In Chaucer's Prologue to the Tales , characters named Harry Bailey, Roger, Huberd, Alice, John, and Madame Eglentyn, meet and tell stories on their annual pilgrimage to Canterbury. More important, though, Chaucer's Tales , like other narratives of the Middle Ages, introduced much more descriptive elements than are found in Anglo-Saxon stories. The emphasis is upon the identity of the characters and their actions rather than the details of their appearance or the colors of their clothes. The focus of Beowulf rests squarely upon the heroic exploits of male characters, while female characters play comparatively minor roles in the narrative. In The Canterbury Tales , however, Chaucer describes his characters in vivid detail and, of course, color becomes one of the most noticeable features.
Women often take center stage as main characters.
Alice, the wife of Bath, wears a broad red hat, for which she is easily remembered. Malory altered the prevailing Arthurian tradition by adding to the romance a touch of realism, presenting characters as realistic human beings motivated by ambition, greed, jealousy, and lust. The fall of the Round Table was inevitable due to the failure of human beings to maintain an ideal, much of the conflict turning inward as the characters struggle with their own ineptitude. His interest in the Middle Ages was an escape into an era which he believed was more noble than that of the late 1800s. Keats and Shelley, both prominent poets of the Romantic period, are alike in only a few ways.