SELIM09.doc


 

Ricardo Sola, Selim  9 (1999): 111—122 

 
 

THE CANTERBURY TALES AND 
ITS DRAMATIC BACKGROUND 

 
 

Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, a collection of tales that show some 
particular features totally new in the literary tradition of the period. It has 
been generally accepted the fact that Chaucer modifies in very important 
aspects the literary sources at his hand to make a literary work full of realism, 
humour, irony and dramatic interplay. Even if we compare Chaucer's 
collection with Boccaccio's we see strong and important differences between 
the two, being the most relevant of them, as Sklovsky pointed out, the design 
of the frame (1971: 119-124). 

As we know the tales in Il Deccamerone are told using a static frame, 
while those in The Canterbury Tales move inside a dynamic one. In the latter 
the pilgrims, the tellers, travel towards Canterbury and in their very detailed 
way enjoy themselves with the telling of the tales, as in a game. In Il Decca-
merone we hear two voices: the author/narrator and the tellers, the Flo rentine 
gentlemen and ladies; but in The Canterbury Tales we hear several voices: 
the authorial voice, the narrator's, the pilgrim Chaucer and the rest of the pil-
grims. These voices are not merely reporting and narrating, but also arguing 
among them, discussing about different topics and subjects, and commenting 
about the excellence or ugliness of the stories, abusing each other, and so on 
and so forth. The pilgrims are described as individuals as well as types: 

 
A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man, 
That fro the tyme that he first began 
To riden out, he loved chivalrie, 
Trouthe and honour, fredom and cursteisie. (C.T. 43-46) 
 

everyone in either the inner or the outer audience would be familiar with the 
typical portrait of the type, and that means that a social and literary convent-
ional pattern is behind the mere lines and words, as Jill Mann showed (1973). 



Ricardo Sola 
 

110 

From this point of view it seems most difficult to explain the following lines 
that describe the real knight in the group of people in front of the audience: 

 
But to tellen yow of his array, 
His hors were goode, but he was nat gay. 
Of fustian he wered a gypon 
Al bismotered with his habergeon, 
For he was late ycome from his viage, 
And wente for to doon his pilgrymage. (C.T. 73-78) 
 

All the prilgrims in the General Prologue, the Host and later the 
author/narrator/pilgrim Chaucer are depicted with these two perspectives. We 
have a tradition for the first, but ¿do we have one for the second? 

Quoting once again Roberth Scholes and Robert Kellog in their book The 
Nature of Narrative they state: 

All art is traditional in that artists learn their craft from their pre -
decessors to a great extent. They begin by conceiving the poss ibi-
lities open to them in terms of the achievements they are acquaint-
ed with. They may add to the tradition, opening up new poss i-
bilities for their successors, but they begin, inevitably within a 
tradition (4). 

It seems that the assumption that any writer belongs to a tradition is an 
unquestionable axiom in literary criticism and textual analysis. Aristotle said 
so in his De Poetica and Horace in Arte Poetica when in their analysis of 
epic poetry and tragedy they proposed Homer as a model for other writers. 
Later in time T.S.Eliot insisted on this debt of the individual artists to a 
received and given tradition when he stated in his essay "Tradition and 
Individual Talent" that a situation of a cultural and literary vacuum is not 
possible in creative writing. Tradition always exists and any poet or artist 
must have this "historical sense", being the seminal difference the 
acceptance or the rejection, and so modification of such tradition (49-52). 

Once we have considered that there is a tradition surrounding or pre ceed-
ing the writer we can repeat our previous question about Chaucer and The 
Canterbury Tales: which tradition do they belong to? or which tradition are 
they following?. Many years ago, as I have pointed above, Jill Mann des crib-



The Canterbury Tales and its Dramatic Background 
 

111 

ed in her book Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973) the catalogue 
that stayed as a background for the depiction of the pilgrims in the "Ge neral 
Prologue", while Claes Schaar in The Golden Mirror (1967) developed a sys-
tematic study of descriptive literary techniques at the back; Bryan & Demp -
ster in their recollection Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury 
Tales (1958) studied and showed the debts of Chaucer's work to other 
authors and to a classical and medieval narrative tradition; D.W. Robertson in 
his A Preface to Chaucer (1969) explored the learned and mythological tra-
dition in which Chaucer was inserted, and W.W. Curry in Chaucer and the 
Medieval Sciences (1960) the scientific one, etc., just to mention a few. 

Very recently Piero Boitani and Jill Mann in their anthology The 
Cambridge Chaucer Companion (1987) have developed with the help of 
other chaucerians scholars more modern approaches and, let us say, 
posmodern analysis studying Chaucer's works and retaking the same facts 
and evidences pointed out in previous studies, some of which I have already 
quoted. But in some way, I think, they miss the chance - specially when 
dealing with The Canterbury Tales - and the opportunity to explain the 
reason for such "rich individual variety and interplay", as they seem to be 
repeating old concepts, ideas and themes in more modern terms and 
expressions. Let us have a brief look to some of the contributions in the 
anthology which more clearly deal with the topic I am proposing here. 

Benson in his article " The Canterbury Tales: Personal drama or experim-
ent in poetic variety" settles his point with a well-known and right statement: 

For many, the clearest signals of the variety of the Canterbury 
Tales are the sharply differentiated tellers and their intricate re -
lationships before, after, and sometimes during the tales. No other 
story -collection has a frame that is so lively and dynamic (93). 

This, in fact, supports his view that the collection of tales reveals a sharp -
ly interplay among a group of speakers/tellers, but next the question is to 
choose between personal drama or experiment in poetic variety to justify it. It 
seems that Benson is in favour of dramatic interplay and so he brings Kit tred-
ge's much quoted definition of this design and develops what he calls "dram-
atic theory": 



Ricardo Sola 
 

112 

Kittredge argued that the individual tales are not told in Chaucer's 
own voice, but that each is a dramatic expression of the personality 
of its particular teller: "The Pilgrims do not exist for the sake of the 
story, but vice versa . Structurally regarded, the stories are merely 
long speeches expressing, directly or indirectly, the characters of 
the several persons - they are more or less comparable, in this 
regard, to the soliloquie s of Hamlet or Iago or Macbeth (94). 

Once Kittredge and Benson have stated that the tale is an extension of 
the personality, ideas and behaviour of the teller they inmediately think of 
character, not type, and in order to explain what character is they refer as a 
way of example to Hamlet, Iago and Macbeth - we may say to a literay 
tradition -. The important fact to notice here is that none of the scholars link 
the "acting and doing" of the tellers to a narrative tradition for there is none. 
Further on Benson goes on saying: 

Given such diverse and energetic portraits it is all too easy to 
imagine The Canterbury Tales as fully developed and 
psychologically complex characters, like those we know from 
realistic novel or popular film (96). 

On the one hand the dynamism and complexity of the characters in The 
Canterbury Tales take the scholars to the field of performance, to the field of 
film, as well as to the idea of character as it is seen in realistic fiction. On the 
other, Benson does not explain the needs and reasons why Chaucer moved 
from a static and "energetic portraits" into "complex characters", so esta-
blishing an opposition between passive portraits and active characters. Final-
ly Benson adds: 

Scholars have even argued that Chaucer must have had real-life 
models and suggested specific names, but the latest studies 
confirm what some earlier readers understood - the General 
Prologue describes types rather than specific individuals (96). 

Following Aristotle's rules a character first must be life -like and so in con-
nection with real known people, and second a character must be a universal, a 
type. This takes the thread of our analysis to the topic of realism, some thing 
that is used by many Chaucerians scholars to support the idea of Chaucer's 
modernity and originality. And its is true, but let us have a look at Bloom-



The Canterbury Tales and its Dramatic Background 
 

113 

field's essay "Chaucerian realism". Again Bloomfield starts with a general 
assesment: 

There is good reason why realism in general is such a popular sub-
ject in literary theory and criticism, for in one way or another one 
might say that it is central to any discussion of literature even art. 
As the ancient theory of imitation or mimesis testifies, art must 
claim to be real in some sense if it is to be taken at all seriously. 
The whole problem lies, of course, in what sense or senses art is 
real (180). 

 

Aristotle's concept of mimesis, as we know, is not concerned with metaphy-
sical thought - as may in Plato - but with the factual evidence that men are na-
turally imitative, they enjoy imitating and learn by imitation. So the content of 
literature is not everything that can be imitated, but its effect is mediated by 
the manner of imitation or representation, that is to say, its form. We do not 
simply react to what we are shown but rather to how we are shown it. Then 
Bloomfield touches upon another important aspect, very much studied by 
formalist critics in the 60s: 

A basic realism in narrative is concerned with the establishment of 
an air of truth or plausibility to a tale. Narratives use such 
s trategies to avoid the accusation of lying. This type of realism 
may be called "authenticating realism" and is to be found in one 
way or another in almost all narratives (181) 

A piece of literature is a thing in its own right, different from those other 
things it imitates or represents, and it is the manner of imitation what deter-
mines the kind of realism in art. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales there are two 
basic authenticating devices: the dream-vision pattern that helps to establish 
the distance between dream and reality, in the opposite way as Bloomfield 
suggests, and the individual interplay of the pilgrims, as Kittredge explains it, 
but considered as a "dramatis personae" not as narrative characters. 

We see how the theoretical frame that the contributors to Boitani and 
Mann's Companion use is based on criteria and judgements not radically dif-
ferent from the ones already known to us, nor do they completely explain 



Ricardo Sola 
 

114 

from the point of view of a literary tradition the rising of this new individual 
characterization. 

When the British dramatist Anne Devlin came to the University of Alcalá 
de Henares (1994), she was talking about her last play After Easter (1994), and 
she declared: 

"I love working in the theatre, in the space of the theater, because 
it's very different. It's very close to standing up in a public square 
and telling a story. I have to say that the origins of After Easter 
began with me standing up in a music room in Corpus Christi 
College, in Oxford, and reading the play that I was beginning to 
write to a group of visiting oversea academic drama teachers and 
students. From that audience experience of them listening to the 
story I was telling I decided I was able to explore that in 
relationship to the audience."  

Then she added: "I come from an oral story -telling tradition and I always 
describe myself as a storyteller. Even in theatre." The recognition of the dra -
matist that a play has a narrative component gives us way to think that a nar-
rative may have a theatrical component too. It is the same idea that André 
Helbó, quoting Roland Barthes, points out when he explains how the process 
of "representation", which is thought of as a peculiar of drama — i. e. a dra-
matic process of representation — also works when we read a story, a narrati-
ve or a fiction: 

La conciencia de la representación se incluye en el origen del he-
cho estético. Dicha comprensión se halla históricamente asociada a 
la tradition narrativa (41). (the awareness of representation is in -
cluded in the origin of aesthetic fact. Such way of understanding 
has been historically associated to narrative tradition). 

It is important to emphasize that both Helbó and Barthes are referring to 
the process of "reading" as a process in which the reader represents (perfoms 
we may say) in an imaginary stage built in their mind the geographical envi-
ronment and the features of the characters as they are depicted in the story. 
In my opinion and following that argument we can conclude that the reverse 
operation is acceptable too: the writer imagines, represents and performs in 



The Canterbury Tales and its Dramatic Background 
 

115 

an imaginary stage built in his mind the plot and, then, expresses it in narrati-
ve sequence. 

One of the most important problems we face in modern literary history is 
when we try to explain the artistic innovations of the past in terms of 
contemporary critical criteria. So that when dealing with character in the 
Middle Ages we inevitably pass through the conceptions drawn by the 
Ranaissance writers and most important the romantic idea of individuality and 
the modernist and postmodernist conflict between subject and art. 

There is nevertheless a basic point I want to state and is the fact that 
subject and identity in the Middle Ages, and specially in the XIVth century, 
appeared as a result of the development of the economical and social 
structures which primed a social relationship based on the private enterprise 
and free will of the subject against a collective pattern of thinking and 
believing imposed upon the individuals. The cultural and literary expressions 
had to accomodate to this social and economic condition and frame; there 
was a literary subject because there was first an economical one. 

Although Dante in La divina commedia deals with the subject's 
understanding in a historical and specific time, Langland in Piers Plowman 
takes subjectivity as one of his topics, though it is a religious identity that 
shows the struggle between the inner and the outer, and then the struggle 
against hierarchy and dogma, and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the 
knight identity is unveiled when his private decisions make him responsible 
for his sins, moral and knightly, and his repentance, in Chaucer as Patterson 
says, character is the result of a conjunction of the specific and the general: 

It (Dryden) has also assumed that the key to his meaning resides in 
the proper understanding of his characters: how we interpret 
Troilus and Criseyde will be determined by how we understand 
the three protagonists; and The Canterbury Tales are habitually 
read as indexed to the ethical register of their tellers. In fact, the 
controversies that have traditionaly preoccupied Chaucer criticism 
have focused not on the legitimacy of this procedure but rather on 
the terms of its practice. On the one hand is a self-proclaimed 
"historicism" that insists on the priority of stylistic and 
iconographic traditions, rhetorical programs, and a required 
exemplary meaning; on the other a "criticism" that privileges 
mimetic accuracy and commonsense psychology. In both cases 



Ricardo Sola 
 

116 

Chaucerian character is seen as a conjunction of the specific 
(whether derived from stylistic imitation, rhetorical precept, or 
empirical observation) and the general (whether taken to be 
authoritative truths or universal human nature). (15) 

but Patterson still collides with the same ideas he wants to criticize and 
returns once more to a kind of thematic - subject vs history - level which does 
not explain the stylistic design of The Canterbury Tales. Surely it is Chaucer 
who better expresses this dialectical tension between subject and history, 
between the inner and the outer-self, between canon and parody in The 
Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde choosing dramatic dialogue and 
theatrical performance to represent this conflict, and so making the character, 
the subject, the "dramatis personae" more relevant than story and narrative in 
front of the audience: 

 
And whan that he was out at dore, anon 
He planed awey the names evrychon 
That he beforn had written in his tables; 
He served hem with nyfles and with fables. 
" Nay, ther thou lixt, thou Somonour!" quod the Frere  
"Pees", quod oure Hoost, "for Cristes mooder deere! 
Tel forth thy tale, and spare it nat at al."  
"So thryve I," quod this Somonour, "so I shal!" (C.T. 1755-1764) 
 

In the Middle Ages there was one only possible definition of character, 
both in tragedy and epic, and it followed the features described by Aristotle 
and Horace. Although Aristotle conceives of action as more important than 
character in tragedy and comedy he also thinks that epic narrative is inferior 
to drama in this process of imitation or "mimesis", so that it is in drama where 
character and action are better developed. There is, however, one important 
distinction to bare in mind: fable is the combination of incidents, and cha-
racter is what makes us ascribe certain moral qualities to the agents. In the 
same way character in a play is what reveals the moral purpose of the agents. 
To put it in other words character is what unveils psychological complexity, 
i.e., individual identity versus individual type. Sklovsky says, "… pro -
bablemente, el carácter, tal como lo comprendemos nosotros, surge como re -
sultado de la contraposición del hombre corriente al "personaje" (… surely, 
character as we understand it, arises as a result of the opposition between 



The Canterbury Tales and its Dramatic Background 
 

117 

common man and the individual", and he goes "… aquí, en la percepción de 
la diferencia empieza a crearse el carácter" (… here, in our perception of the 
difference character appears)(128). Horace goes even further when he says 
that characters must be suitable for the genre, and the ques tion, once again, 
is: what kind of genre do the characters in The Canterbury Tales belong to? 

There is not a specific genre, a particular literary tradition to refer to, and, 
in some sense, to support "authenticating realism", since saying that "Chau-
cer had real-life models" is to miss the point twice: first insisting upon the 
obvious i.e. that realism in literature always means looking at real life, and 
second forgetting that literary patterns and forms can also be models for 
other literary works. So in The Canterbury Tales the combination of the 
specific and the general, the life -like individual and the type was possible 
through the contextual and intertextual reference to the only one literary 
expression that used "mimesis" and character as "dramatis personae", the 
medieval theatre. To support this pose two important clues are given, one by 
Tydeman when he comments some aspects of "closet theatres" and quotes: 

Richard Axton suggests that this mode of separation between 
actors and narrator would mean that the cast (probably 
professional players) would not need to learn complicated Latin 
speeches, simply improvising to the narrator's story -line, while the 
learned author or narrator avoided the stigma of too close an 
association with the acting fraternity (27-28). 

Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales having in mind a stage, i.e., 
interplay of narrator and actors. The other clue is given by Hans-Jürgen Diller 
when in his paper presented in the SELIM Annual Conference held in 
Cordoba showed intertextuality in action between medieval stage and 
medieval painting and glass-working: 

The drama, to which I want to turn now, is a richer medium that the 
ones considered so far, because it combines word and image. The 
image, moreover, is a living image…Like the other verbal media, it 
can represent speech (which the pictorial media cannot). But over 
and above the verbal and the pictorial media, it can represent 
action iconically as developing in time(51). 



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118 

Diller sees the interaction between drama and the pictorial media as a kind 
of process in which the former acts as a model for the latter, so that when the 
medieval glass-worker builds a biblical scene in the gothic glass window of 
the church he looks at theatrical representation not to biblical narrative. It is 
not surprising, then, that Derek Brewer (1974) pointed out the paralelism 
between the design of the tales and the design of a Gothic cathedral, each 
tale being the equivalent to one of the scenes represented in the gothic glass 
windows of the church. We readers realize the truth of that when we see that 
Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, as the narrative proceeds, is showing more 
and more interest in "theatrical interplay" and less in the telling of the story, 
as it happens when we reach the prologues to "The Manciple's Tale" and 
"The Canon's Yeoman's Tale" 

 

There is no time now to enter deeper into the particular analysis and study of 
the Canterbury Tales as a peformance. It is enough to say that the realistic 
details and features described in them belong to the world of theatre more 
than to a specific narrative tradition. To put it in other way, Chaucer is think-
ing of a stage when he describes the Tabard Inn, and of theatrical characters 
when he describes the pilgrims. Chaucer is following the "closet theatre" pat-
tern, with a narrator and a mime, all of them in the stage being in turn protago-
nists and audience. Even more, when Chaucer uses humour and irony is tak-
ing advantage of the parodic element, explained by Aristotle and Bajtín as a 
constitutive element of comedy in front of tragedy, as a constitutive element 
of the popular against the established, courtly literary taste. 

 

Ricardo J. Sola Buil 

Universidad de Alcalá de Henares  

 

REFERENCES 

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1965. Barcelona: Barral Editores. 



The Canterbury Tales and its Dramatic Background 
 

119 

Bloomfield, Morton W. 1987: Chaucerian Realism. P. Boitani and J. Mann 
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Schaar, Claes. The Golden Mirror. Studies in Chaucer's Descriptive 
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