Chaucer: Satire And Humor

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Chaucer: Satire And Humor

Until Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, he was primarily

know for being the writer of love poems, such as The Parliament of

Fowls, narratives of doomed passion, and stories of women wronged by

their lovers. These works are nothing short of being breath taking,

but they do not posses the raw power that the Canterbury Tales do.

This unfinished poem, which is about 17,000 lines, is one of the most

brilliant works in all of literature. The poem introduces a group of

pilgrims journeying from London to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket

at Canterbury. Together, the pilgrims represent a large section of

14th-century English life. To help pass the time of the journey, the

pilgrims decide to tell stories. These tales include a wide variety of

medieval genres, from humorous fables to religious lectures. They

vividly describe medieval attitudes and customs in such areas as love,

marriage, and religion. Chaucer was a master storyteller, and his wit

his shown throughout his work by the use of humor and satire, and it

is most present in The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, The

Pardoner’s Tale, and The Wife of Bath’s Tale.

Many people that the most popular par to of the Canterbury Tales it

The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, which has long been admired for

the lively, individualized portraits it offers. More recent criticism

has reacted against this approach, claiming that the portraits are

indicative of social humor and satire, “estates satire,” and insisting

that they should not be read as individualized character portraits

like those in a novel (Gittes 15). It is the Prologue to the

Canterbury Tales that serves to establish firmly the framework for the

entire story- collecti...

... middle of paper ...

...o her husband, and this defeats the whole purpose of the Wife of

Bath’s entire argument.

For almost a seven hundred year old book, the Canterbury Tales still

is a very irresistible collection of analyses of human life. Not much

has changed in seven hundred years. Medieval traits that Chaucer

described in his tales such as corruption and greed still play a major

part in our society today. Also, issues such as woman’s rights that

were debated back then are still heavily debated today. No other

writer has been able to duplicate the way Chaucer has analyzed and

described human life, and no one has even come close to doing it in

such a humorous and satirical way. The Canterbury Tales brought

Geoffrey Chaucer too his full artistic power, and it will forever

remain as one of the most brilliant and vivid piece of literature ever

written in the English language.

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