Chaucer is rightly famous as a storyteller —a writer who created enduring characters like the Wife of Bath and the Merchant in order to have them tell their stories on the Canterbury pilgrimage. But Chaucer is also famous as a poet, heralded by some literary historians as the inventor of the iambic pentameter. Most of the Canterbury Tales is written in verse, either in rhyming couplets (sometimes called ‘riding rhyme’), seven-line rhyme royal stanzas (rhyming ababbcc) or eight-line Monk’s Tale stanzas (rhyming ababbcbc). Only the Parson and the character of Chaucer the Pilgrim tell tales in prose.
The Parson tells his treatise on penitence in prose because he disapproves of fiction and claims not to know how to tell a story in verse. Chaucer the Pilgrim tells the Tale of Melibee in prose because Harry Bailly, the innkeeper in charge of the storytelling competition, decides that Chaucer’s first effort to tell a tale in verse is so dreadful that he must try prose instead. Prose in the Canterbury Tales is the result of religious piety or poetic failure. The tale-tellers who are willing and able to versify (in the fiction that they, rather than Chaucer the Poet, create their stories) choose poetry. Most of the Tales are thus both narrative and poem. As well as analysing Chaucer’s use of character, psychology and narration, we can also consider his form, the repeating patterns of rhythm and sound which structure each line of verse. In every line, Chaucer’s metre and rhyme communicate the meaning of his tales to his audience. So what are the key features of this verse and how does it work?
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