Arthurian themes appear in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” First she catalogs the evils of celibacy while giving an account of her five marriages. She then tells of a knight who will escape the death penalty for rape if within a year he can discover what it is that women most desire. He meets an old witch who promises him the answer if he will marry her, which he does. She gives him the answer, which saves his life. Chaucer’s flavor survives in Theodore Morrison’s modernized English.
“My liege and lady, most of all,” says he,
“Women desire to have the sovereignty
And sit in rule and government above
Their husbands, and to have their way in love.…”
The witch then poses him another difficult question.
“Choose now, which of two courses you will try:
To have me old and ugly till I die
But evermore your true and humble wife,
Never displeasing you in all my life,
Or will you have me rather young and fair
And take your chances on who may repair
Either to your house on account of me
Or to some other place it well may be.
Now make your choice, whichever you prefer.”
Since the knight has learned his lesson well, he yields her the sovereignty in answering this question too. She rewards him by becoming exquisitely beautiful and also promising to be faithful.
And so they lived in full joy to the end.
And now to all us women may Christ send
Submissive husbands, full of youth in bed,
And grace to outlive all the men we wed.
Then there are short narratives each pointing a moral. The Canon Yeoman cautions against alchemy and other rogueries. The Clerk extols virtues, embroidering the tale of Griselda that Petrarch had translated into Latin from the Decameron. When the poor peasant girl Griselda becomes the wife of the Marquis Walter she vows perfect obedience to her husband. He tests her first by taking away their infant children and pretending that he has had them killed. She responds only with the docile request that they be decently buried where animals will not dig up their little bodies. When he says he will dismiss her so he can take a noble wife, she obediently cleans the house for her successor. Still uncomplaining, she returns to her parents’ humble cottage. Finally the marquis reveals that she has passed the test. He brings her back as his wife revealing that he was only testing her steadfastness.
This tale is written, not that it were good
For wives to follow such humility,
For that could not be borne, although they would;
But that each man, whatever his station be,
Should stand as steadfast in adversity
As did Griselda.…
For since to mortal man a wife could show
Griselda’s patience, how much more we ought
To take all that God sends us here below
With good grace.…
One of Chaucer’s more picturesque creations is the unctuous swindler, the Pardoner, who makes his living by selling pardons for all sorts of sins. His tale begins with a ringing sermon against gluttony, drunkenness, and other evils that he illustrates by his tale of three drunken gamblers. In a time of plague they go out together to kill Death, who has killed their friend. Told that they will find Death under a tree, they go there and find a hoard of gold. But they also find Death when each plots to secure more than his share of the find. Two of them kill the third whom they have sent to get food and drink. Then they drink the wine which had been brought by their slain comrade, but which he had poisoned to secure the treasure for himself. And the Pardoner concludes:
O sin accursed above all cursedness,
O treacherous murder, O foul wickedness,
O gambling lustfulness and gluttony,
Traducer of Christ’s name by blasphemy.…
And now, good men, your sins may God forgive
And keep you specially from avarice!
My holy pardon will avail in this,
For it can heal each one of you that brings
His pennies, silver brooches, spoons or rings.
Your wives, come offer up your cloth or wool!
I write your names herein my roll, just so.
Into the bliss of heaven you shall go!
Despite his Retraction, Chaucer never returned to less worldly writing. In 1391 he wrote a Treatise on the Astrolabe for “my little son Lewis … of the tender age of ten year.” Based on a Latin translation of a work in Arabic, it survives as the oldest known work in English on a complex scientific instrument, witness to Chaucer the enthusiastic and versatile amateur.
It remains a mystery how Chaucer’s works circulated, to whom, and in how many copies. He allowed parts of the unfinished work to circulate among friends. Fifty-five complete manuscripts have survived. We must wonder, too, that when monasteries were the scriptoria, Chaucer’s novel and entertaining, worldly but unedifying work had the power to make itself known. Before printing there was no way of making a reliable estimate of the number of copies of a work that circulated.
Chaucer’s works enjoyed a rich and varied afterlife. He had become a byword and a popular English author long before he appeared in print. He was widely imitated, and by the fifteenth century a whole school of Scottish writers came to be known as the Chaucerians. He was a good believing Catholic, but because of his gibes at monks and pardoners English Protestants treated him as their forerunner. Though he was long praised for his naiveté, his defenders say that a naive collector of customs would have been “a paradoxical monster.” The Canterbury Tales attracted illustrators and became a favorite text for pioneering printers, from William Caxton (c.1422–1491) to William Morris and beyond.
Centuries passed before Chaucer’s stature as a poet was rediscovered. He was condescended to as “rough Chaucer,” for his verses seemed not to scan. Then another literary amateur, a versatile Clerk of the House of Commons, Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730–1786) discovered that the final e’s in words had actually been pronounced in Chaucer’s day. So he made Chaucer’s verses scan. Since then English writers have acclaimed his poetry for its sweetness and charming flow as much as for its broad humanity.
Writers most unlike Chaucer have claimed his lineage. Edmund Spenser (according to Dryden) declared “that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease.” The mystic William Blake noted a wider reincarnation. “Chaucer’s characters,” he wrote, “live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining one of these characters; nor can a child be born who is not one of these characters of Chaucer.”
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“In the Land of Booze and Bibbers”
“MOST illustrious Drinkers and you, most precious Syphilitics,” Rabelais greeted his readers in 1534, “for it is to you, not to others, that my writings are dedicated.” So he introduced the first great comic epic of Western literature, a long digressive adventure in dipsomania. Just then it was not surprising that his paean to the absurd should be a tale of drink, for in the summer of 1532 France had suffered the worst drought in living memory. As Rabelais recalled, men were seen “lolling out their tongues like greyhounds that have run for six hours; many threw themselves into wells; others crept into a cow’s belly to be in the shade.… It was hard work to keep the holy water in the churches from being exhausted. But they so organized it, by the advice of My Lords the Cardinals and the Holy Father, that no one dared to take more than one dip.”
Like many a best-selling author, Rabelais followed closely in the path marked by another recent best-seller. That summer of 1532 had seen the publication of the sensationally successful book Les Grandes et inestimables cronicques du grant et énorme géant Gargantua, a fanciful tale of a family of giants whom Merlin had created for King Arthur. Rabelais noted that “the printers have sold more copies of that work in two months than they have Bibles in nine years.” He may have
had something to do with writing or revising the Cronicques de Gargantua, but this did not prevent him from writing his very own tale of giants. His pretended sequel is the book that many call the first modern novel. Speedily written, as the work of Alcofribas Nasier (anagram for François Rabelais), it was printed in October and sold briskly that November at the Lyons fair.
Pantagruel, the All-Thirsty One, was already familiar in the French mystery plays as the demon of thirst who went around sprinkling salt into people’s throats. Learned physicians like Rabelais had made it a name for the irritation of the throat that induced thirst. But Rabelais would depart shamelessly and exuberantly from the proprieties of medicine and the Arthurian legend. He felt justified because Aristotle, still the highest authority on almost everything, had observed that of all living creatures only man was endowed with laughter. And at the outset of Book One of Gargantua he announced his theme:
It teaches little, except how to laugh:
The best of arguments; the rest is chaff,
Viewing the grief that threatens your brief span
For smiles, not tears, make the better autograph,
Because to laugh is natural to man.
(Translated by Samuel Putnam)
But there is no straight road to the absurd or the comic.
The surprising path that François Rabelais (c.1490–1553) created for himself was through medicine and the thickets of pedantry. Born to the family of a prosperous French lawyer in Touraine in central France, by 1521 he was a Franciscan monk, writing Greek verses to Guillaume Budé (1468–1540), a friend of Erasmus, founder of the Collège de France, inspirer of revived interest in Greek literature. In 1523, when the Sorbonne banned the study of that “heretical language,” Rabelais’s Franciscan superiors seized his Greek books. When these were finally returned he transferred to a more hospitable Benedictine monastery. By 1528 Rabelais—without permission from his superiors—had taken off his monk’s robes and gone to Paris to study medicine. There he fathered two of his illegitimate children by an unidentified widow. Studying at the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier he received his doctor’s degree in medicine (1537), and though it was forbidden by the Sorbonne, he actually dissected the corpse of a hanged criminal. Modern admirers have credited him with such medical “discoveries” as the uterine origin of hysteria in women and novel treatments for syphilis.
Medicine was still a humanistic science, based on the ancient Greek texts of Hippocrates and Galen, which students read only in translation. At Montpellier, Rabelais had impressed his fellows and alarmed his professors by his own translations of the sacred Greek medical texts because a student who could read these texts—and the New Testament—in the original might be tempted to draw his own conclusions. He never ceased to champion the “humanistic” approach to medicine, seeking progress through the better reading of ancient texts.
In Rabelais’s erudite imagination, drink would attain elaborate proportions. It was on a drought-cursed Friday, Rabelais recounts, that Pantagruel was born. “His father named him as he did; for Panta in Greek is equivalent to all, and Gruel in the Hagarene language means thirsty, the inference being that at the hour of the child’s birth, the world was all athirst. Moreover his father in a mood of prophecy foresaw that his son would one day be the Ruler of the Thirsty Ones.” This volume never abandons the leitmotif of drink. When Pantagruel grows up and assumes his throne, his great battle is against the invading Thirsty-People (Dipsodes).
Pantagruel was an instant sellout. Two printings were quickly disposed of, and it was immediately pirated. The next year he wrote a parody of popular almanacs, which he called Pantagrueline Prognostications. Meanwhile the authorities at the city hospital of Lyons appointed him their principal physician with a stipend of forty French pounds a year.
From the popular Cronicques de Gargantua, Rabelais had borrowed the device of listing the giants’ precise measurements, the texture and dimensions of their clothing, their food and drink, their urinations and defecations. Rabelais’s astonishing talent for exaggeration expanded everything into a primeval free-flowing narrative—the birth, education, and adventures of the intrepid young Pantagruel, son of Gargantua and his wife, Badebec, daughter of the king of Utopia. We follow his education in Paris, his meeting with his boon companion Panurge, the learned debates at the Sorbonne, and Pantagruel’s victorious military excursion to defend Utopia against the invading Thirsty-ones, including too a trip to the netherworld.
Rabelais then exploited the popularity of his own Pantagruel by spinning off his own Book One on Gargantua, Pantagruel’s father. For these ribald ventures Lyons had the advantage of remoteness from the vigilant eye of the Sorbonne. When the gibes of Pantagruel against the Sorbonnists came to their notice in October 1533, they labeled the work obscene but still did not impose the faculty’s formal act of suppression. When King Francis I came to Lyons for the marriage of his second son to Catherine de’ Medici, Rabelais met the energetic young Jean du Bellay, bishop of Paris, who would become his great patron. To relieve his pain from sciatica, du Bellay took along Dr. Rabelais on his trip to Rome. There Rabelais sought, unsuccessfully, to secure the pope’s absolution for having given up his monastic robes and for changing from the Franciscans to the Benedictines without proper authority.
He must have been a prodigious worker. Despite his travels and his enlarged hospital duties, soon after his return to Lyons in 1534 he published the substantial Book One of his great comic novel. La Vie inestimable du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel was again signed Maistre Alcofribas (Nasier). While Pantagruel had spun out the fantasy of an amiable giant growing up and going forth to battle in Utopia, this tale of his father, Gargantua, plunged into troublesome issues of education, politics, warfare, and the Church. Although Rabelais remained a Catholic all his life, he sometimes came perilously close to the Protestant positions. The controversial Erasmus (1466?–1536) he called his spiritual “father and mother.”
These were turbulent times, fertile of both discovery and creation. When Rabelais was a boy, Columbus was making his first voyages to America. He had just become a Franciscan novice when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of Palast Church in Wittenberg and was putting the Bible into German. This was the birthtime, too, of modern nations and of the French language under Francis I. In neighboring Italy Rabelais saw the recent works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian.
Learned men across Europe were finally reading their classics in the original Greek. In such an age it still took courage to expose the absurdity of the learned. What might have been Rabelais’s fate was dramatized in the tragedy of his friend Étienne Dolet (1509–1546), “the first martyr of the Renaissance.” Dolet had set up a maverick printing press in Lyons, and after Rabelais’s own expurgated edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, which softened his strictures against the Sorbonne, Dolet brought out his “new edition” of Rabelais, reproducing all Rabelais’s original indiscretions. The Sorbonne banned both editions. Dolet urged his countrymen to write in French, their mother tongue, rather than in Latin, “so that foreigners won’t call us barbarians.” His courage left many in doubt whether he was an atheist or merely a Protestant, but the Sorbonne was not interested in fine distinctions. They condemned Dolet for the heresy of denying the immortality of the soul. On his way to be burned alive at the stake, he punned, “Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pro ratione dolet.” (Dolet does not suffer for himself, but he suffers for the sake of reason).
Rabelais was fortunate in his patrons—Abbot Geoffroy d’Estissac of the Benedictine monastery that he first joined in refuge from the Franciscans; Cardinal Jean du Bellay, who took him along on trips to Rome; and then Jean’s elder brother Guillaume Seigneur de Langey, who supported him for several years in Turin. With their aid he finally did secure the pope’s absolution for abandoning the monastic garb and changing orders. In the vacillating orthodoxies of the age, Rabelais himself played an ambiguous role between compassion for Evangelicals and Protestants a
nd conformity to the latest Roman dogma. But he somehow retained the support of Francis I. In 1551 Jean du Bellay secured for him paid positions as curate of two churches and in accordance with the customs that he lampooned, he never lived in either place, but “farmed out” these benefices and spent his own last years in Paris.
While Rabelais made every institution and article of faith the target of his extravagant imagination, his most enduring fantasies were oblique in their comic attack. The narrative flow of his Gargantua, Book One of his romance (written and published after Pantagruel which he called Book Two), is straightforward. He begins conventionally enough, with the birth and youth of Gargantua, his education at home and in Paris, where Gargantua experiences both an old-fashioned scholastic education by Tubal Holofernes and an enlightened humanistic education by Ponocrates. The Cake Peddlers’ War shows how petty quarrels lead to mayhem and murder.
There was more to come, but only after a long interval. It was not until 1546, twelve years after Gargantua, that Rabelais’s Book Three appeared. But it was his first two volumes, the Gargantua (1534) and the Pantagruel (1532), that would become classics of Western literature. These provided a single novel of romance in the style of those that in the next century would disorder the imagination of Don Quixote and incite Cervantes’s own anti-romance.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 40