Artistic Features of the Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer

1.1. Elements of novelistic narrative in the "Canterbury Tales"

World famous J. Chaucer brought his "Canterbury Tales". Chaucer got the idea for stories from reading Boccaccio's Decameron.

Modern poetry begins with Jerry Chaucer (1340-1400), diplomat, soldier, scholar. He was a bourgeois who knew the court, had an inquisitive eye, read a lot and traveled through France and Italy to study the classical works in Latin. He wrote because he was aware of his genius, but his readership was small: the courtiers, but part of the workers and merchants. He served in London Customs. This post gave him the opportunity to get acquainted with the business life of the capital in many ways, to see with his own eyes those social types that will appear in his main book, Canterbury Tales.

The Canterbury Tales came out from his pen in 1387. They grew up on the basis of a narrative tradition, the origins of which are lost in ancient times, which declared itself in the literature of the XIII-XIV centuries. in Italian short stories, cycles of satirical tales, "Roman Acts" and other collections of instructive stories. In the XIV century. plots, selected from different authors and in different sources, are already combined in a deeply individual design. The chosen form - the stories of traveling pilgrims - makes it possible to present a vivid picture of the Middle Ages. Chaucer's view of the world includes Christian miracles, which are narrated in The Abbess's Tale and The Lawyer's Tale, and the Breton le fantasy, which appears in The Weaver's Tale of Bath, and the idea of ​​Christian forbearance in Ras - the tale of an Oxford student. All these representations were organic for medieval consciousness. Chaucer does not question their value, as evidenced by the inclusion of such motifs in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer creates images-role. They are created on the basis of the professional class characteristics and the inconsistency of the heroes with it. Typification is achieved by duplication, multiplication of similar images. Absolon from The Miller's Tale, for example, appears in the amp-loa of a minister of religion - a lover. He is a church clerk, a semi-spiritual person, but his thoughts are turned to God, but to pretty parishioners. The prevalence of such an image in literature is evidenced, in addition to numerous French fablios, by one of the folk ballads included in the collection Secular Lyrics of the XlVth and XVth centuries. The behavior of the hero of this short poem is very similar to the actions of Absolon. The repetition of the image makes it typical.

All literary scholars who have studied the problem of the genres of The Canterbury Tales agree that one of the main literary genres of this work is the short story.

“The novella (Italian novella, letters - news), - we read in the literary encyclopedic dictionary, - is a small prose genre, comparable in volume to the story, but differing from it in a sharp centripetal plot, often paradoxical, lack of descriptiveness and compositional rigor . By poeticizing the incident, the short story reveals to the utmost the core of the plot - the center, the ups and downs, reduces the material of life into the focus of one event.

Unlike the story - the genre new literature at the turn of the 18th - 19th centuries, which highlights the figurative and verbal texture of the narrative and gravitates toward detailed characteristics, the short story is the art of the plot in its purest form, which developed in ancient times in close connection with ritual magic and myths, addressed primarily to the active, and not the contemplative side of human existence. The novelistic plot, built on sharp anti-theses and metamorphoses, on the sudden transformation of one situation into its direct opposite, is common in many folklore genres (fairy tale, fable, medieval anecdote, fablio, schwank).

“The literary short story arises during the Renaissance in Italy (the brightest example is the Decameron by G. Boccaccio), then in England, France, Spain (J. Chaucer, Margarita of Navarre, M. Cervantes). In the form of a comic and instructive short story, the formation of Renaissance realism takes place, revealing the spontaneously free self-determination of a person in a world fraught with vicissitudes. Subsequently, the short story in its evolution starts from related genres (story, short story, etc.), depicting extraordinary, sometimes paradoxical and supernatural incidents, breaks in the chain of socio-historical and psychological determinism.

Chaucer as a poet was influenced by French and Italian literature even before the creation of The Canterbury Tales. In the work of Chaucer, as is known, some pre-Renaissance features already appear, and it is customary to attribute him to the Proto-Renaissance. The influence of the creator of the classic Renaissance novel Giovanni Boccaccio on Chaucer is debatable. Only his acquaintance with the early works of Boccaccio and the use as sources of the Boccaccievs "Filocolo" (in the story of Franklin), "History of Famous Men and Women" (in the story of a monk), "Theses" (in the story of a knight) and only one of short stories of the Decameron, namely the story of the faithful wife Griselda, according to the Latin translation of Petrarch (in the student's story). True, some echo with the motives and plots developed by Boccaccio in the Decameron can also be found in the stories of the skipper, the merchant and Franklin. Of course, this roll call can be explained by an appeal to the general tradition of short stories. Among other sources of the Canterbury Tales are the Golden Legend by Yakov Voraginsky, fables (in particular, by Mary of France) and the Romance of the Fox, the Romance of the Rose, the chivalrous novels of the Arthurian cycle, French fablio, and other works. medieval, partly ancient literature(for example, Ovid). Meletinsky also says that: “Legendary sources and motifs are found in the stories of the second nun (taken from the Golden Legend, the life of St. Cecilia), a lawyer (the story of the vicissitudes and sufferings of the virtuous Christian Constanta dating back to the Anglo-Norman chronicle Nicola Trive - the daughter of the Roman emperor) and a doctor (ascending to Titus Livius and the "Roman of the Rose" story of the chaste Virginia - the victim of lust and villainy of Judge Claudius). In the second of these stories, legendary motifs are intertwined with fabulous ones, partly in the spirit of the Greek novel, and in the third, with the legend of Roman "valor". A touch of legend and a fairy-tale basis are felt in the student's story about Griselda, although the plot is taken from Boccaccio.

Representatives of various strata of society went on a pilgrimage. According to the social status of the pilgrims can be divided into certain groups:

High society (Knight, Squire, church ministers);

Scientists (Doctor, Lawyer);

Landowners (Franklin);

Owners (Melnik, Majordom);

Merchant class (Skipper, Merchant);

Artisans (Dyer, Carpenter, Weaver, and so on);

Lower class (Plowman).

In The General Prologue, Geoffrey Chaucer introduces the reader to practically every pilgrim (simply by mentioning his presence, or by giving details of his character). The "General Prologue" in some way forms the reader's expectations - the expectation of the main mood and theme of the story, the subsequent behavior of the pilgrim. It is from the "General Prologue" that the reader gets an idea of ​​what stories will be told, as well as the essence, the inner world of each pilgrim. The behavior of the characters presented by Chaucer reveals the essence of their personalities, their habits, personal lives, moods, good and bad sides. The character of this or that character is presented in the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" and is revealed further in the story itself, prefaces and afterwords to the stories. “Based on Chaucer's attitude to each character, the pilgrims participating in the journey can be organized into certain groups:

Ideal images (Knight, Squire, Student, Plowman, Priest);

"Neutral" images, descriptions of which are not presented in the "Prologue" - Chaucer only mentions their presence (clerics from the environment of the Abbess);

Images with some negative character traits (Skipper, Economy);

Inveterate sinners (Carmelite, Pardoner, Bailiff of the church court - they are all church employees) ".

Chaucer finds an individual approach to each character, presenting him in the General Prologue.

“In the poetic Canterbury Tales, the compositional frame was national - the setting of the scene: a tavern by the road leading to Canterbury, a crowd of pilgrims, in which, in essence, the entire English society is represented - from feudal lords to a cheerful crowd of artisans and peasants. In total, 29 people are recruited into the company of pilgrims. Almost each of them is a living and rather complex image of a person of his time; Chaucer masterfully describes in excellent verse the habits and clothes, the manner of carrying himself, the speech characteristics of the characters.

As the characters are different, so are Chaucer's artistic means. He speaks of a pious and brave knight with friendly irony, because the knight looks too anachronistic with his courtesy in a rude, noisy crowd of the common people. About the son of a knight, a boy full of enthusiasm, the author speaks with tenderness; about the thieving majordomo, miser and deceiver - with disgust; with mockery - about the brave merchants and artisans; with respect - about a peasant and a righteous priest, about an Oxford student in love with books. Chaucer speaks of the peasant uprising with condemnation, almost even with horror.

The brilliant genre of literary portraiture is perhaps Chaucer's main creation. Here, as an example, is a portrait of a weaver from Bath.

And the Bat weaver chatted with him, Seated famously on the pacer; But in the temple Before her squeeze one of the ladies, - In a moment she forgot, in furious pride - About complacency and goodness. Pretty and ruddy face. She was an enviable wife. And she survived five husbands, Not counting the crowd of girl friends.

What has changed in six and a half centuries? Is that the horse gave way to a limousine.

But soft humor gives way to harsh satire when the author describes the seller of indulgences he hates.

His eyes shone like those of a hare. There was no vegetation on the body, And the cheeks were smooth - yellow, like soap. It seemed he was a gelding or a mare, And though there seemed to be nothing to brag about, He himself bleated like a sheep about it...

As the work progresses, the pilgrims tell various stories. Knight - an old courtly plot in the spirit of a knightly novel; carpenter - a funny and obscene story in the spirit of modest urban folklore, etc. In each story, the interests and sympathies of a particular pilgrim are revealed, which achieves the individualization of the character, the task of depicting him from the inside is solved.

Chaucer is called the "father of realism". The reason for this is his art of a literary portrait, which, it turns out, appeared in Europe earlier than a pictorial portrait. Indeed, when reading The Canterbury Tales, one can safely speak of realism as a creative method that implies not only a truthful generalized image of a person, typifying a certain social phenomenon, but also a reflection of the changes taking place in society and a person.

So, the English society in Chaucer's portrait gallery is a society in motion, in development, a society in transition, where the feudal order is strong, but outdated, where the new man of the developing city is revealed. It is clear from the Canterbury Tales that the future does not belong to the preachers of the Christian ideal, but to business people, full of strength and passions, although they are less respectable and virtuous than the same peasant and country priest.

The Canterbury Tales laid the foundation for a new English poetry, based on the entire experience of advanced European poetry and national song traditions.

Based on the analysis of this work, we came to the conclusion that the genre of the Canterbury Tales was strongly influenced by the genre of the short story. This is manifested in the features of the plot, the construction of images, the speech characteristics of the characters, humor and edification.

The Canterbury Tales by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340? -1400) is one of the first literary monuments in a single common English language. The book clearly showed the remarkable qualities of Chaucer's humanism: optimistic life-affirmation, interest in a particular person, a sense of social justice, nationality and democracy. The Canterbury Tales is a framed collection of short stories. Based on the pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury, Chaucer painted wide canvas English reality of that era.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer - "the father of English poetry" - lived in the XIV century, when his homeland was very far from the Renaissance, which in England was long in coming for almost two more centuries. Until Spencer and Marlowe, there was nothing in English poetry not only equal, but simply commensurate with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Reflecting its age, this book, for a number of reasons, still does not fit into the framework of its time. It can be said that Chaucer, living in the middle of the century, anticipated the realism of the English Renaissance, and wrote his Canterbury Tales for all ages.

Until the 14th century, England lagged far behind other European countries, especially Italy. Located on the outskirts, far from the main Mediterranean routes, it was at that time a poor country of hunters, shepherds and tillers, a country that had not yet accumulated future material wealth and cultural traditions, a country without developed crafts and guild crafts, without large urban centers. Chaucer's London had no more than forty thousand inhabitants, and the second largest city, York, less than twenty thousand, while in Paris of that time, according to very conservative estimates, lived over eighty thousand. The 14th century was a period of rapid and difficult growth for England, which had a painful effect on the people of that time. They, including Chaucer, had a chance to become contemporaries and witnesses of great social upheavals, of which the most formidable were: the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), the Black Death - the plague (1348 and following years) and the peasant uprising of 1381 of the year. England, like all of Europe, was already on the verge of a great turning point, which cleared the way for the new and made possible great social shifts that hastened the collapse of the feudal system and hastened the beginning of the English Renaissance. The 14th century was the time of unity of the English nation, the formation of a single common English language and the emergence of original English literature.<...>

We know very little about the life of Geoffrey Chaucer, and this information is for the most part unimportant. Chaucer was born around 1340 to a wealthy London vintner. The writer's father, John Chaucer, appointed his son to the court for the modest position of a page. As a page, and then as a squire, Geoffrey twice participated in campaigns in France, and in his first campaign, in 1359, he was not lucky: he was captured by the French, but was ransomed by the king. Upon his return to court, he was entrusted with the duty to entertain the wife of Edward III with his stories. To the Queen, and later to the first wife of Richard II - Anna of Bohemia - Chaucer first read or retold other people's works, translated The Romance of the Rose, and then began to compose his own "poems in case." Around 1359, he wrote the poem "On the Death of the Duchess Blanche", the wife of his patron and patron John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, then the poem "Bird Parliament" (circa 1382) - about the courtship of Richard II to Anna of Bohemia. All this did not go beyond ordinary courtly poetry, but already the following works of Chaucer revealed an uncommon erudition for a self-taught person and a great poetic talent. Chaucer's library contained sixty books, a considerable figure for the fourteenth century, when the price of one book was sometimes equal to the cost of building an entire library. Among his favorites were the French poets of his time, the early poems of Boccaccio, Virgil, Statius, Lucan, and especially Ovid, Dante, and the philosopher Boethius. As a "knowledgeable and reliable" person, in the rank of Esquire, he repeatedly carried out responsible and secret diplomatic missions of the king in France and Italy in the 70s. Chaucer's two visits to Italy left a particularly significant mark: in 1373 and 1378. These travels broadened his horizons. In addition to the direct influence that the country of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio undoubtedly had on Chaucer, he met first-hand with the best works these authors. Echoes of acquaintance with " Divine Comedy» Dante is found many times in Chaucer, starting with the Parliament of the Birds and the poem The Temple of Glory (1384), up to a number of places in the Canterbury Tales. Boccaccio's "Glorious Women" served as a prototype for his "Legend of Good Wives" (mid-80s). Boccaccio's Tezeida was compressed by Chaucer into a knight's story of Palamon and Arcites, and Petrarch's translation into Latin of Boccaccio's Griselda, transcribed into Chaucer's Stanzas, became Chaucer's Oxford student's story. From all his teachers Chaucer looked for and took what he could already consider his own. In this regard, the poem "Troilus and Chryseis" (late 70s - early 80s) is especially indicative. Both in content and in form, this is such an independent and subtle development of Boccaccio's Filostrato that it far surpasses its model. Troilus and Chryseis, the only complete of Chaucer's major works, can rightly be called a psychological novel in verse. In Chaucer's time, the poor poet lived on handouts from patrons and was entirely dependent on his patrons. The king redeemed Chaucer from captivity by paying sixteen livres, but "every thing has its price," and fifty and seventy livres were paid for the two royal horses redeemed at the same time. He was sent on responsible assignments, but even having succeeded in them, he remained in the shadows. In 1374, as a great royal favor, Chaucer received for his service the post of customs overseer of the port of London for wool, leather and furs. It was far from a sinecure: the position was granted to Chaucer with a strict order "to write all accounts and reports with his own hand and to be inseparably on the spot", and only in 1382 did Chaucer receive the right to delegate his duties to a deputy, and before that he spent all day in London port, recording coolies of wool, bales of leather and furs, inspecting goods, collecting duties and fines, and meeting with all kinds of people. In the evening he would go to the quarters allotted to him in the tower above the city gates of Aldgate, and, straightening his back from working on the account book, until dawn he would work his eyes over his other favorite books. In the poem "Temple of Glory" the eagle of Jupiter so reproached Chaucer for being heavy on his feet and not interested in anything but books:

As soon as, summing up, You finish your day's work, Not entertainment calls You then and not peace, - No, returning to your home, Deaf to everything, you sit down Read half-blindly Another book by candlelight; And lonely, like a monk, You live, subduing the ardor of passions, Having fun and avoiding people, Although you are always happy with the sun And you are not rich in abstinence.

Fate did not indulge Chaucer. Today in mercy, tomorrow in disgrace, at times in abundance, and sometimes in poverty. From the rank of royal ambassador, he fell into the customs guards, and then from a wealthy official he became bankrupt, who was saved from a debt prison only by the intercession and new favors of the king. The ups and downs of Chaucer were all the more abrupt and unexpected because, by his very position, Chaucer was involved in court intrigues. Already under Edward III, after the death of the heir - the "Black Prince", the second son of the king, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, took power. However, after the death of Edward III, he had to wage a continuous struggle with his brother the Duke of Gloucester for influence on the infant king Richard II. Chaucer was associated with John of Gaunt for many years, both through his literary debut, and through Wycliffe, and joint participation in French campaigns, and the fact that Chaucer's wife was the maid of honor of the second Duchess of Lancaster, and the fact that Chaucer's sister-in-law became Gaunt's third wife. Chaucer remained loyal to his patrons Hard time. He soon paid the price for it. After the victory of the supporters of Gloucester, he was removed from all positions and deprived of any means of subsistence. Only in 1389, when the matured Richard II finally took power into his own hands, did Chaucer receive some compensation and was granted by the king the position of caretaker of the royal estates and keeper of the pantries and sheds with worthless "royal junk". Then in 1391, after another deposition, Chaucer could not pay his debts and was declared bankrupt. He was arranged as a forester, made an overseer of "walls, ramparts, ditches, sewers, ponds, roads and bridges" along the Thames - in a word, he lived the last years of his life by random handouts and assignments. Chaucer loved and appreciated good book. During his reclusive years in Aldgate Tower, he read a lot, and later, in lonely old age, the book replaced his family and few friends. For many years his companion was Boethius' treatise On the Consolation of Philosophy, which he not only read, but also translated. However, books could not obscure life from Chaucer. There were days when he cheated on books.

Although in science I am very weak. But there is no force that could tear me away from a new book - I love reading most of all. But May will come, the trees will bloom, I will hear the nightingales sing - Farewell, books! There is a stronger love, I'll try to tell you about it.

("Legend of the Good Wives")

Chaucer had been meaning to tell this for a long time. Concluding his "little tragedy" (of eight thousand lines) about Troilus and Chryseis, Chaucer wrote:

I part with my little tragedy Without regret, not in the least Not deceived by what I see in it. Go, little book, go! And someday you will meet the Poet that Dantom was once crowned, Homer, Ovid, Statius or Lucan - Do not dare to compete, be modest, Kiss the ashes at these feet with humility, Be true to the memory of teachers, Repeat the lesson you have learned by heart. There is only one hope glimmering in me, That, perhaps - even hunched and frail, - In a comedy I will try my strength.

In essence, such a "comedy", such a bright story about love for the earthly, for life, was the Canterbury Tales, the main tone of which is extremely cheerful and optimistic, and to which nothing earthly is alien. Their best characterization is one stanza from Chaucer's poem "Parlement of Birds". This is an inscription on the gate, but not at the entrance to the prison, at the threshold of which all hope must be abandoned. This is not Dante's inscription over the gates of hell. Chaucer's Gate leads to a flowering garden - this is the gate of life, and the inscription reads as follows:

Through me you will penetrate into a wonderful garden, Giving healing to the wounds of the heart; Through me you will come to the key of delights, Where young May blooms, not knowing corruption, And where adventures are full of fun. My reader, forget all your worries And joyfully embark on this path.

(Translated by O. Rumer.)

The main core of The Canterbury Tales was created by Chaucer in the late 80s, quickly, over several years. And then, by the mid-1990s, work on the book was interrupted, and all of Chaucer's work began to fade. More and more sparingly, he added separate strokes to his huge canvas. In the late story of the canon's servant, in the priest's sermon, traces of creative fatigue are felt. Difficult and lonely was the last decade of Chaucer's life, which fell on the last decade of his century. Chaucer's poems "The Great Reeling" and "The Old Age" show how soberly and desolately he assessed the general situation. He, apparently, has moved away from the court and is alienated from his former friends and patrons. However, soft and not prone to extremes, he did not follow his other friends to the end - reformers, followers of the famous English theologian - John Wycliffe, Bible translator and teacher of "poor priests", from whose midst came the "rebellious priest" John Ball, ideologue of the peasant uprising of 1381. It was they, the associates of John Ball, who were beheaded along with the rebels of 1381. It was them, as heretics, who were now sent to the stake by the enlightened Bishop Thomas Arundel. The year 1381 saw the suppression of the economic demands of the rebels and the heads of Wat Tyler and John Ball on stakes. The year 1401 will see the suppression of freedom of thought and conscience and the Lollard heretics at the stake. Chaucer was now equally far from those who cut off heads, and from those whose heads flew from their shoulders. Self-restraint was the tragedy of his old age. Creative loneliness has become their woeful lot. Around Chaucer there was no that literary and general cultural environment that surrounded Boccaccio and Petrarch, which was found in France of the times of Marguerite of Navarre and Clement Marot, and Rabelais, - an environment that singled out Shakespeare from its ranks, "the first among equals", - a brilliant Elizabethan in galaxy of talented Elizabethans. Disappointing was the state in which Chaucer left English literature. It was difficult for Chaucer in everyday life as well. Apparently, during these years he lived alone, his financial situation was unenviable, otherwise the “Complaint to an empty purse” would not have developed under his pen. Shortly before his death, in 1399, fortune last time smiled at him. The throne was seized by the son of his former patron Lancaster - Henry Bolinbroke. Henry IV remembered Chaucer and took care of him. But life was already over. In October 1400, Chaucer died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Just in the most difficult years for him, Chaucer creates his brightest, most cheerful book. True, almost everything that Chaucer wrote before is also warmed by humor, but in The Canterbury Tales laughter is the main, all-conquering force. Here Chaucer more readily appeals to the common sense of the people, the folk fable, the folk mockery of the fat-bellies. At the same time, Chaucer did not abandon what his great teachers taught him, and all together made The Canterbury Tales his main contribution to world literature. The idea of ​​the book is very simple. Having gathered those who made up "his" England in pilgrimage from all parts of the country, and having briefly outlined their general appearance in the prologue, Chaucer further leaves each of them to act and tell in his own way. He himself, as the author, slowly tells how they agreed to go to Canterbury, to the relics of Thomas Becket, and together while away the boredom of the road, telling each other all sorts of entertaining stories; how they carried out their plan; how on the road they got to know each other better, sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they joked; how they argued about the merits and demerits of stories, revealing in the process all their ins and outs. It is difficult to determine the genre of this book. If we consider separately the stories of which it is composed, then it may seem like an encyclopedia of the literary genres of the Middle Ages. However, the essence and foundation of the book is its realism. It includes portraits of people, their assessment, their views on art, their behavior - in a word, a living picture of life. Unlike other collections of short stories, even the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales is far from mechanically held together. Chaucer's idea was not completed by him, but from what he managed to do, it is clear that the book has a movement of the theme and an internal struggle, as a result of which new goals are outlined and clarified, perhaps not completely clear even to Chaucer himself. However, it is clear to everyone that everything in this book is about man and for man; mainly about the man of his time, but to create a new man. Therefore, she survived her life. The book consists of a general prologue, over two dozen short stories, and an equal number of connecting interludes. The prologue occupies a little more than eight hundred lines, but in it, as in an overture, all the main motifs of the book are outlined, and all of its seventeen-odd thousand verses serve to reveal and develop the characteristic images outlined in the prologue. The connecting part, the so-called framing novella, shows the pilgrims in motion and in action. In their bickering about who, when and what to tell, in their tragicomic clashes and quarrels, internal development, unfortunately not given permission in Chaucer's unfinished book. It is here, in the connecting part, that the dramatic element is concentrated. So, for example, the figure of the innkeeper Harry Bailey, the chief judge of this competition of storytellers, is, as it were, a stage role. It is all made up of replicas scattered throughout the book. Introductions to individual stories often grow into monologues, in which the autocharacteristics of the narrator are given. Such are the prologues of the pardoner, the weaver of Bath, the servant of the canon and, in part, the miller, the majordomo, and the merchant. The stories of the book are very heterogeneous, and for convenience of review they can be grouped in different sections. A very large group in terms of volume is “ancient stories, noble tales, holy traditions, a precious treasure.” These are Chaucer's borrowed or imitative stories of a lawyer, a monk, a doctor, a student, a squire, abbess, a second nun. Chaucer's story about Sir Topas, the stories of a knight, a chaplain, a weaver are parodic and pointed, like a weapon in the struggle against the past. Many figures of the general prologue are satirically given, especially the servant of the feudal church and the miller; satirical are the prologues of the pardoner and the bailiff, the stories of the canon's servant, the Carmelite and the bailiff. The parable of the three rake in the story of the seller of indulgences, the story of the steward, has the character of moralizing. Often these edifications also take on a parodic and satirical tone in the teachings of the bailiff, Carmelite, in the tragedies of the monk, or in the story of Melibea. The four stories of the so-called marriage group are, as it were, a debate in which old views on unequal marriage. This dispute is opened by the weaver of Bata, preaching in her prologue the complete subordination of the husband to his wife and illustrating this with her story. The stories of the student about Griselda and the merchant about Januarius and the beautiful May approach the question from a different angle, while in Franklin's story the same question is resolved in a new way, on the basis of mutual respect and trust of the spouses. This dispute had been brewing before - already in the miller's story about the old husband's young wife, in the skipper's story about a betrayed trust, in Harry Bailey's lamentations. And it does not subside until the very end of the book, flaring up in the steward's story as a theme of remorse for hasty punishment for infidelity. Most original, freer in interpretation, brighter and closest to folk life is the main group of independent stories by Chaucer. Although in some ways the stories of the miller, the butler, the skipper, the carmelite, the bailiff are indebted to the walking stories of the fablio, their main value lies in the fact that these are realistic short stories masterfully developed by Chaucer. Chaucer learned the art of storytelling from the French trouvères. But fablio, these funny, cruel and sometimes cynical anecdotes, become unrecognizable under his pen. Fablio Chaucer is no longer an anecdote, but a short story of characters. Chaucer humanizes the cruel French anecdote and populates the fablio with living people, in whom, for all their rudeness, he is happy to note everything human. Chaucer's democratic humanism is not Gelerter's cabinet humanism of an aristocrat of science, but a simple and cordial love for a person and for the best manifestations of the human soul, which are able to ennoble the most unattractive phenomena of life. Many lofty and true thoughts about " natural man”, about nobility not inherited, but taken from the battle, about a new sense of human dignity, Chaucer cites in the story of the Bath weaver, and in the story of Franklin, and in the priest’s sermon, and in the special ballad “Nobility”, but these thoughts have repeatedly arisen before and after Chaucer. In art, such declarations have not yet found an artistic embodiment, "the word without deed is dead." But the living, creative work of Chaucer created that by which English literature is alive to this day, that in which its originality was especially pronounced. Chaucer's knowledge of life is not the indifferent observation of a researcher. His love for man is neither sentimental nor tearful. His laugh is not soulless mockery. And from the combination of such knowledge of life, such love for man, and such laughter, Chaucer develops a sympathetic, all-understanding smile. “Understand everything - forgive everything,” says the saying. In this sense, Chaucer is indeed very forgiving. In this sense, the prologue of the Bath weaver, like the tragedy of an aging, life-loving woman, and the stories of the miller and the merchant about the young wife of an old husband are humanistic, although Chaucer in these stories does not close his eyes to the harsh truth of life. Putting into the mouth of an Oxford student a very suitable story about the uncomplaining passion-bearer Griselda, Chaucer questions the act of a mother who sacrifices children for the sake of marital obedience. He does this already on his own behalf in a special afterword, while recalling the Bat weaver:

Griselda died, and with her into the darkness of the grave descended her humility. I warn loudly all husbands: Do not test your wives' patience. No one will find a second Griselda In his wife - there is no doubt about it.

All medieval ideas about marriage, humility, divine retribution, rights, duties and dignity of a person - everything is turned inside out and thoroughly shaken up. The confession of a Batian weaver is written in the tones of a rough farce, and at the same time, it is essentially tragic, such a confession could not have been created by any medieval author. Fablio situations are often perilous and require "mean language," but in Chaucer all this is bathed in the naive and fresh coarseness of the popular mores of his age. “At that time it was the custom in Albion to call all things by name,” Voltaire said, and for those who are still jarred, Chaucer bluntly declares: “There is a whole load of goodness here; // But don't take those jokes seriously." In another place, he appeals to his reader with an appeal: "Keep the grain, and throw away the husk." The husk of Chaucer's fablios - some of their anecdotal and rudeness - is a tribute to the genre and a tribute to the age. A healthy grain is the new thing that we find in them: a well-aimed and vigorous folk language; common sense balanced by sober, mocking criticism; bright, lively, assertive presentation; a salty joke that came to the place; sincerity and freshness; an all-justifying sympathetic smile and a victorious laugh. The easily falling husk cannot hide the mischievous, cheerful enthusiasm and good-natured mockery of what is worthy of ridicule. And all this serves Chaucer as a means of depicting the earthly man of his time, who has already breathed in the first breaths of the approaching Renaissance, but who is not yet always able to realize and consolidate his characteristic “cheerful free-thinking” in abstract terms and concepts. Everything in Chaucer is given in the contradiction of contrast. The rudeness and dirt of life emphasize the emerging love, withering - craving for life, life's ugliness - the beauty of youth. All this happens on the very edge of the ridiculous. The laughter does not yet have time to subside, the tears do not have time to well up, thus evoking that mixed and good feeling, which was later defined in England as humor.

The compositional mastery of Chaucer is manifested primarily in his ability to connect, as it were, incompatible. With magnificent ease, he depicts his diverse companions, and gradually a living image of a person arises from individual strokes, and from the accumulation of individual portraits - a picture of the entire medieval society of England. The Canterbury Tales is colorful and multicolored, like life itself, sometimes bright, sometimes dull and unsightly. Many stories, in themselves of little value, acquire meaning in the general context and find their place precisely through contrasting juxtaposition. It was this compositional innovation of Chaucer that allowed him to resolve in a realistic dominant all the contradictory sounds of the book. That is why even fantastic, allegorical and moralistic stories are realistically justified as completely, and sometimes the only ones possible in the mouth of a given narrator. Chaucer sets out the main plot of the story accurately, concisely, lively and swiftly. An example of this is the end of the pardoner's story about the three rake, the end of the chaplain's story about chasing the fox, all the complicated plot fabric and the swift ending of the miller's story. Chaucer is restrained and stingy as a storyteller, but when it is necessary to depict his characters, he skillfully draws both the chamber of Dushka Nicholas, and the shack of the widow, the mistress of Chanticleer, and an excellent genre scene of the arrival of a monk-gatherer at the house of his spiritual son Thomas. Chaucer generally avoids long, self-sufficient descriptions. He fights them with the weapon of parody, or he himself pulls himself up: “But it seems that I got distracted a little,” or he gets rid of them with a joking excuse:

What is the use of dwelling on what dishes were served Or how horns and trumpets sounded. After all, this is how every story ends. There were dishes, mash, songs, dance.

But when it is necessary to understand the character of the narrator, Chaucer, for the sake of this main goal, gives up everything, even the laconicism he loves. In the spirit of the Middle Ages, Chaucer surrounds the main plot, laconic and impetuous, with an endless tie of unhurried reasoning and teachings and a ragged motley of playful parodic-moralizing or satirical interludes. He subordinates all this to the character of the narrator, and includes the story itself in the frame of a large epic form. Chaucer's narration flows with ease, freedom and naturalness unheard of at that time. As a result, this book of Chaucer as a whole is distinguished even among his own works by the exceptional brightness and realism of the image, the richness and expressiveness of the language, when necessary - laconism, and when necessary - purely Rabelaisian excess and boldness. “Read Shakespeare,” Pushkin wrote to N. Raevsky. “Remember - he is never afraid to compromise his character, he makes him speak with all the ease of life, because he is sure that in due time and in his place he will force this person to find a language corresponding to his character.” So did Shakespeare and Chaucer. The famous English historian John Robert Green, in his assessment of Chaucer, says the following about him: “For the first time in English literature we meet with a dramatic force that not only creates a separate character, but also combines all the characters in a certain combination, not only adapts each story, each word to the character of this or that person, but also merging everything in poetic unity. It was this broad, truly poetic attitude to reality that allowed Chaucer to become, according to Gorky's definition, "the founder of realism." Born of his turbulent and ebullient age, Chaucer never claimed the role of a chronicler, did not intend to write the history of his time; and yet, from the Canterbury Tales, as from the Vision of Peter the Plowman by Chaucer's contemporary, William Langland, historians study the era. Having survived war, plague and rebellion, Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales reluctantly and briefly recalls them - these are events that are still too fresh in everyone's memory and threaten to return every hour. But on the other hand, already from the general prologue, one can get an accurate idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhow they dressed, what they drank and ate, what they were interested in and how the English of the 14th century lived. And this is not an indifferent accumulation of random details. No! Chaucer unerringly selects the most characteristic household items, in which the tastes, habits and habits of the owner are fixed. Worn chain mail, pierced and patched knight's camisole - one detail immediately defines this slightly archaic figure, as if descended from the pages heroic epic. After all, this experienced and skillful military leader is at the same time a knight-monk, combining modesty by vow with a certain sly eccentricity, which also affected the subtle irony of his story. And the magnificent attire of a squire is an attribute of a new court-tournament, gallant knight, no longer Roland, but Lancelot, affected by new education and cultural polish. And then the clasp with the motto "amor vincit omnia" of the abbess' cassock, the longbow of the yeoman - in a word, those things through which Chaucer shows a man and his place in history. Then we find out what these people were doing, and again this is mean and exact description the most essential features of their professional work. Such are the portraits of the doctor and the skipper, the lawyer and the seller of indulgences. What did not fit in the prologue, Chaucer draws in the stories about the alchemist, about the monk-collector or the bailiff of the church court. Having briefly outlined the merchant in the prologue, Chaucer, in the story of the skipper, shows the merchant's preparations for the fair and his views on the "hard trade" of trade. Thus, through the profession, Chaucer again draws the appearance of the whole person. Already in some portraits of the prologue, the behavior and character of a person are found. We well imagine the knight and the priest as people of duty and feat of life, and the Benedictine and Franklin - as zhuyers and life-burners; lawyer, housekeeper and doctor - as dodgers and businessmen. And then the behavior of Zadira Simkin significantly complements and deepens only the outwardly colorful image of the miller in the general prologue. Slim and complex psychological drawing The prologue of the Weaver of Bath makes this boi baba one of Chaucer's most lively and true-to-life images. Thus, through behavior and actions, Chaucer completes the appearance of a person. Chaucer never schematizes or generalizes. However, his exhaustive and precise knowledge of the people and events of his time allowed him to accurately find exactly the right feature, exactly the exact word he needed, which sometimes successfully replaces lengthy descriptions. When a knight, a yeoman, a squire, a merchant and a skipper gathered at the table of the Tabard tavern, they turned out to be the living embodiment of the Hundred Years War. A humble knight led them to victory. Endurance, stamina and the powerful bow of the yeoman decided the outcome of the battles. The squire, fighting valiantly under his father, at the same time wasted his knightly glory in predatory raids on the rich cities of Flanders and squandered spoils of war on expensive French outfits. After all, unlike the old knight, he is a profitable client of the merchant. The merchant himself is the true inspirer of campaigns: in an effort to secure trade with Flanders, he pays taxes to the king, but would like to regard this as a salary to the watchman, from whom he demands that the waters be "guarded" on the main road of maritime trade. Finally, the skipper is a thief and privateer who throws prisoners overboard and trades in captured goods. By doing this, he only does the will of the sender, the order of the venerable merchant-armor, who is not averse to keeping such a robber skipper in the service, turning a blind eye to his exploits and trading his booty with a profit. The roles were clearly established and divided already in Chaucer's time. A knight with a squire and a yeoman conquered the markets, the merchant seized these markets, the skipper carried the goods of the merchant, and, on occasion, obtained them by force for his master. So a few strokes in the five portraits of the prologue give a very accurate idea of ​​the characteristic features of a large historical process.

As a man of the turning point of the era, Chaucer could not help thinking about what was happening. Even in the objective and smiling "Canterbury Tales" we now and then meet mournful and indignant words about violence and self-interest reigning everywhere. Violence is a terrible legacy of the past, self-interest is a new plague of a corrupt and shameless age. We read about the extortions of the monk-gatherer and bailiff of the church court, perpetrated with the blessing of his patron vicar. We read cautious but transparent allusions to the arbitrariness and lawlessness of those whom Chaucer, in the bailiff's story, calls the crowned anger. The call in the chaplain's story: "Fear, lord, bring flatterers closer!" - or such identifications in the story of the economist:

A warlike tyrant or an emperor With a robber, like a dear brother, is similar, After all, their temperament is essentially the same ... Only from a robber is less evil, - After all, the gang of a robber is small, -

finally, the warning to tyrants in the monk's tragedies that the fate of Croesus or Nebuchadnezzar awaits them - in the mouth of a very mild and tolerant Chaucer, all this is quite unambiguous. The “poor priest” in the Canterbury Tales calls in his sermon to follow the natural law, according to which both masters and servants are equal before the Lord and bear different, but equally inevitable obligations towards each other. And in the ballad "The Great Reeling", written many years after the defeat of the popular uprising and in the midst of feudal strife and all kinds of lawlessness, Chaucer himself says that the source of troubles is self-interest and violence, and calls on the lord to fulfill his duty - to protect his servants from self-serving rapist-feudal lord and not lead them into temptation, subjecting their devotion to excessive tests. Someone, but not the creator of the Canterbury Tales, can be reproached for grumbling and pessimism. And indeed, he had quite enough objective grounds to call what was happening in these years the "Great vacillation." By the end of the 14th century, the negative consequences of the upheavals experienced by England had already fully affected. The devastation caused by the plague and the defeat of the peasant uprising had not subsided yet. The short heroic period of the first period of the Hundred Years War is over. Despite some brilliant victories, the British did not fare well in France. Separate French detachments, led by the talented organizer of the resistance, Bertrand Dugueclin, in places have already beaten the conquerors, who were not able to keep the unsubdued country in submission for decades. For the British, the war lost all purpose and meaning, except for robbery and enrichment: English privateers robbed at sea, and the “free companies” that fought off the troops on land, but the recently achieved military power of England was already shaken. Breton and Norman corsairs began to threaten the sea lanes of England, the lifeblood of her nascent wool trade. Moreover: the enemies threatened to land on the English coast. In the early 1970s, with the mere news of the gathering of a French landing, confusion swept over all of England, and it is not known how the matter would have ended if the priority tasks in Flanders had not diverted the attention of the French. A general moral decline deepens within the country. Everything was dominated by "Mrs. Bribe". Court intrigues flared up - the beginning of that struggle for power, which in the 15th century led to the fratricidal dynastic war of the Scarlet and White Roses. The kings executed the feudal lords. The feudal lords overthrew the kings. The "Black Prince" - the winner of the French - was replaced by the "Kingmaker" Earl of Warwick. Edward III and Henry V - Richard III. One could truly say in the words of Shakespeare's Richard II: "Murder everywhere... Death reigns in the crown of kings."

Soberly and bleakly assessing the present in The Great Reeling, Chaucer from the abomination of the selfish age in the poem "The Past Age" is carried away by thought in "Aetas Prima", in the "golden age" serenely patriarchal relations when peace and justice reigned on earth, man followed natural law, and when the source of self-interest, the precious metal, had not yet been mined from the depths. Everything said in The Past Century resonated in Chaucer's time with reality as personally experienced and suffered. Moreover, many lines of the Bygone Vek almost textually coincide with the rebellious folk songs 1381, with the songs of John Ball, "Jack the Carrier", "Jack the Miller", "Jack the Seamstress" about the fact that "envy rules, pride and deceit, and idleness now reigns", that "deceit and violence rule around but truth and conscience are under lock and key.” In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer nowhere directly reveals his relationship to historical events , but here, too, one can determine his own position by his attitude towards people. The legacy of the past for Chaucer is, first of all, the brazen violence and tyranny of the robber barons and their overlords, this is an ascetic deadly scheme, the ego inert thought of the scholastic pseudoscience of alchemists and astrologers-healers, this is a gang of parasites and slurps clinging to the church. But he is touched in the best people of the past by their bright faith and tenderness, their moral firmness and purity. He idealizes the unselfishness and simple cordiality of a knight and a clerk, a plowman and a poor priest. He wants to keep these people for the present as he would like them to be. He likes these eccentric righteous people, but the whole trouble is that the logic of artistic truth reveals their lifelessness and lifelessness. Next in line were people not of this type, but a thief-miller, a usurer-merchant, a rogue-lawyer, a rogue-economist, a rogue-manager, a weaver-woman-woman and other money-grubbers of the Canterbury Tales. All of them are chasing, first of all, material goods and achieve them by any means. All of them grew and developed even before Chaucer, but only now, at the time of devastation, having freed themselves from the tight bridle of the Middle Ages, from any moral restraint and unbelted, they take away their strength and become menacingly active. They become typical (“after all, an honest miller, where can I find him?”) And do not bode well for the future. Speaking about the “actual course of development”, in the conditions of which the feudal system was replaced by the capitalist system, Marx writes in the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” that at this historical stage “movement ... over immobility ...” inevitably had to take over, “ acquisitiveness - over the thirst for pleasure ... "," ... the dodgy egoism of enlightenment ... over ... the prudent, rustic, lazy and fantastic egoism of superstition ". Who could be preferred by the people of the 14th century? Who is better: a robber feudal lord or a bloodsucker merchant? In fact, both are worse, but the robber was a recidivist, and the bloodsucker has not yet shown himself to the fullest. For all their vileness, the money-grubbers then had, if not the truth, then a historical justification: objectively, it was they, as representatives of tomorrow, who, in Chaucer's time, did the vitally necessary sanitary work, like ants, clearing the land of feudal garbage. But even in the image of Chaucer, they did it with far from clean hands, in order to soon litter the earth even more than before. Here are the roots of the realistically truthful inconsistency of Chaucer's characterizations with their sharp chiaroscuro. His knight is a righteous rapist - he is a crusader who exterminates the infidels; the merchant is a practical rogue; the skipper is a thief and a pirate, but he is also a brave and experienced sailor; plowman - a human soul, but a dumb horse; the priest is a righteous soul and an ascetic, but he is a heretic, devoid of the militant spirit of future Puritans. The distribution of colors and the general tone indicate that often, even if reluctantly, Chaucer recognizes the need, but he cannot reconcile himself with unscrupulousness and shamelessness. In places it seems that Chaucer, in painting his money-grubber, senses a new real threat, but in both The Past Age and The Great Reel he emphasizes the need to shake off feudalism as a top priority. In understanding how to achieve this goal, Chaucer was not ahead of his time, did not develop any coherent positive program, did not create an integral image of a new man. He, along with his “poor priest,” shares the naive aspirations of Peter Plowman, that you just need to remove the feudal lords, overcome self-interest and work tirelessly - and everything will be fine. The only difference with Langland's views is that Chaucer does not wait for a heavenly deliverer and puts all his hopes on the innate sense of justice and common sense of a simple earthly person who must himself understand what is good and what is bad. Chaucer is not a fighter by nature, if he fights, then with the weapon of laughter. He does not call for a struggle, but this struggle goes on implicitly on every page of his Tales, just as it imperceptibly flowed throughout England throughout the XIV-XV centuries. As a result, the feudal lords and ascetics, hypocrites and predators were weakened, and the cheerful free-thinking, vitality and confidence of the people were strengthened - in a word, everything that nourished Chaucer's optimism. In spite of everything heavy and terrible, worthy of ridicule and disgusting, everything that Chaucer experienced and saw around him, everything that he denounced in his satirical images, above all the trials and tribulations that his country was subjected to and which Chaucer repeatedly mentions - above all this unsightly reality, Chaucer's vigorous, life-affirming creativity arises, generated by faith in the vitality, strength and talent of his people. With this character of Chaucer's historicism, it is in vain to look for a consistent and direct depiction of events or a reasonable analysis of that complex and contradictory historical process, which is indirectly shown in the Canterbury Tales. And yet, they became a mouthpiece that preserved for us the voice of the people of his time, and a mirror that reflected their appearance. We will not find this in any of Chaucer's contemporary English writers. "The founder of realism," Chaucer carries his wonderful mirror along the high roads of England, and it accurately and truthfully reflects everything that falls within its scope. Chaucer's mirror does not reflect historical cataclysms, it would crack and fall out of his trembling hand, but, to the best of his ability, it does more: it reflects the people whose hands history was made.

Joyful, full of light and movement, Chaucer's work reveals in him great vitality and vigor, which did not allow him to break in the trials and tribulations of his stormy and terrible age. However, from the contradictions and chaos of the pre-rebirth, the complex and contradictory image of Chaucer himself arises. He is generally characterized by the duality of a man of a turning point, who wants to combine the best moral foundations of yesterday with inner emancipation, energy and breadth as the property of the future. Still unable to make an irrevocable choice, he at the same time cannot overcome these contradictions, which only Shakespeare's mighty synthesis proved capable of. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer read, as it were, the waste of feudal England, while not hiding his sadness for individual righteous people of the past. At the same time, his "Canterbury Tales" was, as it were, a welcoming word to the people of modern times, and Chaucer did not hush up their weaknesses and vices. The disparate features are also doubled, from which the positive images of Chaucer are still only being added. Of the people of modern times, Chaucer most often encounters sancho panzas, like the merry innkeeper Bailey. Of the good people of the past, people most readily remembered are not of this world - Don Quixote in the guise of a student or even a righteous knight. Only in the idealized figure of the "poor priest" is the active feat of Chaucer's contemporaries and Wycliffe's followers reflected. Chaucer often denounces married wrathful people, as well as their flatterers and servants, but nevertheless he is well aware that under the given conditions of denunciation these are futile: “Beware of instructing kings, even if they were later baked in hell.” Chaucer could not but see the true and very unattractive face of the Duke of Lancaster, but in relation to him he shared the illusions and short-sightedness of Wycliffe, further aggravated by the inexhaustible feudal loyalty to his patron. He is drawn to the knowledge of the world, but, as for any person of the Middle Ages, this rests on astrology and alchemy. True, he ridicules the astrology of charlatans, soothsayers and healers, and in his Treatise on the Astrolabe he himself engages in practical instrumental astronomy, naively flaunting his knowledge in this area, and in the Canterbury Tales he now and then gives complex astronomical definitions of time. From astrological medicine, he seeks to isolate the healthy grain of the old Hippocratic teaching on temperaments. He denounces charlatans-alchemists, but reveals a deep interest in that technique of alchemical experiment, which has completely passed into modern science and contributed to the knowledge of matter. A sincere and deeply religious person, a knightly passionate admirer of the Virgin Mary and an admirer of Francis of Assisi, he is at the same time a free-thinking lover of life, condemning monastic asceticism, and a mocking skeptic when it comes to dogmas that kill living faith. All his work is imbued with the "cheerful free-thinking" of the Renaissance. But Chaucer's freethinking is an almost instinctive indignation against asceticism and dogma, it is a naively optimistic denial of darkness in the name of light, it is above all a love of life and life-affirmation. Only much later, “cheerful freethinking,” deepened by a new humanistic content, appeared as Rabelais’ convulsive laughter, Cervantes’ bitter grin, Marlowe’s titanic impulses of thought and feelings, and Shakespeare’s mighty, all-encompassing and mournful insights. unfinished past, which caused Rabelais's despondency, Marlowe's rage, Shakespeare's meditation. Moreover, the possibilities of a man of the High Renaissance, who found himself and realized his power in an open struggle against the inert forces of the feudal past and hand in hand with friends and like-minded people, were far from fully revealed. But it was precisely such communication and such an environment that Chaucer lacked. And yet, with all the reservations, Chaucer was a new type of artist for his time. In his work, the ossified class isolation and schematism of the medieval worldview have already been violated. They are replaced by a struggle with inert tradition, a critical approach to the feudal past and present, and an anxious look into the still unclear future.

Those qualities that were previously considered an inalienable property of the upper class - the feudal lords: valor, nobility, self-sacrifice, self-esteem, good breeding, developed mind - in Chaucer become available to everyone. good man. Self-esteem is possessed not only by a wise commander-knight, but also by Harry Bailey, who knows his own worth. In Franklin's story, not only the well-born Arviragus and Aurelius are endowed with inner nobility, but also the rootless sorcerer and philosopher.

Even earlier, in the art of the Middle Ages, the inner world of a person was revealed, but most often it was passive contemplation, the fulfillment of God's will, its predestination, or at least the dictates of fate. In Chaucer, man is the master of his destiny and fights for it. Inner world it is revealed not in reflection, but in effective communication with other people.

Chaucer's man is not a one-dimensional scheme, not a bearer of abstract qualities. And the appearance, and thoughts, and behavior, and everything that happens to a person serves Chaucer to reveal his character in all its versatility and inconsistency, and his people are dynamic, lively characters. Like Shakespeare, Chaucer did not invent something abstractly new, but distinguished much of what was inherent in the character of his people and what was revealed later in his history. Chaucer struggles with the medieval tradition, but takes from it, in the order of succession, certain obligatory elements of historical and cultural necessity. Enriched with elements of a new ideological and artistic freedom, they enter his work in a new capacity and lay the foundation for a new, Chaucerian tradition.

This tradition did not develop immediately and quite organically, since in his work Chaucer expressed some of the essential aspects national character: craving for a sober reality, unbending strength and self-confidence, optimism and self-esteem - qualities that were especially hardened in the successful struggle against feudalism. In the field of artistic mastery, this manifested itself in the free use of material, in the daring combination of terrible and funny, sad and cheerful, low and high, poetic and ordinary, and finally, in the peculiar character of the grotesque and in purely English humor. After Chaucer, these features were ingeniously developed by Shakespeare, especially in the bright, comedic way, which is an integral part of his tragedies and makes up their earthly, Falstaffian background.

And following Shakespeare, the same features appear in Fielding in the contrasting depiction of people and in the contrasting construction of the novel, as well as in the comic adventures of his heroes on the high roads of life.

Chaucer inspired Walter Scott when he resurrected the people and customs of the English Middle Ages in Ivanhoe. Smollett and Dickens inherited Chaucer's outward character, sometimes narrowing Chaucer's living images to the grotesque masks of their eccentrics. Of course, Chaucer does not exhaust all the origins and paths of English realism. This is not where Milton's work comes from. Defoe and Swift. This is only the beginning of one of the paths along which democratic everyday realism developed in England. Here are the origins of the "comic epic" and the beginning of the "epos high road”, hence the turn to the novel and the comedy of characters is planned, here are the prototypes of people typical of one of the faces of Chaucer’s homeland, for “green England”, for the “old, cheerful England” of Dickens and Shakespeare.

With all the corrections for the time and for the not at all tragic worldview of Chaucer, it must be admitted that the English researcher Coulton had grounds when he argued that "after Shakespeare, Chaucer is the most Shakespearean figure in English literature." And it's not for nothing that when you think of Chaucer, the words from Hamlet come to mind: "Scientist, courtier, fighter-eye, sword, tongue." But even this capacious definition does not cover all of Chaucer. A court poet and a customs overseer, a bookworm and a lover of life, a participant in wars and peace negotiations, a frequenter of fairs and pilgrimages, and above all a sharp-sighted artist, he knows people's life not like a scientist, not like a courtier. He looks at life not from a narrow class point of view, not only as an esquire of Edward III and a citizen of the City of London. At the same time, he is the son of his country, a cultured European, standing at the level of his era, and an artist who was far ahead of his time in England.

He can rightfully be considered the first realistic writer in England and the first, and perhaps the only, representative of the initial stage of the English Renaissance, which only in the work of Marlowe and Shakespeare reached maturity and full bloom.

4. "The Canterbury Tales".

Chaucer took up this main thing, apparently, not earlier than 1386. But we know that some of its pieces were written long before that: "St. Cecilia" (the story of the second nun), fragments of the monk's story, "Lalamon and Archytas" (a knight's story), "Melibay" (second Chaucer's story), a priest's story. When these things were written, Chaucer hardly had a plan for The Canterbury Tales. It appeared later, and the suitable material, previously prepared, was drawn into the frame that appeared in the most natural way. The most significant part of the "Canterbury Tales" (Canterbury Tales) appeared in the four years 1386-1389.

The final text contains 20 whole things, two unfinished and two torn off. Here, as we will see, not everything that was intended. But the social meaning of the work, its artistic value, and its influence on the further growth of English literature had an effect.

Chaucer lived in the era of the creation of a national culture in England. The bourgeoisie entered the arena, preparing to wrest political domination from the feudal lords. A new worldview was born. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer depicts the society of New England. There is a place in this society for the knight, just as there is a place for him in the motley company of the Canterbury pilgrims. But it is already being squeezed here and there, and the most lively and flexible part of the feudal class begins, under the pressure of circumstances, to switch over to the path of bourgeois economic management. And soon - it has already begun with the accession of Chaucer's benefactor Bolinbroke - the feudal lords will begin to exterminate each other: the War of the Roses is approaching. Knights will be replaced by others. These others are the middle classes. Chaucer draws them with a special passion. Many of the Canterbury Pilgrims are well-to-do merchants and artisans or freelancers. They are dressed in fine cloth, they have nice horses, they have money in their purses to pay for their stay. Even his peasant (prologue) is not a poor man: he regularly pays his tithes and fulfills his duties without complaining about his fate. He is not at all like the hungry kotters of Langland or the peasant depicted with such tremendous strength in Peter Plowman's Creed. Chaucer willingly goes into the details of the merchant and craft (miller's story) life. He does not hide the funny side of the townspeople (the woman from Bath), but nowhere is his humor so saturated with gentle caresses as in these cases. His attitude towards the upper classes is not hostile. Only subtle mockery, seen through, for example, in the parody story about Sir Topaz, shows that the author has outgrown the chivalrous ideology. Much more clearly mockery of spiritual persons. There are several of them in the company, and they are all caricatured (with the exception of the priest), especially the monks: here, perhaps, echoes of Wyclif's sermon had an effect. Chaucer knows very well that the church must feed the army of its parasites at the expense of the sons of the people, for otherwise it cannot exist, and he knows how to show this (the story of the pardoner). He considers only the parish priest necessary. The rest are no longer needed.

The book was created, one might say, spontaneously. Its spacious frame easily absorbed all the suitable epic material from the old one. And in order to find plots for a new one, Chaucer did not torture himself. He took "his good" wherever he found it. Of the twenty-four plots, many are borrowed from books: the stories of a knight, a lawyer, "Melibey", stories of a monk, doctor, student, second nun, landowner, abbess, housekeeper. Others are then well-known oral itinerant stories: the stories of a miller, a steward, a shipbuilder, a chaplain, a pardoner, a woman from Bath, an executor, a merchant, a squire. The priest's story is not a story, but a sermon. Thus, almost one "Topaz" remains to the share of Chaucer's own invention, and even that one is a parody, that is, it assumes the existence of a close plot on a serious plane. For his realistic pattern to fit well, Chaucer needs a strong and frequent plot line; and where the plot is not completed in the source, he abandons even a well-begun thing, like the history of Cambiscan (the story of a squire). The systematic selection of plots gave the Canterbury Tales an extraordinary variety of genres. Here is everything that a not too rich assortment of literary genres of that time could give: a chivalric romance (stories of a knight and a squire), a pious legend (a story of an abbess and a second nun), a moralizing story (a story of a pardoner), biographies of great people (a monk’s story) , historical story (doctor's story), short story (student and shipbuilder's stories), didactic allegory (Chucer's story of Melibea), fablio (miller's stories, steward's, executor's stories), animal epic (chaplain's story), mythological story (housekeeper's story), pious reasoning in the form of a sermon (the priest's story), a parody of a chivalric romance ("Sir Topaz" and the story of a woman from Bath).

The literary processing of all these plots proceeded according to the same plan as in Troilus. Chaucer wanted to make each story as convincing as possible, which is why elements of everyday and psychological realism are so strong in them. Or he achieved the same persuasiveness in the opposite way, showing the improbability of the situation through parody, as in the tale of the rejuvenated old woman told by the woman from Bath. To enhance the sense of reality of his characters, Chaucer resorts to a method that is still largely new in fiction. It is quite clear that if several stories are pulled together by a common frame with the narrators appearing in it, then the narrators must appear to the reader as characters more real than the heroes of their stories. Framing, therefore, creates, as it were, two levels of reality. In this form, it does not represent a new literary device.

Its use was new. Chaucer deliberately blurs the line between characters he considers real and characters he portrays as fictional. He depicts the abbess in the general prologue, the woman from Bath in the prologue to her story, and, for example, the beautiful carpenter Alison in the miller's story with exactly the same colors. In this way, a fictional image takes on flesh and blood. In exactly the same way, the image of the living student from the general prologue is completed in the portrait of the student Nicholas, transferred to the everyday atmosphere of Oxford in the same miller's story. But perhaps the most remarkable example of such a merging of images is given by Chaucer in two parallel stories of a minor and an executor of an ecclesiastical court (somonour). They are on knives, like a miller with a steward. In the general prologue, both are characterized more outwardly: the executor's face was covered with blackheads and red spots that could not be removed by any ointments and drugs, while the minorite (he is called Frere, in contrast to the important Benedictine - Monk) had a nape white as a lily ; tells about their clothes and outdoor habits. And everyday and psychological characteristics are included in their short stories. In defiance of his foe, a minor tells how a certain executor, at the very moment when he was trying to take the last pennies from a poor and sick old woman, was carried away by the devil to hell, and the characterization of the executor in the story perfectly complements the outline of the general prologue. The same is true in the short story of the executor. In retaliation to the monk, he first of all gives a little information about where the Minorites are placed in hell: it turns out, under the tail of Satan. Then comes the novel. It tells about a minorite, to whom a certain person, bothering them, arranged an obscene muck. The characterization of the monk in the short story continues the characterization of the minorite in the general prologue, but, as in the previous one, in much sharper satirical tones. It is wonderfully told how a monk boldly enters the house, drives away a cat lying on a bench, carefully puts his inventory in its place: a stick, a hat and a bag, sits down himself, then kisses the hostess who appears - this was the custom - and the conversation begins, from which the secrets of his craft are revealed in all their ugliness.

The identity of the images is demonstrated quite clearly. When the executor in the story exposes the fraud of his fictional character, the living minor from the company of pilgrims cannot stand it: "Well, you're lying, executor!" Moreover, Chaucer himself is so fascinated by the idea of ​​the identity of the characters of the prologue and short stories that he sometimes forgets about the necessary literary conventions. In the story of the merchant, the action takes place in Pavia at a time not exactly defined, but in any case much earlier. One of his characters, the knight Justin, discussing the good and bad sides of married life, refers to what an experienced woman from Bath said in the prologue to her story. It is clear that the Lombard knight, who did not take part in the pilgrimage to Canterbury, could not hear the wise explanations of the venerable lady who succeeded five husbands. But for Chaucer, the people created by his fantasy are so close to reality that the differences in the degree of their reality are erased. For him, they are all equally real. The artistic techniques that created them are the same, and they are equally close to the world of reality. Perhaps for contemporaries there was also an additional meaning: they easily recognized many of the characters in the prologue, in addition to the innkeeper and Chaucer himself. If even in our days it turned out to be relatively easy to establish the true names of some pilgrims from documents, then it was given to contemporaries, of course, even easier. And under such conditions, the sign of equality between them and the fictional characters of the stories, extended either with feigned naivety, or with obvious and cunning intent, immediately gave an idea of ​​them as people who really exist and are depicted in exact accordance with reality.

Everyone knows the plot that underlies the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer once spent the night in an inn on the southern outskirts of London, in order to go on a pilgrimage early in the morning, to bow to the shrine of Thomas Becket. People gathered in the same hotel from different parts of England, who set themselves the same goal. Chaucer immediately got to know everyone, became friends with many, and they decided to leave London together under the leadership of their master Harry Bailey. As they thought, so they did. Let's go. The path was long. Harry Bailey suggested that each of the 29 pilgrims should tell two stories on the way there and two on the way back. What Chaucer allegedly managed to write down became the content of The Canterbury Tales.

This is why Chaucer's general prologue to the Canterbury Tales is of great importance. Formally, he, along with prologues and afterwords to individual stories, is assigned the modest role of framing the book, moreover, purely external: in this sense, Chaucer could borrow the idea from Boccaccio. But Chaucer very soon abandoned the idea of ​​giving a bare frame: precisely because he had a strong connecting thread between the characters of the general prologue and stories. And this, in turn, turned the frame into some kind of independent everyday poem, the hero of which, of course, became Harry Bailey, the owner of the hotel. Only he has enough character to take command and discipline a motley company of pilgrims. Only he has enough gaiety and humor, and at the same time strictness, to curb the brawlers. How vigilantly he guards the people who trust him, and warns them against swindlers! How incredulously the charlatan-canon interrogates with his servant, who overtook the pilgrims on the way! How skillfully she guides discussions about the stories she has heard, not allowing the debate to veer off to the side and rigorously demanding another story! In terms of artistic significance, the new idea far outgrew the idea of ​​framing the Decameron. Instead of seven ladies and three gentlemen of Boccaccio, belonging to the same circle and little individualized, there is a huge collection of types from the most diverse social strata, which is far from exhausted by those listed in the prologue. Even counting them in the prologue is inconsistent. At the beginning (verse - 24) the number 29 is indicated, apparently without Harry Bailey and without Chaucer himself. In verse 164, the chaplain who accompanied the second nun and three priests are named, four in all, of which three do not figure further; in verse 544 Chaucer names himself. If you count him and the three extra pilgrim priests, it will come out not 29, but 33, with Harry Bailey 34, but with the canon's servant who stuck on the road - the canon himself escaped - 35. And we are hardly dealing here with negligence . Chaucer simply left a loophole for a possible increase in the number of stories, for, according to Harry's suggestion, each of the pilgrims had to give four stories. This would have amounted to 140 stories, and Chausser, in 1386, when the general prologue was being written, felt himself able to carry out this grandiose plan, quantitatively leaving the Decameron far behind. But, having worked hard for four years (1386-1389), he somewhat cooled down to the idea, and it turned out to be less than a fifth written. The main thing, however, was done. A broad picture of English life was given at the turning point which the poet had witnessed.

Of course, Chaucer's poem is far from the laconic colorlessness of the Comedy, where the tercina with its iron rhythm forced me to count words sparingly and look for a "single" word for a thought that accurately expresses it. Chaucer's is not graphics, like Dante's, but rather the painting of a contemporary multi-color miniature, which loves details and is not afraid of variegation, which dwells long and lovingly on the outside: on the figure, face, clothes, furniture, utensils, weapons, horse decoration. And Chaucer's verse, with all the variety of meters, fits this manner unusually. It flows slowly, easily and generously.

Features of Chaucer's realism are clarified by comparing it with the realism of Boccaccio. The Florentine in the foreground is not everyday realism, but psychological. This is striking in Fiametta even more than in the Decameron. In Chaucer, there is a surprisingly harmonious balance between everyday and psychological realism. Background, furnishings, atmosphere, accessories interest him as intensely as a person, his feelings and experiences. Troilus has already given striking proof of this. In The Canterbury Tales this feature of his genius is at its height. Chaucer the poet has a clear understanding of the importance of the material moment in life.

Riding on his horse, with his typical forked beard and sharp, mocking eye, the poet trotted lightly between the pilgrims, rode first to one, then to the other, looked at the costumes, touched the huge yeoman’s bow or the miller’s bagpipes, listened to the conversation, let go jokes. And he records his observations on ivory tablets, like those on which his minor (the executor's story) wrote down for remembrance, the names of the donors, in order to erase them immediately upon leaving the house. He is full of insatiable curiosity, wants to be everywhere, wants to see everything. Of course, he was among those who lifted the drunken cook who had fallen off the horse and tried to seat him more firmly in the saddle. Of course, he was the first to become interested in what a strange person was, accompanied by a servant, who had caught up with a company of pilgrims at Baughton on a dapple-gray nag. And he hardly remained silent when the innkeeper bantered about the solid build of both of them, as presented in the prologue to the story of Sir Topaz.

This greed for the phenomena of life and, in particular, for the knowledge of people and their individual characteristics, is the main thing in Chaucer's talent. For his time, this was a characteristic and new feature. He was looking for something characteristic in his characters and knew how to find it. Sometimes he limited himself to a detailed description of appearance, and this turned out to be enough. Sometimes he added a cursory psychological description, and the person was outlined as a whole. Sometimes he went deep into the analysis if he was interested in the character, and a small detail illuminated everything. Sometimes he gave an idea of ​​the tastes of a person, putting into his mouth a story of the appropriate tone and content, and this was done both seriously and ironically. It was fitting for a knight and his son, a squire, to tell romantic stories, just as a learned doctor a historical story about Appius Claudius and the beautiful Virginia, or a student about Griselda, or a second nun about St. Cecilia. But when the abbess, the lady tender heart, who wore the motto on her bracelet: "Amor vincit omnia" (love conquers all), mourning every punished dog and every mouse in a mousetrap, tells with a sharp smell of hatred a pious legend about a child allegedly tortured by Jews - this has a special meaning. And it is a completely open irony that the tragicomic story of Chauntecleer is put into the mouth of the chaplain of the convent: the only male spiritual person in the convent tells about the idyll in the chicken coop, where the cock Chauntecleer, the happy husband of seven tender feathered wives, enjoys conjugal joys, not received church blessings.

Among the humorists of world literature, Chaucer is one of the largest. His humor is soft, not evil. He rarely turns into sarcasm, in his humor there is a great understanding of human weaknesses, a willingness to condescend to them and forgive. But he uses the tool of humor skillfully. Humor is an organic part of his literary talent, and sometimes it seems that he himself does not notice how humorous and ironic touches are pouring out from under his pen "Here, for example, is the beginning of the shipbuilder's story:

There once lived a merchant alone in Saint-Denis. He was rich. Therefore, he was considered wise.

She agreed to recognize him as her husband and master, since husbands can be masters of their wives.

Sometimes Chaucer gives an expanded irony, but all the same, so that it does not stick out importunately and you can not notice it. So, in the story of the steward, he lists cases of windiness and inconstancy in the animal world, which are always shown by female individuals - a cat, a she-wolf, etc. And then he adds:

All these examples refer to men who have become unfaithful, and not to women at all. For men always have more desire To satisfy their craving for base things Than their wives.

His methods are extremely varied. With him, Dante's Golden Eagle loses its tragic importance and its Olympian splendor and begins to conduct the most ordinary conversations in simple language. And just as easily, the rooster Chanticleer and his beloved wife, Madame Pertelotte, rise above the insignificance of their chicken coop and quote Cato and Holy Scripture in a scholarly dispute. There, reduction, here sublimation equally serve irony. But Chaucer also knows how to use direct ironic speech. He most often puts it into the mouth of Harry Bailey, the owner of the hotel. Harry's humor is blunt, but hits hard. Here is how, for example, he congratulates the chaplain of the convent, who has just told me about Chauntecleer: “Sir chaplain, may your underwear be blessed! You had a merry tale about Chauntecleer. Because if you had as much desire as you have strength, you would need, I think, seven times seven hens. hawk, and his beard does not require any paint, either local or imported. Thank you, sir, for your tale! The irony here is all the more subtle, because after all, the abbess of the chaplain monastery also listened to Harry's sly gratitude.

The Canterbury Tales are full of comic situations, the cradle farce (the steward's tale) is crude, and it took Lafontaine's pen to give it real subtlety. But even Lafontaine would probably have been powerless to add subtlety to the trick on the minor (the story of the executor). But the short story about the fooled carpenter (the miller's story) is really comical, especially its end. It is also not free from some rudeness, but in terms of the characteristics of the four characters and the masterfully developed plot, it belongs to the best examples of this genre. A similar situation fifty years later would form the basis of one of Masuccio's short stories: rudeness in those days did not frighten anyone, and in Chaucer it served superbly for realistic effect. Just as realistic and just as comical, although in a different way, is the description of a movement intensified, accelerated and saturated to the last limits - a device that Chaucer's contemporary, the most democratic of the Florentine novelists, Franco Sacchetti, liked to resort to for the same purposes. Here is an example. The fox grabbed the magnificent Chauntecleer and dragged him into the forest. This was seen by the faithful wife, the hen Pertelotta. “The unfortunate widow with her two daughters raised her chicken cry and her lamentations, jumped out of the chicken coop and saw how the fox rushed to the forest, dragging the rooster. They began to shout: “Oh, oh! Here! For help! Fox! Hold her!" And they gave chase. And with them many others with sticks. Collie, our dog, ran. Talbot and Gerlinda and Malkin ran with a spindle in their hands. A cow and a calf ran; barks and screams of men and women that almost broke their hearts from grunting, and they squealed like hell. Ducks screamed as if they were going to be slaughtered. so scary, God forbid!" A painting showing a completely new, realistic and very folk literary skill, which, as in Italy, could only be born in the city.

However, one should not think that Chaucer was strong only in the depiction of comedic and farcical situations. There are both romantic dramas and real tragedies in The Canterbury Tales. The most heartfelt gloomy tragedy was told to the pilgrims by a pardoner, who made it the subject of the aphorism: "Radix malorum est cupiditas" (the root of evil is greed). Three friends found a treasure and were going to share it. One left for provisions, the remaining two decided to kill him so that everyone would get more. And he poisoned food and drinks in order to appropriate the treasure entirely. And everyone died.

The plot was very popular even before Chaucer, and after it it was processed more than once. In Chaucer, as always, it is not so much the bare plot that is interesting as its processing. Tragic persuasiveness here is given to the plot by the setting. Chaucer gives a picture of a double betrayal against the backdrop of a pestilence raging in Flanders, and the first scene - unbridled drunkenness in a tavern - a real feast during the plague. It is broken by a death knell, followed by the innkeeper's account of the devastation caused by the epidemic. This story makes three friends take off in a drunken enthusiasm and go on a march to their death. On the way they meet a certain mysterious old man; a conversation with him further thickens the horror of the whole picture. They are instructed where to look for death, and find a chest with gold pieces. This turns out to be death: greed kills all three.

Chaucer took up this main thing, apparently, not earlier than 1386. But we know that some of its pieces were written long before that: "St. Cecilia" (the story of the second nun), fragments of the monk's story, "Lalamon and Archytas" (a knight's story), "Melibay" (second Chaucer's story), a priest's story. When these things were written, Chaucer hardly had a plan for The Canterbury Tales. It appeared later, and the suitable material, previously prepared, was drawn into the frame that appeared in the most natural way. The most significant part of the "Canterbury Tales" (Canterbury Tales) appeared in the four years 1386-1389. The final text contains 20 whole things, two unfinished and two torn off. Here, as we will see, not everything that was intended. But the social meaning of the work, its artistic value, and its influence on the further growth of English literature had an effect. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer depicts the society of New England. There is a place in this society for the knight, just as there is a place for him in the motley company of the Canterbury pilgrims. But it is already being squeezed here and there, and the most lively and flexible part of the feudal class begins, under the pressure of circumstances, to switch over to the path of bourgeois economic management. And soon - it has already begun with the accession of Chaucer's benefactor Bolinbroke - the feudal lords will begin to exterminate each other: the War of the Roses is approaching. Knights will be replaced by others. These others are the middle classes. Chaucer draws them with a special passion. Many of the Canterbury Pilgrims are well-to-do merchants and artisans or freelancers. They are dressed in fine cloth, they have nice horses, they have money in their purses to pay for their stay. Even his peasant (prologue) is not a poor man: he regularly pays his tithes and fulfills his duties without complaining about his fate. He is not at all like the hungry kotters of Langland or the peasant depicted with such tremendous strength in Peter Plowman's Creed. Chaucer willingly goes into the details of the merchant and craft (miller's story) life. He does not hide the funny side of the townspeople (the woman from Bath), but nowhere is his humor so saturated with gentle caresses as in these cases. His attitude towards the upper classes is not hostile. Only subtle mockery, seen through, for example, in the parody story about Sir Topaz, shows that the author has outgrown the chivalrous ideology. Much more clearly mockery of spiritual persons. There are several of them in the company, and they are all caricatured (with the exception of the priest), especially the monks: here, perhaps, echoes of Wyclif's sermon had an effect. Chaucer knows very well that the church must feed the army of its parasites at the expense of the sons of the people, for otherwise it cannot exist, and he knows how to show this (the story of the pardoner). He considers only the parish priest necessary. The rest are no longer needed.

27) English literature of the 15th century: general characteristics.

The fifteenth century in the history of England usually presents itself to us as a time of decline and decay. In all areas of life and culture of this historical period, the observer's gaze reveals, first of all, features of decay, weakening creative activity. The literature of this period, at first glance, does not put forward a single major name; the place of former poetic luminaries is occupied by compilers, imitators, translators who live entirely on the legacy of past times. Continuous wars and civil strife did not favor the development of peaceful creative labor. The 14th century ended with the deposition of King Richard II (1399). In the person of Henry IV, the Lancaster dynasty entered the English throne. Henry's reign was troubled and full of setbacks. The arbitrariness of the feudal lords, constant strife between them, heavy taxes that were a burden on the shoulders of the working population, the beginning of the fanatical persecution of "heretics" - all this soon hardened the population, and at the beginning of the reign of Henry V (1413-1422) led to massive popular unrest . Henry V tried to divert attention from internal troubles with widely conceived military campaigns against the French, thus resuming the Hundred Years' War with France, which had somewhat died out under Richard II and Henry IV. Outwardly, these were successful and for a long time then they amused the English national pride. The battle of Agincourt (1415), when Henry, who landed on the French coast with his small detachments, defeated a large French army, never lost his attractive force for English poets, playwrights and novelists; She was made famous by Shakespeare. The further successes of Henry V seemed even more dazzling; the capture of the entire north of France, the capture of Paris (1422) were the limit of the hopes that his contemporaries placed on him. But Henry V died unexpectedly, at the height of his military glory. The crown was received by his young son (Henry VI, 1422-1461). Immediately began the strife of the feudal lords, the struggle of court parties for influence and power; the French possessions of England began to decrease rapidly, after a period of brilliant victories, a time of bitter defeats began. By 1450, the British retained only one Calais on the continent. Before the Hundred Years' War with France had ended, however, new, this time internecine wars arose in England, which plunged the country into a state of complete lawlessness. The War of the Scarlet and White Roses (1455-1485) was the last mortal battle of the rebellious feudal forces. It was a struggle for the crown and, at the same time, for the creation of a new absolute monarchical regime. On the battlefields between the supporters of the Yorks and the Lancasters, along with the death of almost all the old feudal nobility, the old feudal culture bled and died. The Battle of Bosworth (1485), when Henry Tudor defeated his rival Richard III, begins a new era in English history. The young Tudor dynasty relied on new social forces. The new nobility, which seized the hereditary land holdings of the old feudal families destroyed during the internecine wars, was directly dependent on the royal power and supported its desire for further national-state unification of the country. Throughout the 15th century, the influence of the gentry, the merchants, and the cities was continuously growing, and was already noticeable in the 14th century; industry and trade are expanding, and the spirit of entrepreneurship is growing. Throughout this period, literacy undoubtedly increased in a wider circle of the population than before. Along with the growing needs of the strengthened middle class, the network of schools in London and the provinces increased, ranging from schools established by the king (at Eton and Cambridge), and schools run by churches or guilds, down to small private institutions in which children were given their first lessons in literacy. Characteristically, the largest number of schools belonged to the category of primary schools, where students did not receive a scientific education, but only prepared for a purely practical, most often merchant, activity. The development of school education increased the demand for the book, increased the production of manuscripts as a form of publishing at that time. Based on one official document dating back to 1422, we can conclude that in this year, out of 112 London guilds, four guilds were specially occupied with correspondence handwritten books for sale. By the middle and especially by the end of the 15th century, we have a number of information about the libraries of such handwritten books, which arise not only among the landed magnates or representatives of the church, but also among the nobles and wealthy townspeople. One of the most famous documents of this kind is the inventory of the private library of John Paston, the landowner, made shortly after 1475. Other arts - painting, sculpture, architecture - in England of the 15th century were also not in decline, on the contrary, they received new and more solid foundations for of its development. English painting and sculpture of this time, for example, experienced the beneficial effects of the Italian and Burgundian schools and created a number of wonderful works designed not only for church use. Architecture experienced one of the periods of its heyday and also gradually secularized; along with the magnificent buildings of churches and monasteries, remarkable secular buildings were also erected in England - university colleges, houses of wealthy citizens (Crosby Hall in London, 1470), buildings for guild associations (London Guildhall, 1411-1425). Commercial connections attracted to London and the English port cities a much larger number of foreigners than before. The largest number of Englishmen who showed in the first half of the XV century. propensity to engage in classical antiquity and commitment to the new science, belonged to the highest clerical nobility. Against this background, the figure of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, brother of Henry V, who was the first humanist-philanthropist, patron of humanistic interests among English scientists and writers of his time, stands out sharply. Humphrey was a great lover of antiquity and an ardent admirer of Italian scholarship. He ordered teachers from Italy to study ancient authors, spent huge amounts of money on the acquisition of manuscripts, corresponded with a number of humanists, and ordered translations of Greek authors from them. The most important result of Humphrey's activity was the accumulation of remarkable book wealth, which the first English humanists were able to use half a century later. Humphrey's library was bequeathed by him to Oxford University. Next to Humphrey, one can name another representative of the English aristocracy of the 15th century, who gained considerable fame in Italy itself for his exemplary Latin oratorical cuts. It was John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. Beginning in the 1450s, there was an increasing number of young English people who were drawn to Italy by a thirst for knowledge. Of great importance for everything under consideration and for subsequent periods were changes in the field of language. Compared with the XIV century. in England at this time the prevalence of French speech undoubtedly decreased, even among the circles of the highest nobility. Throughout the century, the importance of the London dialect grew. Under its influence, dialectal differences in the written language of other English regions were obscured. The completion of the centralization of political power by the end of the wars of the Scarlet and White Roses also contributed to the centralization in the field of language, the development of common English literary speech based on the London dialect. Of great importance in this respect was the appearance of printing in England. The opening in England of the first printing press was the work of William Caxton (William Caxton, 1421-1491), publisher and translator. As a young man, Caxton entered as an apprentice to a wealthy London merchant, Robert Large, who was sheriff and later Lord Mayor of the capital. After Large's death, Caxton lived for about 30 years in Bruges; one of the most important shopping centers of the time northwestern Europe. There he attained a considerable position and honor, being something of a consul, "governing the English living abroad." Many writers, translators, calligraphers, miniaturists and bookbinders lived in Bruges; literature and poetry flourished here, though in the late autumn color of a medieval culture already doomed to perish; medieval chivalric romances and courtly lyric poetry were still in full swing here. All this could not fail to have an effect on Caxton; still around 1464 he began to translate from French a collection of narratives about Troy. This translation Caxton subsequently published in the same Bruges (The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, 1474). It was the first printed book in English, although still published outside of England. In 1474-1475. Caxton entered into a company with the miniaturist and calligrapher Mansion and began printing books. In addition to the Collection of Tales of Troy, Caxton, together with Mansion, published a book on the game of chess (The Game And Playe of the Chesse) and one book in French in Bruges.

Between the opening of the Westminster Printing House and the end of the 15th century (before 1500), about 400 books were printed in England. English literature of the 15th century is of a transitional nature - from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The old traditions are still very strong in it; it still gravitates toward the old forms, but gradually these forms are filled with new content that modifies and breaks them. The epic gravitates towards the novel and the chronicle, the place of poetry is occupied by prose. The inclination towards prose finds its reinforcement in the widely developed activity of translation. In the XV century. in England they translate Latin treatises, French novels and various works that have an application to life. Literature acquires a specific practical purpose, which it did not have before, and begins to serve the numerous needs of the population on a much larger scale. Catalogs of English manuscripts of the 15th century are full of treatises on hunting and fishing, military art and fortification, in the cultivation of orchards, agriculture and housekeeping. Medicine and education, cookbooks and rules of etiquette are found here more often than theological writings or works of fiction in the proper sense of the word. Especially numerous are books related to trading activities: commercial reference books and guides for traveling merchants, works of a geographical or economic nature. In the first half of the XV century. all such works, including educational books, are written mainly in verse; In the second half of the century, poetry is replaced by prose, the technique of which is already acquiring some stability, developing common literary and grammatical norms. A typical example poetic work For a purely practical purpose, the very curious "Book of English Politics" (Lybelle of Englishe Polycye, 1486), written by an unknown person in order to instruct the English merchant class, can serve. She puts forward a broad program of government measures necessary, in the author's opinion, for the further prosperity of the country, at a time when England, in fact, is increasingly moving towards active trading activity, towards conquering new markets. The author sees the true way of enriching the English state in protecting trade with all its might and with the help of the fleet and weapons to dominate "over the narrow sea", that is, the Channel, between both, English at that time, ports - Dover and Calais. Among the sciences in 15th-century England, theology still dominated. Dogmatic problems still stood in the foreground, but next to them new ethical interests were already emerging, which life itself put forward, in addition to theology and aside from it. Apologists for Catholic orthodoxy at this time used Latin for their polemical writings. The only exceptions are the theological works of Reginald Peacock, who was one of the most important English prose writers of the 15th century. In the historical and journalistic literature of the 15th century, as well as in other areas of writing, the Latin language is gradually giving way to English. English journalism of the 15th century was born not within the walls of a monastery, but in a whirlpool of political passions and bloody civil strife. First major political writer England, John Fortescue (circa 1395-1476), stood at the very center of the dynastic struggle for the throne and literary activity He started his own as the author of topical political pamphlets. The most important of his Latin works, written by him for Prince Edward of Lancaster, is the treatise On the Nature of Natural Law (De natura legis naturae), the first part of which speaks of various forms of government; unlimited monarchy (dominium regale), republic (dominium politicum) and constitutional monarchy (dominium politicum et regale). Fortescue also wrote for the Prince of Lancaster a Latin treatise, Praise to English Laws (De laudibus legum Angliae, 1470). This essay is wonderful in many ways. Fiction in the proper sense of the word, however, is much more scarce in fifteenth-century England than in the preceding century. Poets imitate Chaucer and for a long time cannot find their own creative ways; prose writers are few in number: next to Caxton the translator stands only Thomas Malory, published by him, with his only book of stories about the knights of the Round Table. But in the 15th century in England, as if in contrast to the relatively poor book poetry, folk poetry flourished. The ballads of England and Scotland - the most original and viable form of poetry of this time - have a strong influence on subsequent literary development. With all the fullness of life, folk drama also blooms at this time, which will have a powerful impact on English theater the Renaissance.

The son of a London wine merchant who supplied goods to the court, Geoffrey Chaucer (13407–1400) in early childhood he becomes a court page, and then, through his belonging to John of Gaunt's entourage, he becomes involved in the ups and downs of his fate, either receiving lucrative positions, performing diplomatic missions in Italy, Flanders, Spain, France, or falling into disfavor and finding himself not at affairs.

Chaucer was brought up in court culture, which is now acquiring a taste for luxury, for a greater elegance of manners and mores. For the queen and court ladies, overseas fabrics are brought, for the king - a velvet vest, which is embroidered by his special order with peacocks. But this is no longer a French, but an English court, which, having changed the language, does not want to give up reading its favorite books. The Romance of the Rose, translated from French by Chaucer at the very beginning of the 1370s, opens the English-language tradition of courtly poetry. However, almost even earlier he wrote the "Book of the Duchess", sustained in the same manner courtly allegorism. With it he responded to the death of his mistress, the first wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The medieval style and genre did not leave his poetry in the future: the poems "Bird Parliament" and "House of Glory" date back to the turn of the 1370s-1380s, i.e. by the time after his visit to Italy in 1373 and 1378.

However, after Italy, the prevailing trend in Chaucer's work gradually changes: the style of medieval French courtship gives way to new Renaissance trends coming from Italy, and above all the influence of Boccaccio. Chaucer followed him in 1384-1386. works on the collection "Legends of Glorious Women", including Medea, Lucretia, Dido, Cleopatra. Despite the deviations that many of them made from the straight path of virtue, Chaucer praises these women, thereby rejecting the medieval idea of ​​a woman as a sinful vessel. Then he wrote a novel in verse "Troilus and Chryseida", which follows the ancient plot developed by Boccaccio, and already moves from Chaucer further to Shakespeare ("Troilus and Cressida").

The first phase of Chaucer's work was French painting, the second passed under Italian influence, and the third was actually English. WITH "Canterbury Tales", on which Chaucer begins work about 1385, continuing it until his death, with this collection, albeit remaining unfinished, begins new English literature.

If the biographical legend suggests Chaucer's meeting with Petrarch, then even legendary information is not available regarding his personal acquaintance with Boccaccio. However, Chaucer knew the works of Boccaccio well, clearly imitated him, retelling his plots, including in the Canterbury Tales, but not from the Decameron (the exception is the short story about Griselda, which Chaucer knew from the Latin transcription of Petrarch). However, both books storybook, revealing the similarity of understanding of narrative tasks and the common desire for both writers to a single plan of the book. It remains to be assumed that such The short story collection was an objective need of artistic consciousness, re-assimilating the richness of cultural memory with a colloquial word.

In the Canterbury Tales, as in the Decameron, the narrators do not remain outside the boundaries of the plot, they are in our field of vision, they are book characters. However, unlike the Decameron and his own early works, Chaucer here changes the character of the audience: the place of narration is not a Florentine villa or an English royal court, but big road, leading from London to Canterbury, where crowds of pilgrims rush every spring. There is one of the main national shrines - the relics of Thomas (Thomas) Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170, right in the cathedral, who died from murderous knights sent by King Henry II.

On the way to Canterbury, almost at the exit from London, stands the Tabard tavern. 29 pilgrims gathered in it, and with the innkeeper Harry Bailey who joined them, they become 30. The innkeeper gives advice: to pass the time, let each amuse the companions with two stories on the way there, and "in addition, save two others, / To tell them to us on the way reverse". Overall plan The collection, therefore, assumed 120 short stories, but in reality Chaucer managed to write (including unfinished ones) less than 30. Even if not completed, the plan of the book is striking in its integrity and consistency of execution. A motley crowd of people of different classes, who accidentally come together, represents the whole of English society. We usually don't know their names. We know only the class or professional affiliation of the narrators: a knight, a lawyer, a skipper, a majordomo, a carpenter, a student, a weaver from Bath, a cook, a monk, a merchant, a squire, a bailiff of a church court. Boccaccio's short stories did not reflect (or almost did not reflect) the characters of the narrators, because there were no characters yet. In Chaucer, the characters exchange short stories as remarks in a general conversation, showing themselves, defending their position.

The first presentation of the participants in the conversation is made in the "General Prologue" - it is given to the whole book. Inside it, each short story is preceded by its own prologue, which evaluates what is told, and sometimes even the one who tells. Harry Bailey, who has taken over the leadership of the pilgrims' society, is not shy about characterizations in the style of rude playfulness. In the "General Prologue" the characteristics were given by the author - Chaucer, who, by the way, also mingled with the crowd of pilgrims and is not watching what is happening with an outsider's eye, but from the very thick of things. It's a sign of his position feature of his narrative subtlety, which the 19th century the poet and critic Matthew Arnold put it this way:

"If we ask ourselves what is the great superiority of Chaucer's poetry over the romance of chivalry, we will find that it arises from a broad, free, unprejudiced, clear and at the same time good view of human life, completely unusual for courtly poets. In contrast to their helplessness, Chaucer has the power to survey the entire world from a central, truly human point of view.

It is said for sure, but in order for what was conceived to become a reality, Chaucer had to create a new way of artistic vision, different, say, from the genre in which, quite in the spirit of medieval tradition, his remarkable contemporary William Langland wrote his poem - "The Vision of Peter Plowman". Langland also made an attempt to take a single look at the entire life field, stretching between the Tower of Truth and the Dungeon of Evil. Between these moral poles an allegory of human existence is played out. Langland's strength lies in the everyday persuasiveness with which he dares to present abstract concepts, embodying them in everyday scenes and recognizable life types. However, for household painting Chaucer does not have a second, allegorical plan at all. His knight is not the embodiment of Valor, like the miller is not the embodiment of Intemperance or any of the other seven deadly sins that Langland illustrates.

Allegorical poet by the very nature of his genre sees clearly correlating the objective, earthly with moral ideas, recognizing them embodied in man. Chaucer thinks otherwise: he watching And compares. He correlates a person not with the idea of ​​vice or virtue, but with another person, in their relationship trying to establish the moral dignity of everyone. The narrative style of the early Renaissance is in this sense akin to Renaissance metaphorism. Novella not coincidentally simultaneous sonnet both genres are busy establishing links, similarities, mutual reflections in which earthly world unfolds in unparalleled detail. Genre vision in both cases, of course, is different, but equally unusually sharp: the sonnet word prefers beauty, the short story prefers colorfulness and everyday diversity.

Neither allegory nor the old epic implied such a focus on the visible, the material, the concrete. In their tradition, Langland remained his poem, Chaucer broke with it. He chose as his genre short story with her colloquial intonation and everyday details; he found a suitable verse for her - paired iambic pentameter, light, breaking up into couplets (known as heroic couplet) each of which seems to have been specially created to become an unconstrained speech formula, an aphorism. A style of detailed description, sharp and precise characteristics of what he saw is born, which manifests itself immediately, in the "General Prologue", when we first meet the pilgrims:

And the Bat weaver chatted with him,

Sitting famously on the pacer;

But swagger does not hide sin -

She was fairly deaf.

There was a great craftswoman in weaving -

It is time for the weavers of Ghent to marvel.

She liked to do charity, but to the temple

One of the ladies squeeze in front of her, -

Instantly forgot in furious pride,

About kindness and kindness.

She could hang a scarf on her head

Going to mass, about ten pounds,

And all of silk or linen.

She wore red stockings

And slippers of soft morocco.

The face of the striker is handsome and blush,

She was an enviable wife

And survived five husbands,

Crowds of girl friends, not counting

(A flock of them entwined around her.)

Per. I. Koshkin and O. Rumer

All the details here are significant, speaking about a person and the world in which he lives. The weaver came from Bath, one of the centers of the English cloth industry, which is on the rise and competes with the cities of Flanders, including Ghent. Chaucer examined everything, saw everything, not missing either the color of the stockings or the morocco from which the shoes were made, making a reliable impression of the moral character of his heroine. However, ironically, he does not rush to conclusions, especially with condemnation, which, however, does not mean that he or his characters are indifferent to the moral side of life. Not at all: let's not forget the purpose for which they travel - they make a pilgrimage. They are looking for cleansing from the sins accumulated over the winter. In their everyday life, they can pursue different goals and achieve them not in the most moral ways. However, each of them would be sincerely horrified if he were denied the opportunity to repent, for each of them would like to believe that his path is the path to God, even if he often stumbles along this path.

The novel explores the forms of life and at the same time the traditional forms of literature about life. Researchers have repeatedly paid attention to the fact that Chaucer's short stories follow a variety of genre paths: fable, chivalric romance, saint's biography, miracle, fable, sermon. The novel becomes a story about existing methods storytelling, those. understanding reality, and it is precisely these methods that she rethinks, parodies. Nothing is rejected, but exists on the rights of one of the narrative points of view - on the rights of the point of view of a character who chooses for himself one or another of the existing genres. At the same time, the short story itself expresses the author's point of view, thereby summing up, keeping both the story and the narrator in his field of vision at the same time. Narrators disagree, conflict. The miller, raging drunk, confuses the order and breaks in with his obscene fable about the old carpenter, his young wife and her ardent admirers. This story stung the majordomo, who had once been a carpenter in his youth, and he responded with a no less acute case about a miller carried out by schoolchildren.

Who better than a Batian weaver knows a lot about marital affairs, and her story opens a cycle of four short stories about marriage. One of the knights of the Round Table, as punishment for the offense he inflicted on the girl, will either answer the queen's question or die. The question is: "What does a woman prefer over everything?" He was given a year to think. He wanders, despairs, but then he met a "nondescript, nasty old woman" who says that she will teach him the right answer if he promises to fulfill her first wish. There is no way out, he agrees. The prompted answer turns out to be correct: "... power is dearest to a woman / Above her husband ..." The knight is saved, but from the fire he falls into the frying pan, since the only and unshakable desire of the "nasty" old woman is to have him as her husband. The knight cannot break this word and, groaning, goes to the marriage bed, but here a miracle of transformation awaits him: for loyalty to the word he is rewarded by his wife, who turned out to be young, beautiful, rich and so reasonable that the knight has no choice but to obey her will.

Among the lessons given to the knight there is this: "He is noble, in whom there is nobility, / And nobleness without him is ugliness." This is said in response to his reproaches that he, a noble knight, will have to marry a woman of low birth. And if the radical feminist position of the Batian weaver in matters of marriage is disputed by subsequent narrators (for example, a student following Boccaccio, who tells about the virtuous Griselda, or a merchant), then this humanistic wisdom does not separate, but brings them together. It crowns a plot that, at least formally, belongs to chivalric literature. It is not the only one in the collection where the courtly tradition, mastered by the novelistic word, becomes part of the national culture. Chaucer's collection opens with a novella of the knight, paying homage to the chivalric novel as the most common and popular narrative form that preceded it. However, the "General Prologue" itself has a beginning reminiscent of courtesy with its spring beginning: nature awakens, people awaken and go on a pilgrimage.

Whan that April with his showres soote

The droughte of March hath perced to the root...

(When April rains heavily

He loosened the earth, blown up by sprouts ...)

Famous lines, for they begin poetry in modern English. However, not yet quite modern: on Middle English requiring effort from the modern reader, and even translation. The words are mostly already familiar, but their spelling and pronunciation was different, archaic: whan - when, soote – sweet, hat – has, perced – pierced. The language, which seems archaic today, but for the first readers, is probably bold to the point of surprise, striking with neologisms and the ability to say anything at ease. With his stories, Chaucer moved from the court chambers to the tavern, which forced him to update his narrative style, but this does not mean that he adopted the style familiar to the tavern. He approached the listeners, but he assumed in them the ability to approach his level, to make a cultural breakthrough.

He helps them in this, allowing a variety of people to learn their experience, their point of view in their stories. Researchers discuss why Chaucer's short stories are so unequal: rather helpless, boring next to brilliant ones. It is assumed that Chaucer mastered the skill of recreating characters so much that, when narrating, he reincarnates, at least in part, in the person to whom he entrusted the word, proceeds from his capabilities. Of course, the possibilities of each do not remain without proper evaluation. Harry Bailey is a rather strict judge, at least he does not tolerate boredom. Many get it from him, but others are not silent. The knight pleaded, exhausted under the burden of the tragic biographies with which the monk would regale them. Chaucer himself, with his courtly story about Sir Topas, was not allowed to complete the short story:

"I swear on the cross, that's enough! No strength! -

Ears withered from such chatter.

Stupid I have never heard nonsense.

And ts people must be mad,

Who likes these dogs."

It remains not entirely clear why Harry Bailey became so enraged: either from the descriptive lengths preceding the exploits themselves, or from the style in which Chaucer narrates his hero somewhat parodically, resorting here (in digression from the heroic couplet of most short stories) to doggerels - a multi-layered line, common in humorous poetry. In any case, the impression remains that the chivalric stories themselves have not lost interest, and the story of the knight who took the floor first, in contrast to Chaucer's parodic narration, was a success:

When the knight finished his story,

Both young and old among us

Approved all his invention

For nobility and skill.

Apparently, the story of the rivalry between the cousins, the princes of Thebes, Palamon and Arsita, for the hand of the beautiful Emilia, which is a fluent arrangement of Boccaccio's Tezeida, and similar courtly plots for Chaucer himself did not already have the charm that they acquired in the eyes of less sophisticated audience of pilgrims. The high poetic tradition descended into the sphere of mass taste, where it existed for a long time, already at the end of the Renaissance, having managed to drive Dop Quixote crazy.

Chaucer is attentive to other people's tastes, to someone else's word as M would say. M. Bakhtin; without this quality, he would not have become one of the creators of a new narrative genre, already completely open colloquial diversity. Chaucer does not adhere to the spirit of the Middle Ages authoritative word, indisputable and unique under any circumstances. His morality and wisdom are situational, even if they are based on the authority of faith, since they sound from human lips, are mediated by the spoken word. For example, in the knight's story, one of his rival friends, Arsita, dies, and Palamon gets Emilia, but how can one move from grief to new joy? The wise man Aegeus appears and teaches:

"What is this world but a valley of darkness,

Where, like wanderers, do we wander?

For rest, death is given to us by God.

He talked about this a lot,

All in order to enlighten people,

Make them feel better soon.

The medieval Christian picture of the world is rather boldly offered not as absolute truth, but only as necessary and useful in this moment comfort. In Chaucer's transmission, traditional opinions, plots, and even genres sound completely different, because they are complicated by new speech material that modifies traditional characters and stable relationships.

Once upon a time, in the years of his youth, Chaucer translated into English the courtly Romance of the Rose. Among the short stories in the collection "Canterbury Tales" there is an arrangement reminiscent of another medieval romance- about Lisa. This is not a courtly, but a satirical animal epic. His episode is the story of the chaplain about the failed kidnapping of Chanticlar's rooster by the insidious Fox. Taken by itself, this episode could be considered a scene in the spirit of fabliau, suggesting a moral conclusion. Formally, it is - an instruction against flatterers. However, in the course of events, considerations were sounded much deeper and more personal. Everyone drew their own conclusions, reasoned, sometimes, together with the author, embarking on the most complex speculations, for example, about free will, or together with the well-read Chanticleer (who had a warning about danger in a dream), recalling prophetic dreams from ancient authors.

Loaded with humanistic erudition, the fablio's plot only superficially retains the need for a final moral, naive and flat compared to what has already been heard. Increasingly, what becomes narratively important is not the direct path to instruction, but deviations from this path. The story actually begins with them, when, before introducing Chanticlear, the narrator sets out in detail the life circumstances of his mistress, a poor widow - a household coloring of the plot. Then, in the most unexpected way, life is replaced by the colors of humanistic education, it is not known (and it doesn’t matter) how they decorated this poultry yard. The plot does not require special motivations in its conditionality, only its justification has changed: before the plot was an occasion to tell an edifying story, now it has become an occasion show the person talking.