The Wife of Bath’s Tale

Summary

I. The Tale of Florent 410 (from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3)

II. The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell 420 (from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C.86)

III. The Marriage of Sir Gawain 442 (from London, British Library, MS Additional 27879)

The Wife of Bath’s Tale makes use of two folklore motifs: in one a “Loathly Lady” is transformed into a beautiful woman, while the other involves answering the question “What is it that women most desire?” G. H. Maynadier’s study remains the most comprehensive discussion of the origins of the Loathly Lady motif in the context of Chaucer’s tale, and it was he who first proposed that the theme of sovereignty found in early Irish analogues made its way into British folklore, although whether by a Scandinavian or Welsh route, he was not sure. Sigmund Eisner reinforced the theory of an Irish origin, introduced to England via first Wales and then France, but argued that the concept of sovereignty over territory, present in the Irish tales, was transformed into the concept of sovereignty over a husband in the English analogues. However, the dramatic nature of the Loathly Lady and her transformations has understandably proven attractive for story-tellers from different places and in different ages, so much so that examples have been found as far apart as the Orient and Texas. In The Taming of the Shrew Petruchio vows to woo Katherina “Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love,” which implies that by Shakespeare’s time the episode in Gower’s Confessio Amantis was well known. Indeed, the enduring popularity of these themes, not least through dissemination of The Wife of Bath’s Tale itself, is manifest through versions continuing to the present day. For example the seventeenth-century ballad A New Sonnet of a Knight and a Fair Virgin is clearly based upon Chaucer’s tale, while in more recent times the Loathly Lady motif is represented by the inclusion of the character Dame Ragnell in Thomas Berger’s novel Arthur Rex (1978) and the retelling of the story for a children’s audience in Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady (1985), written by Selina Hastings and illustrated by Juan Wijngaard.