The Physician's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

It is not absolutely certain where Chaucer intended the Physician’s Tale to appear in the sequence of the Canterbury Tales, as there are no links between the manuscript fragment that contains the tale (also including that of the Pardoner) and any other tale. However, it is usually placed after the Franklin’s Tale.

The Tale is the old Roman story of Apius and Virginia, which the teller claims to have taken from the works of Livy, but Chaucer is more likely to have used the French “Roman de la Rose” as his source. There is no prologue or introduction to the Tale, which is only 286 lines long.

The Tale

Despite the shortness of the Tale, the Physician spends a long time introducing us to one of the characters, the 14-year-old daughter of Virginius, a knight. The girl is a paragon of virtue, beautiful, modest, with perfect manners, and everything a parent would want a daughter to be. Indeed, the physician goes on to tell us that all children should be brought up with the same degree of care as this “lordes doghtre”. More than 100 lines have been spoken before anything happens at all!

The girl, when in town with her mother, is seen by a Apius, a judge, who is struck by her beauty and determines to have her for his own. He pays a man, Claudius, to present a charge to his court against Virginius, alleging that the latter’s daughter is not his daughter at all, but Claudius’s own servant, who was stolen from him at night. Virginius is given no right to reply, and judgment is given immediately in Claudius’s favour. Virginius is ordered to surrender his daughter to be a ward of the court.

Virginius goes home and calls his daughter (who we now learn is named Virginia) to him. He explains to her that the only alternative to disgrace is death, and that he must kill her out of love. She accepts her fate and is beheaded by her father.

Virginius then takes her head to Apius, whose response is to demand that Virginius be hanged for murdering his daughter. However, the people rise up against the judge and throw him in prison, where he kills himself. Claudius is saved from hanging by Virginius, who has him exiled instead.

The physician ends his tale quickly, exhorting his hearers to turn away from sin. The Host responds to the Tale by expressing his anger at the behaviour of Apius and pity for the fate of Virginia, for “hire beautee was hire deth”.

Discussion

This Tale strikes modern readers as being somewhat unbalanced, with the “action” occupying no more than 160 lines, most of the rest being a eulogy about Virginia’s perfection and a digression on the education of young girls. One could say that the huge build-up of the girl’s character is necessary to make the crime seem all the more terrible, but why that interlude that comes between the descriptions of Virginia’s character and her fate?

It has been suggested that this has something to do with events that took place in the household of John of Gaunt. John was the third son of King Edward III (who reigned 1327-77) and virtual regent during the early years of the reign of Richard II (1377-99), who was Edward’s grandson and John’s nephew. Chaucer and John of Gaunt were close contemporaries and connected by marriage, as Chaucer’s wife and John’s third wife were sisters. John was a close friend of Chaucer and acted as his literary patron.

The passage in question in the Physician’s Tale may be connected with the scandal in John of Gaunt’s court that surrounded his relationship with Chaucer’s future sister-in-law, who is known to history as Katherine Swynford. Katherine was the governess of John of Gaunt’s two daughters, but became his mistress and bore him four children before she eventually married John and her children were legitimized.

Katherine’s example may have been a factor in the extramarital affair of one of her charges, the strong-willed Elizabeth Plantagenet, who became pregnant by the man who was later her second husband. However, her first husband was a child (aged eight at the time of the marriage and fourteen at the time of the affair), Katherine was no longer in a position of authority over her at the time, and Chaucer may already have written the lines in question when this scandal became known.

The lines in the Tale call on governesses of the daughters of noblemen to take special care of their moral upbringing. This message is addressed particularly to such ladies who have fallen from grace themselves and “knowen wel ynough the olde daunce”. The poet, through the mouthpiece of the Physician, is of the view that the best guardians are those who know the consequences of going wrong, and he actually uses the illustration of the poacher turned gamekeeper. So could Chaucer possibly have had the wayward Katherine in mind when he wrote these lines, and be extolling that very waywardness as a virtue?

It has to be said that this is nowhere near the best of the Canterbury Tales. It is probably an early piece of work by Chaucer, although the “upbringing” lines may be a later addition. As a story, it has no plot twists or surprises, and its subject-matter, namely the “honour killing” of an innocent young girl, is unpleasant in the extreme. There are holes in the plot, in that the remedies open to Virginius are surely not limited to the extreme measure he takes. If the people are on his side, why can they not be persuaded to depose Apius before Virginia is sacrificed and not after? It is difficult to sympathise with “tough love” taken to this extreme.

One moral of the tale is not particularly startling, namely “if you have power, don’t abuse it by seducing young women”; but the other, namely “death before dishonour”, is less comfortable to our modern Western sensibilities (although that is not the case in many societies in some less developed parts of the world today). Probably of more interest is the hidden subplot of Chaucer’s own connections with the court of John of Gaunt, alluded to in those lines that have such a tenuous link with the Tale itself.

© John Welford