Geoffrey Robertson

In Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" he uses various comedic devices to create comedy; most noticeably melodrama and farce. These devices are used excessively in order to repeatedly address serious matters in a light-hearted manner; Wilde does this to create humour as opposed to offending his audience. Wilde deliberately wrote the play in this manner as he was fully conscious that his audience consisted of upper class Victorians. Throughout the play, Oscar Wilde articulately…

The Canterbury Tales is the most famous work Geoffrey Chaucer ever wrote. Chaucer wrote an introduction to each of the characters in the Prologue and planned to follow with a story pertaining to the characters. Unfortunately, Chaucer was unable to finish each of the stories he planned, but of the tales he did finish, arguably the best known of these is The Knight’s Tale. The problem with this tale, however, is that the focus of the Knight’s Prologue contradicts the focus of his tale or more…

Franklin's purpose for writing the way to wealth was to emphasize that working hard will pay off in the long run Franklin wrote this document to delegate why he decided to write the poor Richard's almanac. He used the alias of an old man who analyzed and explained the logic of gaining and keeping wealth to those around him. The first main point Franklin addressed was that those that stay lackadaisical will never make it far in life. Franklin believed that those that put in the effort would be…

commonly seen and treated as less than their male counterparts, often lacking basic education and career options. Male authors from the fourteenth century often portrayed many patriarchal influences against women in their writing. Such was the case with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, since a majority of the characters were males expressing patriarchal ideology through their prologues and their tales. However, Chaucer also includes a female character that diverges from the patriarchal…

The Unexpected Dimensions of “Lanval” The time period spanning from the fall of Rome in the fifth century all the way to the end of the fifteenth century is what most refer to as the Middle Ages. This period in time lasted nearly a thousand years and with it many great works of literature came about. Some which are still studied in the modern day. These works were passed down orally from one generation to the next as many were illiterate, books at the time were mainly written in Latin, and only…

In The Canterbury Tales the Pardoner is a unique character that travels the land with ill intentions. The narrator describes his appearance as “This Pardoner had hair as yellow as wax…he had bulging eyeballs... His chin no beard had harbored, nor would harbor,Smoother than ever chin was left by barber.” This character appearance is quite normal, but what really sets his character apart from the others making his unique is his mental state and his occupation. The Pardoner job is to travel the…

Church is a central role that plays in a lot of people’s lives but money makes people ruin good things. The Canterbury tales has a lot of characters who aren’t very religious or lie about being religious. Church corruption is when is when people steal money or go to church for their own personal purpose. In the Canterbury tales the characters who are not religious or are apart of the church for personal gain are the Pardoner, The Monk, and the Friar. In the prologue of the Canterbury tales…

Written by Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales utilizes satire to generalize common ideas associated with the norms of English life, society, and people in the 1300s, which is also relevant to present-day. Specifically, the tales of the Physician and the Yeoman, in which both characters share a common love for wealth, support this claim. To this day, people of various backgrounds will engage in extreme measures to fulfill their greedy wants, even if their attempts results in failure. The…

Geoffrey Chaucer a unique way of showing human nature in The Canterbury Tales. He explains each character’s physical appearance and their morals in the General Prologue. In the General Prologue, Chaucer shows people that have good judgement, people with poor or bad judgement and how they conduct themselves around many people. Chaucer shows in the General Prologue that humans have different judgements on everyday life. A few characters that show good judgement include the Knight, the…

Geoffrey Chaucer was viewed as the father of English poetry and language even though his style was satirical and usually made up of nonsense. John Gower was hired by Richard II to make English into a more popular language by using poetry and was not afraid…