Tales

Abstract

If Chaucer’s insistent use of prologues indicates his intention of elaborating the framework of The Canterbury Tales, and introduces a marked intellectual strand into the work, the tales themselves, which obviously make up the bulk of the text, may initially be viewed more simply. The idea of the ‘tales of Canterbury’ stems from an interest in compiling a collection, and the individual components may quite neutrally be regarded as having the possibility of being narratives, stories, fables, anecdotes, histories or exempla. The informal way in which the telling of tales has been proposed and set in motion in the General Prologue, and Chaucer’s provision of a varied cast of potential story-tellers, demonstrates at the very beginning of the series that Chaucer has progressed from the collection of narratives all of the same kind, such as the series of ‘legends’ in The Legend of Good Women. This work is in itself an indicator of Chaucer’s interest in the idea of a series of narratives, but because it is incomplete it is difficult to be entirely sure of Chaucer’s concept of narrative in the work. It rather looks as if, by subordinating the stories to the theme, Chaucer has reduced some powerful classical tales to simple illustrations of a moral (and an equivocal moral at that); the treatment of the stories is mainly characterised by abbreviation, summary, encapsulation, positive resistance to opportunities to give dramatic realisation to their moving situations and to variety of character and setting.