This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 68-3081
WATKINS, Charles Arnold, CHAUCER'S NUN'S PRIEST'S TALE: SATIRE AND SOLAS.
The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1967 Language and Literature, general
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan CHAUCER’S NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE:
SATIRE AND SOLAS
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Charles Arnold Watkins, B.A., A.M.
******
The Ohio State University 1967
Approved by
Adviser Dep&rJrtment of English VITA
January 27, 1930 Born - Bluefield, W. Va.
1957 ...... B.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
1959-1962 .... Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
1960 ...... M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
1962-1964- .... Instructor, Howard University, Washington, D .C.
1964-1966 .... Assistant Instructor, Department of English, The Ohio State Uni versity, Columbus, Ohio
1966-1967 . . .. Lecturer, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
PUBLICATIONS
"Modern Irish Variants of the Enchanted Pear Tree." Southern Folklore Quarterly, XXX (1966), 202-213.
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: Medieval English Literature TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vita ii
Chapter
I. Sondry Folk: The Problem ......
II. Rekke Nat A Bene: The Ta l e ...... 16
III. Joye And Greet Solas: The Audience ...... 43
IV. This Sweete Preest: The Teller ...... 8 7
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 110
iii CHAPTER I
Sondry Folk: The Problem
Advancing his now famous notion of the ’’Marriage Gx'oup,”
George Lyman Kittredge called attention to the drama of the Canter bury Tales and remarked that Chaucer made his tales fit his tellers
More recently, saving the drama and extending Kittredge, Robert M.
Lumiansky has tried to show how Chaucer made his tellers fit his
tales.^ In addition, some Chaucerians have studied the poet’s
relation to his various audiences and his use of traditional rhe
torical devices.^ No one has sought systematically to explain how
Chaucer’s fictional narrators fit their tales to Chaucer’s fiction
al audience. Yet such an explanation is but a logical extension
of the now widely accepted ideas of Kittredge.
This, then, is the undone work I propose for myself. But
because of the enormity of the task, I confine myself to one of
Chaucer’s tales, that of the Nun’s Priest who shares with the
Pardoner and the Wife of Bath the merit of being always aware of
his audience, but who has more success than they in identifying
his interests with those of his audience and in satisfying the
needs of his audience. I make use of what Kenneth Burke, Edward
Bullough, Wayne C. Booth, and others have taught us about aesthe
tic distance.^- For it seems worthwhile to use the concepts of 2 these thinkers to see how one of Chaucerrs fictional narrators adjusts his tale to his audience, to see the strategy he-uses to engage, and alter, his audience.
BurkeTs concept of rhetoric frames my study, so I should at the outset sketch those ideas of his that are central to my inquiry. In a recent essay he remarks that "appeal” is the core of communication and notes that appeal splits into three elements— speaker, speech, spoken-to.^ He insists that a speaker's appeal indicates the presence of distance between him and his auditors.
Thus, rhetoric has to do with overcoming and preserving various kinds of distance so that speaker and auditors become one in atti tude or action.^ Burke holds that the key term in rhetoric de riving from Aristotle and advanced by Cicero, Gaufred of Vinsauf,
Matthieu of Vendome, and others is persuasion, for "old" rhetoric
(his adjective) stresses conscious persuasive intent.^ But the key term in "new" rhetoric, Burke's rhetoric, is identification, for it acknowledges conscious and unconscious elements in a speaker's appeal and indicates that a speaker's appeal is the place in which and the means by which he and his auditors become one in attitude or incipient action. Structural elements in the appeal (syllogistic progression, qualitative progression, repeti- Q tive form, conventional form, and incidental form) make possible the identification of speaker and auditor, for they heed the psy chology of the audience, heed its appetites, some of which are prior to the appeal and some created by the appeal. Using BurkeTs "new" rhetoric, hut not his jargon, and Booth's elaboration of it in his study of the rhetoric of narration, I de vote a chapter to the narrator of the Nun* s Priest* s Tale and try to push beyond the insights of those who have written about the
Nun’s Priest. I try to grasp the Priest’s tale as action by which he solves problems outside his tale, problems of his own such as the relation of "free choys" (VII,3246)® to God’s foreknowledge— a problem that draws him so strongly he must wrench himself back into his tale of a cock. To write of the narrator in this manner, I gather the little information about the Priest available in the links and the General Prologue, use whatever information historical
scholarship affords, and pluck the biographical fruit from the Nun’s
Priest’s own narrative.
Nowhere in this work do I attempt to discuss Chaucer’s re
lation to his listening and reading audiences. That does not fall . within this study. But in this chapter, my opening chapter, I do
discuss the canons of good storytelling the pilgrims themselves
have. In my second chapter I offer a reading of the tale, for I
know that I can only say what Chaucer’s fictional audience and his
fictional narrator, the Nun’s Priest, get from the Nun’s Priest’s
Tale, if I can first say what the tale can give. In my third chap
ter I try to show how the appetites of the listening pilgrims are
satisfied by the Nun’s Priest’s fable. And in my last chapter I
try to say what the Priest’s tale does for him and no one else.
Let me turn now to the rather clear, and firm, canons of good story
telling acknowledged by the pilgrims to whom the Nun’s Priest relates the adventure of Chaunteeleer.
The effects the pilgrim tale-tellers are to strive for are
rather clearly marked out. When Harry Bailly proposes a tale-tell
ing contest, he explains that tales of ,rsentence” and ”solaas”
(1,798) will provide "confort" (1, 773) and ”myrthe” (1,773) as the
pilgrims ride the narrow road to Canterbury. And he adds that it
is not pleasant to ”ride by the weye doumb as a stoon” (1,774-) »
Later Harry informs the Monk that his tragedies annoy the entire
company (VII,2789), for in them there is no ’Ldesport ne game"
(VII,2791); he implies there should be both. He wants tales that
"may oure hertes glade" (VII,2811), not tales that put pilgrims to
sleep, as the Monk’s put him to sleep (VII,2797) . Not surprising
ly, Harry Bailly praises the Nun’s Priest for a "murie tale"
(VII,34-4-9) and invites both the Clerk (IV,9) and the Pardoner
(VI,316) to tell a "myrie tale."
But Harry Bailly is not the only pilgrim who names the ef
fects the tale-tellers should strive for. Chaucer’s Knight can
bear only a "litel hevynesse" (VII,2769). He prefers light tales,
tales of "joye and greet solas" (VII,2774-), he suggests. The Man
of Law complains that he can tell no "thrifty" (11,4-6) tale, no
profitable tale, and to his delight, one infers, has the Host
praise his tale as "thrifty" (11,1165). Occasionally, all of
Chaucer’s pilgrims except the one who has just told a tale react
to a tale and their reactions suggest the effects all of the tale
tellers should strive for. When the Knight finishes his tale, all of the pilgrims, "yong" (1,3110) and "old” (1,3110) agree that his is "noble” (1,3111) and memorable, "worthy for to drawen to memorie"
(1,3112). It seems the KnightTs story has been "thrifty," to use the Man of LawTs epithet. When the Miller finishes his ribald tale, all of the pilgrims, save "oonly Osewold the Reve" (I,3S6Q), laugh at "the nyce cas" (1,3855): "Diverse folk diversely they seyae/But for the moore part they loughe and pleyde" (1,3857-58). Seemingly, the pilgrims prefer a "myrie" tale, a "thrifty" tale, or one both
"myrie" and "thrifty." They do not delight in the Prioress7 tale.
It leaves them all "sobre" (VII,692) . And they are openly hostile to the MonkTs tragedies, for as the Host tells the Monk, his tale
"anoyeth al this compaignye" (VII,2789).
If the effects the pilgrim tale-tellers are to strive for are named by the pilgrims themselves, it is also true that the pilgrims define the subject matter acceptable in the tales they hear. The
Pilgrim Chaucer, the Shipman, and the Host make it clear that they’ disapprove of preaching. When the Reeve falls into a long self- pitying discourse (1,3867-98) on old age and "folie," the Pilgrim
Chaucer describes the Host7s reaction to this "sermonying" (1,3899), and the Host himself makes his first objection to preaching. He observes that "the devel made a reve for to preche" (1,3903). Later the Host warns the Clerk that he wants a "myrie tale" from him but no preaching: "precheth nat," he says, "as freres doon in Lente,/To make us for oure olde synnes wepe,/Me that thy tale make us nat to slepe" (IV, 12-14-) . The Wife of Bath7s preaching wins praise from the Pardoner (111,165), but a gentle rebuke from the Friar.
But, dame, heere as we ryde by the weye, Us nedeth nat to speken but of game, And leten auctoritees, on Goddes name, To preehying and to scole eek of clergye. (111,1274-77)
The Shipman is as strongly opposed to preaching as the Host, so when at the end of the Man of LawTs Tale, Harry Bailly calls upon the Parson to tell a "thrifty tale” (11,1165), the Shipman breaks
in to aver "heer schal he nat preche” (11,1179); instead, the Ship man will tell a tale that "schal waken al this compaignie" (II,-
1187).10
Not only do some of the pilgrims object vigorously to preach
ing, some of them object to the kind of tales manifestly disreput
able pilgrims are likely to tell. In the headlink of the Manciple1s
Tale, the Host calls upon the Cook for a tale. But the Manciple
seeing that the Cook has been riding along in drunken sleep warns
the Host that the Cook would tell a tale "lewedly" (IX,59) and he
warns all the pilgrims to take heed of "this lusty man" (IX,41).
The Manciple himself will tell a tale to forestall any harm the
drunken Cook might do. The MancipleTs successful attempt to pre
vent the Cook from telling an unwanted tale, of course, follows the
outcry of the "gentils" (VI,323) against the PardonerTs telling
"som myrthe or japes" (VI,318) as the Host requests. By their out
cry, the "gentils" succeed in preventing the Pardoner from telling
some unwanted "ribaudye" (VI,324). But the pilgrims who are not
"gentils" are not so successful in defining acceptable subject
matter. Foreshadowing the assault his tale will make on the Summoner, the Friar precedes his tale with unkind remarks about summoners. The Host reminds the Friar that he should be "hende"
(111,1286) and "curteys" (111,1287). In addition, speaking sharp ly, he says "Telleth youre tale, and lat the somonour be" (III,
1289), but to no avail. The Friar will not let the Summoner be.
Neither will the Miller let the Reeve be when the Reeve tries to set the limits of acceptable subject matter. The Reeve cries out,
"Lat be thy lewed dronken harlotrye/It is a synne and eek a greet folye/To apeyren any man or hym defame,/And eek to bryngen wyves in swich fame" (I, SIM-S-MS) . But the drunken Miller replies "Leve
Brother Osewold,/Who hath no wyf, he is no cokewold" (1,3151-52) and tells a tale that delights all the pilgrims save the Reeve.
If the pilgrims know what they do not want in the tales, they also know what is acceptable subject matter. As I indicated ear lier, tales may be "thrifty" and "myrie." Tales may also be "quit- ing" tales, as the Host indicates when he asks the Monk to "quite"
(1,3119)'"the Knight’s tale, apparently with another "noble" tale, since this is what the Miller says he will tell (1,3126) as he rudely insists on taking the Monk’s place. The pilgrims’ tales may also be of love or some "deyntee thyng" (VII,711), for the Host asks the Squire to "sey somwhat of love" (V,2) and when the Pilgrim
Chaucer offers to tell something in "rym" (VII,709), the Host tells the other pilgrims "now shul we heere/Som deyntee thyng" (VII,710-
711), meaning some rare or fine tale. The pilgrims may also tell tales that are essentially autobiographical. When the Clerk ends his tale of "Grisildis pacient and kynde" (IV,1187), the Merchant’s remarks about his own suffering in marriage lead the Host to say
"Syn ye so muchel knowen of that art/Ful hertely I pray yow telle us (my italics3 part” (IV,12M-l-42) . Sometime later when the Canon*s
Yeoman is about to be silenced by the Canon, who fears he will ex pose their fraudulent activities to the pilgrims, the Host cuts the Canon off and says to the Canon1s Yeoman ”telle on, what so bityde./Of al his thretyng rekke nat a myte” (VIII,697-98).
Just as the pilgrims have ideas about the effects tales ought to produce and the subject matter tales should have, they also have
Ideas about the proper way to tell a tale, about the decorum of narration. Harry Bailly expects all of the pilgrims to begin their tale promptly. If they do not do so, he will nudge them or lay burning words on them. When the Reeve delays the start of his tale,
Harry tells him "sey forth thy tale, and tarie nat the tyme”
(1,3905). When the Parson draws out his refusal to tell a fable,
"why sholde I sowen dr'af out of my fest" (X,35) , Harry Bailly urges him to hurry, saying "but hasteth yow, the sonne wole adoun" (X,70).
But when the Franklin, moved by the virtues of the Squire, wants to talk of his sonTs lack of gentilesse, the Host loses his patience and exclaims, "Straw for youre gentillesse" (V,695). Mien the victim of the Hostrs anger protests, he is told to tell his tale
"without wordes mo" (V,702). The Host is not alone in insisting that those telling tales begin promptly. The Friar gently reminds the Wife of Bath that she is none too quick in starting her tale.
"This is a long preamble of a tale" (111,831), he remarks. The Pardoner’s delay in getting his tale underway evokes protests from all the pilgrims and forces him to say, "Now hoold youre pees! my tale I wol bigynne" (VI, 4-6 2).
Not only do the pilgrims insist on having tales started prompt ly, they see a need for tales to move at a good pace and for tellers to stick to the point. The Knight seems quite worried about the length of his tale and the need to avoid digressions. He has just begun his tale when he makes this comment on his storytelling ability and one of his digressions.
But al that thyng I moot as now forbere. I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere, And wayke been the oxen in my plough. The remenant of the tale is long ynough. (1,885-88)
Toward the end of his tale, the Knight finds it necessary to remark that he will quickly come to the point "and maken of my longe tale an ende" (1,2965-56). Among the pilgrims only the Man of Law seems to have quite the Knight’s intense concern for moving at a good pace and keeping to the point. A third of the way into his tale of "faire Custance" (11,24-5), he asks, "What sholde I in this tale lenger tarye" (11,374-). Two-thirds of the way through his tale, he insists that he does not wish to make as long a tale of the
"chaf, ne of the stree" (11,701) as of the "corn" (11,702), for the
"fruyt of every tale is for to seye" (11,706). And nearing the end of his tale, he glances at the sun and offers his audience this aside.
But of my tale make an ende I shal; The day goth faste, I wol no lenger lette. (11,1116-17) 10
Other pilgrims, of course, worry about digressions, and some delight in them to the annoyance of their listeners. The Squire remarks that the gist of a story, the "knotte" (V,M-01) is what one savours not prolixity (V,M-03-M-05) , so he had better stop his di gression and "to the knotte condescende" (V,*+07) . The Franklin thinks it proper to ask why he should make his tale "lenger" (V,1165) by digressing. The Wife of Bath, however, delights in digression.
But she seems to know her audience does not, for she finds it neces sary to ask her audience not to take it "agrief" (111,191) if she indulges her "fantasye" (111,190), her whim. These are her words.
. . . I praye to al this compaignye, If that I speke after my fantasye, As taketh not agrief of that I seye; For myn entente is nat but for to pleye. (111,189-192)
After these words, she plunges into her long discourse on her mar ried life. Her tale must wait. But she does pause again (111,951)
to ask if her audience would like a digression within a digression
that will allow her to relate a tale of OvidTs. Her asking per
mission suggests that she knows digressions are a breech of decorum.
The Wife, however, is not alone in loving a digression. The Par
doner shares her love, and her delight in autobiography. Not
surprisingly, the Pardoner also has his trouble with his pilgrim
audience. As I remarked earlier, he has to quiet the pilgrimsT
protest against his refusal to get his tale underway; he has to
remark "Now hoold youre pees! my tale I wol bigynne" (VI,M-62). The
pilgrims, however, will not hold their peace, so a short time later
he must placate them with "But, Sires, now wol I telle forth my 11 tale" (VI,660). Though he, too, dearly loves a digression, the
Pardoner, like the Wife of Bath, seems to know digressions are a breech of decorum.
But the decorum of narration can be breeched in other ways as some of the pilgrims make clear. The drunken Miller must make a "protestacioun" (1,3137), for he is so drunk he may "mysspeke or seye" (1,3139). His implication is that one should not do this.
The Miller comes very near echoing the Pilgrim Chaucer who main tains with Plato that "the wordes moote be cosyn to the dede"
(1,742). ChaucerTs Cook implies another way decorum can be breeched, namely, ignoring social degree in telling tales. Delighted with the
Reeve’s ribald tale, the Cook asks the pilgrims to allow him to tell a tale, "if ye vouche-sauf to heere/A tale of me, that am a povre man Xjny italic^)" (1,4340-41) . Apparently, the social class of a pilgrim should determine who tells tales first. Another pilgrim, the Monk, suggests that due respect for another kind of order is expected of the pilgrims. The Monk asks the pilgrims to forgive him for not talking of popes, emperors, and kings in proper chrono logical order (VII,1984— 86), since he can only tell things as they come into "remembraunce" (VI,1990). The Pilgrim Chaucer, of course, must also apologize to his other audience, not the pilgrims but those listening to his account of the pilgrimage to Canterbury. He
is guilty of not presenting "folk in hir degree" (1,74-4-). In addi tion, when he is on the pilgrimage, he too blunders in such a way
as to expose the principles of decorum the pilgrims struggle to observe. He tells his tale of Sir Thopas in such an unacceptable 12 manner that Harry Bailly describes it as "verray lewednesse"
(VII,921), veritable ignorance, and remarks that the tale is so filled with "drasty (worthless} speech" (VII,923) and "rym dogerel"
(VII,925) that It makes him "wery" (VII,921). Harry Bailly is, of course, an expert at determining how tales should be told.-*”*- He insists that the Clerk tell his tale in a "pleyn" style, not a
"heigh style" (IV,18-19), and he has the good sense to contrast tales. So when the Prioress tells a tale in "reverence" (VII, 4-73) of the Blessed Mother and the tale leaves all of the pilgrims "as
sobre was that wonder to se" (VII,692), Harry immediately calls upon the Pilgrim Chaucer to tell a "tale of myrthe" (VII,706) . He
later follows the somber tales of the Monk and the Physician with
a similar request of the Nun’s Priest and the Pardoner.
So much, then, for the canons of good storytelling the pilg rims espouse and more or less embrace. Examining the 230 occur rences of the word tale in The Canterbury Tales, one ends so
impressed by Chaucer’s creation of a vital, active, and reactive 1 ? fictional audience that the occasional lapses-*-^ in artifice he
reckons "nat a myte.” Let me turn now to one of the tales de
livered orally to that delightful audience of churls and nobles,
laity and clergy. 13
CHAPTER I: FOOTNOTES
1 Kittredge writes that "the Pilgrims do not exist for the sake of the stories, but vice versa. Structurally regarded, the stories are merely long speeches expressing, directly or in directly, the characters of the several persons .... Thus the story of any pilgrim may be affected or determined,— in its contents, or in the manner of telling, or in both,— not only by his character in general, but also by the circumstances, by the situation, by his momentary relation to the others in the company, or even by something in a tale that has come be fore"; see, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1915), pp. 154-56.
2 One of the best studies of the dramatic unity of the Tales is that of Robert M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Prin ciple in the Canterbury Tales (Austin, Texas, 1955); see, too, Robert E. Kaske, "The Knight’s Interruption of the Monk’s Tale," ELH, XXIV (1957), 249-268; Charles A. Owen, Jr., "The Crucial Passages in Five of the Canterbury Tales: A Study in Irony and Symbol," JEGP, LII (1953), 294-311; J.B. Severs, "Chaucer’s Originality in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” SP, XVII (1946), 22-41.
3 See, Mary Giffin, Studies on Chaucer and His Audience (Quebec, Canada, 1956) ; Robert 0. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer’s Poetics (New Haven, Conn., 1963); Bertrand H. Bronson, "Chaucer’s Art in Relation to His Audience," Univer sity of California Publications in English, VIII (1940), 1-53; Ruth Crosby, "Chaucer and the Customs of Oral Delivery" Spe culum, XIII (1938), 413-432; Germaine Dempster, "Dramatic Irony in Chaucer," Stanford University Publications in Language and Literature, IV, No. 3, (Palo Alto, Calif., 1932); Helge KSkeritz, "Rhetorical Word-Play in Chaucer," PMLA, LXIX (1954), 937-952; Claes Schaar, Some Types of Narrative in Chaucer’s Poetry (Lund, Sweden, 1954); Margaret Schlauch, "Chaucer’s Prose Rhythms," PMLA, LXV (1950), 568-589; E. Talbot Donaldson, "Chaucer the Pilgrim," PMLA, LXIX (1954), 928-936; Edgar H. Duncan, "Narrator’s Points of View in the Portraitsketches, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry (Nashville, Tenn., 1954), 77-101.
4 See, Kenneth Burke, Counter-statement (New York, 1931); Edward Bullough, ’’’Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aes thetic Principle," British Journal of Psychology, V (1912), 87-98, reprinted in The Problems of Aesthetics, ed. Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger (New York, 1953), pp. 396-405; Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), especially 14
pp. 119-133; Morton W. Bloomfield, "Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde," PMLA, LXXII (1957), 14-26,
5 A Rhetoric of Motives (New York, 1950), p. 271.
6 In other contemporary thinkers’ works, one can find the idea that language operates to induce attitudes or actions. See, Bronislaw Malinowski, "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages," Supplement I, in C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (New York, 1953), pp. 46 and 296-336. See, too, Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, Capricorn Books (New York, 1958), p.46.
7 "Rhetoric— Old and New," The Journal of General Education, V (1951), 203.
8 These are the "five aspects of form" Burke discusses in Counter-statement, p. 31. Wayne C. Booth (Rhetoric, p.124) acknowledges that his three-fold classification of interests— aesthetic, cognitive, practical--has some similarities to Burke’s "aspects of form."
9 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957)— hereafter cited as Works. All line citations are to this text.
10 I accept the "Bradshaw Shift" ably defended by Robert A. Pratt, "The Order of The Canterbury Tales," PMLA, LXVI (1951), 1141-67. As everyone knows, the "Bradshaw Shift" moves Fragment VII (Group b 2) to a position immediately following Fragment II (Group Bl), immediately following the Man of Law’s Tale. Al though he chooses to accept the order of the Ellesmere manu script without the "Bradshaw Shift," Robinson (Works, p. 889) points out that the shift does correct an "obvious inconsist ency" in the arrangement of the tales that is found in the "best" manuscripts— the"obvious inconsistency" being that Sittingbourne is referred to before Rochester is mentioned, although Sittingbourne is forty miles from London and Rochester only thirty miles. Robinson holds that there are "so many small discrepancies in the work (]the Tales^ that the misplac ing of Rochester and Sittingbourne may be regarded as an oversight of Chaucer’s own which he left uncorrected.’’ Cf. William W. Lawrencej Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales (New York, 1950), pp. 90-118; Charles A. Owen, Jr.,"The Development of the Canterbury Tales," JEGP, LVII (1958), 449-76.
11 Alan T. Gaylord ("Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII of The Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor," PMLA, LXXXII (19 6 73 , 2 26 - 23 5) sees the Host as Chaucer’s "chief 15
auditor1' (p 227) and attempts to "deduce the assumptions which lie behind his practice" (p. 227). He concludes that "Harry operates from simple rules of variety and diversion" (p. 235). Harry's main-concern is "that things should keep on happening" (p. 235). He is "the Apostle of the Obvious" (p. 235) .
12 The kind of lapse in artifice I have in mind occurs in the headlink to the MillerTs Tale where Chaucer asks his reader to turn the "leef" (I, 3177) if the "cherles tale" (1,3169) of the Miller is likely to offend his taste. CHAPTER II
Rekke Nat A Bene: The Tale
At the end of his tale, Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest turns to his listening fellow pilgrims and warns them that his tale is not merely of a fox, of a ”cok and hen” (VII,3*4-39) , or of ”folye" (VII,
3*4-38) He thus warns them properly to gather the harvest of his tale, to take the "fruyt” (VII,3M43) and leave the ”chaf” (VII, p 3*443) . They are to harvest the seed that he has sown along the way. Having been instructed in their work, the pilgrims will be poor harvesters indeed if they gather the Priest’s ”chaf” and neg lect his ’’fruyt,” if they gather his ’’folye” and neglect his ”doc- trine.” We know, of course, that some of the pilgrims, among them the Host, who sees the Priest as potentially a fine ”trede-foul”
(VII,3*4-51) , and the Reeve, who acknowledges a fondness for "folie”
1,3880), preferred famine to feast, but we need not join them in
”folie." We may yet take the Priest’s tale as he instructed.
But gathering the fruit of the Priest’s tale is no easy matter, for it must be parted from its mock heroics, its montage of literary forms— debate, beast fable, dream vision, romance, complaint, con- solatio, exemplum— and the narrator’s satirical swipes at his fellow pilgrims. Two crucial moments in the Priest’s telling of his tale effect the parting of the fruit and chaff. One comes when the
Priest breaks into his tale to disavow his misogyny (VII,3265-66) , a
16 matter Francis Lee Utley and Charles A. Owen, Jr., have explored.3
This intrusion, however, is merely the smaller sibling of a more significant intrusion— the Priest’s lengthy digression on necessity and free will (VII,3234— 50). Although this digression seems ir relevant, seems not to advance the action of the tale, so burdened with emotion is it that the Priest must violently wrench himself back into his tale. Leaving an unfinished sentence, he interrupts his mock heroic ratiocinatio. his questioning of himself about whether Chauntecleer flew down from the beams freely or from necessity, and avows ”1 wol nat han to do of swich mateere;/My tale
Is of a cokn (VII,3251-52). If the sharp tone of his disavowal of
”swich mateere” is not enough to reveal his true interest, his own words not twenty lines later surely establish it, for he takes care to remark that Chauntecleer, walking in the sun with his sisters,
is, at the moment, T,so free” (VII,3269). He does not, of course, tell his listening audience that Chauntecleer, being spiritually
already in bondage to Pertelote's flesh and falsehood, merely seems
free, or at most is only physically free. (Such telling is beyond
the Priest, who is a deceptive and unreliable narrator, as I shall
show in a later chapter.) The fruit of the Priest’s tale, then, is
a display of the kind of human freedom available to man, the use to which he may put it, and the consequences of failing to use it pro perly .
Two'major rhetorical figures offer access to the fruit of the
Priest’s tale. His tale opens with a debate that is a dispositio
in the medieval sense, for it is a narrative arrangement suggesting 18 values and meanings later developed by amplification, the amplifi- catio of medieval rhetoricians. Moreover, like any good plot, that of the Priest’s tale opens with one set of conditions and ends with another. And since it is a recognition plot, it mock-heroically moves its hero, Chauntecleer, toward self-knowledge and through it, thereby subjecting him to what some might call an initiation cere- 5 mony.
The debate between Chauntecleer and Pertelote is conducted as if it were a horizontal debate, a dispute between persons having
£ 1 equal knowledge and moral equality. But it should be conducted as a vertical debate, a dispute between persons having unequal know ledge and differing moral quality. For the principle of hierarchy that ordered both the medieval cosmos and the medieval community also ordered the relations between men and women. Medieval Chris tians held that man (Adam) was created superior in intellect to woman (Eve), so he had a natural right and a natural obligation to govern and instruct woman. Adam fell through uxoriousness, through a failure to exercise a natural right and honor a natural obliga tion. And as the Nun's Priest suggests (VII,3257-58) , Chauntecleer bears some resemblance to Adam, and Pertelote, not at all reluctant to assume an equality of mind she does not have, is surely Eve’s likeness. Looking at the debate between Pertelote and Chauntecleer stirs memories of Shakespeare’s Ulysses and his comment on the rea sons for the failure of the Greek army to capture Troy:
Degree being vizarded, The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask. 19
The debate begins as medieval debates usually do, with a sharp g accusation that provokes a rejoinder. Murmuring in fitful sleep,
Chauntecleer is parted from his dream by Pertelote’s sharp tongue.
Sounding much like the Wife of Bath, she asks, ’’What eyleth yow, to g grone in this manere?/Ye been a verray sleper; fy, for shame!”
Chauntecleer’s rejoinder is a description of his dream, a memento mori from heaven, as the unfolding of the plot discloses. He has dreamed that a wild beast will waylay and kill him, a fate tradi tionally befalling the sinful man."^ He asks Pertelote for a favorable interpretation of his dream (VII,2896) and in a circuitous womanly way she gives him what he wants. Chiding him for a coward, whom she cannot love, and using the language of courtly love, she first tells him what every woman desires in a man regardless of what "any womman seith” (VII,2908-12).
We alle desiren, if it myghte bee, To han housbondes hardy, wise, and free, And secree, and no nygard, ne no fool, Ne hym that is agast of every tool, Ne noon avauntour, by that God above! (VII,2913-17)
After chiding Chauntecleer, Pertelote interprets his dream for him and in doing so sounds very much like a fourteenth century herba list, a matter of no small import.
Pertelote seizes on the genesis of ChauntecleerTs dream and ignores its purpose. Thus, with a flourish of scientia, with a flutter of herbalist’s lore, she misunderstands that dream. Then concocting her remedy for what ails Chauntecleer from her misunder
standing, she urges him to "taak som laxatyf” (VII,299-3) . There 20 is genuine irony here, not to mention some feminine malice, for he does need a purgative, but a spiritual, not a physical, purgative.
Pertelote, far from being Curry*s "busy little housewife, in real concern for the health of her lord and husband,is pridefully promoting Chauntecleer*s ruin by interpreting his dream favorably, as he begs her to do, and by insisting that his great fear is a
sign of an excess of humours rather than fear begotten by his sins.
Although she does not realize it, Pertelote*s *'taak som laxatyf”
implies that Chauntecleer is a self-sufficient being whose spirit ual disorders can be healed without divine aid. That she interprets his dream at all is a sign of pride and of her addiction to what medieval man called the lust of the eyes.-1-^ Not suprisingly, it
is Chauntecleer, not Pertelote, who is eminently qualified to diag- 13 nose illness. Medieval medicine resting on astronomy, Chaunte
cleer *s very nature make him an excellent astronomer and eminently
qualifies him to heal himself.Ironically, Chauntecleer, peerless
astronomer and astrologer— the two were once one— is unable to see
the adversity that awaits him.
Chauntecleer, of course, does not yield immediately to Perte-
lote*s "loore." In a concessio, he grants (VII,2979-80) that dreams
may signify "joye" as well as "tribulaciouns," but he does adduce
a few exempla and authorities to show "that dremes been to drede"
(VII,3063). His concessio is doubly significant, for it reveals
something of his character— his balanced reasoning, his concern to
placate Pertelote, his learning— and it also reveals his awareness
that he is not making claims about all dreams, but only those which 21
Macrobius, on whose authority he later draws (VII,3123) , called 15 visiones. He merely wishes to insist that dreams giving an exact representation of the future (visiones) are. to be feared.
Chauntecleer's exempla, as is logical, all deal with men who chose to neglect the warnings of visiones and met disaster. By means of his exempla, Chauntecleer insists not merely that dreams come true, as one critic maintains, but that dreams are God-sent warnings.
Curiously, the cock’s exempla, like those of the Nun's Priest, show how men unwisely use their freedom, thereby failing to preserve their lives’ ’’prow” (VII,2950) and ”hele" (VII,2950), if I may use
Pertelote's words, ^he Priest significantly pauses in his narra tion (VII,3233-3|4-) to say that Chauntecleer was forewarned by God but failed to heed God’s warning. Chauntecleer is not so explicit.
But he need not be. His exempla are clear.
It is useful here to recall that a now archaic meaning of de bate is to engage in combat, for the debate between Chauntecleer and Pertelote is a kind of combat, an agon rooted in a conflict of ideas and ideals, a battle in which there may be reversals and dis coveries. Needless to say, the combat between husband and wife foreshadows the strife between Chauntecleer and another natural
’’contrarie" (VII,3280) , daun Russell, who replaces Pertelote as the antagonist trying Chauntecleer’s soul. Not suprisingly, Chaunte cleer ’s acceptance and rejection of his antagonists, his mergers with and separation from their meanings, mark the drama of his ethical growth. The debate between Pertelote and Chauntecleer exposes the status quo existing at the opening of the Nun’s Priest*s narrative, the status quo to be overturned or altered as the plot unfolds. In the microcosm, there is a grave conflict in knowledge that is also a crisis in living, a grave conflict of opinion that should not be, a conflict that the proofs of reason seem not to adjudicate. For, as the disputants recognize, the dispute about the meaning of
ChauntecleerTs dream is about more than a problem in dream psycho logy. As they make clear, nothing can be said about the meaning of
ChauntecleerTs dream until its origin is fixed. Clearly, if they are to fix its origin;" they must draw on their own orientation to ward life and expose their own notions of ought and ought-not, of praise and blame.
Pertelote, as I have noted, insists that Chauntecleer*s dream issues from "replecciouns" (VII,2923), a disturbance of the flesh, an imbalance of the humours."^ Her analysis of the malady produc ing the cock’s dream is superficially plausible, and as Curry has
I Q shown, medically sound. She can easily see that the cock has all the symptoms of the lover’s malady. He is alternately melan cholic (cold and dry) and choleric (hot and dry)he trembles, murmurs, and sleeps fitfully. Obviously, he needs a ’’laxatyf” or an emetic to purge his pollution. From whence does his dream arise
Obviously, from the woes of love. So runs the self-flattering diag nosis of Pertelote.
A look at Pertelote’s praising and blaming, at her ought and ought-not, reveals the source of her understanding, or misunder 23
standing, of ChauntecleerTs dream. As the Nun’s Priest presents her in his parody of the romance, she is a courtly lover’s mistress
(she is also ChauntecleerTs sister, but this is not the place to
discuss her familial ties). She is "faire damoysele Pertelote"
(VII,2870) , Chauntecleer’s "worldes blis" (VII,3200). She is
"curteys," "discreet," "debonaire," and "compaignable" (VII,2871-72) .
She is "scarlet reed aboute pier} yen" (VII,3161). So, not unexpect
edly, when she turns to praising and blaming, to her ought and ought- not— she, who "hath the herte in hoold" (VII,2874) of Chauntecleer, praises lovers who live by the courtly code, lovers brave, generous, 20 and "noon avauntour" (VII,2917). She dislikes niggardly lovers
and boasters. And she dislikes cowards. Hertelees is the first
epithet she throws (VIIi2907) at Chauntecleer. Shortly there after
she exclaims, "How dorste ye seyn, for shame unto youre love/That
any thyng myghte make yow aferd" (VII,2918). Apparently what makes
Pertelote rage is the implication of ChauntecleerTs fear— that her pi love has not, as the courtly love code requires, made him preuxl
This, then, is the ethical Pertelote, who as a female is the natu
ral "contrarie" of Chauntecleer. She is of the flesh and for the
flesh. Inevitably, in the flesh she finds the origin, hence the
meaning, of Chauntecleer’s dream.
Chauntecleer has much in common with Pertelote, for the Priest
also presents him mock heroically. Like a "castel wal" his comb is
"batailled" (VII,2860). Figuratively, he is a king, his wife a
queen, for he is likened to Hasdrubal, king of Carthage, she to
Hasdrubal’s wife (VII,3362-68).^2 Warlike he strides up and down 24- his yard (his kingdom). He seems a "grym leoun” (VII,3179).' What is more, he is a servant of Venus who uses his sexual powers ’’moore for delit than world to multiplye” (VII,334-3-4-5) .^3 He seems to suffer from the lover’s malady.
But Chauntecleer is more than a parodio lovesick warrior. He is the natural ’’contrarie” of Pertelote, thus superior in mind— a superiority he demonstrates in the debate. He is also the natural
’’contrarie as the Priest notes (VII,3279-80) , of the fox, whom the Priest presents as a sycophantic predator, an alien living in a grove beyond the moated (VII,284-7) yard, who, having already
slain the parents of Chauntecleer, figuratively the former king and
queen of the yard, is an agent of civil disorder. If Chauntecleer
is the fox’s ’’contrarie,” as the Priest says he is, then when he
is true to his nature, he is not a sycophant, not an impostor. He
is rather an alert, humble agent of civil order. At his best he
is a better creature than Pertelote and daun Russell. At his best
he intellectually and ethically surpasses both of them. He out-
reasons Pertelote and daun Russell. And, unlike them, he can, and
does, say ”1 shrewe myself.”
But Chauntecleer is ill, polluted.24- Pertelote insists on
this, and he does not deny it. His illness, his pollution, comes
into focus with his relationship to his ethos, to his various 25 ’’scenes,” if I may use one of Kenneth Burke’s terms in his manner.
The cock inhabits five scenes— natural, familial, social, political,
and religious scenes. But he is, from the viewpoint of a medieval
Christian, the Nun’s Priest, not in the right relation to any of 25 these scenes, His character is a violation of his social rank; it 2 fi is a breech of decorum.
His natural scene is his own biological or fleshly surround ings— the means by which he visibly manifests his presence in the world, by which he sounds the hours, gives warnings, and feathers
Pertelote. But his throat, the place from which comes crowing
"murier than the murie organ” (VII,2851), crowing that sounds the hours and gives warnings, has become a place for him to "gronen,"
(VII,2886) or the means to "synge" (VII,2877-79) love songs to his mistress— "My lief is faren in londe" (VII,2879). From his comment at the end of his tale (VII,39-30-32) , it is clear that he chooses to "wynke" when he should see. By his feathering of Pertelote mainly "for delit" (VII,339-5) and his acceptance of her false ex planation of his dream because of the "joye" (VII,3170) and "solas"
(VII,3170) he finds In her "softe side" (VII,3167) , Chauntecleer exposes his concupiscence. In scarcely deigning "to sette his foot to grounde" (VII,3181), he struts his vainglory, his pride of life.
In addition, the luxuriousness of his appearance— "lyk the burned gold" (VII,2869-)— and the pompous pedantry of his arguments are signs of his having yielded to the lust of the eyes, to avarice and curiosity.
ChauntecleerTs relation to his familial scene is awry too. He is an uxorious husband, but he should not be, for medieval husbands were to learn from Adam’s mishap and govern their wives. The cock has "sevene hennes," among "them Pertelote, in his "governaunce"
(VII,2865). They are "his paramours" and "hise sustres" (VII,2867). 26
Chauntecleer’s incest is further evidence of his wrong relation to his familial scene, of his pollution, as Chaucer’s Man of Law would no doubt have been ready to observe, for he found even tales of in
cest "horrible” (11,84-). (Let no reader rush to remind me of the
facts of animal life until he has reminded himself that Chauntecleer 27 is both rooster and man.)
Pertelote’s shaming of Chauntecleer— "for shame" (VII,2891)—
exhibits his unsatisfactory relation to his social scene, to the
customs and activities of his "society." Given the mock heroic
style of the Priest’s fable, that scene requires courtly behavior
of knights. But in the eyes of Pertelote, Chauntecleer is "herte-
lees" (VII,2908), a coward who shames her by not being better, more
brave, because of her love. He is so unsatisfactory as a lover
that his mistress reminds him a proper lover is no "nygard" (VII,
2915), no "fool" (VII,2915), and no "avauntour” (VII,2915) . She
also cries out "now han ye lost myn herte and al my love" (VII,2910).
Chauntecleer has other failings. Though he seems a "grym leoun"
(VII,3179) when roaming "up and doun" (VII,3180) with his paramours,
though he seems "roial, as a prince is in a halle" (VII, 3184-) , he
dreads dying in the jaws of a "beest" (VII,3279). He lacks prowess.
When he first sees the fox, he shouts an alarm like a man "affrayed
in his herte" (VII,3278). After the fox seizes him, he is clever
but not combative. In addition, he lacks a warrior’s instinctive
wariness of his enemy, his "contrarie," for his vanity has closed
the eyes of his instincts. Consequently, he is unable to do what he 27 instinctively ought to do— "natureelly a heest desireth flee/Prom his contrarie" (VII,3279-80) .28
Politically, Chauntecleer is also not what he ought to be. In the tale’s mock heroic scheme, the cock is a ruler, a king. His subjects, of course, are his paramours who share the yard, his king dom, with him. The cock has "governaunce" (VII,2865) over them. As a ruler In a medieval kingdom, albeit a mock heroic kingdom, the cock has authority that is God-given. He is to live as a moral example to his subjects, an exemplar of goodness. He must share his goods with his subjects, as he does, for whenever he finds a
grain of corn (VII,3182), he summons his "wyves alle" (VI1,3183) , his court. But Chauntecleer neglects his natural right to rule his
subjects. He does share his food, but Pertelote implies that his
dream may arise from gluttony, from vapours— "fume” (VII,292*+) —
arising from the stomach as a result of overeating or drunkenness.
Chauntecleer himself admits that he has not remained alert to dang
ers from without his kingdom, for he "wynketh, whan he sholde see"
(VII,34-31) .
But most seriously, for all his other defects and difficulties
arise from this, Chauntecleer’s relation to his religious scene is
awry. He is a prideful servant of Venus (VII, 33 4-3), but he should be a humble servant of God, for he knows his good fortune comes
from God. To Pertelote he says, "Of o thyng God {my italics^ hath
sent me large grace" (VII,3159). Although he does not know it when
he utters these words, his great failing is his loving the "o thyng"
God has sent him out of his "large grace" more than God himself, his 28 loving the gift more than the giver of the gift.His suscepti bility to the flesh and the falsehood of Pertelote and his sus ceptibility to the flattery of his "contrarie," the fox, mark his estrangement from God, mark an imbalance in his relation to his religious scene. (Given Chauntecleer's prideful estrangement from
God, and by implication the estrangement of the society he has been set over to rule and instruct, all the oaths Chauntecleer and Perte lote utter, and there are many, become profoundly ironical— wounds in Christ's side, as the Pardoner might say.)
ChauntecleerTs sickness, his pollution, is guilt arising from his excesses, from his inward imbalance, his failure to maintain a right relation to his various scenes. Chauntecleer has let minor demands of one scene, the familial, become the only demands he will acknowledge. Thus, as the tale opens he is an uxorious husband laid low by vanity and concupiscence. His acceptance of PerteloteTs ar guments at the end of the debate is a dramatic disclosure, a dis closure by freely chosen action, of his vices.
Now let us speke of myrthe, and stynte al this. Madame Pertelote, so have I blis, Of o thyng God hath sent me large grace; For whan I se the beautee of youre face, Ye been so scarlet reed aboute youre yen, It maketh al my drede for to dyen; (VII,3157-62)
The debate, the verbal combat, ends, then, with a reversal for
Chauntecleer and a discovery. The debate has clarified the way to purification. By accepting PerteloteTs interpretation of his dream
and its origin, he moves from misery to happiness, albeit a short lived happiness. But by accepting her argument, which he has 29 demonstrated is false, he " wynketh, whan he sholde see,,T for he has discovered by his argument that he does have something to fear, that his dream is an event testing his ability to act prudently.
Structurally understood, the debate is a moment of "dramatic arrest."^0 For much like the delaying soliloquies of Hamlet, it is a dramatic pause in the action, a moment of indecision in which
Chauntecleer may use his freedom to ward off direful events or to make them inevitable. It is also a moment foreshadowing the re versals and discoveries to come, for the cock’s yielding to the fox is foreshadowed by his yielding to Pertelote. His first reversal or defeat is preparation for his second, but not for his escape and triumph.
As Chauntecleer mock heroically undergoes yet another battle with its own reversal and discovery, the values and meanings of the debate are amplified and ChauntecleerTs guilt, his pollution, is purged, to use Pertelote’s diction (VII, 294-7). His encounter with his "contrarie," the fox, effects his purification (purging of con tamination) and his redemption, for his encounter makes possible his "I shrewe myself, bothe blood and bones" (VII,34-27) .
The forward movement, the amplification, of the Priest’s tale begins with Chauntecleer’s halting of the dispute and his physical merging with Pertelote, his feathering of Pertelote. The physical merger is best understood as symbolic action marking the ethical decline of the cock. In his dispute with his favorite hen, he has remained apart from her, apart from her meanings and values, there 30 by maintaining a proper ethical stance toward his dream and her
interpretation of it, but when the "beautee" of the henTs face
overwhelms him, he becomes one with her physically and spiritually.
Her meanings and values become his. Now only the fox can separate him from Pertelote and her ethical meaning. The proofs of reason, the proofs of authority, have come to nothing when the cock finds himself at odds with the "o thyng God hath sent" him. His imbal
ance is to be righted by the proofs of experience.
At the end of the tale Chauntecleer, having by his wits escap
ed from the fox, is perched in a tree and the Priest has dropped his mock heroic imagery. Both the cockfs spatial position and the
cessation of the mock heroics indicate a qualitative development
in the plot, indicate that the cock now recognizes his responsibi
lity for what has befallen him ("I shrewe myself"). This qualita
tive development of the parodic•action of the tale is most apparent
if one recalls the beginning of the action and treats the debate as
mainly a digression.
When the tale opens, the action is at a nadir, for the cock
is secure on his perch and ill. His natural adversary, the fox,
who has lain concealed in the grove for three years, has "the same
nyght thurghout the hegges brast/Into the yerd" (VII,3218-19). Dur
ing the debate the fox is already within the yard, having broken
through the hedges separating it from the grove. The thief has
already entered the "pasture." (Pasture is a term the Priest uses
(VII,3185) to name ChauntecleerTs yard just before he comments on 31 the cock’s pride.) The entrance of the fox into the yard and the
Priest’s comment on him— "0 false mordrour, lurkynge in thy den"
(VII,3226)— the hue and cry with which the thief is chased from the yard, and the implication that the cock, protector of the 31 pasture, is a shepherd— all of these suggest that the Priest’s characterization of the fox and the cock is inspired by John 10:1-8, where Christ likens himself to the good shepherd who sacrifices his life for the well-being of his flock: "But he who enters not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbs up another way is a thief and a robber . . . .The thief comes only to steal and slay, and destroy.
I come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly." Sign ificantly, Chauntecleer comes very near an involuntary sacrifice of this sort.
The cock, then, who by virtue of the Priest’s mock heroic imagery is a parodic knight, as well as a parodic shepherd, defies both "sweven and dreem" (VII,3171) and moves from his secure perch to the yard, to his "pasture," where, as parodic knight, he is to have an "aventure" (VII,3186) . The "aventure" of the knight-cock
comes to him when he is eyeing a butterfly (VII,3274-) while pecking
among herbs ("wortes"). Despite his outburst against Pertelote’s
"venymous" laxatives (VII,3154-55), having accepted her argument, 32 he has accepted the herbalist’s prescription. The cock discovers the fox, his natural adversary, and in a most uriknightly manner is
"affrayed in his herte." This "grym leoun" wants instinctively to .
flee, but his adversary’s "Gentil sire" (VII,3284-) bespeaks courtly
courtesy and allays his fear. The fox’s flattery and talk of "gen- tilesse” (VII,3284— 92) soon touch Chauntecleer’s pride and he is persuaded to emulate his father’s singing in an effort to surpass
it. To do so ’’with bothe his yen/He moste wynke,” stand on ”tip-
toon,’’ and ’’strecche forth his nekke long and smal” (VII,3305-08) .
He does what his vanity requires and his natural adversary seizes
him: as Augustine observes in his Confessions, inordinate passion
is its own punishment. Throat in the mouth of. the fox, body on his
adversary’s back9 the knight-cock physically merges with his natural
enemy, symbolically assumes his enemy’s meaning. But he has fallen
as low as he is to fall, for he beguiles his beguiler, even as all
the inhabitants of the yard raise a ’’hue and cry” and pursue the
criminal fox into the grove. J The cock persuades the prideful,
flattering fox to turn and curse his pursuers. When he does so,
the cock flies up from the yard to a secure perch in a tree where
he curses himself and refuses to come down.^ He now knows that
he ’’wynketh, whan he sholde see” (VII,34-31). Thus, the parodic
knight moves from high to low to high place, from perch to yard to
perch. His movement marks the stages of his romance ’’aventure,”
as well as his ethical growth.
The cock’s "aventure” is that of the typical romance hero.
It has the usual three stages: ’’the perilous journey and the pre
liminary minor adventures, the crucial struggle, usually some kind
of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both must die; 35 and the exaltation of the hero." Northrop Frye names these three
stages "the agon or conflict, the pathos or death struggle, and the
anagnorisis or discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has 33
clearly proved himself to be a hero even if he does not survive the
conflict.1,38
As a parodic romance hero, the cock moves through his own agon, pathos, and anagnorisis. As I have noted, his movement is also to ward a cure for his illness, toward purgation of his pollution.
That the cockTs physical movement is of greatest importance is be yond cavil, for the Priest, in his mock heroic complaint (VII,
3225-66), underscores its importance. He links it to a question
of free will and necessity when he asks whether by free will or
by destiny the cock flew down from the beams to where the fox lay
in wait for him and then recalls three views of how God’s foreknow
ledge relates to man’s free will. He recalls the view of Bradwar-
dine, a determinist, who did not think the notion of free will worth
a butterfly, the view of Augustine, who held free will to be a gift
from God that could be used only insofar as God allowed, and the 37 view held by Boethius that God foreknows all but forces nothing.
The Priest terms the latter view that of "necessitee condicioneel"
(VII,3250) and his tale indicates that he himself holds this view.
His insistence (VII,3251) that his tale does not have to do with
’’swich mateere” is not to be taken seriously. That "mateere” is
the veritable "fruyt” of his tale and the dispute among thousands
of clerks (VII,3239) about the relation of God’s foreknowledge to
man’s free will is a dispute about the nature of evil, its source,
and man’s responsiblity for it.38 Furthermore, the Priest’s parody
of the romance, a parody achieved by means of the conventions of
the beast fable, is an exemplum exposing right and wrong ways of 3*4- using free will and the consequences of both, in short, an exemplum defining moral vigilance. Thus, the cock’s romance "aventure”— his agon, his pathos, and his anagnorisis— exposes both the catas trophic and redemptive, the destructive and curative, possibilities of free will.
His "I shrewe myself, bothe blood and bones” bespeaks his moral rebirth and his new understanding of his own freedom. The verb the cock uses when he says "I shrewe myself" means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "to curse or blame greatly, as the cause of misfortune." The cock’s shrewe seems a kind of mea culpa bespeaking his awareness of his freedom and his responsiblity for the evil that has befallen him. And because he appears not only as a rooster but also as a husband, a king, and a shepherd, when he is reborn morally and regains his spiritual health, the microcosm he governs is also'reborn and restored to health.
Unlike Chaucer’s Monk, Chauntecleer, knowing where the fault
for his woes lies, does not first "shrewe" Fortune and then himself.
This is a crucial matter, for the action giving rise to the Priest’s
tale--the interruption of the Monk’s tragedies, the Knight’s ex pression of his desire for a tale of "joye and greet solas" (VII,
277M-) , the Host’s implicit demand for a tale worth more than a
"boterflye" (VII,2791), for a different kind of tale — this action
indicates the Priest’s tale is to be a substitution for that of the
Monk, much as a medieval contrafactum was a sacred vocal composition oq substituted for a secular one. In attempting his substitution,
the Priest converts his beast fable, which will satisfy the Knight's 35 demand for a tale of "joye and greet solas," to an exemplum satis- fying his priestly obligations, and he uses his parodic plot and imagery obliquely to denigrate positions and views he opposes. But this is matter for the next chapter where I shall examine the use to which the Priest puts his tale as I try to see what his tale
does for his listening audience. 36
CHAPTER II: FOOTNOTES
1 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1957) . All line references are to this text.
2 J.L. Hotson ("Coifox vs. Chauntecleer," PMLA, XXXIX [1924) , 762-81) also insists that the Priest means to call attention to less obvious meanings of his tale, but Hotson pushes the fictional narrator aside and reads his tale as historical al legory told by Chaucer, not as belletristic literature. Bernard F. Hupp^ and D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Fruyt and Chaf: Studies in Chaucer’s Allegories [Princeton, N.J., 1963), p.7) have also found the "fruyt and chaf" figure important and have remarked that the "figure of rind and kernel or, as Chaucer phrases it, fruit and chaff, implies the Augustinian theory that poetry should arouse the mind of the reader to seek truth beneath the rhetorical surface. For Augustine, Christian lite rature has no value apart from this function.” Like Hotson, Hupp£ and his co-author would read the tale allegorically, a feat that this writer hopes to avoid.
3 See, Francis Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument about Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568 (Columbus, Ohio, 1944), pp. 25 and 27; see, too, Charles A. Owen, Jr., "The Crucial Passages in Five of the Canterbury Tales: A Study in Irony and Symbol," JEGP, LII (1953), 294-311.
4 The Priest1s ratiocinatio is a parodic complaint, a popular medieval literary form that Morton W. Bloomfield (Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse @tew Brunswick, N.J., 1961} , p.30) defines as "not a narrative but rather a long medi tation on the woes of this world." Bloomfield notes that the complaint is often joined to the contemptus mundi theme, as, so I believe, it is in the NunTs P r i e s t s Tale. See, John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956), pp.1-39, for a discussion of the medieval complaint.
5 An observation of Northrop Frye stimulated my awareness that Chauntecleer undergoes an initiation rite. In The Educated Imagination, The Massey Lectures, 2nd Ser. (Toronto, 1963), p.14, Frye remarks that the technical problems of shaping a story are such that in any time or place a storyteller is severely limited in what he can do. Frye then adds that "E.M. Forster once remarked that if it weren’t for wedding bells or funeral bells a novelist would hardly know where to stop; he might have added a third conventional ending, the point of self-knowledge, at which a character finds something out about himself as a result of some crucial experience . . . weddings and deaths and initiation ceremonies have always been points 37
at which the creative imagination came into focus, both now and thousands of years ago."
6 Stephan Gilman (The Art of La Celestina (Madison, Wisconsin, 1956TJ, pp. 159-160) makes this distinction between horizontal and vertical debates, observing that the "didactic superiority" of one speaker over another exists in vertical debates.
7 Robinson, p.755, observes that a belief in the destructive power of the female is widespread in medieval literature and indicates where a number of variations on this theme may be found. Frederick Tupper (Types of Society in Medieval Litera ture [New York, 1926], pp. 107-109) also notes the widespread prevalence of this belief and the importance of the medieval*s husband’s rule over his wife. Tupper insists that "Chaucer’s contemporaries . . .drew no moral distinction between disobedi ence to God, to king, to master, to father, and the slightest disregard of the husband’s wishes:— all are of the deuce damn able" (p. 108).
8 Two examples of medieval debates may stand for all. In the Old English Soul and Body first a wicked, then a righteous, soul address the dead body; the body does not reply. In the Middle English Debate of the Body and Soul, a dream vision, the soul of a dead knight pauses over the body lying on a bier and dumps searing recriminations upon it for its life of vani ty and pomp; the body replies. Significantly, a recurring theme of medieval debates is the mutual confrontation of body and soul. The genre of the debate, and its recurring theme, seems one of the frames into which the Nun*s Priest’s Tale is placed.
9 Pertelote*s remark is echoed by the Wife of Bath:
What eyleth yow to grucche thus and grone? Is it for ye wolde have my queynte allone? Wy, taak it all lo, have it every deel! Peter! I shrewe you, but ye love it weel.
10 Morton W. Bloomfield (The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing, Mich., 1952TJ , p.28) notes that animals, from antiquity, have been linked to evil spirits who attacked men, for "the desert fathers had seen . . . demons in the sly lurking forms of ani mals like the jackals." Cf. Helen Waddell, Beasts and Saints (London, 1939). Note, too, Jeremiah 5:6 where God’s judgment upon the Jews is said to be that a lion shall slay them, a wolf spoil them, a leopard besiege their cities.
11 See, Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2nd ed. (New York, 1960), pp. 222-224-. Although Curry’s gal lantry toward Pertelote and his delight with her medical erudition almost cause him to forget that Chauntecleer’s 38
ndream is shown by the final outcome to be a prophetic vision" (p.222), he himself points to a manifestation of Pertelote’s pride when he speculates that she may be "eager to show him [Chauntecleer} that, for once, in spite of her femininity, she is not so ignorant and incapable as might be supposed" (p. 224).
12 As Donald R. Howard (The Three Temptations {“Princeton, N.J., 1965} , pp.43-75) has noted, the lust of the eyes (avarice and curiosity) was one of the three temptations medieval man fear ed as sources of damnation, the other two being lust of the flesh and pride of life. According to Howard, the Church Fathers linked a process of sinning to the three temptations and concluded that sinning required suggestion, delectation, and consent. Interestingly, Chauntecleer twice moves through the stages of sin, for he accepts Pertelote*s suggestion that his Illness comes from below, to speak figuratively, rather than from above, thereby letting the delectation he finds in her flesh bend his rational consent; and when he encounters daun Russell, he accepts that adversary’s suggestion that he can surpass the singing of his father, thereby allowing the delectation he finds in the fox’s flattery override his "rati onal" instinct to flee from his adversary. David Holbrook ("The Nonne Preestes Tale,” The Age of Chaucer, Pelican Books (Baltimore, Maryland, 1954} , p.120) also sees Chauntecleer as "compounded of ’the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life’.’’
13 We need look no farther than the portrait of the Physician given in the General Prologue (1,4-12-16) to see the fusion of medicine and astronomy:
In al this world ne was ther noon hym lik, To speke of phisik and of surgerye, For he was grounded in astronomye, He kepte his pacient a ful greet deel In houres by his magyk natureel.
14- John M. Steadman ("Chauntecleer and Medieval Natural History,** Isis, L £19593 , 242) has noted that medieval natural history is the tradition to which "belongs Chauntecleer*s instinctive knowledge of astronomy and his punctuality In announcing the hours.”
15 Curry (Mediaeval Sciences, pp.195-240) notes that Macrobius classified five major visions that come in men's sleep: somnium, visio, oraculum, insomnium, and phantasma. The last two are not prophetic, for, being, the result of mental or physical distress, they come not from on high but from below.
16 Samuel B. Hemingway, "Chaucer’s Monk and Nun’s Priest,” MLN. XXXI (1916), 489. 39
17 Nevill Coghill and Christopher Tolkien fThe NunTs PriestTs Tale (London, 1959], p. 101) are quite clear about the mean ing of replecciouns as Pertelote uses the term. It means an "excess of humours," not overeating or an excess of food.
18 Curry, Mediaeval Sciences, p.232.
19 Lawrence Babb (The Elizabethan Malady; A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 [East Lansing, Mich., 195IJ, p.131) observes that melancholy and cholera may both be antecedent contions of love. "According to some authors choleric persons are amorous." Babb also writes (pp. 133-3*4-) that "lovesickness is not a melancholy disease," but if a patient does not find comfort "either by consummation or by medical intervention, his physical and mental distresses will engender melancholy humours."
20 Pertelote*s word avauntour means "one who makes vaunts— but the meaning is specifically those who boast about their suc cess in love, according to Coghill and Tolkien, p. 101.
21 Sidney Painter (French Chivalry, Cornell Paperbacks (Ethaca, New York, 19643 9 p. 114-) remarks that though a loverTs lady "could not fight herself, she could make men more preux" ; she could help the knightly lover move toward chivalric perfection by demanding martial prowess.
22 John M. Manly (Canterbury Tales (New York, 1928] , pp.64-4— 64-5) comments on the lines (VII, 3347-54-) in which Chaucer parodies the absurdities of Gaufred of Vinsauf*s "high-sounding lamen tation for the death of Richard I,” and recalls that Gaufred equated the death of Richard with that of the entire Western World. This linking of the death of Richard to Chauntecleer*s fall supports my notion that the cock is figuratively a royal personage.
23 Bernard F. Hupp4 (A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (New York, 1964], p.183) rightly takes the use to which Chauntecleer puts his sexual powers to be a sign of his cupidity, of a want of charity.
24 In the prologue to her tale, Chaucer’s Second Nun implies that physical and spiritual illnesses are so entwined that one im plies the other.
And of thy light my soule in prison lighte, That troubled is by the contagioun Of my body, and also by the wighte Of erthely lust and fals affeccioun; (VII, 71-74) 40
The Parson also links physical and mental illness, for he quotes Solomon’s remark ’’Whoso that hadde the science to knowe the peynes that been establissed and ordeyned for synne, he wolde make sorwe” (X, 228).
25 Kenneth Burke (A Grammer of Motives |}Jew York, 1952], p.x) suggests that all human motivation can be grasped by consider ing the relationship of five terms often linked to drama: act, agency, agent, purpose, and scene. By scene he understands, as I do, the background of an act or agent’ the background may, of course, be physical, temporal, emotional, ideological, or what have you. I am here concerned with what Burke calls the ’’scene-agent ratio,’’ with the way in which an agent acquires meaning by virtue of his scene and what he does within his scene. Not out of place here is John Ciardi (Dialogue with an Audience [Philadelphia, 1963], p.46) who writes that the metaphors of a poem must perform very much as a scene {my italics] in a play or in a novel performs itself.”
26 At least since Aristotle tale-tellers have found it enough to refer a character to a particular social class in order to render his behavior intelligble. Behavior that violates class norms breeches decorum.
27 D.W. Robertson, Jr., (A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medi eval Perspectives ^Princeton, N.J., 1963], p.251) sees in Chauntecleer’s dual nature (he is at once cock and human being) evidence that Chaucer was drawing on a ’’technique of the grote sque [that] must have been commonplace to any literate man of affairs in the last half of the fourteenth century.” I accept the suggestion that the cock is a grotesque.
28 C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image [London, 196^, p.162) quotes this passage and remarks that estimation, now called instinct3 was one of the ten senses of the Sensitive Soul, one of the three kinds of soul recognized by medieval psychology. Accord ing to Lewis, estimation informs an animal that he must flee from his natural enemy. Chauntecleer is obviously neglectful of what his Sensitive Soul tells him.
29 Chauntecleer is clearly too attached to the World, which, as Donald R. Howard (Three Temptations, p.44) has noted, was in medieval times a fit object of scorn and renunciation. Howard observes that the ’’world” meant "the terrestrial globe; but to medieval Christians it was, like everything, moralized. It meant a realm of human activity which lured the righteous and from which one needed to withdraw in ’contempt’.”
30 I borrow the term "dramatic arrest” from Burke, Grammer, p.245.
31 Robinson, p.968, glosses the word pasture, observing that it 41
means "the act of eating," but the line in which the word ap pears (VII,3226) requires a noun. I have treated the word as a noun because of the syntax.
32 Joseph E. Grennan ("ChauntecleerTs TVenymousT Cathartics," NSQ. X (1963], 287) makes the noteworthy comment that "Perte lote rs dealings in venymous laxatives are simply the final reduction of womanrs reptilian propensities." Pauline Aiken ("Vincent Beauvais and Dame PerteloteTs Knowledge of Medicine," Speculum, X (19353, 285)notes that Pertelote, that delightful herbalist, prescribes a near-fatal dose of laxatives. And J.J. Jusserand (English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, trans. Lucy Toulmin Smith (London, 1888] , pp.179-180) shows that legal authorities pursued herbalists, in the fourteenth century, with royal ordinances, for they believed herbalists so ignorant of men’s temperaments and the virtues of medicine, especially laxatives, that they could prove ignorant instruments of death. Pertelote is no small threat to the well-being of Chauntecleer.
33 Jusserand (Wayfaring Life, pp.168-71) notes that fourteenth- century English law required all citizens to raise a "hue and cry" in pursuit of criminals and to chase a criminal from village to village, if need be, until he was captured. Cf. Edith Rickert, Chaucer’s World (New York, 1948), pp.124-25 There is reason to believe that those who chased the fleeing fox were engaged in a collective, and common, legal action, which I am tempted to call the driving out of the pharmakos— a very old ritual.
34 Harry Caplan ("Classical Rhetoric and the Medieval Theory of Preaching," Historical Studies of Rhetoric and Rhetoricians, ed. Raymond F . Howes ptfew York, 1961] , pp.89-91) has describ ed a thirteenth-century Bruges MS. (MS. 546, fol.42vb) that provides another, and a useful, perspective on Chauntecleer*s physical movements. The manuscript elaborates a coventional analogy between cock and priest. The cock’s beating his sides before crowing (as Chauntecleer does) signifies the preacher’s mortifying himself before preaching; the cock’s stretching of his neck to crow, the preacher’s lifting his head to preach of heavenly things; the cock’s sharing his grain with his hens, the preacher’s willing communication of his wisdom; the cock’s attacking of his rivals, the preacher’s attacking of heretics; the cock’s shutting of his eyes before the sun, the preacher’s indifference to success; and the cock’s mounting to his wooden roost at nightfall not to come down until dawn represents the preacher’s climbing to his perch— i.e., meditating on the pas sion of Christ— at the time of temptation and descending only when the danger of temptation has passed. Another example of a thirteenth-century analogy of the cock and the priest is developed in the poem Multi sunt presbyter, which is available in The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, ed. Stephen Gaselee (Oxford, 1928), n.97. R.C. Petry (Christian Eschato- M-2
logy and Social Thought (New York, 1956}, pp.227-228) re marks, in commenting on this poem, that "the priesthood and the people for which it is responsible are always being reminded that in the analogy of the cock lies the significance of the priest."
35 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957) , p.187.
36 Frye, p.187.
37 In elucidating the views of free will the Priest mentions, I am following Bernard L. Jefferson, Chaucer and the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius (Princeton, N.J., 1917), p. 79. Jefferson insists that the Nun’s Priest "cannot decide" whose concept of free will he should accept to account for the cock’s flight from his perch. My view is that the Priest’s tale dis closes the Priest’s acceptance of Boethius’ notion of conditi onal necessity.
38 Since I maintain that the relation of God’s foreknowledge to man’s free will is the veritable fruit of the tale, I find my self quite close to Hupp£ (A Reading, p.180) who observes that "Chauntecleer’s disregard of his warning dream is emblematic of the relationship between Free Will and Predestination . . . Because of his delight in Pertelote, Chauntecleer consents in his reason to ignore the warning of his peril; he elects to follow his own desires. Thus God did not choose evil for man; man chose it for himself." I should point out that I developed my ideas before reading Huppe’s comments on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.
39 For a lucid discussion of the medieval contrafactum, see Rosa mund Tuve, "Sacred ’Parody’ of Love Poetry, and Herbert," Studies in the Renaissance, VIII (1961) , 2*19-290. CHAPTER III
Joye and Greet Solas: The Audience
All ’’art is made to face the audience,” writes C.S. Lewis, so
"nothing can he left exposed, however useful to the performer, which is not delightful or at least tolerable to them."^ Lewis here touches on some fundamental features of literature--that it is made for an audience, that it is a vehicle of self-expression for the maker, that the maker’s self-expression is the matter from which he presses a form that delights and edifies his audience or at least does not offend them. For seeing the Nun’s Priest’s fable as symbolic action, as action which Chaucer’s fictional audience n enacts, Lewis’ remark is useful. But it requires the elaboration
Kenneth Burke, who has also pondered the relation of literary forms to their makers and audience, can provide.
Burke insists the form of a literary work discloses the psy chology of its audience because "form is the creation of an appe tite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite.” He notes1* that satisfying appetites, either pre existing or created, often entails momentary frustrations for an audience, but as a work unfolds, the frustrations become more subtle and more intense satisfactions. As for the artist, his self-expres sion is not the "mere utterance of emotion, but the evocation of emotion.”^ For the artist converts his emotion into a form capable 44 of arousing emotion in others.® He thus shifts his interest to style and structure. Burke does not hold, nor do I, that elements of a work cause emotions in the one who beholds the work. Instead, he believes, and so do I, that elements of a work— plot, imagery, character, rhythm, and so on— are part of the beholder’s ,rseeing, O not the object of it,” if I may use Paul Goodman’s words. Thus, part of the beholder’s experience— plot, imagery, character, rhythm, and so on— are the conditions of his experience, for the beholder sees the aesthetic object (the non-sensuous object) in and through the elements of a work. From this viewpoint, what a reader or listener may take from a poem or tale by virtue of its language is as important a critical problem as what a poem does for the poet.
This critical problem is my subject in this chapter. Assuming, as the frame of the Canterbury Tales requires, that the tales are told by the fictional pilgrims to a fictional audience much interested in the tales, I describe what the Nun’s Priest’s fable communicates to Chaucer’s fictional audience. In a later chapter I shall de scribe what the tale does for the Priest who narrates it.
A successful aesthetic transaction between a poet and his audience rests on a ’’sympathetic contract,”^-® on an agreement be tween poet and audience that whatever affects one in a certain manner affects the other similarly. The agreement may be either explicit or implicit; often it is both. When a sympathetic con tract exists between an artist and his audience, the audience dreams and the artist dictates the form of its desires by manipulat- 1 1 ing ’’blood, brains, heart, and bowels." But to shape and perpet- uate his audienceTs dream, the artist must stifle his audience’s interest in truth and fact as such, and his eloquence is his means of doing so.^ If the artist fails to stifle his audience’s in terest in truth and fact, he may find that disagreement with his beliefs, his "facts” and his ’’truths," makes a sympathetic contract impossible. No storyteller escapes this problem, for literature of any dimensions expands its implications by exploiting "the re lation between object, situation, or incident and the place they hold in human attitudes and creeds.Thus, by exploiting his audience’s ideology and experience, a storyteller trying to estab lish a sympathetic contract so that his audience will identify with his beliefs does things to appeal to them, ingratiates himself by virtue of his style and his choice of literary forms.^^ Such a process of ingratiation unfolds as the Nun’s Priest shapes a sympa
thetic contract with his audience so that he may make his beliefs
theirs.
The Priest’s tale, as everyone knows, exists because the Knight
grows weary of the Monk’s catalog of tragedies and grows perhaps
more than a little uneasy about the sudden reversals suffered by
men of high place, men like himself. Disturbed, the Knight inter
rupts the Monk and remarks that a "litel hevynesse” (VII,2769)-^
may be fine for some "folk,” but for him it is a "greet disese"
(VII,2771) The Knight’s "disese” is dis-ease, discomfort. He
wants to hear of ”joye and greet solas” (VII,2773), not matters
that make him sick. The Host, too, wants no part of such ”hevy-
nesse” (VII,2787), for he finds it a "peyne" (VII,2786). Such talking makes him suffer too. It is "nat worth a boterflye" (VII,
2790). What is more, it has put him to sleep and almost caused him to fall from his horse into the mud ("slough"). Had he done so, he grumbles, the Monk would have had "noon audience" (VII,2801) and all of his talking would have been in vain. So both the Knight and the Host want the Priest to provide some relief from the unpleasant emotions, the psychological oppression, of the Monk's tragedies.
For the "hevynesse" of the Monk, the Priest is to substitute "joye and greet solas," to use the Knight's language, language later used by Chauntecleer, and not by chance as we shall see. Thus, even as the Priest begins his tale, he has entered into a sympathetic con tract with his audience, if the Knight and Host, a part of that audience, be allowed to stand for the whole. And there is no rea son why the Host at least should not be allowed to stand so, for he sees himself speaking for the entire audience: "And wel I woot the substance is in me,/If any thyng shal wel reported be" (VII,
2803-04-) .
Almost with his first word, the Priest exposes his sympathetic contract. For he speaks of the widow having "whilom" (VII,2822) dwelled in a small cottage and his whilom is, of course, equivalent 17 to "once-upon-a-time." By means of whilom, he invokes an ancient convention allowing him, in effect, to ask his audience to accept the most fantastic events he may present, provided the events are not contemporaneous with the audience. Furthermore, whilom allows the Priest temporally to remove his audience from the events of his tale and to diminish their interest in truth and fact as such, an 4-7
interest provoked by the Monk's chronicling of tragedies. By
diminishing their interest in truth and fact, the Priest makes way for his peculiar eloquence.-®-®
Shortly after using whilom, the Priest, in an ingratiating 1 g aside to his audience, completes his temporal distancing of his
tale by using the ancient formula of beast fables to justify the
speaking of his animal characters: "For thilke time Qny italics],
as I have understonde,/Beestes and briddes couden speke and singe"
(VII,2880-81) . Furthermore, by using the once-upon-a-time con
vention, the Priest immediately relaxes his audience. For, if
they accept the convention, if they agree to believe whatever fan
tastic events he provides, they do so with the expectation of being
amused, not oppressed. T h e r e is to be none of the tension engen
dered by the Monk's tragedies, for the genre the Priest chooses is
also to allow him to court the sympathy of his audience. His lit
erary form, one often used by medieval preachers to court listeners, 21 will both entertain and edify. Conventionally, this is what it
does. And conventionally the beast fable presents animals behaving
as people, thereby producing shifting comments on the animal world
and on the human world. In addition, the beast fable conventionally
offers knowledge winnowed from medieval science and natural history,
thereby allowing the one who tells a fable to court his audience by
satisfying its hunger for knowledge. The Nun’s Priest does not
fail to satisfy this hunger that his choice of literary forms
arouses, for he offers the pilgrims lore, accurate lore, about
rooster and hen, the fox, creation, astrology, and dreams. But the PriestTs exploitation of conventions and conventional expectations is not the only way he solicts the sympathy of his audience. His rapid narrative movement from the widow to Chaunte- cleer, his protagonist, also solicts sympathy. For in moving rapidly from people to beasts, he seems to say,."Relax. I want to tell you about animals, not men. My genre is not tragedy, but the beast fable." His genre is to protect the listening pilgrims, to offer them solace. His beast fable places a physical barrier, a physical distance, between his narrativers characters and his listening audience. Ostensibly, his auditors do not risk identify ing with Chauntecleer, Pertelote, and daun Russell, as they might have identified, and do identify, with the human characters of the
MillerTs Tale or the Monk*s Tale. What happened to beasts once- upon-a-time is not likely to touch their lives immediately. So the physical and temporal barriers the Priest places between his tale and his auditors create an emotional distance reassuring to his audience.
The Priest also uses his narrative technique to reassure his auditors and to maintain his sympathetic contract. For when he begins his portrait of Chauntecleer, and that of Pertelote, his mock heroic imagery enfolds the cock in dramatic irony, an irony arising from a disparity in understanding between the characters in his narrative and those listening to the narrative. Through the irony his mock heroics permit him, the Priest places his audience above the characters and action of his tale. Thus, he puts his audience in a position to understand the characters and action 4-9 while remaining emotionally aloof. He prepares his audience to see his tale as an exemplum--not as what has happened or must happen, but as what can happen, a preview. Not only does the
Priest’s dramatic i r o n y 2 3 place his audience above the characters and action, it exalts them and strengthens the emotional barrier between them and the tale while removing barriers to understand ing, for it separates them from the central characters who are humorous grotesques.^ When the irony holding the audience emotion ally above the action erjds, an ending marked by the cessation of jT* mock heroic imagery, the audience drops to the level of the action, thereby sharing the motion and emotion of the foxchase and Chaunte cleer ’s escape. The pilgrims then must experience surprise and elation, for though the Priest’s irony allowed them to see over the head of Chauntecleer, though it prepared them intellectually for
Chauntecleer’s fall, nothing prepared them for his escape, an abrupt and unexpected reversal that averts tragedy,^5 since the cock deflates the fox’s intrigue. Given the Monk’s tragedies, which the audience has just heard, the audience no doubt expects tragedy.
Further evidence of the Priest’s removal of the emotional barrier between his tale and his audience is the rhythm of the syntax the
Priest uses to describe the foxchase. The rhythm is a crescendo that mimes the chase itself, mimes the hue and cry of the pursuers
— a hue and cry, incidentally, that any fourteenth century audience would have had a physical and psychological response to. English law requiring a hue and cry in pursuit of felons, any audience would have heard such hubbub, have seen such a spectacle, indeed, have Q n joined in such a hue and cry.
The sympathetic contract between the Priest and his audience also rests on a shared psychological mood. As noted earlier, the audience, at least the Knight and the Host, desire relief from the pain of the Monk’s tragedies, from the anxiety enkindled by those tales of joy changing quickly to woe. That the Priest shares this desire is apparent, not only from his making his tale a substitute for the Monk’s, but from one of his pauses (VII,3204— 1*4-) for an ingratiating ironical aside that seems a swipe at the Monk with 27 whom he disagrees. Tongue in cheek, he observes that worldly joy passes swiftly (VII,3206) and that some ’’rethor” (3207) could com pose a ’’cronycle” (VII,3208) and record this fact ’’f o r a sovereyn notabilitee” (VII,3209).
And almost as if he fears his audience will accept his words uncritically, the Priest quickly casts doubt over such truths as the Monk has indeed chronicled:
This storye 0:he Priest’s) is also trewe, I undertake, As is the book of Launcelot de Lake That wommen holde in ful greet reverence. (VII,3211-13)
His phrase ’’also trewe” draws the Monk’s chronicling into the as sertion of the next two lines. The Priest assures his listeners that his tale and the Monk’s are as true as the romance of Launce lot, thereby leaving his audience to wonder if truth is in any or all of the tales. Here he is at his deceptive best and his de ceptiveness is tolerable because he engages his listener’s intel lectual interest and shares with them a sly chuckle at the Monk’s 51 expense. One may imagine that the Monk would not partake of the fun. That the Priest disagrees with the Monk and shares his other listeners* mood can be inferred from his tale, for in his depiction of Chauntecleer and in the plotting of his tale he makes a forceful assault on the Monk, as I shall show later.
Shared beliefs and standards, the intellectual and ethical frame of the tale, also allow the Priest to solicit the sympathy of his audience. Indeed, shared beliefs and standards may be the primary basis of the sympathetic contract, for in large measure the audience*s appreciation of the Priest*s fable rests on its sharing of his creed, its identification with the beliefs determining how he strives for his effects.^8 Clearly, the Priest winnows his subject matter through Christian belief— hence his closing remark that his listeners are to take his fruit and leave his chaff. Fur thermore, his parody of romance succeeds as parody only if his audi
ence shares, or is willing to share, his knowledge of and scorn for
courtly love and the action, it begets. In addition, his depiction
of Pertelote as a quack herbalist succeeds only if his’ audience
shares his distrust of human herbalists— a mistrust Chaucer’s
fictional audience no doubt shared with his non-fictional audience,
for as Jusserand notes, quack herbalists were thought so dangerous
in the fourteenth century that Englishmen were constantly urged to
shun them and legal authorities pursued them vigorously.^
Before considering how the Nun’s Priest exploits the sympathe
tic contract he has with his audience, I should perhaps consider 52
just what kind of audience hears his tale and the appetites that
bring the pilgrims together on the road to Canterbury. Thus, the
Prologue of the Canterbury Tales must detain me for a time, because
it offers a glimpse of the pilgrims’ appetites.
The reverdie of the Prologue announces that the pilgrims to whom the Nun’s Priest speaks are on their way to the shrine of
Thomas a Becket at Canterbury, the saint having helped them when
when they were sick. Like all shrines, Thomas a Becket’s is a
center of belief, for a shrine is a place ’’where God made his power 30 especially manifest.” So the curative power of the shrine draws
the pilgrims. But so does the revival of the land and the spring
time; the pilgrims respond to "shoures soote" and the ’’sweete
breeth” of Zephirus.^
As the Prologue makes plain, however, the pilgrims have their
private as well as their public motives for pilgrimage. Apparent
ly, late from his ’’viage,” the Knight does pilgrimage to honor vows op he made in battle. The Prioresst who in all things must be "estat-
lich of manere,” no doubt makes the pilgrimage because she is
pushed by ’’secular impulses” and drawn by the” sacred redemptive
will.”^ If the Prioress’ motives are ambiguous, the Wife of Bath’s
are more than clear, for she loves a pilgrimage as dearly as the
Clerk loves his "twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed.” Apparently,
the Wife early discovered the delights of roadside dalliance; she
is also in search of another husband. The Summoner and the Pardoner
are such manifest rascals, as Chaucer the Pilgrim describes them,
that their motives can only be venal. The Pardoner’s behavior 53 indicates that, like the Host, he sees the pilgrimage as a business opportunity, for he can fatten his purse by selling his relics and his pardons all hot from Rome, if his fellow pilgrims be suf ficiently gullible. The Parson, who teaches "Christes loore" to his flock, and his brother the Plowman, who lives in "pees and parfit charitee," are no doubt moved by the purity of their hearts to make the pilgrimage to the shrine of "the hooly blisful martir."
From piety, from loyalty to their divine source, they make their pilgrimage solely to worship. They know full well they are crea tures made for God.
Although the private motives of the pilgrims vary considerably, they all, save two, manage to suggest that they mean to have as much of this world as they can between baptism and burial. The
Knight’s inability to endure the Monk’s catalog of tragedies and his preference for tales of "joye and greet solas" suggest that he has his share of the pride of life, that he belongs more to this world than to the next. Although she seems not to know it, the
Prioress’ "ful sheene" golden brooch, inscribed Amor vineit omnia, and her "estatlich" manners strongly suggest that she finds secular love more important than divine, physical delights more precious than spiritual. Her fashionable brooch implies avarice, implies lust of the eyes, as does the Monk’s golden pin complete with "love- knotte." The Prioress’ feeding of her "smale houndes" on "rosted flessh" or "milk and wastel-breed" suggests less than a charitable concern for men, just as strongly as the Monk’s delight in a "fat swan," and his own fat,' suggests gluttony. The Wife of Bath, per 54 haps because she herself is so twisted by her own lust of the flesh, sees that the Friar serves his own sexual appetites (III,
874-81). The Clerk, his gaze firmly fixed on his "twenty bookes," clearly knows well the excesses of curiosity, the lust of the eyes.
And the Summoner and the Pardoner singing their grotesque duet
("Com hider, love, to me") are throat-deep in fleshly lusts. In short, only the Parson and the Plowman of all those making up the
Nun’s Priest’s audience seem to maintain proper contempt for the world, the flesh, and the devil. With but two exceptions, the listening pilgrims are all spiritually sick.
That many of the pilgrims are also physically sick is beyond contention. The Reeve is a choleric man, thin and pale. The Wife
is somewhat deaf. The Cook has an open sore on his shin and has,
incidentally, known the curse of many a pilgrim who has eaten his parsley stuffing mixed with flies (1,4349-52). The Summoner’s
fire-red cherubim’s face strongly suggests that he is mortally ill with leprosy. And the Pardoner, who in his person signifies God’s
love, is a eunuch, thus as ill-equipped for physical love as he is
for divine love.
That the Nun’s Priest knows his audience well, even the purity
of the Parson and the Plowman, is obvious from the way that he
shapes his tale and exploits his sympathetic contract with his
audience. He speaks the language of his environment, of the pil
grimage; he knows about spiritual quests, about sickness and health,
about pollution and purgation, contrition and confession. He seems humanly perceptive in a way the "narwe” Parson is not, so he makes a tale, shapes an experience, his entire audience can live, can enact. His spoofing beast fable is a cautionary tale whose form and rhythm are not merely to make those sick and sinful pilgrims laugh, but to make them remember that there is a "joye and greet solas” not of the World and to incite them to the contrition, con fession, and satisfaction, the ”penaunce,” by which they may gain a more durable ”joye and greet solas.” Both laughter and knowledge issue from the Priest’s tale. For though his spoofing tale need not be allegorical, it must have applicability to the pilgrims’ lives or else he betrays his priestly integrity, which he means to honor as his cautionary remark about the pilgrims’ obligation to winnow his fruit from his chaff indicates.
Since form and rhythm^1* are the pilgrims’ path to knowledge, a path they all can tread, form and rhythm are also the path we must explore at this point. As I suggested in my second chapter, the debate with which the Priest’s tale opens is a narrative ar rangement suggesting values and meanings the Priest intends to amplify as his tale unfolds. Within the tale, the debate is only a moment of dramatic arrest, of incipient action, but it does have its own internal movement that prepares the pilgrims for the action of the amplificatio, for the strife of the debate foreshadows
Chauntecleer’s strife with daun Russell and it lets the pilgrims in on action to come. It does not, however, foreshadow Chauntecleer’s escape from the jaws of his adversary, and this is of great impor tance in understanding the elation the Host, and all the pilgrims, takes from the tale. The debate opens with the action at a nadir. Daun Russell has
already broken through the hedges and entered the grove. Chaunte
cleer, half-asleep and sick, half-alert and polluted, murmurs on his perch, there tormented by a dream forewarning him of disaster.
His angry wife breaks into his noisy sleep and heaps abuse on him
as she draws unflattering inferences from his noise. When he ex poses the source of his discomfort, she parades her medical lore
before him and has the fight much her own way. Seemingly, her
empirical truths will rout Chauntecleer even before his wits are
fully roused from slumber. But the cock does gather his intel
lectual forces and after a concessio (VII,2979-80) in which he
grants that dreams may signify joy as well as woe, he avoids a rout
by presenting an awesome number of exempla and authorities to show
"that dremes been to drede" (VII, 3036). Against the truths of ex
perience he throws the truths of authority. And in a most manly
fashion, he informs Pertelote that he puts no store in laxatives,
"for they been venymous" (VII,3155). He will not take them; he
will challenge them— "I hem diffye" (VII,3156). Furthermore, he
is convinced that his "avisioun" warns of "adversitee" (VII,3152-
53). So the verbal combat ends, for the cock would talk of "myrthe,
and stynte al this" (VII,3157) .
But the combat does not end before the Priest's audience has
had a chance to be engaged in it and in the tale of which it is a
part. For, when the verbal combat ends, the audience has been
alerted to the repetitive form 35 of the tale, to the Protean prin
ciple of parody that shapes ChauntecleerTs knightly adventures. In addition, the syllogistic progression of the verbal combat has aroused some interest in whether the truth dwells with Chaunte cleer or Pertelote. And, if what each pilgrim brings with him determines what he sees, the Merchant and the Host do not neglect qc the domestic squabble. The former, whose wife is "worste that may be" (IV,1218-20) , knows well the torment wives offer in marri age; the latter, whose wife regards him as "a milksop," or a "coward ape" (VII, 1910), also bears the wounds of marital bliss, but more important the Host has an inordinate interest in sexual matters, so his attention is engaged by ChauntecleerTs sexual problems and the resolution of sexual tension his treading of Pertelote seems to bring.
That the Wife of Bath has followed the syllogistic progression of the verbal combat rather closely is apparent from the way she begins her Prologue:
Experience jmy italicsj, though noon auctoritee Were in this world, is right ynogh for me (III, 1-2)
Her remark allows little doubt that in this conflict between the truths of experience and the truths of authority, she has sided with Pertelote who speaks for, and from, experience. ^ The choler
ic Reeve also has reason to take a lively interest in the source
of ChauntecleerTs "superfluytee . . .of rede cholera" (VII,2927-28) .
Is he not a "sclendre colerik man" (1,587) ever eager to find re
ferences to himself? The mortally ill Summoner and one who might
aid him, the Physician, may also find something in the debate to
interest them. Surely, given the widespread fourteenth-century 58 assaults on quack herbalists, the Physician, a man of that century, will react as negatively to Pertelote as a twentieth-century Ameri can physician to a chiropractor.
This much at least is clear about the debate. It arouses sexual (courtly love, incest) and fecal(T,Taak som laxatyf”) anxie ties to which all of the pilgrims can react. In addition, the debate ends with a momentary frustration of the pilgrims’ cognitive interest in the source of Chauntecleer’s dream. Indeed, it has created a cognitive interest that did not exist before the Priest began his tale and it has partially foreshadowed the satisfaction of that interest.
But a desire for knowledge is not the only desire the debate creates in the pilgrims, for the motion, the symmetry, of the de bate allows temporal advances and delays in the action to occur by turn, a consequence of conflict between persons occupying different
OO places in the medieval hierarchy. So time does not move forward in the tale, and the advances and delays occurring by turn shape a moment of dramatic arrest that cannot but arouse in the pilgrims a hunger for temporal progression, for a linear progression akin to that in which the major Christian events occur.^ Because the movement, the time, of the debate has been cyclical, the swinging to and fro of the argument has only brought Chauntecleer back to where he began, for though he out-reasons Pertelote, he does not win the verbal combat. The pull of Pertelote*s flesh being too strong, his reason falls victim to appetite, thereby recapitulat ing the fall of Adam— an observation the Priest himself makes. 59
Thus, the debate simply offers the pilgrims more of what the Monk has already given them— a rehearsal of how the cyclical motion of events casts men down. Though amused the pilgrims may find this frustrating. Have not the Knight and the Host asked the Priest to tell a tale of joy and solace? Has not the Host’s complaint that the Monk’s tragedies put him to sleep indicated that tales having cyclical time lack suspense, if not richness?
Considered as a moment of dramatic arrest, the debate is a moment in time when Chauntecleer may become whatever he chooses to become. For the cock, it is a moment of indecision preceding a
decision from which unwanted consequences issue. Paradoxically, the debate postpones action even as it prepares for action. For the debate itself is incipient action joined to temporal advance
and delay, the characteristic rhythm of a comic plot that typical
ly scuttles between opinions (illusions) before moving linearly to proof (reality) Because the debate scuttles back and forth be
tween opinions about the source of the cock’s illness, the pilgrim
audience must wait for the amplificatio to bring proof of the source
of the cock’s illness as well as a linear progression of time that
will satisfy their hunger for temporal progression.
The swinging to and fro of argument within the debate produces
reversals and discoveries for the characters of the tale to suffer
and for the Priest’s audience to experience. Moving from depres
sion to elation, from low to high emotional state, Chauntecleer
undergoes a psychological reversal as the debate draws to a close. 60
But his psychological reversal does not beget a corresponding dis covery, for he passes neither from ignorance to knowledge nor from knowledge to ignorance. True, his reasoning in the debate confirms what he knows about his dream’s import, but his move from an emo- . tional low to an emotional high arises from his yielding to the delights of Pertelote’s flesh. Thus, the audience, at least the best harvesters among the pilgrims, can see an ironical incongruity between what the cock discovers and what he suffers. This is mat ter to produce headshaking laughter at the silly cock so in bondage to his appetites he cannot heed what his reason teaches him. Thus, despite the sexual and fecal anxieties provoked by the debate, the audience remains safely above the action, for the dramatic irony in which Chauntecleer struts throat-deep makes the audience intel lectually aware of the limits of his response, but does not immerse it emotionally in what Chauntecleer suffers by virtue of his limited perception.
Like the dispositio preparing its way, the amplificatio has
its own internal movement, a movement that is one with' the plot of the Priest’s tale, which the debate momentarily caused to fade out
of focus. As the amplificatio of the tale opens, the tale's clock
starts ticking again. x Cyclical movement yields to linear pro
gression toward the natural terminus of this tale rooted in a problem of knowledge, the natural terminus being self-discovery.
The dispositio, as noted, leaves the pilgrims frustrated in
their desire to know what will happen next, for though it has the
unsatisfactory cyclical time of the Monk’s tragedies, it does, by virtue of its causing the plot to fade from focus, arouse suspense,
something the Monk’s tragedies did not do.1^ The amplificatio
exploits this frustration and practical interest, for its linear movement takes Chauntecleer and the audience, from opinion to proof,
from illusion to reality, thereby dissolving the frustration and
satisfying the practical interest of the audience. But it also robs the audience of the illusion of perspicacity and power that
the dispositio provided, for the Priest’s closing formula applies
his tale to his audience. More on this later.
The Priest-’s foreshortening is evidence that the pace of the
amplificatio is to be brisk. His telescoping of time (action)
avoids any diverting of the audience from what is at the center of
his interest--Chauntecleer’s ritual and exemplary movement from
pollution to purgation. The amplificatio, as I noted in my second
chapter, presents Chauntecleer as a knight-cock undergoing a
parodic romance adventure. His spatial movement— from perch to
ground to perch, from high to low to high place— implies a temporal
movement and is the source of the internal motion of the amplifi
catio. The amplificatio begins immediately after the cock assures
Pertelote that by her "softe side” he is ”ful of joye and of solas”
(VII,3170) and then flies down from his perch, which he finds too
"narwe” for him to "ryde” Pertelote, He then feathers Pertelote
’’twenty tyme” and rides her ”eke as ofte” (VII,3177-78) . At this
point the Priest breaks into his tale to say that in his ’’pasture”
he will leave Chauntecleer "roial, as a prince is in his halle”
(VII, 3184). He will return later to recount his "aventure” (VII, 62
3186). He then leaps forward at once from March to May 3, the day on which the fox seizes the cock, the day on which the cock’s parodic romance adventure begins.
That Chauntecleer’s adventure is a parody of romance adventure
I noted in my second chapter. His movement from his perch to the ground and eventually to the grove (a perilous journey) leads to his conflict of wits (agon) with the fox and a subsequent life and death struggle fpathos), the second conflict of wits with a natural adversary, and his intellectual victory (anagnorisis) over the fox, *+3 which signals his heroic possibilities.
Like the disposition the amplificatio has its own internal movement, its own reversals and discoveries. Physically, morally, and intellectually one with Pertelote at the end of the dispositio,
Chauntecleer is in a high emotional state, a state of physical joy and solace. Having opened with speeches spirited and rough in rhythm ("Avoy fy on yow, herteleesl”) and moved through Chaunte cleer Ts speeches inflated and "estatlich of manere," the dispositio ends with a crescendo of activity, not merely verbal, but physical, sexual, activity. Chauntecleer, however, remains ill, remains morally polluted, as his sexual union with Pertelote makes dra matically clear. The abrupt appearance of the cock’s natural adversary, the fox, begins his reversal, his movement from high to low state, from joy to woe; the crescendo becomes a descrescendo as Chauntecleerfs joy changes to fear in his "herte." With decep tive flattery the fox, however, allays the cock’s fear and per 63 suades him to accept his interpretation of their relationship, thereby effecting the cockTs merger intellectually and morally with the second natural "contrarie" he is to battle, Pertelote being the first. Seized by the fox, Chauntecleer merges physically with his adversary who divides him from Pertelote and his kingdom by fleeing from the farmyard to the grove, his meal in his mouth. The hue and cry, the "howping" and "powping," of those pursuing the fo x ^ indicates a new crescendo, another, and unexpected, reversal, for the cock beguiles his beguiler and flies from the fox’s mouth upward to perch in a tree and to "shrewe" himself for his blind ness, his want of vigilance. For the first time in the tale, he uses his wit to effect his salvation. His last reversal, signifi cantly a passage from woe to joy, brings with it a discovery of his ethical identity. His "shrewe" implies he now sees the limita tions of his old life and the need to transcend these limitations.
Perched in a tree high above the fox and outside his kingdom,
Chauntecleer is now nearer heaven. No longer caught in the cease less repetitive activity implied by his riding Pertelote "twenty tyme," he has come to rest high above the earth and its threats.
Thus, the amplificatio offers the pilgrims a parodic romance adven ture in which Chauntecleer moves through agon, pathos, and anagnori
sis. And the amplificatio completes the movement from opinion to proof, from illusion to reality, for the source of Chauntecleer’s
dream, hence its meaning, is now clear. Finally, the conclusion
of the amplificatio is also the conclusion of Chauntecleer’s move ment from illness to health, a ritual movement from pollution to purgation. Like the dispositio, which it parallels, the amplifi
catio rises to a climax that is a crescendo of activity— the hue
and cry of the amplificatio rhythmically parallels the coitus
concluding the dispositio. And, like the dispositio, the amplifi
catio moves from descrescendo and woe to crescendo and joy, but the joy that accompanies the crescendo of the amplificatio is real, not illusory, for it arises from the cock’s separation from his natural adversary, from his repudiation of his old life, and from his purging of his pollution (before he had only ignored it or
sought physical cures, herbs, for it). So the Priest closes his
tale with the cock’s penitence, and it is penitence as theParson
describes it:
CThe sinner} shal be verray penitent, he shal first biwaylen the synnes that he hath doon, and stidefastely purposen in his herte to have shrift of mouthe, and to doon satisfaccioun,/ and nevere to doon thyng for which hym oghte more to biwayle or to compleyne, and to con tinue in good werekes, or elles his repentance may nat availle. (X,86-87)
As the Parson would have a sinner do, the cock does. He laments
his sin (”I shrewe myself") and pines over his misdeeds, his want
of vigilance.
Instructing his audience to winnow his fruit from his chaff
and warning them not to mistake his tale for a "folye," the Nun’s
Priest closes his tale. Clearly, the pilgrims are to see that
Chauntecleer has moved from sin to penitence, thereby enacting the
Priest’s ideas about sinning and penitence. The cock’s sin has
been loving the "o thyng" God has given him, PerteloteTs flesh, her
"beautee" and "softe side," more than God (VII,3158-60). Indeed, 65 he has loved his wife’s flesh so much that he has momentarily lost his "drede” of dying (VII,3162) . Again, the Parson’s words illumi nate the cock’s sin:
Right so the synful man that loveth his synne, hym semeth that it to hym moost sweete of anythyng;/ but fro that tyme that he loveth sadly oure Lord Jhesu Crist, and desireth the lif perdurable, ther nys to him no thyng moore abhomynable./ For soothly the lawe of God is the love of God. (X,122-24)
Having felt the teeth of death, Chauntecleer regains his fear of dying and the power to curse his old life, the power to find his sin "abhomynable,” so he bewails ”the synnes that he hath doon.”
Hence, if the Priest’s audience takes the fruit of his tale, not its chaff, each pilgrim will experience the tale as an inducement to penitence, an incitement to contrition, confession, and satis faction. In the Parson’s words, each will experience ’’what is the fruyt of penaunce . . . the endelees blisse of hevene,/ther joye hath no contrariwistee of wo ne grevaunce” (X,1075-76). Each will
see, as the Parson foresees in his encomium to heaven’s joys (X,
1075-80) , the end of sickness as well as the illumination of what the Parson calls the "foul and derk” (X,1077) body. The Nun’s
Priest’s listeners do, then, receive a tale of ”joye and greet
solas," but not quite what the Knight and Host anticipated.
The Knight, whose interruption of the Monk’s tragedies gives rise to the Nun’s Priest's fable, has indicated a desire to hear
of the ”joye and greet solas" (VII,2774) men experience, not their
"sodeyn fal." The Host has grumbled that the Monk’s tragedies are
”nat worth a boterflye” (VII,2790); he wants a tale that has "de- 66 sport” (VII,2791). Seemingly, he would not oppose the "fo.Lye"
(1,3144), the defamation of character, that the Reeve finds the
Miller’s fabliau to be.
The Nun's Priest gives both the Host and the Knight what they want, and what they do not want, for his tale is a "folye,” in the
Reeve's sense of the word, as well as a consolatio. By virtue of his tale’s applicability to his audience, the Priest indirectly defames a number of the pilgrims,^ including the Host and the
Knight! It is surely no accident that Pertelote's abusive language
("hertelees . . .coward" (VII,2908-11) ) echoes that the Host says his wife uses when chiding him ("milksop . . . coward ape" (VII,
1910) ) ^ no accident that the cock's Latin is, as bad as the
Host’s,1^ surely no accident that Chauntecleer is eyeing a "boter- flye" (VII,3274) when his natural adversary, the fox, comes un expectedly into view. To no avail, as the endlink of his tale indicates, the Priest invites the Host, whom the Pilgrim Chaucer calls "oure aller cok" (1,824-) , to see himself reflected in Chaunte cleer, a prideful creature whose reason serves his appetite, whose attention to trivia truly "nat worth a boterflye" makes him less than vigilant to mortal dangers. The Priest also invites the
Knight to see himself in Chauntecleer and to apply to himself the lesson of the cock’s life— that fleshly joy and solace are fragile and ephemeral, that they are, to bring the Knight’s words into my context, a "greet disese" (VII,2771).
The Priest puts into Chauntecleer’s mouth the Knight’s very own words. "I am so ful of joye and of solas," the cock, that 67 parodic courtly lover, tells Pertelote as his lust for her rises within him. And, significantly, the cock utters these words, the
Knight’s words, when he is telling Pertelote of the bliss he finds in her ’’softe side,” even when he may not ”ryden her, and is tell ing her that the joy she affords him causes him to defy his dream’s warning. But the Priest is not content merely to echo the Knight’s words. He makes his tale a mock heroic burlesque of the Knight’s romance and the courtly life it depicts, essentially a pagan life in a pagan time.
I have shown in my first chapter that Pertelote and Chaunte cleer appear as courtly mistress and courtly lover and that
Chauntecleer undergoes a romance adventure. But I have not shown the following parallels between the Knight’s and the Priest’s tales.
Awakening from a dream resembling Palamon’s lover’s vision, Chaunte cleer prays that his body will be kept from ’’foul prisoun,” thereby recalling the ’’foul prisoun" in which Palamon and Arcite languish ed. Both Chauntecleer and Arcite suffer from the lover’s malady.
Both meet their archenemies, their natural adversaries, on the third of May; one is gathering herbs, the other "floures.,” Chaunte cleer and Palamon, servants of Venus, are almost undone by Mars in conflicts over which Venus and Mars hover, (The cock is seized on Friday, a day over which Venus has dominion, but during that part of the day when hot and dry humours, those of Mars, dominate and at an hour (ten to eleven) when Saturn dominates and the hours of Jupiter and Mars are in the ascendancy, the hour of Venus (seven- to eight) having past.)1*'** Finally, after a mock heroic plea that 68
Venus aid her servant Chauntecleer, the Priest alludes to Priam ,
Troy, and matter of Rome similar to that marking the KnightTs nar rative as a classical romance essentially pagan. That the Priest’s mock heroic tale not only parodies that romance but burlesques and judges it, as well as the courtly love it celebrates, is implicit in the failure of the epic machinery to effect the salvation of
Chauntecleer. Venus cannot save her faithful servant, as the
Priest makes more than clear in his mock complaint recounting her impotence and her servant’s sin, namely, that of using his sexual powers "moore for delit than world to multiplye” (VII,3345).
Chauntecleer’s sin is that of courtly lovers, the Priest implies, and so implying invites the Knight to see how Chauntecleer’s adventure applies to him.
’’Chaffing,” the Priest also invites the Monk to see himself in
Chauntecleer, for the cock shares some significant qualities with
MQ the Monk. The Priest tells his auditors that the cock’s voice
’’was merier than the merye orgon/In massedayes that in the cherche goon” (VII,2852-53). In the General Prologue, the Pilgrim Chaucer makes an observation any of the pilgrims could have made: the Monk’s bridle jingles as loudly as ’’dooth the chapel belle" (1,171). These
similes place the cock and the Monk in ironic relation to the
church. Furthermore, any of the pilgrims can see that both the
cock and the Monk are skilled at telling tales about reversals mov
ing men from joy to woe. Reasoning from the Monk’s appearance and
speaking somewhat maliciously, the Host describes the Monk as a
’’tredefowel aright” (VII, 1945) , thereby implying that the Monk, 69 not at all unlike Chauntecleer, serves Venus; the love-knot in the
Monk’s golden pin does nothing to undercut this suggestion. Both the cock and the Monk are gluttonous. Pertelote implies gluttony when speculating that her husband’s dream may arise from excessive drinking or eating; the Host implies as much about the Monk, say ing "It is gentil pasture ther thow goost" (VII,1933). Both the cock and the Monk hear wicked and dangerous flattery, one from daun
Russell and the other from the Host, who not only praises the Monk’s sexual powers, but also asks the Monk to tell a tale of hunting-- a tale the Parson, if not the Reeve, would certainly label a
"folye." Both the cock and the Monk have failed to remain properly vigilant; each "wynketh, whan he sholde see." Indeed, each "jang- leth, whan he sholde holde his pees." The cock’s nature requires him to chant the heavenly changes that control earthly life, yet, lax astrologer that he is, having yielded to the three temptations^® so much a part of Adam’s fall, he fails to see the near-disaster awaiting him. The Monk, his eye fixed on Fortune, fails to see that tragedies are God-sent; thus, in describing the unexpected reversals of great and happy men, he overlooks the redemptive pos
sibilities in such reversals. In brief, Chauntecleer and the Monk have much in common and both fall victim to Fortune.
The Priest’s disagreement with the Monk surfaces not only in his characterization of Chauntecleer but in the plotting of his tale. His tale’s denouement, marked by the fox’s seizure of the
cock, has a double reversal moving the cock first from joy to woe, then from woe to joy. And each reversal brings its own emotions 70 and its own discoveries.
Far from being a helpless victim of Fortune or circumstance, the cock moves himself to the point of catastrophe, the point of ritual death so often found in c o m e d y . 51 He deceives his deceiver, his "natural contrarie," and he escapes from the mouth of the
"feend." His action is an exercise of free will in the resistance of evil. So the recognition plot of the tale rehearses the cockTs discovery of his ethical identity, a discovery implicit in his "I shrewe myself," for by this utterance he accepts his culpability for what has befallen him. He will "shrewe" himself "first," then blame his natural adversary or circumstance. Having had a fore taste of death, of Last Things, he will live a watchful life alert to the coming of the "feend."52 No doubt for the Monk's considera tion, the Priest has his tale's plot suggest another view of the woe that befalls m e n .
? t : The Priest’s tale, however, is more than "folye," more than polemic and caricature. As he himself notes, it offers fruit and chaff. It offers what will and what will not nourish its hearers.
Aptly, knowing that his tale does offer nourishment, the Priest concludes by praying that his tale will bring all of his listeners to "heighe blisse" (VII,3*446) .
And his tale does bring "heighe blisse" to the pilgrims. It does so in part by its movement from opinion (illusion) to proof
(reality), by its syllogistic progression, its forensic complexity.
From one viewpoint the tale is a trial by jury in which the emotion ally aloof pilgrims serve as a jury that judges both the opinions of the plaintiff, Pertelote, and the defendant, Chauntecleer. The audience as jury must winnow the fruit from the chaff in the dis pute between the cock and his wife, the lover and his paramour.
The fox inadvertently serves as a witness for the defendant Chaunte cleer, and the unfolding of the plot, the amplificatio, is evidence by which the audience accepts Chauntecleer’s opinions and rejects those of Pertelote. Paradoxically, in accepting Chauntecleer1s opinions the audience judges him guilty of a crime, a want of humility and vigilance, at the very least, for it cannot fail to note the ethical disparity between the cock and the widow to whom he belongs, and being Christian, the audience knows that the lowly
(the widow) are the bearers of true nobility and the proud (the cock) are ethically the lowly. Having as one of its relationships to the Priest’s tale that of a jury to a trial, the audience tran
scends the tale emotionally and intellectually. It dwarfs the tale
as it sees beyond it. The emotional, intellectual,’ and moral dwarf
ing is one way the tale makes "heighe blisse" available to the pilgrims.
It also makes "heighe blisse" available to the pilgrims by its
manner of presenting the cock, the hen, and the fox. The cock
and the hen are round characters; they have the power to surprise
the audience by behaving in unexpected ways.^ The fox, however,
is a flat character, the clever, deceptive fox of fable.^^ But r c all three are grotesques. As human beings they are less than
what men and women are either incipiently or at their best. As 72 beasts they are more than beasts can, and should, be. In addition, the characters vie with one another in being repugnant. Perte lote ’s quackery, pride, and shrewishness make her less than appeal ing. But, unlike the fox, she is not consciously deceptive; she is merely pridefully mistaken. In his pride Chauntecleer struts in his farmyard palace, his lust joined to filth (excrement), as
Pertelote suggests when she implies his distress arises from consti pation (,rTaak som laxatyf") . But Chauntecleer is not merely ridicu lous. He is ugly in the service of Venus. His own words call attention to his ugliness. For in speaking of how he delights to
”ryde” Pertelote, he taps an ancient metaphor in which the soul not ”up-so-doun” rides the flesh as a man rides a horse.^ He then dramatically discloses his lust by riding Pertelote ’’twenty tyme" or more. All in all, the pilgrims look down on a farmyard scene of bondage to appetite, deception and self-deception, per version and absurdity. And the scene they behold admonishes them to be better than the grotesques provoking their laughter and revulsion,admonishes them to be wholly human, to pursue the
”joye” and ’’solas’’ that is genuine ’’heighe blisse.”
The tale, however, does more than admonish. As a way to
’’heighe blisse,” it offers a solution to the pilgrims’ own problems of spiritual and physical pollution— if the Priest’s •eloquence has persuaded his audience to see their problems as he sees them. As the tale unfolds, Chauntecleer moves from Impiety (failure to be loyal to the source of his being) to piety. And the audience moves with him as it listens to the Priest’s tale. Furthermore, whatever else 73 the tale is, it is an incitement to acceptance. While acknowledg
ing the existence of unfriendly and friendly forces, it also shows the power of a free agent to deal with his world as it is, to deal with its seeming contingency. Chauntecleer is conspicuously inferi or in power and intelligence to the pilgrims who hear of his adven tures, but he succeeds in deflating the intrigue of his natural adversary, a ’’feend.” His victory, an intelligent exercise of free will, implies that no man superior in power and intelligence to him need be the victim of Fortune or the hero of a tragedy. No man need endure the meaningless woes the Monk described. The cock’s victory also implies an improved communal life. Being at once cock, husband, shepherd, and king, in effecting his own salvation by
deflating the fox’s intrigue, Chauntecleer effects that of the farm yard community. In his salvation is its resurrection. As his
cupidity changes to charity, his Babylon becomes his Jerusalem.
As an exemplum, then, the Priest’s tale invites the pilgrims
to see the actual human world reflected in the fictional farmyard world— a world "up-so-doun." In addition, the tale enacts the way
that an individual or a community may effect its salvation. The
coming of a man’s natural adversary, the "feend,” or an abrupt
reversal of Fortune need not occasion despair. Rather, it should
incite spiritual improvement, incite the sinful man to ’’penaunce”
and piety, from which he may gain ’’heighe blisse,” true ”joye" and
’’solas.”
Viewed thus, the Priest’s tale solves and interprets the audi
ence’s problem of spiritual and physical pollution. By reminding 74 them that they share the same substance--the feudal, Christian ethos in which, for example, courtly manners and misogyny exist— the Priest ingratiates himself to his listeners. Having establish ed his sympathetic contract with his listeners, he moves to make them accept his view of human folly, his definition of vigilance, and his remedy for ills resulting from a failure to remain alert to the coming of the ufeend.tf That most of his audience surrenders to his viewpoint is suggested by the enthusiasm of the Host for the
PriestTs tale. But the HostTs response also points to the limited success the Priest has in making his audience see.
The Host stands too close to the Priest's tale, so he sees only the sexual details, much as the spectator standing too close to a painting sees only smudges of paint. If the Host stands too close, the Wife of Bath stands too far from the tale, for her readi ness to talk (111,1-2) about what experience teaches suggests that she has been waiting for a chance to rebut the proofs of authority
Chauntecleer parades before Pertelote. The ineluctable conclusion is that not all of the pilgrims see what the Priest teaches, and even those who do see may have hearts that refuse to assent, may prefer pollution to purgation, cupidity to charity.
But perhaps the Priest himself realizes that some of his grain will fall on hard ground and some of his chaff be eaten as fruit.
Certainly, his warning not to regard his tale as merely a "folye"
(VII,3438-43) suggests as much. Significantly, he offers no sug gestion that Chauntecleer may not have to repeat his experience.
Indeed, it is clear that the cock will have to descend from his 75 perch' above and beyond his farmyard world. He will again know the delights of Pertelote’s flesh. He will again have the problem of protecting himself and his flock from their natural adversary, who has been defeated, not destroyed. The Priest’s silence may well mean he knows that despite his exemplum the pilgrims will sin from a want of vigilance and have to rediscover contrition, confession, and satisfaction as the way to that ’’heighe blisse," that "joye and greet solas" securing them forever from the jaws of their own
"feend." 76
CHAPTER III: FOOTNOTES
1 Preface to Paradise Lost (London and New York, 19M-2) , p. 19. Lewis also observes (p.2) that a poem "can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say and as a thing which he makes. From the one point of view it is an expression of opinions and emotions; from the other it is an organization of words which exists to produce a particular kind of patterned experience in the readers (my italics} ."
2 For me the term enact is an important critical tool. I agree with John Ciardi (Dialogue with an Audience (Philadelphia and New York, 1963} , p.151) who insists that T,a poem does not talk about ideas; it enacts them" and enacts them in such a way as to make the reader or auditor re-enact the ideas. Both Ciardi and I are in debt to Kenneth Burke (A Grammer of Motives (New York, 1952), p.447) who holds that "a poem is an act, the sym bolic act of the poet who made it--an act of such a nature that, in surviving as a structure Cform} or object, it enables us as readers to re-enact jjny italics} it." I take it that when Burke speaks of a poem as "symbolic action," he means the poem is action— purposive human action— and the symbol merely its characteristic mode. From this viewpoint, a poem or tale is a human performance to refashion the world.
3 Counterstatement (New York, 1931) , p.M-O.
•4- L o g . cit.
5 Ibid., p.67.
6 Ibid., p.69. This transformation of the artist’s emotion has also been noted by Edward Bullough (Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (London, 1957), p.127) who remarks that in the transformation of emotion "the ’man’ dies and the ’artist’ comes to life, and with him the work of Art .... The result is the distanced finished production . . . the distancing means the separation of personal affections, whether idea or complex experience, from the concrete person ality of the experiencer."
7 Burke (Grammar, p.M-82) distinguishes between the poem as constitutive act and the poem as sensuous object. As con stitutive act the poem is the means by which the poet consti tutes his world through language, by which he makes his world anew and passes it on to his audience. For a systematic state ment and defense of this view, see Eliseo Vivas, "What is a Poem?" Creation and Discovery (New York, 1955), pp.73-92. 77
8 The Structure of Literature (Chicago, 1962), p.5. Goodman ex plains well what transpires between one who looks at a work and the work itself: "We identify with the world of the work as our space and time and sensory existence. (I do not mean ’identify1 with the hero, which is largely an unconscious pro-' cess to which some people are subject.) Our experience is the immediate presentation, the aesthetic surface . . . .Then we can see the plausibility of looking for the importance of the experience (aesthetic perception) in the internal struc ture of the presented work. When we are absorbed, the motions, proportions, and conflicts presented are the motions, propor tions, and conflicts of our experiencing bodies (at rest, in isolation). And these motions, conflicts, and resolutions of experiencing are the various feelings, attitudes, and concerns that are important for us. Thus it is plausible to say, as we shall, ’Fear is such-and-such a sequence in the complex plot’ Cp.4-3."
9 Eliseo Vivas ("What is a Poem?" Creation and Discovery (New York, 195?), p.80) also holds that a poem is a constitutive act and observes "unlike the language of science and that of practical communication, what poetry says or means, it says in and through language. Through language it refers to an object that can also be referred to by means of a more or less carefully contrived paraphrase. In its language the poem says something by means of the linguistic aspect of the language as such and not of those aspects of the language' . . .carrying semantic and pragmatic dimensions of meaning."
10 I borrow the term "sympathetic contract" from John Ciardi (How Does a Poem Mean? [Boston, 1959J, p.846) who writes "every poem makes some demand upon the reader’s sympathies . . . .That demand upon the reader’s sympathetics may be made implicitly, but there can be no poem without some sort of sympathetic contract between poet and reader."
11 Burke, Counter statement, p. *47.
12 Burke, Counter statement, pp. <+8-*4-9.
13 David Daiches, A Study of Literature for Readers and Critics (New York, 196*4-), p.221.
1*4 Burke, Counter statement, p. 2*40.
15 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957)— hereafter cited as Works. All line citations are to this text.
16 Robert E. Kaske ("The Knight’s Interruption of the Monk’s Tale," ELH, XXIV (1957J, 2*49-68) thinks that the Knight finds 78
the Monk’s narrative a "greet disese" because he sees it "not wholly true" (p.266). Kaske imagines the Knight reasons as follows: "If we are to have such comparatively unphilosophical stories (as the Monk’s}, the Knight continues in effect, those that tell of pleasant fortune are ’joye and greet solas’ and ’gladsom’— fundamentally because the appearances set forth in even such stories can give a true account of simple good for tune, and perhaps also because stories of good fortune are . . .likely to represent with a greater degree of poetic truth the reality of an ordered and ultimately beneficial universe {p.276}." I do not agree with Kaske’s explanation of why the Knight interrupts the Monk. Starting from the premise that the Knight as presented in the Prologue is an ideal character who never changes in character, Kaske ignores the psychologi cal reaction of the Knight to the Monk’s tragedies. In addi tion, working deductively, and with vigorous imagination, Kaske changes the Knight into a philosopher and aesthetician. Curiously, Kaske overlooks the simple explanation, which re quires no intellectual straining, that the Knight, like so many of the pilgrims, sees something of his own life in one of the tales, namely, that of the Monk. Why else would he complain about the heavyness of the Monk’s tragedies?
17 Sean O’Faolain ("The Short Story," A College Book of Fiction, ed. W.B. Rideout and James K. Robinson (Evanston, Illinois and Elansford, New York, 1951), pp.599-611) has an excellent discussion of the conventions of fiction, including the once- upon-a-time convention. He suggests that conventions are devices for maintaining illusion by "mesmerizing" an audience into ignoring artifice. He also observes that there are at least two assumptions behind conventions: the hearer can supply what the teller leaves out, since they share knowledge, and by tacit agreement knowledge may be suppressed as well as shared.
18 Kenneth Burke (Counterstatement, p.209) remarks that "elo quence is a frequency of Symbolic and formal effects. One work is more eloquent than another if it contains symbolic and formal charges in greater profusion. That work would be most eloquent in which each line had some image or statement rely ing strongly upon our experience outside the work of art, and in which each image or statement had a pronounced formal sali- ency ...The primary purpose of eloquence is not to enable us to live our lives on paper— it is to convert life into its most thorough verbal equivalent."
19 For a discussion of the concept of aesthetic distance as used in this paper, see Edward Bullough, "’Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle," British Journal of Psychology, V (1912), 87-98, reprinted in The Problems of 79
Aesthetics, ed. Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger (New York, 1953), pp.396-1+05. Bullough initiated the use of the term "psychic distance," suggesting that a writer must take care to objectify his work by making certain that he and his reader find a belletristic work neither over-distanced nor underdistanced. For an elaboration and extended application of the concept of aesthetic distance, see Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), especially pp. 119-133. I have found his discussion of types of literary interest available to a reader provocative. See also Kenneth Burke, "Lexicon Rhetoricae," Counterstatement (New York, 1931), pp. 156-232, and David Daiches, A Study of Literature for Readers and Critics (New York, 1964). See too Morton W. Bloomfield, "Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde," PMLA, LXXII (1957), 14-26. I have borrowed from Prof. Bloomfield the terms "barrier" and "aloofness," which I find especially useful for talking about distance relationships.
20 David Daiches (Study, pp. 119-120) makes the point that fan tasy is a literary form "in which the author tries to break down the readerTs normal expectations about how events follow one another in order to make him reconsider his expectations more carefully, perhaps in sheer disgust at the way things are arranged in this world. This breaking down of the reader's expectations often produce a kind of moral refreshment (rny italics^ . . . .Fantasy may be written with the deliberate intention of suggesting a moral order or a kind of signifi cance in life wholly different from anything generally accept ed or imagined."
21 For a discussion of the use to which medieval preachers cus tomarily put fables, see, G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford, 1961), pp. 188-90; see, too, Stephen Manning, "The Nun's Priest's Morality and the Medieval Atti tude toward Fables," JEGP LIX (1960), 403-416. Jphn M. Steadman writes that under "Chaucer's ludicrously inflated portraits of the cock and his paramours there is a firm core of orthodox scientific doctrine"; see, "Chauntecleer and Medieval Natural History," Isis, L (1959), 236. To see how the Priest's tale reflects medieval notions of the character and habits of the fox, see, An Old English Miscellany con taining a. Bestiary, Kentish Sermons, Proverbs of Alfred, Religious Poems of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Richard Morris, Early English Text Society, O.S. No. 49 (London, 1872), pp. 11-15, where the fox's habit of provoking husebondes by prey ing on cock and capon is discussed as well as his method of lying in wait for his prey and seizing it by the neck.
22 Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination The Massey Lecture, 2nd Ser. ^Toronto, 1963J , p.22) notes that "the effect of 80
irony is to enable us to see over the head of a situation." Aristotle1s remark (Poetics, 1449a) that comedy imitates men "worse than the average," men who are "ridiculous" would also lead one to conclude that the Priest has placed his audience above his grotesque characters. Significantly, Aristotle remarks that the deformity he calls ridiculous may provoke laughter but not pain.
23 For a discussion of the essential dramatic irony in the Priest’s tale, see Germaine Dempster, Dramatic Irony in Chau cer, Stanford University Publications in Language and Litera ture, IV (1932), No.3.
24- D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Preface to Chaucer [Princeton, New Jersey, 1963}, pp.252-253) rightly insists that the Priest’s tale "af fords a striking example not only of the use of grotesque characters, but also of a common grotesque theme. The gro tesque is a monster because of unresolved conflicts in his make-up . . . .the grotesque pretends to be one thing but is actually something else."
25 The Priest’s audience is in the same position as those seeing a tragicomic play of Beaumont and Fletcher. William Mahaney, a colleague interested in Renaissance drama, tells me Beaumont and Fletcher evoked the surprise of their audience because their audience did not expect tragedy to be averted, unlike the audience seeing Shakespeare’s tragicomic plays. Shake speare’s audience was in on the seeming tragedy occurring on the stage and knew that all would end well. Those familiar with the joyous, and wholly unexpected ending of Ingemar Bergman’s The Magician will aprreciate the point I am making.
26 J.J. Jusserand (English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, trans. Lucy Toulmin Smith [London, 1888] , pp. 168-71) notes that fourteenth century English law required all citizens to raise a "hue and cry" in pursuit of criminals and to chase a criminal from village to village, if need be, until he was captured. Cf. Edith Rickert, Chaucer’s World (New York, (194-8)., pp. 124-125.
27 For another argument that this passage makes a direct re ference to the Monk, see Samuel B. Hemingway, "Chaucer’s Monk and Nun’s Priest," MLN, XXXI (1916), 479-483. Hemingway’s argument is that the Monk is burlesqued by his verbal and physical resemblance to Chauntecleer.
28 What Bronislaw Malinowski ("The Problem of Meaning in Primi tive Languages," The Meaning of Meaning by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards [New York, 1943], p.309) says about how the meaning of a word is to be gathered is just as true for the gathering of the meaning of the Priest’s tale. Malinowski writes ’’since 81
the whole world of ’things-to-be-expressed' changes with the level of culture, with geographical, social and economic con ditions, the consequence is that the meaning of a word must be gathered . . .from an analysis of its function with re ference to a given culture." David Daiches (Study, p.121) implies much the same view when he remarks that "parody can only be appreciated by those familiar with what is being parodied." Edward Bullough (Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (London, 19573 , p. 140) also in sists on the link between the artist and his community and he observes that "the artist is not a solitary being . . . but is born into a community whose influences he undergoes in common with his fellows."
29 Jusserand (Wayfaring Life, pp. 179-80) shows that fourteenth- century legal authorities pursued herbalists with royal ordi nances, for they believed herbalists so ignorant of men’s temperaments and the virtues of medicine, especially laxatives, that they could prove ignorant instruments of death. Pauline Aiken, after a careful study of the herbs Pertelote prescribes for Chauntecleer’s illness, writes that it is "fortunate for Chauntecleer that he is a sceptic in regard to materia medica. His stubbornness in the matter saves him." See, "Vincent Beauvais and Dame Pertelote’s Knowledge of Medicine," Speculum, X (1935), 285.
30 D.J. Hall (English Mediaeval Pilgrimage [London, 1965} , p.7) makes this point.
31 Arthur W. Hoffman ("Chaucer’s Prologue to Pilgrimage: The Two Voices," EL H , XXI (19593? 1-16) has brilliantly explored ' the ambiguity of the pilgrims’ motives for their journey. I have relied heavily on Hoffman’s discussion.
32 The moral ambiguity of the Prioress has been repeatedly re marked. For example, Muriel Bowden (Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (New York, 19483 > P-93) is driven to remark the Prioress’ golden brooch inscribed amor vineit omnia: "Which of the two loves does ’amor’ mean to the Prioress? I do not know; but I think she thought she meant love celestial." I am inclined to accept R.J. Schoeck’s de scription ("Chaucer’s Prioress: Mercy and Tender Haart," The Bridge, A Yearbook of Judaeo-Christian Studies, Vol. II, ed. John M. Oesterreicher (Itfew York, 195 (T| , p.255) of the Prioress as a woman "who succumbed too easily to the worldly concern with things and manners, and whoso charity was too much of this world."
33 Hoffman, p. 10. 82
34- I agree with John Ciardi (Dialogue, p.4-1) who observes that "form and rhythm are ways of knowing."
35 The term "repetitive form" belongs to Kenneth Burke (Counter- statement, pp. 157-162). Burke defines form as "the arousing and fulfillment of desires." He maintains that a work may arouse and fulfill desires by repetition ("the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises"), by syllogistic progression (unfolding of logical argument), by qualitative progression (one quality prepares for and leads to another), by conventional form (established literary forms) , and by incidental forms (forms depending on the whole work for their effect— e.g.,metaphor, reversal).
36 At least one reader of the tale bears witness to the impact the tale’s domestic squabble may have. Sister Mary Raynelda Makarewicz (The Patristic Influence on Chaucer (Washington, D.D., 1953), p.78) writes that "in general, the tale is a parody on the relation between a husband and wife where the normal order of the tria bona as taught by the medieval theo logians is disrupted. The effect is more piquant because of the attribution of human qualities to the affairs of a cock and hen."
37 Hemingway, p. 4-82, makes an observation that lends credence to my assertion that the Wife of Bath closely follows the squabble between the cock and the hen: "The Wyf is obviously answering someone— her lines exhibit unusual emotion. She, or at least her manner of life, has been attacked, and she heatedly replies with an attack upon the clerical ideal of celibacy."
38 ' Georges Gurvitch (The Spectrum of Social Time, trans. Myrtle Korenbaum Cpordrecht, Holland, 196if} , p. 121) argues that "social roles, attitudes, values . . .move in their own char- acterisitc time. They vary in their durations, in their rhythm, in the degree to which they are dominated by the past or projected into the future."
39 Oscar Cullman (Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Con ception of Time and History, trans. Floyd V. Filson (rev. ed., London, 1962), pp.51-53) points out that ancient Greek time is cyclical, for "time moves about in the eternal circular course in which everything keeps recurring." But Christian or Biblical time is linear, for it is "conceived strictly in terms of a time process into which Christ enters to fulfill the time. Thus, Eschatology is an essential part of the Christian view of time." Donald R. Howard (The Three Temp tations : Medieval Man in Search of the World (Princeton, New Jersey, 1966), p.267) suggests that medieval man saw time as "at once irreversible CLinear^ and cyclical." He writes that 83
"a unique event of Christian history like the Resurrection which occurred only once for all time, was repeated annually at Easter, weekly on Sunday, even daily in the mass. The liturgical year itself reenacted Christian history. Indeed the pattern is fundamental to the medieval idea of human life itself, which found events like the Fall recapitualated in the lives of men.”
40 Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, New Jersey, 1957} , p.166) has pointed out that it has long been known that comic plots move from opinion to proof. Frye writes that ”a little pamphlet called the Tractatus Coislinianus...sets down all the essential facts about comedy in about a page and a half, divides the dianoia (meaning) of comedy into two parts, opinion fpistis) and proof (gnosis). • . .Proofs (i.e., the means of bringing about (a) happier society) are subdivided into oaths, compacts, witnesses, ordeals (or tortures), and laws— in other words Tthe five1 forms of material proof in law cases listed in the Rhetoric (of Aristotle).”
4-1 E.M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel (London, 194-9}, p.31) notes that in fiction "there is always a clock," for "a story is a narrative of events arranged in time sequence."
4-2 The HostTs comment (VII,2797-99) about falling asleep indi cates that the MonkTs tales lack suspense. One does not need Robert E. Kaske’s laborious deductions ("The Knight*s'Inter ruption of the Monk*s Tale," ELH, XXIV £957} , 249-68) to explain the objections the Knight and Host make to the Monk’s tragedies. The Host's implication is clear: a good story makes an audience want to know what happens next, for it ex- . ploits a linear sequence of events.
4-3 Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism, p. 187) uses the terms agon, pathos, and anagnorisis to describe the typical romance ■ narrative.
4-4- Kenneth Burke (Grammar, p .406) , from whom I borrow my way of looking at mergers and divisions in the Priest's tale, has observed that "criminals either actual or imaginary may... serve as scapegoats in a society that 'purifies' itself* by ’moral indignation* in condemning them, though the ritualistic elements operating here are not usually recognized by the indignant." Burke also remarks that the "scapegoat represents the principle of division in that its persecutors would alien ate from themselves to it their own uncleanliness. For...the scapegoat cannot be ’curative* except insofar as it represents the iniquities of those who would be cured by attacking it." I see the fox as a scapegoat, a principle of discord in the barnyard. He is accorded treatment befittimg a fourteenth century felon (the hue and cry) and the community in chasing 84
him unifies itself in the service of a single end; it also directs moral outrage at the "feend" who achieves his victory by exploiting the cock’s own vices— flattery and deceit.
45 Charles A. Owen, Jr. ("The Crucial Passages in Five of the Canterbury Tales: A Study in irony and Symbol," JEGP, LII (1953), 294-311) has shown, for example, the swipes the Priest takes at the Prioress with whom he travels.
46 W.H. Clawson notes that one matter of dispute recurring in several of the tales is "the age-old war of the sexes." "This matter," he observes, "perhaps begins with the Host’s allusion to his wife’s love of domination" and "is lightly touched on in the Nun’s Priest’s tale of Pertelote and Chauntecleer." See, "The Framework of The Canterbury Tales," The University of Toronto Quarterly, XX (1951), p.149.
47 Many critics have failed to see that the Nun’s Priest uses Chauntecleer to take some satiric whacks at the Host, so they have insisted that Chauntecleer mistranslates and has a little pedantic joke at the expense of Pertelote when in fact the Nun’s Priest is having a laugh at the expense of Chauntecleer and the Host. See,- Francis Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument about Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568 (Columbus, Ohio, 1944), p.118; see, too, David Holbrook, "The Nonne Preestes Tale," The'Age of Chaucer, ed. Boris Ford, Pelican Books (Baltimore, Maryland, 1966), p.122.
48 For a discussion of the principles of astrology I have used to interpret the astrological data in the Priest’s tales, see Walter Clyde Curry, 'Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences (New York, 1926), pp.3-36.
49 Also noting resemblances between the Monk and the. Cock, Hemingway, p. 480, writes that "Dan Piers reminds Sir John irresistibly of a sleek and pompous, well-groomed rooster." Cf. Charles S. Watson, "The Relationship of the ’Monk’s Tale’ and the ’Nun’s Priest’s Tale’," Studies in Short Fiction, I (1964), 277-288.
50 David Holbrook ("The Nonne Preestes Tale,” The Age of Chaucer, ed. Boris Ford Pelican Books, (Baltimore, Maryland, 1966), p. . 120) has also insisted that Chauntecleer is "compounded of ’the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life’ . . .it is by a tabulated appeal to this that the fox has him hente by the gargat’."
51 For a discussion of this feature of comedy, see Northrop Frye, Anatomy, p.179. 85
52 At this point my reading of the Priest’s tale is one with that of Mortimer J. Donovan ("The Moralite of the Nu n ’s Priest’s Sermon,” JEGP, LII [1953}, 498-508) who sees the tale as a sermon on alertness to moral duty. The cock is ’’any holy man” and the fox is "heretic and devil” (p.498). Cf. C.R. Dahlberg, "Chaucer’s Cock and Fox,” JEGP, LIII (1954) , 277-290.
53 One critic writes that "The Priest draws so frequently on the Monk’s tale that we may say that it acted as one of the main influences on his selection of material"; see, Watson, p. 279.
54 D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Preface, p.252) argues that the characters are "far from being ’well-rounded’ characters" because their behavior suggests "a pattern of abstract principles which manifest themselves in common abuses of the time, abuses which Chaucer does not represent on the surface at all." This state ment relies, of course, on a special definition of "well-round ed"— i.e., a a well-rounded character is an imitation of the reality. I think my own definition is a normal one, but I should point out that John M. Steadman ("Chauntecleer and Medieval Natural History," Isis, L [1959), 236-244) has shown that the characters are much like the barnyard reality.
55 Robertson, (Preface, p.251) reminds his readers that the fox "was a frequent symbol for the heretical seductor of the faith ful." Cf. M.J. Donovan, "The Moralite of the Nun’s Priest’s Sermon," JEGP, LII (1953), <498-508; and C.R. Dahlberg, "Chaucer’s Cock and Fox," JEGP, LIII (1954) , 277-290.
56 Robertson, (Preface, pp.250-251) finds Chaucer making use of the theme of the grotesque by virtue of his animals that are at once animals and human beings.
57 Robertson, (Preface, p.254) makes a useful comment on the horse and rider analogy. "The analogy horse/wife (or woman) is clear. Its origin is implicit in Mercy’s speech [the speech of a char acter in the play Mankind), which is not actually about horses, but about the flesh. The analogy horse/flesh is very old and very common. Thus St. Gregory wrote, ’Indeed the horse is the body of any holy soul, which it knows how to restrain from illicit action with the bride of continence and to release in the exercise of good works with the spur of charity.’ The same figure is familiar in the Middle English ’Debate of the Body and the Soul,’ and a fourteenth-century commentator on Scripture sums it up succinctly, ’Thus moraliter our flesh is the horse and the reason spirit is the rider’." The analogy is a very old one, so old that it appears in Plato’s Timaeus.
58 Vincent of Beauvais insisted that "it belongs to poetica to 86 make the hearer through its locutions image something as fair or foul which is not so, so that he may believe and shun or desire it." I have taken this translation from Charles Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1928), pp. 175-176. CHAPTER IV
This Sweete Freest: The Teller
Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. — Yeats
Although most critics commenting on Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest share R.T. Lenaghan’s view that he is a ”sophisticated fabulist they agree on little else when they talk about him. Both his physical appearance and his motive for the pilgrimage arouse sharp l disputes. For example, drawing on historical evidence, Manly sees him as a young parish priest who serves the Prioress officially as p a father confessor. But some see him as a robust young cleric on the pilgrimage to protect the Prioress and the Second Nun, the O Prioress’ amanuensis. At least one critic, however, sees the
Priest as ”a timid and frail person of indeterminate years,”1*' a man with a ’’churchman’s pallor, extreme slenderness, skinny neck, narrow breast, and dull eyes.”^
The Priest’s character provokes almost as many quarrels as his physical appearance. For example, remarking that the Priest views
the "world as if he were no part of it, as if he were. . .on the
moon,” E. Talbot Donaldson insists on the Priest’s detachment from
the woes of humankind and suggests the Priest thinks himself ”im- g mune” to human woe. Charles A. Owen, Jr., on the other hand,
believes the Priest a misogynist suffering from petticoat rule and
not at all detached from human woe, especially his own.^ But the
87 most provocative comment on the Priest’s character comes from
Arthur Broes who sees the Priest’s tale as covert wish fulfillment and shrewdly observes that Chauntecleer "is nothing less than the thinly disguised animal counterpart of the Priest, a persona or alter ego through which he can criticize women and enjoy dominance ' Q over them that he has not been able to achieve in his own life."
"Chaucer," Broes writes, "has cleverly discarded all frny italics} of the unfavorable aspects of Chauntecleer’s personality and trans formed him into a sympathetic creature endowed with the virtues that the Priest either possesses or wishes to possess (my ital- ic£}."9 Clearly, the conflicting opinions about the Nun’s Priest require adjudication, even correction. This is the task I have set for myself in this chapter, where I examine what the Priest’s tale reveals of the Priest and what the tale does for the Priest
At first glance the Priest’s physical appearance seems scarce
ly matter for debate. Calling on the Priest to tell a tale, the
Host remarks that he rides a "jade" (VII,2812) .-*-0 Immediately
thereafter the Pilgrim Chaucer, without a trace of irony, refers
to the Priest as "This sweete preest, this goodly man sir John"
(VII,2820). When the Priest has told his tale, the Host remarks
that if he were "seculer" (VII,3450) he would make a fine "trede-
foul" (VII,3451). The Host then provides a detailed description
of the Priest. He has fleshy muscles ("braunes") in his legs and
arms (VII,3455); he has a "gret nekke" and a "large breest" (VII,
3456); his eyes are such that as he looks about he resembles a
"sperhauk" (VII,3457); his white cheeks have red color ("brasile") 89 in them (VII, 34-59) .
These are the facts available from the links of the NunTs
PriestTs Tale. The Priest*s appearance becomes a serious issue when the words the Host uses to describe the Priest are explained as ironical, as accurate only when inverted.11 But this explana tion is odd. There is indeed irony in the Host*s description of the Priest; however, it is dramatic irony, ^ not verbal irony. ^
If one takes the Host’s description literally and consults a four teenth-century physiognomy, the dramatic irony becomes evident and the Priest’s appearance comes sharply into focus.
The Host observes that the Priest "loketh as a sperhauk with his yen’* (VII, 34-5 7) . A physiognomy of Chaucer’s day notes that from Aristotle on hawks have been characterized as able to "see their meate very farre off”-*-1*' and they often were said to prey on cocks and hens.1-^ Apparently this Priest who "loketh as a sperhauk with his yen" has seen his prey from far off. As I noted in my third chapter, the Priest’s satire is so wideranging that many of the pilgrims, all of whom are called the Host’s "flok"' in the
General Prologue (1,824-) , become the Priest’s prey. Indeed, the
Host, whom the Pilgrim Chaucer calls "oure aller cok" (1,823), be comes the Priest’s prey; for Chauntecleer’s quarrel with his wife strongly suggests that the Priest was listening carefully to the
Host’s account (VI1,1894—1923) of the abuse his wife heaped on him.16 Furthermore, it seems not by chance that Chauntecleer is looking at a "boterflye" (VII,3274-) when his natural adversary, the fox, comes into view. As I suggested in my third chapter, the 90
NunTs Priest invites the Host to see himself mirrored in the cook, a prideful, unvigilant creature whose attention to trivia TTnat worth a boterflye," to use the Host's words, is nearly fatal. Far from trying to "curry favor with the Host," as Lumiansky asserts,-^ the Priest gives him good satiric whacks and makes him his prey.
Thus, the HostTs comment that the Priest "loketh as a sperhauk with his yen” serves inadvertently to show how the Priest has turned the tables on the Host and vented any anger he might have felt when the 18 Host, using rude language, called upon him to tell a tale.
Taken literally the Host's description of the Priest is ac curate, if vulgar, praise; it is the kind of physiognomical observa- 1 Q tion that, as Walter Clyde Curry reminds us, would have made the
inner character of a man transparent to most men of Chaucer's day.
The physiognomy previously mentioned notes that the breast is "the
seate of wit and wisdome, the house of heate of lyfe and of
strength,and remarks that a man with a large breast, such as
the Priest, is in good health and handsome, "wel disposed and in
good point."21 (While drawing an analogy between a large-breasted
man and a hawk, the author of the physiognomy recalls that "the
sharpnesse of breest is a token of boldnesse and of gentlenesse"
and an aid in forcing prey to the ground.)22 The Priest's "gret"
neck (VII,3456), a thick or massive neck, implies a crooked nose,
for fowls with thick necks ("Eagles and Sparhukes") have "crooked
bills."23 His thick neck suggests thick thighs, for one implies
the other.2I^ If the Priest's neck is in "concord and proportion"
with his head, "lightness [cheerfulness^ of complection and dis- 91 pc position" are his. His red cheeks reinforce this possibility, for "in the cheeks the complection of man is most knownen,’’26 and when red mingles with "temperate whitenesse . . .not fat in sub stance," sanguinity, "a hotte and moist complection, and temperat- nesse there-of," is indicated.^ Sanguine men, such as the Priest seems to be, may have many virtues and one serious fault— an in clination toward venery arising from an abundance of blood.^8 It is this inclination that the Host calls attention to when he praises the Priest’s physical appearance, especially his cheeks so red that they need no "brasile." The Host does indeed play on the popular belief that clergymen in nunneries turn their position to sexual advantage.^ But he can play on this belief only because the
Priest’s physical appearance lends credibility to his notion that the Priest would be a "trede-foul aright" if secular. To summarize, viewed through physiognomical lore, the Priest is a healthy and handsome young cleric,^0 of temperate disposition who may, just may, have an inclination to venery.
The Priest’s tale itself enlarges our view of him, but not if we stop at the Host’s remark that if the Priest were secular he would be a "trede-foul aright" and then read the tale convinced
that the cock is the Priest’s alter ego. As I indicated above,
Arthur Broes31 takes this view and comes to the odd conclusion that
’’Chaucer has cleverly discarded all (my italics^ of the unfavorable
aspects of Chauntecleer’s personality and transformed him into a
sympathetic creature endowed with the virtues that the Priest
either possesses or wishes to possess."32 Even when one grants 92 that the uxorious cock surrounded by his hens resembles the Priest surrounded by nuns, BroesT view remains odd because the Priest1s way of telling his tale and his way of presenting the cock show that he either does not possess or does not wish to possess the qualities of the cock. The cock, with or without his hens, is a moral negative to be overcome by the Priest, and by his audience, or else his exemplum is no exemplum.
Not by chance the Priest begins his tale with a description of the widow in whose yard Chauntecleer and his paramours dwell.
The poor widow living in a "narwe cotage” is the moral norm that allows the Priest’s audience to take the moral measure of Chaunte cleer. 33 in "pacience” she has lived a "ful symple lyf” (VII,2826).
From a Christian viewpoint the poor widow’s patience is passion akin to the martyr’s action; her patience is exemplary moral action and consists of remaining quietly in her "narwe cotage” in a way that Chauntecleer could not remain quietly on his "narwe” (VII,
3169) perch. ”By housbondrie of swich as God hire sente” (VII,
2828), the widow provides for herself and her daughters. Her diet is simple fare, for "no deyntee morsel passed thurgh hir throte”
(VII,2835). She does not suffer from overeating; "replecciouns ne made hire nevere sik” (VII,2836). Indeed, she is in excellent health. She does not suffer from "goute" and apoplexy "shente nat hir head" (VII,2841) .
The Priest, I adduce, has the virtues of his widow. If my analysis of the Priest’s physical appearance is accurate, he has 93 the widow’s good health. But more important, his riding on a
"jade," a nag, suggests that he has her frugality and simplicity, not that he has been dealt an injustice by the Prioress, as some argue.^ It is just possible the Priest has selected the "jade” he rides. The Priest also shares the widow’s "pacience," her forti tude. He displays this virtue when he quietly suffers the verbal rudeness of the Host and when in his closing formula he asks God to make all of the pilgrims good men and bring them to high bliss, if it is His will. As the Pilgrim Chaucer observes (VII,2820) ,
"this goodly man sir John" is indeed a "sweete preest."
Chauntecleer, however, is the moral and physical antithesis of the widow and the Priest. He is ill. Pertelote thinks he needs a laxative to ease discomfort arising from an excess of humours
C’replecciouns") , He is manifestly suffering from insomnia and a fearful dream. In addition, his dream foretells the kind of fate the sinful man so often encounters,^ namely, attack by wild beasts.
Furthermore, the richness of the cock’s appearance contrasts sharp ly with the plainness of the widow’s and Priest’s appearance.
• His coomb was redder than the fyn coral, And batailled as it were a castel wal; His byle was blak, and as the jeet it shoon; Lyk asure were his legges and his toon; His nayles whitter than the lylye flour, And lyk the burned gold was his colour. (VII, 28 59-6 H-)
But more important, the cock is the moral antithesis of the widow and the Priest. The fear his dream arouses in him suggests a lack of fortitude. His inability to remain on his perch suggests a want of "pacience." His pride is marked by the Priest, who observes. 94 that the cock is like a prince in a hall and ’’deigned nat to sette his foot to grounde” (VII,3181). The cock’s own words and behavior
expose his cupidity, for he tells Pertelote that she is the ”o
thyng” (VII,3159) of which God has given him ’’large grace’’ (VII,
3159), and looking on the beauty of her face, he loses all of his
’’drede for to dyen” (VII,3162) . Undone by Pertelote’s beauty, he
descends from his perch, thereby ignoring the warning of his God-
sent dream, and treads Pertelote ’’twenty tyme” (VII,3177) in a very
short space of time. It is difficult to see how this grotesque,
though amusing, cock, this cock linked to incest and excrement
("Taak som laxatyf”) , can be anything other than the moral opposite
of the widow and the Priest. And since the Priest has made the
cock what he is, we can infer that before his encounter with the
fox the cock has qualities the Priest either does not possess or
does not wish to possess. Obviously, however, Chauntecleer high
in a tree, repentant and transformed, is no longer the moral anti
thesis of the Priest, though there is no hard evidence even at this
point that he is morally one with the Priest and the widow.
But the Priest who narrates the tale of Chauntecleer is more
complex than I have managed to suggest thus far, for he is a most
sophisticated narrator and one sensitive to the needs and prejudi
ces of his audience, as I tried to suggest in my third chapter.
His complexity and sophistication emerge when one looks at how he
solves the problems with which he must deal even as he begins his
tale, that is, how he adjusts to the stimuli that provoke just the
kind of tale he tells. This "sweete preest" must honor the commitment all of the pil grims have made, namely to participate in a tale-telling contest and to attempt to win. In addition, he must shape his tale for a mixed audience, an audience of both clergy and laity. He must al so meet the request of the Host and Knight for a tale of "joye and greet solas,” a blithe tale that will serve as an antidote to the
Monk’s sorrowful tragedies. And if the Priest’s obvious concern with the clerical debate about free will and necessity, with the views of Boethius, Bradwardine, and Augustine, means anything, it is that the Priest must counter the Monk’s assertions about the role of Fortune in human life,and find some satisfying order in the flux of temporal events. This much his priestly integrity re quires, and it requires too that he deal with those things in the lives of his fellow pilgrims that do not set well with him, that, for example,he deal with the Prioress’ flaws and his own misogynous inclinations.3^ Furthermore, the Priest undoubtedly begins his tale with ruffled feelings to be subdued,38 for he has patiently endured the Host’s raillery and contempt, then emphatically agreed to tell a tale as commanded.
At the outset, then, the Priest must distance39 his tale, must place barriers between himself and his tale. So he offers a beast fable that will also be an exemplum. Presumably he could have told a tale with human characters but his meaning would have been too obvious and his assault on his audience too apparent. By telling a beast fable, however, he physically distances his tale,, for he presents characters with whom neither he nor his listeners 96 can easily identify. He also uses his first words to remove his tale from time, for he speaks of the widow having "whilom" dwelled in a small cottage. Later, in an aside to his audience, he com pletes his temporal distancing of his tale by using the ancient formula of beast fables to justify the speaking of his animal char acters: "For thilke tyme, as I have understonde,/Beestes and brid- des koude speke and synge" (VII,2880-82). The Priest also places a moral barrier between himself and his tale by establishing him self as an "unreliable narrator"^ capable of deception and irony.
Thus, through his habit of speaking equivocally, he can disavow responsibility for his frequently provocative words. After an attack on womankind, he can innocently aver:
Thise been the cokkes wordes, and nat myne; I kan noon harm of no womman divyne. (VII,3265-66)
In addition, as an unreliable narrator the Priest may feign moral neutrality toward the words and deeds of his characters, although as priest, religious teacher, and father confessor, he is morally responsible for his tale and its impact on his audience. But feign ing moral neutrality, he may escape the moral strictures of any who, like the Parson,^! may find repugnant his blithe tale, replete with "trede-foul” and satire. Thus, he need not be seriously hortatory until he ends his tale. Then he tries to prevent criti cism from those who may regard his fable as a "folye." He warns the pilgrims not to take his tale as such. He urges them to sort chaff and fruit.
The Priestls unreliability as a narrator is not only a measure 97 of his distance from his tale; it is also a measure of his distance, his estrangement, from his audience. His unreliability allows him to hide his true convictions from his audience until the end of his tale when he asks God to bring all of the pilgrims to "heighe blisse." But he has good reason to remain aloof from his listen ing audience, for his authorial commentary is not only in his overt intrusions, which I shall examine shortly, but in the unflattering setting he provides for his tale— the farmyard of Chauntecleer and
Pertelote. The farmyard scene is a perspective on the human world that reduces the human world to its comical absurdities, thereby rendering it manageable and acceptable— acceptable because it can be mocked, playfully caricatured, and dwarfed. The farmyard scene allows the Priest to hold the human world at a distance, to display for it a proper contempt.
For the most part, then, the Priest tries to move away from his audience and his tale, letting the latter ride on his aloofness.
But he is not always successful in remaining aloof from either audience or tale. And his failures tell much about him. After an attack on women (VII,3256-6d) , he breaks into his tale to disavow any misogyny and to attribute his views to Chauntecleer (VII,
3265-66). One critic has taken this outburst against women and
subsequent disavowal to be evidence that the Priest is an "uncon scious” misogynist.1*^ But when one considers that the early Fathers of the Church popularized celibacy by dwelling on the wickedness of women,^ what seems more likely is that the Priest is simply echo ing ideas of his day and simultaneously disclosing his concern about 98 maintaining his own celibacy--a concern his sanguine nature inten
sifies and his tale overcomes.
A more significant failure of the Priest to remain aloof oc
curs when he falls into a lengthy digression on necessity and free
will (VII,323*4— 50) as he questions himself about whether Chaunte
cleer flew down from the beams freely or from necessity. The
Priest abruptly ends this disgression and avows nI wol not han to
do of swich mateere;/My tale is of a cok" (VII,3251-52) . His words,
of course, are those of an unreliable narrator bent on deception,
for the sharp tone of his disavowal reveals his true interest, as
does his remark not twenty lines later that the cock is "so free"
(VII,3269) walking in the sun with his paramours and teetering
unknowingly on the edge of peripety. As I remarked in my first
chapter, the "fruyt" of the Priests tale is his disclosure of the
kind of human freedom available to man, the use to which he may
put it, and the consequences of failing to use it properly. In
part this is so because the Priest's tale must be a substitute for
the Monk’s tragedies, in part because the Priest himself is deeply
concerned about the relation of human freedom to God’s foreknow
ledge. He himself seeks some order affording solace, even joy, to
those caught in the seeming chaos of temporal events.
Being his solution to this serious problem, the Priest’s
choice of plots reveals the man. The Priest’s plot is symbolic
action^ that clarifies his problem by interpreting it symbolically,
by providing a "verbal parallel of experience"^ having its own
medicine for what does not set well with the Priest.^ Thus, pro 99 perly understood the Priest’s plot is an analogue of human action that expresses his belief about the importance of human will in determining the shape of events. His plot is a confirmation and disclosure of his position in the clerical debate about free will and necessity. It is an empirical confirmation of his own belief in "necessitee condicioneel,”1^ in the idea that God’s omniscience does not dictate human choices and acts.1*'® Consequently, Chaunte cleer’s acceptance of Pertelote’s interpretation of his dream is of major importance, For his acceptance, coming after God has dis played his foreknowledge, shows what he does with his freedom
(conditional necessity) and the consequences of abused freedom.
Logically, the Priest’s conception of how free will and God’s foreknowledge join to shape human destiny must be prior to the
Priest’s tale-telling. His explanation, his plotting, of what be falls Chauntecleer is impossible without an a priori conception of how things happen, for the Priest himself imposes the shape of his tale on his matter, on the problems he must solve in his tale.
Thus, considering the tale as an exemplum, a warning to the pilgrim listeners, one can infer that the Priest regards action (the cock’s move from his perch after his warning dream) as a disturbance of a norm that ought to operate in human life: the norm is inaction, the
"pacience” of the widow and the Priest himself. If the Priest’s tale teaches nothing else, it teaches that a disturbance in the existing order (domestic, civil, or divine) produces disorder (con fusion and evil). But ending happily and being, after all, comic, his tale teaches more than this. It teaches that existence involves 100 abrupt changes which may produce laughable incongruities (the flatterer duped by flattery, the trickster tricked), incongruities that may be instructive rather than fatal, that may lead everybody to see himself beaten and defeated but happier because of the un
expected turn of events.
The Priest’s plot allows other inferences about the one who
shapes it, for it enacts his attitudes. Since it parodies, it
implies the Priest’s estrangement from what he parodies, implies
that what he parodies— domestic squabbles, courtly love, pedantry—
does not set well with him and is something his tale allows him
to overcome. Furthermore, since the Priest’s plot mimes a pattern,
a ritual pattern of sinning and cleansing, since the plot embodies
medieval penitential theory, it implies the Priest’s identity with
what he deems worthy of imitation rather than ridicule. The Priest’s
plot moves Chauntecleer from suffering rooted in sin, to false joy
and solace in his wife’s flesh, then to a release from sin and
threat of death— a release gained by repudiation (,TI shrewe”) of
former ways and questionable companions. Surely this is a proper
plot for one who serves the Prioress as father confessor and one
who needs to cleanse himself of unwanted perceptions and burden
some problems.
What then are we to make of the argument that the Priest
thinks himself immune to human woe and lives like one dwelling on
the moon.^ To use the Host’s words, it is "nat worth a boter-
flye.” We need only place another of Chaucer’s tale-tellers, the
Pardoner, beside the Nun’s Priest to see what a frail and elusive 101 thing such an argument is. Both Priest and Pardoner offer exempla to their fellow pilgrims. The Pardoner is a "noble ecclesiaste”
(1,708). He "ful wel koude" preach and "affile his tonge" (I,
711-12) to gain money from churchgoers. One would expect him fully to engage his pilgrim audience’s attention and win their applause for his tale. But he has no success with his pilgrim audience, if the outraged Host, who reacts to both the Priest’s performance and the
Pardoner’s, be allowed to stand for the entire audience.^ The reason is clear, and it is not simply that the Host himself is of fended by a tale about sins of the tavern, for the Nun’s Priest has also presented a tale in which the Host may see himself re flected. The reason the Pardoner has so little success with his audience is that he does not win the sympathy of the listening pilgrims. From his own lips fall the words that drive his audience from him because his words call attention to his contempt for his ecclesiastical responsibility and for those to whom he preaches.
He preaches "to wynne" (VI,*4-03) money, not "for correccioun of synne" (VI, 404) ; the souls of sinners may go blackberrying (VI,406) so far as he is concerned.
The Nun’s Priest, on the other hand, does not wantonly estrange himself from his listening audience. He seeks to win the sympathy of his listeners by ingratiating himself. He enters into no quar rel with the Host though the Host’s words are abusive.^ He offers the Knight and the Host the blithe tale, the "joye and greet solas"
(VII,2774), they desire, and need, thereby exploiting the psycho logical discomfort, the "hevynesse" (VII,2787), all of the pilgrims 102 no doubt feel after the Monk’s sleep-provoking tragedies. The
Priest also takes care to disavow his offensive remark that T,mulier
est hominis confusio,” but having made it, he has offered pleasure
to those pilgrims who, like the Merchant and the Host, may hold a
similar view. Finally, the Nun’s Priest remembers that his audience
consists of both clergy and laity and he remembers his clerical
obligation. So he makes the hero of his tale a cock, a convention
al symbol of a priest,^2 in which he or any of the pilgrim clerics
may be reflected, and the Priest shapes his tale so that it exposes
the movement of a sinner from his sin to a repudiation of his sin,
Chauntecleer’s ”1 shrewe myself, bothe blood and bones” (VII,34-27).
Thus, the tale of this ”sweete preest Sir John” becomes an incite
ment^^ to confession, contrition, and satisfaction, and as such an
expression of the Priest’s deepest concern for the most serious
kind of human woe, namely, human sin. As he says in closing, he
wants ”goode God” (VII,34-4-4-) to make him and the pilgrims ”alle
goode men” (VII,34-4-6) , Although he does not know it, the Host has
good reason to be delighted with what he calls the "murie tale of
Chauntecleer." 103
CHAPTER IV: FOOTNOTES
1 "The N u n ’s Priest’s Fable,” PMLA, LXXVIII (1963), 307. Lenaghan observes that because "the significance of a sophisticated fable is indirect and non-assertive,” it "yields to exposition only as tone (my italics')— a verbal relation the speaker establishes between himself and his listeners and ulti mately between the author and his readers." I am inclined to agree that the Nun’s Priest’s fable yields to exposition as tone, but Lenaghan’s definition of tone is too narrow. It overlooks the attitude of the teller toward his tale and ig nores what the tale is doing for the teller and no one else.
2 John M. Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (New York, 1951), p. 222 .
3 George Lyman Kittredge (Chaucer and His Poetry ^Cambridge, Mass., 1915), p. 176) was, I believe, the first to assert that the three priests mentioned in the General Prologue are "to guard £the Prioress) from unpleasant contact with the rougher elements in the company." Cf. Marie P. Hamilton, "The Convent of Chaucer’s Prioress and Her Priests," Philologies: The Malone Anniversary Studies, ed. Thomas A. Kirby and Henry B. Wolf (Baltimore, Maryland, 194-9), 179-190; Arthur Sherbo, "Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest Again," PMLA, LXIV (194-9), 236-24-6.
4- Robert M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Austin, Texas, 1955), p. 107.
5 Lumiansky, p. 111.
6 ' Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York, 1958) , p.94-4-.
7 "The Crucial Passages in Five of the Canterbury Tales: A Study in Irony and Symbol," JEGP. LII (1953), 294-311.
8 "Chaucer’s Disgruntled Cleric: The Nun’s Priest’s Tale," PMLA. LXXVIII (1963), 158.
9 Broes, loc. cit.
10 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957). All line citations are to this text.
11 Lumiansky, p. 110.
12 William F. Thrall, Addison Hibbard, and C. Hugh Holman say that dramatic irony exists when "the words or acts of a charac- 101+
ter in a play may carry a meaning unperceived by himself but understood by the audience.” They note that ”the term is occasionally applied also to non-dramatic (my italics] narra tive” ; see, A Handbook to Literature (New York, 1960), pp. 154-155.
13 Owen (”Irony and Symbol,” p.308) sees the irony enfolding the Host. He notes that the Host's "reaction to the story has . . .a double irony. Not only has he failed to see the point, but he imagines the Priest, if he were only a layman, a prodi gious treader of hens.” li+ Batman vppon Bartholome (London, 1582), Liber Quintus, Cap. 23. This work is a 1397 translation of De proprietatibus rerum composed by Bartholomaeus de Glanvilla in 1366.
15 Batman, Liber Quintus, Chap.9.
15 For my discussion of this quarrel and how it relates to the Host, see pp. 65-66.
17 Lumiansky, p.109.
18 Lumiansky, p.108, has called attention to the rudeness in the familiar pronouns of address the Host uses when he calls upon the Priest to tell a tale. Note also the comments of Nevill Coghill and Christopher Tolkien, The Nun's Priest's Tale (London, 1959), p.37.
19 Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2nd ed. (New York, 1960), p p .56-57.
20 Batman, Liber Quintus, Cap.23.
21 Batman, loc. cit.
22 Batman, loc, cit.
23 Batman, loc. cit.
24 Batman, Liber Quintus, Chap.25.
25 Batman, loc. cit.
26 Batman, loc. cit.; Coghill and Tolkien, p.102, remark that "a person's complexion (in the old sense) showed itself in the color and texture of the skin of his face.” Samuel B. Heming way has also found the Nun's Priest youthful and "rosy-cheeked”; see, "Chaucer’s Monk and Nun's Priest,” MLN, XXXI (1916) , 480.
27 Batman, Liber Quintus, Cap.14. 105
28 Thomas Cogan (The Haven of Health: Chiefly Made for the Com fort of Students and Consequently for All Those That Have a Care of Their Health [London, 1589], p. 244) remarks that "of all complexions. . .the sanguine is most inclined to Venus by reason of abundance of blood, hoat and moyst."
29 Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries _c. 1275 to 1535 (Cam bridge, England, 1922) , pp.144-45.
30 Lawrence Babb (The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing, Mich., 1951}, p.130) notes the belief among medieval and Renaissance medical writers that youth is the sanguine age.
31 ’’Chaucer’s Disgruntled Cleric,” p. 158.
32 Loc. cit.
33 This view of the widow is generally accepted. David Holbrook (’’The Nonne Preestes TaleThe Age of Chaucer. ed. Boris Ford, Pelican Books [Baltimore, Maryland, 1954}, p.119) writes that the widow is ”a member of the medieval community whom the community could recognize as good" and goes on to remark that "Chauntecleer and his wives are set in the midst of this, not only by way of visual and comic contrast, but morally, and in such a way as to give the poem more depth than is allowed by saying it has a ’moral’.” Charles A. Owen, Jr. ("Irony and Symbol,” p.309) also sees the widow as the locus of a moral norm but he is mainly interested in how the contrast between the widow and Chauntecleer becomes "a veiled comment” on the Priest’s relation to the Prioress.
34 Because the Priest rides a nag, Arthur Sherbo ("Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest Again,” p.242) denies that the Priest is the Prioress’ father confessor, for "the whole picture of this priest making his way on an English Rosinante, meekly suffer ing the rude familiarity of the Host, is inconsistent with the dignity and importance of the position accorded him." Arthur T. Broes ("Chaucer’s Disgruntled Cleric,” p.157) finds in the Priest’s nag a motive for the tale and he remarks "the Priest Is a man of such sensitivity...that he could hardly have ignored such ill treatment, and the beast fable . . . provides him with a perfect opportunity to satirize the Prioress.”
35 Morton W. Bloomfield (The Seven Deadly Sins past Lansing, Mich., 1952], p.28) notes that animals, from antiquity, have been linked to evil spirits who attacked men, for "the desert fathers had seen. . . demons in the sly lurking forms of animals like the jackals." Cf. Helen Waddell, Beasts and Saints 106
(London, 1939). Note, too, Jeremiah 5:6 where God’s judgment upon the Jews is said to be that a lion shall slay them, a wolf spoil them, a leopard besiege their cities.
36 Hemingway ("Chaucer’s Monk," p. *+81) thinks that the Nun’s Priest satirizes the Monk by having Chauntecleer tell the story of Croesus, which the Monk has himself told. Charles S. Watson observes that the Nun’s Priest "draws so frequently on the Monk’s tale that we may say that it acted as one of the main influences on his selection of material. The germ of the tale about a cock and his dreams appears in the last tragedy of the Monk, which tells of Croesus and the dream that he misinterpreted'.'; see, "The Relationship of the ’Monk’s Tale’ and the ’Nun’s Priest’s Tale’," Studies in Short Fiction, I (196*+) , 279.
37 For one explanation of the misogynous words of the Priest, see Charles A. Owen, Jr., loc. cit.
38 Lumiansky’s analysis (Of Sondry Folk, p.108) of the Host’s manner of calling upon the Priest to tell a tale suggests a reason for the Priest’s having ruffled feelings as he begins his tale. Cf. Coghill and Tolkien, p. 37.
39 Edward Bullough ("’Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle," The Problems of Aesthetics, ed. Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger (New York, 1953], p. 399) explains that aesthetic distance is gained "by separating the object and the appeal from one’s own self, by putting it out of gear with practical needs and ends." He also notes that the artist is most effective when he detaches himself from an "intensely personal experience" and objectifies it by seeing what is personal as characteristics of phenomena outside of himself. "Hence," Bullough remarks, "the statement of so many artists that artistic formulation was to them a kind of cathar sis, a means of ridding themselves of feelings and ideas the acuteness of which they felt almost as a kind of obsession." For an elaboration and extended application of the concept of aesthetic distance, see Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), especially pp. 119-133. See also Kenneth Burke, Counterstatement (New York, 1931), pp. 156-232, and David Daiches, A Study of Literature for Readers and Cri tics (New York, 196*+) . See, too, Morton W. Bloomfield, "Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde," PMLA, LXXII (1957), 1M--26. I have found Bloomfield’s terms "barrier" and "aloofness" especially useful for talking about distance relationships.
*+0 I borrow the term "unreliable narrator" from Wayne C. Booth (Rhetoric, pp.158-159) who uses it to name a narrator depart- 107
ing from an author’s norms. I use the term, however, merely to indicate that the Nun’s Priest is capable of deception by virtue of his using irony and false disavowals, both of which help to account for Lenaghan’s assertion (Table, p.307) that the Priest’s tale is ’’indirect and non-assertive.”
4-1 Apparently, the Priest anticipates a hostile response, for he addresses himself to those who "holden this tale a folye" (VII, 34-37) . Stephen Manning (’’The Nun’s Priest’s Morality and the Medieval Attitude Toward Fables,” JEGP, LIX £19603 , 4-03-4-16) thinks the Priest finds himself in an awkward situation when he tells a fable and tries to extricate himself as best he can. Manning offers evidence that the telling of fables by clergyman was an ’’unsavory thing to many people in the Middle Ages” (p.4-03). But even after examining Manning’s evidence, we are left with the Host’s delight in the Priest’s tale and no more complaints from the Knight whose interruption of the Monk and request for a tale of joy and solace led to the Priest’s fable.
4-2 Owen, loc. cit.
4-3 In his introduction to Andreas Capellanus’ The Art of Courtly Love (New York, 194-1), p. 18, John Jay Parry writes that the "early Fathers of the Church taught that virginity was pre ferable to marriage and attempted to popularize the celibate life by dwelling on the vices of women. St. Jerome, for example, angered by Jovinian’s statement that, other things being equal, a virgin was no better in the sight of God than a wife or a widow, attempted to prove him wrong by setting forth all the wickedness of women and so provided the Middle Ages with a convenient compendium of anti-feminist literature.” Cf. Francis L. Utley, The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument about Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568 (Columbus, Ohio, 1944).
4-4- I am using the language of Kenneth Burke (A Grammar of Motives (New York, 1952), p. 4-4-7) who holds that "a poem is an act, the symbolic act of the poet who made it." But the emphasis on plot as symbolic action is my own.
4-5 The definition of a literary symbol belongs to Kenneth Burke, Counterstatement, p.77.
4-6 Kenneth Burke (The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (New York, 1957), p.318) suggests that a literary work miming a ritual glues spectators to it because for them it is ”a reliving . . . (of) some basic pattern of experience, with its appropriate ’medicine’.’’ I am suggesting that the Priest’s tale in moving Chauntecleer from sin to penitence mimes a Christian ritual both the Priest and his audience can enact, thereby rendering their lives acceptable. 108
47 "Necessitee condicioneel" means, according to Coghill and Tolkien, p.123, that GodTs foreknowledge does not "constrain" a manTs choice. God may know that I shall drink several glasses of beer too many, but his knowledge does not force me to drink. Coghill and Tolkien attribute this idea to Boethius.
48 Curry fMediae'val Sciences, p.232) remarks that "if Chaunte cleer had ever taken the trouble to learn the distinction between simple and conditional necessity and if his mind had been less obsessed with the idea of his own importance, the fulfilment of even so true an 7avisioun7 as his might have been averted by the mere expedient of remaining upon the beams (my italics)."
49 Donaldson, Chaucer7s Poetry, p.944.
50 I find myself in agreement with Alan T. Gaylord ("Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII of The Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor," PMLA, LXXXII £967), 226) who says of the Pilgrim Chaucer that "the qualities of his audience are implied in the wide variety of appeal in the pilgrims7 stories, and uniquely dramatized in the person of Harry Bailly (piy ital- icsj."
51 In connection with the humble, acquiescent behavior of the Priest, we need to recall Charles Sears Baldwin7s comment (Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic {Jflass., 1959"), p. 238) that medieval manuals on preaching urged preachers to win the audi ence by "humility and the practical import" of the message, not by devices to provoke applause.
52 A thirteenth-century cock and priest analogy is developed in • the poem Multi Sunt Presbyster, which is available in The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, ed. Stephen Gaselee (Oxford, 1928), n. 97. In commenting on this poem R.C. Petry (Christian Eschatology and Social Thought (New York, 1956), pp. 227-228) remarks that "the priesthood and people for which it is responsible are always being reminded that in the ana logy of the cock lies the significance of the priest." Mortimer J. Donovan ("The Moralite of the N unTs Priest7s Sermon," JEGP, LII (1953), 498-508) also calls attention to the cock and priest equation as he attempts to read the Nun7s Priest7s fable allegorically by arguing that "the moralite is hidden in the identification of Chauntecleer as any holy man and Daun Russell as heretic and devil" (p.498). Cf. C.A. Dahlberg, "Chaucer7s Cock and Fox," JEGP, LIII (1954), 272- 290. Unlike Donovan and Dahlberg, I do not read the Nun7s Priest7s fable allegorically. As I have tried to indicate in my third chapter, the cock "stands for" too many of the pil grims to allow such a reading; as I have tried to show, the Priest extends a special invitation, so to speak, to the Host 109
and invites him to see himself mirrored in the silly cock. The Host is most assuredly no holy man.
53 Baldwin fMedieval Rhetoric, p.230) notes that what guarded the medieval preacher from sophistry was his obligation "to move men to action.” It occurs to me that if the Parson's Tale is a "theological treatise on the sacrament of confess ion," as Sister Mary Madeleva (A Lost Language and Other Essays on Chaucer {)Jew York, 19513, P - 7 2 ) rightly contends, the Priest's fable is surely an incitement to confession and an empirical demonstration of the necessity of the sacrament. BIBLIOGRAPHY: WORKS CITED
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