Today | News | Books | Recipes Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History The Canterbury Tales, and Other PoemsThe Project Gutenberg eBook of The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems Author: Geoffrey Chaucer Editor: David Laing Purves Release date: November 1, 2000 [eBook #2383] Most recently updated: December 6, 2022 Language: English Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2383 Credits: Donal O'Danachair *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CANTERBURY TALES, AND OTHER POEMS *** The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Edited for Popular Perusal by D. Laing Purves Contents PREFACE LIFE OF CHAUCER THE CANTERBURY TALES The General Prologue The Knight's Tale The Miller's tale The Reeve's Tale The Cook's Tale The Man of Law's Tale The Wife of Bath's Tale The Friar's Tale The Sompnour's Tale The Clerk's Tale The Merchant's Tale The Squire's Tale The Franklin's Tale The Doctor's Tale The Pardoner's Tale The Shipman's Tale The Prioress's Tale Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas Chaucer's Tale of Melibœus The Monk's Tale The Nun's Priest's Tale The Second Nun's Tale The Canon's Yeoman's Tale The Manciple's Tale The Parson's Tale Preces de Chauceres THE COURT OF LOVE <1> THE CUCKOO AND THE NIGHTINGALE <1> THE ASSEMBLY OF FOWLS THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF <1> THE HOUSE OF FAME TROILUS AND CRESSIDA CHAUCER'S DREAM <1> THE PROLOGUE TO THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN CHAUCER'S A.B.C. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS Transcriber's Note. 1. Modern scholars believe that Chaucer was not the author of these poems. Transcriber's Notes: Credits: This e-text was scanned, re-formatted and edited with extra notes by Donal O' Danachair (kodak_seaside@hotmail.com). I would like to acknowledge the help of Edwin Duncan, Juris Lidaka and Aniina Jokinnen in identifying some of the poems no Longer attributed to Chaucer. This e-text, with its notes, is hereby placed in the public domain. Preface: The preface is for a combined volume of poems by Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. The Spenser poems will shortly be available as a separate E-text. Spelling and punctuation: These are the same as in the book as far as possible. Accents have been removed. Diereses (umlauts) have been removed from English words and replaced by "e" in German ones. The AE and OE digraphs have been transcribed as two letters. The British pound (currency) sign has been replaced by a capital L. Greek words have been transliterated. Footnotes: The original book has an average of 30 footnotes per page. These were of three types: (A) Glosses or explanations of obsolete words and phrases. These have been treated as follows: 1. In the poems, they have been moved up into the right-hand margin. Some of them have been shortened or paraphrased in order to fit. Explanations of single words have a single asterisk at the end of the word and at the beginning of the explanation*. *like this If two words in the same line have explanations the first* has one and the second**, two. *like this **and this Explanations of phrases have an asterisk at the start and end *of the phrase* and of the explanation *like this* Sometimes these glosses wrap onto the next line, still in the right margin. If you read this e-text using a monospaced font (like Courier in a word processor such as MS Word, or the default font in most text editors) then the marginal notes are right-justified. 2. In the prose tales, they have been imbedded into the text in square brackets after the word or phrase they refer to [like this]. (B) Etymological explanations of these words. These are indicted by a number in angle brackets in the marginal gloss.* The note will be found at the *like this <1> end of the poem or section. (C) Longer notes commenting on or explaining the text. These are indicated in the text by numbers in angle brackets thus: <1>. The note will be found at the end of the poem or section. Latin: Despite his declared aim of editing the tales "for popular perusal", Purves has left nearly all Latin quotations untranslated. I have translated them as well as I could - any errors are my fault, not his. PREFACE. THE object of this volume is to place before the general reader our two early poetic masterpieces - The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queen; to do so in a way that will render their "popular perusal" easy in a time of little leisure and unbounded temptations to intellectual languor; and, on the same conditions, to present a liberal and fairly representative selection from the less important and familiar poems of Chaucer and Spenser. There is, it may be said at the outset, peculiar advantage and propriety in placing the two poets side by side in the manner now attempted for the first time. Although two centuries divide them, yet Spenser is the direct and really the immediate successor to the poetical inheritance of Chaucer. Those two hundred years, eventful as they were, produced no poet at all worthy to take up the mantle that fell from Chaucer's shoulders; and Spenser does not need his affected archaisms, nor his frequent and reverent appeals to "Dan Geffrey," to vindicate for himself a place very close to his great predecessor in the literary history of England. If Chaucer is the "Well of English undefiled," Spenser is the broad and stately river that yet holds the tenure of its very life from the fountain far away in other and ruder scenes. The Canterbury Tales, so far as they are in verse, have been printed without any abridgement or designed change in the sense. But the two Tales in prose - Chaucer's Tale of Melibœus, and the Parson's long Sermon on Penitence - have been contracted, so as to exclude thirty pages of unattractive prose, and to admit the same amount of interesting and characteristic poetry. The gaps thus made in the prose Tales, however, are supplied by careful outlines of the omitted matter, so that the reader need be at no loss to comprehend the whole scope and sequence of the original. With The Faerie Queen a bolder course has been pursued. The great obstacle to the popularity of Spencer's splendid work has lain less in its language than in its length. If we add together the three great poems of antiquity - the twenty-four books of the Iliad, the twenty-four books of the Odyssey, and the twelve books of the Aeneid - we get at the dimensions of only one-half of The Faerie Queen. The six books, and the fragment of a seventh, which alone exist of the author's contemplated twelve, number about 35,000 verses; the sixty books of Homer and Virgil number no more than 37,000. The mere bulk of the poem, then, h |