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The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales
AB-ELS 1A
The Canterbury Tales
The Miller’s Tale - “Game” and “ernest” are two important concepts in
reading the Tales representing respectively jokiness, frivolousness and fun, and seriousness,
morality and meaningfulness. Yet one of the things the Miller’s Tale makes clear is that it
becomes very difficult to decide what is lighthearted fun and what is meaningful, moral telling.
The story of John the carpenter is grounded in reality: the details of the story all make sense, and
it appears to be set within a suburban, believable Oxford that Chaucer might have known. Yet
the story itself is clearly a fabliau: and its sources confirm its debt to fabliau - a hugely elaborate
trick, set up with huge care in the story, which snaps shut as the story ends. Immediately
“realism” is juxtaposed with “fantasy”.
The same problem is bequeathed directly to the reader at the end of the tale: when, after
the glorious moment at which John comes crashing down through the roof, and our pleasure in
Nicholas’ elaborate trick stops, Chaucer suddenly focuses on John’s pain. The result of the
elaborate trick is an old man, lying unconscious, pale and wan, with a broken arm on his cellar
floor - his house destroyed, his wife cuckolded. Is Chaucer doing precisely what the narrator tells
us, at the end of the prologue, we musn’t do, and making “ernest” of “game”? Maybe – and the
Tales as a whole tread a careful, ambiguous line between the serious and the comic. The same
ambiguity of tone is applied to the Christian theme which runs throughout the tale. John the
carpenter’s plan involves floating up through the roof in his kneading tub when the flood comes;
and yet the tale replaces his idealistic upward movement with a crashing downward movement,
through his house to the cellar floor. Christian uplift is replaced with a rather damning fall. We
VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U. AB-ELS 1A
might usefully compare this to the fall in discourse and in subject matter from the Knight’s Tale
to the Miller’s Tale: a step downward for the tales themselves as a linear movement (as the Host
seems to know full well) in Middle English class distinction – a noble knight to a churlish,
drunken miller. Metaphorically speaking, John the carpenter isn’t the only thing to come
crashing down in this tale.
Is this, then, a blasphemous version of Christianity? Well, it all depends how seriously
we read it. If we are offended by Absolon’s devilish transformation at the end of the tale (into a
blackened devil carrying a flaming iron), or if we recognise the alignment of Alison and
Nicholas with Adam and Eve (and the respective falls from grace which follow), then perhaps
we might view the tale as deliberately depicting sin. And yet, even though the tale itself is a
comic delight - and there is a tremendous amount of pleasure to be had from reading it - the
Miller’s Tale is far from a negative, anti-type example of sinners in action.
The Reeve’s Tale - Then the Miller tells a version of this tale that is less
like a fairy tale, where one of the men gets slighted and is embarrassed in the end. The Reeve
then takes this theme, of men doing whatever they can to get the woman, even further by making
it about rape and assault. 'The Reeve's Tale' is not a nice story, and is not one you'd want to tell
to children. It starts out light-hearted enough but ends very dark.
'The Reeve's Tale' tells the story of a miller who is dishonest and proud as a peacock.
Two students decide to outsmart the Miller and ensure that he does not cheat them out of their
grain. When they realize that they have failed in this mission, they then decide to get back at the
Miller. In the end, one student sleeps with the Miller's daughter and the other with his wife, and
they leave the Miller badly beaten and unconscious (knocked out by his own wife no less!).
This Miller is not a good man, and as such, the Reeve ends this tale with the moral of the
story that you can't hope for good if you do evil. This is what the Reeve calls justice as he has
now repaid the Miller. However, we must wonder if this has gone beyond justice. In this story,
the students don't even try to use nice words to seduce the women, but simply jump on them or
trick them into sleeping with them. And after the wife (unknowingly) knocks out her husband
(she thought she was knocking one of the students out), the students continue to beat him
senseless. We need to wonder if the Miller really deserves all of this based on his pride and
dishonesty.
The Cook’s Tale - After hearing Reeve's tale, the Cook laughs and says that
he has a story that is quite as good. The host tells the Cook that he must tell a very good story to
make up for the bad food that he has sold. The Cook first says he will tell a story about an inn-
keeper but then changes his mind saying that he will save that story for the return trip home.
Instead, he tells a story about a Cook's Apprentice.
This story is not complete, so we cannot tell how it would have ended, but it starts out
with a young man who goes from bad to worse. Based on the style of previous stories, this story
would have probably continued in the same pattern, showing how bad the human soul is.
The Cook is a repulsive figure. His suppurating sore suggests filthy personal habits and
the Host accuses him of serving stale food. It deals with an apprentice cook. It was probably
intended as the last merry tale in the first fragment. Its plot is very similar to the earlier tales. The
plot contains an eligible woman, the wife of the apprentice’s friend who keeps a shop to mask
her activities as a prostitute. Perhaps this is an indication that there are two rivals vying for the
hand of this lady - her dissolute husband and Perkin Reveler. However since the plot does not
develop the reader does not get the full picture. Perhaps the Cook’s Tale was meant to be more
raunchy than the Reeve’s tale through which Chaucer intended to depict the London low life.
The setting of the Cook’s tale with its taverns and shops is a sharp contrast to the glamorous
world of The Knight’s Tale.
The Friar’s Tale – The corruption of the church in “The Friar's Tale”
teaches the punishment of greed, lies, and manipulation, and how one should repent for those
sins. It also emphasizes the importance of sincerity in everything spoken. The Friar's Tale and
the next one, The Summoner's Tale, belong together as a unit because the Friar tells an
uncomplimentary tale about a corrupt summoner, and the Summoner, in his turn, tells an
uncomplimentary tale about a corrupt friar. The reader should remember that in spite of the
personal animosity between the Friar and the Summoner, the greater quarrel is about the
importance and validity of their respective professions.
Although The Friar's Tale is elegantly simple — partly because of the Friar's intellectual
simplicity — the tale has its enriching subtleties. For example, Chaucer plays on the medieval
word "rebekke," a type of stringed fiddle-like instrument, and "rebekke," slang for "old woman."
The word also puns on the biblical name Rebecca (wife of Isaac and mother to Jacob), whose
sacred water vessel in the biblical story is reflected in The Friar's Tale by a comically brown
cooking pan. Another literary technique is a type of reversal in that the summoner and the demon
ride out seeking "prey" with the pun on "pray." The central irony in the tale, of course, is that the
foxy summoner out-foxes himself and becomes the "prey" of the demon.
The Friar's Tale is connected to The Wife of Bath's Tale in that the Wife discusses the
problem of authority (that is, the husband or the wife), and the Friar deals with the relative
authority in terms of the church and demons. In The Wife of Bath's Tale, authority is given over
to a woman — a violation of medieval sense of hierarchy. The Friar continues the theme of
authority by first describing the evil machinations of his superior, the archdeacon to whom the
summoner is supposedly a "vassal." The summoner, in turn, has his own servants and spies in the
form of whores and thieves. Likewise, the demon falls into a hierarchy in that he is assigned by a
VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U. AB-ELS 1A
higher power the responsibility of capturing his prey, the soul of the summoner. Then in the
episode of the farmer and his cart of hay, the reader learns that the authority of the demon is
limited.
The Squire’s Tale - Since the Squire's Tale exists only in a fragmentary
form, it is difficult to determine precisely how we are supposed to read it. The tale may be a
fragment because Chaucer never finished the tale or because the later section of the tale was lost
in the manuscripts from which the Canterbury Tales were taken. And yet, the Franklin’s
interruption comes at a point which suggests that the Squire’s Tale might be one of Chaucer’s
many trick interrupted-endings (see, for example, his House of Fame, or Chaucer’s Tale of Sir
Thopas).
For the moment at which the Franklin interrupts comes only two lines after the Squire has
outlined his plans – extremely lengthy plans – for the rest of his tale, giving as the last plot point
to be covered in his telling Cambalo’s fight for the hand of Canacee. There seems nothing very
unusual about that, until we remember that, at the start of the tale, we are clearly told that
Canacee and Cambalo are brother and sister. And this is where the tale becomes interesting.
Canacee, of course, is the person discussed in the Man of Law’s Prologue - Chaucer, the Man of
Law claims, will not tell her story, and nor will he.
Yet here is Chaucer, in the mouth of the Squire, promising to tell the story of incestuous
Canacee. It is certainly true that the Squire’s plan for the rest of his tale looks as if it might take
four pilgrimages of its own to complete – the Squire, the son of the Knight, certainly inherited
his father’s long-windedness – and some critics have argued that the Franklin breaks off the tale
(either with irony or with faux modesty and compliments) only to prevent the pilgrimage from
having to endure all of it. Yet critics – who have paid scant attention to the Squire’s Tale, often
VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U. AB-ELS 1A
disregarding it as unfinished – have yet to come up with a fully persuasive explanation of why it
is the promise of incest which seems to motivate the abrupt termination of the Squire’s Tale.
William Kamowski has also pointed out that the abridgement of the Squire’s Tale precedes an
abridgement of the Host’s original tale-telling plan: There are lots of interesting avenues for
exploration and interpretation with the Squire’s Tale, yet it only seems fair to conclude that the
critical work on the Tale remains, like the Tale itself, frustratingly inconclusive.
The Shipman’s Tale - Despite its relative brevity, the Shipman’s Tale
interrogates and complicates several key issues raised in earlier tales. After the darker reaches of
the Physician’s and Pardoner’s Tales, the Shipman’s Tale returns to fabliau origins, presenting a
reasonably simple “trick” story, complicated by Chaucer in the telling.
Primarily, the tale continues the idea, previously raised in The Wife of Bath’s tale, that money,
sex, and women are closely inter-connected. It is interesting that, in the second fragment, the
Shipman promises to tell his tale, mentioning his “joly body” (attractive figure). Scholars have
argued that, in fact, the lines about the Shipman’s “joly body” were intended to be adapted into
the mouth of the Wife of Bath, and it is the Wife of Bath’s Tale which immediately follows the
Shipman’s promise. The bawdy fabliau of the Shipman’s Tale is usually assumed to have been
intended to be The Wife of Bath’s tale before the version we currently have was composed.
Moreover, the Shipman’s would not be an unlikely tale for the Wife to have told. At the end,
when the Host concludes that the monk tricked both the merchant and his wife, he seems not to
have realized the victor at the very end of the tale. Rather like in the Miller’s and the Franklin’s
Tales, we are asked to consider each of the participants at the very close of the tale, and decide
who we think has come off best. It is clearly not the merchant, though he has made huge profits
in his business dealings, and had his loan repaid, and, though (as the Host argues) the monk has
had sex with the wife, remained friends with the merchant, and got off scot-free, it is the wife
herself who seems to triumph. Not only has she had enjoyable sex with both the
merchant and the monk, but she is one hundred franks better off; and she coerces her husband
into agreeing to “pay” in return for sleeping with her.
Like the Wife of Bath, this wife has realized the inherent value of her sexual attractiveness: and
in a way that seems to a modern reader uncomfortably close to prostitution, she bears out the
Wife’s dictum that the “bele chose” is in fact an excellent bargaining tool for women to get what
they want from men. As the Man of Law’s Tale suggested, the female is a pawn in business
transactions, and yet, what the Wives (of bath, and of the merchant in this tale) realize
that Constance never even considers, is their own potential profitability. If women’s bodies are
valuable, these two women seem to say, then why shouldn’t we be the ones to profit from our
bodies?
One also notices the importance attached in these business dealings to giving one’s word, to
agreements sealed with kisses and with handshakes, and of one thing being verbally exchanged
for another before the words become actions – a reminder, perhaps, of the issues of contracts
raised by the Franklin’s Tale.
The Tale of Sir Thopas - Sir Thopas offers up one of the funniest
moments in the Canterbury Tales. Written in ridiculously bouncy tail rhyme, the poem is a
hilarious parody of Middle English verse romances packed full of bizarre pastoral details.
Thopas, for example, is hugely effeminized, well-dressed, and with a girl’s name (Thopas was
usually a woman’s name in the medieval period). Thopas falls in love, in the manner of the
courtly knight, before he has decided who he will be in love with (an elf-queen, in the end) and
runs away from his climactic battle at the end of the first fit because he has forgotten his armour.
In the Ellesmere manuscript, the setting of Sir Thopas has the tale ever vanishing into the
margin, and close readers will note the way each fit is half the length of its predecessor - there is,
as well as its “dogerel” parody of verse romance, a definite sense that Chaucer the character has
definitely run out of things to say. Note the number of times Chaucer has to ask the company to
listen or to be quiet (implying perhaps the jeers and responses of a less-than-impressed pilgrim
audience) and note too the way that details from the prologue seem to echo in the Tales: an
effeminized, antisocial Chaucer becomes an effeminized, entirely chaste Thopas, the Host’s
comment that Chaucer looks like he would find a “hare” becomes a forest with hares for wild
beasts, an “elvish” looking-Chaucer inspires the “elf-queen who is to be Thopas’ lover. To that,
we might add, a storyteller Chaucer reluctant to tell a tale (but pushed into the spotlight)
becomes a knightly Thopas desperate to escape knightly combat. The apparent purposeless of the
narrative, packed with pointless details, might well reflect a narrator who is making the tale up as
he goes along.
There are several interpretable jokes hidden in the fabric of the tale. Chaucer is parodying his
own endless inventiveness, celebrating his own skill at creating varied voices, by presenting
himself as someone who cannot even come up with a single bearable story – and, silenced by his
own characters, the abortion of Chaucer’s tale actually points to a remark about the strength of
his characterization. Chaucer’s characters, it seems, are so well written that they give advice
about tale-telling to their writer. Sir Thopas, vanishing fit by fit as it does, also demonstrates
Chaucer’s awareness of his own elusiveness, the self-vanishing quality which enacts the
invisibility of the writer’s point of view – which we have already mentioned in several other
tales. The Chaucer sent into the fiction to represent the author is, we and he know all too well, a
poor imitation of the real thing - but it is the nearest thing to an omniscient author we are going
to get.
The Monk’s Tale - The Monk provides one of the first-known definitions
of tragedy in English literature, and, though his tale might have been fascinating to Chaucer's
medieval audience, many of whom would not know the classical stories it largely details, it does
not receive a huge amount of attention or adoration from modern readers and critics.
The Monk's tragedies are drawn from a variety of sources: Biblical, classical, historical and even
some that, in Chaucer's time, would have been within reasonably recent folklore and memory.
Yet the model of tragedy that the Monk offers is not, in fact, a classical model as such, but a
Boethian one - a reminder of the mutability of life itself, and the tendency of fickle, feminine
Fortune to spin her wheel and bring those at the top crashing down to the ground. It is, on one
level, simply a series of car-crash narratives - an unrelenting dark, Boethian reminder that the
high-status end miserably.
Some more recent studies have tried to locate the Monk's tale, with its emphasis on the stories
told about the history, and its focus on the writers from whom the Monk has drawn the stories, as
a response to Boccaccio's De casibus tragedies and a comment on the involvement of writing,
poets and poetry in the support of tyrants and despots.
Yet neither of these readings of the Tale really explains what it is doing within its context.
Louise Fradenburg argues very persuasively in her book that the Monk is a death's head at the
feast - a sudden explosion of misery and death into the festive fun of the Canterbury project. The
Monk's own solid physical reality, good for breeding (so the Host jokes - and breeding is the
opposite of dying) is juxtaposed with his tales, precisely about the end of the body and its death,
rather than life and strength.
Moreover, the numbers that the Monk quotes - he has a hundred tragedies in his cell, of which he
manages to fit in seventeen before he is interrupted - suggest a painfully dismal repetition of the
fall from fortune to misery, fortune to misery, fortune to misery. It is rather as if the Monk
himself becomes a sort of anti-Canterbury Tales all of his own: each of his mini-tales
progressively darkening the horizon.
It is no wonder then that the Knight sees fit to interrupt the Monk and halt his tale - particularly
as the Monk tells tales largely about the demise of high-status characters (and the Knight, of
course, is the pilgrimage's highest-ranking pilgrim). The Monk himself presents a threat to the
fun of the tale: he is all 'ernest' and no 'game', as the Host points out to him, and - beginning a
trend which arises more and more as these final tales progress - when he is interrupted, he
refuses to speak any further. One of the tellers has his mouth firmly closed.
VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U. AB-ELS 1A
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale – The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is one of the
best-loved and best-known of all of the Tales, and one whose genre, in Chaucer’s time and now,
is instantly recognizable. It is a beast fable, just like Aesop’s fable, and as one of Chaucer’s
successors, the medieval Scots poet Robert Henryson, would go on to explore in great detail, its
key relationship is that between human and animal. The key question of the genre is addressed at
the end by the narrator himself: telling those who find a tale about animals a folly to take the
moral from the tale, disregarding the tale itself. For a start, it is important to notice that the
animal-human boundary is blurred even before the tale begins, when the Host mocks the Nun’s
Priest (who, being a religious man, would have been celibate) and suggesting that he would have
made excellent breeding stock (a “tredefowl”, or breeding-fowl, is the word he uses). The
thought is an interesting one – because if we can think of the Nun’s Priest himself as potentially
useful in breeding, animalistic terms, then can we think of his tale in potentially useful in human
terms?
The question frames the other themes of the tale. The issue of woman’s counsel is raised again
(last foregrounded in Chaucer’s tale of Melibee) explicitly – should Chaunticleer take Pertelote’s
advice about how to interpret his dreams? Should he disregard his dreams, and get on with his
life? He does, of course, looking among the cabbages (perhaps even to find herbs), when he sees
the fox – and at that point, the tale seems to suggest, he should never have listened to his wife in
the first place: his fears were valid.
That is, until we remember what the narrator tells us anyway at a crucial point, that his tale is “of
a cok” – about a chicken. It is hardly as if we need a prophetic dream to tell us that foxes like
eating chickens: its what we might call animal instinct. This is doubly highlighted when, after
quoting Cato and discussing the various textual politics of dream interpretation, Chaunticleer
calls his wives excitedly to him because he has found a grain of corn – and then has
uncomplicated animal sex with Pertelote all night. It is a contradiction, Chaucer seems to imply,
to expect unchicken-like behavior from a chicken: yet the contradiction is one which fuels the
whole genre of beast fable. If the Nun’s Priest had too much human dignity and restraint to be a
breeding fowl, Cato-quoting Chaunticleer has animal urges too strong to be a viable auctour.
It is a theme of course which points a sharp finger at the whole idea of a beast fable - the whole
genre, we might argue, resting on the writer precisely ignoring the correct moments to have a
character speak or not speak; and it also is a dangerous moral for the Tales as a whole. In a work
of literature that constantly apes orality, the injunction to shut up is a serious one – and, as a
comparison of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale to the Manciple’s Tale reveals – one very much in
Chaucer’s mind at the very end of the Canterbury project.