General Prologue

The General Prologue is the first part of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Synopsis

The frame story of the poem, as set out in the 858 lines of Middle English which make up the general prologue, is of a religious pilgrimage. The narrator, "Geoffrey Chaucer", is in The Tabard in Southwark, where he meets a group of "sundry folk" who are all on the way to Canterbury, the site of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket.

The setting is April, and the prologue starts by singing the praises of that month whose rains and warm western wind restore life and fertility to the earth and its inhabitants. This abundance of life, the narrator says, prompts people to go on pilgrimages; in England, the goal of such pilgrimages is the shrine of Thomas Beckett. The narrator falls in with a group of pilgrims, and the largest part of the prologue is taken up by a description of them; Chaucer seeks to describe their 'condition', their 'array', and their social 'degree':

To telle yow al the condicioun,

Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,

And whiche they weren, and of what degree,

And eek in what array that they were inne,

And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

The pilgrims include a knight, his son a squire, the knight's yeoman, a prioress accompanied by a second nun and the nun's priest, a monk, a friar, a merchant, a clerk, a sergeant of law, a franklin, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, a tapestry weaver, a cook, a shipman, a doctor of physic, a wife of Bath, a parson, his brother a plowman, a miller, a manciple, a reeve, a summoner, a pardoner, the host (a man called Harry Bailly), and a portrait of Chaucer himself. At the end of the section, the Host proposes the story-telling contest: each pilgrim will tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. Whoever tells the best story, with "the best sentence and moost solaas" (line 798) is to be given a free meal.

The Tales

• General Prologue
• The Knight's Tale
• The Miller's Tale
• The Reeve's Tale
• The Cook's Tale {Unfinished}
• The Man of Law's Tale
• The Tale of Gamelyn intended by Chaucer for The Cook's Tale?
• The Wife of Bath's Tale
• The Friar's Tale
• The Summoner's Tale
• The Clerk's Tale
• The Merchant's Tale
• The Squire's Tale
• The Franklin's Tale
• The Physician's Tale
• The Pardoner's Tale
• The Shipman's Tale
• The Prioress Tale
• Sir Thopas Tale told by Chaucer {Unfinished}
• The Tale of Melibee told by Chaucer
• The Monk's Tale
• The Nun's Priest's Tale
• The Second Nun's Tale
• The Canon's Yeoman's Tale
• The Manciple's Tale
• The Parson's Tale
• Chaucer's Retraction
• The Plowman's Tale a 15th-century addition to the Canterbury Tales
• Siege of Thebes (poem) a 15th-century addition to the Canterbury Tales
• Prologue and Tale of Beryn a 15th Century addition to the Canterbury Tales which tells of the epilogue after the Pilgrims arrive in Canterbury

Gallery of the Pilgrims

Structure

The General Prologue establishes the frame for the Tales as a whole (or of the intended whole) and introduces the characters/story tellers. These are introduced in the order of their rank in accordance with the three medieval social estates (clergy, nobility, and commoners and peasantry). These characters, while seemingly realistically described, are also representative of their estates and models with which the others in the same estate can be compared and contrasted.

The structure of the General Prologue is also intimately linked with the narrative style of the tales. As the narrative voice has been under critical scrutiny for some time, so too has the identity of the narrator himself. Though fierce debate has taken place on both sides, (mostly contesting that the narrator either is, or is not, Geoffrey Chaucer) it should be noted that most contemporary scholars believe that the narrator is meant to be some degree of Chaucer himself. Some scholars, like William W. Lawrence, claim that the narrator is Geoffrey Chaucer in person. While others, like Marchette Chute for instance, contest that the narrator is instead a literary creation like the other pilgrims in the tales.

Translation

First 18 lines

The following is the first 18 lines of the General Prologue. The text was written in a dialect associated with London and spellings associated with the then-emergent Chancery Standard.

In modern prose:

When April with its sweet showers has pierced March's drought to the root, bathing every vein in such liquid by whose virtue the flower is engendered, and when Zephyrus with his sweet breath has also enlivened the tender plants in every wood and field, and the young sun is halfway through Aries, and small birds that sleep all night with an open eye make melodies (their hearts pricked by Nature), then people long to go on pilgrimages, and palmers seek foreign shores and distant shrines known in sundry lands, and especially they wend their way to Canterbury from every shire of England in order to seek the holy blessed martyr, who has helped them when they were sick.

References

External links

• Side by side Translation into Modern Verse - Illustrated
• Modern Translation of the General Prologue and Other Resources at eChaucer
• "Prologue to the Canterbury Tales" â€" a plain-English retelling for non-scholars.