Chaucerian creations

Usage examples of tales.

The Canterbury Tales, so far as they are in verse, have been printed without any abridgement or designed change in the sense.

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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.

As regards the manner in which the text of the two great works, especially of The Canterbury Tales, is presented, the Editor is aware that some whose judgement is weighty will differ from him.

With all the works of Chaucer, outside The Canterbury Tales, it would have been absolutely impossible to deal within the scope of this volume.

But this is not to be meant of his Canterbury Tales, they being written in the latter part of his life, when the courtier and the fine gentleman gave way to solid sense and plain descriptions.

The Canterbury Tales are presented in this edition with as near an approach to completeness as regard for the popular character of the volume permitted.

Boccaccio -- although, there, the circumstances under which the tales were told, with the terror of the plague hanging over the merry company, lend a grim grotesqueness to the narrative, unless we can look at it abstracted from its setting.

To describe thus the nature of the plan, and to say that when Chaucer conceived, or at least began to execute it, he was between sixty and seventy years of age, is to proclaim that The Canterbury Tales could never be more than a fragment.

That each of you, to shorten with your way In this voyage, shall tellen tales tway, To Canterbury-ward, I mean it so, And homeward he shall tellen other two, Of aventures that whilom have befall.

Both tales, whatever their origin, are bitter satires on the greed and worldliness of the Romish clergy.

Dame Prudence into a mere outline, connecting those portions of the Tale wherein lies so much of story as it actually possesses, and the general reader will probably not regret the sacrifice, made in the view of retaining so far as possible the completeness of the Tales, while lessening the intrusion of prose into a volume or poems.

Chaucer and of his editor, that, considering The Canterbury Tales as a great picture of life and manners, the piece would not have been complete if it had not included the religion of the time.

Construe the best, believe no tales new, For many a lie is told, that seems full true.

Pardoners: of whom Chaucer, in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, has given us no flattering typical portrait 87.