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The Canterbury Tales Characterization Chart: A Comprehensive Guide
Are you tackling Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters? Understanding the intricacies of each pilgrim is crucial to grasping the depth and complexity of this masterpiece. This comprehensive guide provides a detailed characterization chart, helping you navigate the diverse personalities and unravel the social tapestry of 14th-century England. We'll delve into key characteristics, motivations, and relationships, making your study of The Canterbury Tales significantly more manageable and insightful. Let's embark on this literary journey together!
Understanding the Importance of Characterization in The Canterbury Tales
Before diving into the chart, it's vital to understand why characterization is so important in Chaucer's work. The Canterbury Tales isn't just a collection of stories; it's a vibrant portrayal of medieval society. Chaucer masterfully uses characterization to satirize social classes, religious hypocrisy, and human nature itself. Each pilgrim's personality, speech, and actions reveal crucial insights into the societal norms and conflicts of his time. By understanding these characters, you unlock a deeper understanding of the narrative and its enduring relevance.
The Canterbury Tales Characterization Chart: Key Elements
This section will serve as a framework for analyzing the pilgrims. Instead of providing a static chart (which would be too lengthy and inflexible for this format), we'll focus on the key elements to include in your own characterization chart. You can then use this framework to create your own personalized chart, tailored to your specific needs and focus.
Consider including the following information for each pilgrim:
Name: This seems obvious, but ensure accurate spelling!
Social Class/Profession: Knight, Wife of Bath, Pardoner, etc. – This immediately sets the context for their motivations and behaviours.
Physical Description: Chaucer often uses physical appearance to hint at character traits. Note significant details.
Personality Traits: Identify key adjectives (e.g., pious, greedy, cunning, etc.) that accurately describe the character.
Motivations: What drives this character? What are their goals and desires?
Relationships with Other Pilgrims: How does the character interact with others? Are there alliances, rivalries, or conflicts?
Significant Quotes: Include memorable quotes that showcase the character's personality or beliefs.
Narrative Role: What is the character's contribution to the overall narrative? Are they a comedic relief, a moral example, or a cautionary tale?
Chaucer's Attitude/Tone: How does Chaucer portray this character? Is there sarcasm, irony, or admiration?
Analyzing Key Characters: Examples
Let's apply this framework to a few key characters to illustrate its application:
1. The Knight: He represents the ideal of chivalry, but Chaucer also subtly hints at the potential gap between the ideal and reality. Note his physical description – is he battle-worn and weary, or still bearing the marks of youthful vigor? His motivations are tied to honor and duty, but are they truly selfless?
2. The Wife of Bath: A complex and controversial character, the Wife of Bath embodies female empowerment in a patriarchal society. Analyze her five marriages and their implications. Her physical description reflects her confidence, but her speech also reveals her shrewdness and potentially manipulative nature. Her story provides significant insight into her motivations.
3. The Pardoner: A prime example of Chaucer's satire, the Pardoner is a corrupt religious figure. Focus on the stark contrast between his outward piety and his inner greed. His tale reveals his own hypocrisy, making him a memorable cautionary figure.
Building Your Own Canterbury Tales Characterization Chart
Now, you're equipped to create your own comprehensive chart. Consider using a spreadsheet program like Google Sheets or Excel for easy organization. You can even colour-code entries to highlight relationships or recurring themes. Remember that this is a dynamic process – your understanding of the characters will likely evolve as you progress through your reading.
Conclusion
Creating a detailed characterization chart for The Canterbury Tales is an invaluable tool for understanding the complexities of Chaucer's work. By systematically analyzing each pilgrim's traits, motivations, and interactions, you can unlock a deeper appreciation of the social, religious, and human aspects of medieval life depicted in this literary masterpiece. Remember to focus on Chaucer’s subtle use of language and imagery to uncover the full scope of each character's personality.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What is the best way to organize my characterization chart? Use a spreadsheet program, organizing by pilgrim, with columns for each key element outlined above.
2. Are there any online resources that can help me? Yes! Search for "Canterbury Tales character analysis" to find helpful summaries and interpretations.
3. How many pilgrims should I include in my chart? Include as many as you feel are necessary for your understanding of the text; you don't need to include every single character.
4. How can I identify Chaucer's attitude towards each character? Pay close attention to his word choice, tone, and the details he chooses to emphasize or omit.
5. Is it necessary to memorize every detail about each character? No! The chart is a tool to aid your understanding. Focus on the most significant details that contribute to the overall narrative and themes.
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer, 1903 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Palamon and Arcite John Dryden, 1898 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Canterbury Tales Study Guide Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, Mcgraw-Hill-Glencoe Staff, 2000-11-01 Provides teaching strategies, background, and suggested resources; reproducible student pages to use before, during, and after reading--Cover. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The prioresses tale, Sire Thopas, the Monkes tale Geoffrey Chaucer, 1906 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Canon Yeoman's Prologue and Tale Geoffrey Chaucer, 1965-01-01 The following series consists of separate volumes of the works of Chaucer, individually edited with introductions, notes & glossaries by Maurice Hussey, James Winny & A.C. Spearing. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Merchant's Prologue and Tale Geoffrey Chaucer, 2016-06-02 Six-hundred-year-old tales with modern relevance. This stunning full-colour edition from the bestselling Cambridge School Chaucer series explores the complete text of The Merchant's Prologue and Tale through a wide range of classroom-tested activities and illustrated information, including a map of the Canterbury pilgrimage, a running synopsis of the action, an explanation of unfamiliar words and suggestions for study. Cambridge School Chaucer makes medieval life and language more accessible, helping students appreciate Chaucer's brilliant characters, his wit, sense of irony and love of controversy. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation Geoffrey Chaucer, 2012-03-27 Fisher's work is a vivid, lively, and readable translation of the most famous work of England's premier medieval poet. Preserving Chaucer's rhyme and meter and faithfully articulating his poetic voice, Fisher makes Chaucer's tales accessible to a contemporary ear. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Knight's Tale Chaucer Geoffrey, 2022-10-27 This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Clerkes Tale Chaucer, 1888 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Luminaries Eleanor Catton, 2013-09-05 WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2013 It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. It is full of narrative, linguistic and psychological pleasures, and has a fiendishly clever and original structuring device. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement and will confirm for critics and readers that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Pardoner's Tale Geoffrey Chaucer, 1928 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Teaching Chaucer G. Ashton, L. Sylvester, 2007-02-15 This volume of essays offers innovations in teaching Chaucer in higher education. The projects explored in this study focus on a student-centred, active learning designed to enhance independent research skills and critical thinking. These studies also seek to establish conversations - between teachers and learners, and students and their texts. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Sometimes We Tell the Truth Kim Zarins, 2016-09-06 In this contemporary retelling of The Canterbury Tales, a group of teens on a bus ride to Washington, DC, each tell a story—some fantastical, some realistic, some downright scandalous—in pursuit of the ultimate prize: a perfect score. Jeff boards the bus for the Civics class trip to Washington, DC, with a few things on his mind: -Six hours trapped with his classmates sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. -He somehow ended up sitting next to his ex-best friend, who he hasn’t spoken to in years. -He still feels guilty for the major part he played in pranking his teacher, and the trip’s chaperone, Mr. Bailey. -And his best friend Cannon, never one to be trusted and banned from the trip, has something “big” planned for DC. But Mr. Bailey has an idea to keep everyone in line: each person on the bus is going to have the chance to tell a story. It can be fact or fiction, realistic or fantastical, dark or funny or sad. It doesn’t matter. Each person gets a story, and whoever tells the best one will get an automatic A in the class. But in the middle of all the storytelling, with secrets and confessions coming out, Jeff only has one thing on his mind—can he live up to the super successful story published in the school newspaper weeks ago that convinced everyone that he was someone smart, someone special, and someone with something to say. In her debut novel, Kim Zarins breathes new life into Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in a fresh and contemporary retelling that explores the dark realities of high school, and the ordinary moments that bring us all together. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Ancestor's Tale Richard Dawkins, 2004 A renowned biologist provides a sweeping chronicle of more than four billion years of life on Earth, shedding new light on evolutionary theory and history, sexual selection, speciation, extinction, and genetics. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Boy Roald Dahl, 2012 Presents humorous anecdotes from the author's childhood which includes summer vacations in Norway and an English boarding school. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Young Adult and Canonical Literature Paula Greathouse, Victor Malo-Juvera, 2021-03-15 In the last decade alone, the world has changed in seismic ways as marriage equality has been ruled on by the supreme court, social justice issues such as #metoo and BlackLivesMatter have arisen, and issues of immigration and deportation have come to the forefront of politics across the globe. Thus, there is a need for an updated text that shares strategies for combining canonical and young adult literature that reflects the changes society has – and continues to - experience. The purpose of our collection is to offer secondary (6-12) teachers engaging ideas and approaches for pairing young adult and canonical novels to provide unique examinations of topics that teaching either text in isolation could not afford. Our collection does not center canonical texts and most chapters show how both texts complement each other rather than the young adult text being only an extension of the canonical. Within each volume, the chapters are organized chronologically according to the publication date of the canonical text. The pairings offered in this collection allow for comparisons in some cases, for extensions in others, and for critique in all. Volume 2 covers The Canterbury Tales (1392) through Fallen Angels (1988). |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Nun's Priest's Tale Geoffrey Chaucer, 1915 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight R. A. Waldron, 1970 Chrysanthemum loves her name, until she starts going to school and the other children make fun of it. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Man of Law's Tale Geoffrey Chaucer, 1904 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Challicum Sketch Book 1842-53 Duncan Elphinstone Cooper, 1987 The nineteenth century squatter and painter Duncan Elphinstone Cooper spent about thirteen years of his life in the Western District of Victoria where he painted the fifty-four pictures presented in this volume. Most of these are from Cooper's The Challicum Sketch Book, now a treasured part of the collections of the National Library of Australia; the paintings deal almost exclusively with the grazing property of that name — from tent to house and beyond. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales H S Toshack, 2007-04 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: William Langland's "Piers Plowman" William Langland, George Economou, 1996-12 A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best.—Allen Mandelbaum |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer, 2016-03-24 The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer from Coterie Classics All Coterie Classics have been formatted for ereaders and devices and include a bonus link to the free audio book. “Then you compared a woman's love to Hell, To barren land where water will not dwell, And you compared it to a quenchless fire, The more it burns the more is its desire To burn up everything that burnt can be. You say that just as worms destroy a tree A wife destroys her husband and contrives, As husbands know, the ruin of their lives. ” ― Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales are collection of stories by Chaucer, each attributed to a fictional medieval pilgrim. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales Robert J. Meyer-Lee, 2019-10-24 Introduction: Canterbury tales IV-V and literary value -- Clerk -- Merchant -- Squire -- Franklin. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Greenglass House Kate Milford, 2014 A rambling old smuggler's inn, a strange map, an attic packed with treasures, squabbling guests, theft, friendship, and an unusual haunting mark this smart mystery in the tradition of the Mysterious Benedict Society books. Illustrations. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Telling Tales Patience Agbabi, 2014-04-03 SHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES PRIZE 2015 Tabard Inn to Canterb'ry Cathedral, Poet pilgrims competing for free picks, Chaucer Tales, track by track, it's the remix From below-the-belt base to the topnotch; I won't stop all the clocks with a stopwatch when the tales overrun, run offensive, or run clean out of steam, they're authentic and we're keeping it real, reminisce this: Chaucer Tales were an unfinished business. In Telling Tales award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-Century remix of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales retelling all of the stories, from the Miller's Tale to the Wife of Bath's in her own critically acclaimed poetic style. Celebrating Chaucer's Middle-English masterwork for its performance element as well as its poetry and pilgrims, Agbabi's newest collection is utterly unique. Boisterous, funky, foul-mouthed, sublimely lyrical and bursting at the seams, Telling Tales takes one of Britain's most significant works of literature and gives it thrilling new life. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: 源氏物語 紫式部, 2007-06 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Canterbury Tales John O'Connor, 2001 Dramascripts is an outstanding series of playscripts that are ideal for mixed class reading and performance. This extensive series of scripts encourages students to explore language and a variety of dramatic genres including myths and legends, classic Shakespeare, adventure, thriller, romance and more. Each edition provides guidance and activities alongside the text. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Guilds in the Middle Ages Georges Renard, 2018-01-19 The origin of guilds has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, and two opposing theories have been advanced. According to the first theory they were the persistence of earlier institutions; but what were these institutions? Some say that, more particularly in the south of France, they were of Roman and Byzantine origin, and were derived from those collegia of the poorer classes (tenuiorum) which, in the last centuries of the Empire, chiefly concerned themselves with the provision of funerals; or, again, from the scholae, official and compulsory groups, which, keeping the name of the hall in which their councils assembled, prolonged their existence till about the year 1000. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: My Place Sally Morgan, 2010-04-01 My Place begins with Sally Morgan tracing the experiences of her own life, growing up in suburban Perth in the fifties and sixties. Through the memories and images of her childhood and adolescence, vague hints and echoes begin to emerge, hidden knowledge is uncovered, and a fascinating story unfolds - a mystery of identity, complete with clues and suggested solutions. Sally Morgan's My Place is a deeply moving account of a search for truth, into which a whole family is gradually drawn; finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer, 182? |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Personal History of David Copperfield Charles Dickens, 1868 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Patient Grissil Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, William Haughton, 1841 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Pilgrim Chaucer Dolores L. Cullen, 1999 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales Robert M. Correale, Mary Hamel, 2002 This edition ... contains the sources and major analogues of Chaucer's works (some re-edited from manuscripts closer to his own copies) together with discoveries from the past half-century, some of which have not previously appeared together in print. Special features in this new enterprise include a fresh interpretation of Chaucer's sources for the frame of the work, and modern English translations of all non-English texts; chapters on the individual tales contain an updated survey of the present state of scholarship on their source material.--BOOKJACKET. |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, 1892 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Lost Tools of Writing Level One CiRCE Institute, 2015-01-01 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Nun's Priest's Tale, the Shipman's Tale and the Prioress's Prologue and Tale Geoffrey Chaucer, 1995-05-01 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: The Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan, Edward Ardizzone, 1953 |
| the canterbury tales characterization chart: Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, 1902 |
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