Patterns of Religious Narrative in the Canterbury Tales

Roger Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000681291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1986. This study asks 'What problems confront the narrator of a religious story?' and 'What different solutions to those problems are offered by the religious narratives of The Canterbury Tales?' The introduction explains the grounds for inclusion of the tales here studied then examined in three sections. The first includes the tales of the Clerk, Prioress and Second Nun, and Chaucer's Melibee, and explores the parallels between the production of a religious narrative and that of a faithful translation. The second considers how the tales of the Man of Law, Monk and Physician, though formally similar to those in the first section, subvert the offered parallel by their creation of narrators who actively mediate them to their audience, and who seem as concerned with the projection of their own personalities as with the transmission of the given story. The final section shows how the tales of the Pardoner and Nun's Priest highlight the dilemma and provide distinctive resolutions. The whole study aims to explore the dynamic relationships that exist between two contrasting positions: an artist's commitment to the authority of a given story and his need to assert himself over it.

1

INTRODUCTION

A study of religious narratives in The Canterbury Tales needs to address a number of questions at the outset so as to explain the terms within which it was conceived and the limits within which it had to operate. Three suggest themselves immediately. Why this particular selection of religious narratives? What is the status of the individual narrative in relation to the framing narrative of the Canterbury pilgrimage? And, as a practical expression of this latter, how are we to describe the voice, or voices, we hear telling the individual tales?

A good place to begin is provided by the title of the work (‘here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury’).¹ We are beginning a single work, made up of a collection of tales formally connected with Canterbury. The precise nature of that connection, and hence the kind of reading the work appears to demand, is explained in the prologue to the book, the so-called General Prologue. It tells how Chaucer went on pilgrimage to Canterbury in the company of a group ‘of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle/ In felaweship’ (I, 25-6) at the start of their journey from the Tabard Inn in Southwark; and how the innkeeper, the Host, decided to accompany the pilgrims, and proposed, as an agreeable pastime, that they should tell stories to one another. ‘The Book of the tales of Caunterbury’ is therefore the record of a journey, and a collection of the stories told during that journey.

This simple device of framing the collection of stories by means of another story does what the collection itself could not: it authorises a reading of the stories as a continuous sequence. The logic of an unframed collection is that of an anthology;² the reader may — but need not — follow the author’s arrangement of the individual tales. The logic of the framed collection is that of a novel or a play; or, to use a metaphor beloved of critics of The Canterbury Tales, a drama or a debate, in which the story told by one person directly or indirectly acknowledges one or more of the stories already told, and marks a point of departure for stories yet to come.³ And there is more. The completed collection is in intention coextensive with the completed journey of the framing narrative.⁴ Narratives structured about the idea of journey regularly work on a symbolic as well as a literal level: the hero’s journey is thus metaphorically a quest for self-fulfilment. Therefore, we seem entitled to approach the individual tales of The Canterbury Tales as elements in a larger metaphoric structure.⁵

Strongest evidence for such a reading comes at the end of the work. Day is drawing to a close, and the pilgrims are entering ‘at a thropes ende’, when the Host, reckoning only one tale remains to be told, that of the Parson, asks the Parson, as he believes he can, to ‘knytte up wel a greet mateere’ (X, 1-28). After the Parson’s tale, no voice is heard but that of the ‘makere of this book’, who reviews his total literary output to that point in an epilogue commonly called the ‘retracciouns’, and ‘taketh … his leve’ of the reader (X, 1081-92). The completion of the storytelling also suggests the end of the pilgrimage with which, for so long as it lasted, it was coextensive. Though clearest at beginning and end of The Canterbury Tales, links are forged elsewhere too between the two narrative events of pilgrimage and storytelling.⁶ One set of links has to do with the literal dimension of the pilgrimage as a continuous process in time and space. Shortly after the beginning, for example, when the Reeve prepares to tell his tale, the company have been on the road some three hours, and covered some 2 miles: it is now ‘half-wey pryme’, that is, 7.30 a.m., and they are within sight or sound of Deptford and Greenwich (I, 3905-7). Another considers less the literal dimension than the idea or image of journey, and provides a symbolic expression of the overarching narrative form. Thus the Man of Law begins at 10 in the morning, and ends only as night approaches (II, 1-14, 1117). Three tales begin even earlier: the Squire’s at ‘pryme’ (V, 73); the Manciple’s ‘by the morwe’ (IX, 16); the Second Nun’s, ‘in the morwe-tyde’ — at all events, that is when the group have been seen leaving the inn by a canon who wants to ride with them. He does not catch up with them until the pilgrims have travelled nearly 5 miles; and by then the Second Nun has finished her story (VIII, 554-5, 588-9). Likewise, story’s end is marked, at the end of the Man of Law’s tale, by the drawing of day to a close (II, 1117), and, of the Summoner’s Tale, by the company’s approach to a township (III, 2294).⁷

In the light of this symbolic reading of the temporal and geographical coordinates of the pilgrimage, readers have felt justified in looking for a symbolic ordering of the narratives themselves: the Parson’s tale will thus ‘knytte up wel a greet mateere’ both literally and metaphorically. The ‘greet mateere’ is initiated by a group of tales (those of the Knight, Miller, Reeve and Cook) directly dependent on the unfolding pilgrimage narrative in the General Prologue. Shortly after the pilgrims have set out, the Host initiates the storytelling by inviting the pilgrims to draw lots. The short straw, and with it the first story, falls to the social superior of the group. A story of princely rivalry in love, ending with a death and a marriage, and with earthly and heavenly rulers to dispense justice, the Knight’s offering sets a tone for the whole work.⁸ But the principles of order which the narrator appears to embody, and expresses so movingly in his tale in the concluding words of Theseus the earthly ruler, are not allowed to pass without question. When, at the end of the Knight’s tale, the Host turns to the ecclesiastical superior of the group, the Monk, for the next story, the drunken Miller interrupts with a tale of his own. This features a cuckolded carpenter, and therefore leads to a row with the Reeve (in his youth ‘a wel good wrighte, a carpenter’: I, 614). At the end of the tale the Reeve gets his own back with a story at the Miller’s expense. And even when the Reeve has finished his story, the Host is unable to resume his lost authority, for another cherl, the Cook, has been so taken with the story that he immediately proposes a story of his own. His interruption earns him a witty put-down by the Host, and leads him to propose a tale ‘of an hostileer’ at the latter’s expense. The story he then tells comes to an abrupt end after only 56 lines. By then we have heard of ‘thefte and riot’, sojourns in the Newgate prison, and the wife of a friend who ‘heeld for contenance/ A shoppe, and swyved for hir sustenance’ (I, 4421-2).

So far, the unfolding pattern is most easily described as one of order disturbed, and decline from noble beginnings.⁹ The single story which follows the unfinished Cook’s tale can be read in much the same way as the Knight’s. This time, the Host does not leave the choice of the speaker to chance, but requests a story from one of the intellectual superiors of the group, the Man of Law. The latter agrees, and tells the story of a Christian missionary martyr, daughter to the Emperor of Rome and mother of a future emperor by her marriage to an English king. His agreement, and the story he tells, clearly reassert the principles of order and return us to our noble beginnings — even if, as we shall see, it is difficult to decide what precise principles narrator and narrative claim to embody.¹⁰ Order does not, however, pass unchallenged. At the end of the tale the Host proposes another learned man, the Parson, for the next offering. Like his earlier proposal for the Monk to follow the Knight, this plan is immediately rejected by an uneducated pilgrim, who insists on having his say and telling not a learned but a ‘mery’ tale (II, 1166-90).

At the end of the work this pattern appears in reverse. Now the order — social, ecclesiastical, moral, intellectual — which the self-assertion of the cherles seemed so likely to overthrow is restored. At the beginning of the penultimate tale, that of the Manciple, the Cook reappears with the Host, so drunk that he cannot tell the story demanded by the Host. The Manciple intervenes, ostensibly as an act of kindness to all parties, but in reality to make fun of a fuddled opponent. He overrules the Host’s demand for a story from the Cook, and tells a story himself. In different ways this moment returns us to the beginning of the work, and operates as a mirror-image for the opening session of storytelling. The Cook’s drunkenness re-enacts the Miller’s, and effectively reverses his own role in the earlier session.¹¹ The Manciple, likewise, negates the image projected by the Man of Law, since, as the rascally steward of a London Inn of Court, and servant of the future lawyers of the country, he represents the dark underside of law. Moreover, his story realises the theme of disorder and decline concretely in mythological terms: it explains how the crow, once white all over and a beautiful singer, acquired his black feathers and raucous voice. Finally order is restored. The Parson points us towards the heavenly Jerusalem with the ‘predicacioun’ which the Host had ironically reckoned to hear from him (II, 1176).¹² With his tale, it seems, the ‘greet mateere’ is well and truly ‘knytte up’. Not a Rake’s Progress after all, but the Pilgrims’ Progress which its beginning seemed to authorise.

Unfortunately, the form in which The Canterbury Tales has come down to us authorises this approach only to a limited extent. Every tale, it is true, carries some reference to the frame, but most of them only in a brief narrative prelude or postlude. In these so-called head-links and end-links pilgrims talk about the tales they are to hear or tell, or have just heard or told. Three of the tales — those of the Physician, Shipman and Second Nun — are attached to the frame only after their own event, when each generates a story (or, in the case of the Shipman’s tale, stories) which explicitly or implicitly challenges its assumptions, and relativises them. Before the event they have only their own titles (for example, ‘heere folweth the Phisiciens tale’) to connect them to the containing narrative.¹³ A similar difficulty attends stories like those of the Man of Law, Clerk, Manciple and Parson. These are clearly linked at their outset to the frame, but have only a notional connection with the preceding story, either because it is unfinished or because it ends without clear reference to the frame. By virtue of their narrative head-links, we can read such stories without difficulty as episodes in the Canterbury book: yet the absence of end-links for the preceding stories makes for a sense of fragmentariness, or a grinding of narrative gears, as we jerk out of one story into another by way of an unspecified moment in the pilgrimage narrative.¹⁴

We ought not to exaggerate this sense of fragmentariness. Well over half the tales are securely anchored to their fellows by head-links and end-links; others were joined together even when their respective end- and head-links did not clearly run on in a single narrative moment;¹⁵ scribes regularly concealed the gaps between tales by running one straight into another.¹⁶ Even so, the work as we now have it is not a whole but a series of fragments or groups of tales. Only the first group (I: Knight, Miller, Reeve and Cook) has a secure place in the temporal and geographical context of the pilgrimage narrative, by virtue of its already noted dependence on the General Prologue. The tale normally found in copies of the work immediately after this group (II: Man of Law), and the two normally found in sequence at the very end of the work (IX: Manciple, X: Parson) have only a symbolic connection with that temporal and geographical context.¹⁷ The remaining groups, linked equally loosely to the framing narrative, have no secure place relative to one another or to the outermost groups (I—II, and IX-X).¹⁸ In the Ellesmere order the groups are: III: Wife of Bath, Friar and Summoner; IV: Clerk and Merchant; V: Squire and Franklin; VI: Physician and Pardoner; VII: Shipman, Prioress, Chaucer (twice), Monk and Nun’s Priest; and VIII: Second Nun and Canon’s Yeoman. But this order is not found in all the manuscripts, and cannot certainly be traced to Chaucer himself.¹⁹ Moreover, it is far from certain that these groups generate the same idea as the controlling outer units of the work seem to authorise.

To take only two examples, those of the largest groups (III and VII): the tales of group III normally follow the Man of Law’s tale and might, thus, be expected to repeat or develop patterns set up in the earlier groups. To a degree they do: the Wife of Bath’s tale stands in much the same relation to the following pair...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Titlepage
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• Part One: The Narrator as Translator
• Part Two: Religious Subjects, Literary Interests and the Sense of a Performance
• Part Three: Towards a Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index