The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

 The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

I am no particular friend to Chaucer, though his importance is unavoidable. His is probably the first work in which something recognisably English swims into focus from the murk of dialects made too foreign to us by the passage of time. It is a common school student’s complaint that Chaucer (or Shakespeare, for that matter) isn’t written in English. Despite some unfamiliar words, it is, though. With modernised spelling, turning the ‘shoures’ of the first line of the General Prologue into ‘showers’, for example, little stands between the modern reader and the text. The same cannot be said for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 

Much of my aversion to Chaucer is either political or religious. There are those who see Chaucer as a friend to the common people. I don’t think so. He was a civil servant at the court of the King. The audience for his tales was aristocratic. Poor people are figures of fun in his tales, objects for the wealthy to laugh at. For all of his famed satire of religious figures, he is attacking ‘fake’ religion. Part of his joke is in showing us who ‘longs to go on pilgrimages’, though, of course, redemption awaits after genuine repentance. 

If, then, any part of the Canterbury Tales is to be read, the General Prologue is as good a place as any to determine whether the language and the narrative stance will be of interest. Chaucer uses the first forty-two lines to begin setting the scene. The opening description of the beginning of April is Chaucer at his best. He leads us gradually into the gathering of the pilgrims at an inn and then shows that he will introduce the characters that he will be travelling with, beginning with the knight. After these introductory lines, he introduces each character in terms that are worth reading closely for any reader planning to proceed. The place of satire in these descriptions affects any reading that follows. I suspect that even the first forty-two lines contain elements of humour that escape me, or any other reader with only a passing understanding of Chaucer’s period.

Each tale told by one of the pilgrims is introduced by a brief narrative, a prologue. This opening is the General Prologue as it is a prologue to the whole collection. We know that a prologue is a speech before, a useful reminder that Chaucer’s work was written to be spoken. He was a storyteller, a teller of tales, the narrator of events ordered for his listeners. We understand ‘general’ in terms of ‘relating to all’, in this case relating to all of the following tales. It is also worth reading that generation precedes generality, etymologically. There is a strong connection to the meaning preserved in ‘genus’ and in ‘gene’. In this sense, the General Prologue brings the rest of the narrative into being. The descriptions of the pilgrims are the seeds from which their tales will grow. And this is a very good reason to pay close attention to the descriptions that Chaucer offers to us.