The Canterbury pilgrims

Chapter 4: ACT FIRST

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About This Book

Set in late fourteenth-century England, the comedy assembles Chaucer as a participant and observer among a lively company of pilgrims and additional historical figures gathered at an inn before a shrine-bound journey. The drama presents a sequence of character sketches and comic set-pieces—tavern brawls, bargains over relics, songs, and diversions—while interweaving debates about piety, social custom, and religious reform. Acts and musical antiphons structure shifts from boisterous caricature to moments of reflection, and the ensemble dynamic exposes contrasting social types and tensions between ritual, politics, and personal folly.

ACT FIRST

“Bifel that, in that seson on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay

Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage

To Caunterbury, with ful devout corage,

At night was come into that hostelrye

Wel nyne and twenty in a companye

Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle

In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,

That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.”