Bowdlerising: a family's attempt to sanitise Shakespeare

How a pre-Victorian family made the works of Shakespeare acceptable in polite society by producing a sanitised version that was far removed from the spirit of the original.


Bawdy Shakespeare

It has long been recognised that the works of William Shakespeare contain scenes, dialogues and language that are earthy, suggestive, crude, and full of sexual innuendo. They were, after all, written for audiences that were far less prudish than later generations, and whose idea of humour was much less sophisticated than our own. One reason for Shakespeare’s popularity in our own age is that we have come nearly full circle in our liberal appreciation of bawdiness (in the United Kingdom, at least).

However, this aspect of Shakespeare has caused problems down the years, especially where introducing his works to children is concerned. While appreciating that there is great drama and considerable beauty in his words, which should appeal to young audiences, there is also much that they either would not understand or which is too adult, in a sexual sense, for their ears.

It was quite common in the late 18th and early 19th centuries for family entertainments in middle-class British households to consist of readings of Shakespeare plays, and for scenes to be enacted. The Bowdler family of Bath was one such, with Thomas Bowdler senior reading to the family, which comprised six children, including Henrietta Maria (1750-1830) and Thomas junior (1754-1825).


Amending the text

When it came to the awkward passages, Thomas senior would cleverly substitute other words or skip lines or scenes that were “over the top”. In this way, the children were protected from the bawdiness and profanity that would have amused Shakespeare’s original audiences of “penny stinkards” but were less suitable in more modern times. However, the younger Bowdlers were still left with an abiding love and appreciation of the works of the Bard.

It was Henrietta who first had the idea of taking her father’s custom a step further and producing a version of Shakespeare that was suitable for family reading. She produced the first edition of “The Family Shakespeare” in 1807, comprising expurgated versions of twenty of the plays. She omitted, for example, “Hamlet”, in which the chief character makes so many sexual references that it would be a real challenge to sanitise them without destroying his character completely.

Thomas junior took credit for this work, not so much out of sibling jealously but in order to protect his sister from any accusations of impropriety. After all, if you are able to change a line that makes a punning reference to sexual intercourse, you must be able to appreciate the innuendo yourself. Thomas was, after all, a medical doctor, and a man, and it would not seem improper for him to have been the editor. That said, there is little doubt that most of work of that first edition was done by Henrietta.


Thomas junior takes over

However, Thomas now took the project very much into his own hands and in 1818 published a second edition of “The Family Shakspeare”, with the changed spelling being deliberate. This included virtually the whole Shakespeare canon as recognised at the time, although some of the plays gave him more problems than others. “Measure for Measure”, with its themes of sexual infidelity and prostitution, and “Othello”, in which the sexual relations of Othello and Desdemona are a constant driver of Iago’s innuendo, proved particularly tricky.

Dr Bowdler had a second target, which was profanity. As a convinced Anglican with Puritan leanings, any taking in vain of the name of God was definitely out, so all such exclamations tended to be replaced by “Heavens!” and Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot” became “Out, crimson spot!”

There is a story to the effect that, when editing “Othello”, Thomas Bowdler substituted “trumpet” for “strumpet” in the line “she has played the strumpet in my bed”. Were it true this would be gloriously funny, but unfortunately this would appear to be the invention of a 20th century humorist.

Dr Bowdler’s method was not so much to substitute words of his own but rather to cut whole passages, and even characters, when they offended him by their language. As far as he was concerned, “many words and expressions occur which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased”. His motivation was to improve Shakespeare by removing text that he believed detracted from the quality of the original.

Thomas actually restored some passages that Henrietta had cut. If she thought that a passage was tedious or absurd, out it went, even if it contained no indecencies. Thomas was therefore trying to be loyal to the original except when he found it impossible not to be.

At first, neither edition excited much attention. However, when Thomas’s edition was at first condemned and then defended in the literary press, sales took off and the book continued in print for many years after the death of its progenitor. It was hugely influential, with many buyers convinced that this was the “true” Shakespeare and other versions should not be given house room.

Another approach was simply to retell the stories of the plays as opposed to censoring the texts. The best example of this is “Tales From Shakespeare”, first published in 1807 (the same year as the first “Bowdler”) by another brother and sister team, namely Charles and Mary Lamb. As a way of introducing young children to Shakespeare, this would seem to have more to recommend it than the Bowdler method.


How should we regard the Bowdlers today?

Today, most people look back on “Bowdlerising” with horror, regarding any tinkering with the words of a great writer as an act of literary vandalism. It is true that virtually every stage production of a Shakespeare play will make adjustments to the text, with scenes and speeches being omitted where they add little to the plot, but these are made for dramatic effect and not because they contain too many “naughty words”. Audiences who watched a Bowdlerised staging of Shakespeare would soon wonder what on earth was going on, and they would certainly miss much of the “light relief” that the minor characters provide with their near-the-knuckle banter.

On the other hand, it is also true that generations of young children have grown to know about Shakespeare from versions that have been severely edited. Even today, one would not expect young children to read some of the racier scenes from his plays, but then we do not normally start children on Shakespeare at the sort of age that the Bowdler children presumably were when their father started reading to them.

On balance one would have to say that Bowdlerising is wrong in principle. Any work of art should be judged as a whole and as the artist intended it to be, assuming that this intention can be ascertained. We should certainly not experience Shakespeare in a form that is so cut about and perverted that it cannot be regarded as his work any longer, and that is what we are faced with in “The Family Shakspeare”. If Shakespeare is unfit for public consumption unless sanitised to a pale shadow of its former self, it should not be staged or read at all.

© John Welford

After Easter, a play by Anne Devlin

“After Easter” is the final part of “The Belfast Trilogy”, a set of plays by the Northern Irish playwright Anne Devlin (born 1951). The subject matter of the plays is the “Troubles” of the 1970s and 1980s as seen from a female perspective. The plays therefore echo the “Dublin Trilogy” by Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) which were based on the events surrounding the Irish Revolution of 1916-21.

The title “After Easter” is a further echo of the past, given that it was the Easter Rising of 1916 that, although it was a failure by virtue of being put down within a week by the British Army, lit the fuse that was eventually to lead to Irish independence in 1922. The symbolic importance of the Rising was massive, and it continues to be so to the present day.

Another significance of the title is a religious one, given that Easter is the Christian festival that celebrates the central event of the Christian story, namely the Resurrection of Christ. In the play, one of the characters (Greta) claims to see a vision on Pentecost Sunday, which is seven weeks after Easter.

The theme of the play is how Northern Irish Catholic women can come to terms with their past and the political background of their native city (Belfast) with its sharp divisions between Catholics and Protestants and the assumed loyalties that these impose on women who are expected to fall in line with the views and prejudices of their male family members.

“After Easter” follows the fortunes of three sisters, Aoife, Greta and Helen, who have chosen their own ways of dealing with these pressures in a process of self-healing. Aoife has chosen the domestic route by making a “safe” marriage and living not far from her parental home.

However, Greta and Helen have chosen to leave Northern Ireland and live in England, where they have found that having a Northern Irish accent is a distinct disadvantage at a time when many people on the British mainland were terrified of terrorist bombings and regarded anyone with such as accent with deep suspicion. Helen got round this difficulty by adopting an American accent instead.

The women had been brought up in a strongly Republican and Catholic household ruled by their father, a socialist and a man who sought to control every aspect of his daughters’ lives. They have now returned to Belfast to attend his funeral and must make decisions about where their futures lie.

Greta’s escape from her father’s influence had been to marry an English left-wing academic who encouraged her to abandon her Catholic faith. She has not coped well with the change in that she suffers from hallucinations that lead her into eccentric behaviour. For example, on her return to Belfast she steals communion wafers from a local church and hands them out to people waiting for a bus. She maintains that one of her “voices” told her to do this to “stop the killing”.

Greta’s mental instability is, however, compared with the more general madness of life in Belfast when her sister says: “In England they lock her up if she’s mad but let her go if she’s political. In Ireland they lock her up if she’s political and let her go if she’s mad”. This is not so much a political play as a psychological one, but this comment seems to be making a political statement that is not far removed from that of the Cheshire Cat in “Alice in Wonderland” when he compares the characteristics of dogs and cats (dogs growl when displeased and cats growl (or purr) when pleased) and concludes that “we’re all mad here”.

If Belfast is mad, then Greta, by showing symptoms of madness, is the only one who is truly sane, in that she belongs to her environment.

Helen’s response to the situation in Belfast was to make herself fit into a different environment, namely that of London society. However, she deliberately chose to adopt a persona that was neither Irish nor British, through the expedient of pretending to be American. She also refused to be labelled as anything that might connect her with her background, by not allying herself with any faction, be it religious, political or social.

The point made here is that London, being a melting-pot of every race, creed and proclivity imaginable, allows anyone, man or woman, to be exactly what they want to be and not be forced to choose between conflicting loyalties, which is the situation in Belfast. Helen is able, with justification, to say that she is “a citizen of the world” and that “You don’t have to stoop to other people’s expectations”.

Of the three sisters, Helen is clearly the strongest character. She is an artist who has financial as well as social reasons to throw off her past and adapt to the commercial world in which she can make a living. The fake American accent was in part a ploy to attract American buyers of her paintings. However, after her father’s death she feels able to make a voluntary decision to sell her London flat and return to Belfast. Her strength of character is sufficient, she believes, for her to be able to stand on her own feet in the otherwise stultifying atmosphere of Belfast. She also maintains that, in order to build a secure future, it is necessary to forget elements of the past. As an artist she believes that “It’s my memory that stops me from seeing, so I’m concentrating on forgetting”, and she also thinks that she can use her art to “create and free” whereas the attitude of the Irish political class, represented by her late father, had been to “seduce and dominate”.

Each of the three plays in “The Belfast Trilogy” has a strong element of autobiography, and Helen is clearly closest to the author in “After Easter”. Anne Devlin wrote the play in 1994, some nine years after the second play “Ourselves Alone”. Like Greta and Helen she had emigrated to Britain but it was not until 2007 that she was to follow the example of her characters and make the return journey. Even in 1994 the political situation in Northern Ireland was becoming easier, that being the year in which the Provisional IRA announced its ceasefire and the Peace Process began to make real progress. This was therefore a time of hope for an Easter-like resurrection of normality. The play offers a view of how the people of Northern Ireland, and particularly its women, might respond in personal terms.

The play ends with the thoughts of Greta, after she has had her hallucination at Pentecost. She fears that her father’s influence will always be there, but she also has hope because she is now pregnant. Her vision involves feeding a stag in a snowbound and frozen forest. The stag acquires human features and the snow and ice all melt away. As she says, the stag “took me to the place where the rivers come from, where you come from . . . and this is my own story”. She has therefore found healing for her mental state and been resurrected as a woman with hope for an untroubled future.

“After Easter” might not be the greatest play in terms of its dramatic qualities, and it might be thought of as being over-optimistic and even slightly pretentious, but it does make a powerful statement about the essential place of women in the rebuilding of a broken society. It is therefore worth the effort to see a performance, should one take place in one’s locality, or at least to read the text.

© John Welford

The Knight's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The knight is one of only three Canterbury pilgrims (the others being the parson and the ploughman) whom Chaucer treats without a hint of irony in his General Prologue. Indeed, these three characters are more like nostalgic idealizations of people whom Chaucer greatly admired, but they are figures of a bygone age, much to the writer’s regret.

In the case of the knight, this admiration is no great surprise, because Chaucer himself was in royal service for most of his life, although his duties were more to do with diplomacy (perhaps even espionage) than fighting. However, he would have mixed with and known the knightly class at first hand, and had no reason to disparage the men who defended the monarchy of which he himself was such a devoted servant.

The medieval knight developed into the gentleman, and it is no accident that the word “courteous” has the same root as “courtly”, and that the royal court was peopled by knights who maintained, for example, the tradition of “courtly love” by which women were admired from afar and received tokens of love and pledges to defend their honour, even if they gave no sign of returning the affection.

There is no prologue to the Knight’s Tale, unless one counts the last few lines of the General Prologue. These state that the host decides who shall tell the first tale by the drawing of lots, and the knight literally draws the short straw. This meets with general approbation, and so the knight begins his tale.

The Knight’s Tale

The tale is, as might be expected, a chivalric romance, although it should more accurately be seen as a mixture of medieval romance and classical epic. The knight himself states that he is telling a classical tale, but Chaucer’s source was the Italian poet Boccaccio, whom he follows very closely although far more concisely. Despite this contraction, Chaucer also added fresh material, so only about a third of the tale can be regarded as a direct translation of Boccaccio’s version. The tale was not originally written by Chaucer as a Canterbury Tale, but adapted from an earlier work and given the knight’s “voice” in its new context.

Part One

The pilgrims certainly get their money’s worth with the opening tale, which runs to four parts and some 2,250 lines. The scene is set in Ancient Greece, with Theseus, having defeated the Scythians, returning to Athens with his new queen, Hippolyta, and her sister Emily, when they are met by the widows of knights slain and dishonoured by Creon of Thebes, against whom Theseus swears vengeance. Sending Hippolyta and Emily on to Athens, he immediately sets off towards Thebes.

Defeating and slaying Creon takes little effort on the part of Theseus, and the bodies of the Athenians dishonoured by Creon are given proper funeral rites, but two badly wounded Thebean knights are also discovered and brought to Theseus. These are Arcite and Palamon, who are two young cousins. Theseus orders that they be taken to Athens and imprisoned there.

Time passes, the two knights recover from their injuries, but are locked up in a tower from which they have no hope of release. One May morning, Palamon sees the lady Emily walking in the garden beneath the tower and immediately falls in love with her, as does Arcite when he in turn sees Emily. However, Palamon claims that Emily is his, because he saw her first. Arcite will have none of it, claiming that his love is more worthy than Palamon’s. Of course, this is all nonsense, because neither of them has any hope of actually meeting the lady in question. However, within the rules of courtly love, love at such a distance is every bit as valid as that of “real” lovers, and is indeed more honourable.

The story takes a fresh turn when Arcite is ransomed by an old friend, who was also a friend of Theseus. However, the condition of the ransom is that he must leave Athens, the penalty for returning being death. He is therefore, despite being free, further removed from Emily than is Palamon, who can still see her from his prison window.

Meanwhile, Palamon also bewails his fate, for he is still imprisoned while Arcite is free. In Palamon’s eyes, Arcite is in a position to raise an army with which to defeat Theseus and claim Emily for his own, although this is not something that had occurred to Arcite. The teller then poses the question to his hearers, as he concludes the first part of the tale, which of the two is in the worse position?

Part Two

Part Two opens with Arcite, back in Thebes, pining away for “a year or two” when he has a dream in which Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, tells him to go back to Athens, because everything will turn out for the best if he does. On the strength of this dream, Arcite does so, reckoning that his wretched appearance, caused by his failure to look after himself properly, will render him unrecognizable in Athens. He also adopts a further disguise, as a poor labourer. He is therefore able to get a job in Emily’s household, under a false name, for another “year or two”.

Arcite does his job so well that he is promoted, and eventually becomes squire to Theseus. He is able to become prosperous, especially as his income from Thebes is also smuggled to him, although he takes care to spend it “honestly and slyly”. Another three years pass.

Meanwhile, Palamon has been imprisoned for seven years. He manages to escape, with the help of a friend, and plans to return to Thebes to raise an army, as he had expected Arcite to do. However, on the first night he lies low in a wood, to which, coincidentally, Arcite rides out the next morning. Palamon overhears him bemoaning aloud that Emily is as far from him as ever, which prompts Palamon to break his cover and confront his long-separated cousin.

The two now declare themselves to be mortal foes and vow to fight to the death for the hand of Emily. Palamon, having just escaped from prison, has no weapon or armour, but Arcite promises to return the next day with “harness” for Palamon so that they can fight on equal terms. Knightly honour prompts both of them to settle their differences in the prescribed manner. Arcite even promises to allow Palamon the choice of weapons – “leave the worst for me” – and to bring him food, drink and bedding for the night before the duel.

The following morning, Arcite keeps his promise and the fight begins, on equal terms. However, they are interrupted by Theseus, who is out hunting, accompanied by Hippolyta and Emily and the whole court. The cousins admit that they are the banished Arcite and escaped prisoner Palamon, and that they deserve to die, but are spared when the women present plead their cause, as they are fighting over a matter concerning love.

Theseus considers their plea and agrees that love is such a powerful thing that it can excuse almost anything done in its name. He pardons the cousins, on condition that they cease their conflict for the time being. However, he commands them to return to Athens in a year’s time, each with a hundred knights, to fight a pitched battle with Emily as the prize to the winner. Everybody seems pleased with this decision, although it might be pointed out that this is the first time that Emily has had the slightest inkling that she has been the cause of so much bother, and her wishes on the matter are never sought.

Part Three

The third part of The Knight’s Tale opens with details of the vast amphitheatre that Theseus builds in which the battle between the armies of Arcite and Palamon for the hand of Emily is to be held. This is a circular arena, “a mile about”, surrounded by terraced stands and with marble entrance ways, plus temples to Mars, Venus and Diana. These are described in detail, and at such length that the tale takes a back seat.

Palamon and Arcite arrive, each with their company of knights, and there are long descriptions of each. After a feast hosted by Theseus, the two rivals go to pray at the temples built near the amphitheatre. Palamon prays to Venus, pleading that she will look with favour on him, whose cause is love; Arcite prays to Mars, the god of war; and both of them receive signs that they will be triumphant.

However, in between these two prayers, Emily herself offers a prayer, at the temple of Diana, the goddess of chastity. This is the first time that we have heard Emily speak, and her prayer is that she may retain her virginity, as she has no wish to be the wife of anyone. However, if she has to go through with this, can she at least be given to the one who will love her the more truly? Diana herself appears to Emily, and tells her that she cannot have her first wish.

The scene now changes to the realm of the gods, where Venus and Mars argue over which of them shall prevail. Saturn intervenes, to state that Venus, and thereby Palamon, shall be the winner, which rather spoils the story for anyone wondering how it will turn out in the end.

Part Four

Part Four begins with preparations for the battle, including the stipulations of Theseus that he hopes will avoid a bloodbath, basically by restricting the types of weapon that may be used and setting certain rules of engagement by which defeated warriors are captured rather than killed. Should either Arcite or Palamon die or be captured, then the battle will be ended at that point.

Eventually, battle commences, and quite a lot of blood does indeed flow, despite the precautions of Theseus. Palamon is captured and Theseus declares that Arcite has won. However, this does not please Venus and Saturn, who causes Arcite to be thrown from his horse as he goes to claim Emily as his prize, and he is seriously injured.

With the battle done, the armies are patched up and sent home – with no fatalities. However, things do not go so well for Arcite, and it becomes clear that he is dying. Before he dies, he says farewell to Emily and declares that Palamon will be a good husband to her.

The lamentations and funeral rites for Arcite are then described at some length, with the pyre being built at the site where the two knights first fought.

More years pass, and Theseus summons Palamon and Emily to his court, where he, in effect, preaches a sermon on the mutability of life. Chaucer tends to confuse pagan and Christian theology at this point, referring to “Jupiter” in one line and “God” in another. However, the end result is that he gives his blessing to the union of Emily and Palamon, and they both live happily ever after.

Assessing the Knight’s Tale

So what can we make of this, the first of the Canterbury Tales? To the modern reader an air of unreality hangs over it, mainly because the convention of courtly love is so foreign to us. Indeed, even in Chaucer’s time it was something that belonged to the past. However, to his contemporary audience, Chaucer’s story would not have sounded as ridiculous as it might sound to us.

Even so, there are problems with it as a narrative. As mentioned earlier, Chaucer cut back on Boccaccio’s version but made additions of his own. The pace of the story is greatly helped by the omission of Boccaccio’s lengthy description of the defeat of Creon’s Thebes by Theseus, for example. But the pace is also slowed by the hundreds of lines devoted to the descriptions of the temples and Theseus’s sermon, which owed nothing to Boccaccio. As listeners, we feel cheated at being made to wait so long for the story to develop in the third and fourth parts.

There are other flaws, including the almost total lack of characterization – it is hard to picture Arcite and Palamon as individuals distinct from each other, for example. The treatment of Emily as a character also leaves us cold. Her desires are barely touched upon, and when they are, they are ignored by the goddess to whom she turns for help. There is far less sympathy shown for her plight than there is, for example, for “patient Griselda” in the later Clerk’s Tale. Chaucer was in general quite sympathetic towards the female characters in his tales, but not here.

All in all, the Knight’s Tale offers a reasonable start as the opening tale, although there are better things to come.

© John Welford

Sources used by Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer undoubtedly comprise the earliest work of literature in English of lasting merit. However, their author was a well-read man who sourced his tales from many places, some being of foreign origin.

The origin of The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) was well-travelled and highly educated. He was as familiar with Latin and French as he was with English, and he had little trouble in learning enough Italian to absorb the literary tradition of Italy during his visits to that country. It is therefore hardly surprising to find that stories from the literature of France and Italy, and from the Classical tradition, appear in the Canterbury Tales, adapted to a greater or lesser degree.

Scholars have searched in vain for a definite source for the notion of framing a series of stories within a pilgrimage. One suggestion is the “Novelle” of Chaucer’s Italian contemporary Giovanni Sercambi, which were probably written in about 1374 and with which Chaucer may have been familiar. However, Sercambi’s use of this device was very different that of Chaucer, and the latter’s debt to Sercambi, if one was owed, can only have been for the mere suggestion of a pilgrimage as a framework.

Possible sources for the individual tales

The first of the Tales, namely that of the Knight, has a very clear source, namely that of Boccaccio’s “Teseida”, which was his telling of the Greek epic of Theseus. Part of the Knight’s Tale is a direct translation from the Italian, but Chaucer only tells about a quarter of the story told by Boccaccio (1315-74) and adds some material of his own, thus improving it considerably.

The next three tales, those of the Miller and the Reeve plus the fragment that is all we have of the Cook’s Tale, are derived from the French “fabliau” tradition of popular story-telling, and may indeed have been heard by Chaucer during his travels in France.

For the Man of Law’s Tale, Chaucer’s source was the “Anglo-Norman Chronicle” of Nicholas Trivet (c. 1257 – c. 1334), although the story of the “calumniated wife” who remains faithful despite all the injustices she suffers was a familiar one in medieval folklore romances, known as “märchen”. Again, Chaucer takes the material and adapts it, rather than simply retelling an old story.

In the Wife of Bath’s Tale, Chaucer uses an old fairytale device of the enchanted bride who is “fair by day and foul by night”, which is found in many forms in medieval literature and even down to the present day as in the “Shrek” films. However, Chaucer adds his own twist to the concept to produce an original story that fits his theme of discussing “sovereignty” in marriage.

The Friar’s and Summoner’s Tales return to the fabliau tradition, but the actual stories are probably original to Chaucer.

For the Clerk’s Tale of “patient Griselda”, Chaucer uses a story told in Latin by Petrach (1304-74), and this is actually cited in the short prologue to the Tale. However, Petrach is known to have used Boccaccio’s Decameron as his own source, this being a work with which it is believed Chaucer was not familiar. For the Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer sticks quite closely to the story as told by Petrach.

The Merchant’s Tale of January and May is another folk tale from the “märchen” tradition that is found in many different forms in medieval literature. However, Chaucer takes a simple story and adds extra layers of description, comment and characterisation.

The unfinished Squire’s Tale, a pure romance, has no direct literary source that has been detected, and may quite possibly have been gleaned as an overheard traveller’s or sailor’s tale, it being well known that Chaucer had many contacts with such people around the port of London.

The Franklin’s Tale purports to come from the folk tradition of the Celts, being what is known as a “Breton lay”. This, at least, is what the Franklin states in his prologue. However, it is more likely that Chaucer’s actual source was, once again, Boccaccio, who tells the story in his “Filocolo”.

The Physician’s Tale, the old Roman story of Appius and Virginia, begins by stating the source as the Latin poet Livy, but Chaucer probably knew it from the 13^th century “Roman de la Rose”, a long poem in French that is a fundamental source of medieval “courtly love” literature. The digression on the character and education of young girls may have been prompted by an incident in the household of John of Gaunt, who was Chaucer’s patron and friend.

The “sermon story” told by the Pardoner, of three revellers whose greed leads to their destruction, is a tale known in many versions from antiquity, including moral fables from the Asian Buddhist tradition, but it is not known how Chaucer first came across it. It may even have been from the same “traveller’s tale” source from which the Physician’s Tale derived. Whatever the source, the story has never been told better than by Chaucer.

The Shipman’s Tale, of a merchant cheated by a monk, is another fabliau that occurs in various forms throughout the folk traditions of many countries. It also appears in Boccaccio’s Decameron, although this is unlikely to have been Chaucer’s direct source.

The Prioress’s Tale which, being so anti-Semitic, reads very uncomfortably today, was current in several forms in Chaucer’s time, and he uses it as an appropriate tale for the teller. It is a typical “tale of the Virgin”, in which miracles take place due to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, and reflects the anti-Jewish feelings in England at a time when Jews were banished and could therefore be regarded as the agents of Satan without fear of contradiction or reaction.

The “Tale of Sir Thopas” is a satirical send-up of badly told romantic ballads, of which Chaucer and his original hearers would have been very familiar. This is followed by his (to modern readers) turgid “Tale of Melibee”, which is a close translation of the French “Livre de Melibé et de Dame Prudence”, ascribed to Renaud de Louens, which was itself a free rendering of the Latin “Liber Consolationis et Consilii” by Albertanus of Brescia.

The Monk’s Tale consists of a series of fifteen short accounts of the fall from grace of great men. For these, Chaucer would have used a variety of sources, including the Roman de la Rose, several works by Boccaccio, the Bible, Boethius and Dante.

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a beast fable in the tradition of the old French “Roman de Renart”, although the cycle of medieval stories about a wily fox is found in the folk traditions of several European countries. Chaucer’s exact source is unclear.

For the Second Nun’s Tale, which is the story of the martyrdom of St Cecilia, Chaucer relied on the “Legenda Aurea” (or “Golden Legend”) by Jacobus Januensis (otherwise known as Jacobus de Voragine) who lived from 1230 to 1298). The Legenda Aurea was a collection of “lives of the saints” that was extremely popular, especially in its French translation. However, Chaucer appears to have stuck quite closely to the Latin original.

The Canon’s Yeoman is a character who arrives late to the pilgrimage and tells his tale after his master has ridden away. The tale concerns a cheating alchemist, and would appear to be completely original. It has been surmised that Chaucer included this attack on alchemists from personal motives, although he does not dismiss alchemy as such, which is what a modern reader would naturally do.

The Manciple’s Tale of the “tell-tale bird” was familiar in many medieval traditions, but Chaucer’s source would seem to be Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, although with many elaborations.

The final tale, which is an enormously long sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins, delivered by the Parson, derives largely from the 13^th century “De Poenitentia” (3^rd book) by Raymond de Pennaforte, into which has been inserted a section derived from the “Summa de Vitiis” by Guilielmus Peraldus. It is entirely possible that this joining together was not made by Chaucer himself but by the composer of an unknown source which Chaucer used.

Conclusion

It is therefore evident that Chaucer relied on a number of sources for the Canterbury Tales, only some of which can be known with certainty. What is very clear, however, is that his sources varied from scholarly works to popular folk tales, some of which might easily have been heard in wayside taverns during his travels. It is also the case that Chaucer did a lot more than simply recycle tales for a new audience. His genius was, in most cases, to fit his stories to his pilgrim characters, and it is this adaptation that gives the Canterbury Tales their liveliness and their appeal down to the present day.

© John Welford

See also:

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: an overall view
The background to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales