Chapter 7 Answering the Riddle of the Cooks Tale

The murky case of the Cook s Tale presents a panoply of various issues relevant to the discussion of the Canterbury Tales as a textually dynamic work with a history ofinteraction. However, unlike the other cases discussed in the first several chapters, the fragmented state of the tale, the cloudiness of Chaucer's role and intentions, and the sheer variety of reader responses to the fragmented tale, both in the criticism and in the textual history of the Canterbury Tales, make the case of the Cook:~ Tale unique in many ways. No other fragmented part ofthe Tales resulted in quite the range and number of responses as the Cooks Tale. For instance, the "spurious links" are only in a small number of manuscripts, which are all from the fifteenth century. Written around 1422, Lydgate's Siege ofThebes and its Prologue are in only five manuscripts ofthe Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Interlude and the Tale of8eryn are only in the Northumberland manuscript. The fifteenth-century orthodox Ploughman s Tale is only in Christ Church 152. The sixteenth-century proto-Protestant Plowman sTale is not found in any medieval manuscript but in one early modern manuscript and several printed editions. However, all but eight ofthe fifty or so complete manuscripts ofthe Canterbury Tales have something to say about the Cook s Tale. What is more, the scribes of 33 of the manuscripts interact in some explicit way, either through paratextual glossing or additional text, with the fragmented tale, imaginatively reshaping the path of the CookS Tale. l Recalling the challenge and contestation of text-based games such as a riddle, David Lorenzo Boyd states, "the narrative [of the Cooks Tale] was the focus ofmuch fifteenth-century editorial creativity, for it presented a gap, an irresistible challenge with which the book industry then had to contend."2 The challenge the narrative gap poses remains, and to this day readers continue to fill in the gaps in narratively and textually unique ways. At the end of the first fragment or tale group "a" in the Canterbury Tales, the Cook promises in his Prologue to tell a "litel jape" (I. 4329) in the same manner as the Reeve and the Miller. However, he only begins to tell his tale. The canonical text ofthe Cook s Tale begins by introducing the raucous and unsavory apprentice victualer known as Perkyn the Revel our, the prototypical party animal and wedding crasher, who "haunteth dys, riot, or paramour" (I. 4392). Perkyn shirks most of

[n addition to all the cases in which the scribe explicitly writes something that interacts with the text, I also include the Ellesmere manuscript in which the scribe makes no comment but leaves part of a page and a whole leaf blank before the next tale. 2 David Lorenzo Boyd, "Social Texts: Bodley 686 and the Politics of the Cook's Tale," in Reading From the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature, ed. Seth Lerer (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1996),85. 142 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale 143 his apprenticeship duties and should never have been given his "acquitance" to the fragmented tale and the narratives of explanation that seek to answer the (i.e., certificate of successful apprenticeship completion) by the master victualer, unanswerable question: why does the Cook's Tale end the way it does? The CookS but the master decides to send Perkyn on his way so he doesn't rub off on the rest Tale, for the past 600 years, has been an undecipherable riddle that many have of the servants in the household. The master bids Perkyn to go with "sorwe and tried to answer. with mischance" (1. 4412), and Perkyn leaves to take up residence with a friend of If it was indeed supposed to have an ending, two endings seem realistically his in what seems to be a brothel. With that, the tale ends abruptly right as it begins possible based on the potential narrative: either Perkyn continues his "riotous" and to head down a rather seedy path with the lines, rebellious ways in a comedy, or something will happen to Perkyn that will bring the tale to a didactic and moralized conclusion. Regardless of where the tale was Anon he sente his bed and his array supposed to go, various "involved " as Rust might describe them, have Unto a compeer ofhis owene sort, resolved the abrupt ending in several unique ways. As a riddle, a text-based game That lovede and revel, and disport, of sorts, the hasty ending of the tale similarly demands solution. Since scribes And hadde a wyf that heeld for contenance began copying the Tales, such sudden stops to tales have caused readers to react in 1\ shoooe. and for hir sustenance. (I. a variety of different ways ranging from silence, to invented interruptions, to the after the introduction of this "wyf' and her career as a prostitute, the utter revision of the tale through user-created input. Some of these user-created tale simply ends without a sense of closure, making it unpalatable to our modern inputs were original; some were appropriated from other, often unknown, sources sense of an ending, but also apparently insufficient for a number of late medieval and added to the Canterbury story canon. writerly readers. New-media theorist Nick Montfort cites the riddle as the ancestor to The tale quite clearly ends with the potential for much more narrative and no contemporary forms of interactive fiction. He states, "the riddle is not only the sense ofcompleteness, but it is not particularly evident why it ends where it does. most important early ancestor of interactive fiction but also an extremely valuable Why leave a tale like the Cook's so clearly unfinished? There has been no shortage figure for understanding it, perhaps the most directly useful figure in considering of explanations. It is possible that it was getting too dirty, so either Chaucer or the aesthetics and poetics ofform today."5 Riddles are by definition unfinished texts some censoring scribe stopped the tale in its tracks. It could be too that Chaucer that demand interaction and subsequently completion. They propose questions changed his mind after he had already begun composing the tale, deciding that that readers then answer. I propose that the following riddle-like questions are in there was already too much raucous, bawdy comedy with the Miller and Reeve play with the unfinished Cook:s Tale: For the critics, the question is what would preceding the Cook and not enough serious didacticism. He would have rewritten Chaucer want? For the early scribes, the question was how do we deal with this a new tale, but he never got around to it. It is also possible that Chaucer never got incomplete text? For the present discussion, the question is how have scribes and around to writing the ending of the tale because he had not yet decided whether critics interacted with and reacted to Chaucer:S potential narrative with new texts, to continue down the seedy path of revelry, drunkenness, and prostitution or bring imaginative explanations, or different contexts? In the following sections, I explore the tale and its main character to a moral end for the edification of the reader. Of the variety of interactive responses and solutions to the potential narrative of the course, the Cook's promise of a "jape that fil in oure citee" might indicate that the Cook s Tale, including the range ofscribal actions that negotiated the narrative gap tale will be a fabliau because the Cook uses the same terms when he describes and the critics' own narratives explaining Chaucer's silence, and the tenuous place the events of the Reeve s Tale as a "jape of malice in the derk" (I. 4343, 4338). inside and outside the Chaucer canon ofthe seemingly ubiquitous Tale ofGamelyn However, as A.C. Spearing points out, Chaucer's plans for his narrative seem to as the conclusion to the Cook's Tale. have been in a constant state offlux in all ofhis literary works.3 Because Chaucer's VA. Kolve, discussing the Cook:5 Tale in Chaucer and the Imagery of intentions remain in flux, so too must the Cook's. On the other hand, Chaucer 'rative, states, "[w]e cannot hope to finish what Chaucer left incomplete, or might have had an ending in mind but stopped because of some interrupting life to resolve the problems he had not yet solved."6 Yet we have been doing just that events such as sickness or death. There is also the proto-postmodern possibility kind of interactive solving and narrative shaping for centuries through involved, that, though it ends fragmented, it ends exactly how Chaucer wanted it to end. ergodic textual experiences first in the Tales' transmission and now in the criticism Yet these are all only imaginative conjectures with little basis in the discernable that imagines what became of Chaucer's lost tale. Beginning with the earliest evidence of the manuscripts. They are all possible, but none proves particularly examples, in the manuscripts containing the Cook :\. Tale there are at least four more likely than the other. However, this plethora of potential explanations for the tale ends fragmented fuels the new narratives that have been attached Rust, Imaginary Worlds, 9. Montfort, 1Wisry Little Passages, 37. Spearing, "Afterlife of the Canterbury Tales." See Chapter 4. VA. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery o/Narrative (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1984),257. 144 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale 145 types of scribal responses to the fragmented tale with some variation: 1) Silence. Of this Cokes tale maked Chaucer na moore (or did he?) Silence actually manifests itself in three separate ways in the manuscripts: the scribe leaves the Cook s fragment out altogether; 7 ends the tale and begins the next In spite of the variety ofextra text added to bring the tale to some form of closure, as if the Cook s Tale were complete;8 makes some marginal note that in spite ofthe the tale is often simply left in its fragmented state. In 21 manuscripts, fewer than sudden end this is all the Cooks Tale that is available, and/or leaves a significant the 25 manuscripts that include Gamelyn, the fragment simply ends, and the Man of amount of space blank (sometimes the remainder of a whole gathering) in hopes Law s Prologue begins. There have been at least four critical suggestions as to why that more tale will show Up.9 2) Movement. In BLAdditional MS 35286, the scribe the tale ends the way it does and what exactly it was that Chaucer was thinking or moves the Cook s Tale to after the Manciple s Tale in order to satisfy the Host's call what was happening in his life at the time: 11 First, he never had a chance to finish for the Cook to tell a tale in the Manciple's place. Apparently the drunken Cook the Cooks Tale before he died in 1400, just as he never finished the Canterbury doesn't sober up quite enough to finish his tale. 3) A New Tale. In 25 manuscripts Tales as a whole. Thus, there would and should have been an ending, but Chaucer ofthe Tales, scribes have added the Tale ofGamelyn. 4) Additional Text. In three of never had the chance to finish it. Second, the tale did have an ending, now lost, the manuscripts, Bodley MS 686, Regenstein MS 564 (formerly the McCormick because it was burned, lost, or censored. Third, Chaucer cancelled the Cook sTale, MS), and Rawlinson Poetry MS 141, the scribes have added to the text in its initial but the scribes did not get the message. Fourth and finally, the tale ends exactly state in order to create for it two new moralizing narratives and conclusions, either where it is supposed to end. by appending new text to the end, as in the Rawlinson and Regenstein manuscripts, Chaucer leaves other tales unfinished, such as his own pilgrim's Sir Thopas, or adding new text interlinearly, as in the Bodley manuscript. which is canonically interrupted by the Host; the Squire s Tale, which in some What is most remarkable is the relative obscurity in the critical discourse of texts is interrupted by the Franklin; and the Monk s Tale, which is interrupted by these many ways ofdealing with the fragmented tale in the early textual witnesses. the Knight in some cases; but none garners quite the range of interactive reader E.G. Stanley declares: "the lack of a formal conclusion [ ... ] inspired no scribe to responses as the Cooks Tale. These responses might be because the Cooks Tale add an ending."lo Although one cannot be completely sure what Stanley means, his simply ends and drifts into the ether without a clear catalyst for its ending rather statement seems to ignore the variety of ways that scribes did in fact end the tale, than being interrupted by another pilgrim. This uncertainty and the lack ofa built­ but, more importantly, it suggests how critics only recently have considered scribal in reason for ending is precisely why there have been so many additions and so additions worthy of serious attention. Such statements reveal why the interactivity many explanations. and mobile, textual play in the Canterbury Tales' early textual history has, on the Manly and Rickert suggest that "only sudden illness or some other whole, gone unnoticed by most modem-day critics and why theorizing the textual insurmountable interference could have prevented him from going on."12 They and narrative history ofthe Tales in terms of mobility and interaction is important base this conclusion on the famous case ofa scribe glossing the incomplete Cook s for students and scholars alike in order to better understand how Chaucer's work Tale at the bottom of folio 57v in the Hengwrt manuscript. Other similar glosses, was interactively experienced historically. perhaps all deriving from Hengwrt, can be found in Egerton 2864, Harley 7333, and Royal College of Physicians 388. Recently, Linne Mooney discovered that the scribe behind the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, the two most famous and earliest manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, was a man by the name ofAdam The following manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales lack some or all of the Cook's Pynkhurst. 13 Her evidence indicates that Chaucer knew this scribe well as early as Tale and Prologue for reasons other than the loss of leaves: Additional 25718, Bodley 414, the l380s when Chaucer wrote his complaint "To Adam Scryveyn," who Mooney Harley 7335, Holkham 667, Paris Anglais 39, and Rawlinson Poetry 149. argues is the same as Adam Pynkhurst. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that There are 21 manuscripts of this ilk; for a full list, see Manly and Rickert, Text of Chaucer, in some capacity, supervised the production of Hengwrt. Mooney argues the Canterbury Tales, 2:169. that Pynkhurst likely began the manuscript under the direction ofChaucer, but the The only two manuscripts that leave space blank, almost in anticipation ofmore tale, evidence suggests that something happened, and Pynkhurst never received all the are the two most famous manuscripts ofthe Tales: the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts. pieces of the Canterbury work that he had expected or that Chaucer had promised. Sometimes even empty space can be meaningful if we read the meaning produced by the What that something was and what pieces never reached Chaucer's scribe must bibliographic codes. 10 E.G. Stanley, "Of This Cokes Tale Maked Chaucer Na Moore," Poetica 5 (1976): 42. In another telling case, Edward Z. Menkin states that Gamelyn "is found in sixteen II Daniel Pinti only classifies the responses as either finished or unfinished. See Chaucerian manuscripts, generally following the fragmentary Cook's Tale." It is, in fact, "Governing the Cook's Tale in Bodley 686," Chaucer Review 30 (1996): 379. always following the Cook's Tale and in 25 manuscripts. See "Comic Irony and the Sense 12 Manly and Rickert, Text ofthe Canterbury Tales, 3:446. ofTwo Audiences in the Tale ofGamelyn," Thoth 10 (1969): 41-53. 13 Linne Mooney, "Chaucer's Scribe," Speculum 81 (2006): 97-138. 146 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale 147 be left to speculation. The clearest example of scribal unease with the fragmented Chaucer just put it aside, and he never returned to it. Critics such as Manly and tale occurs on and immediately after folio 57v, where the Cook:~ Tale suddenly Rickert know better than anyone else just how fragmented and troubled the texts ends and then is followed by several blank pages, which were likely left blank of the Canterbury Tales are. It is thus rather curious of them to suggest in their in hopes that more of the tale was on its way, for it would have otherwise been a conclusion that illness and/or death caused this tale to remain fragmented in spite waste ofperfectly good parchment. Below the last line ofthe Cook's fragment and of the dynamic nature of the texts ofthe Tales more generally, which is something written in significantly lighter ink, the scribe says that "of this Cokes tale maked evinced by Manly and Rickert's own work. Though Manly and Rickert stop short Chaucer na moore." The difference in ink color suggests that this comment was of painting a vivid picture, one can imagine such dramatized scenes as Chaucer added sometime later after the rest ofthe tale never reached the scribe or was never keeling over at his desk as he wrote the phrase "and swyved for hir sustenance." composed by Chaucer. Such imagined narratives for the history of the Tales' production make manifest This particular piece of evidence does not ofcourse indicate conclusively that a desire to know Chaucer intimately, inventing for our own solaas the conditions Chaucer supervised the production ofthe text. For instance, as demonstrated in the that have produced the unanswerable riddles of the Tales. Though critics are not previeus chapter, the scribe ofChrist Church 152, working well after the middle of to admit it in writing, such imaginative speculation is indicative ofa love for the fifteenth century, leaves several leaves blank following the Squire sTale Chaucer and his works and the natural desire to want to know what happened and in hopes that more ofthe tale would show up, where a later scribe would add the tales like the Cook's just stop. orthodox of the two apocryphal Plowman's tales. In another late manuscript, the Had Chaucer finished his narrative, critics such as Kolve have conjectured as scribe ofNorthumberland as discussed in Chapter 4, glosses on folio 71 rafter to the narrative path it might have followed. Kolve enters into the imaginative the last line ofthe Squire s Tale that "Chaucer made noo end of this tale." Clearly speculation and riddle-solving mentality when he asks: "What sort of narrator did Chaucer was long dead by the time that the Northumberland and Christ Church Chaucer intend the Cook to be? What sort oftale did he intend for him to tell? What scribes produced their texts. Regardless of Chaucer's role in the production of formal and ethical relationship might such an intention bear to the Man ofLaw s the Hengwrt, the scribe thought there was more of the Cooks Tale to come, later Tale, which followsT16 Exploring these questions in his narrative answer for the learned that there was not, and then backed up and wrote the explanation at the Cooks Tale, Kolve envisions the narrative he feels Chaucer meant to write. Based bottom ofthe page. The same scribe, Pynkhurst, left space blank after the Cook~' on Chaucer's initial input, in what Kolve describes as the moral language the tale Tale and Squire:~ Tale in the Ellesmere manuscript, which was likely produced takes in the description of the master victualer, the sententious precedent set by after the Hengwrt. No similar note mentioning whether or not Chaucer had more other texts in Chaucer's oeuvre, and contemporary visual images ofthe Cook and ofeither tale follows the fragmented tales in the Ellesmere. cooks, Kolve argues that the tale likely had, or was supposed to have, a moral Manly and Rickert come to the conclusion that something catastrophic must conclusion in spite of the Cook's promise of a "jape" (1. 4343). He, nevertheless, have happened in Chaucer's life to prevent him from finishing based on the also holds out the possibility that Chaucer intended a fabliau ending-an alternate textual case cited above and the idea that somehow Chaucer could never leave narrative. Because Kolve recognizes two very divergent paths that the tale his text incomplete intentionally since he was "too thoroughly master of his own take, he seems to be envisioning mUltiple potential narratives stemming story-material to stop."14 Perhaps, part of Chaucer's genius was to be a master Chaucer's initial, fragmentary input. What is more, whether moral, baWdY, or of his own story material, as Manly and Rickert argue, and to present an open, something else, the potential narrative trajectories are indeterminate, open, and unfinished work in spite of his complete control of his narrative. Manly and configurable. Like Jorge Luis Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths," a proto­ Rickert's conclusion demonstrates that the explanations for and meaning-making hypertext of sorts, Kolve's metanarrative imagines a critical field of potential interactions with Chaucer's incomplete text hinge on imagined narratives. Some fnrlrincr ",!>the l""rlina to radically different possible endings. of these narratives are fictional narratives in the world of the Canterbury Tales with new traversals that complete the tale, relocate the tale, or expand the frame been used by most postmodem theorists. I am taking the individual morphemic parts at narrative; others are narratives of explanation or metanarratives used to describe face value. "Meta" means "beyond" or "after." Thus, my use of the term metanarrative is the conditions that would have produced what critics assume is an un-Chaucerian meant to connote the narrative behind the narrative-the narrative that contextualizes thc conclusion. 15 Perhaps the abrupt ending was because ofillness or death, or perhaps creation and production of another narrative. Rather than totalizing ideologies or systemic explanations for all narratives, the metanarratives created by critics are localized to and rooted in long-held beliefs about the way Chaucer's works wcre produced. It is akin to the 14 and Rickert, Text postmodem term in this case because the metanarratives explaining the fragmented Cook s 15 "Metananative" is a loaded term. See Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Tale often hinge on preconceived ideas of Chaucer's genius and complete control over his Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi "story-material. " (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). I am using it here slightly differently than it has 16 Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery o/Narrative, 257-8. 146 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale 147 be left to speculation. The clearest example of scribal unease with the fragmented Chaucer just put it aside, and he never returned to it. Critics such as Manly and tale occurs on and immediately after folio 57v, where the Cook's Tale suddenly Rickert know better than anyone else just how fragmented and troubled the texts ends and then is followed by several blank pages, which were likely left blank of the Canterbury Tales are. It is thus rather curious of them to suggest in their in hopes that more of the tale was on its way, for it would have otherwise been a conclusion that illness and/or death caused this tale to remain fragmented in spite waste ofperfectly good parchment. Below the last line of the Cook's fragment and ofthe dynamic nature ofthe texts ofthe Tales more generally, which is something written in significantly lighter ink, the scribe says that "of this Cokes tale maked evinced by Manly and Rickert's own work. Though Manly and Rickert stop short Chaucer na moore." The difference in ink color suggests that this comment was of painting a vivid picture, one can imagine such dramatized scenes as Chaucer added sometime later after the rest ofthe tale never reached the scribe or was never keeling over at his desk as he wrote the phrase "and swyved for hir sustenance." composed by Chaucer. Such imagined narratives for the history of the Tales' production make manifest This particular piece of evidence does not of course indicate conclusively that a desire to know Chaucer intimately, inventing for our own solaas the conditions Chaucer supervised the production of the text. For instance, as demonstrated in the that have produced the unanswerable riddles of the Tales. Though critics are not previt')us chapter, the scribe ofChrist Church 152, working well after the middle of likely to admit it in writing, such imaginative speculation is indicative ofa love for the fifteenth century, leaves several leaves blank following the Squire's Tale likely Chaucer and his works and the natural desire to want to know what happened and in hopes that more of the tale would show up, where a later scribe would add the why tales like the Cook's just stop. orthodox of the two apocryphal Plowman's tales. In another late manuscript, the Had Chaucer finished his narrative, critics such as Kolve have conjectured as scribe ofNorthumberland 455, as discussed in Chapter 4, glosses on folio 71r after to the narrative path it might have followed. Kolve enters into the imaginative the last line of the Squire's Tale that "Chaucer made noo end of this tale." Clearly speculation and riddle-solving mentality when he asks: "What sort of narrator did Chaucer was long dead by the time that the Northumberland and Christ Church Chaucer intend the Cook to be? What sort oftale did he intend for him to tell? What scribes produced their texts. Regardless of Chaucer's role in the production of formal and ethical relationship might such an intention bear to the Man ofLaw's the Hengwrt, the scribe thought there was more of the Cook's Tale to come, later Tale, which follows?"16 Exploring these questions in his narrative answer for the learned that there was not, and then backed up and wrote the explanation at the Cook's Tale, Kolve envisions the narrative he feels Chaucer meant to write. Based bottom of the page. The same scribe, Pynkhurst, left space blank after the Cook's on Chaucer's initial input, in what Kolve describes as the moral language the tale Tale and Squire's Tale in the Ellesmere manuscript, which was likely produced takes in the description of the master victualer, the sententious precedent set by after the Hengwrt. No similar note mentioning whether or not Chaucer had more other texts in Chaucer's oeuvre, and contemporary visual images of the Cook and of either tale follows the fragmented tales in the Ellesmere. cooks, Kolve argues that the tale likely had, or was supposed to have, a moral Manly and Rickert come to the conclusion that something catastrophic must conclusion in spite of the Cook's promise of a "jape" (I. 4343). He, nevertheless, have happened in Chaucer's life to prevent him from finishing based on the also holds out the possibility that Chaucer intended a fabliau ending-an alternate textual case cited above and the idea that somehow Chaucer could never leave narrative. Because Kolve recognizes two very divergent paths that the tale might his text incomplete intentionally since he was "too thoroughly master of his own take, he seems to be envisioning multiple potential narratives stemming from story-material to stop."14 Perhaps, part of Chaucer's genius was to be a master Chaucer's initial, fragmentary input. What is more, whether moral, bawdy, or of his own story material, as Manly and Rickert argue, and to present an open, something else, the potential narrative trajectories are indeterminate, open, and unfinished work in spite of his complete control of his narrative. Manly and configurable. Like Jorge Luis Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths," a proto­ Rickert's conclusion demonstrates that the explanations for and meaning-making hypertext of sorts, Kolve's metanarrative imagines a critical field of potential interactions with Chaucer's incomplete text hinge on imagined narratives. Some forking paths, leading to radically different possible endings. of these narratives are fictional narratives in the world of the Canterbury Tales with new traversals that complete the tale, relocate the tale, or expand the frame been used by most postmodern theorists. I am taking the individual morphemic parts at narrative; others are narratives of explanation or metanarratives used to describe face value. "Meta" means "beyond" or "after." Thus, my use of the term metanarrative is the conditions that would have produced what critics assume is an un-Chaucerian meant to connote the narrative behind the narrative-the narrative that contextualizes the conclusion. 15 Perhaps the abrupt ending was because ofillness or death, or perhaps creation and production of another narrative. Rather than totalizing ideologies or systemic explanations for all narratives, the metanarratives created by critics are localized to and rooted in long-held beliefs about the way Chaucer's works were produced. It is akin to the 14 Manly and Rickert, Text ofthe Canterbury Tales, 446. postmodern term in this case because the metanarratives explaining the fragmented Cook:S 15 "Metanarrative" is a loaded term. See Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Tale often hinge on preconceived ideas of Chaucer's genius and complete control over his Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi "story-materia!." (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). I am using it here slightly differently than it has 16 Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery ofNarrative, 257-8. 148 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale 149

if the tale did continue as a fabliau in the same vein as the Miller and the common narrative pattern ofthe love triangle and imagines it as the end ofthe Reeve's Tales, rone can imagine a metanarrative explaining how the Cook's Tale Cook's Tale. Certainly, this ending is possible. However, what is most remarkable was censored. This raises a second possible explanation argued by critics, which is about it is less what it says about the Cook's Tale and Chaucer and more what perhaps the mos;;t romantic; some argue that Chaucer did indeed complete the tale it says about Howard's expectations of Chaucer and his narrative and a human but that the dOClUment with the ending was somehow lost, censored, or destroyed desire to solve riddles imaginatively and speculatively. Howard wants a love­ before it reached the earliest scribes. 17 One might insert a rather salacious plot triangle plot. He invents it. It is meaningful in part because it directs and shapes here-akin to Slhakespeare's backstory in the film Shakespeare in Love. In another the development of the underdeveloped narrative; yet it is also meaningful in critical speculattion, Donald Howard begins his discussion of the Cook's Tale in what it says about what such gaps in works do to spur our imagination. The new the 1976 book Tfhe Idea ofthe Canterbury Tales with a riddle-like question, and narrative traversal, complete with prostitution, adultery, and a love triangle set then fully imme:rses himself in the imaginative speculation and invention that the in the seedy London scene is ready-made for the silver screen and a twentieth­ Cook's Tale prOlmpts: and twenty-first-century audience because it was created by a twentieth-century interactor for Chaucer's incomplete fourteenth-century narrative. The point is not it was mot finished, even ifit was not finished, who can say? Possibly it was to accuse Howard ofany wrongdoing. One really cannot chide the critic for doing finished but too scurrilous to be transcribed, and so went underground. Possibly the same thing readers have been doing for centuries, perhaps something that the Chaucer or :someone else suppressed it, ripped it out of an early copy leaving l8 incomplete work demands ofthe writerly reader. only what wras on the same folio with the ending of the Reeve's Tale. Susan Yager argues that Howard's theory for the Tales, as expressed in The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, is something akin to the contemporary theory of After imagining these circumstances, Howard, recognizing the potential narrative hypertext, but Howard did not have the language to put it in such tenns.20 Yager of the tale and rthe metanarrative of its censorship, creates his own narrative for summarizes the features ofHoward's reading of the Tales as a proto-hypertext: the incomplete ttale: Howard's concept of the Canterbury Tales as fluid and dynamic also entails its From the fiifty-seven lines we have of it we can recognize the beginning of a nonlinearity or multilinearity. Howard wishes to dissociate himself from critics plot quite lilke that of the three previous tales. There is an eligible female, the who "tie analysis to ... the 'linear' experience ofreading" (16), yet elsewhere he "wife" mentlioned in lines 4421-4422; about her we learn the startling detail-it refers to the "linear sequence" of the Tales, emphasizing the always-unfolding is the last p.hrase in the fragment-that she kept a shop and "swyved for her "now" ofthe storytelling that readers experience (80). In distinguishing "'linear' sustenance.'" There are perhaps to be, for the hand of this "swyving" lady, experience" from "linear sequence," Howard maintains a distinction between an two rivals: Perkyn Revelour, the sacked apprentice, and his "compeer" who abstract concept of the Canterbury Tales and a reader's particular knowledge it happens ils the lady's husband. It stands to reason that the older man in the of it. The open-ended relations that Howard finds among the Tales' themes and picture miglht be the master vitailler described at the beginning, for the Cook stories, and between the "inner" tales and "outer" framework, are central to both had professed that he will tell a tale about a hosteler (4360). More than that we abstract idea and specific but he does not refer specifically to links do not knowr.19 or linkage. Instead, to describe inter- and intra-textual connections, Howard repeatedly speaks oftexts that "hover" or "float" near others, for examnle when In fact, we know much less than Howard has narrated. Most of what he describes he uses Robinson's term to describe Fragment VI. 21 above about thte wyf and the love-triangle plot is Howard's own interactively produced Cante;rbury narrative. He produces a Cook's Tale with a unique traversal, very much like the scribes who continued Chaucer's fragmented tales and work through the addlitions of apocryphal material via textual transmission. He takes 20 One of the foremost proponents of the language and theory of hypertext is George Landow whose book Hypertext has undergone multiple revisions since its initial publication John dismisses the conclusion that it was censored for its bawdiness. in the late 1980s. See the most recent revision: Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New suggesting that tbe two preceding tales in Fragment I are quite bawdy themselves, and Media in an Era of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006). In spite of the Chaucer does warn his readers to "tume over the leef, and chese another tale" before the importance of the book, there are numerous aspects of new media textuality that Landow Miller sTale, whi\ch might apply to all the tales after this point in Fragment L "The Cook's omits from his study since it is singularly concerned with hypertext, which I argue is a Tale," in Sources ,and Analogues ofthe Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary and in fact, perhaps, passe term that is too narrow for all the textual and interactive Hamel (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006),1:76. forms of electronic text. 18 Howard, idea ofthe Canterbury Tales, 244. 21 Susan Yager, "Howard's Idea and the Idea ofHvoertext." Medieval Forum 6 19 Ibid., 244-5. http://www.sfsu.edul-medievaWolume6/yager.html. ISO Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale 151

Yager's comparison is useful, and her argument is quite convincing. Since the earliest manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales were produced later in Howard's theory and hypertext theory fall short of fully exploring the potent; Chaucer's lifetime or after he was dead, one cannot be certain that Chaucer was "multi linearity" in the Canterbury Tales. Moreover, hypertext theory fails to alive when the manuscripts were produced even with the new evidence discovered flesh out the user-produced narrative Howard himself creates in his (re)creation about Chaucer's scribe Adam Pynkhurst. Even if Chaucer was alive. how of the Cook:I' Tale, Hypertext is predicated on a series of choices made by the he supervised a text like the Hengwrt is not yet known. creator rather than the user. There are many conceptual and textual paths one can In his eighteenth-century edition ofChaucer, Thomas Tyrwhitt explains: take within the rhyzomatic structure of links, but usually it is the creator of the hypertext alone who decides where the links go and what gets a link. To put it in The COKES TALE is imperfect in all the Mss. which I have had an opportunity Aarseth's terms, which I describe in the first chapter, the author alone determines of examining. In Ms. A. [Harley 7335] it seems to have been entirely omitted; the number oftextons and the connections possible to create a limited number of and indeed I cannot help suspecting, that it was intended to be omitted, at least scriptons. Therefore, hypertext is too limiting a term to express all the potential in this place, as in the ManCiple sPrologue, when the Coke is called upon to tell forms of "involved" reading and interactivity exemplified by the addition and a tale, there is no intimation of his having told one before. Perhaps our author might think, that three tales of harlotrie, as he calls it, together would be too continuation of the Tales' narratives and the multifarious reconfigurations of the much. However, as it is superficially certain, that the Cokes Prologue and the Canterbury Tales order of the pieces of Chaucer's work. Most importantly, the beginning of his Tale are genuine compositions, they have their usual place in is not a hypertext because Chaucer did not and could not pre-program the work this Edition.23 with a finite number of combinatory interactions. Rather, the work consists of unfinished, potential narrative, which has a history of being open and configurable Tyrwhitt, like the twentieth-century critics who would follow hIm, ImagIneS a beyond the scope of Chaucer's designs. What is more, hypertext theory tends metanarrative in which Chaucer censored his own work and canceled the tale, to limit itself to an electronic medium, thus posing difficulty in mediating the feeling he had perhaps exceeded his fabIiau limit with the Miller :v Tale and Reeve's historical distance between the Tales and contemporary hypertexts. Moreover, Tale. Other than the narrative evidence of the Manciple's Prologue, some critics Howard's immersion into and appropriation of the Cook's potential narrative is suggest that the tale was canceled because (and this demonstrates a common the very form of involved, ergodic reading that I suggest breaks the hypertext desire to find perfection in everything Chaucer did), as M.C. Seymour states quite mold. Further, unlike the other examples ofcontinuations and additions discussed definitively, "Chaucer left no work uncompleted."24 hitherto that are historically traceable to active reading experiences in past textual Seymour's statement could of course mean something else. That is, finally, 'ansmission, the interaction with the potential narrative of the Cook seems to be as some argue, that the tale ends exactly the way Chaucer wanted it to end-in ongoing in criticism through the production ofnew narratives for the Cook and new ambiguity and without closure. It is complete the way it is. Thus, according to metanarratives for the textual condition ofthe tale. The argument for the censored, the proponents of this theory, even something that is superficially as lacking and lost pages that Howard forms from the potential narrative is pure speculation-a as the Cook's fragmented tale has behind it Father Chaucer's romantic invention ofthe long-lost Chaucer text akin to the lost Aristotelian treatise Such a conclusion presents the to believe that Chaucer was and remains on comedy in Umberto Eco's The Name ofthe Rose. Arguments that fill in gaps the master puppeteer pulling the strings and always in control. Stanley states that by imagining lost or destroyed documents that are not alluded to or referred to in the reason the tale ends where it does is because "there is no more for the [Cook] any other extant documents point primarily to our human desire to solve mysteries to say on that subject."25 Moreover, according to Ji-Soo Kang, "The Cook:~ Tale and imaginatively interact with the cultural objects we love and love to figure out. [ ... ] is fragmentary, yet it provides the reader with a curious sense of conceptual Not unlike the censorship argument, the third argument is that Chaucer conclusiveness to Fragment I, a feeling of finality, precisely because of its formal actually canceled the Cook's Tale, yet it somehow made its way into the collection incompleteness."26 Such arguments evince a desire to believe Chaucer did not nevertheless. William Woods argues that Chaucer cancelled the Tale because of the contemporary political dispute between Nicholas Brembre and John of Northhampton, in which various guilds turned against the guild of victualers.22 23 Thomas Tyrwhitt, ed., The Canterbury Tales o/Chaucer (London, 1775), clxxxiii. However, the tale is too underdeveloped to suggest a conclusive connection. Quoted in Stanley, "OfThis Cokes Tale Maked Chaucher," 44. Neither Tyrwhitt nor Stanley Generally speaking, the possibility exists that the scribe ofthe earliest manuscr mention the fact that many folia and whole gatherings have been lost or were omitted from included the Cook's Tale even though Chaucer decided to abandon or cancel it. 7335, which has resulted in the loss ofmany tales and not the Cook:~ Tale alone. 24 M.C. Seymour, "OfThis Cokes Tale," Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 259. 25 Stanley, "OfThis Cokes Tale Maked Chaucer," 59. 22 William F. Woods, "Society and Nature in the Cook's Tale," Papers on Language 26 Ji-Soo Kang, "The (In)Completeness ofthe Cook's Tale," Medieval Enfllish Studies and Literature 32 (1996): 189-206. 5 (1997): 157. 152 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Talc 153 leave his reader hanging and rest on the comfortable notion that Chaucer intended Cook announces that "Peter" (Ackroyd's translation of Perkyn) has gone to live the singular, canonical text that editors have reconstructed for readers today. These with his friend and his wife the prostitute, the Prioress exclaims: gaps and fissures are not unintended but evidence of Chaucer creating elaborate and closed meanings with ingenious endings. In these views, he is a prototypically "Please, no more." postmodem author. "That's enough," Bailey said. "I don't mind dirty stories. But I draw the line at whores. Whatever are you thinking of, man? There are nuns among us." Jim Casey has perhaps the most prudent response to the question of what Roger was a little abashed. "I didn't mean to offend-" was intended for the Cook s Tale. He concludes his essay "Unfinished Business: "Well, you have offended. Sit on your saddle and stay silent. Someone else will The Termination of the Cook sTale" by stating, "ultimately, we may never know have to tell a what Chaucer had in mind for the CookS Tale. Without new textual evidence, all speculation is suspect, and the commentary must remain, like many of Chaucer's Of course Harry Bailey's objection to whores seems a little arbitrary given the stories, open."27 Openness, then, is the only thing certain and definitive] Miller and Reeve's tales before this. Moreover, the fact that Ackroyd invents this Chaucerian about the Cook:~ Tale as it exists canonically. Perhaps Chaucer ended ending reinforces the notion that the tale ends as a riddle, still demanding writerly it the way he did precisely in order to encourage interaction with the open text. readers like Ackroyd to answer that riddle with playful new additions. Of course, Could it be that Chaucer crafted the work in order to demand us to enter into and such moves have not been particularly well received by some modem readers who imaginatively interact with the narrative and textual world according to Rust's see such additions as corruptions of Chaucer's authorial intentions. A particularly model? Perhaps, with the potential narrative in place, Chaucer programmed his text scathing review in the Spectator states, "this drawn-out version sounds like a to be interactive, demanding non-trivial effort and reactive inputs from "involved new curate trying out prot"imities to ingratiate himself with the local low-life. The readers" either manifesting in the imagination of readers or on the pages of new mystery of this book is why an accomplished writer like Peter Ackroyd should copies of the Tales. Nevertheless, this is perhaps just as much an imaginative have attempted such an approach in the first place."30 Of course this is the tension metanarrative as the rest of the explanations summarized here; the only certain inherent in all the additions to and interactions with Chaucer's Tales. There is thing is not what Chaucer intended but what readers did and continue to do in the a long tradition of interacting with and adding to the Tales, yet such playful narrative space where the rest ofthe tale ought to be. interactivity is often received, rather, as corruption. It continues to be produced What is perhaps most remarkable is how readers continue to do things in and continues to be marginalized. the narrative space where an ending should be. Peter Ackroyd's retelling of the Canterbury Tales, published by Penguin in 2009, adds to the narrative in order to reinforce the interpretation that Chaucer wanted the tale to end where it does; this Movable Texts: New Meanings in New Contexts version does so by adding an interruption by the Prioress. Ackroyd's retelling of the Tales, as a whole, is unique in that it includes lengthy additions to Chaucer's One of the more elaborate responses to Chaucer's silence manifests itself in the description, almost as if to function as a sort of explanatory footnote built into relocation of the tale after the Manciple s Tale in BL Additional MS 35286. Manly the main narrative. For instance, instead of simply translating Chaucer's portrait and Rickert suggest that this rearrangement is the unintentional work ofa scribe who of the Physician in the General Prologue in which Chaucer praises the doctor for accidentally shuffled the unbound gatherings ofhis exemplar within which the Cook s being grounded in astronomy, Ackroyd adds a rather detailed section that imagines Tale and Prologue were the first items. However, this relocation may have been a Chaucer the narrator explaining medical astrology and dropping a bawdy joke conscious decision on the part ofthe scribe to reconcile the references to the Cook in about the genitals lying in Scorpio.28 The point is, where there might be a footnote the prologue to the Manciple:~ Tale with the Cook's abruptly ended tale much earlier about medical astronomy in a more academic text, Ackroyd has invented a in the frame narrative. Tn many ways, the reintroduction ofthe Cook in the Manciple:s Chaucer narrator willing to explain his fourteenth-century ways to his twenty-first­ r'Y'f'''J(TUP seems to point towards the possibility that Chaucer intended to retract the century audience. Ackroyd's appropriative acts ofexplication through descriptive earlier fragmented CooksTale from Fragment I, leaving the Cook unmentioned until amplification manifest particularly clearly at the end of the Cook s Tale. After the he shows up much later in the Tales incapable of telling a tale at the Host's bidding. The Cook, quite drunk in the Manciple sPrologue, becomes the butt of a series of jokes played by both the Manciple and the Host. The Host notices the listless Cook and implores him to tell a tale. The Host teasingly asks, 27 Jim "Unfinished Business: The Termination of Chaucer's Cook's Tale," Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 191. See Casey also for a thorough account of the variety of speculative responses to the Cook's Tale. 29 Ibid., 114. 28 Ackroyd, Canterbury Tales: A Retelling, 14. 30 Byron Rogers, "Instead of the Poem," Spectator 310, May 16, 2009, 38. 154 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale 155

Is that a cook of 10ndoun, with meschaunce? ridiculed publicly for his drunkenness. Moreover, if one imagines the Cook as Do hym come forth, he knoweth his penaunce; upset about the teasing that went on before the previous tale, this might very well For he shal telle a tale, by my fey, explain his desire to requite the Host and the Manciple when, in his own prologue, Although it be nat worth a botel hey. Awake, thou cook, quod he, God yeve thee sorwel he promises, What eyleth thee to slepe by the morwe? And therfore, herry bailly, by thy feith, Hastow had fleen al nyght, or artow dronke? Be thou nat wrooth, er we departen heer, Or hastow with som quene al nyght yswonke, Though that my tale be of an hostileer. So that thow mayst nat holden up thyn heed? (IX. 11-19) But nathelees I wol nat telle it yit; But er we parte, ywis, thou shalt be quit. (4358-{)2) The Host knows very well that the Cook, who "was ful pale and no thyng reed," cannot very well tell a tale because ofhis condition but continues to "joke and play" Instead of telling of a "hostileer," the Cook begins to tell a tale of an apprentice with the drunk Cook for his "penaunce" (Ix. 4, 12). Meanwhile, the Manciple victualer, which is a related profession. Similarly, a victualer, a seller offoods, might joins the fun and keeps feeding the Cook wine to show that, in spite of his drunken deal closely with a manciple, a purchaser of foods, and someone like the Cook, a stupor, the Cook cannot stop drinking, demonstrating his uncontrollable gluttony. preparer offoods.31 Perhaps, then, the Cook intends to requite both the Host and the Thus, with the Cook too drunk to speak, the Manciple tells a tale in the Cook's Manciple in the same tale. However, the reader is left with a rather underdeveloped place, and we never hear from the Cook again in the canonical text. However, in attempt on the Cook's part. The sudden ending, if one imagines the drunken Cook Additional 35286, after the Manciple s Tale of Phoebus the Crow ends, the Cook of the Manciple s Prologue, makes sense. There is no more tale to tell because he speaks as Chaucer the narrator tells us: is too drunk to go on. Just as he is too feeble and listless to respond to the jokes of The cook oflondoun, whil the reve spak, the Host and Manciple in the prologue to the Manciple s Tale, the Cook is too drunk For joye him thoughte he clawed him on the bak. to fully participate in the storytelling game with a full narrative and a clear requital. Hal hal quod he, for cristes passion, He leaves us with potential narrative instead. The scribe of this manuscript does not This millere hadde a sharp conclusion add new text to supplement the incomplete text as other redactors did in their joining Upon his argument ofherbergagel in the creation and transmission of the Tales. Instead, he rearranges the pieces of Wei seyde salomon in his langage, the textual puzzle to create a new set of dynamics between tales, prologues, and -Ne bryng nat every man into thyn hous;­ pilgrims. The incompleteness of the Cooks Tale and the adversarial position of the For herberwynge by nyghte is perilous. (1. 4325-32) Cook take on new meanings within a new context. These lines only make sense in the context of Fragment I of the Tales because the Cook makes a direct reference to the two tales that canonically precede the Gamelyn and its Context Cook's-the Reeve s Tale and the Miller s Tale. Such evidence might indicate that the Additional 35286 scribe simply accidentally inserted the CookS Tale after the The Tale ofGamelyn is by far the most substantial response to the sudden ending Manciple s Tale because some of the gatherings had fallen out of order in the of the Cooks Tale. Found in 25 medieval manuscripts,32 primarily in what Manly exemplar. However, one must note that the prologue to the Cooks Tale begins on the same page that the Manciple s Tale ends so one cannot blame the new ordering on misarranged leaves in the Additional codex though the exemplar could 31 See R.M. Lumiansky, "Chaucer's Cook-Host Relationship," Medieval Studies 17 (1955): 208-9. plausibly be quite another case. Nevertheless, I argue that this newly arranged 32 The 25 manuscripts that include Gamelyn are: Harley 7334, Christ Church 152, version of the Tales might just mark this particular scribe's effort to explain the Laud 600, Royal 17.D.xv, Takamiya MS 8 (formerly Delamere), Trinity College Oxford unexpected ending to the Cook s Tale by putting it in a very different textual Arch. 49, Corpus Christi 198, Lansdowne 851, Sloane 1686, Egerton 2863, Harley and narrative context in a clearly inebriated voice. In this new context, after the 1758, Lichfield 2, Morgan 249, Cambridge Mm.2.5, Glasgow Hunterian U.I.I, Petworth, audience has heard that the Cook is utterly intoxicated, perhaps this seemingly out Rosenbach \08411 (formerly Phillips 8137), Royal 18.c.ii, Laud 739, Sloane 1685, Barlow ofcontext speech to the Reeve and Miller can be imagined as the byproduct ofhis 20, Fitzwilliam McLean 181, Hatton Donat 1, Rawlinson C.86, and Cambridge l.i.3. One drunkenness. In this variant of the Tales, the references to the Miller and Reeve at seventeenth-century manuscript in the hand of the antiquarian Elias Ashmole (Ashmole the very beginning of the prologue are perfectly acceptable if we imagine a barely 45) exists. In this manuscript, Gamelyn is the conclusion to the Cook's Tale; however, the conscious, stumbling, and very confused Cook speaking up after he has just been Cook's Tale, including Gamelyn, is the only part ofthe Tales copied in the manuscript. Other than a standard explicit, "here begynneth ye Cokes tale, Gamelyn," the manuscript does not 156 the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale 157 and Rickert describe as the "c" and "d" groups of manuscripts, Gamelyn is the most In one of the most interactive-laden manuscripts ofthe Tales, the same manuscript prolific apocryphal Canterbury Tale in the extant manuscripts of the Tales. In the that has an image of Chaucer in an historiated initial handing his book off to his texts of the Tales, it is always placed in the voice of the Cook ifit is assigned to a absent reader with his pen, this scribe has imagined the Cook (or Chaucer) as pilgrim at all and always follows the Cook's Prologue and the fragmented tale of suddenly becoming disgusted with the trajectory of his tale. He has censored Perkyn. Moreover, it only survives in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and is the himself. In this strange link, the Cook, the narrator of the tale and apparent most popular example of a Middle English metrical romance by measure of extant controller of its traversal, seems to be reading his own text and only takes control manuscripts. Tn those 25 texts, the tale is generally either joined to the incomplete when he has become too upset by the "schame of the harlotrie that seweth after" Cook's Tale by a two-line link or simply begun without a link, generally with a in the potential narrative of the tale. It is almost as if the narrative was simply standard incipit, after the line "A shoppe, and swyved for hir sustenance." In one unfolding without his control from his mouth, and now, somehow, he has decided case, BL Harley 7334, the tale actually ends several lines early with "Now lat hym to grab hold of the reins and redirect the narrative away from the seedy scene in riote al the nyght or leve," which is then followed by a scribal note that Gamelyn London to the bucolic setting of Gamelyn. The Cook has changed the narrative commences after this. This could be a sign of revision, censorship, or some other road he is on; however, it is not really the Cook's voice that dominates the link. textual act we may never fully recover. The usual link, which is fairly regular in would he suddenly be repulsed by the story he initiates? Rather, this link the 16 manuscripts that have the standard link to Gamelyn, reads: "bot here of I wil presents a profusion of voices, including those of Chaucer the author, Chaucer passe as nowe / and ofyoung Gamelyne I will telle you.''3l The link suggests several the narrator, the Cook, and the interactive reader responsible for the link. Out potential meanings for the Cook's abrupt conclusion. With the words "passe as now," of all those voices, the one that rises to the surface is that of the individual who the Cook might intend to take up the tale of Perkyn at a later time just as the Squire composed the link. He (for he is very likely a male scribe) is the one who "will in the spurious link in Lansdowne MS 851 says "bot I wi! here nowe maake a knotte nowe tell no forthere." He is the one who senses the narrative potential of the tale, / To the time it come next to my lotte" (11-12). But what would prompt the Cook to interacts with it in such a way as to express his opinion of "sentence" and "solaas," "maake a knotte?" The Squire seems to end his tale because it has already gone on and reconciles the sudden ending ofthe Cook's Tale ofPerkyn with the Cook's Tale much too long, but the Cook has just begun. Perhaps, the Cook who speaks in the of Gamelyn. standard two-line Jink recognizes that the tale's path is headed in a seamy direction, A third link was once found in a manuscript that is now lost, which belonged senses displeasure in his audience, and so decides to take his narrative down a new to Sir John Selden in the seventeenth century. According to a reference in the 1653 road and tell a new tale and not "a liteljape that fil in oure cite" (T. 4343); at least that book De Synedriis & Praefecturis luridicis Veterum Ebrceorum by Selden, the link is what the scribes or active readers might have imagined, recognizing the potential after the Cook's incomplete tale reads: narrative of the seedy, urban Cook's Tale. In a unique link found in the Lansdowne text, this narrative desire to change course is evinced even more clearly when the [...] A Shop and swived for her sustenance And there withal he laugh and made chear Cook breaks off and suddenly declares, And said his tale as ye shullen after here therone, it is so foule! I wil nowe tell no forthere Here be!!inneth the Cokes tale of Gamelin [. For schame ofthe harlotrie that seweth after. A vel any it were thareof more to After the canonical line ending "swived for her sustenance," Selden states "statim Bot of a knighte and his sonnes, my tale I wil forthe tell. scripsit Chaucerus," or "Chaucer immediately wrote" the lines that follow in the above quote. Statim strongly suggests that there was no apparent division, scribal or otherwise, between the one line and the next. There is no incipit, explicit, or record any link between the Cook's first narrative of Perkyn Revelour and the second of Gamelyn. See A.S.G. Edwards, "A New Text of The Canterbury Tales?" in Studies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Renaissance Texts in Honour ofJohn Scmtergood: The Key of 35 John Selden, De synedriis & praefecturis iuridicis veterum Ebraeorllm tiber All Good Remembrance, ed. Anne Marie D'Arcy and Alan 1. Fletcher (Dublin: Four Courts secundlls (London: printed by Jacobi Flesheri, 1653),590; my emphasis on original material Press, 2005), 21-8. in the Selden text. A book on Hebrew law is an odd place to discuss a Middle English 33 These manuscripts include: Egerton 2863, Harley 1758, Lichfield 2, Morgan 249, poem. However, Gamelyn has interested scholars for its connections to legal practice, and Cambridge Mm.2.5, Glasgow Hunterian U.l.!, Petworth, Rosenbach 1084/1 (formerly Selden specifically refers to it here for its preservation ofAnglo-Saxon legal language. For Phillips 8137), RoyaI18.c.ii, Laud 739, Sloane 1685, Barlow 20, Fitzwilliam McLean 181, instance, see Edgar Shannon, "Medieval Law in the Tale ofGamelyn," Speculum 26 Hatton Donat 1, Rawlinson C.86, and Cambridge 1.i.3. 458-

36 Richard Beadle, m 1 wol nat telle it yit': John Selden and a Lost Version of the 39 For more on the outlaw genre of narratives, see Maurice Keen, The Outlaws Cook sTale," in Chaucer to Shakespeare: in Honour ofShinsuke Ando, ed. Toshiyuki of Medieval (London: Routledge, 1961) and Joost de Lange, The Relation and Takamiya and Richard Beadle (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, Development ofEnglish and Icelandic Outlaw Traditions (Haarlem: WiIlink, 1935). 3? Ibid. 40 All quotes from Gamelyn have been taken from The Tale of Gamelyn, in Robin 38 Beadle states: "The Cook, having brushed briefly with the Host in the spirit of Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, cd. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, this established enmity between their trades, then develops his prologue in the form of an MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). Knight and Ohlgren base their edition on the elaborate feint at launching a tale set in the London victualling trade, where the interests of text in Oxford, Corpus Christi MS 198. However, there have been some critics who have the cooks and the hostelers notoriouslv overlapped." Ibid., 64. argued for the superiority ofBL Harley MS 7334 over the Corpus MS. For a summary of 160 the Canterbury Tales ".wprinv the Riddle Cook's Tale 161

The story of the father dividing his land amongst his children is a familiar brother to "com a litel nere, / And I wil teche thee a play at the bokelere" (135-6). element, most famously used in Shakespeare's Lear. As in Lear, the division His brother does not fight Gamelyn and instead fools Gamelyn into thinking that of the estate does not exactly go smoothly. The "wise knyghtes" do not follow he will finally give Gamelyn all that their father bequeathed to him. Sir John's dying wishes and only divide the land between the two older sons. After this episode, the narrator from the main plot to tell the story of However, Sir John has not died when they make this decision. Angered by Gamelyn's success against a number ofopponents including a renowned champion the knights' decision to divide his land against his wishes, he divides his estate at a wrestling match, which again fits within the ubiquitous game theme of the himself declaring: Tales. When he returns from the match, the brother has Gamelyn locked out, but Gamelyn has already proven his physical prowess in the two previous episodes. [...] Be Seint Martyne, He breaks in and takes control of his brother's estate. After some feasting, the For al that yc han done yit is the londe myne; brother's beguiling leads to Gamelyn being tied for quite awhile to a post in the For Goddis love, neighbours stondeth alle stille, middle hall without food or drink. His brother decides to hold a feast and invite And I wil delen my londe after myn owne wille. John, myne eldest sone shal have plowes various members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and other local officials, who all That was my faders heritage whan he was alyve; believe the terrible and false stories the brother tells about Gamelyn. The clerics And my myddelest sone fyve plowes of londe, and officials say to him such things as "it is grete sorwe and care boy that thou art That I halpe forto gete with my right honde; alyve" (484). Gamelyn and a servant named Adam plan to facilitate Gamelyn's And al myn other purchace of londes and ledes escape and ambush the feast. At the right moment, Adam cuts Gamelyn free, and That I biquethe Gamelyne and aile my good stedes. they proceed to beat up those at the party and shackle the evil brother. Gamelyn, And I bisechc you, good men that lawe conne of londe, at this point disgraced in the eyes of the clerics and officials, becomes an outlaw. For Gamelynes love that my quest stonde. (53-M) Adam and Gamelyn decide to live in the woods, and once news of Gamelyn's exploits becomes known amongst the woodland outlaws, they make Gamelyn their However, Sir John soon dies, and "the elder brother giled the yonge knave," "maister outlawe and crowned her kinge" (690). Eventually though, after being stealing young Gamelyn's inheritance and making him his servant. Some time hunted by the law and winning at trial with the help of his other, more benevolent passes, and one day Gamelyn realizes his sad state: brother, Gamelyn leaves his life as the king of the outlaws and reenters society to Gamelyne stood on a day in his brotheres yerde, become the heir to his other brother's fortune. He eventually marries, and, so it And byganne with his hond to handel his berde; seems, he lives happily ever after. Nevertheless, he never receives the inheritance He thought on his Iandes that lay unsowe, that his father had intended for him. Like Chaucer's, it seems Sir John's intentions And his fare okes that doune were ydrawe; will remain unfulfilled. His parkes were broken and his deer reved; How then does a tale like this fit within the context of the Cook s Tale, in Of allc his good stedes noon was hym byleved; the mouth of the Cook of London, in the voice of Chaucer, or simply within the His hous were unhilled and ful evell dight; framework of the storytelling game and narrative path of the Canterbury Tales? Tho thought Gamelyne it went not aright. (81-8) Certainly Gamelyn is not "a lite I jape that fil in oure citee" as the Cook promises He strokes his beard, a sign that Gamelyn has come ofage, and decides to no longer (1. 4343). Stephen Knight voices the long-held claim, in the introduction to do his evil brother's bidding. The remainder of the tale is filled with a series of his edition of Gamelyn, that it is possible that "Chaucer himself had included adventures or episodes. The first is Gamelyn's initial fight with his brother, in which Gamelyn among his papers."41 If Chaucer had this tale in his so-called his brother sends his men after Gamelyn. Gamelyn leaves them all in a heap and as Knight suggests, it might have existed as a kind of free-floating textual goes to fight his brother himself, who is hiding in an upper room. Gamelyn tells his used by various early, actively involved readers of the Tales to supply a tale to different pilgrims in different parl<; of the frame narrative and thus create new versions of the Tales. However, this is not the case based on the extant document the history ofthe modem critical editions ofthe Gamelyn, see Nila "The Need for witnesses. If Gamelyn is in a manuscript, it always follows the abbreviated 'Re-editing' Gamelyn," InternationalJournal ofEnglish Studies 5 161-73. Vazquez recently completed a new edition of Gamelyn based on the text. See "The Tale of Gamelyn: A New Critical Edition" (PhD diss., Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, '''Harkeneth Aright': Reading Gamelyn for Text not Context," Other editions include W. W. Skeat's The Tale in Tradition and Transfonnation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Cambridge: 7334. Daniel Neil's The Tale ofGamelvn: A New Edition D.S. Brewer, 1999), 15. For what it is worth, Manly and Rickert call it "Chaucer's literary is based on the chest" Text ofthe Canterbury Tales, 2: 172. Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale 162 Playing the Canterbury Tales 163

Cook s Tale and is very often explicitly assigned to the Cook if assigned to any not only resolved to make this one ofhis pilgrims' stories, but also to substitute it pilgrim in the various forms of paratext such as explicits, incipits, and running for the one he had begun and laid aside as the Cook's Tale. For when he resolved that the Cook should not follow the example of the Miller and the Reeve, it still headers. Some have suggested that the input of Gamelyn has a single ancestor, remained necessary that his story should be one that a man like the Cook might and thus one interactive scribe's addition of Gamelyn multiplied via textual be supposed to tell. He might be supposed to know one of the ballad stories transmission and spread without any basis in Chaucer's own literary creation. common among the people; and the exploits of Gamelyn were such as he could Though this is possible, it is hard to believe that a professional scribe working in very well enjoy, not the less for its having a chief character who was Spencer, the fifteenth century, especially in London, would not have had access to or at least that is, cellarer or clerk of the kitchen. There might even be so much dramatic seen different versions of the Canterbury Tales-some with Gamelyn and some truth in making the Cook run through the romance in ballad fashion, without without. Not because it was an accident or because nothing better was available, subtle elaboration, as to suggest a slight doubt whether Gamelyn may not after I argue that Gamelyn creates a meaning-making path when placed in the context all have been intentionally left as it is by Chaucer.42 of the Cook's fragmented tale and joined in the various ways discussed above. Whether because of textual loss, intention, or some other reason, the Cook sTale Was it Chaucer? Was it one of the active readers who followed in his wake and of Perkyn fails as it exists canonically. It is, as I argue, only potential narrative. made meaning where Chaucer left only potential narrative? Even if Chaucer did However, that potential narrative, in spite of Kolve's elaborate argument that it is not "resolve" to make the connection between Gamelyn and the Cook, involved headed in a moral direction, seems to be headed toward the bawdy and the fabliau readers, exploring the potential narrative of the tales and using an available textual as the Cook himself promises when he states that he will tell "a litel jape that fil piece such as Gamelyn, actively produced the meaning-making relationships in oure citee" (1. 4343). The tale is preceded by two tales of the same genre. Thus, that Morley wants to assign to Chaucer. No matter who initiated the inclusion of one might imagine a narrative path in which the Cook's audience has tired of the Gamelyn, it exists in a number of medieval versions of the Tales, it did not come genre of tale told by the Miller and the Reeve. Once it becomes apparent that about by accident, and it is not void of meaning and intentions. Whether or not the Cook is telling a similar tale and his audience has no interest in hearing such Chaucer wanted to include Gamelyn, either as it exists in the manuscripts or in a tale, he decides to take things in a radically different direction with Gamelyn. another place, one cannot ignore that it exists in 25 manuscripts, with varying Moving from London to the world of romance and outlaws, the Cook abandons connections to the Cook, as a record of user interaction and the dynamic, ongoing the fabliau for another form of merry storytelling, which includes adventure, production of the Canterbury Tales in the fifteenth century. wrestling, and outlaws, and Gamelyn's own japes. Chaucer's pilgrim sets the Because the tale is in so many textual witnesses, some datable to the first decade precedent for this kind of abrupt change with the shift from Thopas to Melibee. after Chaucer's death, critics have had a hard time making sense of its place in the The incomplete romance verse of Thopas is amended with the very didactic prose textual history of the Canterbury Tales. Thus, the critical history of Gamelyn is treatise of Melibee. Though such a transition between the two Cook's tales exists perhaps just as diverse as the various ways in which it has been attached to the only in the text of the Lansdowne manuscript, the narrative of Gamelyn works Cooks Tale in the manuscripts. Urry was the first to include Gamelyn as part of 43 within the context ofthe initial Cooks Tale by introducing a new kind of narrative, the Tales in print in his posthumously published 1721 edition. Later that century, 44 exemplifying a type of mirth and solaas different from the potential narrative Tyrwhitt excluded it from the canon. In the nineteenth century, in spite of the ofPerkyn. number of manuscripts in which Gamelyn is ascribed to the Cook, W.W. Skeat In addition to the possible role of Gamelyn as a needed generic shift in the frame narrative, Gamelyn's sidekick Adam, who figures even more prominently in 42 Henry Morley, English Writers: An Attempt Towards a History ofEnglish Literature Shakespeare's As You Like it, might have offered early readers a point of contact to (New York: Cassell & Co., 1887-95), 320-21. connect the tale to the Cook in that both were in the business of food. Adam, who 43 See John Urry, ed., The Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer [...] (London, Printed for B. in the tale is named Adam Spencere, is so named because of his job as a "spencere" Lintot, I 72 I). or the officer in charge of provisions or food, perhaps similar to the Cook or even 44 Tyrwhitt explains his decision: Perkyn the apprentice victualer in the fragment. Moreover, the setting for several [The Tale ofGamelyn] is not to be found in any of the MSS. ofthe first authority; adventures in the tale involves food and/or feasts, connecting it to both the Cook and the manner, style, and versification, all prove it to have been the work of an and the fragmented tale of Perkyn. In fact, in the late nineteenth-century book author much inferior to Chaucer. I did not therefore think myself warranted to publish it a second time among the Canterbury Tales, though as a Relique of our English Writers: An Attempt Towards a History of English Literature, Henry ancient Poetry, and the foundation, perhaps, of Shakespeare's As you like it, I Morley suggests that Chaucer could have wished to see it more accurately printed, than it is in the only edition which we have of it. See Tyrwhitt, Canterbury Tales ofChaucer, clxxxiii. 164 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale 165 seems to have taken some umbrage at the "stupidity of the botcher whose hand In all the MSS. it is called the Cooke's Tale, and therefore I call it so in like wrote above it 'The Cokes Tale of Gamelyn. "'45 Numerous scribes did just what manner: But had I found it without an Inscription and had been left to my Fancy Skeat describes as botchery. Yet most modem critics, following Skeat, have never to have bestow'd it on which of the Pilgrims I had pleas'd, I should certainly really considered Gamelyn as Chaucer's own alternative ending to the Cook's Tale have adjudged it to the Squire's Yeoman: who tho as minutely describ'd Chaucer, and characteriz'd in the third Place, yet I find no Tale of his in any of based on the internal evidence of the un-Chaucer-like poetic structure and what the MSS. And because I think there is not anyone that would fit him so well as most critics assume is an odd tale for a Cook from London to tell. In Skeat's 1884 this, I have ventur'd to place his Picture before this Tale, tho' I leave the Cook edition of Gamelyn, he states, in possession of the Title. 50 There is, in fact, no connection between this Tale and any work of Chaucer, Urry, based on what he describes as his "fancy," places a picture of the Yeoman and no reason for connecting it with the Cook's Tale in particular, beyond the on the first page of the Tale of Gamelyn, yet he retains the header and title that mere accident that the gap here found in Chaucer's work gave an opportunity for introducing it. It is quite clear that some scribes preserved it because they attach it to the Cook. More recently, T.A. Shippey took up the Yeoman theory itworth preserving, and that it must have been found amongst Chaucer's and suggested that the Yeoman's tale of Gamelyn belongs after the Man ofLaw's 51 MSS. in some connection with his Canterbury Tales.46 Tale. In the "Man of Law's Epilogue," an unidentified pilgrim, conventionally emended and named as the Shipman based on the single example in the extant The conclusion that most reach, in order to reconcile the "apocryphal" status of Selden manuscript, speaks 13 lines to introduce his tale. Aage Brusendorff argued Gamelyn with its recurrence in the manuscripts, is that Chaucer perhaps wanted in 1925 that the speech ought to belong to the Yeoman. Brusendorff argues that to use Gamelyn at some point but never got around to putting it in his own words the Yeoman was often confused with the Squire since the Yeoman seems to be the since the rather crude poetic fonn could not be hisY Skeat suggests that perhaps "Squire's Yeoman" rather than the Knight's Yeoman based on the ambiguous use Chaucer had planned to fashion his own version of Gamelyn as the tale of the of the personal pronoun in the Yeoman's description in the General PrologueY Yeoman whose introduction in the General Prologue is not followed by a tale in Because the Squire is named instead of the Shipman in the "Man of Law's the collection of Tales. 48 Skeat conjectures, Epilogue" in several early texts, including Caxton's two editions, Brusendorff concludes that the scribe responsible mistakenly read "Squire," where Chaucer The fitness of things ought to shew at once that this Tale of Gamelyn, a tale intended "Squire's Yeoman." of the woods, in the true Robin-Hood style, could only have been placed in N.F. Blake, in contrast, begins with the premise that perhaps some of the early the mouth of him "who bare a mighty bow," and who knew all the usage of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales are in fact much earlier than scholars have woodcraft; in one word, of the Yeoman. And we hence obtain the additional generally thought, and thus perhaps Chaucer toyed with the notion of concluding hint, that the Yeoman's Tale was to have followed the Cook's a tale offresh or replacing the existing Cook's fragment with GamelynY Blake, who suggested country-life succeeding one of the close back streets ofthe city. No better can be found for it. 49 50 Urry, Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer, 36. Skeat's supposition that somehow one needs personal experience to tell a tale is 51 T.A. Shippey, "The Tale of Gamelyn: Class Warfare and the Embarrassments of perhaps a bit of a stretch. One could simply tell a tale that one has heard before Genre," in The Spirit ofMedieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert without ever having the actual experience ofbearing a mighty bow. Skeat seems to (New York: Pearson, 2000), 78-96. think that the tale is in the right place but in the voice of the wrong pilgrim. Urry 52 See the following passage from the General Prologue: states similarly: Curteis he was, lowely, and servysable, And carf bifom his fader at the table. A yeman hadde he and servantz namo At that tyme, for hym Iiste ride so, And he was clad in cote and hood of grene. (1. 99-103) 45 Skeat, Tale ofGamelyn, xiv. See Aage Brusendorff's argument in The Chaucer Tradition (London: Oxford UP, 1925), 46 Ibid. 70-73.

47 Skeat describes this as the "variableness of the metre." Ibid., xxiii. 53 N.F. Blake, "Chaucer, Gamelyn and the CooH Tale," in The Medieval Book and a 48 The Canon's Yeoman is, of course, a completely different yeoman who is not Modern Collector: Essays in Honour ofToshiyuki Takamiya, ed. J. Scahill et al. (Cambridge: described in the General Prologue but tells a tale after meeting up with the company of D.S. Brewer, 2004), 87-98. For an argument suggesting that the writing style ofthe Hengwrt pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. manuscript is more like that of the late fourteenth century and largely uninfluenced 49 Ibid., xv. the fifteenth-century secretary hand that dominates so many manuscripts after 1400, see 166 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale 167 the early date for the first manuscripts before Mooney's important discovery to Lydgate in the header and the incipit of the tale canonically allocated to the of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere scribe, argues that even the supposedly "heavily Manciple. While this spurious act may have been a misreading on the part of the edited" manuscript Harley 7334, which happens to include Gamelyn, might be scribe, these textual oddities may tell us something about the concept ofauthorship from Chaucer's lifetime and might have crossed paths with the poet.54 There is in play for the redactor of the Bodley 686 text. The unique text of Bodley 686 no evidence to support this conclusion. In fact, the discovery ofAdam Pynkhurst reveals a reader not necessarily concerned with presenting Chaucer's text, but might make Blake's arguments moot since Harley 7334 is such a different text rather that of the res ofthe Canterbury Tales regardless of whether it was written from the Hengwrt text, with which Chaucer seems to have been more closely by Chaucer, Lydgate, or the anonymous redactor responsible for the extensive involved. Blake, nowever, argues that Chaucer may have supervised the Harley additions to the Cook's Tale. The 45 new lines added by the interactor to the Cook's text as well, whicn would indicate that Chaucer either intended the Cook:s Tale to Tale, unlike Gamelyn and the short ending discussed below, have been added end with Gamelyn or experimented with it as a possible ending. Blake even reads both interlinearly and to the end of the tale. Further, the lines are dissimilar to the much-quoted scribal note in Hengwrt that "of this Cokes tale maked Chaucer the canonical text because they are written in distinctively long, alliterative lines, na moore" to mean that of this particular Cook s Tale Chaucer did not compose which is quite different than the meter ofthe canonical Cook's Tale. The new text anything else, but there is another Cook's Tale, and it is Gamelyn. is further distin2uished from the canonical text through the addition ofpersonified The consensus in this cacophony ofcritical opinion is that there is no consensus. such as "Waste" and "Drynke-more," which the writer uses Thus the critics p:articipate in the formation of new meanings parallel to those Immorality ofPerkyn's actions. The tale finallv ends: early involved realders who continued and added to Chaucer's initial work. They are faced with what appears to be a problem-a riddle or series of riddles to be [ ... J A schoppe, and ever sehe pleyed for his sustenaunee. What thoro we hymselfe and his felawe that sought, solved. Why is Gamelyn in so many textual witnesses? Why is it always the follow­ Unto a myschefe bothe they were broght. up to the Cook's Tale? The critical metanarratives explaining the conditions and The tone y-dampned to presoun perpetually, circumstances sunrounding the addition of Gamelyn, without much hard evidence, The tother to deth for he couthe not of clergye. are just as fictive amd just as imaginative as the actual involved-reader interactions And therfore, yonge men, leme while ye may that had prompted the addition of Gamelyn in the first place. That with mony dyvers thoghtes beth prycked al the day. Remembre you what myschefe cometh ofmysgovernaunce. Thus mowe ye leme worschep and come to substaunce. New Conclusionsi for the Cook Thenke how grace and govemaunce hath broght hem a boune, Many pore rnannys sonn, chefe state of the towne. (86-96)55 While the most common scribal interaction with the narrative ofthe Cook's Tale is to abandon its potential narrative or somehow transition to Gamelyn, two different In the canonical last line, the scribe emends the overtly sexual "swyved" with the conclusions in three fifteenth-century manuscripts actually create some semblance somewhat ambiguous word "pleyed." More importantly, the result of the playing of a moralized narrative from the potential narrative of the canonical text. The of Perkyn and the "wyf' is their death. The moral offered at the end is that one addition that has garnered the most attention is found only in Bodley 686, which should govern one's actions and keep "myschefe" in check. is a manuscript anso marked by the peculiar assignment of the Manciple's Tale For Daniel Pinti, governance is the key that unlocks both the moral of the tale and its place as an example of Chaucerian reception. In "Governing the Cook's Tale in Bodley 686," Pinti suggests that the moralizing lines added A.I. Doyle and M.B. Parkes, "A Paleographical Introduction," in The Canterbury Tales: something like a dialogue rather than the simulation of Chaucer's voice. Geoffrey Chaucer; A Facsimile and Transcription of the llengwrt Manuscript, ed. Paul In other words, according to Pinti, there is no effort to make the additions pass as Ruggiers (Norman: U ofOklahoma P, 1979), xix-xlix. Further, Kathleen Scott argues that Chaucer's own. Pinti states, "not even the most casual reader of the manuscript the illuminations in the Ellesmere manuscript are fourteenth-century in character. See "An Hours and Psalter by Two Ellesmere Illuminators," in The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in could fail to notice that we are hearing a different narrative persona at this point."56 Interpretation, ed. Martin Stcvens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino, CA: Huntington Following in the critical footsteps of Lerer's Chaucer sReaders, Pinti argues that Library, 1995), 87-n19. However, both arguments must be subjcct to further scrutiny given Mooney's convincimg discovery of the identity of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere scribe. 54 Cf. Germaime Dempster, who states that in the opinion of Manly, Harley 7334 is 55 All citations to the Bodley Cook sTale refer to the line numbers in Bowers'8 edition: "characterised by editing almost as bold and extensive as is found in any CT manuscript of John Bowers, "The Cook's Tale," The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations any date." See "MaInly's Conception of the Early History ofthe Canterbury Tales," PMLA and Additions. 61 (1946): 400. 56 Pinti, "Governing the Cook's Tale in Bodley 686," 381. 168 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale 169 the redactor, through his additions, "opens up textual room to create a role for a fabliau narrative] while instructing readers,"6O which echoes the game-like himself as both a commentator on Chaucer's text and a follower in Chaucer's theoretical notion of "strategies of containment" that I first discuss in Chapter poetic footsteps, a role which plays upon some of the distinctive expectations of 3 in terms of Lydgate's religious and social posturing and again take up in the Chaucerian readers and writers."57 Pinti further argues that through the additions, previous chapter in regard to the various employed to offer the Plowman the scribe maintains governance over the text. The moralizing additions use a singular religious identity. According to Boyd, fabliau is a threat in this text Perkyn's life as an example to teach governance to the reader. Pinti argues that because the manuscript, he argues, was produced for an upper-class audience. The the scribe is following in the footsteps of Chaucer, yet he also maintains that the use ofallegorical vice figures, the narration of Perkyn's death, and the addition of scribe governs the text via the interlinear additions. In this way, it is an interactive, a didactic ending cancel any threat ofsuch a 'jape" as the Cook initially promises. game-like script act, which demonstrates the potential for the Tales to exist as a Of course, Boyd is not particularly clear why the Miller and Reeve's tales are communal textual environment open to an ergodic experience. Further, though not threatening and in need of "containment." Perhaps because they were already unknowingly, Pinti enters the discourse of script acts, games, and interactivity complete, there was no hope to contain them. Instead, the incomplete narrative of stating that the allegorical figures and other new literary forms the Cook s Tale opens the tale for "containment" through completion. A similar strategy of containment cancels the threat of fabliau in a far shorter do more than begin "to moralize" Chaucer's tale. In fact, introduce a addition to the tale, which appears in two manuscripts of the Tales. Tn Regenstein concomitant fictional world that circumscribes interpretive parameters for MS 564 (formerly the McCormick manuscript now at the University ofChicago) the reader, that suggest Perkyn and his story may be read from more than one and Rawlinson Poetry MS 141, the new conclusion is abrupt but definitively final: vantage point, and they do so by stylistically marking one vantage point as 58 Chaucer's, the other as his unanticipated co-author. And pus w[iJt[hJ hordom and briberie Togeder pei used tyl hanged Pinti's language evokes the potential to enact multiple vantage points in a fictional For whoso evel byeth shal make a sory sale world distinct from the perspective of the initial text. This recalls Montfort's And pus I make amende ofmy tale.61 suggestion that computer-based "Interactive Fiction" may one day "provide even more appealing possibilities for the interactor. It may allow for a more co-authorial In the Regenstein manuscript, the four-line conclusion stands out because it is role, or it may provide, by serving as a riddle in the richest literary sense, a more the only part of the Cooks Tale that is on folio IOv. 62 However, because it is on and responsive type of systematic world."59 It seems, as I suggest in the verso ofthe page and in the middle ofthe gathering, there is no evidence that Chapter I, actively involved readers were playing the role ofreader, producer, and it was added at a later date. In the later Rawlinson manuscript, the lines occur in author with Chaucer's open and fragmented work centuries before such interactive the middle of the page, again not offering any evidence that they were added by worlds took shape within the textual space of new-media works. the scribe as an afterthought. These lines have garnered far less attention than the The contest for Chaucer's potential narrative and the writerly reader's Bodley 686 additions. Even with such brevity, the new lines create new meanings rhetoric in the moralized additions, as Pinti is right to suggest, are thematically for the Cook and his tale that might something ofthe Cook's middle-class, and textually tied to notions of governance. Governance is both the central mercantile aspirations as conceived by the writer responsible for this addition. value promoted tlhrough the rhetoric of the new additions and something that the In this ending, the lines bring the tale to a sudden, unornamented, and interactor seeks tto impose on Chaucer's potentially unwieldy initial narrative. explicit conclusion. There is no ambiguity. Like the Bodley narration of Perkyn's Unlike other spurio~s texts, there is no effort to be like Chaucer; that is, the execution, the hangings in Rawlinson and Regenstein deny the potential fabliau interactor does nOlt pseudoepigraphically write as Chaucer might have written. The narrative via a narrative of an unambiguous and final conclusion. What is most lack ofeffort on the part ofthe interactor to make hislher work pass as Chaucer's remarkable about this four-line addition, as compared to Gamelyn and the the disttinctness ofthe various script acts that make up the Cook s Tale in extensive additions to Bodley 686 discussed above, is that the conclusion is so Bodley 686 and also exemplifies the interactor' s perception ofthe res of the work final yet so minimal. Only the first two lines ofthe addition actually introduce new through marked additions to the verba. Tn a slightly different critical mode, Boyd narrative, yet all ofthese lines are packed with new meaning for the Cooks Tale. states that the intlerlinear additions in Bodley 686 function to "contain the threat

60 Boyd, "Social Texts," 89. Boyd suggests that Bodley 686 was tailored for a wealthy audience, and the scribe seems unconcerned with presenting the unfiltered words ofChaucer 57 Ibid., 382-3. to his audience. 58 Ibid., 381. 61 Cited from the University of Chicago, Regenstein MS 564, fol. lOv. 59 Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, 5. 62 The Man a/Law sPrologue follows immediately in the manuscript. 170 Playing the Canterbury Tales Amwering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale 171

The interactor seems invested in the "economy oflanguage" through the economical is referred to by the personal pronouns "I" and "my?" On the surface, the first­ introduction of a concluding narrative and the use of economic language. In person voice is that of the Cook. It is of course Chaucer on several levels as well. the first line, the terms "hordom" and "briberie," which both involve the illicit However, in a way, by making amends to the Cook's Tale, the redactor responsible exchange of money for services of one sort or another, refer to the sins of Perkyn for this expansion of the story canon has made it his/her tale as well. and his friends. In the canonical text, there is little evidence that Perkyn's sins are Most critics have not had much to say about the short conclusion in the anything other than carnal sins of excessive merriment, lechery, and sloth. He is, Regenstein and Rawlinson manuscripts other than that it is clearly moralizing after all, called Perkyn the Revelour for a reason. Only the wife who "swyved for and clearly finalizing. Nevertheless, perhaps the most noteworthy reaction to hir sustenance" seems to fit the first sin the interactor describes, and her narrative these four lines comes from the false description of the Regenstein manuscript remains tantalizingly underdeveloped for her to function as an edifying example by a nineteenth-century book dealer. On a paper flyleaf later added to the codex, of what not to do. Nevertheless, the conclusion ends with the moralizing and someone has pasted a listing cut from an 1848 catalogue of the bookseller William economic-laden axiom (or "sentence" in the Middle English sense): "For whoso Andrews ofBristol. Book dealers are notorious for exaggeration, but this particular evel byeth shal make a sory sal." This line best translates to mean something like: case of unveils the desire readers often have for "Chaucer's" work. "whoever buys into evil has made a bad purchase." The use ofthe words Twice the listing that the manuscript dates from Chaucer's own and "sale" in the context of the particular sins mentioned in the first line and the once in the heading stating "written in the Poet's life time" and once later on in the brevity of the sententious ending frame this addition as a strikingly economic and description of the codex's significance stating, "there not being the slightest doubt economically deployed conclusion. of its being written in Chaucer's life-time ...."63 Nevertheless, the manuscript is No one reason stands out as to why this short conclusion has been packed so datable to sometime around 1450, and someone has crossed out, in pencil, the full of economic language to bring the tale to a moralized conclusion. Perhaps above falsehoods in the description in the copy pasted in the codex. However, the the interactor formed the conclusion because ofhislher own particular interest in manuscript is rather sparse. There are no explicits, incipits, or running headers. economic language. Perhaps a scribe added the lines because a patron, perhaps a Other than blue and red initials, which have deteriorated from both time and water patron of a mercantile profession, demanded a sententious ending of this sort. On damage, there is no decoration. Thus, one can perhaps imagine why one might the other hand, the interactor responsible for the conclusion might have imagined be misled as to the manuscript's date. More likely, however, Andrews understood this as a fitting moral conclusion to be told by the Cook. It is a sudden break the profitability of inventing the narrative of a manuscript from Chaucer's own from the developing narrative, which might suggest the Cook's inexperience with lifetime. Moreover, it was not only that it was from Chaucer's own lifetime, but sententious conclusions. Further, the Cook is of London and thus surrounded in that "[t]his original and invaluable Manuscript includes [ ...] also the lost portion his everyday life by the exchange of goods and services in a vibrant mercantile of the Cook's Tale, and other portions not to be found in any printed copy or economy. He is of course on the pilgrimage to cook for London guildsmen, Manuscript."64 The promise of Chaucer's own lost conclusion is enough to justify including the "haberdasshere and a carpenter, a webbe, a dyere, and a tapycer" a hefty price. Yet value is not always monetary as it was for this nineteenth-century 363-4). Thus, perhaps, he fornls a sententious ending using the image of a book dealer. The readerly desire to figure out what Chaucer intended and/or to "sory sale" based on his own professional life purchasing food and the implements a verbal expression to the polyvocal res of the fragment are value-laden to prepare that food and based on his and conversation with the London competitions played out in the rearrangement of., continuation and addition to the guildsmen for whom he cooks. In other words, the Cook of London appropriately valuable Canterbury Tales. Based on the sheer variety of uses the economic language familiar to him from the London scene. Rather than interactions with the narrative ofsomething like the Cook's Tale both textually and performing the moral voice ofa cleric, the Cook, in this short conclusion, sticks to paratextually, Chaucer's intentions and his narratives carry a significant amount of what he knows. Nevertheless, like Chaucer's fifteenth-century reader who decided cultural capital that was, in a different historical and technological milieu before to participate in the production of Chaucer's text, we can only speculate what was modern ideas ofcopyright and singular authorship, free to be used and refashioned intended by the interactor in this case. according to dynamic notions of"sentence" and "solaas." The final line of the conclusion, though it does not have recourse to economic language, functions as a particularly revealing moment of interaction in which the interactor's voice mixes with Chaucer's voice and the Cook's voice. In the line: "And pus r make amende of my tale," the choice of the word "amende" suggests something very different than had it said something like "an end" instead. "Amende" denotes an action taken to change something for the better. In other 63 See the flyleaf in the Regenstein manuscript, or the Andrews's catalogue itself: William Andrews, Catalogue (Bristol, 1848), 19. words, the narrator describes his short conclusion as a change. Moreover, who 64 Ibid.