Geoffrey Chaucer “The Canterbury Tales”
The Canterbury Tales is a book of stories written by the great English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century. This is an important book, because it is one of the first to be written in the Middle English.
The Canterbury Tales tell the story of a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. On their way they decide to hold a contest all of them should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and back home.The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return,the tales help the characters pass the time and entertain themselves.There are people from all three estates:the church people,the noble people and the common people.There are 30 piligrims including Chaucer himself,he planned to write 120 tales but he wrote only 24 because he died.
He wrote in English this is very important because he could write in French or Latin but he wrote in English.In that time there was a class division where the rich spoke French and the poor English but also there wasn’t even one official sort of English,people throughout the country spoke dialects so different they seemed like different languages.Chaucer shaped it and today we speak that language.With his book he brought many new words like:authority,power,reason,button,comet etc.
Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in an heroic couplet form. An heroic couplet is a rhymed pair of lines,the lines are in iambic pentameter (usually of the same length) and he wrote The Canterbury Tales in the narrative frame(a tale within a tale).Chaucer used caesura(a pause or a breathing space abont the middle of a metrical line generally indicated by a pause in the sense) because then was no punctuation and also used enjambement(the effect achived when the verse runs over and beyond the limits set by the meter at the end of the verse also there’s satire all...