In what does the General Prologue reflect Chaucer’s contemporary life ?

In what does the General Prologue reflect Chaucer’s contemporary life ?

Apart from its great poetical and literary merits, The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales forms a wonderful commentary upon English life in the Middle Ages. Dryden has beautifully remarked that Chaucer must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature because he has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the very manners and humours of the whole English nation in his age.

Not a single character has escaped him. Leguois says, "Chaucer...is truly the social chronicler of England at the end of fourteenth century. What he has given is a direct transcription of daily life, taken in the very act, and in its most familiar aspects." The same critic adds : "Chaucer's work is the most precious document for whoever wishes to evoke a picture of life as it then was." The fact is that Chaucer had intimate knowledge of the crosscurrents of English society of his time. His keen observation, vast study, extensive travel and variegated experience in the service of the state had familiarised him with the entire pageant of social life of those days. And perhaps it was with the intention of describing his boundless knowledge of men and manners that he conceived the plan of the Canterbury Tales which encompass every aspect of life in the fourteenth century England.

The group of pilgrims described in the Prologue is itself an unequalled picture of the Society of Chaucer's time. Here are some thirty persons belonging to the most different classes. There is a Knight lately come from the foreign wars, a man who has fought in Prussia and in Turkey, jousted in Tramisene, and been present at the storming of Alexandria. He is a high-minded gentle-mannered, knightly adventurer, type of the courteous, war-loving chivalry which was passing rapidly away. With him is his son, a young Squire, curly haired and gay, his short, white-sleeved gown embroidered like a mead with red-and-white flowers. He is ................TO GET COMPLETE STUDY MATERIAL JOIN NSOU ENGLISH COACHING

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