The Wife of Bath's Shipman's tale and the invention of Chaucerian fabliaux.

The theory that the Shipman's Tale was originally written for the Wife of Bath is generally thought to be based simply on the use of pronouns in the early portions of the tale. The present study shows that the theory is not a textual one, but rather implicated in a series of developments in medieval studies: in Chaucerianism itself, the theory is part of the transformation of traditional theories of decorum into theories concerning character 'growth and development'; it depends also, and less obviously, on the creation of the genre of the fabliau by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French anthologists.

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Article-length histories of literary reception almost inevitably focus on single problems; these micro-arguments are then placed within some general history of culture or cultural development (such as 'nineteenth-century thought') which embraces other problems, textual, literary, or social. But a singular focus is also a potential liability, in that the larger 'grand recit' exists apart from evidence. In such studies, selected and limited evidence finds its coherence less in relation to other evidence than in relation to this larger intellectual narrative. My argument here, by contrast, will consider relations between two specific but apparently diverse problems of Chaucerian reception: the genre of Chaucerian 'fabliaux' and the persistent myth that Chaucer's Shipman's Tale was originally written for the Wife of Bath.

The fabliau, the subject of the first part of this paper, is one of the most studied and more secure genres among the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer wrote fabliaux; no one disagrees, although the list of what these fabliaux are might vary. The Miller's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, the Shipman's Tale, and possibly the unfinished Cook's Tale are nearly always included in discussions of Chaucerian fabliaux; less frequently included are the Merchant's Tale and, occasionally, the Summoner's Tale and Friar's Tale. Modern definitions of the fabliau range from the deceptively simple, such as Bedier's 'contes a rire en vers', to what might be called the deceptively complex, such as this formulation by Tatlock in 1950:

For the most part [...] an almost unmixed narrative, plot the main thing, full of dramatic irony and poetic justice; its purpose is sheer amusement, and it will stick at nothing, not at the fantastic, or even the impossible, assuredly not at the coarse and obscene, the crude, and the cruel [...]. (1)

These tales and the genre they presumably represent are particularly interesting to Chaucerians; they are accessible, short, and can be read even by our undergraduates; they are modern and congenial to our literary sensibilities; (2) the genre itself is intelligible and seems securely documented. Yet the notion that Chaucer wrote fabliaux needs to be qualified. The history of Chaucer's fabliaux is a nineteenth-century history, one intimately connected with the reception and publication of the French fabliaux. Chaucer wrote what we call fabliaux. That is, he wrote in a genre whose definition, or, more strongly, discovery and invention we owe to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French scholars: scholars whose sensibilities and ideologies are not always congenial to those who rely uncritically on their conclusions.

The second problem addressed in this study is the myth prevalent among twentieth-century Chaucerians that the Shipman's Tale was originally written for the Wife of Bath. Like the scholarly notion of the Chaucerian fabliau, this is an idea that soon after its formulation became construed less as theory or conjecture than as fact--another of the 'happy hits' dear to late nineteenth-century philologists. (3) Skeat (1894):