Fate and Fortune in the Canterbury Tales
Fate and Fortune in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales were written by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century. This masterpiece is one of the greatest classics of English Literature, it was and continues to be still very popular. Many manuscripts survived and it was the first work to be printed by William Caxton. It is a story about pilgrims travelling together, who tell stories on their journey to Canterbury, to pay tribute to Saint Thomas Becket. As it is a collection of tales, it varies in genre (there is beast fables, romances, fabliaux, saints’ lives…), subject, mood, length (some tales are 80-page long whereas some are much shorter), form (in verse –several verse-form are also found- or in prose). For this reason it is possible to find many themes, major or minor, that occur in several tales: virtues, honour, chivalry, marriage, love, mastery, religion, magic… Among these themes, chance and fate is really repetitive. When you look in a dictionary for the definition of the word ‘fate’, you find it is explained as a power, that some people believe it causes and controls all events, so that you cannot change or control the way things happen. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer often draws a personified Fortune, seen as a kind of goddess, who, with her wheel, controls everyone’s lives. Thus she is able to put someone on top one day, and the day after to make him or her fall from grace.
In this essay, we are going to deal with The Knight’s Tale, the Monk’s Tale and to a lower extend the Man of Law’s Tale. The Knight’s Tale comes from Boccaccio’s Teseida, and it accounts the story of two cousins, Arcite and Palamon, who fell in love with the same woman and who fight against each other to gain her. The Monk’s Tale is a collection of tragedies, telling the destiny and the bad ending of 19 famous figures. Among them, we find Lucifer, Hercules, Julius Caesar, Nero, Alexander the Conqueror… These stories come from several sources: from the Old
The Canterbury Tales were written by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century. This masterpiece is one of the greatest classics of English Literature, it was and continues to be still very popular. Many manuscripts survived and it was the first work to be printed by William Caxton. It is a story about pilgrims travelling together, who tell stories on their journey to Canterbury, to pay tribute to Saint Thomas Becket. As it is a collection of tales, it varies in genre (there is beast fables, romances, fabliaux, saints’ lives…), subject, mood, length (some tales are 80-page long whereas some are much shorter), form (in verse –several verse-form are also found- or in prose). For this reason it is possible to find many themes, major or minor, that occur in several tales: virtues, honour, chivalry, marriage, love, mastery, religion, magic… Among these themes, chance and fate is really repetitive. When you look in a dictionary for the definition of the word ‘fate’, you find it is explained as a power, that some people believe it causes and controls all events, so that you cannot change or control the way things happen. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer often draws a personified Fortune, seen as a kind of goddess, who, with her wheel, controls everyone’s lives. Thus she is able to put someone on top one day, and the day after to make him or her fall from grace.
In this essay, we are going to deal with The Knight’s Tale, the Monk’s Tale and to a lower extend the Man of Law’s Tale. The Knight’s Tale comes from Boccaccio’s Teseida, and it accounts the story of two cousins, Arcite and Palamon, who fell in love with the same woman and who fight against each other to gain her. The Monk’s Tale is a collection of tragedies, telling the destiny and the bad ending of 19 famous figures. Among them, we find Lucifer, Hercules, Julius Caesar, Nero, Alexander the Conqueror… These stories come from several sources: from the Old
Bibliography: Definitions: Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, third edition ❖ Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, edited by Jill Mann (London: Penguin, 2005) o Notes to the Man of Law’s Tale: pages 858 to 878 ❖ The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Chaucer, Malcolm Andrew (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) ❖ Elisabeth Brewer, Studying Chaucer (Harlow: Longman, 1987) ❖ Howard R