第三部分 乔叟时期

plete the following statements with a proper word or a phrase according to the textbook.1.Geoffrey Chaucer,the “_______”and one of the greatest narrative poets of England,was born in London or about the year 1340eatly c.2.Chaucer died on the 25th of October,1400,and was buried in_____.3.The people’s uprising of 1388 raised the question as to the abolition of ______.4.Boccaccio, Chaucer composes a long narrative poem______,based upon Boccaccio’s poem ______.5.Chaucer greatly contribute to the founding of the English literary language, the basis of which was formed by the ______dialect, so profusely used by the poet.6.Chaucer’s masterpiece is ______,one of the most famous works in all literature.7.The Prologue is a splendid masterpiece of ______ portrayal, the first of its kind in the history of English literature.8.In his greatest work, created a strikingly brilliant and picturesque panorama of his _______ and his _______.9.His work is permeated with buoyant free-thinking, so characteristic of _______ whose immediate forerunner Chaucer thus becomes.10.________are anonymous narrative songs that have been preserved by oral transmission.11.Bishop＿＿(1729-1811) was among the first to take a literary interests in ballads.12.There are various kind of ballads: historical, ＿＿,fantastical, ＿＿, and humorous.13.In the numerous ＿＿the age-long struggle between the scots and the English is reflected.14.Robin Hood is a partly ＿＿and partly＿＿character.15.The first mention of Robin Hood in literature is in Langland’s＿＿.Define the literary terms listed below.1.Romance2.BalladFor the quotation listed below please give a brief analysis.When the sweet showers of April fall and shootDown through the drought of March to pierce the root,Bathing every vien in liquid powerFrom which there springs the engendering of the flower,When also Zephyrus with his sweet breathExhales an air in every grove and heathUpon the tender shoots, and the young sunHis half-course in the sign of the Ram has run,And the small fowls are making melodyThat sleep away the night with open eye(So nature picks them and their heart engages)The people long to go on pilgrimagesAnd palmers long to seek the stranger strands.IV.Give brief answers to the following questions.1.What does the General Prologue tell us?2.What does The Canterbury Tales reflet?3.Can you say something about social criticism in The Canterbury Tales?4.Summarize Chaucer’s literary career.ment on Chaucer’s position in literary history.6.What are the stylistic features of the Ballads?参考答案I1.father of English poetry2.Westminster Abbey3.Feudalism4.Italian Troilus and Cressie Filostrato5.London6.The Canterbury Tales7.Realistic8.Time country9.Renaissance10.Ballads11.Thomas Percy12.Legendary humorous13.border ballads14.Historical legendaryII1.RomanceIt is a literary genre popular in the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century),dealing,in verse or prose,with legendary,supernatural,or amorous subjects and characters.The name refers to Romance languages and originally denoted any lengthy composition in one of those ter the term was applied to tales specifically concerned with knights,chivalry,and courtly love.The romance and the epic are similar forms,but epics tend to be longer and less concerned with knights,chivalry,and courtly love.The romance and the epic are similar forms,but epics tend to be longer and less concerned with courtly love. Romances were written by court musicians, clerics, scribes, and aristocrats for the entertainment and moral edification of the nobility. Popular subjects for romances included the Macedonian King Alexander the Great, King Arthur of Britain and the knights of the Round Table, and the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne. Later prose and verse narratives, particularly those in the 19th-century romantic tradition, are also referred to as romances; set in distant or mythological places and times, like most romances they stress adventure and supermatural elements.2. BalladIt is a lyric poem generally of three eight-line stanzas with a concluding stanza of four lines called an envoy. With some variations, the lines of a ballad are iambic or anapestic tetrameter rhyming ababbcbC; the envoy, which forms a personaldedication to some person of importance or to a personification, rhymes bcbC. Th e last line (C) of the first stanza is repeated as a refrain throughout. Another pattern often employed consists of a ten-line stanza, in pentameters, rhyming ababbccdccD, with an envoy of five lines rhyming ccdcD. The ballad became popular in England in the later 14th century and was adopted by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote served notable examples, including the Complaint…to His Empty Purse.ⅢThe magnificent eighteen-line sentence that opens the General Prologue is a superb expression of a double view of the Canterbury pilgrimage. The first eleven lines are a chant of welcome to the Spring with its harmonious marriage between heaven and earth which mellows vegetations, pricks fouls and stirs the heart of man with a renewing power of nature. Thus, the pilgrimage is an event in the calendar of nature, an aspect of the general springtime surge of human energy which wakens man’s love of Venus (natural love). But Spring is also the season of Easter and is allegorically regarded as the time of the Redemption through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ with its connotation of religious rebirth which wakens man’s love of God (divine love). Therefore, the pilgrimage is also treated as an event in the calendar of divinity, an aspect of religious piety which draws pilgrims to holy places. The structure of this opening passage can be regarded as one from the whole Western tradition of the celebration of spring to a local event of English society, from natural forces in their general operation to a specific Christian manifestation. The transition from nature to divinity is emphasized by contrast between the physical vitality which conditions the pilgrimage and the spiritual sickness which occasions the pilgrimage, as well as by parallelism between the renewal power of nature and the restorative power of supermature (divinity). Thus, in this beginning passage, Chaucer sets the double motivations of the pilgrims in an ambiguous tone with remarkable economy of words and a telling factuality. It is a model of narrative compression, with an 18-line periodic sentence that composes of a subordinate clause (line1-11) of 79 words and a main clause (line12-18) of 49 words, expressing the essential idea of the whole work. And all this is achieved along with a diminuendo to the familiar, straightforward, low style of presentation.Ⅳ1. In the General Prologue which has usually been regarded as the most important part of the whole poem, the poem tells how, one day in April, he comes to the Tabard Inn in the southern suburb of London. By nightfall there arrive at the inn some nine and twenty pilgrims all ready to go to St. ThomasàBecket’s tomb at Canterbury, and the poet joins the company and converses with all of them. At the proposal of Harry Bailey, the host of the inn, all the pilgrims agree that they make their journey to and from Canterbury more interesting by telling stories to one another on the way. Each of them is to tell two stories on the outward trip and two more on the way back. Whoever tells the best tale is to be given a free supper, at the cost of all the rest, upon their guide and judge. According to this arrangement, there should be altogether a hundred and twenty stories in the collection, but actually only twenty-four tales are presented, among which two are left incomplete, being interrupted as it were in thecourse of narration, while two others obviously remain unfinished.2. “The Canterbury Tales” is not merely a collection of stories strung together by some loose thread, as was the general practice for some European writers of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance to assemble a rather large group of tales into a single work of some magnitude, but Chaucer creates in the “General Prologue” to the “Tales” a whole gallery of vivid characters from all walks of life and then assigns to each of them some appropriate tale capable of shedding light on the respective narrator’s distinctive personally, and then in the separate “prologues” to some of the tales and in the “links” linking up some of them the author makes further efforts to show the interplay between the characters as well as their respective traits and idiosyncrasics. Thus the total effect of the poem as a whole is a comprehensive picture of the social reality of the poet’s day, eapecially since the pilgrims portrayed include men and women of all different professions, the high and the low, the lay and the clerical, the learned and the ignorant, the roguish and the upright, all excepting the very highest (i.e., the king and top nobility) and the lowers (i.e., the very poor laboring folk) in Social rank at the time. As was natural in Chaucer’s day a great variety of types represented among those going on the pilgrimage to Canterbury are connected with the church in some way or other: from the monastic orders we have a rich monk and a friar, a prioress with her chaplain, a nun and three priests while the secular clergy in the group includes a person, a pardoner and a summoner, to be joined later by a canon and his yeoman devoted to alchemy. From the upper rung on the social ladder we have a knight and squire and a squire and a yeoman, a wealthy franklin, then a doctor, a lawyer and an Oxford scholar. Trade is represented by a merchant and a shipman. There are a number of burgesses; a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, a tapestry-maker, and their cook, as well as the Wife of Bath. Among the rural dwellers are a miller, a reeve, a manciple and a plowman.Another striking phenomenon concerning a number of the pilgrims is their common practice of acquiring money by improper means, often by downright cheating and trickery. Both the lawyer and the doctor make use of their professional knowledge to make money, the former from the legal deeds he handles and the latter out of astrology and the pestilence. The miller, the reeve and the manciple pile up their wealth by tricking and fooling their betters in social station. The miller knows well how to steal com; the reeve cunningly lends to his master what is the latter’s by right; the manciple can fool all the thirty learned gentlemen he serves.Yet another striking reflection of the social reality of the day is the growing feeling of self-importance shared by all the burgesses. The haberdasher, the carpenter, the weaver, the dyer and the tapestry-maker, are all well-to-do handicrafts men and well-clad, and rich and discreet enough to be aldermen and their wives like to be called madam and have precedence in church services and guild festivals. Even the wife of Bath who is somewhat deaf and gap-toothed likes to wear heavy and gaudy clothes and would get angry if some other woman in the parish tries to precede her while making an offering in church.3. Of particular interest to us are those tales that contain rather keen social criticism. The three tales by the three ugliest figures among the ecclesiasticalpilgrims-the pardoner, the summoner and the friar-together with the portraits of these pilgrims in the General Prologue, produce strong impression upon the readers of the religious profession to which the members of the depths of moral degradation to which the members of the three brunches of religious profession could sink. Not only does the pardoner’s tale of three rioters murdering one another for the possession of a pile of golden flaring reveal the consuming passion for money in the feudal-bourgeois society of Chaucer’s day, but the use of the very tale its narrator the pardoner to lead up to his comments on the prevalent sin of avarice and thence to the need of all the pilgrims present to buy pardons and the saint’s relics from him is a thorough-going expose of the most tricky and unsonpulous pardoners of the age and a penetrating satire on the gullible and superstitious crowd falling for the papal pardons “hot from Rome”and for all sorts of fake relics of the saints. The friar’s tale of a greedy summoner trying to extort money out of a poor widow and the summoner’s tale of a hypocritical and avaricious friar attempting to squeeze dry the sick, bedridden Thomas are companion pieces that not only serve as pungent lampoons on the impious, rapacious summoners and friars in medieval England, but the two tales, together with the terrific fend and mud-throwing between the summoner and the friar as two fellow pilgrims that appear in the “link” preceding and following the two tales, are obviously meant by Chaucer to indicate the sharp intramural conflict between two different branches of ecclesiastical professions.4. Chaucer’s literary career can be divided into three periods corresponding with those of his life. The first period refers to the period of French influence (1359 –1372). In this period he wrote in the manner of contemporary French poets. Among his original poems in his early period, the best known is “The Book of the Duchess”, an elegy written upon the death of the first wife of the poet’s patron John of Gaunt. “The Romance of the Rose” is a translation from a French poem “Roman de la Rose”.The second period refers to the period of Italian influence, especially of Dante an Boccaccio (1372 –1386). In this period, he chiefly used the “heroic”stanza of seven lines. His main works in this period are three longer poems, The House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women.The third period refers to the period of his maturity (1386 –1400). In this period, he is no longer the interpreter of other poets. He has his own choice of subject and diction, his own grasp of plots and characters. His masterpiece “The Canterbury Tales” was produced in this period. He mainly used the “heroic couplet”.5. Chaucer is also a great master of the English language. It has generally been conceded by literary historians that in his hand the London dialect of his day was crystallized into an effective weapon for satire and humour and for poetry. In “The Canterbury Tales”Chaucer’s language becomes a most supple means o f communication. With it he not only could at one moment be quite senous and at another be light-hearted and full of fun but he was able to produce at will truly poetic passages or lapse into a very intimate conversational style to suit an easy-going narrator of familiar stories . And the heroic couplet was employed in the poem with true ease and chann for the first time in the history of English literature .As the main form of medieval folk literature , the popular ballad has an oralcurrency which makes it easier to remember and easier to memorize . Therefore , all the stylistic features of the popular ballad have derived from their oral nature . The first feature is its simple language ；the simplicity is reflected both in the verse form and the colloquial expressions . So far as the verse form is concerned , ballads are composed either in couples (usually heroic) or , more commonly , in quatrains which is known as the ballad stanzn , rhyming abab, with the first and the third lines carrying 4 accented syllables and the second and fourth carrying 3. There is great variation in the number of unstressed syllables；and the rhyme is often approximate with assonance and consonance frequently appearing .By making use of simple plain language or dialect of the common people with colloquial , vivid and , sometimes , idiomatic expressions in its narration as well as in its dialogues, the ballad leaves a strong dramatic effect to the reader.The second feature is that the priority of the ballad is the story which deals only with the culminating incident or climax of a plot. Felicitous details are the exception, not the rule, in balladry. It should be admitted that the author of the ballads, if there was one, was really a good story-teller with a vivid presentation around the central plot. Most of the ballads have a romantic or tragic dimension, with a magic incident, often a murder or an accidental death, as their subject. Like classical tragedy, the ballads have an inevitability which reflects the folk belief that fate shapes human life so that people are lured into the fatally attractive traps.It is a common pattern of romantic tragic balladry that if one lover dies the other must follow suit .So usually the hero would die of his wound and heroine of her sorrow . A large number of ballad stories tend to be autonomous , i.e. They contain in themselves the information they explore . They do not seek historical , or biblical , accuracy . For instance , the ballad '' Judas '' tells a different story form the Bible . Here Judas ,having been given the thirty pieces of silver to buy food in Jerusalem , is lulled to sleep by his sister . He wakes to find the silver gone and when Pilate approaches him he considers selling his Lord in order to recover the lost silver . This makes Judas more a foolish man than a theological bogeyman . But some ballads may go back to actual historical incidents . For instance ''Sir Patrick Spens '' might be based on a historical incident of the end of the 13th century . The Robin Hood ballads are quasi-historical , which make the old folklore figure of Robin Hood a symbol of rebellion against the rich and of help for the poor .Ballads also tell their stories in a highly characteristic way; they are intensely dramatic, involving an explosive situation, highly volatile characters and a short time-span. Like tragedies, ballads would often use a high proportion of dialogue to stage direction, usually beginning in the fifth act and presenting the stories in a series of rapid flashes which may be compared with the techniques of the cinema. They are impersonal in their attitude, and there is little comment on moralizing. They usually have a dominant mood or tone, either tragic like “Sir Patrick Spens”, which tells a story of trea chery, or comic like “Get up and Bar the Door” which presents a funny scene of the domestic life. Furthermore, to strengthen the dramatic effect of the narration, ballads also make full use of hyperbole; actions and events are much exaggerated .For instanc e, in the ballad “Earl Brand”, Earl Douglas is preparing todefend his conquest by fighting single-handedly against eight. This hyperbolic style partly comes from a desire to astonish, for the poor folk would be delighted to hear of the larger-than-life exploits of ballad people. Music has an important formative influence on the ballad, too. The most popular ballads acquired a large number of musical variants. For instance, Mr. Bronson has collected 68 different tunes for “The Maid Freed from the Gallows”. Another impressive feature of the ballad is the using of refrains and other kinds of repetitions. Poetically the refrains and decorative; musically they are absolutely essential. Through refrains and repetitions, the narration is lent a quality of liturgy, or of incantation. Magic or supernatural force, the perpetual presence of impossibility is a rich narrative source of balladry. In the ballad world, things happen suddenly and without warning; the fatal powers of destruction can be overcome by the help of magic or supernatural force.。