The Merchant's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Merchant’s Tale is the last of the “marriage group” of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. These deal with different aspects of the theme of authority in marriage, and include the Wife of Bath’s argument for the sovereignty of wives, and the Clerk’s Tale of what can happen when a husband demands complete obedience from his wife. The Merchant turns the tables again, with a story of a young wife deceiving an elderly husband.

We know from the General Prologue that the Merchant has every appearance of being successful, wearing fine clothes and boots, and talking about how well he is doing in his business. His is a type that has lasted right down to the present day! However, Chaucer also lets slip that he is in debt, and that therefore much of what we see is a sham.

After the Clerk has told his tale, the Merchant lets it be known that his own marriage is far from happy. He has only been married for two months, after many years as a bachelor, but he greatly regrets having made such a mistake, his wife being a “shrew” who treats him with malice and cruelty, although he gives no details about how this is manifested.

The Merchant’s Tale is based on a piece of folklore that had appeared in many forms before Chaucer made use of it. However, in Chaucer’s version the simple plot is richly elaborated with description, comment and characterization, plus a bit of mythology for good measure.

The Tale

An old man, named January, decides that it is high time that he got married. He will have to take a young wife, because he wishes to produce an heir. He thinks long and hard about this, to the extent of 450 lines of verse before the wedding takes place, including a survey of marriage in the Old Testament, discourses on the subject from a number of classical writers, and consultations with his two brothers. January does not plunge into marriage on a whim!

Having decided to marry, January looks around for a possible candidate. Eventually the choice falls on May, who is young and pretty. He finds the wedding and the feast that follows to be too long-winded for his liking, as he wishes to bed his new wife as soon as possible. However, his squire, named Damian, has also been smitten with the sight of young May.

Damian becomes sick with love and writes a letter to May, but can find no way of getting it to her. When January and May first eat together in the hall, January notices that Damian is not there. He asks May to go, with her maids, to Damian’s bedside to wish him well. Damian takes advantage of this visit to pass her his letter, which she reads after she has returned, and then destroys.

When she can, May writes a reply to Damian, and delivers it to him, squeezing his hand as she does so. This is enough to make Damian well again.

January has a walled garden, to which only he has the key. He now uses this garden as a private love-nest to which he takes his wife when he feels so inclined.

As time passes, January loses his sight, but he cannot now bear to have May out of his reach, being jealous of some possible suitor, although he knows nothing about Damian’s passion for May or May’s feelings for Damian.

May makes a copy of the garden key, which she gives to Damian. When January next asks her to go with him to the garden, she motions Damian to slip through the gate before them, using his key, and to wait for her signal. As January and May make speeches affirming their love, sincere on one side but not the other, she give a sign to Damian to climb into a pear tree.

Unknown to any of them, the garden is also being visited by two characters from mythology, Pluto and Proserpine. Pluto takes pity on January and vows to restore his sight. Proserpine takes May’s side and vows to give her the power to defend herself when the truth comes out. There is a very strange element in this conversation, as the two figures from Greek mythology talk about the wisdom of Solomon and the “true God that is but one”!

When January and May reach the pear tree, May insists on climbing up to reach some pears, at which Damian immediately grabs her and starts to ravish her. Pluto instantly restores January’s sight, enabling him to see exactly what is going on. Proserpine now makes good her vow, and puts words into May’s mouth, along the lines that somebody who has just had their sight restored cannot trust what they think they see.

This appears to satisfy January, and the story ends there.

Discussion

So what are we to make of it? A foolish old man is successfully hoodwinked by a clever young woman, albeit one who takes advantage of her husband’s disability. The debate on who shall have “mastery” in marriage has not been settled, and this is something of a “score draw”. Also, the wicked characters in this story get away with it. There is no punishment for May or Damian, which sits oddly with the Merchant’s expressed views on the wickedness of women, as one would have expected him to tell a tale that redressed the balance.

As a tale, the thought must be that it would have been told very differently by a modern writer. All those lines at the beginning of the story about the benefits and drawbacks of marriage are tedious to read, and have only a limited bearing on the story that follows. Once the denouement is reached, the tale comes to a close almost immediately, giving the impression of a somewhat unbalanced piece of work.

The tale does not bear comparison, as entertainment, with the Miller’s Tale, which is on a similar theme but is better told and has much more life to it, with more attractive characters. However, it has left English literature with a name, January and May, for the theme of the old husband who is cuckolded by a much younger wife.

© John Welford

Animal Farm, by George Orwell: a summary of the plot

George Orwell (real name Eric Blair, 1903-50) never joined any political party but regarded himself as a man of the left. He fought on the Republican (i.e. Communist-led) side during the Spanish Civil War that began in 1936, during which he was nearly killed, but became disillusioned with the political infighting of the various factions that were arrayed against the Fascists. In particular he noted how the Stalinists regarded everyone else as an enemy. This experience led to his writing of Animal Farm as a satirical portrayal of the corruption of Communist ideals by Stalin and his cronies in the Soviet Union.

Animal Farm was completed in 1944 but not published until August 1945, having been turned down by four publishers who were concerned that it was unwise to publish a book that was clearly an attack on one of Britain’s wartime allies. However, since its publication Animal Farm has been immensely successful, never out of print, and rightly regarded as a 20^th century classic.

Animal Farm takes the form of a novella of little more than 41,000 words that can therefore be read in a single sitting. Its brevity means that the characters and incidents make an immediate impact that stays in the mind. The corruption and hypocrisy that form the main drivers of the plot therefore strike the reader with considerable force, and that is why the book has proved to be so effective and memorable.

The setting is Manor Farm, somewhere in England, that has been badly managed for many years by Mr Jones, who has worked the animals too hard and kept them short of food, and been drunk most of the time. In the allegory of the book, Mr Jones represents the Tsarist regime of old Russia.

Old Major, the most senior pig on the farm, calls a meeting at which he delivers a speech that stirs the animals to action. He gives the animals a revolutionary song to sing, called “Beasts of England” that promises a wonderful future with less toil and more food, once “tyrant man” has been overthrown. Old Major represents Karl Marx, with possibly a bit of Vladimir Lenin thrown in, and “Beasts of England” (which bears more than a passing resemblance to Shelley’s revolutionary “Men of England”) can be seen as the animals’ equivalent of the socialist hymn, the “Internationale”.

When Old Major dies three days later, the revolution takes place and Mr Jones is driven out. The leaders of the revolt are two younger pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, who represent Stalin and Trotsky respectively. They immediately assume leadership of the animals and state the principles by which the farm, now renamed Animal Farm, will be run in future. These, the “Seven Commandments”, are written on the side of the barn:

1.    Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.

2.    Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

3.    No animal shall wear clothes.

4.    No animal shall sleep in a bed.

5.    No animal shall drink alcohol.

6.    No animal shall kill any other animal.

7.    All animals are equal.

This is the pure form of “Animalism” (or Communism) to which every animal willingly subscribes, at least to start with. As most of the animals are unable to read, these principles are soon reduced to the mantra “Four legs good, two legs bad”.

The “common man” is represented by Boxer, a carthorse who does not have the brains to work things out for himself but is incredibly hard-working and loyal to Napoleon, whom he trusts to always do the right thing.

At first things run smoothly, with plenty of food for everyone, thanks mainly to the hard work of the animals, under Snowball’s leadership, in bringing in the first harvest. Snowball also attempts to improve the level of education on the farm by teaching the animals to read and write.

However, the pigs soon become the elite, and extra food supplies are diverted in their direction. Napoleon trains the pups of the farm dogs to become his personal guard, or secret police, with the emphasis on viciousness.

Mr Jones, aided by his farmhands, makes an attempt to retake the farm (the equivalent of the Russian Civil War in which Tsarist, anti-Communist and international forces attempted to defeat the Bolsheviks) but is repulsed at the “Battle of the Cowshed”. After this, he makes no further attempts to return.

Snowball believes that the farm will prosper if the animals are able to build a windmill to generate electricity, but Napoleon objects to the idea. The disagreement between Snowball and Napoleon turns violent and results in Napoleon setting his attack dogs on Snowball and chasing him off the farm, just as Stalin had Trotsky exiled from Russia.

Now that his leadership is unquestioned, Napoleon makes some changes around the farm, including removing all vestiges of democracy, such as the regular general meetings of the farm animals. Instead, a committee of pigs will make all the decisions.

Napoleon is now in full favour of building the windmill, claiming that, all along, it was his idea which Snowball stole. This of course means that the farm animals will have to work harder still, none more so than the ever-loyal Boxer.

However, the unfinished windmill is blown down in a storm, at which Napoleon takes the opportunity to blame the absent Snowball, although the neighbouring (human) farmers point out that, under Napoleon’s management, the windmill had been built with too-thin walls.

Napoleon and his mouthpiece Squealer (equivalent to Molotov) now institute a purge of animals who express any sympathy with Snowball.

Now that the pigs are firmly in control, life is made increasingly difficult for the other animals. Changes are made to the Seven Commandments, so that, for example, “No animal shall sleep in a bed” has the words “with sheets” tacked on to the end, thus justifying the breaking of the original rule by the pigs, who are now living in Mr Jones’s farmhouse (and drinking his whisky). The old anthem “Beasts of England” is banned and replaced by “Comrade Napoleon”, which praises Napoleon to the hilt for all the benefits he has showered upon the animals, those benefits being explained by statistics invented by Squealer, who also justifies the luxurious lifestyle that the pigs are now leading.

A neighbouring farmer, Mr Frederick, attempts to trade with Napoleon for wood but swindles him, then invades the farm and attacks the windmill, which is being restored. The “Battle of the Windmill” is won by the animals, but at great cost. Mr Frederick is clearly the equivalent of Adolf Hitler, who had at one time entered an alliance with Stalin but then invaded Russia. There is even a reference to the Holocaust, in that Mr Frederick is believed to have thrown his own dogs into a furnace.

One of the casualties of the Battle of the Windmill is Boxer, who is wounded and later collapses when, once again, working to repair the windmill. Napoleon sends for a van to have Boxer taken to the vet, but one of the donkeys, who is able to read, notices that the van is labelled “Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler". The animals are unable to rescue Boxer, but Napoleon claims that the vet had recently bought the van and not had time to repaint it. In all events, Boxer is never seen again but the pigs are suddenly able to afford to buy more whisky.

As time passes, the pigs under Napoleon disown every one of their previous principles, to the extent that they now walk on two legs and wear clothes, as well as having already slept in beds, drunk alcohol, and killed their opponents. The Seven Commandments are reduced to one, suitably amended, that reads: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”.

At the end of “Animal Farm” the pigs invite the neighbouring farmers to a dinner party, at which the human farmers congratulate the pigs on how well they are running things, for example by giving the animals as little food as they can possibly get away with. Napoleon plays poker with Mr Pilkington (who represents the capitalist west) and both appear to have the Ace of Spades. Somebody is clearly cheating, but it really doesn’t matter who it is because, as the other animals peering through the window discover to their horror, it is now impossible to distinguish pigs from humans as they all look exactly the same.

Orwell’s book is a brilliant satire not just of Communism under Stalin but of all dictatorships that pretend to be one thing and turn out to be completely different. It is therefore a precursor to his “1984” in which hypocrisy, double-dealing and the abuse of power are projected into the future.

© John Welford

The originality of Gerard Manley Hopkins

One strange fact about Hopkins’s originality is that it had absolutely no impact or influence on his contemporaries. When he died in 1889 (at the age of 44) his poetry was only known to a small number of people (most notably his friend and literary executor Robert Bridges), and it was not until 1918 that an edition of his work was published by Bridges. Indeed, only when the second edition was published in 1930 did Hopkins’s name become widely known and his poetry appreciated.

With hindsight, we can see that Hopkins was the only Victorian poet who made a radical attempt to reconsider the nature of poetic expression. He can with justice be regarded as the Vincent Van Gogh of poetry, and indeed there are many parallels between the two men, including the fact that they were both “posthumous geniuses”.

It is not possible in a short article to do justice to all the original features of Hopkins’s revolutionary approach to poetry, so a few pointers will have to suffice.

Poetry as music

In their respective media, both Van Gogh and Hopkins bypassed the rules in order to seize the indwelling essence of the object being represented. What Van Gogh did with paint, Hopkins did with words, contravening the rules of standard English in order to seize a poetic experience. If a conjunction or standard mode of expression got in the way, out it went. The result was poetry that was immediate, irreducible and untranslatable.

The analogy above was with post-impressionist art, but Hopkins’s poetry can also be considered as a form of music with words as the notes. Hopkins liked to use the word “explode” to describe what he desired his poems to do. The sound that the words made was part of the total experience, such that the meaning could only be conveyed by those words, and not in any other way. Meaning, to Hopkins, had to be felt as well as understood.

A typical example 

To take an example, consider the opening of “The Windhover” (subtitled “To Christ our Lord”):

“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! …”

It would be a crime to analyse these lines, because they must make their impact on the reader as they stand, and each reader will hear the words differently, just as they will hear a piece of music in their own way, without the need for an academic gloss. It is also a crime to present only part of a Hopkins poem, because the “explosion” is the result of the total impact of the poem. Hopkins often uses language as a means of preventing meaning from escaping prematurely before the total expression has been achieved.

However, a few comments can be offered as regards “The Windhover” in terms of indicating its features of originality.

One aspect is Hopkins’s melding of meaning between the sacred and the profane. Apart from the opening subtitle, there is no mention of the name of Christ in the rest of the poem, the closest being “O my chevalier!” towards the end. But this is an intensely Christian poem all the same. The poem is about the flight of a falcon, but within the first two lines it is representative of the Trinity, as “king”, “minion” and “dauphin”, ruler, servant and heir.

Sprung rhythm 

The poem is also an exemplar of another original feature of Hopkins’s poetry, namely “sprung rhythm”. The second, third and fourth lines contain 16, 15 and 12 syllables respectively, but each can be read as having five stresses. This is therefore a form of syncopation, a series of rhythmic pulses that here represent the beats of the bird’s wings.

This diction has a clear connection to musical rhythm, in which the number of notes can vary while the beat stays the same, and its syncopated nature is highly reminiscent of ragtime, which would have been familiar to many of the first readers of Hopkins’s poems in the early 20^th century.

Hopkins’s own view of sprung rhythm was that it was the rhythm of speech, unforced and natural. It was therefore the most emphatic of all possible rhythms in terms of conveying feeling and meaning. It is also significant that Hopkins spent several years as a Jesuit teacher in North Wales, where he learnt Welsh and became enchanted by the musical nature of Welsh poetry and the lilt of the Welsh speaking voice.

His use of alliteration, which is very evident in “The Windhover” is also reminiscent of Welsh poetry. It is interesting to compare this poem, for example, with the opening lines of “Under Milk Wood” by the much later Anglo-Welsh poet Dylan Thomas:

“To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.”

The influences on Thomas could have been both Hopkins himself and the common thread of Welsh tradition.

It should also be noted that sprung rhythm owed much to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, with which Hopkins was familiar. It must also be stressed that Hopkins wished his poetry to be read aloud rather than on the page. This accorded with the bardic tradition both of the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, and it is ironic that so few of his own poems found an audience in his lifetime. Hopkins would have appreciated the medium of radio, which was of course how “Under Milk Wood”, a “play for voices”, was first made public.

It has to be admitted that not all of Hopkins’s poetry was of uniformly high quality, and he was quite capable of writing poorly, mainly through trying too hard. However, Hopkins’s greatest achievement was to break out of both the elegiac mode of Victorian poetry, as exemplified by Tennyson, and the mode of nature poetry typified by Wordsworth. These two giants dominated the Victorian poetry scene, but not Hopkins. His tradition was one that he discovered for himself. Although his truly great poems are not that many in number, they were to prove highly influential in the 20^th century and certainly deserve the accolade of originality.

© John Welford

Relatively Speaking, a comedy by Alan Ayckbourn

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” So wrote Sir Walter Scott in his poem “Marmion”. However, this line could be the motto for many plays that have graced the British stage in the 20^th and 21st centuries, with Alan Ayckbourn’s “Relatively Speaking” definitely being among their number. It is a typical example of the English “comedy of confusion” that has proved popular with audiences for many years. Indeed, the genre has its roots as far back as the comedies of Shakespeare and Sheridan, with many more since then.

Alan Ayckbourn (born in London in 1939) has written more than 70 plays, most of which have enjoyed considerable success. The world he portrays is that of lower-middle-class suburbia with its particular pretensions and moralities. Nearly all his plays have been first performed at the theatre managed by Ayckbourn (until 2009) in the Yorkshire seaside resort of Scarborough, before they hit the London stage.

Ayckbourn’s plays are therefore first seen by audiences of lower-middle-class holidaymakers who are looking, first and foremost, to be entertained but who are confronted with people on stage with whom they can relate. They can thus imagine themselves facing similar situations and so form bonds with the characters in question. The best comedies work by persuading audiences to look inside themselves, and that is one important reason for Ayckbourn’s continuing success.

“Relatively Speaking” dates from 1965 and is one of Ayckbourn’s earliest plays; indeed, it was his first big success. It had its Scarborough premiere on 9^th July 1965 and was first seen in London’s West End (at the Duke of York’s Theatre) on 29^th March 1967. It has been revived many times since then and has always been well received due to its sparkling dialogue and absurd misunderstandings.

It is a play in two acts and has only four characters.

The play opens in Ginny’s London flat which she shares with Greg, her lover. Ginny is on the point of leaving the flat in order to pay a visit, so she says, to her parents in Buckinghamshire. While she is getting her things together, Greg finds a pair of slippers under the bed that he knows are not his. This discovery, which is on a par with the flowers and chocolates that are also evident in the flat, causes him mixed feelings, as the realisation that there could be another man in Ginny’s life evinces a spark of jealousy in him but also leads him to think that this would be good time to propose marriage in the hope of securing her for himself.

Greg suddenly has a bright idea, which is that if he follows Ginny to her parents’ house he will be able to ask her father for permission to marry Ginny as well as making the proposal directly to her. This will mean getting on the same train as Ginny but without being seen, so off he goes shortly after she leaves.

The second act is set at the house in Buckinghamshire to which Ginny has set off. Greg actually arrives at the house before Ginny does, and so he is convinced that the man who opens the door is Ginny’s father, whereas he (Philip) is actually her married lover, a much older man than Greg, and the owner of the mysterious slippers. Philip is naturally confused, and imagines that the woman Greg is asking to marry is Philip’s wife, Sheila.

Ginny’s object in making this trip had been to break the relationship with Philip so that she could marry Greg. When she arrives she is naturally shocked to find her two lovers in conversation with each other, and she realises the importance of neither Greg nor Sheila finding out who Philip really is. She therefore persuades Philip to pretend to be her father, which is what Greg believes him to be. Greg also, of course, thinks that Sheila is Ginny’s mother.

With this mixture of misunderstanding and deception, it is no surprise that things get even more muddled until, by the end of the play, it would seem that the chances of any of them remaining in a relationship with anyone else are extremely slim. The one person who does not seem to have grasped the truth by the time the curtain falls is Greg, whose naivety remains intact throughout.

“Relatively Speaking” has no deep significance as a drama unless it is the warning from Scott mentioned above. One’s sympathies can lie with Greg, who believed that he was doing the right thing by forgetting about the slippers and proposing to Ginny, but the latter was also being honourable by taking steps to end the old relationship without involving Greg (although it could be argued that she should have done this some time before). Nobody has behaved maliciously, and the worst crime has been one of deception at a level that most people would forgive.

In the final analysis, “Relatively Speaking” is a bit of good clean fun in which nobody gets hurt and the audience members leave the theatre feeling that they have had a good laugh and their money’s worth.

© John Welford

The Clerk's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The world has moved a long way in the last 700 or so years, so that behaviour that was admired then is regarded with revulsion now, and doubtless the people of Geoffrey Chaucer’s time would react with horror at much of what we  regard as normal and commonplace today.

An example of the former is the Clerk’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales. The story of “patient Griselda” would find no place in a modern version of the Tales, because it would be regarded as completely unrealistic and deeply offensive to women. However, as so often with Chaucer, all is not quite as it seems here, and the Clerk’s Tale, in its context, can be seen as an early stirring in the direction of “women’s lib”.

The Clerk

From the General Prologue, we know that the Clerk is an impoverished scholar, whose chief desire is to own lots of books. He might therefore be seen as being unworldly, and unlikely to prove to be exciting company for the other pilgrims.

Indeed, when called upon by “mine Host” to tell a tale, he is reprimanded for being aloof and quiet, “as coy and still as a maid”. The Host, as is his wont, requests “some merry tale”, but he has come to the wrong person here!

The Clerk tells us exactly where he (and therefore Chaucer himself) has got this story from. It is well known that only a few of Chaucer’s tales were original to him, but it is only here that the source is acknowledged. This is an important point, because it lets Chaucer off the hook as far as the story itself is concerned. He is saying, “this story has its faults, but please don’t blame me, because I got it from someone else”, in this case Petrarch, whose own source was Boccaccio.

The Tale

The story is of a noble Italian lord, named Walter, who is persuaded by his people to marry and produce an heir. He agrees, on condition that he has a free choice and that the people will respect her, whoever she may be, “as though she were an emperor’s daughter”.

His choice is Griselda, the daughter of a poor man of the village. He goes about his proposal in a somewhat unorthodox way, in that he makes all the wedding arrangements first and then approaches her father and Griselda to ask for her hand in marriage, which both agree to.

There is a brief comic moment when the court ladies are ordered to remove her old clothes and dress her in a sumptuous gown. We can imagine their distaste at the first part of this job, as we are told, “these ladies were not right glad to handle her clothes wherein she was clad”.

All proceeds well, and in the fullness of time Griselda produces a baby girl. However, at this point things get very strange indeed. Walter decides to “tempt his wife”. As the Clerk himself says, Walter had absolutely no reason to do this, as “he had assayed her enough before”. He goes on: “I say it is evil to test a wife when there is no need, and put her in anguish and dread”.

The test consists of removing the child from Griselda and allowing her to believe that it was to be killed, although the baby girl is actually sent far away to be looked after by Walter’s sister. Griselda is saddened by this event, but does nothing to prevent it happening, as this is clearly her husband’s will and she is bound to obey it. Walter looks carefully for signs of change in her manner, but finds that she is just as loving and servile as ever.

Four years later, Griselda has another child, a boy this time, and, two years after that, Walter does the same thing again. Once more, Griselda is forced to give up her child, Walter’s excuse being that his people will not accept the estate being inherited by the grandson of a pauper. Once again, she believes that the child will be killed, but, as before, she submits meekly to what her husband commands.

The final test comes when Walter proposes to divorce her and take another wife. Once more, she does not complain. To make things worse, he sends for the two children to come back to him, making it appear that the daughter, now aged twelve, is to be his new wife. Griselda returns to her father’s hovel, after making a long speech in which declares that she brought nothing but herself into the marriage and will take nothing out of it, stripping off her fine clothes before walking off.

Walter’s behaviour now gets worse still, as he sends for Griselda and orders her to prepare the house to receive his new bride, as nobody knows better than she how it should look. When the children arrive, he asks Griselda for her opinion of the new “wife”, and she appeals to Walter not to treat her as she was treated herself, as this is clearly a highly-born lady who could not endure the same indignities that she has had to go through.

At this point, Walter comes clean and admits everything that he has done, that Griselda will always be his wife, and that these are her children, now restored to her. She has clearly passed the test, and therefore they can all live happily ever after. The unreality of the story continues, in that there is no recrimination against Walter, only thanks for having saved the children.

Discussion

The tellers of the tale, both the Clerk and Chaucer himself, speaking directly to the reader “out of character” as it were, now offer their comments on the story. The clerk makes clear that this degree of testing is clearly unacceptable, and that the story should be taken not as a model of how a wife should behave towards her husband, but how everyone should submit to the will of God, namely by blind unquestioning obedience and meek submission to misfortune because everything will turn out fine in the end. This is therefore an allegorical tale that is not to be taken literally.

In his “envoy”, Chaucer makes it very clear that he in no way agrees with the theme of the tale that he has put into the mouth of the Clerk. This is no way for either a husband or a wife to behave. “Wives, you who are strong as camels, don’t allow men to offend you in this way. Slender wives, who might easily be pushed around, be as savage as an Indian tiger and make as much noise as a mill, I entreat you”. This is the women’s liberation movement in full swing, hundreds of years before women got the vote, or were even regarded as being anything other than the property of their husbands. Bear in mind that one of the pilgrims most admired by Chaucer is the very liberated Wife of Bath, who is actually addressed by name by the Clerk at the end of his tale.

So why did Chaucer include this tale at all, if he was so opposed to its message? I think that he wanted to include examples of virtually every kind of story he could think of in his collection, and this is a typical story of its age.

There would indeed have been people around at the time who would have applauded Walter’s actions, and still more who would have admired Griselda’s patience, but Chaucer is not one of them. We should therefore regard the Clerk’s Tale, even from the perspective of its context and its time, as being a tale of action to avoid rather than to emulate, and this is the message that Chaucer wishes to convey. If God wants to treat humanity in such ways that is up to him, but it is not right for men to exercise domination along similar lines.

© John Welford

The Summoner's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The two least pleasant of Chaucer’s characters are the Friar and the Summoner, both of whom earn their livings by deceit, and who are also shown as being at each other’s throats for at least part of the pilgrimage journey. When they come to tell their tales, the Friar recounts the story of a rascally summoner who meets the Devil and whose dishonest behaviour leads to him being carried off to Hell, and the Summoner is then determined to reply in like manner.

The Summoner’s prologue consists of him insulting the Friar by, in effect, telling a mini-tale of a friar who has a vision of being shown round Hell by an angel. Seeing no fellow friars, our Friar assumes that this must be because friars never go to Hell. The angel then shows him Satan himself and asks him to lift his tail. When Satan does so, twenty thousand friars fly out of his backside like bees from a hive.

Having told this crude joke at the Friar’s expense, the Summoner proceeds with his tale, which, not surprisingly, concerns a friar and, again not surprisingly, is highly insulting. These people really do not like each other!

In medieval England, “mendicant” friars were members of religious orders, such as the Franciscans or Dominicans, who were officially barred from owning property of their own and had to earn their living by working for the community and receiving alms. By Chaucer’s time, many friars had become grasping and corrupt, and the friar in the Summoner’s tale would probably have been recognised by Chaucer’s original readers as being typical of his kind. The humour would hardly have worked had this not been the case.

The Summoner’s Tale

A friar goes to a village in Yorkshire to preach and beg. However, his sermon entreats his hearers to save their souls by ceasing to encumber themselves with worldly possessions, which they should give to the Church instead, represented, as it happens, by himself!

In going from house to house, he makes a list of all the people who have given him the best hospitality, promising to pray for them. However, once he has been well provided with food and other supplies, he scratches out the names to make room for more.

(At this point in the telling of the tale, the “real” Friar tries to interrupt, but the Host tells him to shut up and lets the Summoner continue.)

The friar comes to the house of Thomas, whom he has clearly visited many times before. There is a nice touch in Chaucer’s description of him shoving the cat out of the way so that he can sit down. However, Thomas is unwell and lying on a couch. The friar tells him about all the prayers he has offered on Thomas’s behalf and then greets Thomas’s wife as she comes into the room, with an embrace that sounds a bit over the top for a Man of God to bestow.

On being invited to stay for dinner, the friar gives his order, and is then told that the couple have recently lost their child, who died just after the friar’s last visit. The friar then assures them that he witnessed the death in a vision, in which he saw the child’s soul being borne to Heaven. Not only that, but two other friars saw the same thing, and the whole convent said a Mass on the child’s behalf. He tells them that holy people such as himself, who live in abject poverty, have a fast track to God and their prayers are far more effectual than those of ordinary people, especially the rich. In fact, he goes on about it at some considerable length, totally forgetting the distress of the bereaved couple.

When Thomas can get a word in edgeways, he tells the friar that he has not been getting good value for all the money he has spent on buying prayers from the various friars who have passed his way. The friar has an answer for this, namely that Thomas has been spreading his gold too thinly, and he should instead forget about all those other “leeches” and give only to one convent, namely the friar’s own.

He also warns Thomas about the sin of anger. We can well imagine just how angry Thomas is getting with all this garbage being spouted at him by a man who is clearly there only to eat him out of house and home!

The new sermon takes the form of several short stories, firstly about a king who condemned three of his knights to death out of misplaced anger. The friar then talks about two other kings, Cambyses and Cyrus, whose anger led to dire consequences. Just how relevant these stories are to Thomas’s condition is a moot point; we can imagine that these little tales are part of the friar’s stock-in-trade, added to any sermon when the sin of anger is the subject at hand.

The sermon preached, the friar returns to his main theme, namely Thomas’s financial contribution. Thomas has clearly had more of this than he can stand; as the Summoner says, “he would that the friar had been on fire”. He then tells the friar that he has a special gift for him, that he will give on the firm condition that the friar shares it equally with all the other friars in his convent.

The friar agrees to the condition, and follows Thomas’s instruction to put his hand down behind Thomas’s back, as far his buttocks, where the “treasure” is to be found. Once the hand is in place, Thomas lets fly an enormous fart. The friar is then chased out of the house.

The story might well have ended at this point, but the Summoner is keen to make his attack on the Friar of the pilgrimage as savage as possible. The friar of the story, having been so keen to warn against giving way to anger, now does precisely that, and storms off to the house of the lord of the manor to seek justice for this slight.

However, once the friar has told the lord, his wife and his squire about the “blasphemous” fart, the latter are far more interested in the problem of how a fart can be divided into twelve so that it can be shared by all the friars in the convent. The squire solves the problem by suggesting that all the friars should stand around a cartwheel, each with their nose at the end of a spoke, and the fart be delivered at the hub so that its stink will spread equally down each spoke. We are not told what the friar did next, only that he did not applaud the squire with the same enthusiasm as everyone else. We can imagine the rest.

The Summoner’s Tale might have been based on a story known to Chaucer, or it could be entirely original. Whatever the case, it is a beautifully told tale that works by gradually building up to a wholly unexpected denouement, that we can imagine would have had the pilgrims collapsing in fits of laughter, with one notable exception. The “coda” to the Tale, namely the added detail involving the squire and the cartwheel, only serves to prolong the mockery of the pilgrim Friar, who we can picture as having got the worse of the exchange with the Summoner.

It is because of tales like this that Chaucer is justly renowned as English Literature’s first comic genius.

© John Welford

Estella in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The role played by Estella in Charles Dickens’s novel “Great Expectations” is a strange one. The reader meets her when Pip, the central character, is invited to Satis House by the eccentric Miss Havisham, ostensibly to play cards with her adopted daughter Estella, the latter being a few years older than Pip but probably barely into adolescence at the time they first meet.

Estella’s upbringing has been far from conventional. She was taken into Miss Havisham’s home as a very young child and brought up under that lady’s tutelage to have a very jaundiced view of men. Many years before, Miss Havisham had been jilted on her wedding day, at which point normal life came to a grinding halt for her. She had all the clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine and never wore anything other than the wedding dress that she had just put on when news of her betrayal was brought to her.

Her chief purpose in adopting Estella had been to have her revenge on men by proxy, namely through educating the young girl to break men’s hearts. This is therefore the role that has been assigned to Estella from her earliest days, and it is what she tries to do with Pip, although the process is a very long drawn-out one. It seems odd that Pip, who was only a child at the time, should have been invited to Satis House as Estella’s first victim, when neither of them would have known what falling in love was all about.

However, as the visits continue, over a number of years, Pip does start to have feelings for Estella, and Estella plays true to form by making fun of Pip and belittling him as a “common working boy”. However, one feels that Miss Havisham’s purpose, strange enough in itself, was not intended to depend on snobbishness and class distinctions. For Estella to be a true heart-breaker she would have to lead a man on and then reject him at the moment of “conquest”, however that might be defined.

The idea that a young woman, who is described as being very attractive, could be educated to reject all her natural instincts, because of an incident that happened to an older woman years before the younger one was born, does seem bizarre. It becomes even more so when Estella is seen in the outside world, beyond the artificial confines of dark and dusty Satis House. How can the reader believe that she would hold the same views as Miss Havisham when she was free from the latter’s influence and had no personal reason to deny her own womanhood? Surely this characterization is impossible to maintain and stretches the reader’s credulity too far?

“Millwood”

The answer comes from the realization that Dickens had in mind a character from a somewhat melodramatic 18^th century play, namely “The London Merchant” by George Lillo. It is known that Dickens had seen the play as a child and it had clearly had a considerable effect on him, as it is mentioned in other writings besides “Great Expectations”. In the context of the novel, Pip is treated to a recitation of the play by a minor character, Mr Wopsle.

In the play, an apprentice is persuaded by a prostitute, named Millwood, to murder his uncle. Both Millwood and the apprentice are brought to justice and hanged. It is therefore a highly moralistic story about how a man can be brought low by the machinations of an evil woman. However, in the trial scene towards the end of the play Millwood refuses to repent but declares that she is only wicked because she has been corrupted by men, and that she has revenged herself on men by avoiding older men who already have a sense of guilt, instead focussing her attention on those who are young and innocent.

Millwood can therefore be seen as a combination of the characters of Estella and Miss Havisham, which in turn means that Dickens envisaged his characters not as individuals but two sides of the same coin. Neither character works, in dramatic terms, without reference to the other.

Pip’s reaction to the play’s recitation is to see himself as a reincarnation of George Barnwell, the murdering apprentice:

“I was made to murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever; Millwood put me down in argument on every occasion.”

If Pip is Barnwell, then Estella is clearly one half of Millwood.

However, Dickens then fails to complete the circle and make Estella continue in her role as the means to the end envisaged by Miss Havisham. Towards the end of the book, Estella begins to step out of the duality to become something else, namely a woman with feelings of her own. These feelings are not so much of love but of guilt. She clearly has a degree of affection for Pip, but she expresses it not by reciprocating his love for her but by warning him that she is incapable of love and therefore he had better keep her at a distance.

Estella therefore fails to be a heart-breaker because her heart is never offered. She also fails to break the spell put on her by Miss Havisham in that she never falls in love with anyone, although she does enter a loveless marriage to another man, namely the boorish Bentley Drummle.

The character of Estella is therefore one of the less satisfactory aspects of “Great Expectations”. Having started off with the idea of the dual persona of Estella/Miss Havisham, Dickens failed to carry his idea through to a conclusion that was a convincing one. On no level does she come across as a complete character.

© John Welford

See also

Pip in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Friar's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are notable for the tale between the tales, namely the framework within which the tales are told. In part, these consist of running battles between certain of the pilgrims who have developed a thoroughgoing dislike for each other. One such pair are the Friar and the Summoner, whose tales are told at each other’s expense.

In 14^th century England, a mendicant friar was a member of a religious order, such as the Franciscans, who were forbidden to own property and had therefore to depend on the charity of the community in which they lived. They were supposed to earn their living by doing good deeds and preaching the gospel, but many became corrupt, such as the Friar on Chaucer’s pilgrimage.  This is a man who hears confessions for a price, and the more he is paid, the more valuable will be his absolution.

Men such as this were always going to be at daggers drawn with summoners, whose job was to issue summonses to ecclesiastical courts, and who had their own protection rackets to operate. A summoner who was willing to overlook an offence, for a price, was hardly going to be best pleased to find that a friar had got there first and absolved the offender, again for a price. Chaucer was probably representing a typical example of the war between friars and summoners to see which could outdo the other in corruption.

In this case, the battle has been foretold by the interruptions of the Friar and the Summoner at the end of the Wife of Bath’s prologue. The Friar promises to tell a tale about a summoner, and the Summoner offers to reply in like manner. The host has to separate them before the Wife of Bath can continue, and, when she has finished, they are at each other’s throats once more during the short prologue to the Friar’s Tale. The host has no option but to invite the Friar to continue.

The Friar’s Tale

The summoner of the tale works for an archdeacon who is very keen to prosecute cases of lechery and “small tithing”, by which was meant the equivalent of today’s declaration of less income than one has actually earned. The summoner, who would be paid a fee for every case that he brought to court, was very good at spying out such cases and excusing certain people who acted as informers on others. He would issue false summonses and accept payment for overlooking them, and would withhold half the fees that should have gone to the archdeacon. Another racket was to act as a pimp, arresting the men for fornication and letting the women go free.

One day, when on his way to summons a widow on a false charge, he meets a yeoman on the road and rides along with him, telling the yeoman that he is a bailiff about to collect a rent. The yeoman says that he too is a bailiff, but not from these parts. He invites the summoner to visit him some time, promising him a gift of gold and silver when he does so. The summoner thinks he has found someone of like mind to himself and, admitting that he lives by extortion and has no conscience in such matters, asks the yeoman if he has any tricks of the trade that he would be willing to pass on.

The yeoman now reveals himself to be a fiend from Hell, in human form. He explains that he will adopt whatever shape is likely to gain him what he wants, although fiends such as himself sometimes work for God, as in the case of Job in the Old Testament. The summoner, despite this knowledge, is still quite happy to do business alongside the “yeoman”.

They ride into town, where they find a carter whose cart has got stuck in the mud and whose horses are failing to pull it free. The carter swears at the horses, saying “The devel have al, bothe hors and cart and hey”. The summoner asks the fiend if he should not take the man at his word and seize the prize, but the fiend explains that the carter did not really mean what he said. This is proved when the horses do eventually succeed and the cart moves on, the carter praising them with “Jhesu Crist yow blesse … I pray God save thee, and Seinte Loy!” Unless the words match the true thoughts, the devil cannot act.

They move on, and the summoner finds the old woman that he came to see. He explains to the fiend that he is determined to get twelve pence out of her, despite not knowing of anything that she has done wrong. He presents his summons, but she says that she is unable to travel the distance to the archdeacon’s court. Can someone else appear on her behalf? The summoner agrees, on payment of twelve pence, claiming that very little of that will go to him. However, she begs him for mercy, because she does not have that much money.

The summoner persists, and says that if she cannot pay, he will take her new pan, which will also be payment of an old debt when he summonsed her for immorality. She refutes all this, stating that she has never been summonsed in all her life, and was always true to her late husband. She ends by cursing the summoner with the words “Unto the devel, blak and rough of hewe, yeve (give) I thy body and my panne also!”

The fiend checks with the old woman to make sure that she means what she says, which indeed she does, unless the summoner repents. This is certainly not his intention, as he then says that he would, if he could, take all her clothes as well. This was not the wisest thing to say under the circumstances, as the fiend now claims his prize, namely the summoner and, of course, the pan.

The Friar ends his tale with a short sermon aimed mostly at his fellow pilgrims, the gist of which is that the devil can be resisted, with God’s grace, and has no power to tempt unless we wish to be tempted. He cannot, however, resist a last dig, for now, at the Summoner, praying in his last two lines that “thise somonours hem repente of hir mysdedes, er that the feend hem hente (catch)”.

Discussion

This tale, and that of the Summoner which follows it, are “fabliaux”, or short moral tales, for which various parallels have been found, although the anecdotes, which have no great depth in themselves, are richly overlaid with description, characterization and witty dialogue that are clearly original to Chaucer at his most accomplished.

It has to be remembered that people in Chaucer’s time, and possibly Chaucer himself, had a very literal view of Heaven and Hell, and would not have been surprised to learn that an agent of Hell could be found on an English lane, ready to strike up a conversation with a passing summoner. People then would have accepted that anyone they met could have been a fiend in human shape, and that the personable, chatty yeoman could take someone off to meet Satan himself should he be so inclined. We should also not be surprised at the idea that an angel of the devil could also work as an angel of God, and state that “withouten hym we have no myght”.

We have, in modern times, come to regard Heaven and Hell as polar opposites, but the medieval view was that all creation was by God and that the nether regions were simply the lower end of a continuous spectrum with Heaven at the top and Earth in the middle. Some people have regarded this Tale as being blasphemous, but that is a modern view. Milton’s cosmos, in which God and Satan talk together about the fate of Man, is merely a development of the Chaucerian one.

What is perhaps surprising is the lack of fear on the part of the summoner, and indeed his fascination to learn more about how the fiend operates. Why, when he knows that a curse to Hell can only work if the curser really intends it, does he make it absolutely certain that he will be condemned himself? Is he just stupid? Or is this the Friar saying that summoners are in any case agents of the devil who know full well that they are destined to go to Hell? Whatever the reason, one can fully understand the angry reaction of the “real” Summoner.

The Friar’s Tale is wittier than the Summoner’s Tale, and does not have the knockabout coarseness of the latter. It has elements that are found again in the later Pardoner’s Tale, which is another tale told by a man who uses his position to dupe innocent naive people of what little money they have.

However, it is with the Summoner’s Tale that the Friar’s Tale should be read in conjunction. The tales are, in effect, a double tale in that they form part of the whole dialogue and fight between two men who are as bad as each other.

© John Welford