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Satire in prologue to Canterbury tales
Satire in prologue to Canterbury tales
Canterbury tales humor and satire essay
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Chaucer's Irony - The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer's Irony
Irony is a vitally important part of The Canterbury Tales, and
Chaucer's ingenious use of this literary device does a lot to provide
this book with the classic status it enjoys even today. Chaucer has
mastered the techniques required to skilfully put his points across
and subtle irony and satire is particularly effective in making a
point. The Canterbury Tales are well-known as an attack on the Church
and its rôle in fourteenth century society. With the ambiguity
introduced by the naïve and ignorant "Chaucer the pilgrim", the writer
is able to make ironic attacks on characters and what they represent
from a whole new angle. The differences in opinion of Chaucer the
pilgrim and Chaucer the writer are much more than nuances - the two
personas are very often diametrically opposed so as to cause effectual
irony.
In the Friar's portrait, he is delineated and depicted by riddles of
contradictory qualities. Chaucer expertly uses ironic naiveté to
highlight the Friar's lack of moral guilt. When the reader is told
that the Friar, "knew the taverns wel in every toun" (l. 240), we can
take it to mean that he spends very much time drinking, flirting and
socialising in pubs. The Friar is superseded to be a holy man, but we
see that he knew the landlords and barmaids much better than the
people he has meant to be consoling, praying for and helping out of
the vicious circle of poverty. Chaucer the pilgrim explains how
impressive the Friar's generous charity is and has respect for the way
he marries off young girls with suitable husbands and pays for the
ceremony. However, he neglects to mention that the only reason the
Friar does this is because he has illegi...
... middle of paper ...
...Of course, Chaucer
the pilgrim simply sees this as being elegant and sophisticated.
Throughout The General Prologue we see how Chaucer the pilgrim has
been swayed and convinced by what the other pilgrims tell him. So much
so that he reports qualities that are often the opposite of the true
personalities of the characters he is describing. This ambiguity
reveals a very clever sort of irony on behalf of the writer - while
Chaucer the pilgrim is easily drawn in by their deliberate
misrepresentations, it is up to the readers to see how wrong he is and
draw their own, more accurate, conclusions. It shows many of the
pilgrims to be very different people than those symbolised by the
ideal qualities they want others to see. This astute technique is
particularly effective in pointing out the hypocrisy and corruption in
the Christian Church during Chaucer's time.
seriously as we can see that he is not meant to be a character that we
In “The Pardoner’s Tale,” Geoffrey Chaucer masterfully frames an informal homily. Through the use of verbal and situational irony, Chaucer is able to accentuate the moral characteristics of the Pardoner. The essence of the story is exemplified by the blatant discrepancy between the character of the storyteller and the message of his story. By analyzing this contrast, the reader can place himself in the mind of the Pardoner in order to account for his psychology.
After reading The General Prologue, it is quite clear that Chaucer’s idea of the church isn’t necessarily a very appreciative one. He makes it very obvious right in the beginning that he thinks the church is a game and that it’s not actually a legit institution. “I have a text, it always is the same and always has been, since I learnt the game, old as the hills and fresher than the grass.” (Page 125, Lines 5-7) Already by line 7, Chaucer has made it clear what he thinks about the church. He says that being a Pardoner for the church is just a game, and that it’s not actually legit. He will go on to talk about how the church and all of the people who run the church are just greedy individuals and they are just doing it for the money. And he will also state that the people that attend the church and believe in what it is doing are just yokels. Yokels are unsophisticated people living a rural are. Chaucer means that the people who attend church are stupid people who will believe anything that the church tells them. This is all very ironic and satiric considering that Chaucer says all of this through a Pardoner, who at the end of the story asks the people to pay him to pardon them. Even though they just listened to him tell the story of how the church is a game and that he is just doing it for the
Chaucer is a medieval author best known for his witty Canterbury Tales. He “was born between 1340 and 1345, probably in London. His father was a prosperous wine merchant” (BBC). Drawing inspiration from what he had experienced in his lifetime, Chaucer wrote his problems about his society with a series of short stories, names the Canterbury Tales. These tales are abnormal, due to being written in English, instead of Latin, like most stories of that period. Also, there is lots of examples of satire within the text. Within the General Prologue, Pardoner’s Prologue, and Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Chaucer uses both types of satire to reach his intended audience, which is the common public.
Chaucer identifies a pardoner as his main character for the story and utilizes the situational and verbal irony found in the pardoner’s interactions and deplorable personality to demonstrate his belief in the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church during this time. Chaucer first begins his sly jab at the Church’s motives through the description of the Pardoner’s physical appearance and attitude in his “Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer uses the Pardoner as a representation of the Church as a whole, and by describing the Pardoner and his defects, is able to show what he thinks of the Roman Catholic Church. All people present in the “Canterbury Tales” must tell a tale as a part of a story-telling contest, and the pilgrim Chaucer, the character in the story Chaucer uses to portray himself, writes down the tales as they are told, as well as the story teller. The description of the Pardoner hints at the relationship and similarity between the Pardoner and the Church as a whole, as well as marks the beginning of the irony to be observed throughout the “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.”
Positivity is a very important emotion that will help to live a healthy life. Instead of being sad and getting angry, people should just be enthusiastic because it can make life much easier. Someone with this outlook on life is the Host. He always is very nice and has a good attitude; because of this he tries to spread his cheer.
The monk receives some scathing sarcasm in Chaucer’s judgment of his new world ways and the garments he wears “With fur of grey, the finest in the land; Also, to fasten hood beneath his chin, He had of good wrought gold a curious pin: A love-knot in the larger end there was.” (194-197, Chaucer). The Friar is described as being full of gossip and willing to accept money to absolve sins, quite the opposite of what a servant of God should be like. Chaucer further describes the friar as being a frequenter of bars and intimate in his knowledge of bar maids and nobles alike. The friar seems to be the character that Chaucer dislikes the most, he describes him as everything he should not be based on his profession. The Pardoner as well seems to draw special attention from Chaucer who describes him as a man selling falsities in the hopes of turning a profit “But with these relics, when he came upon Some simple parson, then this paragon In that one day more money stood to gain Than the poor dupe in two months could attain.” (703-706, Chaucer). Chaucer’s description of the pardoner paints the image of a somewhat “sleazy” individual “This pardoner had hair as yellow as wax, But lank it hung as does a strike of flax; In wisps hung down such locks as he 'd on head, And with them he his shoulders overspread; But thin they dropped, and stringy, one by one.” (677-681,
During Chaucer’s time, there was only one church, the Roman Catholic Church. There is only one church because the Protestant movement hasn’t started yet, it started in the 16th century. Anyone who was a member of the Roman Catholic Church, for example a Pardoner, a Summoner, or a Friar, are not to have sex, or party around, as well as not having money. Chaucer notices that some of these people in the Church break these rules repeatedly. Chaucer uses satire to brilliantly describe the hypocrisy in the church. Although Chaucer may come off as anti-religious, he is religious, he is against anti-hypocrisy. The first character Chaucer uses satire on is the Friar. Chaucer tells his audience that the Friar liked to sleep around a lot with women. The Friar also got lots of girls pregnant and then married them off to men in the church. The Friar was also very wealthy, and liked to party. Which are clear violations of the church’s code. To make things worse, Chaucer said that this particular Friar was better than others. The next characters that Chaucer introduced were the Pardoner and the Summoner. The Summoner’s job in a church is to find people who have committed sin and bring them to the church so that their sins can be forgiven by the Pardoner. However, the Summoner abused his power by blackmailing people to go see the Pardoner or else they
The Canterbury Tales is a literary masterpiece in which the brilliant author Geoffrey Chaucer sought out to accomplish various goals. Chaucer wrote his tales during the late 1300’s. This puts him right at the beginning of the decline of the Middle Ages. Historically, we know that a middle class was just starting to take shape at this time, due to the emerging commerce industry. Chaucer was able to see the importance and future success of the middle class, and wrote his work with them in mind. Knowing that the middle class was not interested in lofty philosophical literature, Chaucer wrote his work as an extremely comical and entertaining piece that would be more interesting to his audience. Also, Chaucer tried to reach the middle class by writing The Canterbury Tales in English, the language of the middle class rather than French, the language of the educated upper class. The most impressive aspect of Chaucer’s writing is how he incorporated into his piece some of his own controversial views of society, but yet kept it very entertaining and light on the surface level. One of the most prevalent of these ideas was his view that certain aspects of the church had become corrupt. This idea sharply contrasted previous Middle Age thought, which excepted the church’s absolute power and goodness unquestionably. He used corrupt church officials in his tales to illustrate to his audience that certain aspects of the church needed to be reformed. The most intriguing of these characters was the Pardoner. Chaucer’s satirical account of the Pardoner is written in a very matter-of-fact manner that made it even more unsettling with his audience. Chaucer uses his straightforwardness regarding the hypocrisy of the Pardoner, suggestive physiognomy of the character, and an interesting scene at the conclusion of the Pardoner’s Tale to inculcate his views of the church to his audience. The way that Chaucer used these literary devices to subtly make his views known to an audience while hooking them with entertainment, shows that Chaucer was truly a literary genius.
The first thing to register when considering irony in Socrates, is that in no passage of Plato 's work does Socrates or any of his associates refer to him as an ironist. Rather, it was his opponents who accused him to be an eiron, that is, someone who practices irony . This, has to do with the fact that up until Socrates ' times, the standard understanding of the Greek word eironeia was exclusively that of deception or dissembling . More precisely, as David Wolfsdorf shows discussing a passage from Oppian 's On Hunting, erioneia '[...] is the use of deception to profit at the expense of another by presenting oneself as benign in an effort to disarm the intended victim [...] ' .
The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is a masterpiece of satire due to the frequent use of verbal irony and insults towards the characters and their roles in society. A major source of Irony is Chaucer’s representation of the Church. He uses the Prioress, the Monk and the Friar, who are all supposed to be holy virtuous people to represent the Church. In his writing he suggests that they are actually corrupt, break their vows and in no way model the “holiness” of Christianity.
The Canterbury Tales examines many important qualities of human nature. Chaucer purposely mocks the faults in his characters, and shows the hypocrisy and deceitfulness ...
...eveals insecurities of him in the process while that itself tells us more about the popular culture in this time. Chaucer, along with many of the other pilgrims attempts to place themselves in a socially desirable or even superior position. With the Narrator having the responsibility of articulating the tales to us in a coherent fashion, he might feel pressure to present himself as all-knowing or superior to his companions rather than show us an honest and unbiased point of view. After all, he is telling the story; the Narrator can ultimately choose to tell us whatever he pleases. The Narrator plays the role of telling tales and providing the groundwork for this pilgrimage story, but since his ideas and opinions are designed in such a particular way; he indirectly tells us so much more about not only about the pilgrimage but of this time period’s culture as a whole.
Geoffrey Chaucer was a on a mission when he wrote The Canterbury Tales. That mission was to create a satire that attacked three major institutions. Raphel displays, “Medieval society was divided into three estates: the Church (those who prayed), the Nobility (those who fought), and the Patriarchy. The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is an estates satire.” Chaucer wanted to shed light on the institutions that were taking advantage of the everyday man. Chaucer does this by making up tales about certain people that she light to the undercover world of the institutions. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses satire to attack the Church, the Patriarchy, and the Nobility.
Over the course of the semester, this British Literature course has adequately exposed myself to a variety of works of differing styles coming from a millennium of English authors and poets. With this literary immersion, some works have proved more memorable than others. Out of these select few, I hope to choose the literary work which demonstrates the greatest combination of entertainment and morals for future readers to take away from the text. After some deliberation, I found the solution obvious, as I had to write about Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. While in reflection of the readings this semester, I could not deny that Chaucer’s collection should be preserved as the author succeeded what his stories were meant to accomplish: to “delight and instruct”. With the alluring variety of characters and entertaining situations which are described in well-chosen detail, each story provided by the pilgrims. Additionally, as each of the chosen tales (as stated in the course reading syllabus) provided a lesson that is still relevant after five centuries, the “instruction” comes from these universal morals. Therefore, in the