An Analysis of Geoffrey Chaucer's Unfinished Cook's Tale from a Realistic Point of View

The unfinished or very short Cook's Tale is an exception among the Canterbury Tales. This quality didnt make the author or later editors to dismiss it from the collection. Yet, it made the tale absent from almost all anthologies and caused it to suffer from the negligence of most critics and Chaucer scholars. However, both the narrator of the tale, who is a lower class Londoner living or working in the crowded city center, and the Tale, which deals with the corruption of lower class Londoners, can be significant from a realistic point of view. The Cook's Tale follows The Miller's and the Reeve's tales, and all three, intertextually linked, are fabliaux. This is in sharp contrast with the romantic and highly idealized Knight's Tale. This contrast is the first manifestation of realistic literature in the Canterbury Tales, and perhaps the whole of Chaucer's works. Indeed, it is this quality of Chaucer that makes the work his masterpiece.