Chancer's art of portraiture in The General Prologue
The age of Chaucer covers the period from 1340 to 1400.
Chaucer is the true representative of his age as Pope is of the eighteenth
century and Tennyson is of the Puritanical period. His workshop breathe the
political, social, profitable and religious tendencies of his time. Chancer's
art of portraiture in The General Prologue , The middle of the fourteenth
century was the transitional period in which Chaucer was born. The rudiments of
Renaissance were breeding.
“ He stands on the threshold of the
new age, but still hedged in a backward gaping world.”
Chancer's art of portraiture in The General Prologue The fourteenth century in England was the most
important of the mediaeval centuries. It covered the period of the Black Death
and the Peasant’s Rebellion, the Hundred Times War with France and the great
profitable and social changes which we associate with the decay of villeinage.
During its times, two lords were deposed and boggled, and dynasties began to
rise and fall. The enmity to the church and the demand for the freedom of
study, which was to crown in the Renaissance and the Reformation were beginning
to be manifested in this pregnant century.
During the English Period, Chaucer appears to us as a great
original minstrel. He'd learnt nearly to perfection the trades of description,
narrativisation and characterization. Chaucer is known for his fashion of versification like that of a fine
handicraftsman and a supreme pen because of his humour and particular talk.
This period includes his remarkable work, The Canterbury Tales. Chancer's art
of portraiture in The General Prologue , In this lyric he truly represented the
comedy of life in its all forms. The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales gives us
the background of the conduct and movements of the pilgrims who make up the
company of the members of the troop who shouldered this passage.
All these pilgrims represent the total of “ English society”
of the fourteenth century. The pilgrims are persons of all species and classes
of society; and in the incomparable description of their mores, dresses,
person, nags etc, with which the minstrel has introduced them, we behold a vast
and minute portrayal gallery of the social state of England in the fourteenth
century.
His keen analysis of the tiniest detail of his characters,
their dresses, aesthetics and mores enable him to present his characters
naturalistic and not bare bloodless abstractions.
Chancer's art of portraiture in The
General Prologue
His lyrical piece, The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is a
real picture gallery in which thirty pictures are hanging on the wall with all
of their details and tricks. Rather it's a grand procession with all the life
and movement, the colour and sound. Indeed,
.His characters represent English society, innocently and
socially, in the real and recognizable types.
And still further representative of humanity
in general. So, the characters in Chaucer’s “ The Prologue” are for all periods
and for all lands.
Chaucer is the first great painter of character in English
literature. In fact, coming to Shakespeare he's the topmost in this field. In
The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales the thirty pictures traced by Chaucer give
us an excellent idea of the society at that time. Except for kingliness and
quality, on one hand and the stealers or out casts on the other, he has painted
in brief virtually the whole English nation.
The thirty pilgrims,
including the host, belong to the most varied professions. The Knight and the
Squire presents the quarrelsome element of the society. The learned and liberal
vocations are signified by the Man of Law, the Doctor, the Oxford Clerk and the
Poet himself. The Merchant and the Shipman stand for the advanced marketable
community while the Woman of Bath, an expert Cloth maker represents the dealers
and manufacturers. Agriculture is represented by the Ploughman, the Miller and
the Franklin. The upper retainers like Manciple and the Reeve and the lower
menial like Yeoman and the Cook represent the city and Country between them.
The Monk from his friary, the Prioress from her cloister, her attendant
preachers, the vill Parson, the roving Friar, the Pardoner and the Summoner
sufficiently cover the casual orders of the religious order in those days.
To save the distinctions among these typical characters,
Chaucer has indicated the differences in their clothes, manner of speech,
habits and tendencies representing the common traits and the average
characteristics of each profession. These lights, thus, aren't bare fantasies
of the brain but real human begins.
The resultant labour shortage disrupted the feudal economy.
Edward III’s costly war policy began to fail, and in old age the king became
unpopular. Richard II came to the throne as a child in 1377 in a time of social
unrest which in 1381 broke out in the Peasants’ Revolt, in which John of
Gaunt’s palace was sacked and Archbishop Sudbury murdered in the street. There
was also religious controversy: the Popes had been in captivity at Avignon
since 1309, and in 1378 the Great Schism began, between rival claimants to the
Papacy. The Oxford reformer, Wyclif, attacked Church abuses in the 1370s, and
criticised Church dogma. Next to nothing of this gets into Chaucer’s work.
He shows us the greed of the new bourgeoisie and abuses in
the Church, but his religious and social values seem those usual in his day. He
was certainly discreet, as befits a diplomat and a royal servant. He flourished
quietly at Richard II’s court, and Henry IV, John of Gaunt’s son, did not reject
his father’s old follower when he took the throne from Richard in 1399. The
history plays of Shakespeare show Richard, murdered in 1400, as the last
medieval king.
Medieval society was vertically organised like a pyramid,
with King and Pope at the heads of State and Church. Chancer's art of
portraiture in The General Prologue, The social hierarchy was in theory quite
clear, and its ranks had legal force. People of a lower rank could be punished
forwearing the dress of a higher rank. But the old feudal system, where social
standing was determined by the amount of land a man held from the king, was
giving way to a more open and mercantile economic pattern, especially in
London, where Chaucer came from the mechant class. He was not a man of the
people, but his origins were equally remote from the nobility; there are no
barons among his pilgrims. His career gave him a wide experience of English
life, and especially the life of London, many of whose 30000 inhabitants he
must have known. Medieval society, in spite or because of its vertical
distinctions, was communal: each of Chaucer’s Pilgrims, however individual, is
conceived of a typical of his craft or profession, and as having a rank and a
role in society.
discuss any two portraits from the general prologue
chaucer art of characterization slideshare
discuss chaucer's narrative art with special reference to the
canterbury tales
write a note on the art of characterization in chaucer's
prologue to canterbury tales
comment on chaucer's art of characterization in the prologue
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