Tales and Tellers (The Canterbury Tales, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on The Canterbury Tales, we welcome translator and editor Sheila Fisher to discuss Geoffrey Chaucer's life and times, his great accomplishment in crafting these Tales, and the intricacies of Sheila's favorite tale, that of the Wife of Bath.

Sheila Fisher is Professor of English at Trinity College (Hartford). She is the author of Chaucer’s Poetic Alchemy: A Study of Value and Its Transformation in The Canterbury Tales, and the editor (with Janet E. Halley) of Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, as well as essays on the Gawain-poet, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Canterbury Tales, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/NLCanterbury.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by The Canterbury Tales: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4w2Lu5kGenjNFtqCQT8djv?si=0b2bd16d939f471a.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/thecanterburytales/part1/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present part one of our two episodes devoted to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, as we are joined by its translator and editor, Sheila Fisher. In this first episode, we discuss Chaucer’s life and times, the singular achievement of his Canterbury Tales, courtly love, as well as Sheila’s favorite Tale. Sheila Fisher is professor of English at Trinity College. She is the author of “Chaucer's Poetic Alchemy: A Study of Value and Its Transformation in The Canterbury Tales.” She also co-edited “Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writing: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism.” We are so happy she could join us today. Sheila Fisher, welcome to the Norton Library podcast! 

[Sheila:] Thank you so much, Mark! It's really great to be here. 

[Mark:] Well, it's great to have you here – to have you join our conversation about Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. And maybe we should start where we like to start on these episodes, and that is with the writer.  

[Sheila:] Mhmm. 

[Mark:] So, Sheila, who was Geoffrey Chaucer? How much do we know about him? 

[Sheila:] Well, in interesting ways, we know more about Chaucer than we know about a lot of other, um, medieval writers. You know, all of those “Anonymous” that you see attached to medieval writers, we don't know anything about them. Um, but with Chaucer, there's a collection of records because he was, um, affiliated with royal courts and he was a civil servant. There are a collection of records that pertain to his life that two editors, you know, quite a while back, named Crow and Olson, edited together into a volume called “Chaucer's Life-Records." So, we can trace his steps through his adult, professional life. What's interesting is, two key, um, two key facts that you might expect we would know about Chaucer, um, or that may come through in the Life-Records, we don't. We don't know what his birth date is. We know he died on October 25th, 1400, but we don't know what day he was born on. And none of those life records, that tell us how much wine he was given in his annuity or, um, where he was living when he was giving an apartment over Aldersgate in London, none of them mention him as a poet. So, I mean, there's the off possibility, which nobody subscribes to, that there were two Geoffrey Chaucers running around England between 1340ish and 1400, and one of them was a civil servant and one of them was a poet. But there are other references in other, um, artist’s literary works of the period to Chaucer and Chaucer's poetry. So – and Chaucer himself alludes to his poetry in his poetry. So, you know, they're probably one and the same person. 

[Mark:] When you mention his royal service, would this have been, uh, political or military or artistic? What's the nature of that service? 

[Sheila:] That's a really excellent question. Chaucer came from what we would call today – and I'm using modern, um, class designations, which, you know, are anachronistic. But they at least give us a sense of where you insert yourself – where he inserts himself in a social class. He belonged to the upper middle class. His father was a vintner, which means that he was involved in the, um, import-export business, um, with wine from France. Um, and it was a prosperous business. His mother, um, Agnes Copton, was wealthy in her own right, so that Chaucer was, um, a young man of some privilege. He wasn't aristocratic; he wasn't noble. Um, he wasn't quote, unquote “of the blood.” But he moved in those circles. There's no evidence that he went to university as a young man, but given the kinds of jobs, as it were ,that he landed, he probably went to what would have been considered “medieval professional schools” for, um, young men of the upper middle class who were aspiring to become, you know, members of the courtier class. And so, he may have gone to one or both of the Inns of Chancery, where he would have been taught how to produce the kinds of documents that, um, civil servants or people in service to the royal class court would have produced, or to the Inns of Court, which was the medieval equivalent of a law school. And so, both of those educational backgrounds may have been of real service to him. 

[Mark:] Well, I wanted to ask you a few questions about his career, but before I do, is there something about the world that he's born into, the society or the world at large, that we need to know – that affects the way we read The Canterbury Tales? What was going on in Chaucer's life and in England at the time? 

[Sheila:] Chaucer's world, if you look at the social structure, was fairly resolutely hierarchical. Uh, there was a sense that the clergy was at the top of the social hierarchy, because it was a deeply Christian society. And so, the clergy would be the most prestigious, uh, because they were mediating between the Earthly and the Divine. And then there was the class of aristocrats and nobility, who were looked at as the, not only the landowning class and the ruling class, but the class of knights who would protect, um, the rest of society from outside marauders, you know, enemy forces, things like that. And then there was the vast majority of people, who were called the Commons, and this was a large class that ranged from everybody – from the very poorest people, who were indentured servants on, um, on estates, to people of Chaucer's class. So, Chaucer would have been on the upper level of the Commons. And in this world, once you posit that kind of hierarchy, because of a lot of other influences that were going on in the second half of the 14th century, there was the beginning of a kind of social fluidity that Chaucer writes about in The Canterbury Tales. And a lot of the social fluidity was occasioned by the demographic assault of the Black Death, of the Bubonic Plague— 

[Mark:] Right. 

[Sheila:] —which went through in 1349, probably took out a third of England's population. And then went through again in 1368, and in the 1370s, and by the time it left – I mean, it would come back in in subsequent centuries – but by the time it left, demographers estimate that maybe half of England's population had perished. So, this is going to create a whole bunch of different kinds of social circumstances. So, for example, if you were a member, say, of the aristocracy, and by the laws of primogeniture, where everything went to the firstborn – or the vast majority of an estate went to the firstborn – and you're the second son and you think, “Well, I'm going to either become a soldier and stay a soldier, or I'm going to become a monk, because” – that's why a lot of monks were from the upper classes – “if that's going to be the case, then, um, then I'm never going to be able to make a marriage; I'm never going to be able to inherit.” And then the first brother dies because of the plague. And all of a sudden, your life takes an entirely different turn. On the other end of the social spectrum, what was happening is that because, um, England, like all of Europe, was primarily an agricultural society – land was owned by aristocrats; income came to aristocrats through the sale of agricultural products. Because of this, the peasants, who – [Laughter] I mean, the Black Death was pretty democratic, if anything was going to be democratic in the Middle Ages. And so, as the Black Death took off, like, say, roughly a third to a half of the quote, unquote “peasant class,” what was happening is there weren't people to work the farms. And so – or work the farmlands. And peasants, you know, knew they could command larger wages, there were laws passed to, you know, squelch the demand for larger wages, and in the long run, when laws were passed to keep peasants on the estates that they were part of, it was basically the cause for the Peasants Revolt in 1381, which was its own kind of disaster because Richard III, who had all kinds of ineptitudes as a king, basically told them to go back to their farms, and he worked things out and he sent his army and slaughtered a whole significant number of them. 

[Mark:] The Canterbury Tales is the most famous thing that Chaucer wrote, but it's by no means the only thing. So, where does it fit into his career? And do we think of Chaucer as somebody who was popular during his time? 

[Sheila:] Chaucer began his poetic career writing primarily dream visions. And his first most famous and most substantial poem was written for John of Gaunt, who was the second son of Edward III. And Chaucer was employed by John of Gaunt in various diplomatic and courtier capacities, and when John's wife, um, Blanche of Lancaster, died in 1369 of the plague, a year or two later, um, to commemorate the anniversary of her death, Chaucer wrote “The Book of The Duchess,” which is a very, um, it's a lovely – it's complex, but it's the work of a young poet. Um, and it's a dream vision elegy that commemorates, you know, it's got a character called the Black Knight and he's the mourning knight, and Blanche is – whose name, obviously, in French means “white” – is called Good Fair White. And it talks about their courtly love affair, and the dreamer is a kind of, uh, doltish guy who keeps – or seemingly doltish, um, maybe disingenuously doltish – who keeps asking The Grieving Knight questions until he says, finally, “She is dead.” It's not just “I've lost my lady,” it's not just “She's gone on to some other guy.” She's dead. And then the dream vision ends. 

[Mark:] Where does The Canterbury Tales fit into the grand scope of his bibliography? 

[Sheila:] When Chaucer, in the early 1380s, starts and finishes what some, um, scholars actually – even though The Canterbury Tales is most famous – consider his master work, which is “Troilus and Criseyde.” It's a five-book romance set at the time of the Trojan War about two star-crossed lovers. And it's long; it's beautiful; it's intense; the characters are, you know, portend the kind of psychological complexities of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was able to go back and polish it. He was able to, you know, as we would say today, sit with it and then go back and do some work on it. And that was the major work that predated The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer never lived to finish The Canterbury Tales— 

[Mark:] I see. 

[Sheila:] —and started around 1387. And so, if you go back to The Canterbury Tales, there are some inconsistencies and some – not just rough spots, but actual inconsistencies that, perhaps, if he had lived he would have smoothed them out. 

[Mark:] Sheila, moving to The Canterbury Tales and some of its major themes, can you start by just giving us a brief plot of The Canterbury Tales? 

[Sheila:] So, The Canterbury Tales start in April, um, with one of the most famous springtime openings in medieval literature. Medieval literature loves springtime openings. And after the first gorgeous 18 lines, the narrator, who’s part of the pilgrim company, sets out portraits of the 29 pilgrims who are going to Canterbury. Um, not exhaustive portraits of all of them, because there's a group of them, like the guildsmen and their wives, who don't get portraits. And he doesn't give a portrait of the host, Harry Bailey, who's also going to be going with them to Canterbury. And so, Harry Bailey, who is the host of the Tabard Inn, where they're gathering, says to, um, the pilgrims, on the morning they're supposed to set off, “You know you're going to be telling stories, anyway. I'm happy to go with you, and – but let's make this more interesting and have it be a storytelling competition.” So, the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, on a pilgrimage for their souls’ amelioration, are involved in a storytelling competition, so that it brings the Earthly and, um – the Earthly project and the Divine project into kind of a collision course. And then, one after another after another, they tell their tales, And the first one seems like a rigged draw, because even though they draw straws, it goes to the Knight who's the highest ranking of the pilgrims. And then the host thinks, “This is going well,” so he calls on the Monk, who is the next highest-ranking male pilgrim. But the Miller, who is drunk and really has it in for the Knight, for, you know, one reason or another – social class, the knight’s snobbery, the way he depicts men's and women's relationships in the tale – butts in. And he says, “I'm going to tell my tale now.” And the host says, “No, you're not. You're drunk.” And he says, “Then I'm leaving!” And so, at this particular moment, the host, who has said to the pilgrims, “The prize for the storytelling competition is going to be a tale back at my Inn at the end of the Canterbury Tales,” realizes he's going to lose total control if the Miller exits out of there. And so, he says, “Go ahead and tell your story.” And then that's followed up by the Reeve, who is really angry and antagonistic towards the Miller. And then the Cook comes in, and the Cook's Tale is so ridiculous – it's not even finished. And whether Chaucer cut it off or not, who knows.  

[Mark:] So, we have stories within stories within stories, and then there's a sort of a larger plot. I know that we assiduously avoid spoilers on the Norton Library podcast, but your explanation begs the question: does somebody win? 

[Sheila:] Nobody – well, that is a spoiler! But no. Nobody wins. And the issue is what changed along the way and what changed along the way in Chaucer's mind. So, for example, the host says, “Everybody is going to be telling two tales on the way to Canterbury and two tales on the way back.” I don't even know how that's possible, um, given the fact that it's just, like, a three-day horse trip to Canterbury. You know, it's about 55-60 miles. And so, I don't know how that's possible. Plus the fact, for really interesting reasons, on medieval pilgrimages pilgrims would gather at one spot and set out together. But then once they got to the pilgrimage destination, they would generally disperse and go their separate ways home. Um, I mean, like – And so, it would be very unusual to get a whole group of pilgrims back to the Tabard Inn. But there's a kind of commercial incentive that he has there. So, as you move along, the only person who actually tells two stories – and, you know, they're supposed to be telling four by the time this is over – is the Chaucer, the fictional Chaucer, who was a pilgrim on the pilgrimage. Or what's called “the pilgrim narrator.” And he tells a second story because his first story is *so* bad— [Laughter] —that the host cuts him off. And, you know, I mean, the – it's such a brilliant story, because it's this what's called a "bourgeois minstrel” romance about this really clumsy knight called Sir Topas, who's going off to see the fairy queen. And he thinks he's going to win the fairy queen. Chaucer’s deliberately made the rhymes not rhyme, the meter not scan – I mean, only a brilliant poet could write a poem this bad. And the host cuts him off and he said, “Your drafty rhyming isn't worth a turd!” You know, “Just stop!” [Laughter] And, um, Chaucer, then, gets really hurt, and he says, “Well, I'm going to tell a tale in prose.” So, he tells a very long prose allegorical tale about Melibee and his wife, and it's Dame Prudence, and it's a very upstanding story. And to some degree he gets his own back at the host, because after a short, truncated, hilarious story, he goes on and tells a long, you know, somewhat boring moral allegory. By the time you get to the Parson's Prologue – and the Parson's Prologue and Tale are the last, um, tale contributions of The Canterbury Tales – the Parson tells his, um, prologue in rhyming pentameter couplet, but he rejects poetry. And so, there's all kinds of images of closure and sun setting that balance the, um, springtime imagery of the opening 18 lines. And then, he tells a tale in prose which is basically a treatise on the seven deadly sins. And then Chaucer gives a prose retraction of his poetic career. And that's it! And so, whether that idea for the round trip, um, back to the Tabard Inn, with four tales each, was ever Chaucer’s, or whether it was just Harry Bailey's and Chaucer never intended it, or whether Chaucer was thinking, “I think it's better to close at the gates of Canterbury with the Parson’s Tale” – I mean, it's a fairly, um, upstanding Christian moral ending – who knows? But it stands on the order of one of the great literary mysteries. 

[Mark:] Sheila, of all of these tales and all the episodes that you're mentioning and these characters, does this work cohere? Or do we find lots of different themes and moods? Is there tragedy and comedy and different elements that we have to assimilate as readers? 

[Sheila:] One of the ways in which The Canterbury Tales has been packaged, and written about, and understood by Chaucerians, is not so much as this, kind of, rolling out of these wonderful, elaborate characterizations, but as an encyclopedia of medieval literary genres. I mean, Chaucer ranges all over the place. He's got a courtly romance in the Knight’s Tale; he moves to the bawdy fabliaux in the Miller’s and the Reeve’s Tale; he has, um, moral allegories in the Man of Law’s Tale and the Clerk's Tale; he's got whatever that is of an Arthurian romance for the Wife of Bath’s Tale; he's got, um, mock-heroic beast people in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. I mean, it's all over the place. And that's appropriate, if one of his other goals is to somehow match tale to teller, which is the way I prefer to read the Tales. And, you know, some Chaucerians will say, “No, it's not all about tale to teller!” But I think that, given the depth of characterization that gets generated out of the general prologue portraits, and the way in which the stories the pilgrims tell reveal aspects of themselves that may not have been apparent from the general prologue portraits, that Chaucer is really deeply interested in characterization. And that's clear way back in the, in " Troilus and Criseyde.” So, it wouldn't be inconsistent for him to take on another characterological project in The Canterbury Tales. One of the most interesting and challenging parts about translating The Canterbury Tales was trying to, basically, evoke and capture those voices. And Chaucer makes it easier for a translator. I mean, I didn't make that up obviously! [Laughter] He makes it easier because he himself is conscious about the way in which, uh, discourse – in tone, in imagery – creates voice. And he even goes so far in the Reeve’s Tale, since the Reeve is from the north, um, and two of the Reeve’s characters are from the north, of having his characters speak in a Northern dialect. And so, it's the first time in English literature that there's the use of dialect characterization. So – And it's a real, it's a real you know smorgasbord of literary genres, voices... And yet, as you look at those, there are themes that they’re thematic through lines that you can trace, so that they're not just all spinning off into their own little orbits. Chaucer has these themes that he's stringing throughout The Canterbury Tales. 

[Mark:] Of all of the characters and all of the tales, do you have a favorite? 

[Sheila:] It would be the Wife of Bath. I have taught the Wife of Bath more than I've taught any other single piece of literature in my life. I still am trying to figure her out. I think everybody's still – well, maybe some people have come to provisional— [Laughter] —provisional accommodations with her. But I, you know, in my own career, I've been all over the place about her. And I'm never losing an awareness and a self-consciousness about the fact that the Wife of Bath is not a real woman. Even the most sophisticated of critics can slip and act, you know, speak as if she is. She's not real. What's more, she's a male-authored woman. Um, she wouldn't be real even if a woman wrote her. But she's a male-authored woman, and she's a male-authored woman whom Chaucer – I mean, she's a first-person narrator . . . who is female . . . who was being vocalized by a male writer. So, there's all of these kinds of mediating layers. That having been said, aside from Chaucer's Criseyde, who is a close second but not quite the Wife of Bath, she is the most complex woman character in, certainly, English medieval literature and I may put down a few bets on European literature in general. 

[Mark:] Why so? 

[Sheila:] Chaucer has a sense, as he articulates the Wife of Bath. And whether he comes through with the promise of the Wife of Bath is up for discussion. And this is one of the things – reasons – I'm still trying to figure her out. He creates a voice of a woman who is aware of what she's up against in the world. And she's a middle-class woman, and to give a middle-class woman voice of this depth and complexity is truly unique. So, she knows she's up against a whole variety of misogynist traditions, from the kind of attitudes that toward her of her five husbands, the attitudes of men of her class in the world around her, the attitudes and dicta of the clerical class, who would define herself, her sexuality, her five marriages, uh, how she can conduct her life. And she's a woman who wants to do what she wants, but by the same token, she also is a woman who doesn't necessarily want to be told she's gonna fry in hell. And so, what she is shown to do is basically take the dynamics of the medieval marital marketplace and turn them to her own purpose. So, if, as she said, she was married to an old man as her first husband at the age of 12, obviously he's going to die pretty soon. And so, she just reverses the economics of medieval marriage to suit her own purposes. And she becomes a wealthy woman doing it. She's also professionally a cloth weaver, which given the, um, the reputation for high quality of English wool, is a, you know, a very solid professional occupation for a middle-class woman. But that doesn't seem to be where she's putting her, um, chips, as it were. She's looking, she's looking to the marital marketplace. There's also the fact that, you know, she's shown, once she gets to be 40 and having basically used older husbands to finance herself, she decides she's going to fall in love. And so, she falls in love with a man half her age, makes some really stupid decisions, and there's a really troubling scene of domestic violence at the end of her tale, that – or her prologue, rather – that leaves her deaf. But there's also a kind of resilience that she has, so that she won't be beaten down. She will bounce back from this. And in the process of creating her, Chaucer creates a range of tonalities that are really extraordinary. I mean, she's introspective, she can be self-deluding, and she can range from being bawdy to being poignant. 

[Mark:] Well, can you talk, Sheila, about the challenge of translating and capturing that complex voice? 

[Sheila:] It was a challenge, but it was also a real privilege to be able to do it. And what I did with the Wife of Bath, and I think I was particularly aware of it because, you know, she is my favorite character and she's probably in one of my favorite, you know, she's – her piece of literature is my favorite piece of literature. [Laughter] You know, really, really, you know, makes her special. So, one of the things that I found with, um, with translating, is that I would just try to listen to her voice. Her voice has so many tonalities, that I wanted to be able to honor those tonalities without overexaggerating them. So, I think that that was probably the biggest challenge. There's also the fact that she goes on to tell a tale that begins with a rape. And it's a rape by a young Knight of, um, a woman he finds walking in the woods. And it's an Arthurian romance, in which Queen Guinevere intervenes and says to King Arthur, who wants to, um, have this be a capital crime, um, “Turn him over to me.” And she sends him on a quest to find what women most desire, which is pretty appropriate. But after a whole bunch of very conflicting, uh, answers from a whole variety of women, he meets a magical old lady who gives him the answer that what women want is mastery; is power; is sovereignty. He goes back with the old woman to the court, and the woman who said to him, “I'll tell you the answer if you give me the next thing I ask for,” wants him to take her as his wife. And so, he's really not too pleased about this, and she has to give her ungrateful, you know, young husband a lecture about why being old, ugly, and poor is not necessarily the worst thing. And then gives him the choice of whether he wants to have her faithful and not so attractive and old, or beautiful and young but he's going to take his chances. And he gives her the choice. So, she transforms herself into a beautiful young woman and they live happily ever after. And that's where a lot of us get snagged on the Wife of Bath.  

[Mark:] So, one more question about the Wife of Bath. So, I know that we, for all this time, we think of the Wife of Bath as this revolutionary figure in literature. Bawdy and poignant, and tragic and hilarious, and also as sort of a feminist icon. Uh, however, I guess I'm interested, also, in how she would have landed at the time, in the sense of: would it have been unusual for a middle-class woman to have a voice amidst that group of pilgrims and to be so prominent and so, sort of, I would say, confident and defiant? 

[Sheila:] One of the brilliant aspects of the Wife of Bath is that even as she emerges as the most, what we'd say is realistic character or a realistic figuration of a woman, she is intricately stitched together from the textual tradition. I mean, it's – if making art in the Middle Ages was adopting and adapting prior sources, and that's the way Chaucer made his art, she is, if you look at it, a kind of crazy quilt of. . . But, you know, I mean, unlike Frankenstein's monster, Chaucer is a great plastic surgeon— [Laughter] —and you can't see the stitches. I mean, she is just, uh, it's – she emerges whole. But in the world that she came in, first of all, there was a whole genre representing middle-class women who were brash, brassy, bawdy, um, and, you know, would be held up in a kind of misogynistic way as not the kind of woman you want to marry. I mean, she's going to push you around and, you know, she's not the only woman in The Canterbury Tales who's like this. Interestingly enough, the host Harry Bailey's wife, who does not come on the pilgrimage and we never see except through his eyes, looks like she may be one of the reasons he wants to get out of the Tabard Inn and go away. There's a whole tradition, um, called, um, the “Mal Mariée” tradition – the “badly married” tradition – where women get together and talk dirt about their husbands. And so, there is a sense that there's a tradition of primarily middle-class women, um, or lower working-class women, being articulate, bold, bawdy, brash – but none that are as sympathetically rendered as the Wife of Bath. 

[Mark:] Sheila Fisher, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast and discussing your edition of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. 

[Sheila:] Thank you so much, Mark! It was great being here. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of The Canterbury Tales, translated and abridged by Sheila Fisher, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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