Abstract
These lines occur at the most bitter moment in the Knight’s Tale, when there is general grief for the death of Arcite, who is struck down by Saturn immediately after winning the tournament and the right to marry Emily. They are a wonderful example of Chaucerian hospitality to a range of voices and experience: for a moment the scope of the narrative widens to include a perspective on the story very different from the views of the main actors.
‘Why woldestow be deed,’ thise wommen crye,
‘And haddest gold ynough, and Emelye?’
CT I 2835–6
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Notes
A point made by Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1986), who sees the relation between the two tales as ‘in classic Marxist terms dialectic; they are in historical contradiction to each other’ (p. 92).
John Dryden, Preface to the Fables in Works, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford, 1958) vol. IV, p. 1455.
John Leyerle, ‘The Heart and the Chain’, The Learned and the Lewed: Harvard English Studies, 14 5 (1974) pp. 113–45, reprinted in Chaucer’s Troilus: Essays in Criticism, ed. Stephen Barney (London, 1980) pp. 181–209.
There are perceptive accounts by E. T. Donaldson, ‘The Idiom of Popular Poetry in the Miller’s Tale’, EIE (1950) pp. 116–40, Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley, Cal., 1957),
and Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London, 1983) pp. 111–13.
‘His golden hair … recalls that of his namesake, King David’s comely son, whose luxuriant hair brought about his death and made him in medieval Scriptural exegesis an example of the effeminacy of sin’ V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (London, 1984) p. 164.
W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, Collected Longer Poems (London, 1968) p. 41.
See M. Copland, ‘The Reeve’s Tale: Harlotrie or Sermonyng?’ MA, 31 (1962) pp. 14–32.
The Cook’s Tale would repay more critical attention than it has received. There are two excellent accounts: E. G. Stanley, ‘Of this Cokes Tale maked Chaucer na moore’, Poetica, 5 (1976) pp. 36–59 and Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, pp. 279–85. Kolve considers, partly on the basis of scribal presentation, that the Tale is genuinely unfinished. He cautions that the Tale as it stands may be anachronistically satisfying to modern taste: ‘We are at ease with fragments and amid ruins. We are indeed suspicious of closure, preferring open-ended forms on the ground that they bear a stricter mimetic relationship to current ideas of truth’, (p. 280); This is not how tales end and certainly not how medieval tales end’ (p. 469).
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics and History of Animals, ed. R. McKeon (New York, 1941) p. 637, and The Generation of Animals, tr. A. L. Peck (London, 1943) pp. 335–9.
W. W. Skeat, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1894) vol. IV, p. 130.
Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ, 1957) p. 42.
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© 1996 Priscilla Martin
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Martin, P. (1996). The Merchandise of Love: Winners and Wasters. In: Chaucer’s Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378636_5
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