the predominant meter.
Let us turn to the peculiarities of the composition of The Canterbury Tales. This work is a collection of stories, enclosed in a single frame. In this, the Canterbury Tales is similar to Boccaccio's Decameron, but the scope of these works differs. So, in Boccaccio, the frame is somewhat artificial, although beautiful, yet corresponding to reality only in part of the description of the plague in Florence. The characters also differ, because in the Decameron they all belong to the same class, they practically do not differ from each other, they are individually little expressive.
In Chaucer's Prologue, the reader is transported into the whirlpool of the present, modern writer life. Chaucer manages to depict a society of pilgrims belonging to the most diverse strata of society, of different sexes, different temperaments and ages. All the pilgrims gather in an inn not far from London, intending to move together from there to Canterbury to venerate the tomb of St. Thomas Becket.
In the General Prologue, the appearance of all the characters is drawn. Among the pilgrims are a knight, a lawyer, a monk, a student, a merchant, a cook, a chaplain, a miller, a weaver from Bath and many others. It is in the General Prologue that the compositional principle used by Chaucer is revealed.
Entertaining stories are being told by the pilgrims at the suggestion of Harry Bailey, the owner of the tavern, and this allows the pilgrims to pass their way to Canterbury and back. Each story is a poetic completed short story, and it is these narratives that make up Chaucer's book.
Indeed, we can say that Chaucer uses the compositional principle taken by Boccaccio as the basis for creating
"Decameron". It was Boccaccio who managed to establish in European literature the method of framing the book of short stories.
Giovanni Boccaccio is called a younger contemporary of Petrarch and one of the founders of humanistic literature in the European Renaissance. Boccaccio's talent developed on the basis of the Pre-Renaissance in the culture of Florence, he managed to look at the world in a new way for his time. Boccaccio possessed and expressed humanistic individualism in his work, in fact offering a historically new, truly revolutionary concept of reality, where the earthly, real, internally free man was considered as the center of this worldly cosmos.
He laid the foundations of contemporary short stories. His
The Decameron is a book of short stories. It includes one hundred short stories, which are told by young people and young ladies within 10 days. The author's short stories are characterized by such features as an entertaining story, vivid imagery of the characters, his short stories are distinguished by artistic elegance, unconventional interpretation of plots. The center of Boccaccio's novel is the problem of self-awareness of the individual, which received a broad perspective in the further development of the culture of the Renaissance. The frame for the short stories is the description of the plague, with which the novel begins. Boccaccio could tell about the plague from his own observations, because he managed to see with his own eyes its destructive effect. The Decameron has a pronounced rhetoric; there are a large number of very different roles in the novel. The plague is described by the writer impartially, calmly, practically with scientific objectivity, with a peculiar severity. The plague in his novel is often interpreted as a specific large-scale image of the crisis state of the world. In the composition of the collection of short stories
"Decameron" some researchers found a reflection of the principles gothic architecture.
So, according to the research of V. Khlodovsky, the construction of the collection reflects and manifests the change of Gothic by the Renaissance, the change of the transcendent - immanent theology - humanism, God - man, the harmony of metaphysical necessity - the harmony of individual freedom.
Medieval plots in the Decameron were not simply expounded, they were retold, while they lost the scenario schematism of religious “examples”, medieval “novellinos”, urban anecdotes. With all these forms of narration, an entirely new narrative extension was acquired.
A.N. Veselovsky wrote about it this way: “The point is not in repeating ready-made narrative schemes, but in their combinations, if they meet aesthetic goals, in a new light, in analysis materials, in the initiative that makes us talk about Boccaccio as one of the founders of artistic realism".
Boccaccio's collection, as well as Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, contains both a common anecdote, a knightly story, and episodes of a modern scandalous chronicle. However, unlike Chaucer, in The Decameron, all these stories are retold in the same carefully calibrated language, distinguished by sweetness, harmony, albeit a certain artificiality.
The novel "Boccaccio" is based on the strict unity of the external structure. Boccaccio's short stories are characterized by a prosaic, neutral style, while typically tense, sharp action, plot drama is highlighted. The action of the short stories unfolds in everyday life, but the plot itself tends to be unusual, to a sharp violation of the regularity of everyday life. Goethe defined the short story as "one extraordinary incident."
In general, the composition of The Decameron is similar to a collection of oriental tales like The Thousand and One Nights, where the framing collection, the “frame”, has an exclusively service character, often ornamental, where short stories are nested into each other and into frames like nesting dolls. But the framing of the Decameron has its own aesthetic necessity.
By themselves, the short stories in the Decameron are not isolated, this work is quite integral. Framing involves the accumulation of short stories from the inside, acts as an organic part of the overall artistic structure. It does
"The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer similar to
"The Decameron". Boccaccio manages not only to collect stories with their rethinking, but also to show how this process took place. Compositionally, the “frame” appears in a completely new quality: within the frame, individualism develops into a historically new social phenomenon.
At the same time, in the Decameron, the framing itself is complex, two-stage. The first stage is the author's "I" of Boccaccio himself, in the second stage the humanistic integrity of the vision of the world is aesthetically embodied. In addition, one can single out a fairly close connection between the narrators in the Decameron and the author's "I" of Boccaccio himself. The narrators themselves are similar to each other in ways of presentation.
Until now, among literary critics (studies by A.N. Veselovsky, A.K. Dzhivelegov, V.E. Krusman, M.P. Alekseev, A.A. Anikst, Yu.M. Saprykin, G.V. Anikin, N .P. Michalskaya, etc.) there is an established opinion that
The Canterbury Tales were written under the influence of
"Decameron".
We examined the features of Boccaccio's Decameron, now we turn to understanding the compositional correspondences of the works of Boccaccio and Chaucer.
Opens the work of Chaucer's "General Prologue", where the appearances of the characters appear. It is in the Prologue that the author sets the main compositional principle, which will be used in what follows. Pilgrims are invited to tell entertaining stories, and it is these stories that serve as complete poetic short stories.
In general, it can be said that the Canterbury Tales belongs to the ancient genre tradition of a collection of short stories, short stories, which are united by a common plot “frame”. In this case, the situation of conversation, the alternation of narrators, acts as such a frame. However, it should be borne in mind that this rather widespread tradition, in which a large number of works of world literature were created, underwent important changes under the pen of Geoffrey Chaucer. The author strives to convey the main plot from a position of greater naturalness, greater significance, which allows for more natural framing of inserted short stories. In addition to the general prologue, the characteristics of the pilgrims are also contained in the prologues that immediately precede their stories.
The dynamic and graphic plot gives Chaucer the opportunity to use or parody almost all genres of medieval literature. So, one of the main genre components of this work is the short story we have already described. However, in addition to the short story, the work contains elements of many other medieval genres. The knight tells the story in the spirit chivalric romance. The abbess tells the legend of a tortured Christian boy - this is already a genre of life. The carpenter, on the other hand, tells a funny and obscene story in the spirit of modest urban folklore, reminiscent of the fablio genre. The stories of the monastery chaplain and the steward have a fable character. The pardoner's story contains elements of a folk tale and a parable.
When considering the composition of the work, it should be noted that all the stories of the pilgrims appear as if by chance, stem from the circumstances of the conversations, while each of them complements or sets off the previous narrative, which closely connects them with the framing "frame", the short story.
We can say that the compositional innovation of Geoffrey Chaucer is a synthesis of genres within the framework of one work. Almost every story has its own, unique genre specificity, which makes The Canterbury Tales a kind of "encyclopedia" of medieval genres.
In the work The Decameron, Boccaccio brings to high perfection only one genre - a small prose story-short story that existed before him in Italian literature.
Boccaccio in The Decameron relies on Latin medieval storybooks, on oriental fanciful parables; often they are told small French stories with humorous content, the so-called "fablios" or "fablios". However, Chaucer goes much further, as we see in his Canterbury Tales.
Boccaccio's work "The Decameron" is not just a collection, which includes one hundred short stories, it is an artistic and ideological whole, which is thought out and built in accordance with a certain plan. The short stories in the Decameron do not follow each other randomly, but in a certain order, which is quite strictly thought out. Fastens these short stories, as we have already noted, framing the story, the introduction to the book, a kind of compositional core. With such a construction, the narrators of various short stories act as participants in a framing, introductory story.
In general, it can be noted that it is possible that Geoffrey Chaucer in the creation of the Canterbury Tales was borrowed compositional technique, used earlier by Boccaccio in the creation
"Decameron". And yet, Chaucer reveals closer links between the individual stories and their framing narrative. Geoffrey Chaucer strives for greater significance and naturalness of the main plot, which frames the "inserted" short stories, which is absent in the work of Boccaccio. poet character narrative novel
Chaucer's work, despite the same composition as the Decameron and the presence of several random plot coincidences, can be called completely unique. It should be noted that in stories that are comparable in plot to Boccaccio, Chaucer always narrates in more detail, more expanded and detailed, in many moments it appears more saturated, begins to have more drama and significance.
And if one can speak in relation to the Canterbury Tales of the relative genre diversity of this work, in comparison with it, the Decameron is a work where only the novelistic genre is represented, although brought to perfection. But, of course, this does not mean that the work of Boccaccio is of much less value for world literature. Each writer has his own tasks, each work carries its own specific mission. Thus, Boccaccio, with his Decameron, destroys the religious and ascetic worldview, giving an unusually bright, complete, versatile reflection of contemporary Italian reality. Boccaccio manages to bring out a whole gallery of figures that he took from different sectors of society, and endow them with typical features.
It was the Decameron by Boccaccio that made it possible to establish the short story as an independent full-fledged genre, and the Decameron, which was imbued with the spirit of modern national culture, began to act as a model for many generations of not only Italian but also European writers, which we see in the example of Chaucer.
For a better understanding of the composition of The Canterbury Tales, you can compare it with Chaucer's The Legend of Exemplary Women. In The Legend and The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer gives two structurally different solutions to the problem of framed composition. In the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the motive is to entertain the pilgrims going to Canterbury. "Legend" combines a love vision (in the Prologue) with a collection of stories, while the General Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales" suggests a real situation. In addition, there is a difference in the mode of presentation: the stories of the "Legend" are told by the narrator, who is probably Chaucer himself. They are united by a thematic thread, but there are no "dramatic" connections between them based on action. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer appears as one of the storytelling pilgrims and at the same time as a storyteller-reporter. There is dramatic action in Chaucer's collection, albeit fragmentary and incomplete, that nevertheless connects each story with the next (such patterns can be traced in relation to a number of stories).
The Legend of Good Women consists of a Prologue and nine legends. In the Prologue to The Legend, Chaucer tried to suggest a structural motivation for framing the collection of stories. The figure of Alceste was meant to provide the motivation for telling the legends. It was a bold attempt on the part of the poet to combine a vision with a collection of stories.
The plot frame of The Canterbury Tales is somewhat different. Host Harry Bailey invents a challenge game to keep pilgrims entertained on their long journey to and from Canterbury: Each one has two stories to tell, but that's not all. At the end of the journey, the one who told the most instructive and interesting story, will be rewarded with a dinner that promises to be sumptuous. In other words, this is a kind of "travel" literary competition based on oral storytelling, with the prospect of a gastronomic award. But events do not unfold according to plan:
the pilgrims do not reach Canterbury, let alone return; and the prize lunch will also not take place. At the end of the twenty-fourth story, the host announces that only one story is missing to complete his plan. And it is told, or rather, preached, by the Pastor, and under the influence of his sermon, the author introduces a renunciation, in which the author of the book is implicitly presented, trying to confess for those sinful stories that were told. He thanks God for the religious works he wrote, for the translation
The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius. And finally, he prepares himself for repentance and rebirth, which he hopes will grant him salvation on the Day of Judgment.
Thus, the Canterbury Tales, although not finished, still has an ending somewhat different from what Harry Bailey intended, organizing the action of the entire narrative. And yet the stories do not have a perfect architectural sequence: they are unconnected fragments of various sizes, preceded by a "General Prologue".
One can find explanations for such contradictions. First of all, of course, this is the hasty approach of the death of the author. In addition, some literary scholars explained this by the fact that the author was organically unable to complete his own work.
In the very structure of the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrimage
There is a hidden allegorical meaning in which the pilgrimage to Canterbury appears as a pilgrimage of human life to Jerusalem, the Heavenly City
In addition, based on earlier research, it can be noted that the “dramatic principle” contains the unifying form of the whole work: three factors in the development of the action (correspondence between the story and the narrator, external motivation, internal motivation) that govern the fulfillment of obligations by pilgrims.
In general, it can be said that the structural model
The Canterbury Tales is an interweaving of a number of stories in a labyrinth that Chaucer mentioned in his work
"House of Glory". Particularly important in this connection is the intention that Chaucer pursues in The Canterbury Tales, and which makes this collection of short stories so complex.
In the work, Chaucer himself is presented to the reader as one of the pilgrim characters making the journey to Canterbury. It is he who appears at the Gabard Hotel, joins a group of pilgrims, listens to the words of the Master and goes to the grave of Becket. As an unknown pilgrim and an unsuccessful storyteller, he tells the story of Sir Topas. When he is interrupted, he starts talking about Melibea. He appears in the narrative as an ordinary observer who is closer to worldly interests. This Chaucer pilgrim is the narrative "I" of the whole action, the so-called frame, framing.
Of course, The Canterbury Tales is by no means a diary, in connection with which it can be assumed that the pilgrim Chaucer refreshes in his memory what he saw and heard. These are different events - the appearance of different pilgrims, their characters, features, faces, conversations, conflicts and, finally, stories. A similar narrative ambiguity (of Chaucer the pilgrim and the narrator versus the pilgrim storytellers) is reflected at the end of The Student's Tale, where the student who has just told the story of Griselda wishes to sing a song that describes Chaucer's "Afterword", which makes it unclear who exactly acts as a narrator - the student himself or Chaucer the narrator.
This ambiguity in The Canterbury Tales is often significant: for example, in the case of Miller, who, while drunk, promises to tell his story, but tells it in good literary language with rhyme and perfect organization, which does not correspond to his condition. Here the narrator again secretly reveals his presence. The analysis carried out allows us to speak about the presence in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales of an implicit narrator who does not name himself, but, nevertheless, often influences the course of storytelling.
In general, the narrator himself is presented as the narrator of stories presented by others, and at the same time as the author of the book; we note that Chaucer used a similar technique in Troilus and Cressida.
We also note that in the Canterbury Tales, the compositional frame, in fact, is national. Such is the setting of the scene of the novels: this is a tavern on the road leading to Canterbury, this is a crowd of pilgrims, where, in fact, almost the entire English society is represented.
Thus, the narrator of the vision-poems and "Troilus and Cressida" is at the same time as a creator above the text and as a character within it. He is the person who created this text. Sometimes the narrator in the text also reports about his other works (“The Legend of Good Women”). He is the creator of other storytellers and he is also a fictional storyteller among other storytellers, a man who gives an account to his conscience. Chaucer at the end of The Canterbury Tales
It is simultaneously for the reader the “I” who tells the story of the pilgrimage, and the “I” of the one who tells “Sir Topas” and
"Melibea". It is possible that all the stories presented in the collection of short stories were read publicly, which explains some repetitions, the use of formulas, direct questions from the audience, requests for attention, narrative transitions.
These stories, told by pilgrims to other travelers, reproduce the social and literary reality of that time, the relationship between the text, its author and the reading public.
