Sophie Gee

And what he does is tell a story about a whole bunch of people who go to the pub and

try to oust one another to get to tell their life stories, end up back at the pub and don't really make it to the religious shrine at all, and also that it's a sort of second-tier religious shrine anyway.

And that is the brilliance of this poem because he then goes into a series of tales, and you can see it even in the prologue, where the depth of the characterisation, the tiny...

details of daily life, that these modest depictions of real lives and real desires and uncovering of people's hypocrisy and the cheating and the lying that goes on, not just in the church, but in the law and in the courts and in people's ordinary households, the way that people deceive themselves, but also the way that people can be incredibly loving and generous and compassionate and kind when you least expect it.

The

the places that joy comes from, the beautiful things that make us happy and the things that make us sad, all of that is what the Canterbury Tales are about.

And so at the end of the prologue, he has Harry Bailey say that the rules are that the person's going to win who telleth in this cast tales of best sentence and most solace.

And this is a very famous phrase in the Canterbury Tales, tales of best sentence and most solace.

So we don't use either of those words anymore, at least not in this context.

Sentence means moral meaning.

It means the kind of ethical and moral content of the story that's being told.

And solace obviously means solace, pleasure.

And what the host is saying by putting those two terms into a single sentence, sentence and solace, is that

Morality and pleasure, as far as literature is concerned, are on equal footing.

One isn't better than the other.

You're not supposed to be moral and not privilege pleasure.

You're not supposed to achieve solace by misrepresenting morality.

He's basically saying that literature has this kind of levelling quality.

It represents great literature, the story that's going to win the free dinner at the end.

It's going to represent morality and pleasure as they really are.