The Shipman’s
Tale has several features that strike a familiar note to anyone who has
followed the Canterbury Tales in sequence to this point. This is another
“fabliau”, meaning, in Chaucer’s hands, an amusing short story in which poetic
justice is meted out, and it concerns a husband whose wife cuckolds him. This
is therefore the territory already explored by the Miller, the Reeve and the
Merchant.
However,
there is another echo in this Tale, which is the theme of “what do women want?”
that was explored by the Wife of Bath. Indeed, it is entirely possible that
Chaucer originally intended to allow the Wife of Bath to tell this Tale, rather
than the Shipman.
The Tale
The Tale is
set in France, in the town of Saint Denis (near Paris) where a rich merchant is
married to a lively and beautiful young woman who has expensive tastes. The
merchant’s house is visited by many people including, on a regular basis, a
monk, aged about 30, who lives at a religious house in Paris
The merchant
is about to go off on a trading mission to Bruges, but he invites the monk to
pay them a visit before he does so. On the morning of the third day of the
visit, the merchant shuts himself up in his counting-house to deal with his
finances, while the monk walks in the garden where he meets the wife and her
young daughter. The wife looks pale, and the monk jests that she must have had
a busy night between the sheets, with little time for sleep.
However, this
is not the case, and the wife tells him that she is not at all happy in her
marriage. Swearing him to secrecy, she offers to tell him the whole story. As
this is clearly going to be a time for confessions, the monk freely admits that
he is not, after all, related to the merchant. She then tells him that the
merchant is a very poor husband, as he fails her in the six things that a wife
needs from her man, namely good health, wisdom, wealth, generosity, obedience
to her (shades of the Wife of Bath!) and being good in bed. She also tells the
monk that she needs money for her next Sunday dress and could he please lend
her a hundred franks? He promises to do so, and gives her a very un-monklike
kiss.
After an
interlude in which the merchant reveals, to his wife, his care with money,
pointing out that only those merchants who take such care are likely to
survive, the monk approaches him to ask for a loan of a hundred franks, which
the merchant is happy to make him. He therefore reveals his hypocrisy in being
parsimonious towards his wife but generous towards the monk, whom he believes
to be his kinsman.
On the next
Sunday, the monk returns to the house and hands over the money to the wife, for
which she rewards the monk with a night of passion, after which he leaves
again.
On returning
from his business trip, the merchant tells his wife that he needs to raise some
capital, and he goes off to Paris where he hopes to obtain loans from people he
knows. He visits John the monk, and asks for the return of his hundred franks.
John tells him that he has already returned the money, having given it to the
merchant’s wife during his absence.
The merchant
concludes his business in Paris and goes home, expecting to make a thousand
franks profit from his various deals. He is in such a good mood that he spends
the night with his wife “in myrthe” and in the morning “gan embrace his wyf al
newe and kiste hire on hir face”.
However, he
then complains that her failure to tell him that she had had the loan repaid
has led to his embarrassment, having asked his supposed kinsman for the return
of money that was no longer owed. She says that she has been misled by the
monk, thinking that the money was a gift from him, and admits that she has
already spent it. No matter, though, she can repay the merchant well enough by
giving him full access to her “joly body”, a deal which he seems quite happy to
accept. After an admonishment to be more careful with money in future, the
merchant forgives her and the Tale ends, followed by an appreciative comment
from the Host who warns the company to beware of such trickery.
Discussion
In contrast
to the other abovementioned Tales that concern extramarital dalliance, this is
a very gentle story, in which nobody gets hurt. The merchant is cheated out of
his hundred franks, but he is repaid between the sheets, the wife appears to
have had her marriage repaired, and the monk has had a night with the wife
that, as a monk, should certainly not have been on his itinerary.
This is certainly
the sort of story we could have expected from the Wife of Bath, as it
celebrates the power of sex and puts the woman in charge. The wife of the Tale
is clever enough to use the situation to her advantage, and comes out of the
story as the eventual winner. The Wife of Bath would certainly approve!
It is perhaps
interesting to note that the Shipman has already appeared in the intervening
dialogues between the Tales, just before the Wife of Bath begins her long
prologue. This is a passage that is disputed by scholars as to where it fits
in, but is commonly placed as the epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale. The Host
praises the teller of the previous tale, without mentioning the teller by name,
there is some debate as to who the next teller shall be, and the Shipman
objects to it being the Parson. Instead, he volunteers to be next, expressing
this as “my joly body schal a tale telle”. We have just noted the use of the
words “joly body” in the mouth of the wife in the Shipman’s Tale, and they do
sound more like words that a woman would use.
Given that it
is the Wife of Bath who is next to offer a tale after the Man of Law, and not
the Shipman (albeit not on the same manuscript fragment), could that
introduction have originally been intended for her lips and not those of the
rugged master mariner? This is one of many mysteries in the Canterbury Tales
that might have been settled had Chaucer been able to edit the whole work
before he died.
Taking the
Tale as it stands, it condemns nobody for their actions, even to the extent of
apparently condoning the link between money and sex. The monk in effect buys
the sexual favours of the wife, and she in turn uses sex as a means of buying
herself out of trouble with her husband. This sounds very much like one of the
Tales for which Chaucer seeks forgiveness in his final “Retraction”, “thilke
that sownen into synne”. Even the behaviour and conversation of the monk excite
no criticism. There is no comment from the Monk of the pilgrimage after the
Tale is told, so he presumably did not see it as an unfair portrait!
The Tale ends
with a slightly naughty pun, the final line being “God us sende taillynge
ynough unto oure lyves ende. Amen”. The pious “Amen” is almost sacrilegious,
because the word “taille” meant not only “credit”, in monetary and business
terms (the origin of “tally” in more modern English), but the female genitals,
and the slang term “a piece of tail” is still used today to refer to a sexually
attractive woman. The wife has already used the words “score it upon my taille”
to invite her husband to bed, so the pun is clearly intentional.
This is a
well-written tale, without the long descriptions that spoil the flow of several
of the Canterbury Tales. It features another of Chaucer’s lively, sassy young women,
who know what they want and how to get it, and it has a few nice plot twists.
However, it lacks the sheer joy of life that is found in, say, the Miller’s
Tale, and is therefore not generally regarded as one of Chaucer’s best.
© John
Welford
No comments:
Post a Comment