The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Geoffrey Chaucer · tales in verse and prose · a General Prologue, twenty-four tales and the Retraction, in ten fragments · c. 1387 to 1400, unfinished at the poet’s death · about 181,700 words · in Chaucer’s Middle English, in W. W. Skeat’s text from the Ellesmere manuscript (1900), for every quotation
Mode
Frame collection of tales; estates satire, fabliau, romance, saint’s life, beast fable, sermon and debate in one game of tellers
Mythos
The pilgrimage, built as the frame and turned at its end into the way to the heavenly city; the old man who cannot die; the loathly lady; the patient wife as Job; the fall in the farmyard
Phase
An April pilgrimage out of Southwark, from the gathering at the Tabard to the low sun of the Parson’s Prologue; the return and the supper never reached
Presentation
Poem with two prose tales; a General Prologue, twenty-four tales told by twenty-three pilgrims and the links between them, in ten fragments, closed by a Retraction; 17,395 verse lines, three quarters of them in decasyllabic couplets
Register
From the Miller’s fabliau and the Host’s oaths to Griselda’s grief, Cecilia’s martyrdom and the Parson’s penitential; every teller in a voice of their own, the poet’s included
Scale
Nine and twenty pilgrims of mixed estate, Knight to Plowman, on one road; a society, its marriages, money and faith, in their tellings
Governing Proposition
Nine and twenty pilgrims of mixed estate, riding out of Southwark for Canterbury, agree to tell tales on the road for a supper, and every tale they tell is an act of its teller: told for something, against somebody, in answer to the tale before. The wager of the work is that a whole society can be shown in its own interested tellings, played as a game on the road, and that the game, carried to the road’s end, can be turned there into earnest.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote / The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote” (A 1 to 2). The first sentence runs eighteen lines, from the rain and the young sun “in the Ram” to the birds that sleep with open eye, and then: “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” (A 12), to Canterbury, to the martyr “That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke” (A 18). The season that wakes the birds sends people on the road, and the sentence does not say whether nature or devotion moves them. At the Tabard in Southwark the narrator finds “Wel nyne and twenty in a companye” (A 24), joins them, and describes them one by one, from the Knight to the Plowman.
He describes and does not judge. Of the Monk who would rather hunt than keep his rule he says, “And I seyde, his opinioun was good” (A 183). Then he states his method, which is to have none of his own: “Who-so shal telle a tale after a man, / He moot reherce, as ny as ever he can” (A 731 to 732), every word, however broad. He asks pardon for not setting folk in their degree: “My wit is short, ye may wel understonde” (A 746). The pose of the plain recorder is the work’s instrument. If the narrator only repeats, each tale belongs wholly to the one who tells it, and is to be read as that person’s act.
The Host proposes a game. Each pilgrim is to tell two tales “To Caunterbury-ward”, “And hom-ward he shal tellen othere two” (A 793 to 794), and the best is to have “a soper at our aller cost” (A 799) at the Tabard on their return. What exists is a General Prologue, twenty-four tales told by twenty-three pilgrims (the pilgrim Chaucer tells two), the links between them and a Retraction, about 181,700 words in ten fragments. Three quarters of the verse is in decasyllabic couplets; the Man of Law, the Prioress, the Clerk and the Second Nun tell in rhyme royal, the Monk in eight-line stanzas, Sir Thopas in tail-rhyme, and two tales are prose. Within each fragment the tales are joined by links; between the fragments the joins are missing, and the manuscripts do not agree on their order.
Movement II
The lot falls to the Knight, and his tale is the longest in verse, 2,250 lines, more than an eighth of all the verse. It is a romance of Theseus’s Athens, two sworn brothers in love with one woman, and a tournament that one wins and dies of. Arcite dying asks the question the whole work keeps asking: “What is this world? what asketh men to have? / Now with his love, now in his colde grave / Allone, with-outen any companye” (A 2777 to 2779). Old Egeus, to comfort the city, names the frame from inside the tale: “This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo, / And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro” (A 2847 to 2848). Theseus closes on “The firste moevere of the cause above” (A 2987).
Then the Miller, drunk, will not wait. He tells of a carpenter, his young wife and two clerks who want her, the Knight’s two rivals and one lady brought down to a house in Oxford, and he times it to the line: “But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers / Ful savourly, er he was war of this” (A 3734 to 3735). Before it the narrator makes his apology. He must rehearse every tale, so whoever does not wish to hear it should “Turne over the leef, and chese another tale” (A 3177), and should not blame him: “men shal nat make ernest of game” (A 3186). It is an apology and a defiance in one, and it sets churl beside knight in the same book.
The Reeve takes the carpenter as an insult and pays the Miller back with a miller beguiled by two clerks “At Trumpington, nat fer fro Cantebrigge” (A 3921). The Cook begins a tale of a London apprentice and stops at its fifty-eighth line, on a wife who kept “A shoppe, and swyved for hir sustenance” (A 4422). The Hengwrt manuscript alone writes after it “OF THIS COKES TALE MAKED CHAUCER NA MORE”; Ellesmere leaves the space blank. The first fragment is the work’s method at full strength, a chain in which every tale is answered and every insult paid, and it ends in a break.
Movement III
The Wife of Bath opens with a claim against the books: “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, were right y-nough to me / To speke of wo that is in mariage” (D 1 to 3). Her prologue, longer than her tale, is a life told in argument: five husbands at the church door, scripture turned against the clerks who use it on her, and a book of wicked wives read aloud to her by her fifth husband until she tears out its pages. Her answer to that book is a question: “Who peyntede the leoun, tel me who? / By god, if wommen hadde writen stories, / As clerkes han with-inne hir oratories, / They wolde han writen of men more wikkednesse” (D 692 to 695).
She is not only an argument. Her couplets run on as a voice does, and age arrives in the middle of a boast: “Unto this day it dooth myn herte bote / That I have had my world as in my tyme” (D 472 to 473). Her tale is set in Arthur’s time, when all the land was “fulfild of fayerye” (D 859): a knight under sentence must learn what women most desire, and learns it from a loathly old wife: “Wommen desyren to have sovereyntee” (D 1038). The Friar and the Summoner, meanwhile, quarrel through the rest of her fragment, each telling a tale to damn the other’s trade.
The question she has opened is answered from other fragments. The Clerk tells of Griselda, tested by her husband past reason and patient as Job, who greets her children given back to her with “O tendre, o dere, o yonge children myne” (E 1093). The Franklin tells of a marriage in which neither rules: “Love wol nat ben constreyned by maistrye” (F 764), and its crisis turns on a promise kept at a cost, “Trouthe is the hyeste thing that man may kepe” (F 1479). The debate runs across three fragments whose order the manuscripts do not fix, and it is argued throughout by tellers with something at stake in the answer.
Movement IV
The Pardoner tells the pilgrims how he preaches. His theme is always one, “Radix malorum est Cupiditas” (C 334), the love of money the root of evil; he shows his bulls and his relics, and he preaches against avarice to get money. He does not hide it: “For, though myself be a ful vicious man, / A moral tale yet I yow telle can” (C 459 to 460). Then he tells the tale he tells in churches. The doctrine is true and its use is a fraud, and the work lets both stand in one voice.
Three rioters in a tavern hear that Death has taken their companion, and swear to find him: “Deeth shal be deed, if that they may him hente” (C 710). On the road they meet an old man who cannot die and walks the world looking for anyone who will trade youth for his age: “And on the ground, which is my modres gate, / I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late” (C 729 to 730), and he asks the earth, “leve moder, leet me in!” (C 731). He sends them to a tree where Death is to be found. They find gold under it and kill one another for it. The tale works on its hearers, and at its end the Pardoner offers his relics to the company.
In the seventh fragment the poet tells his own tale, the romance of Sir Thopas, and the Host stops him: “No more of this, for goddes dignitee” (B 2109, VII 919). The pilgrim asks why, “Sin that it is the beste rym I can?” (B 2118, VII 928), and is told: “Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a tord” (B 2120, VII 930). He answers with Melibee, a long treatise in prose. The Monk’s tragedies of the fallen are stopped in their turn by the Knight, “good sir, na-more of this” (B 3957, VII 2767), and the Nun’s Priest follows with a cock, a hen and a fox, told in the full machinery of epic, and ends: “Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille” (B 4633, VII 3443).
Movement V
The work shows its seams. The Man of Law says “I speke in prose” (B 96) and tells his tale in rhyme royal. The Shipman’s Tale speaks for a moment as a wife, “He moot us clothe” (B 1202, VII 12). The Second Nun calls herself “unworthy sone of Eve” (G 62). The Summoner promises his tales before “Sidingborne” (D 847), and a later fragment announces “Lo! Rouchestre stant heer faste by!” (B 3116, VII 1926), a town nearer London. The Squire’s tale stops two lines into its third part, where the manuscripts fail. These are the marks of a work unrevised, and none of them touches the law that holds it.
Then the sun is low, the shadows long, and the Host counts: “Now lakketh us no tales mo than oon” (I 16), “For every man, save thou, hath told his tale” (I 25). The Parson refuses: “Thou getest fable noon y-told for me” (I 31). He will tell “a mery tale in prose / To knitte up al this feeste, and make an ende” (I 46 to 47), and he asks for grace to show the company the way “Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrimage / That highte Ierusalem celestial” (I 50 to 51). At the point where the fiction runs out of tales the road to Canterbury becomes the road to the heavenly city, and the treatise on penitence that follows is the earnest the game has deferred.
After it the maker takes his leave. He asks those who read to thank Christ for what pleases them and to blame his want of skill for the rest, and he revokes his “translacions and endytinges of worldly vanitees” (I 1085), among them “The tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sounen in-to sinne” (I 1086). The revocation stands inside the book it revokes, and it takes back only the tales that tend to sin. The Host’s supper at the Tabard is never reached. The game was played on the road out, and the road ends at Ierusalem.
Act III · The Twelve
Within a fragment the parts are compelled, because each tale is required by its teller and by the tale before it: the Miller must answer the Knight, the Reeve the Miller, the Friar and the Summoner each other, and the narrator’s “Turne over the leef, and chese another tale” (A 3177) concedes that he may not cut. What holds the axis at its lowest is matter the whole could lose. The Physician’s, Shipman’s and Manciple’s tales could go with little loss; the Monk’s ninety-seven stanzas are long by design, but long; the Cook breaks off after fifty-eight lines. And the plan that would have compelled the scale is abandoned: “every man, save thou, hath told his tale” (I 25), one each, not four.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: every story is told by somebody, for something, against somebody, and a society is the sum of its interested tellings. The narrator’s poetics say so (A 731 to 732). The Pardoner discloses the gap between doctrine and use: “For, though myself be a ful vicious man, / A moral tale yet I yow telle can” (C 459 to 460). The Wife exposes who wrote the books about women: “Who peyntede the leoun, tel me who?” (D 692). The marriage debate states power in the household as a question, and the Franklin answers it: “Love wol nat ben constreyned by maistrye” (F 764). A meaning, not a mood.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Chaucer’s register is comic, ironic and humane, and elevation is not his constant mode; but it comes more often than the reputation allows, and in every kind. Beauty: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote” (A 1). Grandeur: Theseus on “The firste moevere of the cause above” (A 2987). Pathos: the dying Arcite (A 2777 to 2779) and Griselda’s “O tendre, o dere, o yonge children myne” (E 1093). Terror: the Pardoner’s old man knocking on the earth with his staff (C 729 to 731). Devotion, in the rhyme royal of the Prioress and the Second Nun. The height is real and recurs. What holds it down is frequency: the Monk, Melibee and the Parson’s treatise are long reaches that do not rise.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth built, not evoked: the pilgrimage is the structure, and the poem turns it at its end. It begins in the season that sends folk “to goon on pilgrimages” (A 12); old Egeus names it, “This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo, / And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro” (A 2847 to 2848); and the Parson converts the road into “Ierusalem celestial” (I 51). Inside the tales deep patterns bear load: the old man who cannot die, and the rioters who go out to slay Death and find gold; the loathly lady; Griselda as Job; Chauntecleer’s fall as a farmyard Eden. Held below the top by the middle fragments, where the frame is social and the road only a road.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the frame collection (Boccaccio’s Decameron, whether or not Chaucer knew it; Gower’s Confessio Amantis), estates satire, the French dream vision and the Italian poets he had translated. The departure is large: a company of mixed estates whose quarrels drive the sequence; tales fitted to tellers, so that genre becomes character; a narrator who withholds judgement (A 183); English decasyllabic couplets at a length no English poet had sustained. The stake is in the text: churls’ fabliaux set beside saints’ lives with an apology that is also a defiance (A 3171 to 3186), and the Retraction revoking “The tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sounen in-to sinne” (I 1086). Held from the top because the frame and the satire were inherited.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Substitute an anthology for the frame and the work stops knowing what it knows: that a tale’s meaning is a function of its teller, its audience and the tale it answers. The Miller parodies the Knight because he is drunk and the Knight first; the Pardoner’s sermon damns because he says what it is for; Sir Thopas is a joke because its teller is the poet, and his second tale is Melibee because his rhyme has been silenced (B 2120, VII 930). Rhyme royal serves the Prioress’s miracle and the Clerk’s exemplum, couplets the quarrels, prose the treatises. Where the frame is present it is the instrument of the knowledge; the cost is that it works fully within fragments, fitfully between them.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Six centuries of return have not exhausted it, and the evidence is in the record: Dryden’s Preface to the Fables (1700); Tyrwhitt’s edition and the recovery of the metre; Kittredge’s reading of a marriage group (1912), still the frame of argument a century later; the quarrel over the narrator’s irony; exegetical, feminist, historicist, manuscript and queer readings, the Wife and the Pardoner each with a library. The yield is formal as well: the order of the fragments, the status of the links, the Retraction, and game against earnest, “men shal nat make ernest of game” (A 3186), are open questions the work itself sustains. The Physician’s and the Manciple’s tales have yielded little, which keeps it below the top.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is the work’s own tradition and region, English, and there it is foundational. Its intrinsic force: it made English a medium for a long work of every register, established the decasyllabic couplet that runs to Dryden and Pope, and made dramatic character in verse narrative, the monologues of the Wife and the Pardoner standing behind the English dramatic monologue. Its pressure on Continental literature is small. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the fifteenth century made Chaucer its master (Hoccleve, Lydgate, who wrote a Canterbury continuation, the Scottish poets); Spenser named him the undefiled well of English; Shakespeare and Fletcher made The Two Noble Kinsmen from the Knight’s Tale; then Dryden’s Fables, Blake’s engraving of the pilgrims, Wordsworth’s Prioress, Eliot’s April and Pasolini’s film (1972).
Score: 9.4 / 10
The form is legible: beginning and end are present, and each fragment is ordered within by its links. Only the sequence of the fragments is uncertain, and since the poet never fixed it, that is unfinishedness, not loss; a small charge remains, because the manuscripts “differ as to the arrangement of the Tales”, as Skeat records. Presence is continuous for six centuries: more than eighty manuscripts, Caxton’s press, every century’s editions. The larger charge is to the form as read: the loss of final -e made the metre illegible from the sixteenth century until Tyrwhitt, and for some two centuries the printed work carried tales not Chaucer’s. Restoration has made both good. The fabric is excellent: Ellesmere and Hengwrt, within a decade of the poet’s death.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged on Chaucer’s Middle English as Skeat edits it, the making is load-bearing. The General Prologue’s portraits do in a line what estates satire took a stanza for: “And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche” (A 308); “Housbondes at chirche-dore she hadde fyve” (A 460). The Miller’s Tale is timed to the line-break (A 3734 to 3735); the Wife’s couplets run on and digress as a voice does. The Nun’s Priest’s mock-epic, the Pardoner’s sermon and the deliberate badness of Sir Thopas show a poet who can write in any key, the wrong one on purpose included. The charge is the prose: Melibee and the Parson’s Tale are workmanlike translations, competent, not commanding, and a quarter of the words.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The two most distant elements, the Miller’s Tale and the Parson’s treatise on penitence, obey one law: the game under the pilgrimage, in which play is licensed on the road and earnest waits at its end, “Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille” (B 4633, VII 3443). The range governed is very wide: fabliau, romance, saint’s life, beast fable, Breton lay, sermon, tragedy, an alchemist’s confession. What lowers it is that the law is not applied throughout, because the work was not finished: the Man of Law announces “I speke in prose” (B 96) and tells rhyme royal; the Second Nun calls herself “unworthy sone of Eve” (G 62); Sittingbourne comes before Rochester. These are seams of an unrevised draft, not contradictions of the law.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held are many, and the frame integrates them rather than listing them. The estates: chivalry, the Church in all its ranks and parasites, law, medicine, commerce, the guilds, the land. Marriage, argued from four sides. Labour and money: the Reeve’s accounts, the Shipman’s loan, the Canon’s Yeoman’s ruined alchemy. The sacred: the Prioress’s miracle, Cecilia’s martyrdom, the Parson’s penitential. History and fortune: the Monk’s tragedies, Theseus’s Athens, Custance’s Rome and Syria. The heavens: the April sun “in the Ram” (A 8), Chauntecleer’s astronomy, the Franklin’s astrologer. Fairy, in a land “fulfild of fayerye” (D 859). Consciousness, in the Wife and the Pardoner speaking themselves. Only the incompleteness of the whole keeps it below the very top.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 9.4, with The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.3. The founding work of English poetry, its reach unbroken from Lydgate to Eliot; every estate of a society, with its marriages, money, faith, history and heavens, held in one frame of tellers; six centuries of argument the work itself sustains; and a text whole in two early witnesses, its blurred centuries made good.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8, held by matter the work could lose: the Physician’s, Shipman’s and Manciple’s tales, the length of the Monk’s tragedies, the Cook’s fifty-eight lines, stretches of the two prose treatises, and a plan of four tales a pilgrim abandoned for one. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.3: height in every kind, from the April opening to the old man at his mother’s gate, with long reaches, the Monk, Melibee and the Parson’s treatise, that do not rise. The sounding of Chaucer’s final -e is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5, by three tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.4, The Imperishable at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.4. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 107.4, an average of 8.95, which rounds to 9.0, the figure Tier V requires, with no room beneath it.
Basis · a full reading of The Canterbury Tales in Chaucer’s Middle English, scored as one unfinished work: the General Prologue, twenty-four tales told by twenty-three pilgrims, the links between them and the Retraction, in ten fragments, c. 1387 to 1400. The text is W. W. Skeat’s (The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. IV, Clarendon Press, second edition, 1900), Project Gutenberg e-text #22120. On Skeat’s own statement it “is founded upon that of the Ellesmere MS. (E.)”, collated with Hengwrt and five other manuscripts, with every departure from Ellesmere recorded in his notes. The work is read in the Ellesmere order, Fragments I to X. Skeat prints the tales in another order, in Groups A to I, and citations give his group and line, with the Ellesmere line added for Fragment VII: B 2120, VII 930 is the same line. The arrangement of the fragments in the first manuscripts is part of the work. The Tale of Gamelyn, which Skeat prints as an appendix, and the other tales later copies and printings added are not; they bear on survival only. Measured by script on the text with Skeat’s apparatus removed: about 181,700 words, a quarter of them prose, and 17,395 lines of verse. Every quotation is in Skeat’s spelling and was checked against the file; no modernisation is used or quoted. The metre depends on the sounding of final -e, which editors reconstruct and readers still dispute; the music of the line as Chaucer spoke it is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.