Canterbury Tales 2 - The Prologue Chart & Extra Credit Picture
"But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space, /Er that I ferther in this tale pace,
Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun /To telle yow al the condicioun
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me." Geoffrey Chaucer
The Prologue Chart and Extra Credit Picture: Ok - this is a very different lesson. For the first time - this isn't something that takes place in class (or it might if you have enough time to give the students time) but at home. I also want to disclose that in the old iteration of AwayToTeach - this Prologue Chart was by far the most popular handout on the site - in fact, I once found someone selling it on Teachers Pay Teachers. Oh well - like the pilgrims in Chaucer's story, our world is populated with all kinds.
Lesson Overview
The chart is designed to be filled out at home (and if you have time in class) by the students as they are reading "The General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales. There are an awful lot of characters in the prologue (and the Tales) - and the chart should help them clarify and focus their reading. It should also help them with the test that I give to check if they did their reading (and to see how much they were able to process).
Handout 1 - The Prologue Chart
The Prologue Chart Docx PDF
The Prologue Chart has all of the major characters from The Tales as well as a few of the more amusing minor ones. It has headings for the line numbers that character is found on, a place for a general description, their clothes (which is often - like the prioress - very telling), whether they are positive or negative representation of their profession (ah - we start to get into some serious stuff here), whether or not irony is present (pretty close to the last column but not always - an evil monk is different than an evil miller), Rank of Honor (this is the easiest - and hopefully the students catch on fast - Chaucer lists the pilgrims in the their rank of honor [and says so in the very beginning]), and finally a representative sentence of that pilgrim (ah - some thinking at last!)
Handout 2 - Blake EC Picture
The Blake EC Prologue Picture Docx PDF
What a fun Extra Credit - and also a great way to study the Prologue. William Blake (whom the students will encounter later during The Romantics Unit) made an incredible etching of all of The Canterbury Tales pilgrims. He also gives tons of clues as to who is who. For example, the greyhounds circling the Monk. The gap in the teeth of the Wife of Bath, etc. There is a space for the students to put the pilgrim names. Caution - I required that the students fill out this chart in my classroom with only their textbook in front of them (so they couldn't cheat). They could work with another student and get 75% of whatever EC I was giving out for completing it.
Links - Audio of the Prologue
The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - in Modern English - translation by Neville Coghill
The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - in Middle English - translation by Neville Coghill
Class Recordings (for registered members)
Audio
Video
The Canterbury Tale 3: The Prologue - A Discussion and a Group Work - For the last 11 years that I taught, we did the General Prologue together as a Discussion - first with my ever-present Lesson Notes and the last few years I also had Power Point slide (with lots of quotes - but not a Vertext) discussion. I think this is the right way to teach The General Prologue.
WHAT CAME BEFORE:
Thoughts on the Lesson
One really important aspect of these two charts is that they are TEXT-CENTERED. After my time as a student at The Folger Shakespeare Library (ah - what an incredible summer), I started incorporating centering the lesson on the actual text in everything I did.
I used to get kind of sad that this was the most downloaded lesson from my old AwayToTeach. I do think it is very useful for those students who want to study and keep their prologue and characters straight. I also used to ask that the students had it filled it out (or sometimes 1/2 way) in order to do the Group Work on The Prologue - which later became a Class Discussion.