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(a) SHORT VERSE
In his Retraction [149], commonly printed at the end of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer refers to ’many a song and many a leccherous lay’ which he has written over the years. While the impression of prolific output created by this phrase fits with similar phrases used for Chaucer by Cower and Lydgate, it is hardly borne out by the relatively few short poems (twenty-two, not all strictly songs or lecherous) which have survived and are generally agreed to be Chaucer’s. The answer may lie in part with the very similarity of phrase – it seems to have been common to refer to a poet as having written many such short pieces and indeed Chaucer makes use of this habit when referring to the ’manye layes/Songes, compleintes, roundels, virelays’ Aurelius composes in The Franklin’s Tale, as Scattergood points out (Minnis
1995:455). This appears to be an entirely positive reference, in contrast to the much-mocked Absolon of The Miller’s Tale, who merely sings the songs, he does not write them. It may also be that such short pieces were regarded as enjoyable, but essentially ephemeral and so not worth recording.
When writing these poems Chaucer may have had a specific audience in mind: a group made up of court and civil servants like himself. Patricia Kean put forward this view in 1972 and is supported by Scattergood, who refers to them as ’coterie poems’ with in jokes and references (’Minnis 1995: 457). They are relatively overlooked by critics, although Laiia Z. Gross points out that, after prolonged neglect, some of them are beginning to receive attention (Riverside: 631-3). Much of the neglect is attributed to the fact that several of them (notably ’A Complaint to his Lady’ and An ABC’) are clearly exercises in verse form and adaptation or close translation. Robinson termed them ’exercises in conventional styles of composition’, a view Gross endorses, but without therefore dismissing them, while David’s reading of An ABC’, prevents us regarding it as primarily translation, however adept (David 1982). Indeed, as Ruud (Ruud 1992) and Scattergood (Minnis
1995: 455-512) illustrate, these poems reward attention. Moreover, they provide a good introduction to a Chaucer beyond that associated with the Canterbury Tales by illustrating his interest in the dominant poetic forms of his time, which he both copied and adapted, and by providing succinct examples of some of the major traditions, such as the courtly love vocabulary and devotional verse, which surface again embedded in his major works.
’Womanly Noblesse’ might be taken as an instance of such exploration of a popular theme. Although the Riverside Chaucer places it among
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Chaucer’s lyrics, this attribution has been challenged, and is questioned by Pace and David (Pace and David 1982: 179-86). The title, invented by Skeat in the 1890s, is rather misleading as the poem does not focus on womanly ’noblesse’, nor, indeed, on any other single quality but is an expression of love service in general terms. Its main interest lies in the technical feat of writing 32 lines rhyming only on ’-aunce’, ’-esse’ or ’-hede’, thus epitomising Robinson’s description of the lyrics as poetic
experiments.
It is impossible to date these poems precisely. While some of the shorter poems are undoubtedly early, with ’An ABC’ being probably the earliest complete text surviving, Chaucer continued to write lyrics throughout his life, some in comic vein, some still as experiments in form and style. Although there are some aspects which suggest the influence of contemporary Italian authors (such as Dante and Boccaccio [40]), which are generally agreed to indicate a later date of composition, many of even the later lyrics show an abiding French influence, and remind us that ballades, roundelays, complaints and other French forms, as well as the topic of love, throve throughout the fourteenth century. The most informative edition to date is Pace and David for the Variorum Chaucer (Pace and David 1982).
(i) Three early short poems: ’To Rosemounde’, ’An ABC’, ’The Complaint Unto Pity’
Chaucer was the Erst to adapt the French ballade form to English verse. This ballade is distinct from the English minstrel ballad form (as exemplified in The Tale of Sir Topas) being a poem of three eight-line stanzas, each rhyming ababbcbc, where the last line forms a common refrain for each stanza. The poem might then be rounded off with a separate ’envoy’ addressed to a lady or to a prince.
’To Rosemounde’ ’
The simplest, and possibly earliest, example of this form is ’To Rosemounde’. It consists of three stanzas, but has no envoy. Despite the name in its title, it is possible that it was not written specifically for a woman called Rosemond, as the name was to some degree typical for a love poem, much as Celia and Sylvia were to become in later centuries. Literally, Rosemond means either ’rose of the world’ or ’rosy mouthed’ and as such could be taken to signify the beauty of any woman. There is a theory that this ballade was in fact written for Isabelle de Valois, Richard II’s seven-year old bride who came to London
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. 1396 The fact that the poem begins with the word ’Madame’ can
nnort this theory, as ’madame’ was the formal title given to the eldest
, ughter of the house of Valois. However, it was also a common enough
f rm of polite address, and other scholars believe this ballade belongs
an earlier period of Chaucer’s writing, mainly because of its
simplicity-
That simplicity is an integral part of its charm. The language is typical of conventional love poetry as the woman’s eyes are compared to crystal and her cheeks to rubies. The idea of love as a form of sickness, for which only the beloved has the cure, is hinted at in line seven, where seeing Rosamounde dance ’is an oynement unto my wounde’. However, the refrain of this particular ballade refers to the commonly bewailed heartlessness of women. ’Though ye to me ne do no daliaunce’ asserts that she ignores the poet, ’daliaunce’ implying the friendly encouragement of attentions that the poet says he desires, but which he will continue to do without, regardless. In thus ignoring him, Rosamounde is acting in a perfectly conventional manner, one which we will see again in Criseyde’s initial response to Troilus [98], and indeed the poet seems not particularly disheartened by the state of affairs. A suggestion of comedy even enters into the similes invoked in the final stanza which begins ’Nat never pyk walwed in galauntyne/ As I in love am walwed and ywounde’. The image of a fish smothered in aspic to be served cold may be an accurate representation of how it feels to be devoted to one who overlooks you, but it is not without humour. Perhaps such overstatement is appropriate for a verse cornposed for a grand but nonetheless young girl. A more serious note returns in the comparison to Tristram, the legendary knight famed for his love of Isolde. Such brief allusion is typical of courtly verse, and could be simply a reference to lovers renowned for their mutual devotion, but here, too, there is an appropriate element if the verse was indeed composed for Isabelle, in that these two lovers met when Tristram was escorting Isolde to her wedding to King Mark.
The poem ends with a typical assertion of continued devotion, regardless of the lady’s behaviour, as the poet declares himself Rosamounde’s ’thral’, her slave, thus ending the ballade in the same conventional tones as it began.
’An ABC’
while ’To Rosamounde’ is a ballade of courtly love, An ABC’ is a devotional poem which uses the same rhyme scheme (though without the refrain) and ten-syllable (decasyllabic) line with five stresses or accents.
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This line pattern (iambic pentameter) adapts the eight syllable (octosyllabic) line of the French ballade form. It had rarely been used in English before, but was to become a favourite with Chaucer. ’An ABC’ itself is a close translation of a prayer to Mary which appears in the long allegorical poem, Pelerinage de la Vie Humame (first brought out
1331) by Guillaume de Deguilleville. Each verse begins with a different letter of the alphabet (j, u, and w are omitted, probably because the capital forms of these letters would be identical to I and V or W respectively) and contains a different image or allegory appropriate to the Virgin as the poet petitions Mary for help. It is likely that this poem belongs to an early point in Chaucer’s writing career, when he was experimenting with poetic forms. On this basis Pearsall places it in the
1370s (Pearsall 1992:83) but Thomas Speght (reprinted in Brewer 1969) records a tradition that Chaucer composed it at the request of John of Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche, for her to use as a prayer. There is no support for this tradition, and it may well reflect Speght’s desire to strengthen Chaucer’s links with the Lancastrians.
’An ABC’ is usefully read in conjunction with ’The Complaint Unto Pity’, which is also allegorical, but is entirely secular. Both texts draw on the same two lexical areas, law and courtly love, in a way which illustrates how much overlap there was between terms used for secular and religious spheres of life. Thus in An ABC’ the ’cruel adversaire’ of the first stanza is not only sin, the enemy, but also, it becomes apparent, a legal adversary, while in ’Unto Pity’ ’crueltee’ becomes personified and is not only Pity’s opposite (’contraire’, 64), but also her opposition. In each text a further allegorical level is also in play. The cruel adversary of ABC’ is Sin in the abstract, who brings the legal action (accioun,
20) and is also the poet’s own ’perilous langour’ (7) which has prevented him fulfilling his religious duties and allowed him to fall into a state of sin. In ’Unto Pity’ Pity, whose death is being lamented, is not just the general, abstract quality of pity, but the pity in a particular lady’s character. As her mercy and pity to the poet die, her cruelty (also personified) takes over, condemning the poet to bewail his fate, while yet allowing the lady to retain her
Beauty, Lust, Jolyte, Assured Manner, Youth and Honeste, Wisdom, Estaat, Drede, and Governaunce
(39-41)
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which, with ’Bounce’, surround Pity’s hearse and have taken on the aspect of conspirators with the word ’Confedred’ (42). All of these Qualities are expected elements in the character of the courtly lady, so we need not feel the text relates any actual or personal experience on the part of Chaucer.
The conventional aspect of this vocabulary is reinforced through comparison with ’An ABC’ where the Virgin is also described in terms appropriate for ladies in court poetry. Thus Mary is ’Ladi bryghte’ (181) and ’ful of merci’ (173) whose ’grace’ and ’socour’ (156) are sought, just as Pity’s mercy is implored (’Unto Pity’ 92). It might also be added that in each text the poet is hoping to influence the lady’s actions by invoking what she is – if she is a true lady, or the Lady of Heaven, she is bound to act with mercy and charity. Both Mary and Pity are intercessionary figures to whom the afflicted poet flees, seeking help in adversity while simultaneously promising undying service. The theme of continued service is similar to the end of To Rosamounde’, with one major difference: there the poet is unconcerned about getting any actual response – he merely needs an excuse for the poem. In contrast, reciting An ABC’ is itself an act of unending devotion: the move from Z to A (Zachariah to Adam) in the final stanza completes the circle of the poem by returning us to the beginning of the prayer and thus continuing the process of asking for Mary’s benign intervention. In ’Unto Pity’, however, things are less sanguine as the poet is left with the somewhat poorer consolation of his unending service to a lady whose death he has just lamented.
(ii) Other complaints: of Venus, Anelida and Arcite, of Mars, to his Purse
The rather down-beat ending of ’Unto Pity’ is exactly what one would expect of a Complaint, which was more a tone than a form. Chaucer was the first to use the term in English, using it to cover a variety of lyrics which expressed emotion, without expecting any redress. The complaint is thus a peculiarly self-contained genre, which refers to a sequence of events without fully describing them. Two of the shorter Poems conform to this pattern: A Complaint Unto his Lady’ (sometimes called ’ A Ballade of Pity’) which may be a collection of fragments rather than a complete poem, and The Complaint of Venus’. This is a tree-standing love complaint with an envoy which reveals it to be a cl°se adaptation of some ballades by Granson [41].
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’The Complaint to Venus’
The structure of ’Venus’ is a triple ballade with envoy; that is, three sections of three eight-line stanzas and a final, ten-line, stanza. The verse form is fairly tight, the stanzas of each section are closely linked through their common rhymes, patterned ababbccb, and shared final line. This requires a lot of rhyming words, a trick easier in French than English, as the envoy remarks: ’rym in Englissh hath such skarsete’ (80). However, the self-referential effect of this rhyme-scheme suits the tone of complaint – Venus has no wish to change her situation, merely to express it. The discontents of love are acknowledged, but contained in the central section of the poem, where its topsy-turvy effects are described only to be dismissed in the third section, where Venus returns to thinking of her lover and his perfection. Although this inversion theme is a commonplace of love poetry, it is particularly appropriate here, since Chaucer has changed the speaker from the male of Granson’s ballades to female, while yet retaining a close rendition of Granson’s text. The fact that he could do this without changing too much illustrates the conventional nature of lovers’ praise, but also raises the question of why he bothered. Some critics have found an answer in the manuscript rubric which records the belief that the poem was a riposte to ’The Complaint of Mars’ for ’my lady of York’ (Riverside:
1079) and that the two poems refer to a scandalous liaison between John Holland and one of Gaunt’s daughters (possibly Isabella of York). However, this view has been challenged, as has the idea that the two complaints are linked, leaving ’Venus’ to be read as a self-contained
text.
While such self-containedness is fitting for the complaint genre, Chaucer rarely used it in this pure form. More often he prefaced the complaint with a narrative poem relating the events which gave rise to it (e.g.’The Complaint of Mars’ and Anelida and Arcite} or embedded it in a longer poem (e.g. Troilus’s complaint in Troilus, I: 400-34).
Anelida and Arcite
Anelida and Arcite is an early and possibly incomplete experiment with this combination and is assumed to be Chaucer’s first use of Boccaccio’s Teseida [40], from which is drawn much of the invocation and background, involving Theseus’ return to Athens and the subsequent war between Athens and Thebes. Chaucer returned to this material later for The Knight’s Tale, a fact which has contributed to Anelida and Arcite being largely regarded as a failure, redeemed only by the impressive
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etic experimentation of the complaint itself. Scattergood, however, fter dismissing the attempts to link it with some court scandal (also H’srnissed by DiMarco, the Riverside editor) defends the whole poem, sserting that it lives up to its grand opening in presenting the kind of love story found in classical epic (Minnis 1997: 469-73). Certainly it has its interest, particularly when read next to The Legend of Good Women MOO] and Troilus and Criseyde [89]. In this tale it is the man who is deceitful and unequivocally so. Arcite is introduced as ’double in love’ (87) and out to deceive Anelida. She is deceived, but despite trusting him utterly, still acts as a lady ought: ’But nevertheles ful mykel besynesse/Had he er that he myghte his lady wynne’ (99-100). She is thus a contrast to Dido, whose quick (but reciprocated) love is told in both The House of Fame (239-387) [73] and The Legend of Cood Women (924-1367) [104]. Arcite has no affection for Anelida but enjoys his power over her until his urge for change (’newfanglenesse’) takes over and he courts another, far less receptive, woman. Here the narrative is interrupted by Anelida’s metrically complex complaint. The pattern of the complaint is detailed in the Riverside edition (Riverside: 993 n211-
350) as Chaucer ranges across a variety of rhyme schemes and stanza lengths, while yet retaining a broadly symmetrical shape and offering some fine poetry. Three lines of elusive imagery in the fourth stanza describing Arcite’s fickleness stand out in particular:
i ’f \ • i *
For though I hadde yow to-morrowe ageyn, )••”•’
I myghte as wel holde Aperill fro reyn ; • ’
As holde yow, to make you be stidfast.
(308-10) ”’” ’ ”’ ’’
i *
Although one stanza of resumed narrative exits after the complaint, there is no more than that and the authenticity of this one stanza has been questioned. It is possible that Chaucer intended to end the poem with the complaint, thus following the same pattern as ’Unto Pity’ and ’The Complaint of Mars’. Lee Patterson prefers this view, adding that by ending with Anelida’s complaint Chaucer leaves his protagonist held within her historical story (Patterson 1991: 78).
I i , • ’The Complaint of Mars’ %
Like Anehde and Arcite, ’The Complaint of Mars’ assumes we know something of the tale that provides the poem’s context. That is the love affair between Venus and Mars, which is discovered by Phoebus, who tells Vulcan (Venus’s husband). In the Ovid original, Vulcan sets
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an elaborate trap for the two, which results in them being trapped in a net, caught in the act. Chaucer omits this aspect, but the reference to the two being eager to avoid Phoebus reminds his audience of it. As well as retelling Ovid, the poem also describes fairly accurately the conjunction of the planets Venus and Mars of April 1385, thus providing a likely year of composition. In the poem Mars gives the date of 12 April (139), while the proem declares the story and complaint to have been sung by birds on St. Valentine’s day (probably the Genoese celebration, held in May [77]). Whether it was actually written then or soon after, it attests Chaucer’s interest in astronomy, an interest which the audience is expected to share: Mars won Venus ’As wel by hevenysh revolucioun/ As by desert,’ (29-30) and Venus is seen to move ’as faste in her weye/ Almost in oo day as he dyde in tweye’ (69-70) while the fact that the lovers must part as Phoebus (the sun) appears dramatises the fading of the planets at dawn as well as the passing of the planetary conjunction. The complaint proper makes no reference to astronomy, being instead a lament about the misfortunes of love in five parts, each with a particular theme. It is prefaced with a single
stanza which sums up the essence of the complaint form:
r
The ordre of compleynt requireth skyfully ,
That yf a wight shal pleyne pitously, Ther mot be cause wherfore that men pleyne; Or men may deme he pleyneth folily , ., ,
And causeles; alas, that am not I. /1(1 (
Wherfore the ground and cause of al my peyne, ,,,”,»’,”,, , So as my troubled wit may hit atteyne, I wol reherse; not for to have redresse, -’ ’
But to declare my ground of hevynesse .,, , ,
(155-63) ”’’’”
It is a nice touch that this is an occasion on which one might wish to be regarded as having no grounds for complaint. Instead, not coming in for that kind of criticism becomes a further matter for regret and leads into the description of Mars’ distress. The complaint and the poem ends with an appeal to the gathered audience in which knights and scholars are asked to sympathise with him, while ladies empathise with Venus and lovers with the situation as a whole.
’The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse’
The turning outward of the poem towards its audience seen in ’Mars’ is used again in this last complaint definitely attributed to Chaucer
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which was written late in his life. Usually dated 1399 this complaint is presumed to be addressed to Henry IV, recently crowned and here reminded of Chaucer’s need for payment. It is a true complaint in that it has no preceeding narrative and, while making the reasons for the complaint: clear, does not explicitly ask for redress. That is the job of the envoy, which some believe may have been added later, presumably when Chaucer sent the poem to the new king. The poem is wryly humorous, with the purse taking the place of his lady and Chaucer mourning its lightness. The refrain line, ’Beth hevy ageyn, or elles mot I dye’, exploits the literal meaning of words frequently used metaphorically in love poetry: ’hevy’ would be an undesirable aspect in a lover, where it would mean ’sad’, but is a most welcome sign in a purse, and without money Chaucer will literally die.
The envoy reveals the politic side of Chaucer: to describe Henry as a conqueror is no more than accurate, as is his right to the throne through blood-line. To add ’free eleccioun’ is rather pushing the point, but is undoubtedly flattering. In all, the poem, with its graceful rhymes and clever exploitation of the language of both money and love, displays the skill of the mature poet returning to a favoured verse form.
(in) Boethian ballades and envoys
The Former Age’, ’Fortune’, ’Truth’, ’Gentilesse’ and ’Lak of Steadfastnesse’ form a group of poems usually termed ’Boethian’ because their themes are similar to those found in Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy Chaucer clearly read with interest and translated probably in the early 1380s [83]. The ballades themselves may have been written over quite a period of years (probably between the late 1380s and mid
1390s) and the influences present in them are not solely Boethian, as Chaucer also blended in elements from Virgil, Ovid and The Romance of the Rose, amongst others. Nonetheless, there is a certain common tone to these lyrics, perhaps because in them Chaucer is at his most straightforwardly reflective and socially critical.
.’The Former Age’
This ballade describes the mythical golden age before hardships of any kind entered the world. It was a common topic which influenced the Garden of Love motif in courtly love poetry, although in the latter the lack of work is due to affluence rather than contentment with one’s lot. Inevitably the ’former age’ was a time of simpler values, which is
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the aspect Chaucer develops through the poem as he embarks on a list of all the things people then did without. As Scattergood points out, many of these are the ’questionable benefits’ of fourteenth-century living (Minnis 1995: 487) including wine, dyed wool, and spices ground into wines or sauce galantyne, the very sauce which covers the fish of ’To Rosamonde’ [49]. The playful tone of that earlier lyric is hardly heard here as Chaucer expands the tradition of the central trope, that in simpler times there were no riches to give rise to greed and in turn to strife, in particular the strife which breeds in the halls of the affluent and the corridors of power. Jupiter is here mentioned as a symbol of wilful indulgence in lust, while Nimrod represents ambitious rulers. Such descriptions have led the poem to be read as harsh political satire directed at Richard, specifically between the years 1397-99, when he was particularly despotic, although his court was criticised at earlier dates too. However, the last three lines paint a bleak picture of actual life which reaches beyond specific historical referents:
1 X , >
’i For in oure dayes nis but covetyse • * ”•: – <>
Doublenesse, and tresoun, and envye, • .; i .. ’
Poyson, manslawhtre, and morder in sondry wyse. i
It is this tone which has led Scattergood to describe Chaucer’s attitude here as’pessimistic’(Minnis 1995: 489). :..” …
, j ’Lak of Stedfastnesse’
The general pessimism of ’The Former Age’ becomes particular in ’Lak of Stedfastnesse’ which focuses on how unreliable everyone has becomes in word and deed. It begins with referring back to a time when things were secure and a man’s word his bond. All that has been overthrown through greed and desire for power to such an extent that men are judged by their ability to oppress others. The third stanza expands the topic into a list of inversions, illustrating how the whole world has ’mad a permutacioun’ (19), which is not only a change but also a revolution, shifting, the poem says, from right to wrong, from truth to falsehood. The final stanza is an envoy addressed to Richard II, which might have been added at a later date, imploring him to reassert right rule. It is ironic that the terms in which this is couched hint at the very oppression criticised in the second verse: ’Shew forth thy swerd of castigacioun’ (26). The difference being that Richard is by right the one in the position to scold, though the envoy goes on to warn him to ’Dred God, do law, love trouthe and worthinesse’ (27).
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Debates over royal prerogative and objections to its abuse characterised the later part of Richard’s reign, especially the Parliament of 1386, which Chaucer attended as a representative for Kent. To a civil servant and one heavily reliant on royal grants and positions, the issues would have had a personal application which perhaps accounts for the earnestness of this poem.
’Fortune’
’Fortune’ likewise relates wider movements to the individual, but that may as easily result from the form of the poem as from any particular events in Chaucer’s life. It is written as a debate between a plaintiff and Fortune, and thus draws somewhat on complaint conventions. Its subtitle, ’Balades de Visage sanz Peinture’ (ballads of a face without paint), has given rise to some discussion. It could refer to the description of Fortune in Boethius as covered up to other people but revealed to the poet (Consolatio, II: pr. i), thus the poem reveals the picture of one who has never been portrayed, or it could suggest that the verse provides a naked picture of Fortune, without her benign side, here equivalent to make-up. It has also been suggested that the subtitle should in fact read ’deux visages’, thus linking it to the kind of dialogue poem written by Machaut [41] and termed ’balades a deux visages’ – between two people.
To rail against Fortune for bringing adversity, as the plaintiff does here, is a lost cause, since Fortune is by her nature unreliable. Frequently pictured with a wheel which she constantly revolves, the idea of fortune was one of change and instability: if you were up one day it was likely you would be down the next. This is the aspect of her referred to in The Knight’s Tale (Tales, I: 925 and 1235-43) [111] and in The House of Fame, where she is mentioned as Fame’s sister, and just as cavalier in doling out good or bad circumstances to people in general as Fame is in bestowing good or bad reputations on individuals (House: 1547) [74]. In this ballade, however, we are reminded of the benefits that even illfortune can bestow – primarily that of discovering who our true friends are. The image of Fortune holding up a mirror of truth is an unusual one which harks back to the notion of portraiture in the sub-title. However, the complainant asserts that it is his reason which allows him to distinguish the reflection of the true from the false, rather than it being simply a property of the mirror itself.
Throughout the poem, the plaintiff persists in defining Fortune only as bad luck, declaring that his self-sufficiency will see him through without her. In response she points out that in that case he has nothing
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to complain about (he who has sufficent, has enough), but also reminds him that she is as much the embodiment of good fortune as of bad. She is by definition changeable, and treats all people impartially in her unreliability. Although she has the last word, it is clear that the plaintiff remains unconvinced and in the envoy it seems that Fortune is aware of this as she seeks to stop his constant complaints by asking ’princes’ to ’releve him of his peyne’. This envoy makes the poem into an oblique begging letter, in which the ’three of you or tweyne’ may refer to the dukes of Lancaster, York and Gloucester, at least two of whom had to agree to any royal grant, after the ordinance of 1390. This allusion has been used to date the poem and to identify the ’beste frend’ of the second section as Richard II.
The theme of sufficiency which ’Fortune’ wields in defiance is offered as a more stoical consolation in Truth’. The envoy to this poem clearly refers to Philip de le Vache, a close friend of Chaucer who suffered badly in the upheavals of power of 1386-89, falling out of favour and losing his position and income. This envoy appears in only one manuscript, however, and may well have been added at a later date to add particular relevance to a pre-existing poem whose theme was already one of being content with one’s lot and the advantages of obscurity. The good counsel (’bon conseyl’) of the subtitle is not only philosophical but also Christian. The truth that will deliver him thus gradually becomes the truth of faith, as the reader of the poem is reminded that this life is like a journey through a potentially hostile land (’wildernesse’) to our true home in the next world. The metaphors of pilgrim and driven beast reflect the somewhat ambiguous feelings that accompany such an image.
’Centillesse’
’Gentilesse’ is altogether less dour. It succinctly expresses the tenet of true gentility being a quality of character, not an attribute of wealth or family inheritance, which is also presented by the crone of the Wife of Bath’s Tale (Tales, in: 1109-64) [123], The idea is by no means original to Chaucer, being found in both Boethius [83] and Jean de Meun’s section of Le Roman de la Rose [62], but readers fond of making biographical connections like to see this as a particularly apt theme for an up-and-coming poet from the merchant classes. It is important to note that in putting the case for virtue to bestow nobility the poem not only assumes that such nobility is worth striving for, but also addresses itself entirely to an audience for whom such social standing was at least potentially within reach. It is more a reminder that the
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gentry should live up to their title, than a call for meritocracy, and is a long way from the egalitarian, not to say revolutionary cry of John Bull and the peasants of 1381, who used the ditty ’Whan Adam delf and Eve span/Who was thanne the gentleman^’ Scattergood suggests that the use of ’stok’could indicate a reference to the image of a tree trunk (stock) used by the royal house (Minnis 1995: 486) though other critics have interpreted ’stok’ as referring to Adam, as first father of mankind. Henry Scogan (the addressee of Chaucer’s ’Envoy’) quoted the whole of ’Gentilesse’ in his Moral Balade addressed to Henry IV’s sons and took ’stok’ to mean God as the source of all noble qualities.
’Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan’
Addressed to the Henry Scogan mentioned above, this may be a poem asking his friend who has influence at court (all manuscripts gloss ’the stremes hed’ as Windsor) to use it to Chaucer’s advantage, or at very least not to forget those who live further down the Thames (i.e. Greenwich). The poem is humorous in its use of exaggeration, accusing Scogan of being the cause of the downpours which accompanied an outbreak of plague in 1391, which here become the tears of Venus, weeping excessively because Scogan has ditched his mistress. It appears that Scogan has given up love, and while Chaucer cautions him that to do so is traditionally dangerous (Troilus pays for a similar offence) he simultaneously urges that to give up love is not to give up friendship. He also implies that one so important as Scogan giving up love could lead to Cupid ignoring all the other grey and fat people who might not have taken such a drastic step: though at least they will know whom to blame for being unlucky in love. Chaucer then excludes himself from this group, declaring he, too, has given up such things, ending the body of the poem with the thought that there is a time for such things and implying that both he and Scogan have had their turn, ’Take every man hys turn, as for his tyme’. Yet the envoy seems to contradict this thought as Chaucer encourages Scogan to remember his old friend Chaucer, stuck out in the wilderness, and warn him not to defy Love again. This is best accounted for by reading this last love as the love between friends, which should lead Scogan to act like the mythical king Tullius, renowned for his kindness to the poor.
’Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton’
Both ’envoy’s to Scogan and Bukton owe much to the tradition of verse letters. Norton-Smith argues that Chaucer is particularly indebted
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to Horace here, and certainly the image of the pen rusting in its sheath and the exiled position of the poet in ’Scogan’ echo Horace closely (Norton-Smith 1974: 213-35) as does the more general tone of ’Lenvoy a Bukton’. Attempts to indentify Bukton have arrived at two candidates: Sir Peter Bukton of Holderness and Sir Robert Bukton of Goosewold, with Peter Bukton being the more favoured candidate (see Riverside: 1087 and Scattergood 1987). While it would satisfy our curiosity to know exactly who Bukton was, there is nothing in the poem which demands a specific recipient. Rather it is a mock-serious warning against remarriage, working round stock responses, but presented in a manner described as ’the gently jesting style of Horace’ (Norton-Smith 1974: 221). Certainly the poem is a rhetorical flourish as Chaucer balances what he dare say against what he dare not, Biblical authority against personal experience and finally actual experience against that of the fictional Wife of Bath. Buried within all this is a rare allusion to contemporary events. In 1376 there was an expedition against the Frisians, which may well have given rise to ’That the were lever to be take in Frise/Than eft to falle of weddynge in the trappe’. This is saying a great deal: the Frisians were renowned for killing their prisoners rather than putting them up for ransom. This comedy carries serious undertones; how far they reflect Chaucer’s actual views on marriage must be a matter of personal conviction.
’Chaucer’s Wordes unto Adam, his owne Scriveyn’
What is unambiguously clear from ’Lenvoy a Bukton’ is Chaucer’s awareness of the standing of his work. To refer to the Wife of Bath, however ironically, is to admit her importance. Such awareness gave rise to this short but decidely sharp poem. Here again there is a surface of humour as Chaucer calls down a curse of itchy scalp should his scribe be negligent, but under that surface is the voice of a man who not only knows that Boece and Troilus are in demand but is also well aware of the ease with which errors are made and become enshrined within texts. It is easy to think that this preoccupation is peculiar to the days before printed books, when the author was the creative one who did the ’makyng’ while the scribe’s job was to ’wryte’, but there are twentieth century parallels: James Joyce allowed several printing errors in the proofs of Ulysses to stand, thus incorporating them into the final version. Chaucer’s attitude to his standing as author seems to have been less relaxed as his interest in the vagaries of literary transmission that gave rise to The House of Fame [71] develops into the anxious prayer that ’non myswrite the’ of Troilus, V: 1795. It has been
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suggested that ’Adam’ refers to the Biblical Adam (Peck 1975: 467 and Kaske 1979), the archytypal spoiler of a good creation, but on the whole this seems unlikely, though efforts to identify Adam securely have simply given rise to a list of possibilities (Pace and David 1982: 133-4).
Further Reading
Minnis’s Oxford Guide (Minnis 1995) is a good, informative starting place for exploring Chaucer’s shorter poems. More detail can be found in a still accessible form in the Variorum Chaucer (Pace and David 1982). Norton-Smith (1974) offers interesting readings in the context of Chaucer’s life generally, while Ruud (1992) is particularly useful on the lyrics and Scattergood (1981) offers historically informed engagement with the envoys.
(b) THE DREAM POEMS
Chaucer’s major dream poems (The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women) tend to be grouped together and regarded as products of the earlier part of his writing career, that is between the 1370s and late 1380s. However, there is some support for a date of 1369 for The Book of the Duchess and some debate over the date of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, which exists in two versions: the earlier F text being probably composed in around 1386 while many believe the later G version to have been written in around 1397 (but see Delany 1994: 34-
43). In addition and indeed prior to these texts, Chaucer translated the-” popular French love vision Le Roman de la Rose. This text is frequently overlooked for the simple reason that, although we know Chaucer translated it, we do not know for sure that the fragment of text attributed to him is in fact his. Despite this, the French original was influential enough for Chaucer and the Middle English fragment close enough to his style to merit attention. It also provides an excellent introduction to the traditions of medieval dream poetry: having read The Romaunt of the Rose, even only Fragment A [62-4], the many elements which Chaucer borrowed and adapted from courtly poetry, in particular the love vision, become familiar, as they would have been to a contemporary audience. Chief among these are: the use of the double framework of narrator and dream; the descriptions of the natural world; the reference to other books, especially The Dream of Sctpw or Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the topic of love. However these poems are not
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just variations on the theme of love and love vision. Chaucer makes good use of the tradition of the dream as a genre which could include debate of the full range of intellectual and philosophical topics and also allowed for easy movement between different forms of writing, from narrative to lyric, into debate or even song. Thus, it may be misleading to describe love as the central theme of all Chaucer’s dream poems (Phillips and Havely 1997: 3) as, while love is indeed mentioned in each of them, the texts themselves seem to be more interested in other topics. The Book of the Duchess clearly explores grief and melancholy and touches on memory. This last is developed in The House of Fame to encompass ideas of how fame (living on in other people’s memory) is achieved and to include thoughts on the writing of literature. The Parliament of Fowls blends social satire and simple fun with its debate on love, while the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women must serve as an introduction to a series of stories about women who died for love.
(i) The Romaunt of the Rose
The French allegorical poem, Le Romaunt de la Rose begun by Guillaume de Lorris in 1237 and continued by Jean de Meun in around 1280 was arguably the single text most influential on Chaucer. It was widely known in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and thus provided not only a pattern for style and poetic matter, but also a rich source of allusion. The earlier section of the text encapsulates the love vision genre, indeed Guillaume de Lorris is credited with having written the definitive love vision in his Roman and Chaucer was clearly impressed by it enough to not only translate it but also to use and adapt the form in his own dream poems. We know that Chaucer translated it, as he refers to his version in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women where the god of Love accuses him of having translated it into plain English (Legend, F: 327-31; G: 253-7), we are less certain that we still have his translation. Certainly not all of it has survived, assuming he did indeed translate both de Lorris’ section and de Meun’s. Of the three fragments of Middle English versions which have survived two are certainly not by Chaucer, despite having been attributed to him at various stages. The other, ’Fragment A’, consists of about 1705 lines, translating the beginning of de Lorris’ text, but breaks off mid-sentence. The Riverside Chaucer prints all three fragments, but as only the first is agreed to be possibly by Chaucer, that is only one to receive attention here. However, it is clear from other texts that Chaucer was well acquainted with both parts of the poem, as he draws on elements from de Meun’s section as well as de Lorris’. Study of this translation thus provides not only
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an idea of the kinds of writing that influenced Chaucer and an introduction to his habit of close translation as a method of absorbing texts, but also offers a good basic knowledge of dream poetry. From this it is possible to see how Chaucer went on to develop the form in his own dream poems before moving into other forms to explore narrative techniques. He never fully abandoned dream poetry; elements of it can be seen even in his latest works as he drew on theories of the significance (or otherwise) of dreams either to provide an excuse for later action (as happens in Troilus, II: 925-31; V: 1233-41, 1442-1540 and the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women [81, 100]) or for more simple comic effect as in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale [141].
The poem opens with the narrator addressing the audience directly with a few thoughts on the validity of dreams and a fleeting reference to Macrobius, known for his commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipwnis). This forms the last part of Cicero’s Republic and tells how Scipio the Younger dreamt that his grandfather, Scipio Africanus, visited him and engaged him in a long philosophical discussion. The Republic was not known to the Middle Ages, but the Dream of Scipio had been preserved through the long commentary that Macrobius made on it, which led to the Dream itself being mistakenly attributed to Macrobius. The commentary takes various sections of the dream as illustrations of subjects as diverse as arithmetic, the music of the spheres and the immortality of the soul and was a popular text in the Middle Ages. Above all, Macrobius’ text became a source for views on the origins and value of dreams. As such it provided a secular companion for the divine authority of dreams as attested by the Bible. Other causes of dreams were also acknowledged, such as preoccupation with a particular idea or worry, a reflection of an aspect of the dreamer’s personality or simple indigestion. Chaucer makes reference to these notions of dreams in several texts, summing up most of the views The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Tales, VII: 2922-3171).
The Romaunt’s simple two line defence of the value of dreams is also an appropriate description of allegorical writing; each contain ’Ful many thynges covertly/That fallen after al openly’ (19-20) and so the audience is primed to interpret as well as listen. As it goes on the narrator reveals that he is twenty years old, a significant detail as the brief preambles of love visions tend to contain elements which resurface in the main part of the text and here youth is revealed as an essential quality for those engaged in the pursuit of love. The poet/narrator then describes falling asleep and waking into a dream. The May setting of the dream landscape prepares us for both a love vision and the following allegory of the walled garden (associated with earthly
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paradise and idealised love) and the characters who populate the dream are likewise personifications or allegories. As the poem moves into its narrative, further elements of romance are introduced. The larks and parrots (81) are taken as signs of the season, although while larks are simply symbols of spring, famous for the beauty of their song, parrots have more complex associations. Their bright plumage fits with the colours of this landscape and their reputation for loving luxury and wine perhaps add to the rich overtones of the dream, but it could also introduce an unwelcome note as their voice was considered ugly. When Chaucer uses the birds again in The Parliament of Fowls they are ’ful of delicasye’ (359) and grouped with lower order birds who are known for destructive habits and by the time he uses them in The Merchant’s and Shipman’s tales (Tales, IV: 2321-2; VII: 369), and in ’Sir Topas’ (Tales, VII: 767) the disparaging undercurrents have become deliberate overtones, used for comic effect. It may be then, that their appearance here is not only true to the French original, but also introduces a first hint of satire into the poem.
However in the Romaunt the themes of unconcerned beauty are dominant, as the dreamer prepares himself for a walk in this idealised landscape by sewing up his sleeves in a suitably fashionable manner, using a silver needle, which not only indicates affluence in itself, but also gives a clue to the fineness of the fabric: a silver needle will not catch on delicate threads (97-9). Suitably attired, the dreamer wanders by a stream until he comes to a walled garden (136). On the outside are painted the figures of Hate, Felony, Villainy, Covetousness, Avarice, Envy, Sorrow, Age, Pope-Holiness (hypocrisy, particularly that expressed by pretending to be morally superior) and Poverty. Initially it seems we have a representation of human sins or failings, but the inclusion of sorrow and poverty make it clear that these figures represent characteristics which prevent entry into the garden of courtly love. One cannot afford to be sad or poor. On the other hand it is essential to have leisure: the gatekeeper of this idyllic spot is Idleness.
The garden is governed by Sir Mirth and all the company are fair, young and engaged in the refined pursuits, including dancing a formal ’karole’, which is here accompanied by a song, sung by Gladness. This dance offers the opportunity to name those present in the garden, in balance to those excluded. Here are Courtesy, the God of Love, SweetLooking, Beauty, Riches, Largess (generosity), Franchise (nobility/ generosity of spirit) and Youth. As with the previous list of personifications, most of these figures are female, but that reflects the gender of the nouns in French, rather than being a specific choice on the part of the translator. The dreamer is invited to join the dance and when it
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comes to an end, he wanders off to explore the rest of the garden, unaware that the God of Love is stalking him like a hunter (1450-4). This inverts the motif of the love hunt in which the lady is often the quarry, but other elements of the motif are present in the description of the grassy area full of flowers, deer, squirrels and rabbits, which recalls the ’millefleurs’ background of medieval tapestries. The dreamer rests under a tree next to a well which he recognises as the Well of Love into which Narcissus looked when he fell in love with his own reflection. The story of Narcissus is retold, thus introducing a further element of the romance genre, that of the classical tale or fable. Significantly, though, the moral drawn is not the warning against male vanity which the story most obviously offers, but a warning to ladies not to mistreat their lovers. Upon looking into the well himself the dreamer sees the reflection of a gorgeous rose-bush, which he promptly seeks and easily finds, commenting that he prefers buds to open roses, as they last longer. On this bush is one rosebud, fairer than all the others, which he describes.
At this point Fragment A ends. In the rest of the French poem the dreamer falls in love with the rosebud and strives to possess it. In de Lords’ hands the allegory remains allusive, though it is clear the rose symbolises a lady, who, after granting a kiss, is swept away and guarded by Jealousy, amongst others. The poem relates the dreamer’s attempts to win the rose against all the odds, clearly with the intention that the attempt will be successful. In de Meun’s continuation the allegory becomes more acerbic and he widens its sphere of reference to include social satire and philosophical debate, both of which are within the remit of the love vision genre, but only lightly present in de Lords’ text. His use of the rose symbol is also more explicit as the depiction of the final possession is a thinly disguised description of the sexual act. The mixture of elegant romance, highly suggestive symbolism and social satire, gradually surfaces in Chaucer’s own writings. At this early period it seems to be the combination of courtly convention and philosophical debate which drew his attention.
(ii) The Book of the Duchess
This, Chaucer’s most courtly poem, is generally agreed to be a commemorative text written for the death of Blanche, John of Gaunt’s first wife. She died in 1368/69, and the poem may have been written shortly afterwards, or for one of the commemorative services that were held for her each year (see Hardman 1994). It is generally believed to have been written before 1371, however, as the title of Earl of
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Richmond, which is punned on in the ’ryche hille’ of line 1319, was restored to John de Montfort in 1372, having been John of Gaunt’s
title before that.
Broadly speaking, the poem is divided into three parts: the first (1-
289) introduces the narrator, who retells the story of Seys and Alcione, which he has read in a book in an attempt to get to sleep. The second (290-442) comprises the dream, as the narrator is ’woken’ by the sound of a hunt, which he joins, but which loses its quarry. The dreamer then follows a puppy who appears at his feet and comes across a man in black sitting under a tree reciting a lament. This leads into the third section (443-1310) which consists of the dreamer asking the knight why he is so melancholy (he has lost his lady) and of the knight’s replies, which describe his lady and their mutual love and ends with the statement of her death. This signals the end of the poem (1311-
34) as the hunt is heard again in the distance and the dreamer sees the hunting party enter a castle whose ringing bell wakes the narrator from his dream to find himself still holding the book he had been reading before falling asleep. He declares he will record the dream he has just had; which is, of course, the poem we have just read.
The three parts of the text are linked not only by the simple linear narrative of the dream, but also by recurrent use of the theme of bereavement, of the colours black and white and by an underlying play with the connotations of the word ’reflection’. We know little about the narrator figure of this poem, except that he is unable to sleep and has been in that state for some considerable time, due, he believes, to a sickness he has suffered for eight years. Some critics have taken this to be an indication that the poem was written eight years after Blanche’s death, giving a date of composition of 1376, though some French tales, such as those by Machaut, use such phrases to provided a sense of a stretch of time (see Riverside: 967n30-43.) He describes this as an affliction so unnatural and severe that he fears he
will die from it:
< t
• And I ne may, ne nyght ne morwe,
•• Slepe; and thus melancolye ,-.,.,..,,- ,, .-. .
* And drede I have for to dye. i.’ . .
(22-4) . .’ ’ •’.;<„
It is unclear whether the sorrow results in lack of sleep or whether the inability to sleep gives rise to the melancholy, but the picture is that of a man in distress. Moreover, such protracted sorrow is termed unnatural ’nature wolde nat suffyse’ (16) thereby introducing the first
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hint that prolonged grief may be excessive and undesirable, even unhealthy, as it could result in melancholia, a state of life-denying sadness, which we might describe now as acute depression. At the time it was believed to be caused by an excess of black things in the body and one of its effects was dreams of black things (Minnis 1995: 154-
5). It has been suggested that the one physician who the dreamer asserts is the only one who could cure him is his loved one and that the sickness he suffers is the love-sickness suffered also by Troilus, but it is also possible that the affliction is grief and the anticipated cure, death. The action of the poem, the reading and the dream, thus become not only variations on the theme of expressing sorrow, but also a process of cure or consolation as well.
At first it would seem that the example of Seys and Alcione is hardly an encouraging one. Seys has died at sea, but all that Alcione knows is that he has not returned from a voyage. Driven by sorrow, she prays for certain knowledge about her husband, and receives it via a dream in which the dead Seys stands at the foot of her bed and tells her both that he is dead and to cease her grieving: ,’• •,”,-. ,.-.’.•! :-« f j ••
Awake! Let be your sorwful lyf, ’•’ ’^r* • • •
For in your sorwe, ther lyth no rede; • • > > ,<, ;
For, certes, swete, I am but ded. • ’ -i •-, ••> -, *. •
(202-4) •-. <• ;’•-«•,,H ,
The call to ’awake’ links the states of sleep, grief and even death, as Seys urges his wife to rise up and continue living. Ironically, however, when Alcione does awake, she dies of grief within three days, hardly a good example of consolation. However, the original does not end there, but with the transformation of the two into seabirds, thus providing the metamorphosis of the story, and reuniting and literally reviving the two as a testament of the power of their love. Chaucer, or perhaps his narrator, deliberately omits this, thus denying the figure of consolation in that story and effectively deferring it into the rest of the poem. It is a change which would probably have been noted by the contemporary audience, also familiar with Ovid and Machaut, who would thus have been amused by the consolation the narrator does draw from the story, i.e. that there is a god of sleep who may be petitioned in the hope of being granted rest.
The sleep that he is granted gives rise to the dream, which is the bulk of the poem and in which we encounter several elements drawn from this first section of the text. First of all the May landscape, complete with birdsong and hunt, all create the atmosphere of courtly
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love vision, familiar to us from The Romaunt of the Rose [62]. The bright morning and wide outdoors contrast with the inside and evening setting of the first section of the text, as does the dreamer’s sudden liveliness, compared to his previous lethargy. It seems he has followed Seys’ advice where Alcione did not and has paradoxically come awake in his dream and indeed left behind his sorrowful life. Now full of energy he eagerly joins in the hunting of the hart, though as an onlooker rather than a main hunter. When the quarry is lost he wanders off, but is prevented from resting for too long and perhaps becoming once again too introspective by the puppy, which he follows until it leads him to the Man in Black, a Knight singing a lament under a tree.
The identity of this figure is one of the mysteries of the poem: as Minnis says, ’to equate the Man in Black with John of Gaunt is absurd, while to deny the connection would be perverse’ (Minnis 1995: 154). The fact that this figure is lamenting the loss of a lady called ’White’, a translation of Blanche’s name, invites us to link the Man in Black with the presumably grieving Gaunt. The deference with which the dreamer addresses him (using the polite ’you’ while the Man in Black uses ’thou’) supports this reading for those who see the dreamer as figure of Chaucer. While clearly operating on one level of the text, this is not the only interpretation open to us. It is also possible to read this figure as a representation of the dreamer’s melancholy self, thereby making the dream a kind of self-analysis. Such a reading is within the bounds of medieval dream theory, as both an insomnium (resulting from physical causes such as mental distress) or a visium or phantasma (the result of images occupying the mind on the borders of sleep). Neither form of dream is prophetic, but although they were not necessarily significant, they could be seen to reveal deep-seated pre-occupations. Certainly all the elements combine to encourage us to regard the Man in Black as an allegorical figure and indeed he himself presents himself as an icon of grief asserting ’For y am sorwe, and sorwe ys y’ (597). The symmetrical balance of the sentence defies further explanation and serves to make the figure not only self-contained but also static. It is as if there is nowhere to go from that statement, just as for Alcione there was no way forward from the certainty of her loss. More than that, each half of the sentence answers the other, encapsulating a chiasmic exchange of: ’who are you^’ ’I am sorrow.’ ’What is sorrow1?-’ ’I am’. The figure is thus caught in a constantly echoing pattern which leads nowhere and works like two mirrors set up opposite each other, eternally reflecting themselves. This reflection motif is continued as the Man in Black goes on to explain why he is in this state. Every thing in his world has become its opposite, as reflection becomes inversion:
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My song ys turned to pleynynge, • , , i’”^- • • >
And al my laughtre to wepynge, .< • , (,,- , –
My glade thoghtes to hevynesse, .t\ , < f’-n’-’ ’ •• ,« • In travayle ys myn ydelnesse •> >* ? > ^ TV-V -,;«••, ;- «.
(599-602) ,•.,, !•;;-, ,..-,,• ’.
This is not an explanation of cause, however, but a description of being grief. We are no further on.
By now a link is established between the Man in Black of the dream and the grieving Queen of the story. This link is also a reflection, as the positions of the pairs are reversed – in the story it is the man who has died and the woman who is bereaved: in the dream it is the man who is bereft, while the lady has been lost. In each case the griever summons up the image of their lost one: Alcione through her prayer to Juno, the Man in Black first in his song – which the dreamer overhears (475-86) – and then in the series of narrative and allegory with which he answers the dreamer’s questions. Reflection thus develops from mirroring into considering as the Man in Black presents his memory of his lady in a variety of literary forms and simultaneously establishes his own role as her knightly lover. The self-contained genre of lyric complaint gives way to lament as he describes his current situation (561-617) which flows into the allegory of the chess game (618-709). Chess, with its black/white contrast and mirror-image board is the ideal allegory here. It is also a pastime which the narrator rejected in favour of reading at the beginning of the text (51) when he also rejected games of chance. The Black Knight has been playing chess with Fortune, a game which proverbially he cannot win. As his ’fers’ White is both his most valuable piece and also, originally, his advisor rather than his queen (see Riverside. 972 n652-71 and Phillips and Havely 1997: 80 n651). The use of the chess image itself alludes to Le Roman de la Rose (6622-5) and moves us into the romance genre, which is then continued as the Knight relates the story of his courtship of White, in which she is very clearly the typical lady of courtly literature. Significantly he describes her as a ’chef myrour of al the feste’ (974), ’myrour’ here taking on the meaning of ’best example’, as if White is the fair copy text which all others seek to emulate. Diane Ross (1984) points out that the poem’s movement through different genres offers a wide variety of ways a court lady could be presented, each of which emphasises different aspects either of the lady or of the lover’s relation to her.
However, while all this variety may present many aspects of White, all are the result of remembering her and are thus in effect commemorative. She is held within these recollections, but so is the Black Knight.
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The nature of such memories may keep her or her memory alive in one way, but it militates against nature in its desire to hold things as a given point. While such remembrance allows for the recreation of White and Black’s love of her, it does so through literary creation, through allegory, story and song. All of these are essentially ways of presenting the past and fending off the present. Thus when the dreamer asks where she is now (1298) the Black Knight tries to avoid that ’now’ by referring back to the past:
v ,rt, ’ . , – >rf
”Now<?-” quod he, and stynte anoon. ’. . ”V/ ••’ •’
Therwith he wax as ded as stoon •”• ’i> j, . <- ’-; ’•
And seyde, ”Alias, that I was bore! .’ f – •• ••’ > That was the los that here-before •.- ’>. > aljiv* . • ” •”’<”•’ I tolde the that I hadde lorn. ,:.,”,<’<;: . > •»
Bethenke how I seyde here-beforn, • ; < i>»/.! M .,« – > • Thow wost ful lytel what thow menest; .-n •> i*.;. .- • ,:•’ r * I have lost more than thow wenest.’ .T.s.tw,;; • si’.v. • l>
God wot, alias! Ryght that was she!” W^J ’^-u .• ’.rwj
(1299-307) . : if”1’
The animation the Knight drew from telling the dreamer his recollections drains away the moment he is drawn back into the present. His wish to return is evident in the repeated ’here-before’, ’here-beforn’ as he attempts to redirect the dreamer into the past, but the attempt is thwarted and the whole imaginative world of the dream collapses as the Knight is finally forced into a bald statement of White’s death.
After such an unequivocal sentence, there is nowhere left to go. All the elements of the dream reappear as the hunt returns and enters the castle, leaving the Man in Black still, presumably, under his tree, but taking the dreamer back to the waking world, where the tale of Seys and Alcione is found lying on the bed. Al was doon,/For that tyme, the hert-huntyng’ (1313-14) we are told, and the ’hert’ may be not only the deer of the hunt, but also the lady of courtly love-vision poetry or even the dreamer’s own heart, or melancholy. The process is only over ’for that tyme’ however; it is possible that it will happen again, as would indeed be the case for an annual act of commemoration, but in the meantime we have been released from the constant reflection which prevents action and are able to shut the book and go on to something else, consoled, perhaps, by the knowledge that we can relive the process at any stage by simply re-reading the poem. It is an elegant way of presenting a process which may be cathartic but may also become
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stultifying, or even fatal as it was for Alcione, if one does not break out of the cycle of reflection.
The Book of the Duchess is thus a consummate occasional poem, written as an exploration of grief and the desire to remember the loved one. As such it draws on many aspects of medieval theories of memory, which are most accessibly found in Mary Carruthers’ study (Carruthers
1990). The mind is much like a book in which memory writes the material which is later recalled. The book is indexed, thus allowing for one memory to trigger another, or for recollection through association, much as the dreamer in Duchess is led from one aspect of his dream to another. What is produced from the memory is not, however, an exact copy of the original, but a re-creation resulting from the original material and rememberer’s reaction to it. It is a literal re-collection of the various parts which make the new, but remembered, whole. Jesse Gellrich made use of a similar idea some years before Carruthers’ book when writing about the use of books as a concept in medieval literature. Discussing Dante’s invocation of the muse of memory in Inferno book
2 Gellrich says:
Instead of reproducing them [literary authorities] in their full presence, Dante is suggesting that writing cannot avoid becoming an interpretation of them and initiating change in the process. The ”original” text cannot be recreated, only supplemented. Or, to put the matter another way, writing distances or alienates its sources even as is tries to retrieve them.
(Gellrich 1985: 148-9)
The process of remembering White, or Blanche, has indeed recalled her, but also altered her, while resulting in a Book which thus becomes her memory, allowing the reader to recreate her whenever The Book of the Duchess is read.
This is not the only kind of memory Chaucer explores in his dream poetry, however. The House of Fame considers the topic too, as fame necessarily involves being remembered. Here the memory is cultural rather than personal and the effects more obviously linked to what it is like to be a poet.
(in) The House of Fame
Probably begun in the late 1370s, when Chaucer was Controller of Customs (alluded to in the ’rekenynges’ of line 653), the version of The House Fame that has survived is incomplete. Whether this is because is
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was never finished, as most scholars believe, or because pages of manuscript have been lost, is a matter for debate. Fyler provides a precis of the various arguments (Riverside: 990 n2158). It is highly unlikely that Chaucer meant it to end as it does now, with its unfulfilled promise of finally meeting the ’man of grete auctorite’, who will, it is implied, have all the answers, although late twentieth-century criticism rather likes the idea that the text should be thus deliberately curtailed at the very point where an answer is promised, but before it is delivered. The ironic view of authority and the status of the author of a text created by the sudden halt works as a very consciously literary or perhaps historical joke, but on the whole seems unlikely. The text is indeed humorous, even ironic, about how authors achieve their revered status, but it is more credible that Chaucer had simply written himself into a corner than that he was inspired to end his poem on a cliff-hanger. This is to start at the end, however. We should turn to the beginning of the poem and decide what it is all about.
Certainly authority is one of its themes, but authority in its medieval sense, which included not only power, but also, specifically, a text which could be cited to prove an argument. These ’authorities’ were the works of classical philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle or Cato, or writers such as Homer or Ovid, or of Christian philosophers such as Augustine. The text itself was the repository of knowledge that could be trusted and regarded as true, with the prime authority being, naturally, the Bible. An author, then, becomes one who writes such a text and is esteemed as a result. This is a more specific use of the word than our current ’author’ which simply means the writer of a text. Minnis (1981) provides a full study of the various medieval concepts of authority; for a more succinct overview see G. Rudd (1994). In a time when all documents were written by hand, often by scribes who had not composed the original, there was a greater awareness of the distinction between creating and writing. The word also had connotations of leadership and the ability to increase things, through an etymological link to augeo to increase. Thus God may be termed the chief auctor, as leader and enlarger of creation as well as the true author of the Bible, with the individual writers of it being in effect scribes under divine instruction. When it came to secular texts there was still a similar division. Chaucer’s references to his ’auctor’ indicates the composer of the text or story he is following, half suggesting that he is a mere scribe, recording what he is told. How, though, does one choose a source to follow and how do the famous writers, characters and events achieve their status^ These, in large part, are the questions The House of Fame poses.
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Like The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame is a dream poem, but while Duchess suggests that the dream results primarily from the narrator’s state of mind, House gives no such hint, the dream is simply presented as one the narrator experienced one 10 December and retells here because it was so remarkable (59-65). The poem is divided into parts, each of which has a short proem or invocation (Book 1 has both) before moving into the main narrative. Book 1 opens the dream in a temple of glass, on the walls of which the whole story of Troy is depicted. The dreamer dwells particularly on the tale of Dido, Queen of Carthage, who loved Aeneas, and who commits suicide when he departs for Italy at Mercury’s command (239-467). After marvelling at the pictures, the dreamer wonders where he is and runs out of the temple into a desert in search of someone who could tell him. The book ends with him praying for deliverance from ’fantome and illusion’ (493) and seeing an eagle flying down out of the sun. In Book 2 the dreamer is swept up by the eagle, who complains he is a troublesome burden (574) and then goes on to explain that he is Jove’s eagle, sent by the god to take the narrator away from his books and show him the House of Fame. There, it is implied, the narrator will hear at first hand all the tidings of love. It transpires that the narrator is a writer who spends all his time with books, either reading them or writing love poetry, but never experiencing anything beyond his doorstep, nor, it is hinted, gaining any personal experience of love.
This trip is a gift from Jove in recognition of his diligence and perhaps to give him further material for his writings. The eagle explains that the House of Fame is at the mid point between earth, sea and sky and is the place where all sounds come, rippling out from their source until they arrive there (711-822). He further offers to teach the narrator (called ’Geffrey’ in line 729) about the stars, but, after the length of the explanation of sound and Fame, which has taken up the best part of the book, Geffrey speedily declines. The eagle sets him down close to the House of Fame, a very noisy place, where every sentence uttered can be seen entering the house, taking on the appearance of the person who said them as they do so. Book 3 then takes over, as the dreamer walks towards the House of Fame, which is situated on top of a high rock whose slopes are made of ice. Carved into the ice are the names and deeds of famous people, some of which are impossible to read because they have almost thawed away by the sun. Those written on the northern side are still clear, preserved by the shade of a castle and tower on the hill. Geffrey continues towards this castle, every wall of which is covered with carvings and full of windows. Every niche is filled with a minstrel or storyteller telling their tales (1194-200) among
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whom he sees makers of popular ballads, Latin shepherd-poets, Dutch musicians and those who told stories of famous battles. There are musicians of every kind as well as jugglers, witches and scholars: in short anyone and everyone who has some connection with words and sounds. From this noisy place the dreamer moves on to another ornately carved building, which turns out to be Fame’s hall (1357). Here the goddess Fame or Renown presides, while people come to petition that they might be remembered. The hall is full of statues of famous writers, mainly writers of histories and epics such as Homer, Statius (who wrote the stories of the fall of Thebes and of Achilles in the first century AD, which were much read in the later middle ages), Josephus (who wrote the history of the Jews also in the first century and whose work was known through Latin translations in the medieval period) and Virgil. Each author carries on his shoulders the fame of the people who figure in his work. As Geffrey puts it, the hall is full of those who had written old tales (1514-15).
His contemplation of these precursors is interrupted by a mass of people noisily entering the hall like a huge swarm of bees (1522-3). Each one desires fame; some have done good works, some not, but Fame’s decision about whether or not they receive a good reputation, a slanderous one, or simply sink into oblivion is dictated not by their worth but by her caprice (1559-66). In total, nine groups approach Fame:
• the virtuous seeking deserved fame, who are consigned to oblivion
• the virtuous seeking deserved fame, who receive infamy instead
• the virtuous seeking deserved fame, who receive it
• the virtuous seeking oblivion, despite their good deeds, who receive i it
.fr the virtuous seeking oblivion, despite their good deeds, who instead ’ receive fame
• idlers desiring fame, despite having done nothing to merit it, who receive it
• idlers desiring fame, having done nothing to merit it, who receive infamy
• workers of ill deeds, who seek deserved infamy, but receive oblivion
• workers of ill deeds, who seek deserved infamy and receive it.
The point being made is that any kind of reputation can be inaccurate and is dictated by chance more than merit. Moreover, as the poem goes on to illustrate, any kind of fame relies upon there being people to tell the story. This means not only ihe illustrious authors on pedestals
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in the hall, but also those humble minstrels and ballad-singers in the castle.
Despite the impressive array of people and deeds, Geffrey remains unimpressed, as he tells the stranger who accosts him in line 1870 asking if he has come to seek fame. Geffrey replies he indeed has not, rather he was promised he would hear something new him, some ’thynges glade’ (1889). However, nothing he has seen so far is the kind of ’thynge’ he meant. On hearing this, the stranger directs him toward a twiggy house, constantly spinning round, which is full of entrances, holes and echoes with rumours and gossip. Amazed at the sight, Geffrey suddenly sees the eagle perched near by, who tells him he is there to drop Geffrey into this whirling house, as otherwise he would be incapable of getting in. True to its word, the bird delivers him through a window, landing the poet in the thick of it, surrounded by people swapping news and retelling it, elaborating as they pass it on. This house is full of seafarers, pilgrims, pardoners and messengers: in short of all those whose occupations involve travel, the one thing, we may remember, that this narrator has not done. Then in a corner he hears a group talking about love and hurries up to join. It is at this point he sees a man who seems to be A man of gret auctorite’ – and there the text ends.
Even this precis shows how packed full of detail the poem is, but also how little there is by way of plot. The text is clearly interested in the welter of material there is for narrative poetry, as the subjects of history, epic and even saints’ lives (represented by those who did good deeds, not for personal glory, but for God) are brought on stage, but all are found wanting. There is no shortage of books or stories, but how is one to know which text will make a good authority, or which author to follow^ This line of questioning leads into reflection on the nature of Fame, moving on from the ideas of memory and recollection of the Book of the Duchess [68-71] into a more abstract exploration of the arbitrary way reputations are decided. In this Chaucer is unusual, as Fame was a less popular subject for such reflections on the arbitrary nature of fate than the figure of Fortune. Fortune is in fact mentioned in Book 3 (1547-8), where the close relation of the two concepts is signalled by describing her as Fame’s sister, but no more is made of it than that, as Chaucer goes on to develop the concept of Fame as cornpounded of both reputation and rumour. Despite the apparent richness of this topic, the narrator-poet of the text still seems to be having difficulty finding material for writing which suits him.
The eagle which comes down at the end of Book 1 may be an allusion to Dante’s eagle, who appears in both the Purgatorio and the Paradise sections of Dante’s Divine Comedy. If so it seems that Chaucer is simul-
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taneously acknowledging the greatness of Dante’s achievement, and signalling that he will not be writing similar stuff. Even as a symbol of contemplation, the eagle is dismissed as inappropriate as the Geffrey of the poem declares himself too old to learn about the stars: Chaucer is by no means a contemplative writer and here clearly signals this fact. It has been suggested that the poem is best read as a kind of demonstration of the ways of writing poetry, chock full of rhetorical devices and examples (Spearing 1985: 24-7; Minnis 1995: 172-82). While there are certainly many such devices to note – the apostrophes, particularly the invocations at the beginning of each book; the exclamations (exclamatio); the extensive and detailed descriptions (descnptio); the anaphora (lines 1961-76 being a veritable tour de force here); the eagle’s wry comments on matching form to content (854-
64) – this is clearly not organised as a book of instruction. Its structure has itself provoked considerable interest, as critics seek to defend it from the accusation of simply being a text that got out of hand. Havely, following Billington, suggests that the laughter and folly, which characterise the final section of the text, support the idea that the whole poem is a bit of ’winter foolery’, but also recalls the links with other literary journeys, including Dante, Boethius and The Book of Revelation (Phillips and Havely 1997: 122 and n51, also Riverside: 977). A connection has also been made between the somewhat confusing structure of the text and the labyrinth, or maze, which is mentioned in the description of the house of twigs (1920-1). Minnis summarises most of these arguments and indeed other readings of the poem in terms of its structure (Minnis 1995,216-27), while Doob offers a thorough study of mazes (Doob 1990). Meanwhile Delany regards the poem as enacting the conflicts between the different kinds of truth found in literature, philosophy and religion (Delany 1972). While all these approaches offer fruitful ways of reading the text, it remains true that the poem is weak on narrative impetus. The only place the poem seems to be carried by plot is in the first book, where the story of Dido is retold.
Chaucer returns to this tale in Legend (924-1364) [104], so it clearly interested him and of course it is a love story, which fits with the figure of the dreamer as a writer of love poetry. However it is also a story with two main sources and thus two ’auctors’ -Virgil’s Aeneid (which Chaucer probably knew, as well as being likely to be acquainted with the popular French romance version, the Roman d’Eneas) and Ovid’s Heroides where the story is told from Dido’s viewpoint (the Heroides being a collection of stories of wronged women, presented in the form of letters which they write before they die). Chaucer here blends elements from each, which results in a richer version in which the audience
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1S not immediately sure whether Aeneas is being accused of being a deceitful absconder (as in lines 267 and 294), or a hero driven by his fate against his will (427-32). Dido, on the other hand, may be held up to be pitied, but she is scarcely admired here. We are invited to understand her folly: ’Loo, how a woman doth amys/To love hym that unknowen ys’ ( 269-70), but the upshot is that she joins the ranks of women whose complaints and lamentations (their only weapons) fail, leaving suicide as the only recourse. Interestingly, she, like Criseyde after her, bewails the fact that her story will be known throughout the world and her reputation is thus fixed: . . , . ,/,,.>
V,
O wikke Fame! – for ther nys ’v – <K No thinge so swifte, lo as she is. ’ j ’•> ’<t ”>
O, sothe ys, every thinge ys wyste, ) > ->’ ,, Though hit be kevered with the myste./’i – -” Eke, though I myght dure ever, <>> « < :••.
That I have do rekever I never, ’’ui’<b” -.•’ That I ne shal be seyde, alias, M ’>, Yshamed be thourgh Eneas –
(House: 349-56)
Even if she lived forever, whatever she did would not alter the fact that she would be remembered as the woman Aeneas betrayed. This is perhaps the inevitable fate of those who star in someone else’s story.
As a whole, The House of Fame is an experiment in discussing the matter of fiction. Chaucer takes us on a journey through various kinds of narrative material and treatments of Fame providing several complicated images en route, but in the end he seems to have become trapped in the labyrinth of his own text and never found a way out. ,
(iv) The Parliament of Fowls
This is the only dream poem written in rhyme royal, which Chaucer had used for the narrative poemAnelide and Arcite [52] and used again for Troilus and Criseyde as well as for some of the Canterbury Tales. The change to a stanzaic verse-form with a more complex rhyme pattern seems to have allowed for a greater range of registers and more natural speech rhythms than the eight syllable rhyming couplets of Duchess and House. In Parliament Chaucer ranges across formal but straightforward diction of general narration, to elaborate lofty rhetoric, to low-brow informal chatter of cuckoos and geese. For the content of the poem he makes use of several traditions connected with St.
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Valentine’s Day. As well as being associated with love generally it is also, supposedly, the day the birds choose their mates for the year. This provides the central motif of the poem as Nature presides over the court of birds who, having selected their mates, have gathered to hear the formel eagle decide between the three male eagles who court her. The court is also a debate, hence the ’parliament’ of the title and the topic under discussion is, appropriately, love. The debate form is another literary tradition Chaucer draws on here, and it has been suggested that a court reading of the poem would have been followed by a general debate in which case the lack of conclusion within the text may have been designed to feed elegantly into the live debate to come. The connection of birds with love was an established one, and even the idea of a debate about love conducted by birds is not original to Chaucer, though Chaucer’s use of it here seems to have influenced the Songe Saint Valentin by his French contemporary and friend, Oton de Granson. The various sources and analogues for the poem are usefully collected in Windeatt’s edition (Windeatt 1982).
While we can be certain of the St. Valentine’s Day associations, quite which day it was is less certain. Matters are complicated by the existence of a popular feast of a Genoese St. Valentine (one form of Italian influence on the poem) which was celebrated in May. It is possible that this feast and the universally established date of 14 February for the other St. Valentine became conflated. Some have gone so far as to claim that Chaucer himself inaugurated the tradition of Valentine celebrations with this poem, but, although this is the implication of the Riverside introduction, others find it a little far-fetched (see Minnis
1995: 256-61).
Another claim made for Parliament is that it is an occasional poem, reflecting various marriage negotiations for Richard II. If this is the case it gives a composition date of between 1377, when such negotiations began, and 1382, when Richard married Anne of Bohemia (Chaucer himself was involved in some of these negotiations [16]). In
1890 John Koch first suggested that the poem refers to negotiations surrounding Anne and Richard, giving a possible composition date of
1381, allowing a year’s space between the ’courting’ of Anne and the marriage in 1382. Supporting this theory, and assuming Richard to be the first eagle, various people have been identified by Benson as likely candidates for the other two suitors (Benson 1982). A particularly neat detail is that the marriage treaty was ratified on 2 May 1381: the feast day of St. Valentine of Genoa. Minnis points out that 3 May seems to have been a significant date for both Richard II and Chaucer, inferring that Parliament was written to celebrate the first anniversary of the
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treaty m 1382. All of which is, as Minnis admits, ’pure speculation’ (Mmnis 1995: 260).
There are several elements which Parliament has in common with Chaucer’s other dream poems: once again we have a shadowy narrator persona who, like that of House, seems to be a love poet, though one without first-hand knowledge of love whose ’I knowe nat Love in dede’ (8) links him to the narrator of Trotlus and Criseyde ’that God of Loves servantz serve’ (Trotlus, 1:15). Books also figure largely; generally as the source of all the narrator’s knowledge and specifically in The Dream of Scipio, the book he reads for a full day in search of ’a certeyn thing’ (20), though we never discover what. As with Duchess and House, Parliament moves from book to dream in which the narrator is guided by Africanus to a walled park whose gates present both the promises and pitfalls of love. He is rudely shoved through these gates by a mocking Africanus, with the promise of being shown something to write about (168). This promise is reminiscent of House, while the garden we enter recalls the idyllic landscapes of both Duchess and The Romaunce of the Rose. Several of the figures within the garden also recall Romaunce: Cupid is there, beside a well, as are Beauty, Delight, Gentilesse and Youth among many others (211-28). Venus is also here, ensconced in her temple, surrounded by servants and pictures of love in all its guises.
It is Nature, however, who presides over this garden. Before her are gathered all the birds, ranged according to their status, determined by their diet. The carnivorous ’foules of ravyne’ (323) are highest, the worm-eaters next, with water fowl after that and seed-eaters last. The social distinctions are easily mapped onto human social groups, with the birds of prey associated with the richer and courtly classes, down to the peasants at the bottom of the heap. It is this classification in which all have their place and appropriate use (which may also be seen reflected in the earlier list of trees, 176-82) which lends the text to the kind of reading offered by David Aers, whereby the ’lower’ birds’ views function as serious criticisms of the privileged and impractical ways of the noble stock (Aers 1986: 14-17). This is one of the few readings to link the poem with the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 [21].
Chaucer has a field-day with the list of birds and succinct descriptions, displaying his skill at this kind of listing (ennumeratto) which was clearly much enjoyed at the time, and which can still draw applause, but eventually the poem moves on to debate as the central figures are introduced. These are the formel (female) eagle and her three suitors, (’tercel’ reflecting the belief that every third eagle hatched was male). Nature’s plan is that the birds will select their mates in turn
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according to their species’ social standing. The roles of courtship operate: males propose, females accept or refuse, with the clear expectation that they will accept some mate or other. Certainly this seems to be the presumption for the chief of birds, the royal eagle who speaks first to choose the formel who sits on Nature’s hand. His terms are suitably elaborate: the formel will be his ’sovereign lady’ not merely his mate or equal ’fere’ (416); his devotion is such that he will die without her and if he is found unfaithful, may he be torn to pieces by the assembled birds. It is the typically excessive vocabulary of courtly love, which informs the speeches of the Black Knight in Duchess [65] and is parodied in the figure of Absolon in The Miller’s Tale [113]. It may be that Parliament marks the beginning of Chaucer’s irony about this form of speech, as the two other eagles (who butt in after the royal eagle) put forward their claims just as hyperbolically, and the verbal contest goes on till sunset. This is too much for the other birds, who must wait for the royal eagle to be matched before they can get on with the mating game themselves. Their cry ’Whan shal youre curseded pletynge have an endei’ (495) elicits a smile from the audience and leads Nature to invite each order of birds to depute a spokesman to give their verdict on which eagle deserves the formel.
Inevitably opinions differ, and the discussion is taken off into an exchange over the virtues or folly of fidelity even where love is unrequited. It is this which allows the poem to be read as a social satire or as a critique of courtly love values, implying that they may be all very well for those with leisure, but they are ridiculous and impractical in the eyes of common folk. The precise question of which eagle should win the formel is thus lost, as the birds exchange insults until Nature turns to the bird herself, saying she should choose her mate of her own free will (though quite how free a choice it is when Nature also says that were it her choice she would select the royal eagle, is another < matter). The formel then defies all expectation by asking for a year’s deferral. In so doing she is perhaps acting as a lady should, but her request effectively prevents the debate reaching a conclusion. Instead the poem shifts register into a song as the other birds pair off and depart. The song is a triple roundel – a circular form in which the first lines of the song become the refrain, thus bringing it round on itself in a way which partly reflects the pattern of Parliament as a whole. For the narrator the song is less a harmony than a cacophony which wakes him from his dream and leaves him determined to go back to his books.
Taken together, these three dream poems reveal not only common themes, but also the development of Chaucer’s particular interests. He moves steadily away from the more ornate, artificial, traditions of
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the French style towards a more flexible narrative form. He becomes increasingly interested in the figure of the narrator and begins to develop it from a simple persona who relates a story, into a character who affects the tale he tells. By the time he reaches Parliament Chaucer is experimenting with moving between different speakers to a far greater extent and makes them more distinct from each other than has been the case before. Although he continues to write lyrics throughout his life [47] (as well as fulfilling his posts and finding the time to translate Boethius [83] and compose the Treatise on the Astrolabe [86]), he now leaves behind the dream vision form and embarks on larger fiction projects which involve not only telling more complicated stories, but also using a variety of narrators. He still refers to dreams and even includes them in his plots as for instance in Criseyde and Troilus’s dreams, (Troilus, II: 925-31; V: 1233-41), or Chanticleer’s (Tales, VII:
2898-907) but when he returns to the dream vision form it is to use it only as a Prologue to the collection of tales which form The Legend.
(v) Prologue to The Legend of Good Women
The Prologue exists in two versions, now called F and G after the manuscripts in which they were found. Twelve manuscripts survive, of these eleven contain the version of the Prologue now termed the F Prologue (after the best of these manuscripts: Bodley Fairfax 16) with the G version appearing in just a single manuscript, University Library Cambridge Gg 4.27 (hence its name). There is some debate over which of the two is the earlier. The alphabetical order of our modern titles F and G is a coincidence, which makes it harder to bear in mind that, as Sheila Delany points out, there is no certainty about the order of composition (Delany 1994: 34-43). Debate continues both over this and over the relative merits of the two versions. Brewer (1998: 246-7;
249-52) assumes F to be the earlier and G the better text, whereas Delaney takes issue with both these views. In terms of dating, the question revolves around the reference to the Royal palace at Shene which exists in F but not in G: ’…whan this book ys maad, yive it the quene,/On my byhalf, at Eltham or at Shene’ (F: 496-7). Shene was Queen Anne’s palace. After her death in 1394 Richard was (apparently) so distraught that he ordered the destruction of Shene, an act which may account for the deletion of these lines in the G Prologue. It also suggests dates for the two versions of the Prologue: F can be assumed to have been written in the late 1380s. If G is later, Chaucer must have returned to the poem and revised at least the Prologue sometime after June 1394. If G is taken as earlier, the lines in F consitute a memorial
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allusion to Anne, which is further developed through the association of Anne and Alceste (who figures as the God of Love’s consort, see below) Despite this, it is not necessarily the case that the Legend was written at royal command, indeed Pearsall points out that it is highly unlikely that Anne either commissioned or received the work (Pearsall
1992 191) The two versions of the Prologue are distinct and Phillips believes they should be taken as individual texts (Phillips and Havely
1997 281), but they contain much of the same material and are similar enough to be treated together here
Chaucer’s use of dream vision for the Prologue is a deliberate return to a form he had abandoned for a work which takes as its pretext a general review of his poetry to date This overview takes exception to his portrayal of love and of women in love in particular, to couch such criticism in a poetic form associated with courtly love is itself a wry joke All the elements we have come to expect of Chaucerian dream poetry are here the use of the typical landscape (a grassy bank strewn with daisies), the fair lady (Alceste, who, as a figure from antiquity is also a bookish reference), the narrator figure (a mere poet, buried in his books except when he goes out in May to lose himself in adoration of the daisy so Chaucer here portrays himself), the books which give rise to the dream (and here are Chaucer’s own writings, another witty twist) Alceste may be a figure of Anne of Bohemia, who, according to Lydgate in his Fall of Princes, commissioned the Legend (Riverside 1059, Phillips and Havely 1997 283) She is certainly very much the ideal lady and also an intercessor with her consort, here the God of Love, which may be intended to recall Anne’s intervention with Richard II as well as roles associated with Mary (Phillips and Havely 1997 283-
6) For some this is Chaucer’s best dream text, with F being praised for its warmth and G for its better structure A good analysis of the G prologue is to be found in R Payne’s The Key of Remembrance, but in the main the Prologue is treated as part of the Legend as a whole, so further consideration will be deferred to later in this volume
Further Reading
Phillips and Havely (1997) is a useful edition of the Dream Poems and a reasonable starting place for critical reading Wmdeatt’s collection of sources and analogues is a fund of information (Wmdeatt (ed ) 1982) Delany offers a challenging and now influential reading of House (Delany 1972) Chaucer’s relation to previous representations of fame have been fully explored by Piero Boitani (Boitani 1984) while Niall Rudd discusses his use of Latin sources with particular reference to
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Dido (Rudd 1994 1-31) Two articles on Duchess are particularly useful ’Understanding the Man in Black’ (Morse 1981) and The Play of Genres’ (Ross 1984) A full study of the medieval ideas of authority can be found in Mmms (1988), a more succinct one in G Rudd (1994
29_31) The best work on the Prologue to Legend remains The Key of Rememberance, which is also relevant for Parliament (Payne 1963)
(c) NON-FICTION PROSE
(i) Boece
Boethius (c 480-524) was a Roman patrician who rose to high office m the state, but was put to death for treason He was a Christian, who was also deeply interested in the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, whose works he translated into Latin to allow more people access to them While in prison he composed De Consolatione Philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy) in which he presents himself bewailing his fate, but then visited by Lady Philosophy, who points out that it is useless to upbraid Fortune, since by her nature Fortune is changeable Instead he should draw consolation from considering the true value of things Over the course of five books Philosophy demonstrates that material goods (riches, social status, fame, beauty) are unimportant when compared to true happiness, which is to be found by uniting with the one Good from which we came This Good may be identified with God, who orders all things This leads to a discussion of how human free will and divine foreknowledge can co-exist, on which note the text ends
Although the doctrine Philosophy presents is largely reconcilable with Christian belief, Philosophy herself is more of a Neoplatonic figure, drawing on the classical and late-classical traditions that Boethius had studied for most of his life Readers in later centuries tended to make the work more explicitly Christian, mainly by emphasising the link between the concepts of Good and God, and often adding commentaries and glosses to the text which enhanced the more Christian aspects of the work Despite occasional patches of relative obscurity, by the fourteenth century Boethius’ Consolation was well-known in educated circles and very influential However, since it was written in lateclassical Latin, only those with a fair degree of Latmity could read it In some ways Boethius had thus become a figure like Aristotle and Plato in his own day- a respected philosopher rendered obscure through
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difficulty of language. Translations had been made at various points over the centuries (including one into Old English by Alfred the Great), as had later Latin versions, and there was also a strong tradition of interpretative commentaries. Of these two of the most influential were by William of Conches (c. 1080-1154) and by Nicolas Trevet, published in 1307.
Chaucer first encountered Boethius through Jean de Meun, who drew on it for Le Roman de la Rose and translated it into French prose as Li Livres de confon, which Chaucer may have known. In the 1380s Chaucer embarked on his own translation, Boece, and must have completed it by 1387, when Thomas Usk used it for his Testament of Love. Although Boethius’ original alternates between prose and verse sections, both de Meun and Chaucer translate into prose only, thus enabling a more literal translation, intended to make the text more directly comprehensible to vernacular readers. In so doing they were taking the same decision as had Boethius himself when translating Aristotle and Plato. Chaucer clearly had access to a glossed Latin text of the Consolation, and also to Trevet’s commentary, as well as to de Meun’s French translation. His Boece thus reflects the interpretative tradition of Conches, as well as Trevet and de Meun.
Most of the critical work on Boece concentrates on the accuracy of Chaucer’s translation, an area which is fraught with pit-falls. Simple comparison with the texts of the original now available to us can give the misleading impression that Chaucer was inaccurate, when in fact he might have been either closely translating the version of the text before him, or arriving at a phrase which incorporated the later Latin glosses and commentaries as well as de Meun’s French (see Machan
1985 and Minnis 1981). Also, of course, he could have made mistakes. Nonetheless, in compiling his translation, Chaucer not only rendered into English some of Boethius’ memorable images, such as that of the man searching for the ’sovereyne good … ryght as a dronke man not nat by whiche path he may retourne horn to his hous’ (in: pr2.84-5) but also composed some striking English phrases, such as ’slydynge Fortune’ (I: m5.34) who in her dealing with Boethius has kept ’hir propre stablenesse in the chaungynge of hirself’ (II: prl.54) or the rhetorical question ’what pestilence is more myghty for to anoye a wyght than a familier enemyi’ (in: pr 6.69-70).
For general students of Chaucer, however, the main interest of Boece lies in finding here the initial source of many ideas which Chaucer reworked imaginatively in his fictional works. Thus the ’Boethian ballades’ [55] explore further some of the themes and images found in the Consolation, not least the concept of ’steadfastness’, which is para-
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doxically linked in Fortune’s case to perpetual change, but in human terms comes to mean integrity. Fortune herself is shown to be most useful to men when she is adverse, thereby revealing their true friends, a theme which leads to the second section refrain in Chaucer’s lyric ’Fortune’ [57]: And eek thou hast thy beste frend alyve’. The lyric is almost an abbreviated Boece, while Fortune and her wheel crop up in Troilus (I: 138) and The Knight’s Tale (Tales, I: 925) [111], which Chaucer was writing while working on the Boece. Here, too, we find Arcite using the image of the drunkard, sure he has a home, but not sure how to get there (Tales, I: 1251-74), which has its roots in the Boece, as do the speeches on free will, predestination and the greater order of things which permeate Troilus as well as The Knight’s Tale. Indeed the Troilus who looks down on all human affairs from the eighth sphere (Troilus, V: 1807-13) can be read as a figure who has achieved the unity which Philosophy tells Boethius is the ultimate aim of mankind.
The form of Boece is of interest in itself. When we first meet the author persona he is lamenting in verse and invoking the Muses of poetry. Philosophy seems to send these Muses packing, asserting that intellectual consolation is more effective than poetic lament. We might reasonably expect no further space to be allowed for poetry in his text, but Boethius continued to use both verse and prose in the text, merely reversing the order, so that whereas previously verse sections preceded prose, they now follow them, acting partly as summations of the important points. While Chaucer’s all prose translation necessarily loses this verse/prose structure, it retains traces of the original’s form in the section titles – metrum (verse), prosa (prose). The language of the verse sections is more poetic and the general tone of the piece links it to ’compleynte’, a favourite genre for his lyrics [51], as well as being evident in Duchess. Duchess also makes use of another important element which Chaucer took over from Boethius: the use of oneself, the author, poet or narrator, as a character within the text. As Brewer points out this ’duality of the author/persona creates an attractive blend of realism, and fiction: a blurring, or fluidity, of limits’ (Brewer 1998: 147). It was a blend Chaucer was to exploit to the full, not only in his dream poems but increasingly in his narrative verse.
Further Reading
Walsh’s new edition of Boethius provides an informative introduction covering Boethius’ life and the tradition of the Consolation, as well as an accessible modern English translation of the original (Walsh 1999).
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A collection of essays looks at Boethius’ influence generally (Gibson
1981) in which Minnis looks at the issues of translation in particular. Another collection focuses on Chaucer’s Boece and the medieval context of Boethius (Minnis ed. 1993).
(ii) A Treatise on the Astrolabe
In his introduction to this work Chaucer addresses ’lyte Lowys’, saying he has written the treatise in response to Lewis’ ’besy praier’ to learn about the astrolabe (Riverside 662). It was probably written in 1391, as this is the year referred to in the text when Chaucer is providing examples of how to use the instrument. Lewis’ identity has been discussed above [17]; the important facts here are that he is a ten-year old child, to whom Chaucer has given an astrolabe, for which this treatise is a kind of instruction manual. The astrolabe was an instrument for measuring the height and position of stars, which then allowed for other calculations to be made, such as latitude, time and astrological information. Astrolabes came in varying degrees of intricacy; the one given to Lewis seems to have been a comparatively basic one, as one would expect for a child, although it nonetheless contained some pretty detailed and complicated information. Apparently, the treatise was likewise written in a basic manner, with some repetition in order to make it easier to follow. For a modern reader without an astrolabe to hand, however, it is not an easy read, though not without interest. It is also unfinished – Chaucer promises five books, but only got as far as two, though it may be that a third was started and the somewhat fragmentary character of the end of the treatise results from bits of that third being added to the end of the manuscripts. Later hands have also added sections explaining other aspects of the astrolabe.
Apart from the intrinsic interest of the astrolabe as a gadget and continued fascination with astronomy, there are two literary aspects of the text which lend it interest for the student of Chaucer. The first is that it illustrates how closely astronomy and astrology were intertwined. The information required to use the astrolabe and the information calculated from it include both factual data on the positions of stars and planetary orbits, and such astrological knowledge as the signs of the zodiac and their influence on the passing planets. The prevailing model of the universe in the late fourteenth century was still the Ptolemaic one, with the earth central and the moon, sun, planets and stars revolving around it in a series of eight concentric spheres. The planets occupied a sphere each, while the stars, apparently fixed, took up the eighth, on which the pattern of the band of the zodiac was
easily observable. Outside these was the nint^ Sphere Mobile, whose function was to transform the J_ove Of QO(J ^Q force which moved the other spheres. As they iAove the spl]etes ma]<e a sound, not audible to the human ear, which is th e music of the spheres. This movement also sends the planets through the Zodiac, thus Beating the shifting relations between planets and const;eiiatlons w),,cli could then be interpreted and their presumed effect on events on earth calculated. Hence the interweaving of astronomy and astr0logy; Of observation and interpretation.
This mixture is evident in the Astrolabe, in hiedieval literature in general, and in several of Chaucer’s fictional texts jn particular. So when Troilus dies and ascends to the eighth sphere, h.e arrives at a point beyond the influence of planetary motion and car\ [oo^ (jown on earthly events from the perspective of heavenly harmony (Troitus,V-1811-13). However, Troilus inhabits a pre-Christian world, ancj Chaucergoes on to exhort his Christian readers to trust not in the st;ars ^ ^^ QQ(J whose love controls the heavens. There is a line to ^ <jrawn between the superstition of astrology and the certainty of astronomy thus the magician/clerk of The Franklin’s Tale is perha,ps iess magiclan than accurate astronomer, and in the Astrolabe itself Cl\aucer puj]s (,adfrom his detailed exposition of the powers and influe^gg Of ^ ascendant to reassert his more scientific views in the face of horoscopes- ’fWieles these ben observaunces of judicial mattere ancj rytes Of yfflSj -in whiche my spirit hath no feith, ne knowing of her horoscopunt’(H- 4)
This disclaimer reminds us of the fine lines t0 be drawn between the effects of planetary motion on terrestial events ancj SUpefstiti0us belief. Wood reminds us that it is only in this treatjse that we Qn be sure that the views expressed on astrology in all its forms are Chaucer’s own, as opposed to those he ascribed to fictiony creations as P’rt of their characters (Wood 1970: 12-21). The astronomicaj eieinents in Chaucer’s fiction should not be dismissed lightly; as North points out astronomy had high standing as a natural science ancj a compkated one at that. He praises the Astrolabe as ’the first competent work in English on such a subject’ immediately adding <jt was ^ n0 sense original’ (North, 1988: 38), but of course, that w^s not tne polflt As a guide to knowledge of the stars, in its widest tet^g the Asiro/^ is a remarkable text and acknowledging this goes sot^ wav to verit: us from reading references to astronomical detail ot astrological b^ef in the rest of Chaucer’s texts too glibly.
Which leads to the second feature for which the text is significantits literary style. Its patient pedagogical tone crea[es wriat the j?»s;We editor, J. Reidy, terms ’a sustained, delicate rappcrtachievedby*ans
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of a mode of address in which the magistral and the familiar are happily blended’ (Riverside 661). This tone is echoed in The Parson’s Tale [148] and may even be heard put to different use in the ostensibly measured views of Troilus’s narrator [91, 166]. It is the tone of a writer who makes it clear that he knows exactly what he is doing. Thus in his preface Chaucer highlights his use of repetition throughout the text, defending it as a useful tool of instruction. The wit with which he offers two, closely related, reasons, for repetition should not be overlooked, nor the beautifully balanced prose in which the first reason is couched: ’for that curious endityng and hard sentence is ful hevy at onys for such a child to lerne’ (Prl.44). Throughout the text such relatively simple sentence structure allows Chaucer to move easily between intricate explanation and informal address. Moreover, while this rhythmical prose is comparatively free of the French and Latin influences of his early poetry, the tropes of elegant writing are still in evidence. The modesty topos, ’I n’am but a lewd compilator of the labour of olde astrologiens, and have translatid in myn Englissh oonly for thy doctrine. And with this swerd shal I sleen envie’, is a masterly example of a well-established tradition. Chaucer simultaneously reminds us of the scholarship and translation skills required to be able to compile the treatise and makes us aware that we would not like to attempt such a thing ourselves. That short second sentence displays his rhetorical skill, while also, notice, slaying envy, not preventing it
from occurring.
t , x.i.< n
Further Reading *•!… s.-.-
Chauncey Wood provides a succinct introduction to medieval astrology in his first chapter, before going on to discuss the Astrolabe in some detail (Wood 1970). Julian North readably explores the astronomy in Chaucer’s fiction texts (North 1988).
(in) The Equatorie of Planetis
In part it is such linguistic elements which have led some scholars to assert Chaucer’s authorship of the Equatone. Like the Astrolabe, it is a manual for using an astronomical instrument, and it seems to have been written around 1393 (judging from calendar references made in the text), which makes it contemporary with the Astrolabe, and its manuscript is accompanied by a set of tables, one bearing the phrase ’Radix Chaucer’, which inevitably led to much excitement. Several
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scholars find the topic as a whole fascinating, but Rand-Schmidt’s book (1993) serves to remind us that Chaucer was writing in a context of broad intellectual enquiry, not as a lone genius.
Further Reading
The most recent reconsideration of Chaucer’s possible authorship is by Kari Rand-Schmidt (1993) in which the Equatone is compared not only to the Astrolabe, but also to other Middle English astronomical prose texts, on the grounds that a writer’s style may be affected by the genre of the work in question.
(d) TROILUS AND CRISEYDE
Written between 1381 and 1386, Troilus is regarded by some as Chaucer’s finest work; Pearsall implies that Chaucer himself treated it as such, ’quite self consciously and deliberately’ (Pearsall 1992: 170) and indeed Chaucer makes large claims for it in the final section of the text (Troilus, V: 1786-92) where he envisages the poem paying its respects to Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan and Statius, all of whom wrote epics and among whose illustrious number Chaucer thus places himself. Lucan (39-65 AD) was the author of thePharsalia, which deals with the war between Caesar and Pompey. Statius (c.45-96 AD) wrote the Thebiad, which recounts the rather bloody lives of Oedipus’ sons. Ovid was not only responsible for the Metamorphoses, but also for the Heroides, in which female characters from Classical myths and epic, give their own sides of their stories, usually bewailing their fates in letter form (Chaucer goes, on to imitate this in his Legend [ 102]). Homer, of course, is the putative author of the Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, whom Virgil imitated in writing his own epic, the Aeneid, which deals with events for the surviving Trojans after the end of the Trojan War, thus taking up where Homer left off. Chaucer’s boast is thus quite high, but his pride may have been justified: Troilus is Chaucer’s longest single poem (the only large endeavour he actually finished) and is remarkable for its complexity of character and interweaving of plot, narration and historical background, which lend it a quality now frequently associated with novels. ’Astonishingly’ so, according to Brewer (Brewer 1998:180) although Stephen Barney, the Riverside editor, more coolly refers to the wider genre as historical romance, reminding us that not only Boccaccio, but also Chretien de Troyes and Benoit (in whose midtwelfth-century Roman de Troie the story of Troilus and Criseyde first
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appeared) wrote in similar vein Similar, but not identical while the story itself was well-known, and indeed Chaucer is in many ways translating Boccaccio’s // Filostrato, it is a translation informed by Chaucer’s interest in Boethius which he was translating at roughly the same time [83]), in narrative and in developing his own poetic repertoire The result is a richer text, which rewards study more than light reading
Set towards the end of the Tro]an War and divided into five books, the plot is as follows In Book One the scene is set and the protagonists introduced Criseyde is a young widow, alone in Troy since her father, the prophet Calchas, defected to the Greek camp, having foreseen the downfall of Troy Criseyde is aware of her vulnerable position as daughter of a traitor, and has sought protection from Hector, hero of Troy and eldest son of the king Troilus is one of Hector’s brothers who is earning himself a reputation as a brave warrior and scoffer at love Inevitably, the result of the latter is that he is smitten by Criseyde, whom he sees at a religious ceremony, whereupon he becomes the epitome of the love-lorn knight Troilus’ confidant is Pandarus, who, conveniently, is also Cnseyde’s uncle Upon discovering Troilus’ plight Pandarus takes it upon himself to do something about it Book Two sees Pandarus presenting Criseyde with Troilus’ love in extreme terms his life is in her hands, as is that of Pandarus, for if she refuses Troilus she will lose Pandarus too Criseyde agrees to a limited degree of contact with Troilus (’myn honour sauf’, Troilus, II 480) but begins to fall in love with him when she later sees him riding in from battle Pandarus first sets about establishing a correspondence between the two and then brings them together in Deiphebus’s house (another of Troilus’ brothers) At this point we are reminded again of Cnseyde’s vulnerable position in Troy, which makes it too risky for her relation with Troilus to be acknowledged openly However, in Book Three the two are physically united and a happy three-year love affair begins It is ruined in Book Four by the capture of Antenor by the Greeks The Greeks offer an exchange Antenor for Criseyde and a Greek captive The majority of the Trojans agree, despite Hector’s objections, leaving Troilus distraught Pandarus suggests he simply elope with Criseyde, but he refuses to act without her agreement and she demurs, setting her hopes on subterfuge and the chance that she will be able to escape from the Greek camp In Book Five the exchange takes place and Criseyde finds herself reunited with her father, but surrounded by potentially hostile Greeks Enter Diomede, Greek hero and more than interested in seducing Criseyde, particularly because he guesses at her affair with Troilus Unable to escape and beset by Diomede, Criseyde gives up
trying to return to Troy and accepts Diomede Troilus, meanwhile, continues to pine for Criseyde, despite Pandarus’ best advice, until one day he recognises a brooch he gave Criseyde on Diomede’s cloak Overcome, Troilus enters ever more wildly into battle, eventually finding death at the hands of Achilles The tale ends with Troilus ascending to the eighth sphere, whence he looks down on the earth and laughs, seeing all things, including his own life, in cosmic proportion In a final coda, the narrator sends his poem out into the world and urges his audience to value the love of Christ over worldly vanity
As might be expected for a work of this stature, there are a variety of ways critics have approached the text Usefully, there are some broad categories, although that is not to say there is consensus within these categories One is source study even the most cursory glance brings home how much Chaucer developed and expanded his source, while a simple reading of any two stanzas in the Italian and then in English makes one aware of the difference m rhythm and pacing which arises not simply from the difference in language but also from Boccaccio’s eight-line stanza compared to Chaucer’s seven lines But source study is not just about how writers adapt or change their material, it also addresses why they do so and the effects of such changes Boccaccio says that his reason for telling Troilus’ story is because he has just suffered in love himself and so the tale struck a chord This may be actually true or may be a fictional ploy, but the idea is clearly to create a close and informal relation between teller and audience Chaucer goes about it rather differently We are quickly aware of a narrator of the kind familiar from his Dream Poems [61, 165] not just unlucky but indeed inexperienced in love, a bibliophile who is not adverse to disclaiming reponsibility for some aspects of his story by placing the blame firmly on his author’s (source’s) shoulders ’if they on hire [Cnseyde] lye,/Iwis, hemself sholde han the vilanye’ (Troilus, IV 20-
1) This narrator comments on the action and motives of his characters as well as recounting them and thus makes himself felt in the poem Yet there is some dispute over how far this figure can be equated with Chaucer (albeit a fictionalised version of himself) and how much it is in effect a distinct character, created by Chaucer to add a further layer to the text The notion of the Narrator as a character on much the same level as Troilus, Criseyde and in particular Pandarus, was first put forward by E T Donaldson (1970 68-83) for whom the Narrator was a bumbling fool Others since then have had different opinions, but many have retained the idea of the Narrator as an individual whose character is epitomised in his early words ’ I, that God of Loves servantz serve’ (Troilus, I 15)
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Certainly, there is a long way we can go with this kind of reading. The Narrator becomes a conscious manipulator of his text; now ironically disclaiming responsibility; now cunningly making us think thoughts that would not have crossed our minds had he not urged us to ignore them. The best example of this is probably his unexpected defence of Criseyde’s sudden love for Troilus:
11 >H’,
Now myghte some envious jangle thus: : ”This was a sodeyn love; how myght it be • r That she so lightly loved Troilus . >
Right for the firste sighte, ye pardei”
(Troilus, II: 666-79)
;
Would we have accused her of ’sudden love’4- We are, after all, reading a love story in which such things are likely to happen. Following Donaldson, we detect here a clever and convoluted slur on Criseyde, which combines with phrases used of her elsewhere (not least in the summarising opening where she unequivocally ’forsook’ Troilus) to create a portrait of a fickle, even manipulative, woman. Brewer, however, has no truck with this view.
The critical flaw, according to Brewer, is that this kind of interpretation ’assumes that no text is written in good faith’ (Brewer 1998:
191). Moreover, it raises questions of when we refer to the Narrator and when to Chaucer. The knottiness of this problem has already been touched upon when dealing with the Dream Poems [67, 73], and the case is not dissimilar here. However, there is one crucial difference between the narrators of the dream poems and the voice which recounts Troilus: the degree of participation in the action of the text. In the Dream poems the narrator is directly involved in the action. He goes into the gardens, quizzes the people he finds there, demands information, eavesdrops on debates – he is a participant. Here, in Troilus, he is not. Yet it would be critically naive to equate the narrative voice with Chaucer entirely. As much as anything, even given the little we know about Chaucer’s personal life, it seems disingenuous to regard him as a non-participant in affairs of love, which is the image this narrator seems keen to project.
The question becomes particularly intricate when the end of the poem is under discussion, because here the poet addresses his audience directly, amongst whom are numbered Cower and Strode, both contemporaries of Chaucer, whom he invites almost to proof-read the text:
O moral Cower, this book I directe • ” <• t • • , »’< –
To the and to the, philosophical Strode, . ’,• . •,,« ,,
To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte, ” • •”,; ,(<•’.-•< n>”<} Of youre benignites and zeles goode. ”’ ’• xri ,>,;•’;•>• •«• ,.
(Troilus, V: 1856-9) flr*. ’ «•>,„•«
If we believe that the narrator is indeed a separate character, how do we account for thisi Some critics take advantage of the multiple endings of the poem to imply that in these final sections, the codas as it were, Chaucer casts off his persona and addresses us directly through the text. However, if we establish the notion of a narrative stance for the duration of the tale it is possible to see here the same trick of selfpresentation being used to slightly different ends. Chaucer may indeed no longer be using the persona of an anxious narrator, but the humility of the request for correction is perhaps just as much a stance. One could question how much Chaucer was inclined to believe there was ’need’ for correction beyond the scribal errors which he was all too aware could creep in easily:
And for ther is so gret diversitee f/
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, • •• So prey I God that non myswrite the, i •
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge:
(Troilus, V: 1793-7)
Here we can detect the tone which dictates ’Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn’ [60] in which Troilus is specifically mentioned, as the dire consequences of severe scalp disease are wished on Adam, should he miswrite Chaucer’s texts.
It does not do, however, to concentrate so much on who is doing the telling as to overlook what is being told. As has been mentioned, Chaucer was re-telling an already familiar story. In this tradition Troilus is central – it is his story, as it is for Chaucer, who refers to the text as ’Troylus’ in ’Unto Adam’ and as ’the book of Troilus’ in his ’Retraction’ [149]. The manuscripts which give the text a title divide roughly equally between The. Book of Troilus and Troilus and Criseyde (Riverside
1020) and indeed the opening line declares the focus of attention: ’The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen’. So what kind of figure is this central character: a heroi a knight1?- a lover£ a philosopher^ Critics have made him all four.
The opening lines firmly place him in his epic setting: he is Troilus, son of King Priam of Troy. Later we are further told that he is considered
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second only to Hector on the battlefield and the connection between his name and that of his city (Troilus means ’little Troy’) runs throughout the text, allowing us to draw comparisons and further increasing Troilus’ standing. Initially, too, he is entirely the young warrior making a name for himself on the field and having no time for love. Once he sees Criseyde all that changes and he becomes the epitome of the love-struck knight of medieval romance. He takes to his bed (when he is not on the battlefield), sickens, tells no-one, composes songs and never considers making direct contact with his love object, preferring instead to simply conjure her up in his thoughts.
Interestingly, this is described thus:
( r 11
Thus gan he make a mirour of his mynde , • . . •
In which he sough al holly hire figure, , ’ . ’
And that he wel koude in his herte fynde. i.’ • n ;
(Troilus, 1: 365-7) .” vpn
There are shades of Duchess here with its recognition of the power of memory as Troilus finds himself in a state not far from that of the Black Knight [69]. We have moved out of epic and into romance and Troilus adopts different attitudes accordingly.
There is a temptation to describe this Troilus as passive, reluctant as he is to make any direct move towards Criseyde, even when Pandarus has engineered a meeting between the two. However, this view of him must be tempered by the fact that throughout the affair Troilus continues to accrue credit as a fighter. He does not become inert, he simply refuses to assert control in his relations with Criseyde, a tactic which underpins The Franklin’s Tale [130] and is recommended by the Wife of Bath [120]. Some regard this lack of assertion as in keeping with his role as courtly lover. According to the convention, it is the lady who calls the shots, who decides when or indeed whether the two lovers will meet and who decides exactly how things progress from there. Of course it is also possible to see Troilus as manipulating the convention to his benefit – by apparently dying from love he evokes the ’pity’ from his lady which is a normal precursor to love. Certainly it is with this in mind that Pandarus goes into such detail when describing Troilus’ plight to Criseyde (Troilus, II: 316-85) even adding the threat of his own death to that of Troilus should she refuse (Troilus, II: 439-46). Again, when Pandarus engineers the covert meetings of the two, first at Deiphebus’s house and later at his own in order to give them opportunity to consummate their passion, Troilus is apparently incapable of independent action to the extent that rather than capitalising on
Pandarus’ plan he swoons and has to be tipped on to the bed by Pandarus. Hardly the most commanding performance, but for some critics that is the point: Kittredge (1915) and Lewis (1936), each regard this as an example of Chaucer’s use of the courtly love tradition. Aers (1986) takes this a step further, pointing out how Troilus, Pandarus and Diomede all exploit the language of male courtly ’service’. For each of these critics in very different ways, Troilus’ inaction is thus proof of the power of love.
Caught between the role models of his two brothers, warrior Hector, the hero of Troy, and Paris the lover, whose seizure of Helen caused all the trouble to start with, Troilus follows neither fully. Having been content to go along with Pandarus’ deceptions of Criseyde up to the point of this rather bizarre seduction, Troilus subsequently renounces such dominant action in favour of deferring to Criseyde. Aers sees this conversion as the triumph of the personal relationship between the lovers over the social conventions of love. However, this private concord can exist only in a ’secret oasis’ (Aers 1986: 95-98) which cannot survive in the external social world, let alone when this world is one of war. Troilus’ apparently fatal decision to reject Pandarus’ advice (Troilus, IV:
529-32) to simply abduct Criseyde rather than allow her be traded to the Greeks is thus the result of his conversion to private individual from his previous social role as Trojan defender. Rather than simply ’ravysshe’ Criseyde, which might echo Paris’ action with Helen before the text, and rather than stoutly defending her as Hector does, Troilus consults with her, deferring to her decision to put hope in strategem over action.
Strategem fails, or perhaps Criseyde does, and Troilus is left bereft. His despair takes the form of seeking death in battle with a determination made all the stronger when he sees his own brooch on Diomede’s cloak. Here it is possible to see him moving out of the romance genre and the individual role he took on after seeing Criseyde, back towards a more social one as warrior. In a way he is granted a magnificent death, at the hands of Achilles, greatest of Greek warriors, but while Troilus’ ’wrath’ (Troitus,V: 1800) may recall the wrath of Achilles which introduces the Iliad, the single line which describes their encounter is hardly what we expect for an epic hero: ’Despitously hym slough the fierse Achille’ (Troilus, V: 1806). More disconcertingly, this is not the end of Troilus, let alone the end of Troilus. He slips up to the eighth sphere, whence he looks down on those grieving below and laughs, and then moves again to come to rest ’ther as Mercurye sorted hym to dwelle’ (Troilus, V: 1827): we are never told exactly where that is.
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It is fitting that Mercury, most elusive of gods, should thus preside over Troilus’ end as the end of the poem is likewise elusive. Or rather we are given too many endings. Claudia Papka (1998: 267) describes the ending of Troilus as:
…a critically divisive textual moment: as redemption for the Robertsonian, a cop-out for the narratologist, and a self-defence for the new historicist. For many, there is the sense that there must be some mistake.
That ’sense of mistake’ may arise from the fact that from the start we have been told that the poem is about Troilus and so we might imagine that his death will be its end-point thereby making the text the ’tragedye’ it describes itself as being (Troilus, V: 1786: this, incidentally, is the first use of the word ’tragedy’ in English, see also The Monk’s Tale (Tales, VII: 1991) [140]). While we may be prepared to accept a reference to his ghost’s final resting place and even a retrospective summary of the whole poem as a way of rounding things off, we are not prepared for the extended coda which moves out from this plot to other tales of Troy (Troilus, V: 1765-71) and attitudes to Criseyde (Troilus, V: 1772-8) into suggestions of how the text could be interpreted: as an instance of general human betrayal (Troilus, V: 1779-85) or as a moral tale on the fortunes of love which should lead us to think of the greater merits of Divine Love (Troilus, V: 1828-55). Imbedded in this are wider considerations of the fortune of texts as a whole, which are evidence of Chaucer’s consciousness of the vagaries of scribal error, which he fulminates against humorously in ’Adam Scriveyn’ [60] and which make Troilus so appealing for deconstructionists:
And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that non myswrite the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche! But yet to purpos of my rather speche.
(Troilus, V: 1793-5
This preoccupation with the fate of the text as a document, which could be mis-transcribed and misconstrued, hints at the difference between rewriting an already existing tale and making free with some of its details (which has been Chaucer’s practice throughout this poem)
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and having the coherence of an individual text spoiled through incompetence. Correction should come only from those qualified – Chaucer names Cower and Strode and by so doing treads the fine line of expected humility while preserving his own standing as an author, ready to take his place with the best.
It is not only Chaucer the poet who is aware of the link between text and reputation in this poem, however. Criseyde looks forward from within the story, envisaging how she will be remembered: t
Alias, of me, unto the worldes ende, • • ..-. •
Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge • •. .
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende. »t,i, I, O, rolled shal I ben on may a tonge! •.,. 1 1- <• ’•. £ I , ; –
Thoroughout the world my belle shal be ronge! , ’ ’; And wommen moost wol ha ten me of alle. *’-,,•> -,»>’•, Alias, that swich a cas me sholde falle! •>’ ,••!••/• \
(Troilus, V: 1058-64) • rj, • •»<„ •. •
Concern for her reputation has been a governing factor throughout the poem, and here, in a move reminiscent of House [72, 77], Criseyde looks beyond the bounds of her immediate situation and acknowledges the literary character she will be given by the very books that immortalise her. This is a marvellously literary moment, as Chaucer’s Criseyde can only voice these words because they have already been proved true. She, like Troilus, is bound by the narrative of her story: she must abandon the idea of returning to Troilus. By making her aware of this, Chaucer perhaps offers his readers the chance to come to a more sympathetic understanding of her plight than that envisaged here, but his narrator’s response is more ambiguous. Even as he refuses to condemn her he reminds us of those others who have by shifting from ’Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde/Forther than the storye wol devyse’ (Troilus, V 1093-4) to ’Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se’ (Troilus, V 1776). The use of ’sely’ is not entirely derogatory. It could mean ’silly’ as we understand it now, but it also meant ’wretched’ or ’innocent’ which could become ’ignorant’ and thus ’unwise’ or, most surprisingly for modern readers, ’happy, blessed’. Less open to benign interpretation is the use of ’slydynge’ (Troilus, V: 825) which at best means ’flowing’, from the verb ’slyde’, but more usually ’wavering’ or ’changeable’, as it does when Chaucer uses it of Fortune in Boece (I.m5.34) [84]. The effect in this line is doubly damning since the whole phrase is ’slydynge of courage’ and forms part of the description of Criseyde which follows that of Diomede as hero. It is as if Criseyde is being re-described in
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order to begin again as the romantic heroine of another narrative, this time starring Diomede as her lover, but no sooner is she thus reestablished than we are reminded of Troilus and that a particular instance of her ’slydynge’ nature is her failure to return to him.
The figure of Criseyde has been the focus of much debate over the years, particularly when the question of Chaucer’s treatment of women is discussed [174]. Such debate seems to have started immediately, as Chaucer incorporates criticism of his treatment of Criseyde into the Prologue to his Legend. Alceste takes him to task: ’And of Criseyde thou hast seyde as the lyste,/That maketh men to wommen lasse triste,/ That ben as trewe as ever was any steel.’(Legend, F: 333-5). He must write the stones of good women in recompense. Henryson (c.1425-
1500) [179] also suggests that there might have been another version of Criseyde’s story and writes The Testament ofCresseid to prove it, taking up Cresseid’s tale more or less where Chaucer leaves off. In this version she becomes a leper, which perhaps shows Henryson taking Chaucer’s Criseyde at her word, as lepers carried a bell to warn people to keep a
safe distance.
Criseyde’s relation to text is not all to do with her future. It also directly affects her actions in the poem. After seeing her exchange banter on an equal footing with Pandarus and hearing her reservations about entering into a liaison with Troilus, she seems to fall prey to the coercive effect of the song her niece, Antigone, sings in the garden (Troilus, II:
827-75). The exact tenor of this song is ambiguous. On the one hand it is a secular love song, extolling the virtues of loving a man who is (inevitably) ’the welle of wothynesse,/ Of trouthe grownd, mirour of goodlihed’ (Troilus, II: 841-2). As such it is addressed to the god of Love and accords with the classical and secular medieval aspects of the poem. It is this aspect that influences Criseyde, drawing her into the role of lover and lady of romance and apparently allaying the fears the idea of love had raised when suggested by Pandarus. As a result of this, and her conversation with Antigone (who asserts the bliss of love, Troilus, II: 885-96), Criseyde ’wex somwhat able to converte’ (Troilus, II: 903) so that when Pandarus visits her with a letter from Troilus, which he delivers, significantly, in a garden, she is already more open to the idea of the liaison than she was. Note that although she rebukes Pandarus for bringing Troilus’ letter, she does not throw it away, but rather reads
it in private.
An alternative reading of Antigone’s song suggests another way in which the text influences Criseyde. The god of Love can be taken as the Christian God, whose love surpasses human romantic infatuations, as in Chaucer’s An ABC [49]. The blending of religious and secular
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language is typical of both religious and secular medieval lyrics. If its lead is followed here, Criseyde’s subsequent actions make her into not a type of unfortunate or fickle lover, but a weak mortal soul, falling prey to the fears and temptations of the world. A hint of warning might be perceived in Antigone’s enthusiastic support for the lover’s state in which she refers to both the saints in heaven and the devils in hell (Troilus, II: 894-6), but Criseyde is a secular reader and thus seals her fate. Even the dreams Criseyde has that night do not deter her, although the story of Philomel, the nightingale (told in Legend, 2228-
393 [104]) might warn her against becoming entangled in the affairs of men, and the eagle who tears out her heart could symbolise either her fall in Christian terms or her vulnerability in pagan ones.
Criseyde, then, like Dorigen in The Franklin’s Tale [130] is at the mercy of romance conventions [32, 40], but, like the Wife of Bath [121], is aware of the power of text to define her. Often regarded by critics as a pragmatist, she thus accepts that she will forever be known for being unfaithful to Troilus, so the best she can do to mitigate her reputation is be faithful to Diomede. As she says: And that to late is now for me to rewe,/To Diomede algate I wol be trewe.’ (Troilus, V:
1070-1).
Chaucer never tells us if she is in fact true to Diomede and we have already seen that his attempt to redeem her reputation was not entirely successful, if, indeed, we believe he made such an attempt. Instead what we have is a text in which character is very strong. We may read Criseyde as a metaphor for the human state, as a representation of fortune, as a type, but the intricacy of the text requires that we also read her as a believable, if not likeable, person. Likewise Troilus and Pandarus have individual as well as representational roles to play, while that shadowy figure of the narrator stalks through the text, part identified with Pandarus, part with Chaucer, part with the tale’s tradition. The laugh that Troilus sends up at the end of the story is not only the character mocking the vanity of the world that makes the death of a man mean so much and puts his tragedy into comic as well as cosmic perspective, but may also be the laugh of Chaucer delighting m the difficulty of fixing secure meaning on a text so full of different voices. It is the number of voices, each with its own relation to the central plot, that is worth noting here as Chaucer’s fascination with variety and multi-vocal texts is clearly evident. It is this that he goes on to expand, making it his forte, as he moves away from telling one particular story into composing collections of Tales in which both teller and tale are part of a larger framework.
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Further Reading
For those interested in Chaucer’s use of his sources there are two invaluable books. Windeatt’s edition of Troilus and Criseyde (1984) presents parallel editions of Chaucer’s text and Boccaccio’s II Filostrato, accompanied throughout with detailed textual notes. A detailed study of Chaucer’s use of Boccaccio is to be found in Havely’s Chaucer’s Boccaccio (1980). Chaucer’s use of the courtly love tradition underpins Kittredge (1915) and Lewis (1936). Aers (1986) takes this a step further, pointing out how Troilus, Pandarus and Diomede all exploit the language of male courtly ’service’. Patterson is central on Chaucer’s development of the concept of historical sources and deals explicitly with Troilus in chapter 2 (Patterson 1991: 84-164). Lawton (1985) is clear on narrators, as is Donaldson on both Crisseyde and the ending of the poem (1970), while Leicester (1987) offers an interesting and comprehensible deconstructionist reading. Feminist critiques are offered by Mann – particularly good on betrayal (1991: 5-47), Dinshaw, who looks at habits of reading (1989: 28-64) and Hansen who concentrates on masculine control of reading (1992: 141-87). A useful overview of the various ways Criseyde and other characters have been read is given by Anne Rooney (1989: 60-5).
(e) COLLECTIONS OF TALES: i THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN
!
In the late 1380s Chaucer, now probably resident in Kent [22], was engaged upon his two great narrative collections: The Legend of Good Women and The Canterbury Tales. It is likely that there was some overlap of composition, but as Pearsall points out, the fact that Legend refers explicitly to Troilus (Prologue, F: 332-5; G: 264-7) but makes no mention of the Tales, whereas the Man of Law speaks of the Legend as a ’large volume’ (Tales, II: 60-76) before going on to tell the tale of Custance (who could easily have been a candidate for inclusion the Legend], indicates that Chaucer abandoned the Legend once he hit upon the more ambitious plan of The Canterbury Tales (Pearsall 1992: 191). This order also makes sense in terms of metre. The Legend is composed in couplets in iambic pentameters (heroic couplets) which predominate in the Tales. Arguably the slightly looser structure of ten rather than eight syllables and couplets rather than stanzas makes for more elasticity and ease in writing long narrative. On the other hand it runs
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the risk of monotony, as the ear bumps along with the rhythm of the line, anticipating the end rhymes. Certainly when it came to the greater enterprise of the Tales, Chaucer chose to vary the form of the narratives as well as the tellers and the genres. In all likelihood, then, Chaucer worked on Legend from 1386 to 1387 and then shifted his attention entirely to the Tales.
The notion of collecting stories together is of course very old: the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, could all be described as texts made up of a series of tales, but the term ’collection’ tends to suggest a group of stories with distinct protagonists brought together through some common theme. A useful example of this is the thirteenth-century Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea) composed by Jacobus de Voragine (1230-98) which is a collection of lives of saints and other exemplary figures, and stories of miracles and morals. As a collection of religious stories intended to instruct and inspire, this text needs no further rationale and was widely drawn upon for entertainment, sermons and literary reference throughout the Middle Ages. Chaucer probably used it as one of the sources for his Second Nun’s Tale and imitates its structure in The Monk’s Tale. The word ’legend’ for the collection now known as The Legend of Good Women also harks back to Voragine, and is used both by Alceste in the Prologue (Legend, F: 483) and by the Man of Law (Tales, II: 61).
The word ’legend’ perhaps summons up expectations of exceptional behaviour or the intervention of gods, but the idea of using some kind of framework to bring together a variety of popular, secular tales was also current. Boccaccio [40] used the fiction of a group of nobles retreating to a country house to avoid the plague as the excuse for the tales brought together in his Decameron, while Cower [39] likewise creates a group of lovers to serve as narrators for his Confessio Amantis, which he finished in around 1387. The important point here is that for the legend-type collection the stories are told directly without an obvious narrator figure, whereas the more diverse collections are apparently recorded by someone listening to a series of story-tellers. There is still unity within diversity, however, as both Boccaccio and Cower link their tales by theme. In the Decameron a new topic is chosen each day; for Cower the title of the work, which translates as The Lover’s Confession’ declares its theme. In Legend and The Monk’s Tale we see Chaucer beginning to tinker with these conventions until he overthrows them entirely in The Canterbury Tales.
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(i) The Legend of Good Women
As has been mentioned above [81], the two versions of the Prologue for Legend constitute Chaucer’s last foray into the dream vision genre. In them we meet several of the elements familiar from his earlier dream poems: an opening address to his reader; the use of a fictionalised form of himself as narrator; delicate description of the natural world and a typically elusive tone which moves between simple narration and ironic comedy. Several lines also refer back more directly to previous poems, such as the use of the gleaning metaphor (F: 73-7; G: 61-5) recalling Parliament’?, bide feldes’ (Parliament: 22) and the birds addressing their songs to St. Valentine (F: 144-7; G: 131-3) again similar to Parliament, although these later birds defy bird-catchers as they sing. It is precisely this less idealised thread which opens Legend to rather more sardonic reading than it at first appears to invite, for the main question surrounding this text is: is it all a sarcastic joke^
(ii) The pretext for writing the Legend
According to the text itself, the collection of stories about good women is a penance for spreading the disparagement of Love found inle Roman de la Rose by translating it into English [62-5], and for then further defaming the character of true lovers, and women in particular, by telling the story of Criseyde (Legend, F: 320-40; G: 246-66). The accusation is levelled by the god of Love, who in the G Prologue goes on to point out that Chaucer has sixty books full of stories of Roman and Greek women in which good women outnumber bad a hundred to one (And evere an hundered goode agyen oon badde’, G: 277). Defence comes from the unexpected angle of Alceste, who is here Love’s consort, but it is a rather barbed defence. Perhaps, she suggests, Chaucer simply wrote what was to hand without really understanding what it said, after all he also composed works in praise of Love (Legend, F: 362-
72; G: 340-52). She then lists most of Chaucer’s works including the stories of Palamoun and Arcite and St. Cecilia which are now best known as The Knight’s [110] and the Second Nun’s Tales [142] respectively. It is Alceste, then, who proposes that Chaucer exonerate himself by spending the best part of the rest of his life ’In makynge of a gloryous legende/Of goode women,’ (Legend, F: 483-4; G: 473-4). The penance is accepted and the prologue ends with Chaucer waking from his dream and settling to the task.
The figure of Alceste is significant for two reasons. She herself is a legendary good woman: she volunteered to die in her husband’s stead,
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thus proving her devotion to him, but was rescued by Hercules who challenged Death to a wrestling match with Alceste as the prize. Her later transformation into a daisy seems to be Chaucer’s invention and is a detail which neatly brings together the fictional and real contexts of the poem. In the fictional world, Chaucer ventures out in May to seek out his favourite flower, the daisy, whose virtues he details over several lines (Legend, F: 40-67; G: 40-60). There is no hint at this stage of the connection between Alceste and the daisy (which is merely asserted in F: 519 and G: 507), but there is a reference to the historical and literary context of the poem. A cult of the daisy, or marguerite, sprang up in honour of Richard H’s queen, Anne, which allows for the suggestion that Alceste is here a figure of Anne. Although evidence of the exact status of such cults is thin on the ground, the allusion indicates that Chaucer expected the work to have a court audience. As such the daisy reference becomes part of the courtly contest between the Flower and the Leaf which Chaucer explicitly invokes in the F prologue ’Whethir ye ben with the leef or with the flour’ (F: 72) and then elaborately refuses to join in the G version: ••<; t
•i:, i ,-
For trusteth wel, I ne have nat undertake > .•. ,• ,. K As of the lef agayn the flour to make, ,’-,.,
Ne of the flour to make agayn the lef -i • , • \ >
(G:71-3) • .. ,
This contest was primarily a May Day game which entailed courtiers playfully swearing allegiance to either the flower or the leaf and then asserting the merits of their chosen icon. The side which provided the best argument won. Two things are of interest here. First, in portraying himself as a devotee of the daisy, Chaucer is in effect espousing the cult of the flower. It may be no coincidence that, according to Deschamps, Philippa, John of Gaunt’s eldest daughter, was the patroness of the Flower faction. Second, it places the Legend as a whole in the context of a competition, and while the tales of the good women are told as an act of penitence and to redress the balance of his previous work, this broader literary context might have contributed to the eventual framework of The Canterbury Tales.
It could be said then that Legend partakes in two contests: the Flower and Leaf debate, and the challenge to produce exemplary tales of women. The question is how seriously did Chaucer take that second challenged Brewer (1998: 250-1) points out that the allusion to the hundred stories of good women to one bad mentioned at G: 277 is immediately followed by a joke at the God of Love’s expense as the
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rhetorical questions ’What seith Valerye, Titus, or Claudian^/ What seith Jerome agayns Jovynyan<?-’ (Legend, G: 280-1) could be answered by one who knew with ’not much good about women’, despite the implication here that they speak in women’s defence. Once that tone is established the Legends themselves are open to ironic interpretation ’ and attention is drawn to the fact that not only do all these women prove their worth by being victims of male betrayal, rather than through active good work, but also that the more one examines the tales, the more one wonders how far some of these women may be called ’good’.
The stories told are, in order, those of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle and Medea (who share a legend, as they are abandoned by the same man, Jason) Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, Phillis and Hypermnestra. The first six are explicitly termed martyrs in the Latin headings to their tales and seven of the ten die, four through suicide. One begins to suspect that the only good woman is a dead woman. Those wishing to defend Chaucer point out that these women are all held up as loyal in love and for Brewer this is evidence of Chaucer’s belief in such steadfast love as the central virtue of mankind (Brewer
1998: 254-5), a virtue which Alceste also epitomises (and for which she also nearly dies). More important for the twentieth-century reader is the fact that the best known source for these women’s stories was Ovid’s Heroides, a series of letter-poems composed as if written by women lamenting their betrayal by men. Nowadays, we are more likely to know versions drawn from Ovid’s sources, which tell the overall story, such as the tale of Antony and Cleopatra, or the version of Philomela’s story which includes (as Chaucer does not) her revenge of serving Tereus a pie made out of his children.
The legends themselves are brief; the longest, Dido’s, is 443 lines long, though the legend of Hypermnestra is unfinished. They are selfcontained in that they make perfect sense when read without any prior knowledge of the stories or their context, but there is a cumulative effect, which is most explicit in the story of Phillis, who is abandoned by Demophon, Theseus’s son. The text hints that she might have expected such a fate, given Theseus’s own reputation, already established in the tale of Ariadne, likewise abandoned. As Phillis herself declares, ’ye ben lyk youre fader as in this’ (2544) and the narrative notes that women would be well advised to learn from the examples set before them, although it is somewhat harder to judge the tone of the final line of this tale: And trusteth, as in love, no man but me’.
Men in fact do rather well out of Legend in one particular way each legend contains many lines devoted to the men associated with
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women. Thus we hear a good deal about Antony, about H nerrnnestra’s father, Egiste and uncle, Danao, about Tereus Philomela’s husband (and raper of her sister) and of course about Aeneas
d Theseus, all before the women themselves enter their own stories. Perhaps, then, the joke is that Legend is less one of Good Women than of Perfidious Men. It is a very courtly joke, as Antony, Aeneas and Jason are all described at various points as the epitome of courtly, knightly virtues. If we accept that Chaucer was expecting primarily a court audience for this text, it makes reading the Legend increasingly interesting, as it raises the possibility that he is offering some gentle, humorous criticism of what were becoming increasingly outdated values. In this light the much-acclaimed, highly sexualised, description of the sea-battle in the story of Cleopatra (Legend, 635-53) sets the tone for the tales that follow.
In all Legend is an experiment in bringing together a series of stories, united by theme, but offering the chance of variety plot and largely disposing of the need of a narrative persona. Yet, while such structure suited Gower and Boccaccio and was used successfully with explicit didactic purpose by Christine de Pizan, Chaucer evidently found it uninspiring and, whether as intentional joke, or as the result of restricted imagination, did not take full advantage of the opportunity to tell a wide variety of narratives. For all we know, he may have been composing further legends sporadically until the end of his life, as his Retraction refers to the book of twenty-five ladies (or in some manuscripts twenty-nine). We do know, however, that he exercised a far greater range of genres and character types in what is now his most famous composition, The Canterbury Tales.
Further Reading
For criticism of the Prologue see [83]. Of the Legends themselves, those of Dido and Cleopatra have drawn particular attention. Dido is discussed by Mann (1991: esp. 5-18) and N. Rudd (1994: 3-31). Hamel shows how Cleopatra’s sea-battle draws on literary conventions for the description of naval engagements in a welcome and accessible essay (R. Edwards (ed.) 1994: 149-62). Delany’s book prevents us dismissing Legend too easily (Delany 1994) and picks up on Dinshaw’s groundbreaking reading (Dinshaw 1989: 65-87). ,
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(f) COLLECTIONS OF TALES: THE CANTERBURY TALES
i; (i) The ’whole’ collection: manuscripts,
v> texts and dates
For many Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales are synonymous. We refer to the collection as if it was a complete and coherent whole, whereas the truth is rather different. Eighty-four manuscripts survive, no two alike, only fifty-five of which seem to have been ’complete’ at any point and even amongst those the sequence of tales varies. This has given rise to much debate about the order and overall idea of the collection: does the Second Nun follow the Nun’s Priest or the Franklin^ Does the Wife of Bath follow the Man of Law or the Pardoner^ Was she originally intended to tell the Tale now given to the Shipmani How many Tales were there to have been: one tale per pilgrim or four^ In some ways the early manuscripts do not help. Hengwrt, the earliest manuscript, was probably copied in the year of Chaucer’s death and can be called the ’best’ in that it arguably preserves the closest text to Chaucer’s original, but it is incomplete as the scribe seems to have acquired the Tales haphazardly and the manuscript has been bound and rebound in several orders since 1400, thus further scrambling it. Ellesmere is thought to be by the same scribe and is a beautiful, clear text (’best’ in a different sense) which forms the basis of most of the modern editions [157].
It is impossible to determine an exact date for the Tales, or even a reliable order of composition. The tendency has been to suggest that work on them started in around 1387 and continued intermittently from then until Chaucer’s death in 1400. This would mean he was adding to the Tales while also writing Astrolabe [86], The Equatorie of Planetis [88], several short poems and revising the Prologue to Legend [81]. Very likely he was also tinkering with earlier Tales as he wrote later ones, and certainly was adding linking passages and perhaps internal references and re-assigning tales to characters. It is also entirely likely that the General Prologue was written after several of the tales existed and was still open to adjustment (several pilgrims who tell tales are not featured in it while tales do not exist for some who are described). The result is a more fluid text than we perhaps are used to imagining, in which individual Tales easily stand alone, even if they also have obvious relations to others.
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This less settled view of the text indicates that the current habit of reading one or two of the Tales in rather random fashion is not all that far removed from the kind of reception they received from the first. As vvith The Legend of Good Women, The Canterbury Tales may have been conceived of as an ongoing project, to which tales could be added at any time and which also offered a home for already extant pieces which were in danger of being overlooked (Pearsall 1992: 228). The reference in the Prologue to Legend to what we now think of as The Knight’s Tale as ’the love of Palamoun and Arcite/ Of Thebes, thogh the storye is knowen ]\t&’(Legend, F: 420; G: 407) supports this view. Similarly, the life of St. Cecile, mentioned in F: 426 (G: 416) became the Second Nun’s tale. Neither of these tales would have required much revision, if any, to become part of the larger body of The Tales.
Amongst the chaos there is some order. Groups of Tales tend to have stuck together and are now referred to as ’Fragments’ labelled either alphabetically A-I, or in Roman numerals I-X. The Riverside Chaucer (the edition used here) uses Roman numerals and follows the Ellesmere order, numbering lines from the start of each fragment accordingly. This sequence suggests particular connections between Tales, but we should bear in mind that other correspondences exist and feel free to pursue them, much as we do, perhaps, when reading a book of short stories today.
Further Reading
The manuscripts and the questions raised by them are presented exhaustively but clearly in Owen (1991). More general treatment can be found in Cooper (1984), which explores the effects of order and links between fragments in the Tales. For engaging treatment of the Tales as a whole it is hard to beat Howard (1979) and Pearsall (1985) while Brewer discusses them in the general context of Chaucer’s life and work (Brewer 1998: 261-397). Cooper’s tale-by-tale guide is invaluable (Cooper 1996), while Phillips (2000) is approachable and less detailed. A succinct overview of the question of the chronological’ order of the Tales may be found in Pearsall (1992: 226-31).
(ii) The General Prologue
Probably the most famous prologue in English Literature, the poem begins with a brief description of English spring weather: April showers penetrate dry March roots, setting new life in motion and making everyone restless. For those particularly enamoured of Chaucer’s bawdy,
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these lines carry obvious sexual overtones, but they also reflect the landscape descriptions which commonly open dream poems while simultaneously placing the action of the Prologue in a particular season, country and indeed attitude, when ’longen folk to goon on pilgrimage’ (Tales, I: 12). The appeal of pilgrimage is as ’sondry’ (varied) as the people who embark upon it: for some it is primarily a holiday, an excuse for a change of scene; for others a genuine religious act (although there is no reference to attendance at Mass or other devotions being observed). By rights the Monk ought not to be travelling at all and we might question what prompts the Miller or Pardoner (to select but two) to go along. Chaucer has used the pilgrimage as a credible pretext to gather a carefully selected collection of characters and create a group which is more varied than any likely to unite voluntarily for other reasons. He then isolates them from interaction with any but themselves. In this the Tales has much in common with the road or disaster movies of today, but it is important to remember that we are not in fact dealing with individuals, but with representative types: a Knight, a Reeve, a Wife etc. More than that, the Knight is ’verray, parfit gentil’ (Tales, I:
72), the epitome of a chivalric ideals, the five-times-married Wife is specifically from Bath, a thriving merchant town, whereas the Parson is just ’of a toun’ (Tales, I: 478) and his brother, the Plowman, is simply described in terms which draw directly on the tradition of the Plowman as a role model of the pious, humble common man.
The pilgrimage motif is thus exploited to gather together a group of people which would never usually occur. For Benson
The Canterbury Tales has the air of actuality because it is based on actuality. A pilgrimage was one of the few occasions in medieval life when so diverse a group of people might have gathered on a basis of temporary equality and might have told tales to pass the
time on their journey.
(Riverside: 4)
It is a seductive idea, but those ’might’s are important. However realistic we may find the Tales, this is neither realist fiction nor a fictionalised account of an actual journey. Like many other literary premises it will not stand up to too rigorous scrutiny, for instance it would be impossible for everyone in a band of twenty-four riders to hear the story told by one of their number while travelling. Nonetheless the pilgrimage motif deserves some attention. The destination is St Thomas a Beckett’s shrine, one of the most popular pilgrimage centres
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f the day. To travel there is to take part m a personality cult: the legend surrounding the individual gives the journey meaning. The practice trius validates the concept of individual identity, which in turn concurs easily with reading the journey as one of self-discovery or reljgious allegory. It is also essential for an enterprise which plays as extensively with ideas of voice and character as the Tales does. The sketches of the pilgrims thus draw on the tradition of social satire, as Mann has demonstrated (Mann 1973), but also suggest personalities, thus creating a fertile tension exploited by Leicester (Leicester 1980 and 1990). So The General Prologue introduces more than just characters who will tell stories, it also sets up a pattern, followed by many of the Tales themselves, of a Prologue which introduces themes later elaborated while simultaneously guiding the audience’s reading.
The collection of pilgrims is thus eclectic, but not random, and significantly excludes aristocrats as well as beggars and unskilled peasants (ploughmen performed a skilled job). It is a carefully constructed literary fiction, which allows Chaucer to bring together the dominant and emerging traditions of his time, while also pursuing his own creative interests. We have already seen Chaucer explore the possibilities of narrative voice in Troilus [89] and Legend [100]. Here he takes a further step by giving himself a variety of personae to adopt, but he also retains his shadowy presence as an observer, who seems only tangentially involved in the action. It is in this presence that Pearsall detects the influence of Froissart’s chronicle style, whose apparent disinterest disguises an actual control of material [41] (Pearsall
1992: 69). As narrator, Chaucer does not describe himself, that falls to Harry Bailly, the Host, who gives the briefest of sketches of a timid man when he calls upon him to tell a tale (Tales, VII: 695-704). Indeed in the General Prologue it at first seems that Harry will be the governing force of the whole text. It is he who suggests that the assembled pilgrims travel together and proposes the story-telling competition, but it is Chaucer who plants ideas in our heads, as when the drawing of lots is described. Whether ’by aventure, or sort, or cas’ the Knight begins (Tales, I: 844). All three words could mean ’chance’, but ’sort’ could mean ’class’ as well as ’lot’, thus referring to the Knight’s social standing. The very fact that we speculate on this shows that we are by now fully engaged in this fictional world, for of course it is by authorial design that this is the first Tale, and that it is one which itself treats of chance, standing and character and destiny.
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Further Reading
Bloom (1988) provides a good collection of eleven essays on The General Prologue, including Leicester (1980) and the relevant section of Mann (1973) both mentioned above. More taxing and certainly more idiosyncratic is the chapter ’Re-constructing the ”General Prologue”’ in Frese (1991). Woolf tackles the subject of Chaucer as satirist with clarity. (Woolf 1986: 77-84, reprinted in Burrow 1969: 206-13).
(in) The Knight’s Tale
The longest of the verse Tales and in four parts (three in Hengwrt) [106, 157], The Knight’s Tale stands easily on its own, reflecting its original existence as an autonomous text. Chaucer probably composed the previous version, Talamoun and Arcite’ in the early 1380s. The deft insertion of three lines (Tales, I: 889-91) incorporates the story into the wider structure of the Tales, while also allowing the Knight to refer to the company as a ’route’ – a neutral word which nevertheless hints at ’rabble’. Depending on one’s view of the Knight himself (Terry Jones presents an eloquent case for him being viewed as a mercenary, rather than a noble practitioner of a dying art, see Jones 1980) the ensuing romance [39] is either a prime example of a chivalric tale appropriate for a courtly figure, or a clever use of a high style to assert social superiority. There is no separate prologue, instead the Tale opens directly with the charming formula ’Whilom, as olden stories tellen us’ (Tales, I: 859) which is pretty much the equivalent of ’Once upon a time’. The time is that of classical legend, as Theseus returns from conquering the Amazons in what is Chaucer’s adaptation of Boccaccio’s Teseida [52] and encounters a group of women, bewailing the overthrow of their city, Thebes, and the death of their husbands, including king Cappaneus. The widowed queen begs Theseus to revenge them, which he duly does, laying the city waste (Tales, I: 896-1004).
From here the focus shifts onto two cousins, Palamoun and Arcite, who are rescued from a pile of dying warriors and imprisoned. Their similarity to each other and the fact that they are sworn blood-brothers become central to a story of two knights and a lady. Much can be made of the different courses of action these well-nigh interchangeable heroes follow and how much they come to represent contrasting types. Arcite, freed by a powerful friend, but banished from Athens (Tales, I:
1202-15), bewails his enforced separation from the beautiful and oblivious Emelye (Tales, I: 1223-74). He resorts to subterfuge, disguising himself as a minstrel to gain entry to Emelye’s court (Tales, I: 1399-
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. r ater when the two cousins are about to engage in formal combat der to settle who should win Emelye, Arcite selects Mars, god of as his patron (Tales, I: 2367-70). Palamoun, who has more ignobly
aped from prison, seeks the help of Venus, goddess of love or desire,
the same point in the action (Tales, I: 2209-20). Neither deity is ntirely noble or trustworthy, as the descriptions of their respective temples reveal (Tales, I: 1914-2050). It thus becomes possible to read Arcite as the embodiment of the warrior knight and Palamoun as the epitome of the lover knight – the two aspects which Troilus tried to unite in Troilus [89] (written at around the same date). The Tale can then be read as a debate over which aspect of the knightly ideal is preferable, in which case it is crucial to include Theseus in the equation, who is arguably the ideal combination of all knightly attributes.
The symmetry suggested by the likeness between Palamoun and Arcite informs the structure of the tale. Helen Cooper has sketched out the parallels (Cooper 1996: 74) and also highlights how the more philosophical elements of the poem are an integral part of its balance. These elements focus on the distinctions between Fortune, Destiny and Providence and owe much to Boethius, whose Consolatio Chaucer was translating [83] at the same time. It takes most of the poem to work through the differences, all of which come down to human perception, rather than divine ordinance. Thus the changeability of Fortune is first mentioned by Creon’s widow, who significantly reminds Theseus of his current good fortune (’Lord, to whom Fortune hath yiven/Victorie, and as a conqueror to lyven’, I: 915-16) before blaming the same fortune for her own downfall (’Thanked be Fortune and hire false wheel’, I: 925). When Arcite takes up the theme he articulates our often confused use of ’Fortune’. Newly liberated, we would expect him to be rejoicing, but in fact he bewails his position. Fortune favours Palamoun, he asserts (’Wei hath Fortune yturned thee the dys’, 1:1237) declaring that ’syn Fortune is chaungeable’ (Tales, I: 1241) it is possible that Palamoun will achieve his desire (Emelye) by some unforeseeable means. Incapable of applying the logic of his conclusions to himself, Arcite conflates God’s providence and Fortune (Tales, I: 1252), while ironically wondering why men complain of their current situation, when it often proves better than the one they desire (Tales, I: 1252-
74). His speech is immediately followed by Palamoun’s, which refers not to a changeable wheel of Fortune, but to a cruel goddess who writes the fate of men in adamantine, the hardest stone (Tales, I: 1281-333). The confusion is not clarified until Theseus’ speech to Emelye in the final book of the poem, in which he replaces the changeability of Fortune and the unmoving cruelty of Fate with the stability of the
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First Mover, who governs all things for the good of all (Tales, I: 2987-
93).
Ironically, the denouement of the plot has been brought about not by some embodiment of order, but by the chaotic god, Saturn, who presents himself as deeper and less civilised forces than either Venus or Mars (Tales, I: 2455-78). It is also worth noting that Emelye, too, has prayed to a deity, Diane (Tales, I: 2273-366), but whereas Palamoun and Arcite simply request one thing, Emelye’s petition is more complicated: if she cannot remain unmarried, then at least let the one who loves her most win her. Perhaps her equivocation is her downfall. Certainly she is given to understand in no uncertain terms that her fate is that of all ladies of courtly romance – to be the prize awarded to the male. Her role here links her to Criseyde [90, 98] and Dorigen of The Franklin’s Tale [130], both of whom are likewise at the mercy of their romance plots (arguably the Clerk’s Griselde is a counter example [126]) although Mann argues that the ideal female role embodied by Emelye is presented as essential, not secondary (Mann 1991: 180-2).
Several distinct codes which govern life thus jostle each other throughout The Knight’s Tale: philosophy, courtly conduct, and simple narrative drive. This allows the Tale to be read as an exploration of what governs our actions – the chances that befall us (’aventure’), the kinds of people we are (’sort’), or an overarching destiny (’cas’). Additionally it can be assessed primarily as a paradigm of a good story in a contest of tales: the text from which all the other Tales take their cue. The reaction of the pilgrims is interesting here. It is recorded in the Prologue to the Miller’s Tale, but as Cooper points out, the prologues frequently round off the preceding Tale before introducing the next (Cooper 1996: 92).
The Knight ends his tale ’And God save al this faire compaignye!’ (Tales, I: 3108), this makes his audience into a noble group, a description they reciprocate by calling the tale ’a noble storie’, one worth remembering (Tales, I: 3111). In the next line, however, divisions reappear in the cohesive company, as the gentry are specifically mentioned, and finally the atmosphere of high seriousness is broken by the Host’s laugh (3114). His attempt to have the Knight’s noble, secular Tale in the high style followed by an equally prestigious but religious Tale told by the Monk is famously overturned by the Miller. > , … –
,.’,„ , ;, • ’W
Further Reading ’ ’:i”~
Leicester (1990) devotes six chapters to The Knight’s Tale, covering genre, the gaze and the presentation of the gods in his exploration of
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Chaucer’s subjectivity. Patterson (1991) concentrates on the concept of chivalry. Jones (1980) is a lively, engaging and idiosyncratic reading which deserves attention, but also caution – it is best read in the light of Patterson. Carruthers’s discussion of locational memory is scholarly, demanding and rewarding (Edwards, R. 1994: 93-106).
(iv) The Miller’s Tale
The Miller’s tale features John, a carpenter, his eighteen-year-old wife Alison, their lodger, the student Nicholas and Absolon, the local parish clerk. Both Nicholas and Absolon desire Alison, but Nicholas, using a more direct approach, succeeds where Absolon fails. In order to consummate the affair, Nicholas devises a plan. He tricks the carpenter into believing the next deluge is due and tells him the only way to survive is to take refuge in a wooden trough suspended from the ceiling. With John safely hidden and asleep, Nicholas and Alison slip off to bed. Then Absolon is heard outside, begging Alison for a kiss. The kiss he is granted is what is politely referred to as ’mis-directed’, but Absolon realises and fetches a hot iron to wreak revenge. It is Nicholas, however, who receives the branding and the Tale ends in comic chaos.
The image of Robyn, the Miller, drunkenly overthrowing the authority of the Host and insisting on telling his tale next is a prime example of the relation between high literature (romance) and low literature (fabliau) [40] in which the driving forces are those of laughter and inversion. Low language, bawdiness and a cavalier attitude to rules mirror the cultured tone and emphasis on right behaviour of romance; yet, although it is tempting to describe such texts as rebellious, the concept of carnival is more useful here. The social structures are acknowledged, but simply inverted in a show of licensed festival. Thus fabliau agrees that there are external forces which govern our lives, but, broadly speaking, represents those forces as lust, greed and luck, which can be met with sex, covetousness, trickery and laughter: very different from the philosophical resignation which the Knight’s Tale advocates. We willingly permit such carnivals, and have the option of nonparticipation. If we join in we know what we are letting ourselves in for:
… Whoso list it nat yheere,
Turne over the leef and chese another tale
[…] f ,
Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys.
The Miller is a cherl; ye knowe wel this.
(Tales, I: 3176-7; 3181-2)
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The Miller is out to ’quit’ the Knight, to trump his tale with one which takes the same narrative, twists it, and turns it into a comedy of low-life. The rival lovers are no longer knights and cousins, but a poor scholar (Nicholas) and an affected parish clerk (Absolon). The object of their desire, Alison, is ’wylde’, ’yong’ (Tales, I: 3225) and fair, but hardly noble. Described through animal imagery, she is apparently unattainable not because she is a lady, but because she is already married to a carpenter, John, with whom Nicholas lodges. In fact she is not all that unattainable and is soon in cahoots with Nicholas.
The sense of parody pervades plot and language. Like The Knight’s Tale, the story begins ’whilom’, but instead of a duke we have a ’gnof’, a word whose Anglo-Saxon roots betray the more down-to-earth mood of this tale. Likewise the action takes place in a specific place – Oxford
– and at a contemporary time, not removed into the land of legends occupied by Theseus. Epithets also take on a new twist as the ’hende’ relentlessly applied to Nicholas comes to mean more than ’courteous’ as we are reminded through force of association that it also means ’handy’. Is such trickery and cuckolding really ’courteous’: are we being invited to comment sarcastically on actual court behaviour or to scoff at the kind of behaviour we might expect from an impoverished scholar1? Where Absolon is evidently a figure of fun, with his curled hair, red hose and penchant for serenading (Tales, 1:3313-33; 3371-85), Nicholas is more ambiguous. Our interpretation may depend on whether we regard ourselves as noble or as solid townsfolk. Importantly, Nicholas, although clearly the hero of the tale, insofar as there is one, does not escape unharmed. Absolon’s branding of him could be a hint that the Church still has the power to correct such opportunistic behaviour, if it is discovered. Interestingly, Alison, like May in the Merchant’s Tale [128] gets off scott free.
Like The Knight’s Tale much of The Miller’s Tale is formulaic – the adultery, the hoodwinking, the mis-directed kiss, the cast of characters all fit the form. The actants have enough personality to engage us, but not enough to worry us, and the whole is a deft comic inversion of the Knight’s admirable romance. All this leads Cooper to describe it as ’the best’ fabliau – a fitting riposte to the Knight’s best romance (Cooper
1996: 95). Its remarkable speed makes it vivacious and brings it to a brilliant conclusion with its triumphant plot summary and sudden end, which again recalls the Knight:
Thus swyved ws this carpentens wyf, For al his kepying and his jalousye, And Absolon hat kist hir nether ye,
And Nicholas is scalded in the towte. • > . L.
This tale is doon, and God save al the rowteJ •,••.•
(Tales, I: 3850-4) < •• f
’ ’ , ’.» ! !«’)’ i
The reaction to the Tale at first seems to be unanimous laughter (Tales, I: 3855), reminding us that appreciation of fabliau was not restricted to the bourgeoisie any more than romance was to the nobles. However, discrepancy soon surfaces: two lines later ’Diverse folk diversely they seyde’ as individuality is re-asserted and is finally voiced by the insulted and angry Reeve who takes up the challenge.
Further Reading
Birney provides a succinct introduction to structural irony in The Miller’s Tale and also offers a useful bibliography (Birney 1985: 77-83,
146-50). Lindhal explores the relations between the Miller, oral traditions and insult (Lindhal 1989:134-42), while Knapp concentrates on the competition between the Miller and the Knight in her book Chaucer and the Social Contest: the sections relevant to the Miller are usefully brought together by Ellis (Ellis 1998:62-77; 238). C.D. Benson’s fourth chapter also compares the first two tales (C. Benson 1986), while Richardson includes a section on imagery in her book on Chaucer’s fabliaux (Richardson 1970: 18-57).
(v) The Reeve’s Tale
Also a fabliau, this plot revolves around a miller, two students, a quantity of flour and desire for revenge. Angry at being cheated out of flour from grain they brought to be ground, the students respond by sleeping with the miller’s wife and daughter. A moved cot causes confusion and discovery, but the students manage to make off safely with the bags of flour and a loaf made from the amount the miller purloined.
Rumbustious and direct as the Miller’s style is, it is left to the Reeve to introduce a personal note. His Prologue is the first self-portrait in the Tales and is less ’confessional’ (Cooper 1996: 108) than defiant. Hurling the stereotype of the dishonest miller in Robyn’s face, apparently in riposte for the gullible and cuckolded carpenter who figured in the Miller’s tale, Oswald reflects the professional rivalry of reeves and millers. Both are on the take, making their profit from others’ labours, as reeves manage their lord’s land, while millers cheat customers out of flour, through exorbitant prices or theft. This rivalry underpins the
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tale, but so does anger, and desire for revenge. Portraying himself as old and beyond frivolity (Tales, I: 3867-70) the Reeve is far from serene, asserting that the four incentives to life in age are ’Avauntyng, Hying, anger, coveitise’ (Tales, I: 3884). These recall the picture of him in the General Prologue as a choleric man (Tales, I: 587), as Chaucer draws on the idea of the humours to create an expectation of an irascible tale.
The expectation is only partially fufilled. Certainly the driving force is revenge and indeed this fabliau could be seen as a series of ways to get even. It takes the Miller’s ’quiting’ a step further – all the characters are cheated and avenged in turn, as the Reeve illustrates the theme he pronounces at the end of the tale: ’A gylour shal hymself bigyled be’ (Tales, 1:4321). Even the setting is part of the rivalry, as rural Cambridge replaces Oxford town and the satire becomes cynical as we learn that the social pretensions of the miller and his wife rest on the fact that she is the illegitimate daughter of the priest. Moreover, as Phillips points out, ’the plot is, of course, about rape’ (Phillips 2000: 67). Things and women (little distinction is made between the two) are seized willynilly in a battle of wits between rival males of different ages, backgrounds and professions. However, the sheer pace of the plot and the lack of characterisation means that this apparently more violent story is less disconcerting for some than the more personality-based sex-tricks of the Miller’s and Merchant’s Tales. It is a comedy of types in which the northern clerks (complete with northern dialects) take on the stereotypically slow Norfolk man and intellect is pitted against commerce (it is worth remembering that Chaucer was probably resident in Kent at the time of writing this [22]). Every loose end is magnificently tied up; every action balanced with counter-action in a story told in language riddled with double-entendre. Even the ruse of cooking up the stolen flour into a cake is bested when the daughter gives the cake to the escaping students. There is no room for emotional involvement here – sheer amoral cleverness rules this world.
For some this world is a dark one: anger begets action, desire for revenge is presented as a commoner motive than lust and the sheer pace prevents emotional engagement or even moral judgement. Yet exhilaration breaks through: an underlying energy of escape, albeit one stemming from the excitment of getting away with something. Perhaps the best figure of this is the horse, let loose by the miller, heading for the company of the wild mares (Tales, I: 4064-6). Significantly, the Reeve mimics the Knight in his final sentence: once again the pilgrims are a ’compaignye’ and the final judgement is left to God ’that sitteth heighe in magestee’ (Tales, I: 4322). However, rather than a general
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response, Chaucer gives us here one pilgrim’s gleeful reaction as the
rnok takes over the stage.
i^r- • ~
Cook takes over the stage.
Further Reading
Knapp 1990 is invaluable on the rivalry theme, while Lindhal provides much useful material on the historical basis for animosity between social groups and how that is reflected in narrative (Lindhal 1989: 73-
158). Richardson’s fifth chapter is useful on the Reeve in the light of the Miller (Richardson 1970). Kolve is particularly interesting on the imagery, especially the role of the horse (Kolve 1984: chapter 5). Delany illustrates the use of social class and irony, focusing on the ’clerks’ as agents of the ’quiting’ (Delany 1990: 104-11).
(vi) The Cook’s Tale
This last, unfinished, Tale of Fragment I [106] promises to follow in the vein established by the Miller and Reeve of capping the previous story. The Cook calls his tale ’a litel jape that fil in oure citee’ (Tales, I:
4344), thus bringing the action close to home as London replaces Oxford and Cambridge. He fleetingly suggests that the butt of his story will be the Host, but then defers that particular taunt until another time (perhaps reflecting the original ideas of the Tales in which each pilgrim told at least two tales). Instead we begin a story of an apprentice given to gambling, who is ejected by his landlord and takes up lodgings with a man with similar interests, married to a prostitute. We are back with the two men, one woman format of The Knight’s and Miller’s tales, but in the lowest possible setting, the seediest part of the city.
That begining is all we have, arguably because Chaucer had no source to follow (analogues and possible sources exist for all the three previous tales, see Bryan and Dempster 1941), but possibly because in striving to out-fabliau the fabliau genre, Chaucer comes to an imaginative wall, whether intentionally or not (see Patterson 1991: 278-9). Although it seems to be a fabliau, Cooper suggests it does not fit the genre due to the dominance of proverbial wisdom she detects (Cooper 1996: 120). The exchange between the Cook and Host continues the theme of professional rivalry begun by the Miller and Reeve, while the terms used for the various kinds of debauchery indulged in by Perkin Revelour reflect the themes of riot and festival (uncomfortably closely linked) as well as providing some material for the description of London life.
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Further Reading
Little has appeared on the Cook’s tale alone, most critical responses form part of a general consideration of Chaucer’s fabliaux or discussion of Fragment I [106]. Thus Kolve (1984) and Lindahl (1987) give it due space. For most purposes, Cooper (1996) and Phillips (2000) give all the detail required.
(vii) The Man of Law’s Tale
This is the story of Custance. The daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, she is married off to the Sultan of Syria (’Surrye’), who agrees to convert to Christianity in order to wed her. This enrages his mother, who arranges for her son and all the Christians with him to be killed at a banquet and for Custance to be put to sea in a rudderless boat. Custance fetches up in Northumbria, where she is taken in by a man and his wife. But the devil, hating Custance, makes a knight kill the wife and accuse Custance. Custance is brought before the King, Alia, for murder, who is impressed by her manner. Her innocence is proved, Alia marries her and they have a son. Alla’s mother is not pleased, however, and plots against Custance, with the result that Custance and her son are put to sea in a rudderless boat. They are rescued by a senator, who takes them to Rome, without knowing who they are. Meanwhile, Alia, having had his mother executed, travels to Rome in penance. The family is reunited and Custance is also reunited with her father, before they return to England. Finally, after Alla’s death, Custance returns home.
This Tale constitutes a Fragment of its own, but is generally agreed to follow The Cook’s Tale. Cooper discusses its links with other fragments, showing how such themes as destiny and reversals of fortune are picked up from The Knight’s Tale, but also pointing out that this tale ’makes a new start’ (Cooper 1983: 120-4). The tone is certainly very different from the amoral, if not immoral, fabliaux which have dominated since The Miller’s Tale and there are some indications that ’The wordes of the hoost to the compagnye’ which preface the Man of Law’s Tale might have been intended to start the whole series of Tales at one stage (Cooper 1983: 63-4). If so, and there is dispute about this, Chaucer certainly replaced the idea with the current order, leading into The Knight’s Tale, as preserved in all the manuscripts. Nonetheless, the rhyming couplets exchange between Host and Man of Law certainly signals a fresh start and is significantly distinct from the rhyme royal Prologue, which leads directly into the Tale.
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This exchange begins with the Host noting the time of day and
ar using the kind of precise calculations that would normally require •nstruments. The result is a miscalculation, which could either be a slip on Chaucer’s part, or a mistake deliberately inserted for comic effect. The Man of Law’s part in the exchange consists of a selective resume of Chaucer’s narrative fictions and a reference to Cower’s tale of Canacee. The boundary between fiction and the creators of fiction is thus wittily blurred, as The Man of Law in effect presents himself as a narrator struggling in the shadow of these two literary giants. The implication is that since Chaucer has told every tale worth telling in verse, leaving Cower [39] only the more unseemly ones (Canacee revolves around incest), what hope is there for such as the Man of Law1?- He will therefore speak in prose. Except he does not. While this may be further evidence for Chaucer changing his mind about what he wanted to do with this pilgrim and tale, it is also true that all the rhyme royal prologues are followed by rhyme royal tales.
The plot, with its series of trials undergone without complaint and final reunion, recalls the two closely related genres of romance and Saint’s Life [39, 142], which share such motifs as the innocent being put to sea in a ruddlerless boat. Stylistically, the stanzaic form and elevated language recalls the epic tone of Troilus [89] while Custance herself is the first of the female figures of virtue in the Tales (the others being the Griselde, Virginia and Prudence of the Clerk’s, Physician’s and Chaucer’s ’Melibee’, respectively). Without doubt it is a religious tale following the fortunes and misfortunes of Custance, whose name Chaucer alters from the more explicit ’Constance’ used in the sources. She exemplifies constancy in adversity as well as faith as she is passed from father to husband to second husband, converting nations to Christianity as she goes through simple force of personality, before finally washing up (literally) at home again. This repetitive pattern, in which Custance undergoes every trial three times, extends the theme of doubling developed over the course of Fragment I. The tripartite structure potentially reflects several different aspects of the story: it allows for references to the Holy Trinity of the Christian Church, as Custance passes from the house of her father, significantly in Rome, to that of her first husband, thence to her second, returning as herself a spiritual force at the end of the poem. Alternatively it could reflect the three stages of female life: daughter, wife, mother.
It is also interesting to note that it is Custance’s two mother-inlaws who are her enemies, each resenting her influence over their sons. Arguably, as well as upholding the Christian law of God, this Tale may be exemplifying a patriarchal viewpoint, by which good women are
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protected (or governed) by men, while dominant women are dangerous. Portraying women as rivals is typical of this attitude. Human as well as Divine law pervades the Tale as themes of trade, inheritance and marriage, all closely connected to legal affairs, underpin the story.
There is no audience reaction after this tale and indeed there is some question over the Epilogue (printed in square brackets in Riverside to indicate the difficulty). The Ellesmere manuscript [106, 157] omits it, perhaps indicating that Chaucer intended to cancel it altogether. The pilgrim who spoils the Host’s plan of hearing a tale from the Parson is variously the Shipman, Wife of Bath and Squire, which tells us little, but does illustrate ’the device of using the independent-minded pilgrims to bring about apparently random and unhierarchical sequences of tales’ (Phillips 2000: 78).
Further Reading
It is worth reading Gower’s version of Custance’s story in his Confessio Amantis [101] or the romance Entare, to see how differently the same basic story can be treated. Dinshaw (1989: 88-112) focuses on the significance of Custance’s story being told by the Man of Law – a man made up of law and with a personal stake in the maintainance of both law and the patriarchal status quo. Those intrigued by the Host’s calculations will be interested by North (1988).
,t ~~
^ (viii) The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
In effect the Wife of Bath tells two stories: her life story in her Prologue and the Breton lai [130] of her actual tale. Her first words sum up the two opposing sides of a debate Chaucer engaged in in various ways throughout his works: which is the more reliable source of knowledge
– experience or the authority of booksi As very much a woman of the world, it is inevitable that the Wife aligns herself with experience, and thus with the body rather than the intellect; the sexual, not the spiritual. As such she is the epitome of the types of women warned against in the kind of book her fifth husband, Jankyn, wields (literally and metaphorically). She is thus as much an exemplum (example) as Custance or Griselde [118,126]; she simply represents the supposedly negative rather than positive role model. Her clear comic quality (heightened by sharing a name, Alison, with the gleeful heroine of The Miller’s Tale) and the exuberance Chaucer has created makes her one of the most popular pilgrims, who in the twentieth century has been held up as a champion for women. Feisty, self-confident and successful,
she is cited as proof that Chaucer was, in Douglas’s term ’all womanis frend’ [175]. However, Alisoun’s prologue poses some questions for those who seek in her a role model for women.
tjri
The Prologue
According to her Prologue, Alisoun was first married at twelve, has had five husbands so far and is currently widowed. The first three husbands were good, rich and old, and are not characterised. The fourth was a ’revelour’ and had a mistress – something for which the funloving, hard-drinking Alisoun made him pay heartily. The fifth, Jankyn, she describes as her favourite, whom she married for love. In her terms, he treated her the worst, taunting her with descriptions of bad wives taken from books, enraging her so much she tears three pages out of the book and the two come to blows. The upshot is reconciliation, lingering deafness on her part, and continuing devotion until his death.
From her appearance in the General Prologue (Tales, I: 445-46), to the end of her Tale, it seems that marriage is what the Wife of Bath is all about. While five husbands is just about a credible number for a fourteenth-century merchant woman [33] it is still comically exaggerated, as Chaucer has Alisoun flying in the face of religious treatises on marriage and citing Biblical precedents in a deliberate parody of theological debate (Tales, in: 9-162). However, marriage is more than just a game – it is a financial transaction, especially for a trader whose business benefits from profitable links. The beautiful, young woman is a desirable commodity and can more or less name her price; the older woman needs to be rich to be sexy. As the Wife says, ’Winne whoso may, for al is for to selle’ (Tales, in: 414), which casts a more monitory light on being ’a worthy womman al hir lyve’ (Tales, I: 459) and marrying’ worthy men in hir degree’ (Tales, in: 8). This double market is evident in lines 587-92 where the ostentatious use of coverchiefs to cover her lack of tears also serves to display her wares literally as well as figuratively: she is a clothier by trade and here presents herself as a viable proposition on all fronts.
Like any other market, though, marriage is not without its dangers and indeed the Wife has promised to tell of wedded woe, not wedded bliss (Tales, in: 3). Her accounts recall the more cynical parts of The Romance of the Rose [62] which, in common with other misogynist writings, assume a predisposition to masochism in women and must surely undermine any easy assertion that the Wife of Bath is a positive role model for women. The obvious example is the fight she has with Jankyn, her apparently much-loved fifth husband. Significantly the
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word she uses of his love is ’daungerous’ (Tales, in: 514), which, in the vocabulary of courtly love, indicates both the danger the suitor must overcome to win his lady and the danger to her honour posed by his advances. In the Wife’s case the gender roles have been reversed: she is the supplicant and the danger Jankyn poses is not only emotional but real physical violence. Their fight leaves her half-deaf, a detail often read as the symbolic effect of the tales of subservient wives Jankyn insists on reading. More disturbingly, it leaves her more enamoured of him than before: ’thogh he hadde me bete on every bon,/He koude wynne agayn my love anon’ (Tales, in: 511-12). In all she is similar to the character of Vieille, the Old Woman, in The Romance of the Rose [62] but she does come out on top, as the final upshot of the fight with Jankyn has been to get her own way, to achieve the very ’soveraynetee’ (Tales, in: 818) that her Tale asserts is what every woman wants, and which comes up again as a topic of debate in the Franklin’s and Clerk’s tales.
Drawn as she is from sources which portray only wicked wives (Tales, in: 685), Alisoun arguably takes control of those stereotypes and makes them the basis of personal strength. In so doing she acknowledges the power of stories to mould our expectations and of the importance of taking the teller into account: ’Who peyntede the leoun, tel me, who^’ (Tales, in: 692). Chaucer’s fascination with narrative position and control is evident here, as it is in the Tale the Wife tells.
The Tale
The Wife tells the story of a knight, convicted of rape, who is given a year to discover what it is that every woman most desires and report back to court. If he gets the answer wrong, he will die. The year is nearly up and the knight no closer to finding the answer, when he meets an ugly, old crone, who declares she knows what he seeks and will tell him, on condition that he marry her. The knight agrees and returns to court, where the crone’s answer proves correct. Most unwillingly, the knight marries the crone, bewailing her ugliness. She gives him a lecture on inner qualities and then offers him a choice: to have her ugly and definitely faithful, or beautiful and take the consequences. The knight asks her to choose, thereby showing he has learnt his lesson and the crone becomes both beautiful and faithful.
Readers and scholars have expected the Wife to tell a fabliau and indeed there is evidence she was originally given the bawdy marriage tale now given to the Shipman. Instead we get this Breton lai, for which there are several analogues (see Cooper 1996: 157-60). Lai is linked to
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rornance and tends to include magic; as such it fits the idea of ’fantasye’ and ’pleye’ (Tales, in: 190,192), but raises the questions whose fantasy is it and what kind of game is being played herei This leads to comparisons with the Franklin’s Tale [130], another lai which revolves around promises and in which easily overlooked phrases take on significance. Thus the line ’Save on the grene he saugh sittinge a wyf’ (Tales, 998) becomes prophetic, as the hag will become his literal wife, despite his attempt to call her by the other available honorific ’mooder’ (Tales, 1005). Likewise the romance formula ’I nam but deed, but if that I can seyn’ (Tales, 1006) is actually true, as failure to discover the riddle will result in death. Conceivably, then, the hag’s assertion ’For by my trouthe, I wol be to yow bothe’ (Tales, 1240) (i.e. both beautiful and faithful) may indicate that if the knight fully understands her lecture on ’gentillesse’, she will become in his eyes both fair and true, even in her hag-like form. The moral must be that ’gentillesse’ is to be prized. This noble quality (closely linked to ’fre’, explored in The Franklin’s Tale) is not dependant on bloodline, but rather on temperament and involves the right treatment of others. It is a fittingly valued quality for an aspirant member of the merchant class, and indeed Chaucer devoted a lyric to it [58], but we must be wary of attributing too much anachronistic liberalism to him: the clincher for happiness in The Wife of Bath’s Tale is that ’she obeyed him in every thing’ (Tales, in: 1255).
Further Reading
Extracts from the texts which make up Jankyn’s book may be found, translated, in Blamires 1992. Not surprisingly the Wife of Bath has been the focus for much feminst criticism [174], Diamond’s essay ’Chaucer’s Women and Women’s Chaucer’ (Diamond 1977,1988) takes up the question of Chaucer as ’women’s friend’; Carruthers focuses on the issue of experience versus authority (Evans and Johnson (eds) 1994:
22-53) and Dinshaw discusses interpretation (glossing) and its effects (Dinshaw 1989:113-131). Leicester considers the creation of the subject through text both in the form of books referred to in the Wife’s Prologue and in the tale she tells (Leicester 1990: 65-160).
(ix) The Friar’s Tale
Although the Friar and Summoner are usually cast as an opposing pair, Chaucer clearly intended both to be also challenged by the Wife of Bath, whom they interrupt (Tales, in: 829-56). Indeed her ready
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appropriation of Biblical examples to support her own views neatly parodies the scholarly debates for which Churchmen were criticised. It is this aspect that the Friar picks up as he prepares to tell a tale directed against the Summoner, setting aside serious philosphical debate as inappropriate for ’game’. His Prologue thus establishes the principle of rivalry which provides immediate structure for the Friar’s and Summoner’s tales and echoes the similar professional rivalry and stories told against each other of the Miller and the Reeve [116].
Briefly, the plot is this. A summoner meets a yeoman, who introduces himself as a fiend. The summoner proposes they keep each other company, each taking what they are given (or extort) along the way. They encounter a carter, cursing his horse for being stuck, but the fiend does not take it, saying the man doesn’t really mean his curses – as proves to be the case. Next they visit a woman, from whom the summoner intends to extract money. She wishes him in hell, at which the fiend whisks the summoner off.
Although couched in the tone of fabliau [40], the Tale is in fact closer to an exemplary sermon, that is, the protagonist (a summoner) epitomises certain vices (here greed and extortion). Summoners were minor church officials (not themselves clerics) who summoned people to ecclesiatic courts for offences which fell into the domain of church rather than civic justice e.g. marital disputes or non-payment of tithes (the tax due to the local church). Inevitably the system was corrupt and summoners were accused of trumping up charges, accepting bribes and lining their own pockets. While there are stories which could be Chaucer’s sources, it is more likely that his own knowledge of legal records furnished the details. The kind of satire levelled at summoners was close to that currently directed at lawyers, right down to the cornparisons with vultures and allusions to the devil being of their party.
As so often in the Tales, the crux is the use of words: here, as in the Wife’s Tale, intention and word must match. The summoner is not fooled; he is a clever man who puts personal gain above all else and believes himself beyond the reach of law: civil, church or Divine. That is his error and the audience realises that long before he does. As soon as the identity of the mysterious ’yernen’ is revealed (Tales, in: 1448) and the summoner’s assertion of loyalty uttered (Tales, in: 1525-34) we wait for the pattern of words that will consign this summoner to hell. Cooper points out that this adds a level of suspense to the irony (Cooper 1996: 170), which is rare in Chaucer, who usually advertises the end of the plot long before he gets there. However, an alert listener might begin to guess the stranger’s identity from the description of the yeoman’s green clothing, as the colour was associated with the
devil (although also suitable for a woodman). Such symbolism would be expected in this exemplum, or homilitic kind of narrative.
Also expected is the moral drawn at the end. Significantly, the Friar gets this wrong. According to him, the point is that even the innocent are at risk, but the story clearly shows that those who sin knowingly and refuse to repent are damned: the widow is saved, after all. Thus the tale, while attacking summoners also satirises friars.
Further Reading
Hahn and Kaeuper (1983) give the historical context for the tale; those interested in learning more about the tradition of criticism against friars and other clerics will find Szittya (1986: 3-11; 231-46) informative. Birney’s essay on irony is accessible and likeable (Birney 1985: 85-108).
(x) The Summoner’s Tale
Like the Reeve’s Tale, this fabliau is a direct riposte to the previous Tale. The central figure is a greedy friar, John, whose unseemly eagerness to acquire a bequest from a merchant, Thomas, is rewarded by the bequest being a fart. With comic meticulousness, the Tale goes on to explore how such a gift can be distributed evenly among all the friars of John’s community.
The Summoner’s prologue gives ample warning of the kind of Tale to follow. His outrage at being the butt of the Friar’s Tale continues the quarrels we have already seen between them (Tales, in: 829-49;
1265-300) so, although the Prologue is an anecdote against friars, it is no surprise that the longer Tale is also a story of friars getting their comeuppance. It satirizes scholastic nit-picking, punning on the hotair expelled in empty speech and in flatulance. Its linguistic base of punning and implication is appropriate here, as friars were widely criticised for their habit of twisting words, whether to gain money, goods, or free lodging, in order to seduce or for the joy of abstruse theological argument. This last is the ’glosynge’ in which friar John rejoices (Tales, in: 1793) and which is parodied in his speeches, as he wilfuly misinterprets Biblical texts. Significantly his long discourse against anger serves merely to enrage Thomas even more and precipitates the eventual revenge. It is a further attack on friars in general that the tale does not end with friar John’s discomfiture at Thomas’s bequest, but with another household, the lord’s, being entertained by the story. This household then adds insult to injury by focusing on, and solving, the comical problem of how Thomas’s gift could be divided
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equally between the friars of the convent, which was the condition of the bequest.
The fact that the last word is given to those who have no connection with any branch of the Church could be a final dismissive gesture at all clerics. As an employee of the church court, it is wise of the Summoner to avoid overt criticism of all clerics, but it is in keeping with the carnival spirit of fabliaux that the witty solution to dividing the fart is offered by a layman and requires a simple cartwheel.
Further Reading
General discussion of Chaucer’s representation of religion in the Summoner’s Tale can be found in Aers (1986: 37-45), while more detail on it as antifraternal literature is provided by Szytta (1986: 231-46). Birney’s highly readable essay examines the comedy of watching the friar talk himself into increasing trouble with the largely silent Thomas (Birney 1985: 109-25). While Lindahl discusses the insult hurling between summoner and friar (1989: 118-23; 144-7).
(xi) The Clerk’s Tale
Fragment IV begins with the Clerk’s Prologue, in which the Host seeks to forestall the kind of over-learned discourse he seems to expect from this quiet scholar. Significantly, the themes of holding to the terms of an agreement (here the ’pley’ of story-telling) and obedience (Tales, IV
22-24) are introduced, but with the easily over-looked caveat ’as fer as resoun axeth’ (Tales, IV: 25). The Clerk tells us that the tale comes from Petrarch, who in turn took it from Boccaccio [40], but Chaucer also consulted an anonymous French version of the story (Cooper 1996:
188-91). It has attracted strong reaction since its first appearance, ranging from horror at Walter’s treatment of Griselde to impatience at Griselde’s passivity. Even reading the tale as an allegory illustrating the soul’s duty of absolute obedience to God, does not entirely remove the feelings of discomfort engendered by this story. It is this which raises the question of reasonable obedience, hinted at in the Prologue: is there a point beyond which unquestioning obedience becomes culpable1?- Arguably, this Tale contains one of Chaucer’s rare references to contemporary affairs, as Walter’s tyranny can be read as a reflection of Bernabo Visconti’s Milan [16].
Griselde is a peasant girl, picked out by the local marquis, Walter, to be his wife, in response to pressure from his nobles to marry. Walter demands a condition of total obedience from Griselde, to which she
grees. The people take to Griselde, who proves to be a skilled governor when deputising in Walter’s absence. Soon after their daughter’s birth Walter decides to test Griselde and has the child removed, ostensibly to be killed. Years pass and a son is born. Again, Walter commands the removal and apparent death of the child. Finally, Walter summons Griselde before him and in full court informs her that he is casting her off. She obeys, first stripping down to her shift in a refusal to take anything that isn’t hers. After a few years Walter summons her back to court to prepare the house for his new bride. Again she obeys. Finally it is revealed that the new bride is in fact her daughter and the page her son. Mother and children are reunited and Griselde reinstated as Walter’s wife.
Griselde’s acquiescence in giving up her children to be killed (as she believes) often provokes outrage, stemming from the belief that a mother’s primary concern ought to be for her offspring. This reflects a shift in social attitude: in the fourteenth century children were more explicitly attached to the father, and a woman’s duty as wife came before those as mother. The audience is still expected to be outraged, but the weight of opprobrium falls more fully on Walter. Nonetheless, note that in his conclusion the Clerk specifically states that it would be insupportable (’inportable’, Tales, IV: 1144) for all wives to be like Griselde. Like Custance, Griselde is a type, not a naturalistic character. The Tale itself has been the focus of feminist and marxist criticism. The Clerk is regarded as both feminised, with his ’coy’ attitude, and as a representative of the educated but not necessarily landed classes. Griselde is thus read as his representative in his own tale, being both female and a peasant, but clearly no fool. Her story is one of the more free-standing tales which seems to have been copied frequently on its own, and has continued to crop up in literature down to the present day (she appears in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls [181]).
Further Reading
Griselde’s appropriation into Walter’s household is examined as a metaphor of translation and literary tradition by Dinshaw (1989: 132-
55) while Hansen discusses Griselde’s use of silence (Hansen 1992:188-
208). Aers provides a thought-provoking reading of the Tale as an exposition on the nature of power, usefully read alongside Hansen (Aers
1986: 32-6). Wallace discusses the Tale in the light of Chaucer’s travels in Italy (Patterson 1990: 156-215).
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(xii) The Merchant’s Tale
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Further Reading
The Merchant’s response to the Clerk’s Tale, bewailing the huge difference between his wife’s attitude and that of Griselde prepares us for a story populated by characters we can read as real, if only for the space of the narrative. The insistence on identifying the characters as drawn from secular walks of life (Tales, IV: 1251; 1322; 1390) suggests that this Tale may have been originally assigned to a religious pilgrim, probably the Monk, (see Cooper 1996: 203-4). However, the latent anxiety about inheritance, the suggestion that May, as a young wife is the ageing Januarie’s most valuable investment (Tales, IV: 1270), whom he then keeps under lock and key, make it a reasonable tale for a merchant to tell. Simultaneously the names Januarie and May invite symbolic readings of winter being displaced by spring, although such symbolism is not overtly developed.
The Tale itself is another fabliau, which continues the variations on the theme of two men and a woman, but it is more genteel than the Miller’s or Reeve’s as characters are deceived, but not physically hurt. January is a jealous old man who marries the young May. Damyan is a squire, who falls in love with May, as she does with him, but they lack opportunity to be together. Meanwhile, January has built a walled garden, for which he alone has the key, and gone blind. Taking advantage of this, Damyan and May tryst in a pear tree. This outrages Pluto, the king of fairies, who restores January’s sight, but Proserpina, Pluto’s wife, promptly endows May with the ability to create plausible excuses. Thus when January suddenly sees the two lovers in the tree he is talked into believing it is some magic ritual designed to restore his sight.
The relations between the protagonists mirrors one of the major paradigms of courtly love, as the young wife is courted by the accomplished squire of her husband’s household, while the active role of classical gods (albeit in the less elevated form of fairies, see IV 2227-
37) harks back to romance. The Tale also includes a good deal of learned dispute on marriage in which Januarie and his friends, Justinus and Placebo, cover most of the sources used by Chaucer. As with many of these tales, it literalises a common saying – here that love is blind, as we are reminded when Januarie makes his choice of bride (Tales, IV:
1598) – while also playing on women’s proverbial deceit and ability to talk their way out of anything.
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The parodic relation between Merchant’s and Knight’s tales is illustrated by Cooper (1983: 214-30). Aers regards the Tale as a disconcerting representation of masculinist control of marriage (1986: 71-5). Hansen is worth reading for her challenge of over-easy readings of the tale, although she presumes some attitudes to the tale, which we may not hold (Hansen 1992: 245-67). A section of Patterson’s chapter on commerce focuses on this tale (Patterson 1991: 333-44).
(xiii) The Squire’s Tale
Beginning a new Fragment, the Squire’s story harks back to the world of kings, knights and ladies. Cambyuskan is celebrating his birthday when into the feast rides an unknown knight, riding a brass horse, wearing a naked sword and carrying a mirror and a ring. Horse, sword, mirror and ring are gifts, whose magic properities the knight describes, adding that the mirror and ring are for Canacee, Cambyuskan’s daughter. She is so excited by them that early next morning, while most of the court sleep off the effects of the feasting, she goes for a walk. Thanks to the ring she is able to understand what the birds are saying and overhears a falcon bemoaning the infidelity of her mate. Here the Squire breaks off, promising to return to that story, but first he will tell us about Cancee’s brothers and father. He is interrupted by the Franklin and the Host takes advantage of the break to hasten in the next Tale.
The Squire’s romance advertises its narrative and fictional nature in a way that is less assured than, for example, the confident references to Petrach used by the Clerk (Tales, IV 31; 147) [126]. Arguably this lack of ease reflects the Squire’s own position, still in training, not yet a knight, but accompanying his father, the experienced and confident Knight who begins the series of Tales. Romance, with its tropes of young aspirant men successfully negotiating rites of passage, would be particularly fitting for the squire. The jumble of elements – exotic location; stranger’s entrance; flying, brass horse; magic mirror, ring and sword; noble princess; heart-broken falcon – might also be taken as deliberate indications of the Squire’s inexperience. Alternatively, this could be the beginning of an intricate interwoven romance in which each magic gift has a separate story which are finally brought together for the conclusion. Such a tale would be highly ambitious and whether by accident or design it breaks off two lines into the third part.
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The Tale is not without charm; the falcon’s complaint (Tales, V:
479-631) recalls the betrayed women of Legend [102] and introduces the theme of gentillesse [58,125], a concept developed further by the Franklin [130]. It also suggests that the cause of the hawk’s infidelity is the lure of ’newefangelnesse’ (Tales, V: 610) the innate desire to try new things, which inevitably engenders restlessness, a theme first sounded mAnelida and Arcite (141) and echoed in The Canon Yeoman’s Tale [144]. This is the very opposite of ’steadfastness’ [56], one of Chaucer’s central virtues. ’Newefangelnesse’ also neatly recalls the fascination exerted by the brass horse in the first section of the tale, which, after drawing all the people to marvel at it, promptly vanishes. Arguably, the Tale as a whole is thus a satiric rewriting of the courtly romance (see Patterson 1991: 71-3) in which man may be entertained by high culture, but is not saved by it, which would connect this Tale to the more ironic elements of Troilus [89]. ’ ’’’ •’ • • ’ [
Further Reading
.if
Cooper (1996: 217-29) is invaluable, as is Cooper (1984:144-54) which discusses the thematic as well as verbal links between the Squire’s and Franklin’s tales. Lawton (1985: 106-29) discusses most aspects of the Tale in his exploration of narrators in Chaucer. Brewer provides an accessible discussion of the tale in the manuscripts (Brewer 1998: 328-
32).
(xiv) The Franklin’s Tale
Like The Wife of Bath’s Tale [122] this is a lai, a form of romance, which often, as here, includes magic. Once again we have a love triangle. This time the original marriage is apparently happy: Averagus has wooed and won Dorigen and they agree that although it will appear that Averagus controls the marriage, in fact Dorigen will be in control. Averagus then goes abroad. In his absence, Dorigen is courted by Aurelius, whom she rejects, suddenly adding that if he can remove the rocks that threaten Averagus’s safe return, she will be his. Aurelius goes to a magician-cum-clerk, who charges a thousand pounds and tells him that at a particular time the rocks will vanish. The clerk is right and Dorigen, appalled, tells all to Averagus, who has returned safely some two years previously. He insists she keep her word, and sends her to Aurelius, who is so impressed by Averagus’s ’gentillesse’ that he sends Dorigen back, untouched. Aurelius then goes to the clerk, confesses he does not have the thousands pounds due and relates the
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story. Proving himself as ’gentil’ as the other two men, the clerk lets Aurelius off the debt. The Tale ends with the Franklin posing the question, who was the most ’fre’i (Tales, V: 1623).
This tale revolves around that concept of ’fre’ which, as now, means both unconstrained and liberal. It is a quality associated with being noble and closely connected with ’gentillesse’. Thus the tale forms part of the debate on nobility as quality rather than birthright which is found in the Knight’s and Wife’s Tales [110, 122] as well as in Chaucer’s lyrics [55]. It also continues the discussion of marriage, although as Mann and Phillips point out, this story explores possible developments after the ’happily ever after’ of Dorigen and Averagus’s marriage which begins the tale (Mann 1991: 111; Phillips 2000: 138). Aurelius is not addressing an unhappy or bored wife and Dorigen has no intention of being unfaithful. However, in issuing the test to Aurelius, Dorigen casts herself as the lady in a romance, honour bound to give the reward promised once the apparently impossible condition has been met. The crux thus becomes the issue of ’treuthe’, another noble quality about which Chaucer composed a lyric [58], and Dorigen comes to represent not only her own fidelity, but also the truth of the men in the tale. The difficulty would not have arisen had her words to Aurelius, spoken ’in pleye’ (Tales, V:988) not been taken in earnest. The trope is familiar from folk tales, to which the lai is also related, and allows the audience to foresee problems ahead.
The role of magic is interesting: the tale’s genre expects actual magic, but whereas the Squire’s Tale’s magic is clearly just that, here there is room for doubt. The magician who knows how to make rocks disappear and resolve conundrums, is also a ’clerk’, a scholar, and arguably reminds society (both within and beyond the Canterbury pilgrimage) to treat . such people with respect. They are the ones who truly understand the concepts others assume they embody. His magic may be simply advanced learning: certainly he knows his astrology (a science which fascinated Chaucer, as his Astrolabe proves [86]) and therefore probably knows about tides as well. We could question whether or not those rocks are removed, or just vanish from sight. ,, .(,, *•»;».
Further Reading ’
The kind of calculations the clerk might have used are explained by North (1988: 422-42). Mann reads the tale as prefering patience and trust to domination (’maistrye’) in marriage (Mann 1991: 111-20), while Riddy explores the uses of romance and social conventions (Evans and Johnson 1994: 54-71). More challengmgly, Hansen explores the
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danger the figure of Dorigen poses to the males within and outside the tale (Hansen: 1992: 267-83). A wide range of readings can be found in Morgan (1980).
(xv) The Physician’s Tale
Fragment IV begins abruptly with the opening of this Tale. Drawn from The Romance of the Rose [62], it is a short tale here, rather in the style of the stories in Legend [102], which has led to some unsubstantiated speculation about an early date of composition. Above all it is disconcerting. Less because of its content, than because of the lack of pointers to how to read it. The plot is straightforward. Apius, a lecherous, corrupt judge lusts after a pure young woman, Virginia, the daughter of Virginius. In order to gain the girl, Apius colludes with a churl who trumps up charges against Virginius, designed to result in Virginia being handed over to Apius. Virginius’s response is to kill Virginia and send her head to Apius. Apius orders Virginius to be hanged, but the mob rise up against the judge and save him.
All the elements here seem clear enough, but the focus is strangely uncertain. Is the judge, Apius, the central figure, in which case the moral of the tale seems to fit: ’Heere may men seen how synne hath his merite’, Tales, VI: 277), or is it Virginia, in which case lines 278-9 are severely unnerving: ’Beth war, for no man woot whom God wold smyte/ In no degree, ne in which manere wyse’. Virginia’s death fits this description as much as Apius’s. Both virtue and corruption can kill us, it seems. The ’worm of conscience’ (280) which is then invoked has hardly been seen to act, unless we surmise that it was the reason for the churl telling all, as apparently he did (264-5). Rather than a private worm there is a very public mob.
In comparison with his sources, Chaucer reduces the role of the people. Delany argues that this takes him into ’creative stalemate’ (Delany 1990: 136). Yet Chaucer may be invoking the forms of both history (the first line correctly cites Livy, the Roman historian, as the source for the story) and what the Host calls ’piteous tale’ (Tales, VI:
298), in which case the lack of explanation allows events to speak for themselves, while the exchange between father and daughter creates the pathos. Significantly, it is during that exchange that the daughter is named: ’Virginia’ indicates her place as attached to her father (Virginius) and her status as a virgin. Both these attributes, and therefore in textual terms her very existence, are threatened by Apius. Paradoxically the only way she can remain Virginia is through death, fittingly, thus, at the hands of her father and in private. This combina-
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tion of the actual and the symbolic occurs frequently in our reaction to news as one way of registering the significance of events. The disconcerting nature of this Tale probably springs from the way it fairly accurately represents the way life is: as Brewer points out, it comes close to closure (Brewer 1998: 350).
The hundred lines which intervene before the Physician gets to the matter of his tale are frequently overlooked. Much is said in them about Mature as creator and painter, but there is also much about counterfeits. This links nicely with the portrait of the Physician in the General Prologue and the character of the Pardoner, who tells the next tale, but it also alerts us to the way things are not quite what they seem even in the tale itself. Questions remain unanswered: how did Virginius know that the motive behind Claudius’ false accusation was Apius’s lust^ Does he in fact know, or is he reacting against the idea that his noble daughter will be handed over to a ’churl’ £ Why are guardians warned to keep a close eye on their charges^ For a short and straightforward story this Tale raises a lot of questions; a fact which goes far to contradict the notion that it is one of the weaker of the Tales.
Further Reading,
Mann reads the tale alongside The Man of Law’s Tale, as an exploration of suffering and ’thraldom’ (Mann 1991: 142-6), while Brewer emphasises that it reflects fourteenth-century sensibilities (Brewer 1998: 341-
50). Delany is interesting on why the tale fails (Delany 1990: 130-40).
(xvi) The Pardoner’s Tale
The Host’s request that the Pardoner tell a tale as a cure for the effects of the Physician’s tale is double edged in that while it is complimentary and appropriate to ask a religious man for solace, the Host actually demands ’som myrthe or japes’ (Tales, VI: 319), perhaps in parody of the theory of fiction’s role as a tonic (Cooper 1996: 259). The Pardoner provides it all: the amusement and trickery strike us first, but his Tale also contains some solace, if we care to extract it.
The Prologue is part self-presentation, part description of his profession and fully in keeping with the criticism levelled at pardoners at the time. Pardoners were so called because they were employed by religious houses, or directly licensed by senior churchmen to raise funds by selling pardons. These were documents, worded in a precise manner, which certified that the person named (usually the buyer) had fulfilled correct penance to be pardoned for specific sins. Theoretically the person
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pardoned had been duly confessed and had performed appropriate penance, but the system was easily abused and simple payment often took the place of any spiritual endeavour. The status of pardoners was ambiguous. They were usually ordained to the level which licensed them to say mass, preach and perform some of the offices of the church, but not all. Moreover, they were required to gain the permission of the bishop before preaching in his diocese, but frequently they flouted this requirement. The opportunities for malpractice are obvious and Chaucer’s Pardoner outlines most of them for us.
He gleefully describes selecting texts which can be worked up into harangues on the evils of wealth and the virtues of donations. He depicts his own presence in the pulpit, from which he lowers down on the congregation and declares that those who have committed some terrible sin and not confessed it will be incapable of walking up to give alms. He talks about the sheep’s bones he passes off as relics and ends laughing at people’s gullibilty. Then he tells a tale about three revellers who see a friend’s body carried past while they are in a tavern and declare they will go and seek Death, and kill him. On their travels they encounter an old man, to whom they are rude, but who tells them they will find what they seek over a style and down a path. What they find is money. They then plot to kill each other in order to have all the gold to themselves and, inevitably, they all die as a result.
Duplicity is the hallmark of Chaucer’s Pardoner, as his doubledealings extend from his fraudulent relics into the creative premiss of his Tale. Almost everything is two things at once. He addresses two audiences: the envisaged one of ’the lewed peple’ (Tales, VI: 392) and the pilgrims, whom he flatteringly terms ’lordynges’ (329). His Tale is both pseudo-homily and entry in a story-telling contest. His chosen text both asserts the evil that springs from the love of money and enriches the Pardoner. The tavern in which his Tale begins echoes the ’alestake’ (Tales, VI: 321) mentioned by the Host (a tavern-owner) just before the Pardoner begins his narrative. The story itself is both the ’ribaudrye’ the gentils don’t want and the ’moral thing’ they do (Tales, VI: 324-5) and its plot relies on the ’japes’ (trickery) requested by the Host (Tales, VI: 319). The old man in the Tale is likewise double as he seems to be a figure both of Death and of one who cannot die, but who shows the three revellers where to find death themselves. Moreover, although we are presented with ’Prologue’ and ’Tale’, the placing of the Latin tag before the Prologue indicates that the two are part and parcel of the same piece. This is a contrast to The Wife of Bath whose Prologue can be regarded as a story of its own, but is distinct from the tale she tells [120]. Finally, in the context of the Tales as a whole, the
Pardoner and his Tale should also be read in comparison with the Parson [148], who offers a true sermon and true repentance, it*.’ U, > . ” – ’
Further Reading
The richness of this Tale means it has received much critical attention. Bloom (188c) is a useful collection of essays on various topics. Minnis (Boitani and Torti 1986: 88-119) provides the best discussion of the Pardoner as sinful preacher, while Patterson (1991: 367-421) explores the motif of confession at length and Howard draws the comparison with the Parson (1976: 333-79). Critics interested in narrative and subjectivity have been particularly drawn to the Pardoner: Lawton (1985: 17-35) and Leicester (1990: 35-64; 161-220) cover this ground. Patterson pairs the Tale with the Physician’s Tale and, drawing on Lacan, discusses the theme of confession (1991: 367-423). The suggestion that the Pardoner is a eunuch is most fully exploited by Dinshaw in her chapter ’Eunuch Hermeneutics’ (1989: 156-84).
(xvii) The Shipman’s Tale
The Shipman’s Tale, which lacks preamble of any kind, begins fragment VII, the one containing the most tales and the one subject to the most speculation about its place in the general running order of the Tales. The Tale itself was almost certainly originally intended for the Wife of Bath and echoes the views on husbands she expresses in her Prologue (Tales, in: 136) [120], The use of the female voice for the Tale (Tales, VII: 12; 14; 18; 19) thus reflects incomplete revision rather than a deliberate rhetorical ploy on the part of the Shipman. Nonetheless, this fabliau [40] with monetary references is reasonably appropriate for a sea merchant and ’good felawe’, as he is called in the General Prologue (Tales, I: 395). However, as Cooper points out, there is less connection between teller and tale here than at any other point in the Tales (Cooper 1996: 278).
The story concerns a monk, his friend, a rich merchant, and the merchant’s wife who is also related to the monk. She complains to the monk that her husband is miserly and that she is in debt. The monk promises to help her, in return for sex. He then goes to the merchant, who is about to go away on business, and begs a loan, which is granted. The monk then gives the wife the money and receives payment in kind. When the merchant returns and asks for the money, the monk says he has given it to the wife. She declares she has spent it, but, now a debtor to her husband, will repay it in bed.
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Of all the Tales this is the most explicit on the interchangeability of money and sex which underpins many of the other tales and, arguably, much of society. In keeping with the genre, though, this is exploited for comic effect, rather than being a point of concern. The plot is in fact kind to all the participants; the merchant is rich, forebearing and not made a mockery of in the way the miller of the Reeve’s Tale or January in the Merchant’s Tale are. The monk is corrupt, of course, but he, too, escapes retribution and indeed garners laughing praise from the Host for his cleverness (Tales, VII: 439-51). The wife, likewise, is quick-witted enough to talk her way out of trouble. Humorous appreciation is thus substituted for moral judgement in a tale which revolves around exchange and the profit that comes from it.
One effect of the elision of money and sex is the remarkable lack of overt bawdiness in the tale. We are in no doubt about what is going on, but the language is unfailingly decorous – a marked contrast to the other fabliaux, and indeed fabliaux in general. Another disconcerting, but easily overlooked, consequence of the Tale is that the carefully misleading truth of the monk’s words and his cheating are placed on a par with the direct speech and honest trading of the merchant. For Cooper this highlights the extent to which Chaucer was fascinated by language development (Cooper 1996: 283-6) and it is certainly an extension of the awareness of the closeness of truth and lies which underpins House [71] as well as many of the Canterbury Tales.
Further Reading
Money and sex as commerce is discussed by Patterson (1991: 344-66). Cooper discusses its position in the Tales sequence and its slippery language, particularly with reference to the monk’s abuse of his relation with the merchant (Cooper 1984: 161-5; 1996: 281-5). The probable source for the tale is found in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Day Eight) and printed in translation in Bryan and Dempster (1958).
(xviii) The Prioress’s Tale
The Prioress prefaces her Tale with a prayer to Mary, which readies us for the story of a miracle performed by Mary which follows. A Christian boy has learnt a Marian hymn, whose words he cannot understand, but which he sings every day out of devotion to Mary. His route takes him through the Jewish quarter and, incited by Satan, some Jews kill the boy and fling his body in a sewer. His mother seeks her son and
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finds him, throat cut, still singing. The Jews are executed and an abbot finally releases the child’s soul.
There is no getting away from the anti-Semitism of this Tale. Contextualising it makes it more comprehensible, but not more comfortable. The fact that, following their explusion in 1290, few Jews were resident in England until the later seventeenth century, made it easy for stories demonising the Jews to circulate in the folk imagination. Setting the story in Asia also helps: anything is believable of so foreign a place. As Brewer points out, the Prioress’s Jews are ’bogeymen’, not people (Brewer 1998: 359) which merely serves to show how ready any society is to demonise another, especially on the basis of ignorance. ’Demonise’ is the right word here, as it is explicitly Satan who incites the Jews to murder the boy (Tales, VII: 558) thus heightening the standing of the Tale as Christian story. The Tale does not allow us to question this standing by, for example, describing the boy’s deliberate singing of a hymn in praise of Mary while walking through the Jewish quarter as an act of provocation. This is a ’miracle’, designed to engender piety and wonder, not sceptical interrogation.
As such it is a story of praise, introduced by the Prioress’s Prologue hymn, itself ’perhaps Chaucer’s finest religious poetry’ (Cooper 1996:
292), whose last line introduces the theme of music: ’Gydeth my song that I shal of yow seye’ (Tales, VII: 487). The role of song is interesting here: it has a more direct connection with faith than learning has. This may reflect its purely musical aspect: music has no need for language in order to have an effect and it is precisely such affective (as opposed to intellectual) piety that the miracle seeks to engender. Thus it is fitting that neither the boy martyr of the story, nor the older lad from whom he learns the Marian hymn, understands the words. Simple, emotional, faith is the point here. The link is emphasised by the use of the miraculous grain placed on the boy’s tongue, which makes him sing even after his throat has been cut. The singing continues until the abbot, explicitly ’hooly’ (in contrast to the monks who have figured in previous tales, or indeed the Pilgrim) ’conjures’ (Tales, VII: 644) the boy to explain the miracle. The role of the Church and learning is thus established as being one of passing on and explaining such stories of exemplary faith to a wider populace.
Direct and essentially uninformed piety thus demands acknowledgement, even if it does not quite command respect. We are left uncertain as to how to read this Tale, an uncertainty reflected in the reaction of the other pilgrims: ’every man/ As sobre was that wonder was to se’ (Tales, VII: 691-2). Is the solemnity a thoughtful reaction to the story of a miracle and the ’wonder’ admiration at its ability to
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elicit such response^ Or is it a wonder that such a diverse group of people actually take such stories seriously1?- As so often it is the Host who breaks the silence with his customary call for ’a tale of myrthe’ (Tales, VII: 706). ^ ,-,\. , ,.. ,U- ./- –
.6 ’);..»’. ,s; k->’l
Further Reading ’ ”’ *
The best short reading of the tale is Pearsall’s (1985: 246-52) which covers the religious nature of the tale and touches on the main issues. It is a good starting place for further reading. The anti-Semitic aspect is best covered by Schoeck (Schoek and Taylor 1960: 1.245-58), who provides the historical context, and Koff, who poses pertinent questions (1988: 204-21). Aers’s brief discussion of the tale in the context of Chaucer’s general presentation of religion is accessible and useful (1986:
54-7). Robertson draws on French feminist theory and views of female piety as a source of strength (Ellis: 1998:189-208), while Collette shows how the Prioress, like the Second Nun, carves out her right to speak through invoking worship of Mary (R. Edwards (ed.) 1994: 127-47).
(xix) The Tales of Sir Topas and Melibee
With a piece of authorial cheek, Chaucer awards himself two Tales: Sir Thopas, a parody romance and The Tale of Melibee, a moral tale in prose that turns into a treatise. Phillips sees the two as going ’beyond the expected definition of story-telling’ (Phillips 2000: 171); certainly they can be regarded as occupying opposite ends of a story-telling continuum.
Sir Thopas is a romance [40] which assembles all the ingredients required for a tale of an ideal knight errant, but in which nothing actually happens. Adventures are promised, but deferred, as the storyline meanders away from chaste knight falling inexplicably in love with unknown love-object (unknown because unseen, even by Sir Thopas) past chance encounter with giant, to description of Thopas being just like all the other pure knights of romance – at which point the Host cuts ’Chaucer’ short. Readers familiar with the nonsense verse of Edward Lear will be familiar with Sir Thopas’s world. This is a tale in which both narrator and protagonist literally lose the plot.
The technical form of the poem assists the rambling. Termed ’rym dogerel’ by the Host (Tales, VII: 925), it is a burlesque of popular romances and ballades composed in simple verse forms, heavy on rhyme, rhythm and formulaic phrases, which keep the momentum of the verse going without necessarily adding much to the poetry. Sir
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Thopas takes on a fairly usual stanza form for this genre, rhyming aabaab or aabccb, with occasional variations and additional rhyming two-syllable phrases (’bobs’) tacked on to the end of a line. The layout of this verse-form was thus surprisingly complicated and is reproduced in most of the manuscripts of Sir Thopas but not in modern printed editions. Cooper provides an example of how it looks on the page, illustrating how much room there was for confusion (Cooper 1996:
300). Added to the masterly parody of subject and form is a further joke. Sir Thopas is divided into three parts decreasing in length from eighteen, to nine, to four and a half lines: the law of diminishing returns enacted on the page.
In contrast, Melibee has a great deal to say about returns, about the difference between just deserts and the kind of return that a just man should make for injustice done. The tale begins as a parable: Melibee is married to the allegorically named Prudence, their daughter is Sophie, Greek for wisdom. The women are attacked while Melibee is away, significantly at ’pleye’ ’for his disport’ (Tales, VII: 971; 970). Distraught to discover what has happened, Melibee follows Prudence’s advise and calls his friends together to tell them about it and ask them what to do. Opinion is divided between those who advocate peace and reconciliation (professional men, beginning with surgeons and doctors) and those who are for vengeance (false friends). It seems that retribution will prevail, but Prudence again intervenes to dissuade Melibee and eventually wins the day. In the course of the discussion the narrative drive lessens, taking this tale away from story towards treatise, thus very like Boece [83] in tone.
Melibee is a fairly faithful translation of the French version of a Latin ’Book of Consolation and Advice’ (Liber consolanonis et consilii) written by Albertanus in 1246 (Chaucer does not seem to have known the Latin original). It is a treatise of political advice against war which Chaucer may have translated before including it in the Tales, possibly for Richard II, though, if so, whether for the young king of the 1370s or the older one of the 1390s is a matter of debate (see Cooper 1996:
311-12). It is also long, overlong in the context of the Tales as a whole, which has led most critics to view it as deliberately tedious, as Chaucer sending himself up in prose as well as in verse. Perhaps so, but Mann asserts the centrality of this Tale, and of Prudence in particular (Mann
1991: 120-7). Prudence is also kin to the Clerk’s Griselde and, like her, causes the Host to reflect on his own wife and how different she is from these ideal wives. Such reaction diffuses the philosophical atmosphere, but the themes of learning from literary example and
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drawing on literary sources are continued as the Monk takes up the role of storyteller. >, M »iv
Further Reading
Pearsall places Sir Thopas in the context of romances (1985: 160-5), while Brewer highlights the mocking self-portrait Chaucer offers here (1998: 361-4). Details of the structure and terms in Sir Thopas are discussed by Burrow (1984: 54-8; 60-78). Rigby discusses Melibee in the context of Chaucer’s feminism (1996: 153-63), though see also Mann (1991: 120-7). Brewer takes issue with the notion of Melibee’s centrality, but also with categorising it as parody (1998: 364-9).
(xx) The Monk’s Tale
The similarities between this tale and Legend have already been established [101]: both are collections of short stories, ostensibly united by theme, but our understanding of that theme alters as we read. Here the Monk promises a selection of tragedies, from which we are supposed to learn that our good fortune may not last. He immediately undermines his ostensible purpose by starting with Lucifer who fulfils the criteria only in the most tenuous fashion – neither man nor victim of Fortune, since he fell through wilful disobedience – his downfall is his only qualificiation for inclusion here. Normally we would expect him to be an example of the fatal folly of pride or insubordination, but the Monk comments on neither; instead he moves on swiftly after giving Lucifer a mere stanza. This departure from the strict definition of tragedy, reprised at the end of the tale of Cresus (Tales, VII: 2761-6), is particularly interesting since it was not commonly recognised as a genre at the time. Chaucer first uses the term ’tragedye’ at the end of Troilus (Tales, V: 1786) [96] and his description probably has its roots in Boethius, which he was translating at the time [83], but it is the definition of it here in the Monk’s Tale which fixed the genre as dealing with the fall of great men for English literary tradition.
The theme of reversals of Fortune was common and features in both The Knight’s Tale [110] and Troilus (e.g. I: 138-40). Interestingly, a wall-painting in Rochester Cathedral depicts the Wheel of Fortune. This allows for the Monk’s reference to Rochester (Tales, VII: 1926) to be a hint of things to come in his Tale, rather than an indication of the Pilgrims’ progress, as has been often assumed.
The structure of The Monk’s Tale, with its succession of short stories, imitates that of the Tales as a whole. It could go on indefinitely
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d there is no set order to it, as (purportedly) the stories are set down s they come to mind (Tales, VII: 1985-90). This Tale contains explicit references to important, contemporary, political figures, something rhaucer rarely did. A case in point is the stanza devoted to Barnabo Visconti (Tales, VII: 2399-406), whom Chaucer met in 1378 [16] and vvho may lie behind Walter in The Clerk’s Tale [126]. The powerful men featured in the Monk’s collection are a mixture of biblical, historical and contemporary figures and the seemingly endless list has an almost hypnotic quality about it, as few of the examples are expanded into full stories. .,,,„, ,,•„,., ,
Further Reading ’
The Rochester reference is explained by Olson (1986-87). Discussion of medieval tragedy is best found in Kelly (1986). Koff explores the kind of reading the Monk elicits in the context of the way other Tales are received (1988:84-8). Godman argues that the stories in The Monk’s Tale are directed specifically at the Host (Boitani (ed.) 1983: 278-91).
(xxi) The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
The framework for the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is the familiar fable of the Cock and the Fox, in which a conceited rooster is first caught by a flattering fox and then escapes by persuading the fox to speak, thus making him open his mouth, enabling the bird to fly free. However Chaucer expands this fable almost out of all recognition by including an old woman who owns the coop, a bossy hen-wife and a discussion of the role of dreams (Tales, VII: 2882-3171) which compares with the opening of House [71]. Here, as there, there is an analogy between how we interpret dreams and how we read literature. This Tale has been read as an allegory on the Church, a metaphorical description of this priest’s particular position as attached to a convent, a tour de force of the moral beast fable and as ’the wittiest and most original dramatisation … of the distribution of roles in a conventional marriage’ (Mann
1991: 187).
The Tale takes up the theme of the downfall of the affluent as Chaunticleer, the cock, literally rules the roost until he falls prey to a smooth-talking fox. The theme is then reiterated when the fox is about to lose his catch: ’Lo, how Fortune turneth sodeynly’ (Tales, VII: 3403). Such exclamations link the Tale to the epic romance of The Knight’s Tale and Troilus, whose high rhetoric is imitated in the mock-lament for Chaunticleer’s impending doom (Tales, VII: 3338-74) as well as in
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the previous debate on dreams and philosophy between Chaunticleer and his wife, Pertelote (Tales, VII: 2882-3171). The irony is that, having proved to his own satisfaction that dreams are portents and having dismissed Pertelote’s opposite view, Chaunticleer then ignores his own advice. Arguably this habit of solemnly agreeing on the worthiness of a text and then ignoring it is hinted at in the Priest’s final exhortation ’taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaff be stille’ (Tales, VII: 3443).
The Tale contains one of Chaucer’s rare allusions to contemporary events in England in the reference to the noise of the hunt being like the uproar caused by the Peasants’ Revolt (Tales, VII: 3394-6) [21]. It is impossible to know if the detail is there simply to add local colour or if it reflects some deep-seated response to the uprisings, hounding of foreign workers, damage done to property and threat of revolt.
Further Reading
Mann’s reading is one of the most engaging and original (Mann 1991:
186-94); Delany offers a lively reading of the tale including consideration of its popular appeal, but her conclusions about Chaucer’s personal life must be treated with caution (Delany 1990: 141-50). A complex and interesting reading focusing on language as reality is provided by Harwood (Ellis 1998: 209-24). Donaldson debunks reliance on allegorical readings of the tale (1970: 146-50) which are recapitulated succinctly in Pearsall’s general discussion of the tale (1985: 228-38). Cooper gives an excellent guide to the Tale’s variants and critical reception (1996: 338-56) and Brewer gives a concise and useful account of its relation to other cock and fox tales (1998: 371-6).
(xxii) The Second Nuns’ Tale
There is no preamble to this Prologue and Tale; Fragment VIII goes straight into the Life of St. Cecilia, which probably pre-dates the Tales as a whole, as it is mentioned in the Prologue to Legend (F: 424; G: 416) [81, 100]. Beyond the title indentifying it as the Second Nun’s Tale and the sentence referring back to the story, which begins the link into the Canon Yeoman’s Tale, nothing has been done to integrate this tale into the wider structure of the Tales. Nor is there any trace of the character of the Second Nun. In all, this Tale can easily be read as Chaucer’s foray into the genre of the Saint’s Life [39].
Cecile’s story is a simple one. On the night of her marriage she tells her husband, Valerian, that her chastity is preserved by an angel, who will slay Valerian if he touches her. Valerian demands proof and is sent
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to a holy man to be cleansed of sin, after which an angel does indeed appear, corroborating Cecile’s words. Valerian is converted and returns home to discover an angel awaiting him with coronets for both him and Cecile. Tiburces, Valerian’s brother, comes in, is told all, and is likewise converted. News of Valerian and Tiburces reaches Almache, the ruler of the country, who promptly orders them to sacrifice to Jupiter, as he has commanded. They refuse and as a result are killed, thus becoming martyrs. One of their converts, Maximus, witnesses to their souls’ ascent to heaven, and is martyred himself as a result. Finally Cecile is summoned by Almache and they engage in debate. Because Cecile holds to her belief, Almache orders her to be burnt in a bath, but she is miraculously preserved and even survives three blows to her neck for three days, preaching all the while. She finally dies, requesting a church be built in her honour.
Reading a Saint’s Life was in itself an act of devotion, which was considered particularly appropriate for women and others who had limited access (or none) to books and education. Saints naturally inspire by their example, but within this Tale there is also the suggestion that books are an equally good, if not more authoritative, source of religious knowledge. Valerian has his readiness to believe and his fitness for conversion proved by the vision of a man holding out a book, written on in gold (Tales, VIII: 202-17). There are traces in this image of the Chaucer of the Dream poems [61], while the motif of revelation through vision balances the discussion of dreams found in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale [141].
Despite the visionary element, the main effect of the story is intellectual. Readiness to believe is tested in both Valerian and Tiburces, but once established, arguments are offered and intellectual debate opened. This is a marked contrast to the affective piety of the Prioress’s Tale, which rests on blind faith alone [137]. Whereas the Prioress’s Tale left the pilgrims in stunned (or moved) silence, there is no recorded reaction to this story of St. Cecile. Arguably martyrdom is so far removed from the experience or aspirations of the pilgrims that no response could be found, except to supplant the tale of transformation from mortal to saint through martyrdom with one of attempted transformation of base metal to gold in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.
Critically, the Tale has been rather overlooked, perhaps because the lack of intervening pilgrim character leaves readers uncomfortable with the idea that the same man wrote this as the other Tales. Yet the Chaucer of this Tale is the same as that of the Parson’s Tale [148], An ABC [49] and the lyric ’Truth’ [58].
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Further Reading
An excellent introduction to the Saint’s Life genre is provided by WoganBrowne and Burgass, whose introduction gives some background on the genre and its expected readership (1996). Aers discusses the Tale in the context of Chaucer’s presentation of religion and makes illuminating comparisons with the Prioress’s Tale (1986: 51-4). PearsalPs rather dismissive treatment of the tale is nonetheless useful (1985:252-
6) although Cooper provides both greater detail and greater engagement (1996: 358-67).
(xxiii) The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale
The sudden arrival of the Canon and his Yeoman and the equally sudden departure of the Canon led some critics to suggest these figures were afterthoughts, perhaps reflecting a possible encounter on Chaucer’s own part with a fraudulent alchemist (as opposed to a misguided one) in the 1390s. The detail must remain speculation, but a Canon of the King’s Chapel at Windsor (for which Chaucer was responsible during his term as Clerk of Works [23]) was cited as an alchemist in 1374. It is possible that he provided the inspiration for the cast of conman Canon and his Yeoman side-kick. It is also possible that their haste is part of their characterisation: they may be escaping some particularly irate victim – but that also is speculation. Their arrival increases the level of drama, however, as Chaucer breaks out of his closed group of original Pilgrims, perhaps an indication that the necessarily repetitive pattern of story, followed by reaction and introduction of next story, was begining to pale.
Not having featured in the General Prologue, all the description of both Canon and Yeoman must take place in the Prologue to the Tale. The Prologue is therefore similar to the Wife of Bath’s and Pardoner’s in being a self-portrait, but in the absence of a previous sketch to measure it against, Chaucer uses the Host to draw out details from the voluble Yeoman, prompting him in what is in effect a dramatic monologue. The character that emerges is more complex than the other Pilgrims: it is hard to tell whether the Yeoman still believes there is something to alchemy, despite all the failed attempts, or whether he is irrationally hooked on the process, although rationally aware that it is a delusion. His self-portrait spills over into the first part of his Tale, which is a description of the Canon’s tricks of the trade, but the detailed enumeration of all the regal’3 of alchemy is reminiscent of an addict’s obsession.
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To an extent this fascination reflects the standing of alchemy itself in fourteenth-century England. The ’science’ came from the East, as had astrology and mathematics, and was careful to preserve its mystique. From what we know of Chaucer’s interest in all aspects of science and culture, it is more than likely that he was curious about it, and while the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale bears witness to his awareness of the trickery that attended alchemy, it also retains a suggestion that there might be a true science lurking behind the fakery. This element of trickery links the Tale with the Pardoner’s Tale [133], which likewise revolves around people being taken in through their own greed. The consequences here are scarcely less dire, for the final question of the Tale is not whether or not alchemy is true, but whether or not it is permitted to delve into the secrets of God’s universe to this extent. The association of the alchemist with the devil, which runs throughout the Prologue and Tale, reinforces the unease about what exactly alchemy is and links the alchemist with the false summoner of the Friar’s Tale [124].
The tale proper really begins in the second part (Tales, VIII: 972). A canon gets the trust of a poor chantry priest, whom he tricks into believing that the canon knows the process for turning base metal into pure silver. The canon practises three sleights of hand on the priest, who is so convinced he pays forty pounds for the recipe. The canon then disappears and the priest never understands why he cannot get the process to work.
Humour and anxiety together pervade this text, as Chaucer has a field-day with references to heat, sweating and change in colour, all integral to the alchemical process and all also echoing elements from the Second Nun’s life of St. Cecile. Even red and white as symbolic of purification are shared ground: compare Valerian and Cecile’s divine coronets (Tales, VIII: 253-5) with the red and white elixirs which purify base metals to gold and silver respectively (Tales, VIII: 797 and 805). This clever literary linking also raises the question of alchemy as blasphemy; on which note the Tale ends with the rather double-edged tag: ’God send every trewe man boote of his bale’ (Tales, VIII: 1481). We may no longer be sure what constitutes a true man, nor how we are supposed to test truth, and proverbially it is not always good to be sent a cure for one’s ills. <
Further Reading ’’
Muscatine links the Tale’s interest in experimentation with Chaucer’s own literary experiments (1957: 213-21) and Howard explores the
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themes of idealism, delusion and hope (1976: 292-8). Blake (1985) has argued against this Tale being by Chaucer, but the argument has been generally rejected.
(xxiv) The Manciple’s Tale
Fragment IX contains just the Manciple’s Prologue and Tale and seems to be incompletely absorbed into the general structure of the Tales. The Host’s request that the Cook tell a tale ignores the Cook’s earlier, unsuccessful attempt and is probably evidence of incomplete revision. The intervention of the Manciple makes sense, however, as an instance of professional rivalry, akin to that between Miller and Reeve, since manciples were in charge of provisions for an institution or household (in this case one of the Inns of Court, I: 567). The Host’s hint that the Manciple should be careful of what he says to the Cook (for fear of the Cook revealing the Manciple’s sharp practice) works dramatically and also introduces the theme of the Tale: unwary speech.
The Prologue’s opening geographical references place the pilgrims close to Canterbury and suggests that several of them have yet to tell stories. However, the Parson’s Prologue, the next and last in the series as it stands, indicates that the Pilgrims are closer still to Canterbury, and also declares that only the Parson remains to tell a tale (Tales, X:
16). Despite such discrepancies, the weight of evidence is that the Manciple was designed to precede the Parson and thus be the penultimate Tale of the collection.
The Tale itself stands out in the context of the Tales as a whole in having a fairly short story and relatively long and repetitive epilogue. The story itself harks back to Chaucer’s early use of The Romance of the Rose [62] and also draws on Ovid. It is a fable of explanation, telling us why all crows are black. Once the crow was white and could sing beautifully and also speak. Phebus kept one, which saw his wife committing adultery. The crow told Phebus, who kills his wife in rage and then in grief curses the crow: henceforth it shall be black and capable only of cawing.
As with all such fables, there is an added moral, but this is where the complexity creeps in. We are expected to take the crow’s place in the narrative and to learn that there are times when it is better to keep quiet, particularly in matters of adultery: ’Ne telleth no man in youre lif/How that another man hath dight his wyf (Tales, IX: 311-12). However, if we focus on Phebus another moral emerges, that there are times when it is better to be ignorant or deceived. Phebus kills his wife
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without stopping to ask questions and then bewails her death. His conclusion is a warning against acting in haste: ’Smite nat to soone, er that ye witen why’ (Tales, IX: 285). He is of course wrong in asserting her innocence, but we are left with the possibility that in some cases deception is the happier resolution – as the Merchant’s Tale suggests [128].
The sixty-two lines of conclusion form a comic epilogue as the moral not to speak unnecessarily is parodied by the constant repetition of the point. Proverbial wisdom gets the bit between its teeth here, but it may also be setting such homespun lore against the more elevated learning gathered from ancient books – authorities. When it comes to it, the advice is much the same, regardless of its source. This theme of the way similar things are awarded different terms depending on their social status, not their intrinsic worth, is dealt with explicitly in lines
212-34 where the pairs ’wenche’/’lady’, ’capitayn’/’outlawe’ and ’triaunt’/’theef’ are held up as examples. The theme recalls the chaotic awarding of renown or notoriety and the fusion of truth and lies in House [71]. This focus on language tends to be what attracts the most critical attention as it echoes the relation between tales, such as the Knight’s and the Miller’s [113] and also links with the Parson’s rejection of frivolous speech in favour of Vertuous sentence’ (Tales, X:
63). There are other, more specific, echoes: the caged bird longing for freedom (Tales, IX: 172-4) recapitulates the falcon’s lament in the Squire’s Tale (Tales, V: 610-20). In each case the bird is not blamed for acting according to nature, but the desire for freedom is blameworthy because the cage represents fidelity. Reading this Tale at the end of the sequence thus allows resonances with previous Tales to be heard, but there is also a fine irony in a Tale which rejects the value of speech taking part in a story-telling competition. !•
Further Reading
Cooper considers the Tale in terms of its position in the sequence and its thematic relation to other tales (1985: 195-200). Howard’s analysis is engaging and covers most of the ground (1976: 298-306), while Cooper’s Guide clearly and usefully summarises the main areas of debate (1996: 383-94). Mann focuses on the reversal of the expected trope of female infidelity (1991:18-22) and Birney considers the relation between the character of the Manciple suggested in the General Prologue and his Tale (1985: 125-33). „
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
(xxv) The Parson’s Tale
With the Parson’s Tale the idea of a literal pilgrimage, which has held the Tales loosely together, is transmuted into a metaphor. Dusk is drawing in and the end of the trip is in sight, but there is no mention of Canterbury. Instead they enter the outskirts of a village (Tales, X:
12), at which point the Host declares that they have nearly completed the plan he suggested: there is only one more tale to hear. The atmosphere of conclusion and leave-taking is strong and the Parson effects the final shift into allegory as he explicitly makes their pilgrimage life’s journey to the heavenly Jerusalem and ’this viage’ becomes ’thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage’ (Tales, X: 49-50).
Linked with this shift is a refusal to tell a fable, even a moral or religious one, and a rejection of poetry. The cut at ”’rum, ram, ruf” by lettre’ (Tales, X: 43) is a jibe at alliterative verse forms which survived in the north and midlands [31] and which, as a ’Southern man’ the Parson seems to despise. He is similarly dismissive of rhyme (Tales, X:
44), which may refer to the heavily rhymed forms of popular ballad parodied in the Tale of Sir Thopas [138]. Both these prejudices reflect Chaucer’s own literary preferences and add to an inclination to read the Parson’s Tale as Chaucer’s own views (an inclination increased by the Retraction which follows the Tale, see below) but, as ever, caution is wise here. It is possible that the treatise which makes up the Tale was written as a free-standing piece and then absorbed into the Tales, but, unlike the Knight’s and Second Nun’s Tales [110, 142], there is no reference to its autonomous existence. What we have is a Tale told to ’knytte up al this feeste and make an ende’ (Tales, X: 47) and arguably all the themes of the previous Tales are caught up one way or another in its discussion of penance and description of the seven deadly sins.
The Parson is careful to say that all that follows is ’under correccioun /Of clerkes’ (Tales, X: 56-7), thus wisely avoiding any charge of heresy and pre-empting scholastic quibbling. However his treatise reveals the love of definition and division that riddled academic debate and gave rise to the huge encyclopedic volumes (summae) that were the mark of scholarly endeavour throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The habit of breaking down concepts into parts and discussing each division is still a pattern for philosophical discourse; in the fourteenth century it was the common form of any kind of intellectual debate. A good comparison would be Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love [38], which likewise uses this habit as a mark of the logic of her explanations. The Parson’s treatise thus follows the expected
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pattern as it divides penitence into three parts: contrition, confession and satisfaction, and further subdivides those parts so that there are six points of contrition, and confession can be divided into venial and deadly sins. This last allows for the digression into a description of the Seven Deadly sins, each followed with a remedy, which takes up roughly a third of the piece before we are returned to the overall structure with an explanation of the importance of satisfaction, or making amends. Rhetorically the piece is masterful. It dictates its own pace, but once caught by it, it is easy to be carried by its cadences and the exact logic of its tone makes it almost impossible to question what is being said. This is exactly what such works require, of course, so that even the similes and asides that vary the rhythm and atmosphere work to keep us within the mindset of the piece as a whole. Chaucer was clearly good at and interested in this kind of writing: he translated Boethius [83] and at least one work by Pope Innocent, now lost [25]. He also composed the Astrolabe [86], which uses similar literary effects. It is a mistake to think poetry demands more crafting than prose: the final paragraph of the Parson’s Tale demonstrates one aspect of Chaucer’s writing at its finest.
(xxvi) The Retraction
Printed at the end of The Canterbury Tales, this is the point where Chaucer’s voice most clearly blends with that of one of his Pilgrims, the Parson. The opening reference to the ’litel tretys’ and the tag ”Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine”’ easily apply to the Parson’s Tale, and only possibly to the Tales as a whole. Once we get to the list of works, however, we are firmly in the area of Chaucer’s own output. Whether the sentiments that follow reflect a deliberate winding-up of a poetical career or the adoption of a literary convention (which could nonetheless be genuinely felt) is a matter of personal conviction. Attempts to render it wholly ironic probably reflect twentieth-century unease with declared piety rather than any approach to truth, but that does not mean we must render it naive. Moreover, Chaucer may not have written it under some approaching apprehension of death, indeed it may not have been the last thing he wrote. The powerful tone of leave-taking, coupled with our habit of reading The Canterbury Tales as his last great unfinished work, inclines us to interpret this short piece as Chaucer’s final word: we may be wrong on all fronts.
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Further Reading
The case for the Parson’s Tale as an autonomous composition, added to the Tales later is made by Mmms (1984 207-9) Examples of Summac structure are reproduced, with introduction, in Bryan and Dempster (1941 723-44) Aers focuses on the Parson’s treatment of marriage (1986 66-8) Koff’s chapter on’leave-taking’is an elegant example of the desire to read the Retraction and the Parson’s Tale as Chaucer s final words (1988 222-36) Howard (1976 376-87) offers an elegiac reading of the Tale, also taking it as Chaucer’s final words, a view tactfully countered by Pearsall (1992 228 and 269-70) Cooper discusses the standing of the Retractions and its thematic links to the Tales as a whole (1996 410-12)
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