“The Canterbury Tales” is Chaucer’s masterpiece and one of the monumental works in English literature. “The Canterbury Tales” is more than a mere collection of true-to-life pictures. Taking the stand of the rising bourgeoisie, Chaucer affirms men and women’s right to pursue their happiness on earth and opposes the dogma of asceticism preached by the church.
As a forerunner of humanism, he praised man’s energy, intellect, quick wit and love of life. His tales expose and satirize the evil of the time, as the degeneration of the noble（the Merchant’s Tale）, the heartlessness of the judge (the Doctor’s Tale) and so on.. With especially formidable force Chaucer attacks the corruption of the church. He lashes the whole body of the clergy in the tales of the Pardoner, the Canon—yeoman and the Friar. It’s only from between the lines of the passages describing the poor country parson who is called “a Lollard” by the host, and describing the studious Oxford scholar that we freed the author’s warm feeling. Their indifference to worldly wealth is emphasized by the author in sharp contrast with the greed and debauchery of all the other clerics. This gives us an impression that Chaucer’s political viewpoint bears some resemblance with that of John Wycliffe the leader of the Lollards, who preached reformation against the corruption of the Catholic Church. Living in a transitional period, Chaucer is not entirely devoid of medieval prejudices’. He is religious himself. There is nothing revolutionary in his writing, though he lived in a period of peasant rising. While rightly praising man’s right to earthly happiness, he sometimes likes to crack a rough joke and paint naturalistic pictures of sexual life. There are Chaucer’s weak points. But these are, however, of secondary importance compared with his achievement as a great poet and story-teller. Chaucer’s contribution to English poetry lies chiefly in the fact that he introduced from France the rhymed stanza of various types, especially the rhymed couplet of 5 accents in iambic meter (the “heroic couplet”) to English poetry, instead of the old Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.
Alliterative：头韵的，头韵体的 Verse：诗歌，诗文 Stanza:诗的一节
Couplet：对联，对句 Accent：重度音节
Iambic：抑扬格，短长格 Meter：韵律
heroic couplet：英雄偶句诗
2． Thomas More: 《Utopia》 短评：
Masterpiece:
Utopia: It comes from two Greek words meaning “no place, which was written in the form of a conversation between More and Hythloday, a returned voyager. It is divided into two books:
1) The 1 Book contains a long discussion on the social conditions of England.
2) The 2 Book describes an ideal communist society,Utopia,in detail.
ndst
Limitation
1) Though a great thinker, More was no revolutionary in the sense of wishing to arouse the people to start any revolutionary movement among the exploited classes. As he came from the upper section of the London merchants, he did not trust in the activities of the common people. “ All for the people but nothing by the people” was his watch-word.
2) More, living in a world based on handicraft production, was faced with the very real problem of social productivity. In his Utopia, he solved it partly by reducing the wants through the abolition of luxury and partly by the system of bondsmen, who were to do all the unpleasant jobs which free citizens would not willingly undertake, this system still retains the feature of class exploitation.
3) Living in the Middle Ages, More could see what was right and what was wrong, but he could never find at that time the means by which socialism could be realized.
Only after the birth of scientific socialism is it possible for man to realize the dream of More and other Utopian socialists.
弗里德里希·恩格斯（Friedrich Engels） 卡尔·马克思（Karl Marx）
3．Edmund Spenser (1552—1586)
Works:
1) The Shepherd’s Calendar:
It is a pastoral poem of 12 eclogues which was written in different metres and love is the dominant theme. Its publication marked the budding of the Renaissance flower in the Northern island of England. 2) The Faerie Queene: a long poem
① The dominating thoughts of it: nationalism, humanism and Puritanism
② The Spenserian stanza: a verse form consisting of 8 iambic pentameter lines followed by a ninth line of 6 iambic feet with the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc.
4．
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