Chaucer's Miller's Tale and Reeve's Tale, Boccaccio's Decameron, and the French fabliaux.(Critical Essay)

While the indebtedness of Chaucer's versified comic tales to thirteenth-century French fabliaux has been closely studied by scholars, their relationship to the prose tales of Boccaccio's Decameron has been studied less and with greater reservation. (1) The relationship between the comic tales of Chaucer and Boccaccio deserves more attention, at least as much as that given to the English poet's tales and the French fabliaux. Many of the French antecedents are judged to be "lost;" whereas, Boccaccio's tales are there for the reading and it is increasingly clear that Chaucer knew them. Even when the relationships between the English and Italian comic tales turn out to be more those of analogues than of sources and derivatives, much can be learned from a comparative examination of style. This article focuses on the first two English fabliaux told in Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's Miller's Tale and Reeve's Tale and their possible links to Boccaccio's Decameron. They are the comic tales that Chaucer's readers encounter first and remember best.

A word on the genre is in order. "Les fabliaux sont des contes a rire en vers" (Fabliaux are stories in verse that make one laugh)--thus Joseph Bedier summed up the genre in his seminal study. (2) His study followed on the publication of the collection of medieval French fabliaux edited by Montaiglon and Raynaud in the nineteenth century. (3) The recently completed Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, edited by Noomen and Boogard, pays homage to that important earlier edition in its title. (4) Most of the extant 150 comic tales in Old French narrative verse were composed in the thirteenth century, but the earliest date to the twelfth and the latest, to the fourteenth century. They have come down to us in 43 manuscripts dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wherein the fabliaux appear side by side with courtly poems, testifying to the varied tastes of aristocratic audiences and the wide repertoire of the jongleur's who entertained them. (5) The fact that the compilers and scribes who made the thirteenth-and fourteenth-century manuscripts included sacred and profane, crude and sophisticated texts side by side led the Danish scholar, Per Nykrog, to question Bedier's assumption that fabliaux were intended for a bourgeois audience. (6) The best of the fabliaux suggest authors (and audiences) with considerable learning and sophistication, those associated with court and church. Clerks may well have composed and recited fabliaux alongside the jongleurs; clerks, it has been pointed out, "are interestingly, the only class of people uniformly admired in the fabliaux...." (7) The clerical connection may explain why the Old French fabliaux bear an interesting relationship to non-dramatic Latin "comedies" written in elegiac distichs. Most of them come from the Loire valley in France and date from the second half of the twelfth century. Early Latin comedies written in France by Vital de Blois such as Geta and Aulularia even suggest the Old French fabliaux reach back to the ancient Latin comedy of Plautus (though the Roman's works were intended for the stage). (8) The non-dramatic Latin comedies written in France and the fabliaux contain common themes (i.e., the eternal triangle and the deceived husband) as well as character types (the sensual young woman of engin [cunning], the tricked husband, the clever lover [usually a squire, clerk or priest]). The Latin comedies could rightly be called Latin fabliaux. (9)

Chaucer's relationship to the French fabliaux has long been a subject of study since, of the twenty-one completed Canterbury Tales, six are fabliaux: "The Miller's Tale," "The Reeve's Tale," "The Merchant's Tale," "The Shipman's Tale," "The Summoner's Tale," and "The Friar's Tale." Derek Brewer well observed in his discussion of the fabliaux for Beryl Rowland's Companion to Chaucer Studies, "Chaucer's own handling of the genre shows both his deep understanding of it, in its original French form, and his transformation of it.... these indecent anecdotes were Chaucer's greatest interest in his maturity." (10) The Fabliaux among the Canterbury tales are fundamental to Charles Muscatine's early study of the stylistic contrasts between the "ideal" and the "realistic" tales of the collection: Chaucer and the French Tradition (published in the same year as Per Nykrog's Les Fabliaux). (11) These comic tales have an important position in The Canterbury Tales: we have a courtly romance followed by two fabliaux (three if the Cook's fragment is counted) in the first fragment, followed by a pious tale (The Man of Law's Tale, fragment II), and then another romance followed by two more fabliaux (in fragment III). Hall of the tales in the first half of the collection are fabliaux. (12) Barbara Nolan has recently applied her sense of Chaucer's orchestration of The Canterbury Tales as a miscellany containing all medieval genres (romance, fabliau, saint's life, parody, beast fable, Breton lay, sermon) to her study of manuscripts containing French fabliaux. Not primarily concerned with definition of genre nor the establishment of intended audience, she settles on matters codicological. Nolan emphasizes that manuscript compilations that contain fabliaux are miscellanies much like Chaucer's wherein "The fissures, the tensions, the conflicts between scriptural history or saint's lives or religious allegories or courtly lais or chronicles of kings on one hand and fabliau-farce on the other lie open to laughter." (13) Thus, she applies Chaucerian intertextuality to anthologies containing fabliaux and insinuates a question--is it possible that Chaucer "knew and aimed to mimic ... what he found in one or several manuscripts" of the sort she discusses? (14)

There is, as far as I know, no extensive examination of Boccaccio's knowledge of French fabliaux. If a general statement of Charles Muscatine's is correct, Boccaccio was likely to be well acquainted with them:

 
   in a large sense ... twelfth-century French (with Provencal) was the 
   seminal vernacular literature of the high Middle Ages. It is behind 
   Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio and Machaut, the dolce stil Nuovo, 
   Minnesang, and English and German romance. (15) 

Moreover, though Boccaccio was born in a small village (Certaldo?) outside of Florence in 1313, his education really took place in the learned courtly atmosphere of the Angevin kingdom of Naples to which the family moved in 1327, making his ...