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The Man of Law vs. Chaucer: A Case in Poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alfred David
Alfred David*
Affiliation:
Indiana University Bloomington
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Extract

      For swich lawe as a man yeveth another wight,
      He sholde hymselven usen it, by right;
      Thus wole oure text.

Among the many passages in which Chaucer or one of his characters talks about poetry, and more specifically Chaucer's own poetry, one of the most tantalizing is the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale. The Man of Law claims to be at a loss for a “thrifty tale” because Chaucer “thogh he kan but lewedly / … Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan” (ii.46–49). He continues with a partial list of Chaucer's works that consists chiefly of stories from the Legend of Good Women, surprising us with several that Chaucer apparently never got around to writing. He praises Chaucer for avoiding stories about incest and alludes to two such tales with indignation. At last he declares that he will leave rhyme to Chaucer and tell a prose tale and immediately begins a prologue in rhyme royal.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , May 1967 , pp. 217 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 Quotations from Chaucer are from the second edition of F. N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).

2 See Eleanor P. Hammond, Chaucer, a Bibliographical Manual (New York, 1908), pp. 257–258, 280.

3 For a general discussion of the Man of Law's character with a summary of other views, see R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk (Austin, Texas, 1955), pp. 61–71.

4 The argument is summed up by John H. Fisher, John Gower (New York, 1964), pp. 285–292. For Mr. Fisher's own stimulating interpretation of the evidence see n. 8 below.

5 The fact that poetry itself is a frequent subject in Chaucer's works has received increasing recognition. See, for example, Robert J. Allen, “A Recurring Motif in Chaucer's House of Fame,” JEGP, lv (1956), 393–405, and the chapter on the Legend of Good Women in Robert O. Payne's The Key of Remembrance (New Haven, 1963), pp. 91–111. Payne remarks that “the nature and the functions of art and the justification of the artist” is a “minor theme” in every one of Chaucer's early works (pp. 103–104).

6 I have been assuming, for the sake of argument, that Fragment ii was written after Fragment i, but my interpretation of the Man of Law's Introduction does not depend on such an order of composition. Chaucer's audience would have learned the nature of the Canterbury Tales from the General Prologue; the Shipman's fabliau, at that time probably still assigned to the Wife of Bath, would have provoked exactly the same reaction as the tales of the Miller and the Reeve. For the theory that the Canterbury Tales originally began with Fragment ii, see Carleton Brown, “The Man of Law's Head-Link and the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales,” SP, XXXLV (1934), 8–35, and Charles A. Owen, Jr., “The Development of the Canterbury Tales,” JEGP, Lvii (1958), 449–476, and “The Earliest Plan of the Canterbury Tales,” MS, xxi (1959), 202–210.

All such theories depend in large measure on conjecture. A strong case, however, can be made for the view that Fragment ii represents a fresh start after Chaucer had drawn up short in Fragment i: 1) It seems simpler and therefore more reasonable to assume that the first two fragments always stood in the order in which they remain in the great majority of the manuscripts. 2) If Harry Bailey had the social tact to see that the Knight must tell the first tale, we may give Chaucer credit for realizing this too from the very start. 3) The Miller's Tale is a response to the Knight's just as the Reeve's is to the Miller's; it seems likely that all three tales are products of a single creative period that got the Canterbury Tales under way. 4) Tatlock's dating of the Man of Law's Introduction as 1390 or later on the basis of the allusion to the Confessio is still generally accepted (The Development and Chronology of Chaucer's Works, Chaucer Society, 1907, pp. 172–175). If Chaucer began the Canterbury Tales around 1387, he must have been working on something in the meantime, and Fragment i seems as good a possibility as anything else. 5) Although Robinson places the fabliaux in Fragment i in the “early nineties” (Works, p. 683), there is no good reason for not assigning them to the first period of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer may well have discovered his talent for the fabliau from the first, and the high gusto of the Miller's and Reeve's Tales could result from the initial inspiration. The use in these tales of portraits like those in the General Prologue would be an additional reason for associating them closely with the Prologue.

7 William L. Sullivan, “Chaucer's Man of Law as a Literary Critic,” MLN, lxviii (1953), 1–8.

8 John Gower, pp. 286 ff. Mr. Fisher proposes a novel and, to me, the most logical reason yet offered as to why the friendship between Chaucer and Gower might have cooled. He suggests that Gower must have felt strongly that in abandoning the Legend of Good Women for the Canterbury Tales, and especially such scurrilous stories as the Miller's and Reeve's, Chaucer had deserted his high poetic mission and was employing his genius unworthily. Gower may have cancelled Venus' compliment to Chaucer in the Epilogue of the Confessio Amantis, not because his feelings had been hurt by the lines in the Man of Law's Introduction but because he thought that the author of stories like the Miller's Tale had ceased to deserve it. In that case, Mr. Fisher argues, we may interpret Chaucer's joke about Gower not as the cause of Gower's withdrawing the tribute but as Chaucer's good-humored response to Gower's displeasure at the new direction of Chaucer's poetry.

9 Fisher, pp. 287, 290.

10 On Chaucer's use of Innocent, here and elsewhere in the Man of Law's Tale, see Robert E. Lewis, “Chaucer's Artistic Use of Pope Innocent III's De Miseria Humane Conditionis in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale,” PMLA, lxxxi (Dec. 1966), 485–492.

11 “Dives autem superfluitate resolvitur et iactantia effrenatur, currit ad libitum et corruit ad illicitum, et fiunt instrumenta penarum que fuerant oblectamenta culparum. Labor in acquirendo, timor in possidendo, dolor in amittendo, mentem eius semper fatigat, sollicitat et affligit: ‘Ubi est thesaurus tuus, ibi est et cor tuum’.” De miseria humane conditionis, ed. Michele Maccarrone (Lugano, 1955), pp. 20–21.

12 J. L. Lowes, “The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Considered in its Chronological Relations,” PMLA, xx (1905), 794–796.

13 The appropriateness of the tale to the Man of Law has been argued by Bernard I. Duffey, “The Intention and Art of the Man of Law's Tale,” ELH, xiv (1947), 181–193. See also Paul E. Beichner, “Chaucer's Man of Law and Disparitas Cultus,” Speculum, xxiii (1948), 70–75, and R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk, pp. 61–71.

14 On the possible humor, see Paull F. Baum, “The Man of Law's Tale,” MLN, lxiv (1949), 12–14.

15 See Edward A. Block, “Originality, Controlling Purpose, and Craftsmanship in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale,” PMLA, Lxviii (1953), 572–616.

16 I agree with John A. Yunck, that this stanza contains the theme of the tale, “Religious Elements in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale,” ELH, xxvii (1960), 256. My reading of the Tale is very close to his.

17 As Elizabeth Salter has shown in a sensitive analysis, “The Tale confronts us with active malice and passive suffering,” The Knight's Tale and The Clerk's Tale (New York, 1962), pp. 34 ff. Both in style and content, Chaucer manages to stress the darker side of human experience as well as the concept of a universal order.

18 On the thematic importance of Egeus' speech, see Robert A. Pratt, “‘Joye after Wo’ in the Knight's Tale,” JEGP,lvii (1958), 416–423. Pratt also points out (p. 423) the recurrence of the theme in the Man of Law's Tale, ll. 1132–33 and 1160–62.

19 Owen, “The Development of the Canterbury Tales,” pp. 450–452, points out this correspondence but draws the very different inference that the Parson's Prologue must therefore have been written shortly after the Man of Law's headlink. The echoes are no doubt deliberate, but I do not think that this necessarily implies proximity in time of composition.