Sisyphus

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote 
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour, 
Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth 
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, 
And smale fowles maken melodye, 
That slepen al the night with open yë, 
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages): 
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages 
(And palmers for to seken straunge strondes) 
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes; 
And specially, from every shires ende 
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, 
The holy blisful martir for to seke, 
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.
Bifel that, in that seson on a day, 
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay 
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage 
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage, 
At night was come in-to that hostelrye 
Wel nyne and twenty in a companye, 
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle 
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle, 
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde; 
The chambres and the stables weren wyde, 
And wel we weren esed atte beste. 
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste, 
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon, 
That I was of hir felawshipe anon, 
And made forward erly for to ryse, 
To take our wey, ther as I yow devyse. 
But natheles, whyl I have tyme and space, 
Er that I ferther in this tale pace, 
Me thinketh it acordaunt to resoun, 
To telle yow al the condicioun 
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, 
And whiche they weren, and of what degree; 
And eek in what array that they were inne: 
And at a knight than wol I first biginne.

— Geoffrey Chaucer, The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

And so, out of April’s sweet (not sooty) showers comes the great unfinished cycle of Chaucer’s celebration of God and man as he finds them in an age of war and death and pestilence and piety both sincere and false. He was the son of the king’s bottler, or butler, which was to say vintner, and we find him in service as a page in a noble house as a youth and later a diplomat married to a prince’s sister-in-law and, of course, he was most famously to history a court poet. The Canterbury Tales loosely follows a plan adopted by the Florentine Boccaccio in the Decameron, a work of scorching humor where characters in the story share stories themselves, creating a cycle of stories. The Decameron is first released when Chaucer is about ten, and a revised edition when he is about 30. Chaucer appropriates the plan and uses it in part to repurpose and revise earlier works as modern writers sometimes do today, as with Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, and also to bring us new stories. 

Chaucer’s original plan was to have each of the 30 pilgrims tell two stories on the way from London to Canterbury and two on the way back for 120 tales total. The current state of scholarship delivers us 24 tales plus an extensive prologue and some framing bits about the pilgrimage and the pilgrims. 

Chaucer’s idiomatic range is extraordinary in these tales. “The Knight’s Tale” starts off the set, the knight in question with armor that is worn and tattered and a career that has seen, as Chaucer says, fifteen mortal battles. Chaucer, a veteran of the king’s campaigns, is giving us a portrait of a humble, worthy veteran rather than a gleaming exemplar. It is a tale of love and loss and suffering and loyalty and nobility. It will break hearts and serve as a “pious” expression of courtly love, which was being lambasted by the French poets of the day (you know of their predecessors, they gave us Lancelot, the French knight that beds Arthur’s wife, of all the gaul). 

And then we are off to “the Miller’s Tale,” which is about the complications that arise when old men marry young women and when flatulence collides with flame. From the elevated to the ribald, Chaucer’s clear plan is to make the Tales a sort of map of the literary world as he has known it. 

We will see pious clergy and impious, wise men and fools, and we will meet the one character that assured Chaucer’s reputation, both as a poet and an Englishman, for all time. The bawdy, lusty, gap toothed wife of Bath. She is a rule breaker and a force of nature. She reminds me of the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:1ff), whose many husbands Jesus told her about and who clearly did not align with the expectations of her age. Shakespeare had his Falstaff, Milton had his Lucifer, Chaucer has his Wife.  Some feminists suggest that this was a woke Chaucer as he catalogs through her many of the misogynies of his age. I suspect that he has encountered such women and seen the storytelling possibilities, an element of which is injustices not usually articulated in court poetry. Her part may have grown as the character’s novelty and comic value showed itself through audience response. I wonder how the men and the women of court responded. (Remember, Chaucer was not bound to a printed text the way authors today are, he could and did change some of his works over time if the surviving manuscripts are any indication. Plays and such do the same today, fine-tuning scripts and performances in response to audience reaction.) Almost as if he anticipated our 21^st Century obsession with finding the author’s preferred or final version and conceived to frustrate scholars through all the ages. But probably not.

Chaucer is a court poet who, as he achieves eminence-gris, turns his pen to the humble people of the world. Raised among nobles but not noble, stature and pension offer him the chance to document the range of stories he has heard, but also the range of people he has met. It has been suggested that some of the financial squeeze we find in his last days arose from royal disfavor with this idiosyncratic turn to the examination of common people. Centered around a pilgrimage in honor of Saint Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury who was assassinated by four of the king’s knights (see T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral for a dramatic treatment, or Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole in Becket). Subsequently his king, the formidable Henry II, was publicly flogged for the crime of his murder to settle the matter with the Church. Royals have long memories for such things. Is that a whiff of anti-royalist sedition from an aged court poet? Or perhaps it was a glint of Saxon egalitarianism that nettled the Norman royals. Maybe if he had written a cycle where an errant Norman knight put the horns on Charlemagne all would have been mended. Or not.

And so, sweet April showers brought us one of the most extraordinary and culturally influential works in history and its affection for humanity in all of its manifestations, sacred and profane, rich and poor, quick and dull, was subversive to the elitism of its age. It would come to influence Anglophone culture and values worldwide to this day.

This is dedicated to Sr. Dunn, Dr. Olmert, and Ms. Bjelland, who labored long and hard to embue me with some small bit of Chaucerian scholarship despite my notoriously thick skull, and, of course, to Geoffrey. I am sure he has long since completed the full cycle for the greatest court of all. If any of you angel types happen to be carrying a spare copy, I don’t suppose you could see your way to…