The Canterbury Tales

"So, the Canterbury Tales . We have a group of people who meet at an inn, or a pub. They’re all going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and they decide they’re going to travel together and tell stories on the way to pass the time. This is going to be a competition, so at the end, the person who’s told the best story will get a free meal paid for by the rest. The scene is set precisely for variety: for lots of people to be able to tell different kinds of stories. The idea of the tale collection—a group of stories—is a brilliant genre, because it allows you to do many different things. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It starts in a seemingly conservative way, where there’s a pretend drawing of lots, but in fact, the person of the highest social status gets to tell the first tale, the Knight. But then, after that, Harry Bailly (the innkeeper) wants to keep on a hierarchical order of tale-telling. He says, in effect, ‘Okay, the person of highest secular status, the knight, told the first tale; now the monk, the person of highest religious status, will tell the next tale.’ And the drunken miller just says, ‘Absolutely not, I’m going to tell the next tale. I can tell a great tale, I won’t be stopped!’ So, he’s allowed to tell the next tale. And he tells a brilliant tale. After that, we never return to the principle of hierarchy. The tales take on an organic form where one follows another. Sometimes someone suggests something; sometimes there’s an argument in between tales and someone jumps in. All kinds of different things happen. Absolutely. Some of the tales are deliberately extremely comic; some are very ribald in all kinds of ways. Others are very serious. In different centuries, people have liked different ones the best. In the 15th century—so, in the hundred years after Chaucer’s death—people liked best tales that in the 20th century people thought were quite boring: the tales with a serious moral message. So, the saint’s life, ‘The Second Nun’s Tale’, for instance, and ‘The Tale of Melibee’, an allegory about prudence, which is one of only two prose tales. In the 20th century, the ones that people liked best were the ones that were outrageously funny and often very rude. For many, if they know anything about specific Canterbury tales, they’ll know about ‘The Miller’s Tale’, which involves someone farting out of a window. It involves adultery, and this very complicated story where one suitor thinks that he is kissing the face of his loved one, but he’s in fact kissing the bottom of her lover. There’re all these farcical things going on. “For many, if they know anything about specific Canterbury tales, they’ll know about ‘The Miller’s Tale’, which involves someone farting out of a window” Or they know about ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, which involves two people having adulterous sex in a tree. These kinds of outrageous stories were the ones people liked best in the 20th century. There’s a Chaucer for everybody because he did so many different things. And each individual tale can be interpreted in so many ways—he really opens up possibilities of multiple interpretations. Even when he seems to give you a clear moral, that moral is never effective or convincing. He’s always saying: ‘Find your own moral; find your own meaning.’ And he’s always telling you to look further and to think for yourself—not to let anyone else tell you what things really mean. One of my own favourites is ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, a tale that ends by telling the reader to find the moral for themselves—it has spliced together many genres and stories-within-stories, and seeming digressions, and avoids giving a clear moral message."