Idealism in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale and Shakespeare's Sonnets
This paper examines the theme of idealism as expressed in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales and William Shakespeare's love sonnets (Sonnets 18, 116, and 130). It argues that both authors, though writing in different centuries and genres, share a commitment to idealism while employing distinct methods. Chaucer channels his idealism through social satire and religious criticism, using the Pardoner's confession to expose corruption and hypocrisy within the Church. Shakespeare, by contrast, pursues idealism through Romantic imagery, portraying love in its purest, most enduring form across three sonnets that progress from idealized beauty to philosophical constancy to imperfect but genuine devotion.
- Introduction: Idealism in Early English Literature: Chaucer and Shakespeare share idealism across centuries
- Chaucer's Pardoner and the Corruption of Faith: Pardoner exposes Church corruption and hypocrisy
- Religion, Hypocrisy, and Social Criticism in The Canterbury Tales: Canterbury Tales critiques corrupt religious society
- Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Imagery of Ideal Love: Sonnet 18 idealizes woman through nature imagery
- Sonnet 116 and 130: Love Against Life's Imperfections: Love endures imperfection and life's changes
- Conclusion: Two Visions of Idealism: Contrasting methods converge on shared idealism
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper establishes a clear comparative framework early on, identifying idealism as the shared thematic thread between two very different authors and aligning each author with a distinct expressive method — social satire versus Romantic imagery.
- The analysis grounds claims in specific textual evidence, quoting directly from the Pardoner's confession and from each of the three sonnets, which prevents the argument from becoming purely abstract.
- The treatment of Sonnet 130 is particularly effective: by acknowledging its apparent departure from idealism before arguing that it actually achieves ideal love through imperfection, the paper demonstrates nuanced thinking rather than forcing all texts into the same mold.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses comparative thematic analysis — it identifies a single unifying theme (idealism) and then traces how two authors express it differently. This technique requires the writer to hold both similarity and contrast in tension simultaneously, which is modeled clearly in the transitions between the Chaucer and Shakespeare sections.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a contextual introduction placing both authors historically, then states its thesis. It devotes the middle sections first to Chaucer — analyzing the Pardoner's role, the quoted confession, and Chaucer's broader social critique — before turning to Shakespeare and moving sequentially through Sonnets 18, 116, and 130 in ascending order of complexity. The conclusion synthesizes both authors' contrasting approaches to a shared ideal.
Introduction: Idealism in Early English Literature
Fifteenth- to sixteenth-century English literature is characterized by the expression of radical idealism, whether that idealism pertains to social issues or human emotions. Geoffrey Chaucer, well known for The Canterbury Tales, exemplified the English poet of his period (14th–15th centuries), demonstrating through his famous work his ideals on religion and the expression of faith. On a relatively similar vein, English playwright William Shakespeare (16th–17th centuries) reflected the same belief in idealism, this time in the form of expressing human emotions — most popularly evoked in his love sonnets (Sonnets 18, 116, and 130).
This paper examines the theme of idealism as reflected in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The analysis demonstrates how both works illustrate the prevalence of each author's ideals: for Chaucer, his ideals on what religion and the expression of faith should be; and for Shakespeare, how love is and should be.
While both poets share idealism as their dominant theme, each expresses it in his own distinct manner. Chaucer demonstrated the theme through real-life scenarios via his characters' narratives, whereas Shakespeare revealed his version of idealism through effective imagery.
Chaucer's Pardoner and the Corruption of Faith
Influenced by the ideology of idealism during his time, Chaucer reflected his ideals of Christianity and its followers through the Pardoner's Tale in The Canterbury Tales. Like the other tales in Canterbury, the Pardoner's Tale is a satire meant to criticize the society in which Chaucer lived. While some of the tales do not explicitly express his disagreement with the rampant corruption and hypocrisy within the Church and among its elements — the clergy and the laity — the Pardoner's Tale addresses these issues explicitly through the persona of the Pardoner.
The Pardoner's role, at first glance, acts as a bridge between the Church and the people: as a pardoner, he helps people be absolved of their sins through payments that are considered earnings of the Church. What sets him apart from the other pilgrims in Canterbury is his honesty in acknowledging that, despite being an agent of God, he is not untainted by the culture of corruption and hypocrisy already rampant within the Church and society. His candid recognition of his own faults is made explicit in the following lines from the Pardoner's Tale:
By this trick have I won, year after year,
An hundred marks since I was pardoner.
A stand like a clerk in my pulpit,
And when the ignorant people are set down, preach as you have heard before
And tell a hundred more false tales.
My hands and my tongue go so quickly
That it is joy to see my business
Of avarice and of such cursedness —
For my intention is only to make profit,
And not at all for correction of sin.
From this passage, it is clear that Christianity is used as a tool to "legalize" acts of corruption such as those the Pardoner has been committing. The religion also serves to cultivate a culture of hypocrisy — one that has developed over the years as a result of the Church's rigid conservatism and strictness in imposing rules and traditions upon its followers. The Pardoner acts as a devil's advocate to both the Church and its followers. As a pardoner, he helps people obtain absolution from their sins in exchange for money, allowing them to return to their hypocritical ways once they have secured that absolution. For the Church, the Pardoner acts as a collector who solicits money from the people, perpetuating the culture of corruption that has made the clergy ever more powerful, rigidly conservative, and unreasonable in its actions and resolutions regarding orthodox behavior and attitudes.
Religion, Hypocrisy, and Social Criticism in The Canterbury Tales
From the Pardoner's Tale, Chaucer communicates to his readers his ideals of a religion that possesses integrity and morality. For the poet, Christianity must be free from the cultures of corruption and hypocrisy that prevailed during his time. Ideally, a religion, in order to be respected and followed by the people, must maintain a clean image — one that reflects the truth of its teachings, wherein its religious principles are embodied by those who make up the Church.
It is also through Canterbury that Chaucer was able to portray the theme of idealism as mirrored in the lives of the people of his times. With the pilgrims representing individuals from all walks of life in 15th-century English society, Canterbury acts as a mouthpiece for every member of Chaucer's society, giving readers a window into the kind of world that existed during that period. Each tale narrated in Canterbury — like the Pardoner's Tale — was Chaucer's way of setting reality against the ideals of what a learned and religious society should be: specifically, by portraying what a society should not be when governed economically, socially, and politically by a religious institution like the Church.
Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Imagery of Ideal Love
While Chaucer's method of illustrating the theme of idealism is through social criticism and the mirroring of realities in English society, Shakespeare demonstrated the theme through Romanticism, adhering to the purest sense of expressing idealism. In his illustration of feelings of love and of love itself, Shakespeare used effective imagery to show how love can remain pure and untainted — principally through romantic imagery and his reflections on what love and loving should be.
The most famous among Shakespeare's sonnets, Sonnet 18 is an example of an individual's pure expression of love for a woman. In this sonnet, Shakespeare used nature as the vehicle for his imagery, centering primarily on how the woman's qualities are compared to "a summer's day." The poet goes further in expressing his love for the woman, idealizing her in such a way that makes her more lasting and beautiful than nature itself: "…everything that is beautiful will lose its beauty, / By chance or by nature's planned out course; / But your youth shall not fade, / Nor lose the beauty that you possess…" In Sonnet 18, idealism is demonstrated by depicting the woman as more perfect than Nature — and this perceived perfection is the result of the poet's love for her. The poem becomes a vehicle through which idealized love and Romanticism are illustrated explicitly by a poet-lover.
Conclusion: Two Visions of Idealism
While Chaucer's method of illustrating the theme of idealism is through social criticism and mirroring the realities of English society during his time, Shakespeare demonstrated the theme through Romanticism and a commitment to the purest expression of idealism. Both poets share idealism as a dominant feature of their works, yet each arrives at it by a different path: Chaucer through the exposure of religious corruption and the vision of a morally upright society, and Shakespeare through lyrical imagery that presents love — whether perfect or imperfect — as the highest and most enduring human truth. Together, their works reveal how idealism was a defining preoccupation of early English literary culture.
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