Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is undeniably one of the English language’s greatest literary achievements. However, despite the apparent accessibility of many of its unforgettable characters, and the continued relevance of some of its main themes and concerns, this collection of tales, ostensibly told to each other by a group of late-fourteenth-century English pilgrims while on their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury, offers the twenty-first-century reader many problems of interpretation and understanding ; among these, its (to us) archaic language is perhaps the least formidable. The following pages, after a brief rehearsal of information about Chaucer’s life, times, social placement, and other works, will consider some of the major critical questions that have swirled around the form and content of The Canterbury Tales during the last century or so and propose, however hesitantly, answers to some of them.

Life and Times

Chaucer was born in London in the early 1340s, the son of a prosperous vintner (wine merchant). With its population of 50,000 (the largest in England but small compared to Paris, Florence, or Venice), London had recently established itself as the commercial, intellectual, and cultural capital of the English kingdom; its port was a major center of wool exports (England’s most important product) and wine imports, and its close relations with the nearby city of Westminster (the seat of the royal government and its national legal and financial bureaucracy) gave it additional prominence because of its political and economic importance to the monarchy.

Men such as Chaucer’s father were entrepreneurs who tended to trade in any commodities that offered profits; in London, as in the other major cities of the realm, they formed an oligarchy exercising, through their associations, or guilds, predominant authority in the political life of the city. One of the consequences (and sources) of London merchants’ power was their often close relations with the king, to whose court they were purveyors of victuals and luxury goods (including spices from the East), and to whom they sometimes lent money for use in his prosecution of the war with France (the so-called Hundred Years’ War) over his supposed right to the French throne as well as his own.

It is presumably as a result of such contacts that John Chaucer, Geoffrey’s father, obtained for his son around 1356 a place, probably as a page (a quite menial servant), in the household of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster and wife of Lionel, second surviving son of King Edward III (1327-1377). Before this, Chaucer was presumably educated in one of London’s many “grammar schools” attached to parish churches or other religious establishments; and perhaps at the Al monry School attached to Saint Paul’s Cathedral (near Chaucer’s presumed home on Thames Street). He did not attend university, al though several of his works make it clear that he knew the town and schools of Oxford and Cambridge well. He also knew Latin, French (both the continental variety and the “insular,” Anglo-French variety, the latter used for legal purposes), and presumably some Italian, which he could have learned from the many Italian merchants with whom his father probably had business dealings.

In 1359 Chaucer became a valettus (yeoman) in Prince Lionel’s service; in that capacity he fought in the latter’s army in France, where he was captured in battle and ransomed in March 1360. Sometime after the end of 1360 he passed into the King’s household, first as a yeoman but later in the decade attaining the higher rank of esquire, along with a life annuity (a standard reward for services rendered). By 1366 he was married to Philippa, a member of the Queen’s household, and in the following year a son, Thomas, was born. In royal service—to the King, to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and perhaps to Edward III’s eldest son, the Black Prince—Chaucer made repeated trips abroad in the coming years, on public and secret diplomatic missions, to France, Spain, and Italy, while also participating in court life and entertainments in England. He was dispatched to Genoa and Florence on royal business at the end of 1372, and spent several months in Italy, where he is often thought by modern scholars to have met Boccaccio and Petrarch, or at least become familiar with many of their works.

In 1374 Chaucer was appointed controller of wool customs for the port of London, a civil service position that he held for the next twelve years; at the same time he received a rent-free lifetime lease on spacious quarters above Aldgate, one of London’s seven city gates, and a further annuity from John of Gaunt, in honor of whose dead wife, Blanche, he had written The Book of the Duchess (see below). At the time Chaucer’s wife was a member of the household of John’s new wife, Constance of Castille, a situation in which she continued until her death in 1387.

Chaucer’s job as controller was to keep an accurate record of wool and other goods being exported, in order to ensure that that accurate duties on them might be charged by the collectors of customs. These worthies tended to be rich and powerful London merchants (many became lord mayors) who obtained their positions as favors from the king, and did not hesitate to use them for personal profit, a situation that put the much less powerful controller in an awkward position. Halfway through his term as controller Chaucer became involved in a court case that has created controversy among modern Chaucerians: In May 1380 Cecily Champain released Chaucer from all legal reprisals concerning her raptus. Other court documents and debts called in by Chaucer at this time suggest an expensive settlement, but the actual details of the rape (for that, not abduction, is what the Latin term means in this legal context) are lost.

From time to time, Chaucer was temporarily excused from the obligations of his controller’s position to make further trips abroad on royal business, some in connection with peace negotiations with France and Richard’s search for a suitable wife. On a second (at least) trip to Italy in 1378, he may have spent time in the Visconti library in Milan, and there obtained copies of works by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

The 1380s were a decade of major political tensions and upheavals in London and in England as a whole. The merchant oligarchy that controlled London politics was challenged (successfully for a time) by an alliance of lesser guilds led by John of Northampton. In 1381 there was the Great Rising (formerly known as the Peasants’ Revolution), a mass and often violent protest by peasants, urban artisans, and minor gentry against the radically unequal distribution of power and resources in English society. In the latter part of the decade, frequent threats of French invasion agitated Londoners. Above all, young King Richard II (Edward III’s grandson, who had inherited the throne at age eleven) was caught up in power struggles with Parliament and with several of the great barons of the realm. The climax came in 1387 and 1388, when Richard was almost deposed by an alliance of his opponents, the so-called Lords Appellant (that is, accusers), who, acting in conjunction with Parliament, managed to have several of the King’s friends and confidants (some of whom were also Chaucer’s friends or associates) executed, and others exiled and stripped of their lands.

Chaucer’s reputation as a poet grew during the 1380s, both at court and in the London literary circles in which he doubtless also moved (more about this shortly). The French poet Eustache Deschamps praised him as a “grand translateur,” and his London contemporary Thomas Usk called him a “noble philosophical poet.” Concurrently, in what might be seen as the height of his public career, Chaucer was elected to the Commons in the so-called Wonderful Parliament of October—November 1386. In a session that initiated some of the anti-Ricardian legislation mentioned above, Parliament also requested (without success) that controllers of customs appointed for life be removed from office and no further life appointments made; shortly after the session ended, Chaucer resigned his position as controller of customs and vacated his Aldgate residence. It is hard not to see this as a precautionary move, though some scholars regard the timing as coincidental and see the decision as no more than a sign that Chaucer was tired of a time-consuming job and wanted to live in the country. Since 1385 he had been serving as a justice on the commission of the peace for the county of Kent, which investigated and prosecuted minor crimes and offenses.

In 1388 Chaucer sold the rights to his annuities, perhaps to repay debts (he was sued for debt more than once in this period) or simply because the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 attacked the practice of granting life annuities as part of its campaign against Richard’s supposed malfeasance. Chaucer’s return to royal service, and a regular stipend, came in May 1389, when he was appointed clerk of the King’s Works, responsible for the building and repair of royal properties, an important and demanding job that involved obtaining building materials and paying contractors, supervisory craftsmen, and laborers. Relieved of this position in June 1391, he retired to Kent, presumably to continue work on The Canterbury Tales, which most scholars believe he had begun in the late 1380s. From 1394 onward his financial situation improved due to grants from the crown (presumably rewards for past service), and in 1398 he may have moved back to London; it is certain that late in 1399, not long after Richard’s deposition by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV), he leased a house on the grounds of Westminster Abbey and had his latest annuity from Richard renewed by Henry (who also gave Chaucer a substantial gift, perhaps, as has been suggested, because he recognized the potential usefulness of a well-known poet to his new and shaky reign). Chaucer died the following year—probably on October 25, 1400—and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1556 his remains were moved to their present tomb, and the area surrounding his burial spot became known as Poets’ Corner.

Audience and Sources

Chaucer moved in several milieux during his adult life, among them the royal court at Westminster; the mercantile world of the London docks and customs houses; and the literate cohort of court functionaries (household knights and squires, many of whom Chaucer knew well), government clerks (of chancery, the exchequer, and the law courts), scribes, notaries, lawyers, and men of letters that probably formed his most challenging, and preferred, audience. To many such listeners or readers of Chaucer’s poetry, themselves placed peripherally or ambiguously with respect to major centers of power or patronage, the ironies, obliquities, and downright silences that distinguish the Chaucerian narrative voice might strike a familiar, self-preserving, and deferential chord.

The poetry that Chaucer created for his varied audiences reveals wide knowledge and keenly honed appropriative skills. He was thoroughly conversant in the lyric and narrative forms of French court poetry; he is the earliest known English poet to have been familiar with, and to adapt, texts written by the three great Tuscan authors, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He translated or paraphrased several Latin texts of classical antiquity, and was also familiar with influential medieval-Latin philosophical poetry. His knowledge of insular literature in English (his own natal tongue) was expectably great if not always respectful: The jogging meters of Middle English popular romances are the butt of the poetic joke in the tedious tale of Sir Thopas,^a told by Chaucer’s alter ego, the narrator of The Canterbury Tales. Whatever he borrowed from another language or culture he stamped in his poetry with the unmistakable marks of Chaucerian style: wit, complexity, and what the late E. Talbot Donaldson characterized as a habitual “elusion of clarity.”

Canon

That Chaucer wrote almost entirely in English for the audiences I have enumerated above suggests the headway that English (marginalized socially, intellectually, and politically after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066) had made by the later fourteenth century in being accepted as a medium for serious expression in a wide range of cultural situations. French had been considered the language of genteel society for almost three centuries after the Conquest, although even the upper nobility was English-speaking within a few generations of that event, and French (in its insular form, commonly known as Anglo-Norman) was increasingly a language that had to be learned, as opposed to spoken from birth. In Chaucer’s day French continued to be the language of legal and Parliamentary written records, and Latin the language of the Church and higher education, but both tongues were increasingly invaded by the vocabulary and syntax of the language native to everyone born in England.

Chaucer’s first substantial poetic efforts are innovative versions of an established French literary form, the dream vision, in which a narrator, while dreaming, observes or takes part in discussions or debates about love among characters who may be allegorical abstractions (Youth, Age, Beauty, Pride, etc.) or who may represent, in idealized form, powerful noble folk who are the poet’s patrons and members of their court. The Book of the Duchess, written around 1369 to honor Blanche, the recently deceased duchess of Lancaster, offers stylized sympathy and consolation to her husband, John of Gaunt (who later granted Chaucer a life annuity, possibly in thanks for the poem). The House of Fame, written in the late 1370s, inspired by the poet’s reading of Virgil, Ovid, and Dante, stresses comedy rather than pathos in depicting the arbitrary and amoral judgments handed down by the goddess Fame; it is a cynical commentary on the untrustworthiness of all communication—especially by poets. In The Parliament of Fowls (written around 1381), birds of all kinds meet on Saint Valentine’s day to choose mates, and in their arguments demonstrate the stereotypical ideas that people (here represented as birds) have of each other.

Abandoning the dream vision, between 1380 and 1386 Chaucer composed Troilus and Criseyde, his most fully realized poetic achievement. Set against the background of the Trojan War, the poem depicts a passionate and ultimately tragic love affair. Chaucer created in Criseyde a woman whose complexity of character and motive has fascinated and disturbed modern readers. She may also have disturbed some of Chaucer’s contemporaries, or at least he pretended that she did, for in The Legend of Good Women—a collection of short tales about women betrayed by men, preceded by a prologue in the form of a dream vision—the poet must defend himself against an angry God of Love (depicted as a king, sharing some traits with Chaucer’s sovereign, Richard II), who accuses him of slandering women by his portrait of Criseyde. After (or while) composing the unfinished Legend, Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales.

Problems: Unity, Coherence, Authenticity

The twenty-first-century reader of The Canterbury Tales experiences Chaucer’s tale collection in a manner very different from any the poet could have imagined. What we read today in carefully prepared printed editions may not correspond to what Chaucer wanted his poem to look like; indeed, it seems doubtful that he even had a final plan for its contents and order. He probably began to compose a collection of tales quite different from the monothematic, classically oriented stories comprising The Legend of Good Women—but like it, a collection headed by a considerable prologue—sometime in the late 1380s, before or after he left London for Kent. How long he worked on The Canterbury Tales is unknown—perhaps until illness or death interrupted his labors, but he may have abandoned the project much earlier. Other unanswerable questions: Did he ever really contemplate writing 120 tales, as is implied by the Host’s suggestion to the Canterbury-bound pilgrims that each of the thirty travelers tell two tales on the road to the shrine and two more on the way back to the celebratory dinner at his inn, the Tabard? (Elsewhere in the framing fiction there are suggestions that one tale will suffice from each pilgrim.) And how many of the tales had been written and either circulated in writing or performed orally before the poet had the idea of incorporating them within a frame? (A list of his works included by Chaucer in the prologue to the Legend suggests that “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Second Nun’s Tale of Saint Cecilia”* preex isted the Canterbury collection, and various scholars have conjectured an earlier composition for a number of others.)

What modern presentations of The Canterbury Tales hide behind their neatness and precision is the state in which Chaucer’s Canterbury project actually comes down to us. More than eighty extant manuscripts contain all or part of the text; each has variants and errors because, as with all textual reproduction before the invention of printing, manuscripts were copied one at a time by scribes in differing states of attentiveness or fatigue. Scholars have been unable to work out a system that organizes the manuscripts in such a way as to discover, behind all the variant readings, exactly what Chaucer wrote.

Only one manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (the so-called Hengwrt manuscript, now in the National Library of Wales) may date from Chaucer’s lifetime; it contains a highly accurate text but lacks a tale (that of the Canon’s Yeoman) and several passages linking tales that appear in other manuscripts written within a decade of Chaucer’s death. The most famous manuscript, and until recently the one accorded highest authority because of its completeness and illustrations of all the pilgrims, is the Ellesmere manuscript, now in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. What emerges from these and other manuscripts is that Chaucer gathered many of the tales into groups, or fragments, by means of interstitial dialogue between the pilgrims. There is no agreed order for these fragments, and some manuscripts omit genuine linking dialogues, while others contain obviously spurious links. So except for the first fragment (containing the so-called “General Prologue,” the Knight‘s, Miller’s, and Reeve’s tales, and the Cook’s unfinished tale*—which comes first in all manuscripts that contain it), we cannot be absolutely sure about how Chaucer intended to order his stories—if indeed he ever settled on an order or, for that matter, on a text. All the evidence suggests that when he died, or abandoned work on The Canterbury Tales, he left behind piles of papers containing versions of the tales, but that he had also, during his years of composing them, circulated individual stories among his readership that he may later have revised, leaving different versions in circulation to be copied after his death into the manuscripts we now possess. It follows that a cloud of uncertainty, varying in extent and density, must hang over all critical judgments about the meaning and effect of this radically incomplete, but still quite brilliant, collection of tales within their framing fiction.

Analysis

The Canterbury Tales as we possess it contains twenty-four tales—some incomplete—gathered into ten fragments (at least according to the Ellesmere text), headed by a prologue that establishes the pilgrimage to Canterbury as the occasion for a tale-telling contest, and offers the narrator’s more or less detailed descriptions of almost all the pilgrims. The tales themselves fall into a wider variety of story types than is characteristic of other European tale collections Chaucer may have known, including Boccaccio’s Decameron: saints’ lives, miracle stories, romances of various types, pathetic tales of victimized women, fortune tragedies, fabliaux (brief, irreverent, and often sexually explicit tales mocking marriage, the Church, and all social ranks), even an animal fable. There are two long prose tales: one an allegory opposing anger and prudence as bases for political action, the other (not really a tale at all) a concluding exercise in the dominant late-medieval discourse of penance and confession, attributed to one of the priests on the pilgrimage, but considered by some scholars a separate Chaucerian text that accidentally became attached to The Canterbury Tales after the poet’s death. Appended to “The Parson’s Tale”* is a statement of retraction in which Chaucer, speaking in some version of his own voice, expresses regret for the irreligious nature of much of his poetry and prays for forgiveness; it too has been judged by some a mistaken addition.

Chaucer’s treatment of The Canterbury Tales’ framing fiction is as innovative as the variety of literary genres it encloses and interconnects. He uses the frame to expose social and political tensions that are manifested in interpersonal rivalries and in resistance to the authority of the self-appointed “monarch” of the pilgrimage, Harry Bailly, innkeeper of the Tabard Inn, from which the pilgrimage begins and to which, thanks to Harry’s intervention, it will return. In this way, Chaucer shapes frame and tales into a social model of ongoing competition for success and mastery.

The key to the dramatic impact of The Canterbury Tales is to be found succinctly stated in these lines from early in “The General Prologue,” initial component of Fragment I: “At night was come in-to that hostelrye / Wel nyne and twenty in a companye / Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle / In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle” (p. 2; see translation on facing page). The characters who will tell Chaucer’s tales are “sondry”—that is, of widely differing ranks and professions or trades—and they have come together accidentally, united solely by their decision (or, as the poem more precisely puts it, their shared desire: “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”; p. 2). Hence no ties of class solidarity and antecedent friendship or association bind them. The mix of personalities and statuses (soon to be described by the narrator) is potentially volatile, and the match to set it ablaze is supplied by the Host of the Tabard when he suggests to his guests that since they will undoubtedly pass the time on their journey by telling stories and playing games, they can increase the pleasure derivable from storytelling by making a contest out of it, the winner to receive a free meal “at our aller cost” (p. 42)—not just Harry s—on their return to the Tabard. He will accompany them in order to serve as judge of the tales told, and anyone who disobeys or challenges him “shal paye al that we spenden by the weye” (p. 42), a heavy penalty indeed.

Harry’s ostensibly friendly suggestion, and volunteering of himself as judge, has political and economic dimensions the burly innkeeper does not acknowledge. Southwark, the suburb across London Bridge (later home to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), was a rowdy place of brothels, bearbaiting, and bars; there was plenty of competition for travelers on their way to Canterbury, and by proposing his storytelling contest to the pilgrims, the Host is obviously thinking about how he can secure the custom of this group, as a group, after the conclusion of their pilgrimage. By installing himself as leader and judge, whose word is law, Harry is also transforming a “felawshipe” into a de facto monarchy (hence comparable, however obliquely, to Chaucer’s England under its embattled ruler, Richard II).

That the Host, though only an urban bourgeois, will prove a monarch who embraces both narrative and social decorum becomes clear when, after the conclusion of the first tale (told by the Knight, the highest-ranking secular pilgrim), he asks the Monk,* an analogously respectable Churchman, to tell the next story, “sumwhat, to quyte with the Knightes tale” (p. 166)—that is, a tale as elevated in style and subject as its predecessor (albeit presumably on a religious subject). (“Quyte” can mean to pay back, redeem, achieve balance, or get even, depending on the context.) But at this point the social and rhetorical journey of The Canterbury Tales turns sharply in new directions. Robin, the drunken Miller, insists on speaking next and, in response to the Host’s articulation of his program for the tale-telling contest: “Abyd, Robin, my leve brother, / Som bettre man shal telle us first another” (p. 166), calls the latter’s bluff by asserting that he will speak now or leave the company. Harry, in a pinch more businessman than king, gives in rather than lose a customer, and the result torpedoes his proposed top-down telling order; the Miller, who has already announced, “I can a noble tale for the nones, / With which I wol now quyte the Knightes tale” (p. 166), brings class-based anger into the pilgrimage, expressed via the discursive weapon of corrosive irony: His sarcastic descriptor, “noble tale,” echoes, and in echoing mocks, the earlier reported judgment of the pilgrims (but especially of the “gentils everichoon,” those far above the Miller in status) that the Knight has told “a noble storie, / And worthy for to drawen to memorie” (p. 166). His rejoinder will be anything but noble in content, and with it he will “quyte” the Knight’s epic romance of classical antiquity, not by matching it, but by exposing to ridicule its pretensions and class biases.

The Miller announces that he will tell a “legende and a lyf” of how a clerk cuckolded a carpenter, a raunchy fabliau with blasphemous echoes of the Gospel narrative of Joseph and Mary, “a Carpenter, and... his wyf” (p. 166). But another pilgrim, the Reeve (an estate manager who is also a carpenter by craft) becomes incensed at what he perceives to be an insult to women and to himself. He confronts the Miller, who rebuffs the attack with more vicious humor, this time equating the divine providence (“goddes privetee”) with the private parts of a wife and arguing facetiously that a husband should not attempt to know too much about either, as long as he has access to “goddes foyson” (“God’s bounty”) on both fronts.

By this point it is clear that the tale-telling competition proposed and refereed by Harry Bailly has metamorphosed into a contest of a very different, much less sociable nature. Language has begun to demonstrate its capacity to annoy and destroy as well as to create and delight, and its availability as an instrument of both inter-class warfare (Miller versus Knight, in a dim and discreet echo of the Great Rising of 1381) and intra-class rivalry (the respective positions of Millers and Reeves within the manorial economy would tend to make them frequent opponents, though both of humble status). As important, tale-telling will receive its impetus not only, or even primarily, from the choices of the pilgrimage’s “monarch,” but also from the desire or need of one pilgrim to reply to inaccuracies or insults perceived in another’s story; tale follows tale not as a manifestation of social decorum but as an ongoing process of reception, interpretation, judgment, and reciprocation.

I have thus far omitted from this analysis of Fragment I of The Canterbury Tales the role of the narrator, which is crucial to the process I have outlined because it is through the narrator’s act of supposedly memorial reconstruction that we know what we do about the status, character, and appearance of his fellow pilgrims: “Whiche they weren, and of what degree; / And eke in what array that they were inne” (p. 4). The series of “portraits” of the pilgrims are perhaps the single most famous part of the poem, and it is important to state at once that they are not portraits drawn from life—not, that is, descriptions of Chaucer’s contemporaries as he carefully observed them in their respective professional, vocational, or artisanal capacities. Instead the portraits enact something more complex: The narrator’s “erotics of memory”—that is, his recollection of particular things he especially liked or disliked about the pilgrims—fitted into an overall taxonomy of “estates” (social statuses) that he (and behind him Chaucer the poet) gleaned from the popular literary form called “estates satire,” which purported to reveal and excoriate the characteristic vices (or, less often, praise the ideal virtues) of the different estates. The problem with the narrator’s descriptions is that they sometimes reveal the erotics of memory and the classifications of estates satire pulling in opposite directions (as, for example, with the Monk,^* Prioress, and Friar, all of whom the narrator likes while giving us abundant, if stereotypical, reasons why he, and we, should not). To complicate matters further, characters such as the Monk,^* Friar, Pardoner, and Wife of Bath show signs of being themselves thoroughly familiar with the accusations directed at their respective cohorts by estates satire, and of gleefully mouthing or enacting them in a spirit of holiday fun, or to outrage the simple souls who take seriously such categorizations. One effect of the portraits in “The General Prologue” is to impose on us a double task of interpretation: On the one hand we’re invited to judge the pilgrims, and on the other to judge the narrator’s representation of them, to seek out inconsistencies and obvious instances where attraction (for example, to the Prioress’ dainty mouth) or repulsion (such as to the Miller’s big mouth and the wart on the tip of his nose) support or subvert estates satire commonplaces.

So much for the frame into which Chaucer put the opening tales of his collection. The tales themselves form a brilliant sequence featuring radically different narrative styles and social points of view, but also thematic interconnections and a progressive revelation of language’s efficacy as an instrument of mastery in a competitive world. “The Knight’s Tale,” based on Boccaccio’s early epic romance Il Teseida, is a serious meditation on the uses and limits of unfettered political power when it is threatened by external enemies, by the irrationality of erotic passion, by the unpredictable, irresistible actions of Fortune, and above all by the provocations to intemperate, tyrannical behavior that the just ruler must resist in exercising his authority. Theseus, duke of Athens and mighty conqueror, is faced with the dilemma of how to deal with Palamon and Arcita, two Theban princes who fall into his hands after he has defeated Creon, ruler of Thebes, and destroyed his city. The tale chronicles the continual policy adjustments he must make in attempting to solve this problem (even as the Host will have to make analogous adjustments to keep the Miller in the pilgrimage), thanks to his prisoners’ being enamored with his ward, Emily, and their resultant dispute over her, which leads to escapes, disguises, potentially deadly duels, and finally, under the Duke’s supervision, a tournament battle between the two lovers, each with one hundred followers, in an arena built for the occasion by Theseus. (The circumstances surrounding this battle provide the Knight an occasion to offer a distinctly nonidealized depiction of chivalry—that is, professional combat-in action.) As the tale’s narrative unfolds, it contrasts the struggle between mortal anger and prudential restraint that the Duke must wage within himself with the extravagant, unrestrained rhetoric and deeds of Palamon and Arcita, whose desires and flights of eloquence about their unjust fate as Theseus’ prisoners serve to emphasize both the imprudence and the powerlessness of their situation.

When the gods (representing both human passions and the universal forces that radically restrict humanity’s control over its fate) thwart Theseus’ plan by destroying Arcita, the tournament victor, the Duke must finally rely on language’s persuasive power to achieve politically satisfactory closure. His final speech to the grieving Palamon and Emily (adapted by Chaucer from Boethius’ influential, late-classical treatise The Consolation of Philosophy), after justifying Arcita’s untimely death as the working of Divine Providence, urges the young couple to marry, thus making “of sorwes two / O parfyt joye” (p. 162)—and, in the process, insuring that the Duke will “have fully of Thebans obeisaunce” (p. 156).

The Miller’s parody of “The Knight’s Tale” reconceives the rivalry of Palamon and Arcita for Emily’s hand as a competition—between Nicholas, a clever, fast-talking, and entirely self-interested university student, and Absolon, a dandified parish cleric with a delusory attachment to the ridiculous rituals of romantic love—for the body of Alison, beautiful and earthy young wife of John, who is Theseus reimagined as a foolish old carpenter with whom Nicholas boards in Oxford. The Knight’s depiction of power politics in ancient Athens is thus reduced to a town/gown squabble in contemporary Oxford, a university town famous for such tensions. Their passion for Alison leads all three men to painful fates that the Miller clearly believes they deserve; his tale presents each as seduced not only by her but by an uncritically embraced literary genre. Gullible John’s acceptance of the depiction of Noah’s flood in medieval mystery plays allows Nicholas to convince him that a new flood is about to engulf the world, and that he must hang separate tubs inside the roof of his house for himself, Alison, and Nicholas, in which they will weather the storm. (Nicholas’ persuasive speech parodies Theseus’ more elevated but equally self-interested words to Palamon and Emily at the end of “The Knight’s Tale.”) Nicholas, in turn, is so enamored of the role of the tricky cleric who cuckolds unsuspecting husbands in dozens of medieval fabliaux that, after having sex with Alison in John’s bed while the carpenter snores in his tub—the Miller’s tart version of Theseus sitting on a high throne towering above his worshipful subjects—he can’t resist improving on his scheme by sticking his buttocks out the window for Absolon to kiss, only to have them badly burned when that worthy man, frustrated and furious over having been tricked into kissing Alison’s “naked ers” at the same window earlier that night, buggers Nicholas with a hot coulter (a phallus-shaped plow blade).

Absolon’s mistreatment by Alison results from his assumption that he could win her by reciting plaintive love lyrics outside her bedroom; his resulting indignation leads him to forswear such “paramours” and to undertake the red-hot vengeance that constitutes one of English literature’s great comic climaxes: When wounded Nicholas cries out for water, John awakes and, thinking that “Nowélis flood” (p. 202) has come, cuts loose his tub and falls to the ground, breaking his arm.

The epic struggle in “The Knight’s Tale” between ancient city-states degenerates in the Miller’s hands into Oxford intergroup antagonism and stereotyping. Early in the tale, Nicholas, promising Alison that he will find a way for them to have sex without John’s knowledge, declares scornfully, “A clerk had litherly biset his whyle, / But-if he coude a carpenter bigyle!” (p. 176). John returns the favor when he thinks Nicholas’ (phony) coma results from his prying into “goddes privetee” (p. 184), and berates scholars for lacking the good sense of working people like himself. At the end, when the wounded John tries to tell his neighbors the truth about his fall, he is successfully contradicted by all the students present, who stick together in unanimously pronouncing the carpenter mad.

As the Miller “quytes” the Knight, so “The Reeve’s Tale” enacts revenge for the latter’s perceived mistreatment in the Miller’s prologue and tale. A further coarsening of language results: When the Reeve is not showering words of sarcastic contempt on Simkin, the vicious, scoundrelly, and ridiculously proud miller of Trumpington, the latter is sassing his victims—Alien and John, two Cambridge students, further degraded versions of Palamon and Arcita, whom he has just cheated—by suggesting that since they must stay overnight in his narrow dwelling they should use the hocus-pocus of philosophy to make it bigger. Even Allen and John (yokels whose northern dialect Chaucer reproduces in the first known instance of English dialect comedy) respond to their misadventures by insulting each other, and when Allen decides to get even by raping the Miller’s daughter, he chides his companion as a “swynes-heed” and a “coward” (p. 226) for not joining in (John then rapes the wife). When language finally yields to violence—the students beat the Miller to a pulp and get their stolen flour back—the reader feels that the descent has not been very great.

The last part of The Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, is the ninety-eight-line snippet of “The Cook’s Tale,”* all that is extant and probably all Chaucer wrote. It’s preceded by a prologue featuring a brief, sharp dialogue between the Host and the Cook, natural rivals for Southwark customers, suggesting future (if not present) “quytyng,” but in the few lines of the tale that we have, its inhabitants (London low-lifes) meet to “hoppe and synge and maken swich disport” (“dance and sing and make sport”) rather than tell stories; the preferred form of intercourse (because of the money it can supply) is sexual rather than verbal or commercial: As the fragment ends we learn of a wife “that heeld for countenance / A shoppe, and swyved for hir sustenaunce” (“that kept, for countenance, / A shop, and whored to gain her sustenance”).

In another instance of “quytyng,” the Friar and the Summoner—two clerical con men who prey on their victims by means of opportunistic preaching and flattery (the Friar) or threats of punishment by ecclesiastical courts (the Summoner, or process server)—square off with the anger of competitors, not for a free dinner but for a free ride at the expense of the gullible or the vulnerable. The Friar, a university-trained intellectual, adapts to his purpose a widely diffused preacher’s parable about a notoriously predatory official (in this case a summoner, of course) who is carried off to hell by a devil because his victims really mean it when they wish him there for his crimes. To his appropriation of the medieval “theology of intention” the Friar adds a dialogue between the summoner and his diabolical companion that emphasizes the former’s prying nature (necessary for one who makes a living by blackmail as well as coercion) in the way he grills the devil about his life in Hell and his methods of trapping sinners. The Friar’s implication is clear: The summoner’s curiosity—his meddling in other people’s pryvetee—is setting him up for his final, infernal destination, where he will learn plenty about the wages of sin.

The Summoner’s reply counters the Friar’s theological language with a dose of the well-established anti-fraternal discourse that took shape in thirteenth-century Parisian university circles (where it was sponsored by opponents of mendicant scholars such as the Dominican Thomas Aquinas) and became popular among fourteenth-century critics of the increasingly worldly and prosperous fraternal orders, which originally intended to support themselves by begging. The outrageously greedy and hypocritical friar of “The Summoner’s Tale” suffers a double humiliation. First, Thomas, the sick householder from whom the friar relentlessly solicits a monetary offering, farts into the latter’s hand after inviting him to “grope” behind him for a gift that, however, the mendicant must share with the other eleven members of his convent. (“Grope” was a word widely applied to a priest’s quizzing of a penitent in confession—“groping” his conscience in order to discover all his sins—and friars were popular confessors because, according to their detractors, they assigned easy penances in return for gifts; hence Thomas’s use of the term has a satirical edge.) Thomas’s angry, flatulent riposte to his tormentor sets up the friar’s second comeuppance: the solution to the problem of how to divide a fart in twelve parts proposed by Jankin, a squire of the local lord to whom the friar goes to complain about his mistreatment. Jankin’s ingenious suggestion, involving a cartwheel along the spokes of which the fart’s sound and odor can be dispensed equally to the other members of the convent, with the friar himself occupying a privileged position at the hub of the wheel immediately below farting Thomas, has parodic overtones of Pentecost (when the gift of the Holy Spirit showed itself divided into tongues of flame over the head of each apostle), and thus makes a satiric comment on the pride taken by the mendicant orders as preachers of the Word, which, in their hypocritical mouths, becomes no better than a fart.

Several Canterbury Tales besides “The Knight’s Tale” explore the problem of making appropriate decisions in situations where there can be no certainty about the best choice. In such cases careful deliberation, based on the wisdom to be garnered from prior experience and trustworthy counselors, leads to prudent decision-making, while imprudent choices, driven by the passions of the moment and applauded by sycophantic subordinates, can issue in folly and disaster. The long prose “Tale of Melibee”* told by the pilgrimage narrator (hence some version of Chaucer) consists of an extended dialogue between Melibee, a mighty lord outraged by an assault on his home and intent on vengeance, and his wife, Prudence, who, true to her name, argues for patience, good counsel (especially hers), and full consideration of possible consequences before Melibee takes action.

More purely narrative than the “Melibee,”* but like it seriously concerned with the processes and outcomes of decision-making by those who possess domestic or political power (and in some cases those who do not), are the tales told by the Clerk (graduate student) of Oxford, the Merchant, and the Franklin. “The Clerk’s Tale” is the great enigma of The Canterbury Tales; its story of Griselda, the humble peasant girl chosen as wife by Walter, a rich marquis, who then brutally tests her obedience to him, even to the point of her acquiescing when she’s told of his apparent murder of their young children, was one of the most widely known stories of fourteenth-century Western Europe. Each version of the story differs in how it seeks to explain Walter’s behavior, his motivation for testing Griselda, and her choices in obeying him. The happy ending, in which Griselda is reunited with her children and her husband (who had also feigned divorcing her so he could marry someone of a more appropriate social rank), does nothing to efface the air of psychological mystery and extreme human imprudence that hangs over the story. In the end, the greatest mystery is whether Walter or Griselda has the greater power in their relationship—he by his ability to impose harsh trials on her, or she by her ability to endure the trials and to force him finally to suspend them.

“The Merchant’s Tale” is a quasi-allegorical fable about the high price of imprudence. Lecherous old January decides to marry beautiful young May, ignoring the reservations of his counselor, Justinus, in favor of the enthusiastic support given by his time-serving lackey, Placebo (literally, “I will please”). When January cannot satisfy May sexually, she decides to accept the importunate advances of his squire, Damyan. January, long blinded by his imprudent passion, is suddenly struck literally blind and seeks, in his jealousy, to enjoy his wife in exclusivity in a beautiful walled garden he has built—a symbol of the paradise he has expected his marriage to be. But his garden harbors a serpent, Damyan, hidden by May in a tree into which she climbs with her blind husband’s assistance, a symbolic enactment of how his imprudence and impercipience have contributed to his being cuckolded. The ensuing argument between the god Pluto and his consort Proserpina, improbable residents of the garden, over May’s culpability leads Pluto to give January back his sight, an advantage that Proserpina immediately neutralizes by giving May the persuasive speech she needs to convince January that his restored vision in fact results from her “strugle with a man up-on a tree.”

So if the tale’s message is that January’s imprudence makes him the certain victim of May’s schemes and mendacity, it seems also to be saying that blind or sighted (that is, imprudent or prudent), men cannot escape the wiles of women (especially their verbal wiles). Justinus and Pluto know the bitter truth about women and marriage, but they cannot open January’s eyes to his folly; by implication, the misogynistic, misogamous message of “The Merchant’s Tale” will go similarly unheeded. This is the ultimate cynicism of the tale: Its teller has ultimately wasted his time telling it.

“The Franklin’s Tale” uses the kind of short romance called a lai Breton (Breton lay) to pose several questions. The first is what prudent choice a wife should make when her earlier imprudence (setting a supposedly impossible task for a would-be lover in order to discourage him) comes back to torment her (when he accomplishes the task and asks for his reward)? Should she acquiesce? Refuse? Commit suicide? This leads to the second question: What prudent choice can the husband make when he learns of the wife’s situation? Should he allow her to leave him, in order to fulfill her imprudent promise, or forbid her to go, thus saving his honor as her husband while simultaneously ruining hers as a breaker of contracts? The Franklin’s resolution of this double dilemma reflects a point of view grounded in his social status as a wealthy, but not gently born, landholder: Acts of generosity, reflecting nobility of spirit that is not the exclusive property of any one class, can solve even the most difficult problem and, in effect, efface the contrast between prudence and imprudence, but from an idealistic, rather than a cynical, perspective. The three such acts he depicts save the chastity of Dorigen, the wife; the honor of Averagus, the husband; and the money that Aurelius, the would-be lover, had contracted to pay to the magician who accomplished, for a hefty fee, the impossible task. This improbable ending leads to the tale’s last, unanswerable question: Which man (husband, lover, or magician) was the most “free” (generous)?

Having showcased domestic prudence in action, Chaucer parodies it in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” a barnyard fable about Chauntecleer, a colorful, libidinous rooster with seven hen-wives. Chauntecleer’s terrifying dream (a strange animal grabs him with murderous intent) prompts a debate between himself and his number one paramour, Pertelote, over the veracity of dreams, with exemplary stories, recipies for herbal laxatives, and mutual recriminations flying thick and fast. Having rejected his wife’s counsel, only to reject his own rejection out of lust for her body, Chauntecleer encounters a fox, who tricks the vain rooster by challenging him to sing as well as (that is, compete with) his dead father (eaten by the same fox). The fox is outwitted in turn by heeding some very bad advice from his captive. This is a world in which, despite immense expenditures of learning and counsel, prudence is very little in evidence.

The other tale besides that of the Nun’s Priest to use avian protag onists to offer a tart commentary on human, especially domestic, relationships is that of the Manciple. There a bird distinguished by its bright plumage and ability to communicate directly with humans runs afoul of its powerful owner, Phoebus Apollo, by revealing that his wife is cuckolding him with a lover of much lower status; the distraught god kills his wife in jealous anger, too late experiences remorse for his hasty reaction, and wreaks vengeance on the tattletale by stripping him of his voice and colorful feathers. The lesson usually drawn from this exemplary tale, of which several versions exist, is not to be the bearer of bad news, even if it is true. Other obvious morals—don’t take pleasure in revealing other peoples’ faults; don’t allow your emotions to get the better of you in ways you’ll later regret; don’t blame others for your own lack of self-control—seem rarely, if ever, to be drawn. Chaucer takes the cynical and incomplete nature of this tale’s traditional moralization as the starting point for his placement of it within his Canterbury collection. He gives it to the Manciple, a dubiously honest purchasing agent, who, after verbally trashing another pilgrim (the helplessly drunken Cook) and being warned by the Host of the latter’s potential retaliation (he could reveal some of the Manciple’s shady dealings), tells the tale as a caution against plain speaking, but in a manner so parodically excessive as to make clear his scorn for the story’s traditional exemplary function. Phoebus’s jealous near-imprisonment of his wife (she is almost as caged as his bird) and his behavior in first killing and then idealizing her cost him our sympathy, while the bird, al though speaking truth to power, does it with such obvious malice and pleasure that it too forfeits the consideration it might otherwise earn as the innocent victim of a distraught husband’s misdirected violence. Along the way, the narrating Manciple reveals his misogyny, comparing women to animals in heat, and his complete disenchantment about the role of language in perpetuating class distinctions and protecting the powerful from the opprobrium they deserve for their wrongdoing: An adulterous wife of the upper classes is someone’s “mistress,” while her equivalent of humbler status is a mere “wench” or “lemman.” His final exhortation to silence, put in the mouth of his loquacious mother, puts the seal of insincerity on the supposed moral dimension of the tale.

Various Canterbury Tales are connected by, but also contrasted within, shared literary types, rhetorical modes, and thematic elements. For instance, both “The Squire’s Tale” and the Chaucerian narrator’s “Tale of Sir Thopas”* are loosely structured adventure tales, or “romances”; they also share a dubious distinction as two of the three tales rendered incomplete thanks to interruptions by other pilgrims (the Squire by the Franklin, who clothes his disruptive move in flattering words; the narrator by the Host, who minces no words in telling the narrator, “Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a tord”). The respective matters and settings of the two tales diverge widely; the Squire evokes an “orientalized,” exotic Mongolian court where rituals of courtesy familiar to all readers of French chivalric romance provide a setting for marvelous happenings and artifacts, including a ring that allows its wearer to understand animal speech and a mechanical, flying horse whose movements are governed by a kind of control panel. The Mongolian courtiers, unaware of this simple mechanism for putting the horse into orderly motion, offer a range of opinions, all irrelevant, as to the creature’s nature and function; the result is a sly metaphor of the young Squire’s inability, through inexperience, to shape his own miscellaneous fund of romance motifs and conventions into an effective narrative trajectory. Analogously—and with thoroughly Chaucerian irony—the poet’s surrogate narrator shows his complete inability to construct a credible tale about a Flemish knight whose feminized appearance and pointless wanderings constitute Chaucer’s parody of many popular English romances of his day, and also (as William Askins has recently argued) a sharp satire on the economic and military policies of a duchy (Flanders) whose rulers at that time were bitter rivals of the English monarch and English merchants.

A very different kind of romance narrative, known since classical antiquity and based on the many risks and perils inherent in Mediterranean travel and commerce, organizes “The Man of Law’s Tale,” in which Custance, the beautiful and pious daughter of a Roman emperor, endures hardship and victimization in places as far apart as Muslim Syria and Anglo-Saxon England, but is protected throughout her trials by the Divine Providence. The special agents of her persecution are the stereotypically cruel and jealous mothers of the two men she marries and converts to Christianity: the Syrian Sultan and the English king.

Narratives that repeatedly place a beautiful woman (like the famous Pauline of silent movie serials) in situations of great personal danger, often involving or suggesting rape, appeal to their audience by evoking feelings of compassion (and, by extension, of self-pity), but also, and less overtly, sado-masochistic responses to the spectacle of a virtuous heroine threatened with violation and destruction. The Man of Law’s version of this story attempts further to manipulate its audience’s response by embracing a form of rhetorical expansion quite divergent from the irrelevancies and ineptitudes of “Thopas” or “The Squire’s Tale”: an amalgam of apostrophe, lament, and other forms of self-conscious narratorial intrusion that demonstrates both the lawyer’s forensic skill in defending his “client,” Custance, against her persecutors, and the learning, wisdom, and moral stature that should (in his own opinion) earn him the storytelling prize.

“The Physician’s Tale” of the Roman maiden, Virginia, killed by her father to prevent her ravishment by a lustful and corrupt judge, and “The Prioress’s Tale” of an innocent Christian child brutally murdered by Jews, who object to his singing a song in praise of the Virgin as he passes through their ghetto each day on his way to and from school, share with “The Man of Law’s Tale” reliance on situations of helpless, victimized virtue and a narratorial voice designed to manipulate audience emotions. The anti-Semitism and blood thirstiness of “The Prioress’s Tale”—the Jews cut the child’s throat and throw him in a privy, and are themselves later punished by being torn apart by wild horses, then hung—has occasioned much controversy about Chaucer’s attitude toward Jews (who had been expelled from England in 1290 and were thus not part of his normal experience) and toward his character, the Prioress, whose refined behavior (as described in her “General Prologue” portrait) may disguise strong feelings of resentment toward, and victimization by, men that surface in the sado-masochistic elements of her tale.

“The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” is absent from the earliest extant manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, leading some recent scholars to question its place in the Chaucer canon. It may represent a late entry into Chaucer’s plan for his collection, a fact perhaps alluded to in the belated arrival among the pilgrims of the Canon and his servant, whose frantic haste to overtake the compaignye leaves the master so perspired as to prompt the narrator’s almost admiring comment, “But it was joye for to seen him swete.” The tale proper, a fairly conventional story of how a phony alchemist runs a con on a priest whose greed matches his gullibility, is preceded by two more unusual segments, an introduction and a prologue. (Unfortuntely, these have been mislabeled, respectively, “Prologue” and “Part One” [of the tale].) The former of these is a reconception of “The General Prologue” in which the narrator, instead of recalling the impression made on him by specific pilgrims over the whole course of their journey together, vividly recapitulates the appearance of Canon and Yeoman at the precise moment of their arrival on the scene and the Host’s penetrating interrogation of the Yeoman, which forces the latter to confess that the initial salvo of praise he delivered to the compaignye on his master’s behalf is a tissue of lies, since he and the Canon are failures in their alchemical quest to turn base metals into gold. His inhibitions destroyed and frustrations liberated by Harry Bailly’s cross-examination, the Yeoman proceeds, in his prologue, to launch into an obsessive cataloguing of the materials (mostly noxious) among which he passes his days in the Canon’s laboratory, in the process reducing himself to a barely human piece of alchemical detritus. The pandemonium of regrets and mutual accusations that ensues, according to the Yeoman, when an experiment misfires, spewing broken crockery and its contents across the room, would have strongly reminded the tale’s medieval audiences of the panic and recriminations among the devils when Christ comes in glory before his Resurrection to liberate the virtuous dead from hell, a popular scene in the English mystery plays.

Perhaps the most striking feature of The Canterbury Tales is the “confessional” prologues that precede (and dominate) the tales told by the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. Both these monologues contain so many outrageous and mutually inconsistent statements that making secure judgments about their speakers becomes extremely difficult. As a result, much ink has been spilled, through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, about their motivations and moral status, and about Chaucer’s goal(s) in creating them: Is the Wife of Bath a protofeminist or simply an anthology of misogynist and misogamous stereotypes? Does she represent Chaucer’s indirect comment on the contention of religious reformers that women should be allowed to teach and preach, and if so, on which side of the question? Is the Pardoner a eunuch, or what we would today call a homosexual? When, after having revealed the tricks and phony relics by which he takes money from congregations, he invites the pilgrims to come and pay to kiss what are presumably those same relics, is he drunk? Or just adding a final twist to his deliberately over-the-top performance as stage villain? Or is he moved by some deep impulse of self-loathing that desires the cruel rejoinder of the Host, who proposes to cut off what the Pardoner may already lack, his “coillons”?

To ask such questions seems appropriate, even inevitable. On the other hand, to seek clear-cut answers to them risks misunderstanding, and diminishing, Chaucer’s achievement. The nature of that achievement is to explore, seriously but also comically, the important role of self-construction and performance as strategies of successful participation in the competition for justification and mastery central to social existence. In creating his great prologues, Chaucer in effect anticipated the theorization of social behavior as performance in the works of sociologists such as Erving Goffman (whose books include The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). Chaucer was, of course, familiar with the performative rituals and spectacles—tournaments, royal entries, coronations and crown wearings, state banquets, etc.—by which nobility and royalty constructed images of their power and hegemony. But the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner undertake their respective self-constructions and self-presentations from much less powerful and secure positions. As a woman, Alison of Bath played the game of life on a distinctly unleveled playing field; as for the Pardoner, both his body and his profession made him suspect: the first because of widely (but not universally) recognized medical and physiognomic theories that equated physical “deformity” with moral failings, and the second because the offer of indulgences (guarantees of the diminution or elimination of purgatorial suffering after death for sins committed during life) in return for acts of piety, including contributions to the building of bridges and the maintenance of hospitals, was widely regarded in late-medieval Europe as an ecclesiastical practice rife with corruption—nothing less than the selling of salvation.

The question then becomes, what are we to make of these self-constructions? Where and how, if at all, does virtuoso performance intersect with reality? This seems to me the other significant achievement of the prologues of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner: They put the reader (or listener, if Chaucer ever read them aloud to his contemporaries) in the same position of trying to separate fact from fiction, or of discovering the psychological truths that lie beneath the most extravagant or self-delusory masquerades, which we experience in our social or professional interactions with our friends, acquaintances, superiors, colleagues, or subordinates.

It’s important to realize that in crafting their pilgrimage personae the Wife of Bath and Pardoner make use of readily available, dominant discourses, as they (and the other pilgrims) do in their tales. For example, the later, larger portion of the Wife’s prologue utilizes two major bodies of textuality—misogynist and misogamous—by which men have justified their continuing social and political hegemony over women. Classical, clerical, and popular literary strands intermingle in these discourses, and Chaucer, by putting these stereotypes in the Wife’s mouth, has seemed to some readers to be endorsing, however playfully, their points of view. At least as likely is the view of other critics that Alison, by constructing herself as a compendium of male fears about female sexuality and aggressiveness, is enjoying the paradoxical power that such discourses unintentionally grant their victims: the power to induce shock and anger by their overt, hyperbolical embrace, in word and deed, of the supposedly debilitating stereotypes. Chaucer suggests the success of this strategy by his depiction of the responses of male pilgrims (Friar, Clerk, Merchant, Franklin, perhaps Nun’s Priest) whose tales, or comments in links between tales, reveal their need to respond to, and dispute, the Wife’s outrageous claim to have achieved complete mastery over her five husbands (albeit, in the case of the last one, not without a fight).

The Pardoner’s strategy is similar. Faced with the knowledge that his physical features—high voice, lack of facial hair, glaring eyes—suggested to adherents of physiognomic analysis an absent or deviant sexuality (as witnessed by the narrator’s assessment in “The General Prologue”: “I trowe he were a gelding or a mare”; p. 36), he plays with, and seeks to provoke, his fellow pilgrims by singing “Com hider, love, to me” with the Summoner (suggesting what me dievals would have called a sodomitic relationship), but also claiming, when he interrupts the Wife of Bath, that he was about to marry, and then declaring, as proof of his villainy, that he will “have a joly wenche in every toun” (p. 490). That both the Pardoner’s appearance and his profession suggest an immoral character is underscored when the Host (who salutes him insolently as “thou bel amy”) asks him to “tel us som mirth or japes” (an off-color story), and there is an outcry from the pilgrims of upper rank—“Nay, lat him telle us of no ribaudye!”—who obviously fear the kind of filth such a man might be capable of uttering. As part of his strategy of exacerbating (and thus in a sense controlling) such negative reactions to him, the Pardoner implies that it will be a stretch for him to think of “som honest thing” to tell, and that he will need strong drink to help him!

The “honest thing” he chooses to tell in his tale is a hair-raising story of evil’s self-destructive nature, the quasi-allegorical quest for Death by three young scoundrels who start out on their “pilgrimage” from a tavern and end up killing each other over a cache of gold to which they are directed by an old man whom they meet (and verbally abuse) along the way. It’s fairly easy to see this story as the Pardoner’s tart comment on the pilgrimage that began at the Tabard and on some of his self-righteous detractors, who have treated him as the young wastrels treat the old man who responds by sending them to their death.

But before we get to this grisly tale, which demonstrates the Pardoner’s command of the exemplary stories so important to medieval preaching (especially that of the mendicants), the Pardoner performs a different kind of honesty (or fictitious honesty): an expose of the pulpit trickery by which he defrauds gullible congregations of their hard-earned money by hawking phony relics. He does not just reveal his hypocrisy—he preaches against greed, the very sin that motivates him—he revels in it: Although a sinner, he saves others by his preaching, but that is not his intention; as long as the money rolls in, its donors can go to hell for all he cares.

In crafting the Pardoner’s prologue, Chaucer synthesizes contemporary concerns about the fraudulent selling of pardons with two other areas of discontent: the traffic in false relics and the problem of sinful priests who do not practice what they preach. The last of these three abuses contributes most to the Pardoner’s melodramatic “confession” of his misdeeds, and it’s no surprise that Chaucer lifts the Pardoner’s description of his hypocritical preaching from an established discourse on the subject that circulated in late-medieval preaching manuals and treatises, which besides offering advice on effective preaching contained warnings that such preaching required of its practitioners a virtuous life, as well as discussions about whether a priest guilty of mortal sin should be allowed in the pulpit. That the poet should have converted the manuals’ warnings and condemnations into the self-description of a Canterbury Tales character can mean one of two things: Either Chaucer raided the discourse of the hypocritical preacher in order to give, in the Pardoner, an example of clerical villainy, or the Pardoner is himself fully conversant with the preaching manuals and from them has constructed two voices: one, that of the effective preacher (as shown in his tale); the other, that of the hypocritical, evil preacher (as shown in the prologue). By showing his mastery of both discourses, the Pardoner not only manages to upset and outrage his critics on the pilgrimage; he also makes a good case for winning the supper for the best tale. After all, he boasts that “my entente is nat but for to winne” (p. 488), which could refer not only to his quest for wealth, but also to the storytelling contest, and indeed to his ongoing battle against being physically and professionally stereotyped—or to all three.

The self-constructing performances of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner may represent the pinnacle of Chaucer’s art in The Canterbury Tales, but they share with many other moments in that incomplete collection of stories told on a pilgrimage that never reaches either of its announced goals—Becket’s shrine or Harry Bailly’s dinner table—a power to delight, engage, and mystify their readers that shows no sign of lessening more than 600 years after their author’s death.

Robert W. Hanning is Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1961. He holds degrees from Columbia and Oxford Universities, and has also taught at Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and New York University. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has published The Vision of History in Early Britain, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, The Lais of Marie de France (co-translated with Joan Ferrante), and Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (co-edited with David Rosand), as well as many articles on Chaucer’s poetry and other medieval and Renaissance subjects.