Canterbury Tales Prologue Essay

The duel ends with Arcite’s death, which leaves Palamon and Emelye despondent over the loss rather than happy that they are finally united.

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Rather, the tale shows how love can inspire jealousy, which can lead unexpectedly to violence and sorrow.

The Wife of Bath’s Tale moves us further away from an idealized depiction of courtly love.

The tales also vary, illustrating popular medieval genres: romance, fable, saint’s life, fabliau (a coarse, comic tale), exemplum (a story designed to illustrate the theme of a sermon).

Chaucer the pilgrim burlesques a type of popular romance, but his satirical purpose goes unrecognized and the Host will not allow him to finish.

By the end of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, it is clear that, as an idealized concept, courtly love cannot be applied to relationships where real human emotions are concerned.

No No Boy Essays - Canterbury Tales Prologue Essay

The Knight’s Tale presents ideal characters for a story of courtly love.Courtly love was one of the most pervasive themes in the literature of Chaucer’s time.According to this conception of love, romance is an ennobling force that can raise the male lover—usually a knight—to heights of bravery in the service of his lady. Thirty pilgrims have gathered at the Tabard Inn just south of London prior to departure for the shrine of St.Thomas a Becket, martyred in his cathedral at Canterbury two centuries earlier.This illuminates the dark side of the courtly love model, in which the knight is seen as the lady’s servant and she his mistress.The Wife of Bath’s tale is true to the underlying power dynamics of this conventional relationship—a notion that is strengthened by the presence of an authoritative female monarch who directs a submissive knight—but in this context those elements seem far from noble or admirable.The beloved, in turn, is the epitome of feminine perfection and often difficult, if not impossible, to attain as a romantic partner.Passion and devotion are emphasized throughout, and the spiritual dimension of love is valued above the physical.The Wife of Bath, on the lookout for a sixth husband, tells a tale cunningly contrived to prove that the main ingredient of domestic happiness is rule by the wife.The Miller, somehow drunk early on the first day, tells of a carpenter deceived and made the laughing stock of his neighborhood by his wife and her lover.