2 (p. 681) ’Loss of property may recovered be, / But loss of time ruins us’: The Host cites Seneca (Moral Epistles 1.3), but the expression is commonplace.
3 (p. 683) More than Ovid made of mention l In his Epistles: The reference is to Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of letters supposedly written (mostly) by women of classical myth and legend to their lovers and ex-lovers.
4 (p. 683) “In youth he wrote of Ceyx and Alcion”: The Book of the Duchess, apparently Chaucer’s earliest extant long poem, contains a paraphrase of Ovid’s story of Ceyx and Alcyone from Metamorphoses, book 11.
5 (p. 683) the Legend of Good Women: The list of abandoned or mistreated classical heroines that follows includes those who appear in The Legend of Good Women and several who do not; the latter may have been slated for inclusion had Chaucer completed the collection.
6 (p. 685) wicked example of Canacee: See Ovid, Heroides 2.
7 (p. 685) Apollonius of Tyre: The story of Apollonius of Tyre was widely known in medieval Europe. Apollonius is a prince who must go into exile when his life is threatened by Antiochus, the incestuous father of the woman Apollonius wishes to marry.
8 (p. 685) Pierides: The Pierides (daughters of Pierus) challenged the Muses to a singing contest and for their presumption were transformed into magpies (Ovid, Metamorphoses 5). But the term Pierides can also refer to the Muses themselves, who, according to legend, were born in Pieria.
9 (p. 685) Oh hateful misfortune, condition of poverty!: The dispraise of poverty is adapted from On the Misery of the Human Condition (also known as De contemptu mundi [On Contempt for the World]), a late-twelfth-century oration by Cardinal Lothario de’ Segni, who later became Pope Innocent III. A companion oration on the dignity of humanity was planned but never executed. The Man of Law’s subsequent praise of merchants has no connection to Innocent’s text.
10 (p. 691) Hector... Julius Caesar: Hector and Achilles were, respectively, Trojan and Greek heroes of the Trojan War. Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar were first allies, then bitter rivals at the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire.
11 (p. 691) The siege of Thebes: In classical myth, the city of Thebes was the home of Oedipus, who blinded himself in punishment for unintentionally killing his father and marrying his own mother. After Oedipus’ death his two sons, Polynices and Eteocles, agreed to take turns ruling Thebes, but Eteocles broke the agreement, refusing to vacate the throne when his time was up, so Polynices raised an army and besieged the city. Eventually, the two brothers met and killed each other in battle. The story is the subject of the first-century C.E. epic, the Thebaid, by Statius.
12 (p. 691) Turnus: Prince of the Rutulians, he was Aeneas’ rival in the war fought by the exiled Trojans for a place to settle in Latium on the Italian peninsula, as told by Virgil in the Aeneid.
13 (p. 697) the Berber nation: The Berbers, a north African civilization, are here used broadly to represent non-Christian nations.
14 (p. 697) Pyrrhus: The son of Achilles. See the Aeneid, book 2.
15 (P. 697) O primum mobile!: The primum mobile (“prime mover”) was the outermost heavenly sphere in the Ptolemaic model of the universe; it was thought to be the force that moved the other spheres from east to west.
16 (p. 697) Inauspicious ascendent tortuous: This stanza describes the conditions of the heavens that made Constance’s voyage inauspicious. Three lines below, the atazir of a planetary configuration was its dominant factor with respect to human affairs.
17 (p. 703) Caesar’s triumphal march, / Of which Lucan makes such a boast: Lucan’s Pharsalia (a history of the Roman civil wars) reports Caesar’s plans for a triumph (that is, a celebration of his victory) on his return to Rome after defeating Pompey; the triumph never materialized.
18 (p. 707) Who saved Daniel in the horrible cave: Daniel is saved from the lions’ den, as told in the Bible, Daniel 6:16-24.
19 (p. 707) Who kept Jonas in the fish’s maw: See the Bible, Jonah 1:17-2:10.
20 (p. 709) Who kept the Hebrew people from their drowning, / With dry feet passing through the sea: See the Bible, Exodus 14:21-23.
21 (p. 709) the four angels of tempest: See the Bible, Revelation 7:1-3.
22 (p. 709) Who fed Saint Mary the Egyptian in the cave: The legend of Saint Mary the Egyptian, a repentant prostitute who lived a solitary life in the desert for forty-seven years, was widely known throughout medieval Europe.
23 (p. 711) In all that land no Christians dared gather; ... Because of the pagans, who conquered all about / The coasts of the north, by land and sea: Chaucer takes these details of early English history from Nicholas Trevet’s Anglo-Norman chronicle, his source for the Constance story. Behind Trevet stands Bede’s authoritative account in his Ecclesiastical History of the English (c.735 C.E.).
24 (p. 717) saved Susanna / From false blame: See the Bible, Daniel 13 (Vulgate), the story of Susannah and the Elders who want to have sex with her, and accuse her of fornication when she refuses. Daniel’s intervention saves her from being condemned to death.
25 (p. 735) Oh Goliath, immeasurable of length: See the Bible, 1 Samuel 17:4-51.
26 (p. 735) Who gave Judith courage or strength / To slay Holofernes in his tent: See the Vulgate Bible, Judith 13:1-10.
The Manciple’s Tale
1 (p. 751 ) Bob-up-and-down: The reference is probably to the town of Har bledown, outside Canterbury on the road from London.
2 (p. 751) We’re stuck in the mire!: “Dun is in the mire” is the name of a rural game of strength and a popular expression for getting stuck.
3 (p. 751) in Cheap: The reference is to Cheapside, a London district of shops; the name derives from the Old English ceap, meaning a bargain or a business dealing.
4 (p. 753) very drunk: In medieval popular thought, wyn ape (“ape drunk”) was one of the four stages of drunkenness; each stage was related to the behavior of a particular animal.
5 (p. 753) he could not prop himself up with his ladle: That is, he should have been content to remain a cook instead of trying to imitate a knight on a campaign (chyvachee); this is said ironically, of course.
6 (p. 755) Phoebus: Apollo, the god of the sun and of music.
7 (p. 755) Python, the serpent: See Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.438-451.
8 (p. 759) Take any bird, and put it in a cage: The following is a popular piece of conventional wisdom, also told in “The Squire’s Tale.” Chaucer could have found it in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (sixth century C.E.) or Romance of the Rose, both of which he translated.
9 (p. 761) To Alexander was told this sentence: This well-known story was available to Chaucer from several sources, including works by Cicero and Saint Augustine.
10 (p. 763) “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”: The cry of the cuckoo was often used to refer to a husband who had been cuckolded by his wife. See also note 11 to “The Knight’s Tale.”
11 (p. 767) Lord Solomon, as wise scholars say, / Teaches a man to keep his tongue well: See the Bible, Proverbs 21:23.
The Squire’s Tale
1 (p. 771) in the land of Tartary : Tartary was the generic medieval term for the Mongol Empire.
2 (p. 773) In Mars’ face and in his mansion / In Aries, the coleric hot sign: The sun’s relation to the planets and constellations is an important element of an astrological horoscope, here relevant because this is the ruler’s birthday (a horoscope is cast based upon the subject’s date of birth).
3 (p. 775) Gawain: In medieval chivalric romances, Gawain, a knight of Arthur’s Round Table, was considered a model of courtesy.
4 (p. 777) He waited many a constellation: That is, he waited until the stars were so aligned as to favor his enterprise.
5 (p. 781) Diverse folk diversely they deemed: A favorite line of Chaucer’s, expressing the inevitable multiplicity of human opinions on most matters in life.
6 (p. 781) Pegasus: In classical myth, Pegasus was a winged horse belonging to the hero Bellerophon.
7 (p. 781 ) Synon:
The Greek Synon, pretending to be a refugee from persecution by his fellow Greeks besieging Troy, convinced the Trojans to take the wooden horse, its hollow belly full of Greek soldiers, into Troy, assuring the city’s destruction. See Virgil, Aeneid, book 2.
8 (p. 783) Alhazen, and Vitulon: Alhazen was an Arabic author of a treatise on optics. Vitulon (Witelo) was a Polish author of a treatise on perspective.
9 (p. 783) Telephus the king: Telephus was an enemy wounded and then healed by Achilles during the Trojan War.
10 (p. 785) ascending was the beast royal, / The gentle Lion, with his Aldiran: The gentle lion is the constellation Leo; the precise meaning of “Aldiran” is unclear; the time is after noon.
11 (p. 785) Now danced Venus’ lusty children dear: Venus’ astrological “children” are lovers. Venus is most powerful when favorably located in the constellation of Pisces.
12 (p. 791 ) the young sun, / That in the Ram is four degrees uprisen: That is, it is just after 6 A.M.
13 (p. 799) neither Jason nor Paris of Troy: In classical mythology, Jason was the lover and betrayer of Medea. Paris, son of the king of Troy, brought on the Trojan War by abducting Helen from her home in Argos.
14 (p. 799) Lamech: In the Bible, Lamech had two wives; see Genesis 4:19-23.
15 (p. 801) As birds do that men in cages feed: The piece of conventional wisdom that follows also appears in “The Manciple’s Tale” (see note 8).
The Physician’s Tale
1 (p. 807) as Livy tells: The story of Virginia originates in the history of Rome from its beginnings (Ab urbe condita) by Livy (Titus Livius; 59 B.C.E.-17 C.E.), but Chaucer probably knew it from Romance of the Rose, lines 5589-5658. It was widely known in the Middle Ages, and is also told by Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower in his story collection Confessio amantis (The Lover’s Confession).
2 (p. 807) Pygmalion: Pygmalion made a sculpture of a beautiful woman and fell in love with his work of art, so the gods brought her to life for his pleasure. See Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.243-297.
3 (p. 807) Apelles, Zeuxis: Apelles and Zeuxis were fabled artists of antiquity. Their marvelous works were known to the Middle Ages only from stories about them in various classical texts.
4 (p. 807) Phoebus: Apollo, the sun god.
5 (p. 809) Pallas: Another name for Athena, the goddess of wisdom.
6 (p. 811) the old dance: The “old dance” is a colloquial way of referring to the maneuvers of courtship and seduction as practiced by experts in these matters; the term is also used by Chaucer elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales to describe the Wife of Bath, and in his Troilus and Criseyde to describe Pandar, the go-between figure who woos Criseyde for Troilus.
7 (p. 813) Saint Augustine made this description: See Augustine, Interpretation of the Psalms 104.17, on envy.
8 (p. 819) Jephtha gave his daughter grace: See the Bible, Judges 11, where Jephtha promises God, in return for victory in battle, to sacrifice to him the first creature he encounters on his return home; it is his daughter, who requests a two-month respite to mourn before dying.
Inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales
The last six centuries have seen an incredible number of specific allusions to Chaucer in canonical world literature—and not exclusively in poetry. In Chaucer, the Critical Heritage (1978), Derek Brewer writes, “All the later major poets, and almost all distinguished English and American men of letters up to the first third of the twentieth century have made at least passing allusion to Chaucer.” In his own day, Chaucer found favor with groups as diverse as court society, the general public, and other poets; he inspired a number of verse tributes and imitations during that time and immediately following his death. The first recorded instance came from French poet Eustache Deschamps, whose tribute, in the form of a ballad (c.1386), lauds Chaucer as a Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, and an Ovid in poetry. High praise of Chaucer surfaces in several of his close descendants’ works, such as Thomas Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum ( 1412; Regiment of Princes), in which Hoccleve refers to Chaucer as “maister deere and fadir reverent” (“worthy and respected master”), and John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes (c.1431-1438), in which Lydgate calls the poet the “lodesterre” (“lodestar”) of the English language. Two English monarchs sang the praises of Chaucer, including King James I of Scotland, who in The Kingis Quair (1423; The King’s Book), calls Chaucer and John Gower “my maisteris dere” (“my dear masters”), recommending “thair saulis vn-to the blisse of hevin” (“their souls unto the bliss of heaven”). Sir Walter Scott notes in The Monastery (1820) that Queen Elizabeth I, too, was fond of quoting Chaucer’s aphorism from “The Reeve’s Tale” that “the greatest clerks [scholars] are not the wisest men.”
Chaucer earned much admiration among fiction writers, particularly during the nineteenth century, when the novel rose to a respected status. Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell all quote from or allude to Chaucer in their works. In the visual realm, William Blake produced a 54” x 18” tempera painting, The Canterbury Pilgrims, in 1808, and Edward Burne-Jones provided illustrations for the Kelmscott edition of Chaucer’s writings (1896), which was edited by William Morris. Film adaptations of The Canterbury Tales include Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film in 1972 and an animated version in 1998, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. A six-part miniseries also appeared in Britain in 2003.
Chaucer’s greatest legacy, however, has always manifested in verse. The first work of the English literary Renaissance, Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579), reflects a strong Chaucerian influence, and Spenser invokes the author by name in the first books of his greatest work, The Faerie Queene (1590). William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595-1596) most likely had its beginnings in “The Knight’s Tale,” and act 3 of King Lear (c.1605-1606) has the Fool quoting from “The General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales. Indeed, Chaucer’s general influence permeates the works of Shakespeare and of John Milton, who directly alludes to Chaucer in his poem “Il Penseroso” (c.1625-1632; “The Melancholy Man”).
At the turn of the eighteenth century, John Dryden published his Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), which includes a highly regarded modernization of The Canterbury Tales. Several years later, satirist Alexander Pope modernized “The Prologue of the Wife of Bath’s Tale” and likely “The General Prologue” and “The Reeve’s Tale,” both of which were attributed to Thomas Betterton. Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) composed an imitation of Chaucer, now lost, that Sir Walter Scott mentions in his memoir of Swift. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, English scholar Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) considered creating a major annotated edition of Chaucer’s writings similar to his earlier interpretation of Shakespeare, but the project never came to fruition.
As Romanticism dawned at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Chaucer continued to influence writers. William Wordsworth mentions him in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) and the Prelude (1805); he also modernized “The Prioress’s Tale,” praising the original in the sonnet “Edward VI” (1821). Around the same time, John Keats imitated Chaucer in the poem “The Eve of Saint Mark” (1819). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) is an adaptation of the Canterbury Tales; the first tale in the collection, told by the host of the inn, which still stands in western Massachusetts, is “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Longfellow also immortalized the Canterbury Tales author in the sonnet “Chaucer” (1825):
An old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,
And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book lik
e any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.
George Meredith wrote his own poetic appreciation, “The Poetry of Chaucer” (1851):
Grey with all honours of age! but fresh-featured and ruddy
As dawn when the drowsy farm-yard has thrice heard
Chaunticlere.
Tender to tearfulness—childlike, and manly, and motherly;
Here beats true English blood richest joyance on sweet
English ground.
But the best-known Chaucer-inspired lines in poetry appear in T. S. Eliot’s landmark The Waste Land (1922), the premier poem of the twentieth century. Delineating the horrors of the modern era, Eliot turns on its head the celebration of spring in “The General Prologue.” The poem opens with a lament that a winter of hibernation has ended, declaring, “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” Echoes of Chaucer continue in E. E. Cummings’s “honour corruption villainy holiness” (1950), a poem about Chaucer; Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); and Spencer Reece’s The Clerk’s Tale (2004), a highly regarded collection of Chaucer-influenced poems.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as comments contemporaneous with the work, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter The Canterbury Tales through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Canterbury Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 93