Notes on Comedy from Derek Pearsall's article "The
Canterbury Tales II: Comedy" The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer
There are six tales in the CT that can be said to be
primarily comic in structure and theme:
FriarT, SumT,
MilT, RvT, ShipT, MerT, CookT
(the last unfinished)
These tales have very clear narrative principles:
Time -- Present
Place --
Near, usually
Tone -- reductive, almost cynical description "a riche gnof"
Worldview -- "There are no values, secular or
religious, more important than survival and the satisfaction of appetite"
(126).
The
characters and actions are not satirical and present an amoral world that is
not "realistic, no more than the worldview of the romance."
II. Fabliaux
Four of the
six tales are clearly fabliaux: "a tale in which a bourgeoisie husband is
duped or tricked into conniving at the free award of his wife's sexual
favors."
Tales
written for upper-class audience in which they laugh at the upwardly mobile and
at themselves -- John the riche gnof, and Absolon the courtly lover, clerk.
The basic ingredients of the fabliaux are three: husband (a
member of the petit-bourgeoisie), a wife (usually younger than the husband),
and an intruder (from a different social class, usually a clerk -- which is
almost a classless class).
"Romance
asserts the possibility that men may behave in a noble and self-transcending
manner; a fabliau declares the certainty that they will always behave like
animals. The one portrays men as superhuman, the other portrays them as subhuman. Neither is "true" or realistic,
though we might say that our understanding of what is true gains depth from
having different slanting lights thrown upon reality, so that beneficial shock,
enrichment, invigoration is given to our perception of the world. Romance and fabliau complement one another,
and Chaucer encourages us to look at them thus by setting the Knight's Tale and
the Miller's Tale side by side. Each
type of story makes a selection of human experience in accord with its own
narrative conventions or rules. Out of
the interlocking of these and other different types of story, in the general
medieval hierarchy of genres, or in the Canterbury Tales as a whole, grows the
social relevance of literary form, the fabliaux amongst them" (Derek
Pearsall, "The Canterbury Tales II: Comedy," The Cambridge Chaucer
Companion, ed. Piero Boitani
and Jill Mann [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986] 129).
"... Some see the fabliaux as the center of Chaucer's
artistic creation, finding in them a source for his artistic objectivity that
others see rooted in his Christianity and study of Boethius. Similarly, most definitions describe fabliaux
as 'realistic' to contrast with an 'idealistic' quality of romance; this
implies a judgment that true and faithful representation of humans shows them
as coarse and ignoble, self-seeking, and lacking consideration of others. Because Chaucer wrote so many romances, both
secular and religious, it seems more appropriate to regard the fabliaux with
marginalia in Gothic manuscripts, which not infrequently provide images of
action from fabliaux as well as grotesques combining animal and human
features. These figures not only
accompany romances but also religious texts in manuscripts of great beauty. All indicate a medieval awareness that humans
have both body and soul, as a popular poetic form poses in debate,
that they live in a temporal world but this is only a shadow of the
eternity that is to come. Great energy
and vitality are present in what has been called the gothic tension, the
balance of these disparate 'realities'" (Velma Bourgeois Richmond,
Geoffrey Chaucer [New York: Continuum, 1992] 83).
An Anatomy of Interpreting the Fabliaux
1. Definition: genre -- courtly, performative aspect
a. Miller, plot, descriptive detail, word play, reference to
the medieval drama, senex amans,
petit-bourgeois
b. Miller and wife, low-class, cradle trick, slapstick
fight, dirtier wordplay (pricketh, grint)
c. Merchant--corrupt rich Italian, senex
amans, fruit tree,
2. Political and historical allegories
a. Miller--Peasants' Revolt, results of emerging bourgeois
in ruling position
b. Reeve--emptiness of social pride of lower class, the critique
of early factories, the grinding down of humans to beasts
c. Merchant--ineffective parliament
3. Religious or doctrinal allegories
4. Humanistic allegories