How Does The Performance Of Storytelling Traditions Contribute To The Experimental Nature Of The Canterbury Tales Fiction?

Chaucer like most artists ‘with a bent for natural verisimilitude drew from living modes and thought of individuals’1. From this we are presented with the Wife of Bath, who has accurately been described as one of Chaucer’s most enduring and realistic characters, who as all the other pilgrims has a distinct trade. As it has been said that ‘the conception of The Canterbury Tales involved an inherent conflict, between the pilgrimage, with its goal the martyr’s shrine in the cathedral at Canterbury, and the game of storytelling, with its purpose of entertaining the pilgrims throughout their journey’2.

It has been argued that Chaucer constructed her prologue and character out of commonplace Latin clerical teaching and satire on both marriage and women and, also ‘misogynist sources and analogues…. savagely antifeminist French Fabliau Le Leu of the thirteenth century’3.

I feel it is important to look at the Prologue and Tale as her Prologue inverts our expec

The term kaleidoscopic could be judged appropriate in the Knights Tale as the ‘oscillations of narrative, the shifts of rhetorical level, the alterations of mood, and the swing of diction from professional to colloquia, to the impassioned but simple language of grief’9

A woman married five times, some for pleasure but mostly for money. Her long monologue is a comic drama; she is ‘drawing on the illusions of a lifetime with roots in social archetypes’. She is portrayed as both an imposing and comical figure with her anomalies and contradictions towards marriage and life. Her prologue is the genre of a confession, ‘the confessional device leapt to Chaucer’s hand when he wished to reveal the naked inwardness of a character’4, as he did similarly in the Reeve, Merchant and Pardoners Prologues. Instead of repenting for her wrong doings, her mistreatment of her husbands etc, she boasts about how in her fifth marriage she has sovereignty.

The story of Palamon and Arcite originated from one of Chaucer’s older contempories, Boccaacio, his was titled Teseida. However Boccaccio’s work was modelled on the classic epic, and therefore had twelve books. Chaucer’s story is not just a summary of the Teseida, as while he omits some parts and condenses others, he expands others and adds his own ideas. In contrast to Boccacios story Chaucer’s narration works to distance us from the characters and from the narrators perspective on events.

Some topics in this essay:
Knights Tale, Wife Bath, Palamon Arcite, Arthurian Romance, Literature Tale, Knight Prologue, Canterbury Tales, English Romances, Teseida Boccaccio’s, Wicked Wives’, prologue tale, palamon arcite, wife bath, wife baths, knights tale, baths tale, pattern story, tale modified, wife baths tale, medieval literature,