Canterbury Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read online

  Chaucer’s treatment of The Canterbury Tales’ framing fiction is as innovative as the variety of literary genres it encloses and interconnects. He uses the frame to expose social and political tensions that are manifested in interpersonal rivalries and in resistance to the authority of the self-appointed “monarch” of the pilgrimage, Harry Bailly, innkeeper of the Tabard Inn, from which the pilgrimage begins and to which, thanks to Harry’s intervention, it will return. In this way, Chaucer shapes frame and tales into a social model of ongoing competition for success and mastery.

  The key to the dramatic impact of The Canterbury Tales is to be found succinctly stated in these lines from early in “The General Prologue,” initial component of Fragment I: “At night was come in-to that hostelrye / Wel nyne and twenty in a companye / Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle / In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle” (p. 2; see translation on facing page). The characters who will tell Chaucer’s tales are “sondry”—that is, of widely differing ranks and professions or trades—and they have come together accidentally, united solely by their decision (or, as the poem more precisely puts it, their shared desire: “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”; p. 2). Hence no ties of class solidarity and antecedent friendship or association bind them. The mix of personalities and statuses (soon to be described by the narrator) is potentially volatile, and the match to set it ablaze is supplied by the Host of the Tabard when he suggests to his guests that since they will undoubtedly pass the time on their journey by telling stories and playing games, they can increase the pleasure derivable from storytelling by making a contest out of it, the winner to receive a free meal “at our aller cost” (p. 42)—not just Harry s—on their return to the Tabard. He will accompany them in order to serve as judge of the tales told, and anyone who disobeys or challenges him “shal paye al that we spenden by the weye” (p. 42), a heavy penalty indeed.

  Harry’s ostensibly friendly suggestion, and volunteering of himself as judge, has political and economic dimensions the burly innkeeper does not acknowledge. Southwark, the suburb across London Bridge (later home to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), was a rowdy place of brothels, bearbaiting, and bars; there was plenty of competition for travelers on their way to Canterbury, and by proposing his storytelling contest to the pilgrims, the Host is obviously thinking about how he can secure the custom of this group, as a group, after the conclusion of their pilgrimage. By installing himself as leader and judge, whose word is law, Harry is also transforming a “felawshipe” into a de facto monarchy (hence comparable, however obliquely, to Chaucer’s England under its embattled ruler, Richard II).

  That the Host, though only an urban bourgeois, will prove a monarch who embraces both narrative and social decorum becomes clear when, after the conclusion of the first tale (told by the Knight, the highest-ranking secular pilgrim), he asks the Monk,* an analogously respectable Churchman, to tell the next story, “sumwhat, to quyte with the Knightes tale” (p. 166)—that is, a tale as elevated in style and subject as its predecessor (albeit presumably on a religious subject). (“Quyte” can mean to pay back, redeem, achieve balance, or get even, depending on the context.) But at this point the social and rhetorical journey of The Canterbury Tales turns sharply in new directions. Robin, the drunken Miller, insists on speaking next and, in response to the Host’s articulation of his program for the tale-telling contest: “Abyd, Robin, my leve brother, / Som bettre man shal telle us first another” (p. 166), calls the latter’s bluff by asserting that he will speak now or leave the company. Harry, in a pinch more businessman than king, gives in rather than lose a customer, and the result torpedoes his proposed top-down telling order; the Miller, who has already announced, “I can a noble tale for the nones, / With which I wol now quyte the Knightes tale” (p. 166), brings class-based anger into the pilgrimage, expressed via the discursive weapon of corrosive irony: His sarcastic descriptor, “noble tale,” echoes, and in echoing mocks, the earlier reported judgment of the pilgrims (but especially of the “gentils everichoon,” those far above the Miller in status) that the Knight has told “a noble storie, / And worthy for to drawen to memorie” (p. 166). His rejoinder will be anything but noble in content, and with it he will “quyte” the Knight’s epic romance of classical antiquity, not by matching it, but by exposing to ridicule its pretensions and class biases.

  The Miller announces that he will tell a “legende and a lyf” of how a clerk cuckolded a carpenter, a raunchy fabliau with blasphemous echoes of the Gospel narrative of Joseph and Mary, “a Carpenter, and... his wyf” (p. 166). But another pilgrim, the Reeve (an estate manager who is also a carpenter by craft) becomes incensed at what he perceives to be an insult to women and to himself. He confronts the Miller, who rebuffs the attack with more vicious humor, this time equating the divine providence (“goddes privetee”) with the private parts of a wife and arguing facetiously that a husband should not attempt to know too much about either, as long as he has access to “goddes foyson” (“God’s bounty”) on both fronts.

  By this point it is clear that the tale-telling competition proposed and refereed by Harry Bailly has metamorphosed into a contest of a very different, much less sociable nature. Language has begun to demonstrate its capacity to annoy and destroy as well as to create and delight, and its availability as an instrument of both inter-class warfare (Miller versus Knight, in a dim and discreet echo of the Great Rising of 1381) and intra-class rivalry (the respective positions of Millers and Reeves within the manorial economy would tend to make them frequent opponents, though both of humble status). As important, tale-telling will receive its impetus not only, or even primarily, from the choices of the pilgrimage’s “monarch,” but also from the desire or need of one pilgrim to reply to inaccuracies or insults perceived in another’s story; tale follows tale not as a manifestation of social decorum but as an ongoing process of reception, interpretation, judgment, and reciprocation.

  I have thus far omitted from this analysis of Fragment I of The Canterbury Tales the role of the narrator, which is crucial to the process I have outlined because it is through the narrator’s act of supposedly memorial reconstruction that we know what we do about the status, character, and appearance of his fellow pilgrims: “Whiche they weren, and of what degree; / And eke in what array that they were inne” (p. 4). The series of “portraits” of the pilgrims are perhaps the single most famous part of the poem, and it is important to state at once that they are not portraits drawn from life—not, that is, descriptions of Chaucer’s contemporaries as he carefully observed them in their respective professional, vocational, or artisanal capacities. Instead the portraits enact something more complex: The narrator’s “erotics of memory”—that is, his recollection of particular things he especially liked or disliked about the pilgrims—fitted into an overall taxonomy of “estates” (social statuses) that he (and behind him Chaucer the poet) gleaned from the popular literary form called “estates satire,” which purported to reveal and excoriate the characteristic vices (or, less often, praise the ideal virtues) of the different estates. The problem with the narrator’s descriptions is that they sometimes reveal the erotics of memory and the classifications of estates satire pulling in opposite directions (as, for example, with the Monk,* Prioress, and Friar, all of whom the narrator likes while giving us abundant, if stereotypical, reasons why he, and we, should not). To complicate matters further, characters such as the Monk,* Friar, Pardoner, and Wife of Bath show signs of being themselves thoroughly familiar with the accusations directed at their respective cohorts by estates satire, and of gleefully mouthing or enacting them in a spirit of holiday fun, or to outrage the simple souls who take seriously such categorizations. One effect of the portraits in “The General Prologue” is to impose on us a double task of interpretation: On the one hand we’re invited to judge the pilgrims, and on the other to judge the narrator’s representation of them, to seek out inconsistencies and obvious instances where attraction (for example, to the Prioress’ dainty mouth
) or repulsion (such as to the Miller’s big mouth and the wart on the tip of his nose) support or subvert estates satire commonplaces.

  So much for the frame into which Chaucer put the opening tales of his collection. The tales themselves form a brilliant sequence featuring radically different narrative styles and social points of view, but also thematic interconnections and a progressive revelation of language’s efficacy as an instrument of mastery in a competitive world. “The Knight’s Tale,” based on Boccaccio’s early epic romance Il Teseida, is a serious meditation on the uses and limits of unfettered political power when it is threatened by external enemies, by the irrationality of erotic passion, by the unpredictable, irresistible actions of Fortune, and above all by the provocations to intemperate, tyrannical behavior that the just ruler must resist in exercising his authority. Theseus, duke of Athens and mighty conqueror, is faced with the dilemma of how to deal with Palamon and Arcita, two Theban princes who fall into his hands after he has defeated Creon, ruler of Thebes, and destroyed his city. The tale chronicles the continual policy adjustments he must make in attempting to solve this problem (even as the Host will have to make analogous adjustments to keep the Miller in the pilgrimage), thanks to his prisoners’ being enamored with his ward, Emily, and their resultant dispute over her, which leads to escapes, disguises, potentially deadly duels, and finally, under the Duke’s supervision, a tournament battle between the two lovers, each with one hundred followers, in an arena built for the occasion by Theseus. (The circumstances surrounding this battle provide the Knight an occasion to offer a distinctly nonidealized depiction of chivalry—that is, professional combat-in action.) As the tale’s narrative unfolds, it contrasts the struggle between mortal anger and prudential restraint that the Duke must wage within himself with the extravagant, unrestrained rhetoric and deeds of Palamon and Arcita, whose desires and flights of eloquence about their unjust fate as Theseus’ prisoners serve to emphasize both the imprudence and the powerlessness of their situation.

  When the gods (representing both human passions and the universal forces that radically restrict humanity’s control over its fate) thwart Theseus’ plan by destroying Arcita, the tournament victor, the Duke must finally rely on language’s persuasive power to achieve politically satisfactory closure. His final speech to the grieving Palamon and Emily (adapted by Chaucer from Boethius’ influential, late-classical treatise The Consolation of Philosophy), after justifying Arcita’s untimely death as the working of Divine Providence, urges the young couple to marry, thus making “of sorwes two / O parfyt joye” (p. 162)—and, in the process, insuring that the Duke will “have fully of Thebans obeisaunce” (p. 156).

  The Miller’s parody of “The Knight’s Tale” reconceives the rivalry of Palamon and Arcita for Emily’s hand as a competition—between Nicholas, a clever, fast-talking, and entirely self-interested university student, and Absolon, a dandified parish cleric with a delusory attachment to the ridiculous rituals of romantic love—for the body of Alison, beautiful and earthy young wife of John, who is Theseus reimagined as a foolish old carpenter with whom Nicholas boards in Oxford. The Knight’s depiction of power politics in ancient Athens is thus reduced to a town/gown squabble in contemporary Oxford, a university town famous for such tensions. Their passion for Alison leads all three men to painful fates that the Miller clearly believes they deserve; his tale presents each as seduced not only by her but by an uncritically embraced literary genre. Gullible John’s acceptance of the depiction of Noah’s flood in medieval mystery plays allows Nicholas to convince him that a new flood is about to engulf the world, and that he must hang separate tubs inside the roof of his house for himself, Alison, and Nicholas, in which they will weather the storm. (Nicholas’ persuasive speech parodies Theseus’ more elevated but equally self-interested words to Palamon and Emily at the end of “The Knight’s Tale.”) Nicholas, in turn, is so enamored of the role of the tricky cleric who cuckolds unsuspecting husbands in dozens of medieval fabliaux that, after having sex with Alison in John’s bed while the carpenter snores in his tub—the Miller’s tart version of Theseus sitting on a high throne towering above his worshipful subjects—he can’t resist improving on his scheme by sticking his buttocks out the window for Absolon to kiss, only to have them badly burned when that worthy man, frustrated and furious over having been tricked into kissing Alison’s “naked ers” at the same window earlier that night, buggers Nicholas with a hot coulter (a phallus-shaped plow blade).

  Absolon’s mistreatment by Alison results from his assumption that he could win her by reciting plaintive love lyrics outside her bedroom; his resulting indignation leads him to forswear such “paramours” and to undertake the red-hot vengeance that constitutes one of English literature’s great comic climaxes: When wounded Nicholas cries out for water, John awakes and, thinking that “Nowélis flood” (p. 202) has come, cuts loose his tub and falls to the ground, breaking his arm.

  The epic struggle in “The Knight’s Tale” between ancient city-states degenerates in the Miller’s hands into Oxford intergroup antagonism and stereotyping. Early in the tale, Nicholas, promising Alison that he will find a way for them to have sex without John’s knowledge, declares scornfully, “A clerk had litherly biset his whyle, / But-if he coude a carpenter bigyle!” (p. 176). John returns the favor when he thinks Nicholas’ (phony) coma results from his prying into “goddes privetee” (p. 184), and berates scholars for lacking the good sense of working people like himself. At the end, when the wounded John tries to tell his neighbors the truth about his fall, he is successfully contradicted by all the students present, who stick together in unanimously pronouncing the carpenter mad.

  As the Miller “quytes” the Knight, so “The Reeve’s Tale” enacts revenge for the latter’s perceived mistreatment in the Miller’s prologue and tale. A further coarsening of language results: When the Reeve is not showering words of sarcastic contempt on Simkin, the vicious, scoundrelly, and ridiculously proud miller of Trumpington, the latter is sassing his victims—Alien and John, two Cambridge students, further degraded versions of Palamon and Arcita, whom he has just cheated—by suggesting that since they must stay overnight in his narrow dwelling they should use the hocus-pocus of philosophy to make it bigger. Even Allen and John (yokels whose northern dialect Chaucer reproduces in the first known instance of English dialect comedy) respond to their misadventures by insulting each other, and when Allen decides to get even by raping the Miller’s daughter, he chides his companion as a “swynes-heed” and a “coward” (p. 226) for not joining in (John then rapes the wife). When language finally yields to violence—the students beat the Miller to a pulp and get their stolen flour back—the reader feels that the descent has not been very great.

  The last part of The Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, is the ninety-eight-line snippet of “The Cook’s Tale,”* all that is extant and probably all Chaucer wrote. It’s preceded by a prologue featuring a brief, sharp dialogue between the Host and the Cook, natural rivals for Southwark customers, suggesting future (if not present) “quytyng,” but in the few lines of the tale that we have, its inhabitants (London low-lifes) meet to “hoppe and synge and maken swich disport” (“dance and sing and make sport”) rather than tell stories; the preferred form of intercourse (because of the money it can supply) is sexual rather than verbal or commercial: As the fragment ends we learn of a wife “that heeld for countenance / A shoppe, and swyved for hir sustenaunce” (“that kept, for countenance, / A shop, and whored to gain her sustenance”).

  In another instance of “quytyng,” the Friar and the Summoner—two clerical con men who prey on their victims by means of opportunistic preaching and flattery (the Friar) or threats of punishment by ecclesiastical courts (the Summoner, or process server)—square off with the anger of competitors, not for a free dinner but for a free ride at the expense of the gullible or the vulnerable. The Friar, a university-trained intellectual, adapts to his purpose a widely diffused preacher’s parable about a notorious
ly predatory official (in this case a summoner, of course) who is carried off to hell by a devil because his victims really mean it when they wish him there for his crimes. To his appropriation of the medieval “theology of intention” the Friar adds a dialogue between the summoner and his diabolical companion that emphasizes the former’s prying nature (necessary for one who makes a living by blackmail as well as coercion) in the way he grills the devil about his life in Hell and his methods of trapping sinners. The Friar’s implication is clear: The summoner’s curiosity—his meddling in other people’s pryvetee—is setting him up for his final, infernal destination, where he will learn plenty about the wages of sin.

  The Summoner’s reply counters the Friar’s theological language with a dose of the well-established anti-fraternal discourse that took shape in thirteenth-century Parisian university circles (where it was sponsored by opponents of mendicant scholars such as the Dominican Thomas Aquinas) and became popular among fourteenth-century critics of the increasingly worldly and prosperous fraternal orders, which originally intended to support themselves by begging. The outrageously greedy and hypocritical friar of “The Summoner’s Tale” suffers a double humiliation. First, Thomas, the sick householder from whom the friar relentlessly solicits a monetary offering, farts into the latter’s hand after inviting him to “grope” behind him for a gift that, however, the mendicant must share with the other eleven members of his convent. (“Grope” was a word widely applied to a priest’s quizzing of a penitent in confession—“groping” his conscience in order to discover all his sins—and friars were popular confessors because, according to their detractors, they assigned easy penances in return for gifts; hence Thomas’s use of the term has a satirical edge.) Thomas’s angry, flatulent riposte to his tormentor sets up the friar’s second comeuppance: the solution to the problem of how to divide a fart in twelve parts proposed by Jankin, a squire of the local lord to whom the friar goes to complain about his mistreatment. Jankin’s ingenious suggestion, involving a cartwheel along the spokes of which the fart’s sound and odor can be dispensed equally to the other members of the convent, with the friar himself occupying a privileged position at the hub of the wheel immediately below farting Thomas, has parodic overtones of Pentecost (when the gift of the Holy Spirit showed itself divided into tongues of flame over the head of each apostle), and thus makes a satiric comment on the pride taken by the mendicant orders as preachers of the Word, which, in their hypocritical mouths, becomes no better than a fart.