ABSTRACT
Undoubtedly the compositional periods of the Legend and the Canterbury Tales at some point coincided. The Canterbury Tales has learnt from the structural problems encountered in the evolving of the serial-episodic plot of the Legend. The Tales has all the means fictionally of coming to a controlled, complete conclusion without the obligation of reproducing or fulfilling the exact terms of the ‘compact’ made in the General Prologue. The Tales also derives another very important structural element from the Legend as it stands in both versions. This is the invention of a serial plot structure in a suspended form. All Chaucerian criticism holds a priori that the Tales exists in an unfinished state; that its proper completion was forestalled by Geoffrey Chaucer’s death. Although no single more-or-less ‘complete’ manuscript gives the final, definitive order of the tales, yet the work provides with the means of coming to at least a reasonable or arguable version of that order.
