Chaucer: An Introduction

Second Edition

S.S. Hussey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000681307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1981, this second edition built on the success of the first which had established itself as a standard introduction to the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. It shows Chaucer not only in the context of his own age, but, more important, as a writer and a man who is still vivid to us so many years later. As well as examining the early poems, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Canterbury Tales the author gives a thorough account of Chaucer's background. He examines the traditions in which he wrote, his audience, and his position among his contemporaries. The second edition was updated throughout and included a number of revisions and additions, in particular on the second part of the Roman de la Rose and on The Knight's Tale.

V

‘THE CANTERBURY TALES’ II

Fabliau: The Miller’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale

The modem counterpart to the fabliau is the bar-room story, although regrettably few of these are as well told as Chaucer’s. Because they are such good stories, Chaucer’s fabliaux usually have world-wide analogues, although attempts to find actual sources have not met with much success. With the possible exception of the Manciple’s account of why crows became black, they would appear to represent some of Chaucer’s later work, and TheMancipl’s Tale is held to be early chiefly on grounds of its slight story, its evident rhetorical padding and its lack of any obvious relation to its narrator or even to its own prologue. Quite apart from their other virtues, the Miller’s and Reeve’s tales on the one hand and the Friar’s and Summoner’s on the other stand out by reason of the mutual animosity of their tellers and by Chaucer’s dramatic exploitation of this within the scheme of the Canterbury pilgrimage. The Shipman’s Tale is about adultery and money, and contains rather less action than the others. Props like tubs, cradles or pear-trees therefore play no part in it, but its intrigue and final fooling of the stuffy husband by both wife and lover show that it conforms to the type.¹ The Merchants Tale, as we shall see, while having a fabliau plot, goes some way beyond the mere requirements of the genre.

Curiously enough, there are almost no Middle English fabliaux outside Chaucer, although there are plenty from France, and the name itself is, of course, French. It used to be thought that they were designed for the amusement of the newly-rich bourgeois of thirteenth-century France, with leisiure but not much sophistication, but since the fabliaux often seem to satirize this class – and, incidentally, the clergy with whom they came into contact – it is nowadays assumed that they were meant for more aristocratic entertainment, although the appeal of a risqué story well told does not limit itself to any one class. Two sorts of plot recur. The first is that of the old, jealous husband whose young wife deceives him, despite all his precautions, with a more attractive and sprightly lover. The second is that of the biter bit, as in The Reeve’s Tale, where the miller, having stolen some of the clerks’ meal to bake a cake, is not only humiliated by the swyvyng of both wife and daughter but also loses the cake and the expense of entertaining the clerks. Or, on another level, the rapacious summoner of The Friar’s Tale is tricked in his turn and earned off to hell by the devil who has assumed the guise of a bailiff. The two motifs are combined in The Miller’s Tale, where Ahson first deceives her old husband John the carpenter with the young lodger Nicholas and then tricks her other suitor Absolon with the misdirected kiss, and where Nicholas, thinking to improve on the joke, is himself painfully outsmarted by Absolon. The outcome of the fabliau is thus predictable within general limits – old husbands marrying young wives must expect to be cuckolded, and young men (especially clerics) are apt to be too clever by half – but the interest is sustained by watching the method by which these obvious conclusions are to be achieved. The fabliaux therefore sometimes depend on huge practical jokes which, in their way, are as unrealistic as anything in the romances. They demand an extravagance of action and gesture which goes well with Chaucer’s frequent extravagance of description in The Canterbury Tales whose pilgrims are often, according to the author, the best (or cleverest, or wickedest) at their job you ever saw.

The solutions are deliberately ingenious and hence keep up our interest to the end of the story. The summoner of The Friar’s Tale actually condemns himself to hell. The seemingly insoluble problem of The Sutnmoner’s Tale is in fact solved, and in a way which humiliates the friar most of all by rewarding him with the chief share in the disgusting ritual at the end. Nicholas’s fantastic arrangements for the flood culminate in a way he never imagined. The Shipman’s Tale tells how a smooth young monk borrows money from his merchant friend in order to pay a debt for the merchant’s wife. In return she agrees to spend the night with the monk. The monk later tells the merchant that he has repaid his loan to the wife, but when challenged she – with the quick thinking characteristic of fabliaux wives – claims she thought the money was a gift from her husband. The merchant has lost his hundred francs and the monk has enjoyed his wife, but, as Craik points out,² we are left in some doubt whether the wife really desires the monk or is simply using him as a means to get the money. If the latter, there is a further irony in that he eventually uses her for his own convenience. However things go, the fabliaux often end with a demonstration that what has been achieved is, within the terms of the genre, something approaching poetic justice, although we may note that the wife usually comes off better than the others:

siuyvyng, seduction

Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf,

For al his kepyng and his jalousye;

And Absolon hath kist hir nether ye;

And Nicholas is scalded in the towte.

This tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!

Miller’s Tale I 3850-4

Thus is the proude millere wel ybete,

And hath ylost the gryndynge of the whete,

And payed for the soper everideel

Of Aleyn and of John, that bette hym weel.

His wyf is swyved, and his doghter als.

Lo, swich it is a millere to be fais!

Reeve’s Tale I 4313-18

The lord, the lady, and ech man, save the frere,

Seyde that Jankyn spak, in this matere,

As wel as Euclide dide or Ptholomee.

Touchynge the cherl, they seyde, subtiltee

And heigh wit made hym speken as he spak;

He nys no fool, ne no demonyak.

And Jankyn hath ywonne a newe gowne. –

My tale is doon; we been almoost at towne.

Summoner’s Tale III 2287-94

swyved, seduced

For, despite

nether ye, backside

towte, bottom

rowte, company

ylost, got no money for

everideel, every bit of

swich it is, that’s what comes of

subtiltee, intelligence

demonyak, madman

But we are really not encouraged – except perhaps at the end of The Merchants Tale-to speculate about what happens after the climax.

Should the fabliaux seem to exhibit a somewhat cynical view of human nature, especially in marriage, it might be replied that, firstly, jokes of this kind are often knowing and cynical, and, secondly, that similar situations occur elsewhere in medieval literature with a very different tone, as in this lyric which shows how intolerable a loveless marriage could become to a young wife:

Alas hou shold Y singe? Yloren is my playnge.

Hou shold Y with that olde man

To leven, and let my leman,

Swettist of all thinge?³

To illustrate Chaucer’s development of the fabliau form,⁴ one might choose either The MtHer’s Tale or The Reevefs Tale. But The Miller’s Tale is the better. The Reeve’s Tale is clever enough, but it lacks the variety OiTheMiller’s Tale, the feeling that several things are going on at the same time. Roger the Cook calls it a jape of malice in the derk (14338), and it ends, in the true fashion of farce, with an almighty scrap.

THE MILLER’S TALE

The beginning of The Miller’s Tale makes only passing reference to the carpenter who is to be characterized later by his reaction to events. For the present the description of him as a riche gnof and the mention of his age and possessiveness is enough to label him as the typical senex amans. Instead there are descriptions of Nicholas and Alison of a length and detail not often found for the stock characters of most fabliaux. Nicholas is demure and orderly enough on the surface but really he is sleigh (artful) and privee (secretive), as many students were evidently expected...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• I Poet and public
• II Dreams and their dreamers
• III Troilus and Criseyde
• IV The Canterbury Tales I
• V The Canterbury Tales II
• VI Chaucer and his contemporaries
• Abbreviations used in the notes
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index