- The Monk's Prologue and Tale
The Monk's Tale is one of "
The Canterbury Tales " byGeoffrey Chaucer .The tale is a collection of seventeen short stories, exempla, on the theme of
tragedy . The tragedies of the following people are included in the tale:Lucifer , Adam,Samson ,Hercules , Nebuchadnezzar,Belshazzar ,Zenobia ,Pedro of Castile ,Peter I of Cyprus ,Bernabò Visconti , Ugolino of Pisa,Nero ,Holofernes , Antiochus,Alexander the Great ,Julius Caesar andCroesus .The majority of the tale is thought to have been written before the rest of the Canterbury Tales with only the four most recent people within the tale added when it was given to the Monk to tell. It may have be written in the
1370s shortly after Chaucer returned from a trip toItaly but thetragedy of Bernabò Visconti must have been written after1385 for this is when he died. The basic structure for the tale can be found inGiovanni Boccaccio 's "Concerning the Falls of Illustrious Men" and the tale of Ugolino of Pisa comes fromDante .The monk in his prologue claims to have a hundred of these stories in his cell but the Knight stops him after only seventeen saying that they have had enough sadness. The order of the stories within the tale is different in several early manuscripts and if the more modern stories were at the end of his tale it may be that the Knight did not interrupt merely through boredom. As it says of the Knight in line 51 of the
General Prologue ::At Alisaundre he was, whan it was wonne.
If the Knight was at the capture of
Alexandria then he was probably part of thecrusade organised byPeter I of Cyprus and hearing of the tragedy of his former military commander may have been what prompted him to interrupt.Fact|date=April 2008Themes
Tragedy in The Monk's Tale is not that argued in Aristotle's Poetics (not yet recovered), but "the medieval idea that the protagonist is victim rather than hero, raised up and then cast down by the workings of Fortune." [Benson, Larry D. "The Cantebury Tales" in Riverside Chaucer. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986, p. 18.]
Style
The metrical form of the Monk's Tale is the most complex of all the pilgrim's: an eight-line stanza rhyming ababbcbc. There is usually a strong, syntaxical link between the fourth and fifth lines which some literary theorists feel prevents the stanza from breaking in half. This metrical style gives an elevated, spacious tone to the Monk's Tale that is not always evidenced in the diction. In fact, the language is often simple and direct except in those instances of moralizing, whether discussing God or Fortuna, when the vocabulary becomes weighter. [Cooper, Helen. The Canterbury Tales (Oxford guides to Chaucer). Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996, p.334-5.]
References
External links
* [http://www.librarius.com/canttran/monktrfs.htm Side by side modern translation of "The Monk's Tale"]
* [http://www.umm.maine.edu/faculty/necastro/chaucer/ct/mkt/ Modern Translation of the "Monk's Tale" and Other Resources at eChaucer]
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