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):

This [the pronoun us] is clear proof that some of the opening lines of this Tale were not originally intended for the Shipman, but for the Wife of Bath, as she is the only lady in the company to whom they would be suitable. (4)

Skeat's confident conclusions regarding 'some of the opening lines' were then generalized, with equal confidence, to apply to the entire Tale. Tatlock (1907): 'the Shipman's Tale was certainly written not for the Shipman but for a woman [...] there cannot be the smallest doubt that the woman is the Wife of Bath'. Kittredge (1915): 'The Shipman's Tale was originally intended for a woman; for the Wife of Bath, beyond a doubt. It accords with her character both in style and in sentiment.' Whiting (1941): 'There can be little doubt that Chaucer originally intended what is now the Shipman's Tale for the Wife of Bath. (5) The self-assured tone in which these assertions are expressed is perhaps an index of the tenuous nature of the evidence on which the theory was based. But no one has considered what assumptions the theory and such weak objections as are occasionally raised against it actually entail, (6) that is, how belletristic arguments insinuate themselves into textual-critical ones.

Each of these critical and scholarly myths has its own history and could be subject to critique; each shows, as do other cases in reception, succeeding generations of scholars relying uncritically on conclusions of earlier scholars whose ideological and critical assumptions they claim to renounce. (7) But reception myths exist not only in relation to general movements of scholarship; they also exist in specific relation to each other. And the specific histories intertwine in ways that are not always clear when each is studied only in relation to a predetermined master narrative of scholarly history.

The Fabliaux

What we now consider to be Chaucer's fabliaux were not 'Chaucer's fabliaux' until someone so identified them. And this was not done until the mid-nineteenth century, during the publication of a series of anthologies by French scholars which specifically described the works as 'fabliaux' in their titles. The word fabliau comes into English in early English translations of eighteenth-century French anthologies of medieval 'contes et fabliaux', beginning with Barbazan's Fabliaux et contes of 1756. Tyrwhitt, in his Chaucer edition of 1775, cites Barbazan as a source in the following comment on the Reeve's Tale:

It has been generally said to be borrowed from the Decameron, D. ix. N. 6. but I rather think that both Bocace and Chaucer, in this instance, have taken whatever they have in common froman old Fabliau, or Conte, of an anonymous French rimer, De Gombert et des deux Clercs. (8)

Tyrwhitt's note is followed up by Thomas Wright, Anecdota literaria (1844), again commenting on the Reeve's Tale. Wright cites Robert's Fabliaux inedits (1834), and is also familiar with the re-edition of Barbazan by Meon, Fabliaux et contes (1808). (9) Wright finds the tale of the Miller and Two Clerks represented in 'two forms':

one branch is represented by the tales here printed, the French fabliau, the Miller of Trompington, and the Miller of Abingdon; the other is found in the fabliau of Gombert, in the story in Boccaccio, and in the French novelists down to Lafontaine. The English fabliau of Dame Siriz is one form of a story of which we can trace the history through all its variations from its first origin in the farthest East. (p. vi) (10)

At this point, the word fabliau is obviously very broadly defined, and Wright associates such broadly defined narratives with an even broader class of literature that he calls 'ribald poetry', a genre defined socially:

The ribalds, to whom the terms lechers, harlots, and various others, were applied, formed a large class of society in the feudal ages, including the worst portion of the population, those who lived upon the rich and earned their life by low and degrading offices.…