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Wednesday, May 18, 2016

The Wife of Bath's tale -summary


Students in the third class have studied The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer.
In particular, they've focused on The Wife of Bath. They've read the description made by Chaucer in the General Prologue.
They've also read the tale told by her and they 've been asked to make a summary of it and build up five sentences about the text.
Here's one of the summaries with the questions:
The Wife of Bath’s tale

Questions:

1.   Why does Queen Guinevere punish the knight?
2.   What is the punishment?
3.   According to the hag, what do women most desire?
4.   What does the hag want the knight to do for her?
5.   At the end of the story, why does the hag decide to be both beautiful and faithful?

Summary:

Queen Guinevere punishes a knight for having rapen a maiden. His punishment is to discover what women most desire.
After a year, the knight hasn’t discovered yet what the Queen has asked him. When he goes to the court again, he sees an ugly old hag, who tells him that she will give him the answer if he grants her anything she wants.
The knight agrees. The hag says that women want to have sovereignty over their  husbands. Then, she asks the Queen to force the knight to marry her.
They get married but, on their wedding night, the knight doesn’t want to consummate the marriage because his wife is horrible, old and low-class. Therefore, the hag starts a speech about gentility, poverty and old age.
She offers the knight a choice: either he can have her or he can have a beautiful but not faithful wife. The knight turns the choice over his wife and she decides to be both because he has yielded sovereignty to her. Finally, they live happily together. 

 Here’s another summary




During King Arthur’s age, in a land of fairies and elves, there’s a young knight who one day sees a young woman walking along a river and rapes her.
To punish him, queen Guinevere and her ladies decide to make him find out women’s biggest desire and if he doesn’t, he’ll be beheaded.
So he starts his search: he finds out lots of answers but he can’t find two women who agree.
One year later he goes back to King’s Arthur’s court without an answer, but on his way he meets 24 fairies who are dancing: they disappear all of a sudden, to be replaced by an ugly old woman who accepts to tell him what women most desire, but only on one condition.
He has to promise to please her. He accepts, so the old lady tells him that women want to have control over their husbands.
After that, the hag wants him to fulfil his promise: he has to marry her. But during the wedding night he doesn’t want to go on with her because he thinks she’s ugly, old and poor.
The hag tells him to choose between an ugly but faithful wife and a young but unfaithful one. He asks his wife to make a choice and it means that he accepts to give his wife sovereignty over him.
That’s how he ends up having a beautiful and faithful woman and living with her happily ever after.

QUESTIONS
Which punishment do the Queen and her ladies decide to give the knight?

Who does the knight meet on his way to King’s Arthur’s court?

What is women’s biggest desire?

What does the hag want the knight to do?

What choice does the knight make?



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