Transit and Revision: The Clerk and the Merchant (2024)

Warren Ginsberg

What did Petrarch translate when he decided to retell Boccaccio’s Griselda in Latin? What did Chaucer translate when he had his Clerk rehearse the tale he claims he learned from “Fraunceys Petrak” at Padua? And why did he pair the scholar from Oxford with the Merchant in both the “General Prologue” and the E fragment of the Canterbury Tales? I would answer that in each case the poet translated a mode of meaning he found in his source. Petrarch rechanneled the oppositional energies of Dioneo’s irony by having Griselda’s constancy, which is exemplary because it is historical, translate her patience, which is allegorical and unrestricted by time or place. Chaucer translated Petrarch’s alignment of this life and the next by creating a Clerk in transit: although he has largely left the world of physical needs for the headier realm of abstract thought, he has not yet taken up residence in the spiritual Canterbury that his studies were preparing him to live and work in as a priest. Chaucer’s Merchant also is a man in motion; he, however, is not in transit but in flux. He rises or falls with the ebb and flow of rates of exchange; he lives in the constant uncertainty of the man whose goods are always en route. He owes his success to his ability to create a corresponding incertitude in those with whom he deals. When they try to discern whether he is flush or on the brink of bankruptcy, he leaves them guessing; he has learned how to remain blurry in plain sight. In the first part of this chapter, I will examine material that Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer added to the beginning and end of their tales; each author’s prologue and epilogue reconfigures ideas that make his Griselda a Benjaminesque translation of the others’. In the second, I will discuss how Chaucer correlated the performance of his reticent, outspoken logician with that of the now you see him, now you don’t marketeer who follows him.

I

Before he begins the last tale of the Decameron, Dioneo tries to secure his companions’ receptivity to his story even though it controverts theirs. Unlike his friends, who have spoken of kings and sultans who acted generously or magnificently (“chi liberalmente o magnificamente alcuna cosa operasse”), Dioneo will present “a marquis who behaved not grandly but as if he were a mindless beast:” “vo’ ragionar d’un marchese, non cosa magnifica, ma una matta bestialità” (10.3).1 Despite this apparent about-face, Dioneo prefaces his statement by telling the brigata that he does not want to stray too far from them: “acciò che io troppo da voi non mi scosti, vo ragionar di un marchese … ” He means, evidently, that his nobleman is not much lower in rank than the royal figures of the previous tales. But his words also have ethical import. By inviting the company to lessen the distance between his story and those they have told, he raises the possibility that its characters may have as much pertinence for them as theirs. If they had seen in Nathan’s forbearance or Torello’s fidelity an image of the way they have behaved since they left Florence, the novella they are about to hear perhaps is near enough to them to comment on their conduct as well. If, however, that proves to be the case, by assuring the group in advance that his protagonist, far from generous and magnificent, comported himself in a way that was crazed and feral, Dioneo hints that they may find it easier to deny than to acknowledge kinship with the picture of themselves he is about to present.

As if to forestall the awkwardness of either response, at the end of the tale Dioneo quickly rejects both Gualtieri and Griselda as exemplary figures. “What can one say,” he says, except that “celestial spirits drop like rain on the houses of the poor as well as the palaces of those who are better fit to tend swine than rule men:” “Che si potrà dir qui? se non che anche nelle povere case piovono dal cielo de’ divini spiriti, come nelle reali di quegli che sarien piú degni di guardar porci che d’avere sopra uomini signoria” (10.68). Dioneo acknowledges that divine blessings alight on palace and hut alike, but he objects to the impartiality of their distribution; how could he not, if someone as piggish as Gualtieri is a beneficiary. His wonder darkens into contempt so abruptly, however, that it is hard to say when one becomes the other. Dioneo’s sarcasm seems more corrosive here than elsewhere; rather than an instance of his usual detached bemusem*nt, this judgment is acidic enough to think it may be a reaction to the trauma of the plague itself. He still believes that God’s grace is gratuitous; he still believes as well that nobility inheres in deeds, not in birth or wealth. These beliefs are foundation stones on which Dioneo, perhaps without realizing it, rebuilds the city he hopes to return to. At the same time, however, his scorn not only renders this city invisible, it reduces it to dust: God, it seems, favors deserving and undeserving with no greater discrimination than the pest that struck down with equal indifference the meanest beggar and the greatest magnate.2 By likening Gualtieri to a swineherd, Dioneo confirms the “matta bestialità” of the marquis’s actions; his slur also recalls the two pigs that the narrator of the introduction was astonished to see drop dead soon after they had nuzzled the rags stripped from a recent victim of the Black Death:

The leveling of anger and awe is a symptom of the despair that will haunt a man who has lived to see the utter confusion of good and evil; it is an abreaction to the collapse of distinction that will leave Florence a grey zone even after the plague has left it.

As for Griselda, who but she, Dioneo asks, could have borne “with a face not only tearless but happy the rigid and never before heard-of trials that Walter devised?”: “chi avrebbe, altri che Griselda, potuto col viso non solamente asciutto ma lieto sofferir le rigide e mai piú non udite prove da Gualtier fatte?” (10.68). His opinion of her follows the pattern of his assessment of Gualtieri; he grants that her fortitude is unmatched, but he denounces the circ*mstances that made her exhibit it. But for all the space Dioneo puts between tortured and torturer, he also connects them when, as before, his admiration turns into disdain. Just as “divini spiriti” had linked “povere” and “reali case,” so Griselda’s face, which remained “non solamente asciutto ma lieto” (“not only undampened by tears but joyful”) is tied to Gualtieri’s tests, which were both “rigide” and “mai piú non udite” (“harsh, and unheard-of”). In Dioneo’s next sentence, the gap between husband and wife, which the balancing of paired adjectives has begun to shrink, disappears completely; he suggests that if Gualtieri’s tests were sad*stic, Griselda’s docile submission was also objectionable. “Gualtieri,” he says, “non sarebbe stato male investito d’essersi abbattuto a una che, fuori di casa, l’avesse fuori in camicia cacciata, s’avesse si a un altro fatto scuotere il pilliccione che riuscito ne fosse una bella roba” (10.69): “he would have gotten his just desserts if he had bumped into a woman who, after he had thrown her out of his house in her shift, had gotten someone else to rattle her pilliccione and had gained a fine robe in the bargain.” As if to offset his own impotence in the face of the plague, Dioneo fashions an alternative Griselda who answers Gualtieri’s outrages per le rime.4 The submerged pun on “vestire” in “non sarebbe stato male investito” couples the marquis with this pan per foccaccia Griselda, who finds another man to shake her “pilliccione,” which I would translate as “skin-fur-hairshirt” to convey the mixture of obscene and ascetic overtones in its merging of “pelle” (“skin”), “pelliccia” (“fur”), and “pelo” (“hair”), not to mention the “bella roba” she gets to boot.5 This sort of woman would satisfy Dioneo’s sense of justice, which God’s apportioning of his bounty seems to have frustrated; in the process, however, he returns Griselda to her peasant origins, coarsening her so that, in becoming a fit match for his swine-keeping Gualtieri, she takes her place as yet another specimen in the misogynist’s display case. This Griselda, the Griselda Dioneo obviously prefers, makes a hash of the other, who embodies his belief that noble is as noble does. In the end, Dioneo’s idealism and cynicism translate each other; he implies that his friends will ignore the lesson of Gualtieri and Griselda at their peril, but that neither character has much to teach them.

Try as he might, however, Dioneo cannot distance the brigata from either Gualtieri or Griselda. He may be untroubled that he strips and re-clothes his heroine as peremptorily as Gualtieri stripped and reclothed his wife, or that the Griselda in his tale is as fanatical in keeping her vow as her husband is in testing it. But Pampinea and the others must blink hard to overlook how little sets them apart from Gualtieri and how far they fall short of acting like Griselda. She endured twelve years of torment that were no less a plague for being metaphorical; for the company to read her as their proxy, they would have had to stay in Florence and suffer its wrack in patience. Instead, they did what any sane person would do—they fled the city. But once away from it they gamboled in gardens, with scant regard for the future; they lived, that is to say, as Gualtieri lived before his marriage, determined to pass the time by seizing the pleasures of the hour. If at the start of his story Dioneo intimates that we should consider its moral application, by the end he has thrown ethical evaluation into disarray. Which character should we emulate? Which action eschew? What middle ground between extremes has he mapped out where he, his companions, and his readers might find a place to take our stand?

II

Petrarch, I think, recognized that Dioneo’s commentary subverts the tropological reading that his tale invites; he countered by deploying the figures of speech and thought that underwrite exemplarity.6 Before he begins his retelling, Petrarch appended a preface in which he turns geography into allegory:

In retrospect, we see that the mountain, lofty, unmovable, “suapte nobilis natura,” notable in its own right but “nobilissimus,” most noble and notable as source of the Po, serves as a natural stand-in for Gualterius; the river’s progress from its humble rising to its regal debouchment, with stretches of turbulence along the way, charts the course of Griselda’s life.

At the end of his retelling, Petrarch added a moral. He has told the tale “in a different style,” he tells Boccaccio, “not so much to move women of our time to imitate [Griselda’s] patience, which seems to me scarcely imitable, but that I might urge readers to imitate her constancy, so that what she took on herself for her husband we might dare to take on ourselves for God:”

It is worth pondering the distinction Petrarch draws between “pacienciam” and “constanciam.” When Griselda married, she exercised her free will by choosing to bury it, once and for all. From then on, her patience would collapse every situation into the all-encompassing instant she swore her vow. As she says when she accepts Gualterius’s stipulation that she never complain: “At si voluntas tua, sique sors mea est, nichil ego unquam sciens, nedum faciam, sed etiam cogitabo, quod contra animum tuum sit; nec tu aliquid facies, etsi me mori iusseris, quod moleste feram” (59–62): “and if it is your desire, it is my lot; I will never knowingly do or even think to do what is against your will, nor will you do anything, even were you to order me to die, that will aggrieve me.” By swearing that her submission is absolute, Griselda in effect stops time; this act of removing herself from change, which she associates with death, is what equips her to be an allegory of the soul that wills only God’s will once it is joined forever to Him in the embrace of mystical marriage.

When Griselda converted contingency into necessity, when she sacrificed her freedom to choose to obey or disobey in the future, her patience became scarcely imitable for Petrarch, not because it is unattainable, but because it is scarcely historical. With her “I do,” Griselda gave up the power to re-enact her choice; never again would she take into account fresh circ*mstances, which makes each decision a different decision, even if the conclusion reached is always the same.

But if Griselda’s patience is not exemplary, her constancy is, because constancy presupposes the historicity of choice. In the face of Gualterius’s tests, Griselda proves her steadfastness again and again. It is this proof over time that Petrarch urges his readers to imitate; what he finds praiseworthy is the willed resolution to affirm one’s choice in full recognition that new conditions could have led one to decide otherwise.

For Petrarch, Griselda’s exemplarity, in other words, depends on our ability to translate her patience into her constancy. The one stands to the other in the same relation that time, which always is in motion, stands to eternity, which always is. Chaucer’s Clerk, who will direct the story of Griselda against Alice of Bath, is also very concerned about time, will, and eternity. Before he speaks, Harry Bailly quotes Ecclesiastes—“every thing hath time”—to induce the Clerk to put aside whatever “sophyme” he has been considering and tell a “myrie” tale. Like his companions, the Clerk had agreed to take part in the tale-telling contest the Host had proposed: now is the time, Harry says, for the Clerk to honor his pledge. To reinforce his point, and to remind the schoolman that the pilgrims had also agreed that he would be their governor, he adds: “For what man that is entred in a pley, / He nedes moot unto the pley assente” (E 9–10).

The Clerk responds in two ways to this flourish of Baillyesque reasoning. One associates him in advance with Griselda. He benignly consents:

Even as he assures the Host that he will do his bidding without complaint, however, the Clerk limits Harry’s jurisdiction by pointing out that it is temporary: “Ye han of us as now the governance.” Indeed, the obedience he promises becomes less obedient the more one looks at it. He has already begun to shift authority from Harry to himself by translating his sententious axiom, which amounts to a tautology—a person who has begun playing a game has assented to play the game—into an enthymeme whose conclusion follows from its premise. His prior agreement now obliges him to acknowledge the Host’s “yerde;” ergo, he will obey him. But the Clerk’s “therfore” in fact reroutes his compliance; the master to whom this “and so” bends its knee is not the owner of the Tabard but the necessity of the deduction that the conjunction introduces. At the same time, the Clerk’s “therfore” highlights the fact that he accepts its rational force; he yields to Harry, but only after he has yielded to the dictates of his own mind. His submission is actually an exercise of clerkly self-determination, which he makes clear by the very un-Griselda-like codicil he appends to his acquiescence: he will “do … obeisance / As fer as resoun axeth, hardily” (E 25–6).

With this proviso, and its emphatic adverbial reinforcement, the Oxford logician comes into full view; as he does, the affinities he shares with Griselda give way to qualities that will link him to Walter. The implication of his stipulation is clear: sovereign in his own domain, he alone, by virtue of his training, is qualified to determine what is reasonable. He then turns implication into fact by again translating what the Host has said. In place of Harry’s emphasis on timeliness, on action that fulfills commitments one has promised to meet, the Clerk substitutes death, the “twinkling of an eye” moment that ends time by changing all nows into forever. Already aiming his remarks at the Wife, who is old, but dreams of magically transforming herself into the young maid she was, the Clerk says, twice, that Petrarch, laureate poet though he was, is dead. Nor does he let pass unchallenged the Host’s recourse to the Bible to buttress his right to name the Clerk the next story-teller. He trumps Harry’s Solomon by quoting Paul; if “everything hath tyme,” the apostle expressed the sad consequence of that truth: “and alle shul we dye” (1 Corinthians 1.15).

The Clerk, it seems, stands ready to defend the rights and privileges of his order against anyone he thinks has unjustifiably laid claim to them. Yet he also presents himself as patient and constant. His quiet circ*mspection has put Harry in mind of a new bride sitting demurely at her wedding feast.7 To this teasing the Clerk submits without a murmur. Until called on, he has in fact been demure and kept his counsel to himself.8 But once called on stage, he leaves no doubt that he will seize the moment; he proves as ready as the Miller to take on all challengers, whoever they may be. In the “Prologue,” we see him counter Harry’s innuendos by rephrasing his remarks so that they serve his own ends. In the “Tale,” he defies the Wife of Bath, even though he knows from the Pardoner’s, from the Friar’s, and most of all from Jankyn’s experience that few men, no matter how intrepid, escape unscathed if they bandy words with her. He is self-possessed, indeed staunch. But he also is subtle. He does not, like Robyn, charge headlong at his chosen opponent; he bides his time, waits patiently before he even identifies the Wife as the enemy. Only then, when the moment is right, does he launch his counterattack, and when he does, in the Envoy, he uses every color in his palette to paint the Wife as the shrewish lion he takes her to be. He is the picture of complaisance, this Clerk, until he isn’t. And when he isn’t, he’s as aggressive a mocker as any.

Indeed, even Petrarch’s preeminence elicits a similar response from the Clerk. He is quick to bow to the poet; he is equally quick to nail him in his coffin. The Oxford scholar seems a far cry from Nicholas, his irreverent, “sautrie”-playing college-mate; he is a clerk, however, who has not yet become a cleric. He is impoverished, but he is not “povre” the way the Parson is (A 477). These are all the motions of someone who is between stations. In him Chaucer has created a figure who combines Petrarch’s gravitas and Dioneo’s spirit—not that Chaucer knew the last tale of the Decameron; there is no convincing evidence that he did.9 The Clerk rather owes his shuttle from earnest to game to Chaucer’s understanding that irony and allegory, the modes that shape Boccaccio and Petrarch’s versions of Griselda, are Benjaminian translations of each other.

III

In “The General Prologue,” the first thing Chaucer tells us about the Clerk is that he has specialized in logic at Oxford:

The rush of details and rapid shifts of perspective certainly have their rhyme, but if there is a reason that lies behind their arrangement, it is not immediately apparent. One sees how tireless study would have caused the Clerk to grow thin; he has, one imagines, become so engrossed in mastering the rules of inference and supposition that mundane necessities, like feeding himself, no longer command his attention. The Clerk, it would seem, is a man who has subordinated physical needs to the life of the mind; why, though, does the narrator’s attention suddenly swerve to his rake-thin horse, as if to suggest they somehow are connected? Perhaps Chaucer was playing against the Platonic notion that the soul gripped by passion is like a rider borne by a reinless horse—in this instance the simile would reinforce the feeling that the Clerk devotes himself to his mental exercises with the same fervor that other college men devote to less perceptual pursuits like skirt-chasing. But Chaucer actually conveys this idea less by allusion than by what we might call translational grammar. The Clerk “unto logyk hadde longe ygo.” The past participle “ygo,” “gone,” is a word of movement; the Clerk’s horse is likewise a vehicle of locomotion. A horse, however, brings you from one place to another. The Clerk’s having gone deeply into logic, which has made him as skeletal as the jade he rides, implies a different, non-spatial motion—the further he sounds contemplative depths, the more his studies remove him from the world of touch and taste that most people inhabit. But the term that depicts the effects of the Clerk’s ever deeper immersion in logic is “holwe;” he “looked holwe, and therto soberly.” In Middle English, “holwe” carried the same sense of emptiness, of something no longer or not yet there, that “hollow” has in English today. The connotations of the word are unsettling; they might lead a reader to worry that the Clerk’s exertions will carry him only so far. His mind grows more acute, his body more scrawny; meanwhile his nag plods its way to Canterbury. Perhaps its bony frame is meant to remind its rider that however sober his ardor for Aristotle has made him appear, sounding the inner workings of propositions will not get him to where he ought to be going. The emaciation of spiritual fasting is a better hollowness for a priest-to-be to embody.

I hesitate to burden the Clerk’s gaunt horse with more weight than it can carry, but his mount is crucial because as a means of transit it is linked to the man it bears, who is also in motion. The Clerk, Chaucer goes on to tell us, is too unworldly to accept appointment as a bureaucrat in the chancellery at Westminster; on the other hand, he has not taken a benefice and the parish duties that come with it:

The irony of the inference is wicked: had the Clerk already taken up appointment as a priest or vicar, his cloak wouldn’t be so worn, because the income from his benefice would be more than enough for him to buy a better one. The Clerk’s penury may not rise to the level of Franciscan abnegation, but it certainly moves him closer to Lady Poverty (and to Griselda in his tale) than the worldly churchmen Chaucer indirectly censures here.

If the Clerk’s indigence locates him between the Parson and the Friar, whose double-worsted, ambergris-cuffed semicope was hardly “thredbare, as is a povre scoler’s” (A 260–2), his studiousness differentiates him from other Oxford clerks, whose inclinations are less rarefied:

The Clerk would rather have Aristotle’s books at his bedside than rich robes; these rejected robes not only tie the couplet to the “courtepy” of the previous lines, they bring to mind Jankyn, the Oxford clerk who married the Wife, at least in part, we assume, for the “fine ground” of the ten pounds of coverchiefs she would wear on Sundays. The Clerk also has little interest in fiddles or psalteries; I doubt there is a reader of the Canterbury Tales who does not think of the “gay sautrie” that other Oxford clerk, Nicholas, strums in his bedchamber. But the number of works the Clerk would rather have implies that he still covets in a quantifiable way, even if the knowledge he prizes in those twenty volumes is not something one can number. Once again Chaucer situates the Clerk with one foot in the physical world and the other in a world beyond it.

Perhaps this is the reason why Aristotle’s philosophy turns alchemically tangible in the next couplet. A common pun of the time dubbed men like the Canon and his Yeoman philosophers; instead of changing base matter into gold, the Clerk transforms alms into axioms:

Once again, the Clerk commutes between the graspable and the ideal. He repays the friends who give him money by praying for their souls. Alms, though, are the currency of charity, which is ecumenical. It would be wrong to fault the Clerk for praying for those who support his studies. Nevertheless, a reader might think he limits his supplications to them, especially if we compare his intercessions to those of the Parson, a beneficed “clerk” (A 480) who ministered to all his flock. If so, the restriction of his thankfulness to his benefactors would emphasize the sense that the Clerk has shrunk his world to the dimensions of his study. He is, no doubt, a worthy man, who would gladly learn and gladly teach, but the logic that connects him to his horse and organizes the rest of his portrait makes us wonder whether Oxford will always be the place he calls home or a station on the way to a higher calling.

After the Clerk’s dialogue with Harry, he informs the pilgrims that he learned the tale he will tell from Fraunceys Petrak, the poet laureate of Italy. The claim is hard to credit; it flies in the face of Petrarch’s contempt for the English in general and for scholastic logic in particular. Chaucer, one surmises, knew of neither. He certainly did know, however, about the preface Petrarch had attached to his translation. The Clerk reproduces it nearly word for word; but when he is done, he adds that to his mind it is superfluous: “And trewely, as to my juggement, / Me thynketh it a thyng impertinent, / Save that he wole conveyen his mateere” (E 53–55). By reporting Petrarch’s preamble and then dismissing it as unneeded, the Clerk splits himself in two. This time, on one side he is the deferential translator–copyist who will endeavor to find English equivalents for the words he committed to memory at Padua; on the other, he is the forceful translator–editor, ready not only to interpret but to trim the text. This double posture as modest scribe and excising commentator, which translates the posture he assumed when he answered Harry and forecasts yet again the Clerk’s identification with both protagonists in his tale, effectively converts Petrarch’s geography into ethopoesis; the Clerk owes his character to the manner in which Chaucer balances his propensity to declare his independence from authority, his willingness to submit to it, and his desire to invest himself in it. The odd commingling of attitudes that move in very different directions changes the terms but repeats the pattern of his portrait in the “General Prologue” and his earlier interchange with Harry Bailly; once again the Clerk veers between connected but competing sensibilities.

When he finishes his tale, the Clerk dutifully repeats Petrarch’s reading of it: the forbearance Griselda showed by never complaining to her husband is a model for the steadfastness with which we should bear the trials God allows life to bring us. But instead of stopping here, the Clerk appends an envoy, in which he erases Petrarch’s distinction between patience and constancy and turns Griselda’s exemplarity inside out. Over six rollicking stanzas, the Clerk says Griselda is not the model of wifeliness that the Wife of Bath should imitate but the incarnation of everything she should renounce. No longer an allegory of faithful submission to God’s will, the Clerk translates Griselda into an ironic endorsem*nt of Alice and archwives like her; her experience with Walter is exemplary, proof that they should steadfastly continue to browbeat their husbands, lest they become fodder for Chichevache, the cow that was rake-thin because its only fodder was obedient wives. As he concludes his performance, the moralizing Clerk’s feminist antifeminism displays the same verve and reserve, the same modesty and self-assertiveness that he displayed at the beginning of it.10

In hindsight, however, we also see that the Envoy’s unexpected levity, so closely following Petrarch’s sober homily, makes the Clerk’s initial verdict about the impertinence of the Italian landscape more and more pertinent. By acknowledging that he would remove the passage, the Clerk, we realize, wittingly or not, imitates the Wife of Bath he skewers; she too, one recalls, was a cut and slash censor of sorts, as she demonstrated to her Oxford clerk of a husband when she tore three leaves from his book. Unlike her, however, the Clerk repeats Petrarch’s prologue; he shows Alice that, like Griselda, he yields to greater authority, whatever his personal opinion might be. This retrospective identification of the Clerk with two women, one the symbol of patience, the other the epitome of men’s idea of feminine irrepressibility, is disconcerting. More disconcerting still, the interlacing of restraint and competitiveness in him provides a motive that explains how the prologue the Clerk would cancel is connected to the Envoy he adds. He sings his parting song not simply to fire satiric squibs at the Wife; his sourly good-natured rhyme and vitriol fills the virtual space he had cleared by admitting he would delete the preface. In the end, under the guise of editorial meekness, the Clerk triumphantly restores at least one of the pages Alice had ripped from the book that Jankyn was translating for her. Where the Wife had trimmed by turning a deaf ear to those parts of texts she did not like, the Clerk pastes by commenting on the text he has translated for the pilgrims. In this respect, as in a number of others, each figure is both inverted image and doppelgänger of the other.

After he has dutifully rendered Petrarch’s moral, but before he launches into the Envoy, the Clerk marks the point where he leaves off speaking for Petrarch and begins to speak for himself: “But o word, lordynges, herkneth er I go” (E 1163). The passage from performance to performer is subtle, simultaneously a break and an extension. The Clerk had just recounted Petrarch’s belief that it is not Griselda’s patience we should imitate; now he begs his audience’s patience for a parting observation. His deference (“lordynges”) allows him to continue to align himself with the heroine of the tale. At the same time, by seizing the opportunity to give his own view (“every thing hath time,” as Harry said), he opens a space between himself and her, just as his soliciting the pilgrims’ sufferance puts distance between himself and the authority he just quoted. The distance between him and Petrarch grows as he goes on; in his next lines he proceeds to bury the allegorical Griselda as deep beneath his interpretation of her as he buried the poet in the ground in the “Prologue:”

Like the laureate, dead and nailed in his chest, “Grisilde is deed, and eek hire pacience,” he adds, “And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille” (E 1177–8).

Before he told the tale, the Clerk had questioned the relevance of Petrarch’s exordium; now that it is done, he puts the relevance of Petrarch’s epilogue in question by setting beside it a moral directed at contemporary Walters in search of real-life Griseldas. For Petrarch, we remember, Griselda’s patience was scarcely imitable; the Clerk translates this into the scant probability of encountering more than a few women like her. By returning Griselda to the every-day world, a world in which marriage is not, as the Merchant’s January believed, paradise regained but a place where wives, like florins, often turn out to be less pure than they seem, the Clerk demystifies Petrarch’s transformation of her impassivity into a symbol of states of being beyond time and change. As if in riposte to the rejuvenating climax of the Wife’s tale, the Clerk reminds her, and everyone else, that the age of gold, like the age of elves and fairies, is gone, alas.

Yet even as the Clerk shades in its loss, he stages its restoration; he allows that we will come upon not just one Griselda in a town, but two or three. As his story ends, Chaucer has the Clerk cast a cold eye on things in decline, place this vision alongside Petrarch’s, who regards the will as a portal to the divinity that we all, fallible though we are, may still attain, and embrace both. The coincidence of divergent perspectives translates the Clerk’s embrace at the beginning of the tale of both Petrarch’s fondness for “heigh stile” (E 41) and his own preference for pithiness. He thought the Latin proem “a longe thing … to devyse” (E 52), one infers, because he favors statements that, like his own, are “short and quyk;” nevertheless, he reproduces Petrarch’s landscape almost verbatim. The two episodes mirror one another; in each separately and in both together, a propensity to engage the hurly-burly of social intercourse at one moment hugs a propensity to restrict himself to silent sessions of sweet thought, and trips over it at the next.11

In retrospect, the Clerk’s metaphor of alloys, of brass mixed with gold, which makes the coin brittle, so that, when assayed, it breaks rather than bends, recalls Chaucer’s quip that the Clerk was a philosopher who had “litel gold in cofre.” In the “General Prologue,” the line gains its wit from the way it animates the jest that alchemists are philosophers. Because the Clerk changes his knowledge into further learning instead of money, his coffers are as “soberly” hollow as the schoolman himself seems to the narrator. At the end of the tale, Chaucer reclothes the conceit by having his logician’s thoughts turn to counterfeiting; most of today’s Griseldas, the Clerk implies, have hollowed out a portion of the gold that is their patience and filled the cavity with baser matter, which has made the amalgam less malleable.

The connection between alchemy and counterfeiting, which I am suggesting links the first and last views we have of the Clerk, may seem over subtle; it isn’t. Dante made it as well, when he put Capocchio, who falsified metals with alchemy (“falsai li metalli con alchìmia,” Inf. 29, 137) and Master Adamo, who minted florins that had three carats of dross (“li fiorini / ch’avevan tre carati di mondiglia,” Inf. 30, 90) in the tenth pit, the “last cloister of the Malebolge.” In addition to these “falsifiers” (“i falsador,” Inf. 29, 57), Dante also encounters perjurers like Sinon and Potiphar’s wife, and impersonators like Gianni Schicchi, the famous mimic who, at Simone Donati’s urging, pretended he was Donati’s recently deceased uncle Buoso so that he could dictate a false will in Simone’s favor. As translator, the Clerk is something of an impersonator as well; while he tells the tale, he becomes a Petrarch who speaks Middle English. No one, of course, would call the Clerk another Schicchi; his translation, like all translations, is an impersonation without the intent to defraud. But when the Clerk reveals, as he does now, that his Griselda is neither Petrarch’s emblem of patience nor his paragon of constancy but a paean to the Wife of Bath’s termagancy, he comes close to counterfeiting Sinon. He hasn’t borne false witness, but he hardly proves the plain talker the Host wanted him to be. He is, we realize, a man who has masked his motives by directing his audience’s attention to one woman while his was aimed at another. Harry was right; the Clerk was studying his sophisms. For someone whose speech was “ful of hy sentence” and “sownynge in moral vertu” (A 306–7), his indirection alloys him as much as any of his iron-age Griselda lookalikes.

In the Envoy itself, the seven-line stanza in rhyme royal, the form in which the Clerk told the tale, drops a line, as if a diminished strophe were a metrical correlative of the debased Griselda he is about to exchange for Petrarch’s.12 There are still three rhymes, but the desinences—“-ence,” “-aille,” and “-ynde”—never vary, a constancy that parallels the Clerk’s transformation of Griselda’s steadfastness into a justification for constant uxorial badgering. The c-rime, however, is made across stanzas at the conclusion of the fifth line; its orphaned state within each strophe I see, maybe somewhat fancifully, as a muted swipe at the Wife’s deafness in one ear, an inference the Clerk perhaps reinforces when he urges that she not let her innocence “bidaff,” that is, deafen her.13 The veritable menagerie he imports to describe scolding wives—camels, tigers who reduce their mates to quails—refashions the poor maid who kept a few sheep and was favored by God, who sometimes sends “his grace into a litel oxes stall” (E 207). The other cluster of images, which outfit hapless husbands in defensive armor and pit them in dubious battle against their wives, whose “crabbed eloquence” breaches their chain mail and pierces their “aventailles” (E 1203–4), beyond mocking the Wife’s disquisition on “gentilesse”—the “aventaille” was a helmet’s mouthpiece—meanly lampoons her fight to wield the mastery men were supposed to exercise in marriage. By transforming Alice and all her sect into crusading battle-axes, the Clerk disenchants her tale’s winsome metamorphosis of old woman into young damsel. He is a quick study; when he turns the Wife into the husband she wants to be, the Clerk reverses Harry’s casting him as a virgin at her marriage feast.

IV

The Envoy reveals the full use the Clerk has made of Harry’s invocation of Ecclesiastes; not only has he turned the general proposition that all things have their time against the Wife, we see now that one Solomonic precept in particular has guided his performance from the start: “Tempus tacendi, et tempus loquendi” (Eccles 3.7)—there is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak. These paired truths underlie both the Clerk’s reticence and the conceptual engrossments it assists, and his capacity, when he does talk, to patiently abide until the right moment to name and attack his true opponent. He is not, however, the only pilgrim whose actions the biblical verse glosses. As soon as the Clerk ends his song, Harry swerves rapidly from barely contained enthusiasm to fear that perhaps he has said too much:

Although it appears in all the early manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, many editors think Chaucer intended to cancel this stanza when he decided to pair the Clerk and Merchant’s tales.14 The latter’s prologue begins by echoing the weeping and wailing in the last line of the Envoy; the Host’s outburst disrupts the continuity Chaucer clearly wanted to establish. Moreover, Harry says nearly the same thing at the end of the “Melibee:”

Nevertheless, it is a mistake, I think, to put the Host’s stanza in brackets. In it Chaucer knits together beginning and end a final time; he translates Harry’s dressing the Clerk in a wedding gown by providing a glimpse of Harry’s own emasculation as a married man. The feast the Host imagined, with the bride sitting silently at the “bord,” becomes the barrel of ale he would be willing to trade for the chance to sit his wife down to hear the “legend” of Griselda even a single time. The picture he sketches of his home life clearly bears out the Clerk’s judgment that the golden harmonies, the domestic bliss of a former age have been adulterated. But the figure the Clerk used to express this unhappy decay suited his circ*mstances, not Harry’s. If you marry, the Clerk had said, you will almost certainly find that the bright noble of obedience your wife promised will turn out to be more gilt than gold. You do not have to be a Duns Scotus to see where the thought is headed: it is therefore better to stay unwed, as the Clerk has. For the Host, however, this is barn-door advice. He therefore reformulates the idea that a wife, more likely than not, is a bad penny; in place of the Clerk’s implicit “caveat emptor” Harry pictures himself as honorable tradesman. If the soberly thin logician would rather have (“for hym was levere have … ”) twenty books of Aristotle than rich robes or a gay “sautrie,” the Host would rather (“levere”) his spouse hear this story of wifely humbleness than have a barrel of ale.15 He means, I take it, that he’d be willing to exchange the profit he’d have made by selling it; foregoing the gain a tun’s worth of tankards would bring, far more than the pleasure he’d feel if he meant that he would drink the ale, shows how much he’d savor the sight of Goodlief schooled by Griselda.16

Of course, Harry doesn’t say that he would be the one who instructs her. He leaves no doubt he wants his wife to hear the story: “This is a gentil tale for the nones, / As to my purpos, wiste ye my wille.” But the person who actually will recount it to her goes unnamed. And with good reason, it seems, for in the same breath that Harry puffs out his cheeks he begins, as we have seen, to draw in his horns. The story, he assures the pilgrims, is a perfect vehicle for him to enact his intentions; what those intentions are—well, they are for him to know.17 He then retreats further: “But thyng that wol nat be, lat it be stille.” He acknowledges now, to himself and everyone else, that the lesson he has just conjured up is pure fantasy. It will never happen. It’s as if he suddenly remembered first Alice’s airing of her fourth husband’s domestic laundry, then Jankyn’s fate when he recited tales that she did not like to hear. The Clerk, following Petrarch, advised women to imitate Griselda, if not her patience, then at least her steadfastness. Here, at the very moment when Harry imagines but realizes he must waive the pleasure of being a clerk to Goodlief, we see him imitate the scholar’s brand of patient resolution. He too realizes there is a time to announce his purposes and a time to keep them to himself: “wiste ye my wille,” he tells the pilgrims. He too marries meekness with the determination to assert himself; he too merges the person he is at home and the person he is outside it. Unlike the bachelor schoolman, however, who finally does confront the Wife in the Envoy, Harry decides that under his roof the better part of valor is discretion. His resolve to stand face to face with his wife, she of the “byg … armes,” lasts for less than a sentence. The rest is silence.

But a silence that rests only so long. By having Harry repeat his wish at the end of the “Melibee,” Chaucer signals that we should consider Prudence, who lectures her husband at great length about the need to be patient, a translation of Griselda, whose patience determines that she hardly speaks at all to Walter. Here the Host fills in the details of house and hearth that he so quickly had suppressed before.18 The reason why he loosens his tongue now is that he has just heard Chaucer’s tale. Prudence talked back to an irate Melibee, much to his advantage; Harry follows suit by talking back to his irate wife, with the added benefit that he does not have to confront her while he is doing it. The more he reveals about how he tries to dampen Goodlief’s ardor for vengeance, the more he acts like Prudence, although as he natters on, the imprudence of saying so much to men and women who presumably will return to the Tabard begins to dawn on him. And as we watch Harry follow, then not follow Prudence’s example, we see that in his own inimitable way he first ignored, then imitated Griselda’s example when he opened and shut his lips at the end of the Clerk’s tale. The two scenes differ completely yet, as the verbal echoes suggest, they stage the same action. The Host translates himself; he is perhaps the principal figure through whom Chaucer creates the interlocking variations on a theme—in this case the timeliness of talking—that give the Canterbury Tales its internal cohesiveness and depth of implication.

Harry may cast himself a Prudence to his wife’s ramping and cries for vengeance; he nonetheless keenly feels her charge that he is so much a “milksop … a coward ape” (B² 1910), she “wol have thy knyf, / And thou shalt have my distaf and go spynne!” (B² 1907). In the rest of the “Prologue to the Monk’s Tale” he deflects Goodlief’s unsexing him by jocularly lamenting the tragedy that a man as manly as the Monk cannot do all his “lust in engendrure” (B² 1947). This too is a translation. Harry had earlier compared the Clerk to a bride; he had equated her (presumed) virginity with the (presumed) celibacy of someone who was preparing to enter the priesthood. But, as everyone knows, after the “bord” comes the bed. The Host’s nod toward love-making and procreation in the “Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale” now becomes his wink and a smile preoccupation with potency in “tredyng” (B² 1955); he ruefully admits that by comparison with so prodigious a fellow as the Monk, “borel men” such as he “been shrympes” (B² 1955).19 Sapless, a sprig set beside the trunk of a man before him, Harry becomes very like the timorous Clerk he had pictured. He even reinvents the Clerk’s trope of assaying the purity of wifely obedience only to discover it is like a gold coin that has been alloyed with brass. Because laymen are so limp when it comes to producing heirs, their wives “wole assaye / religious folk” (B² 1959–60), “forfor ye mowe bettre paye

A “lusheburgh,” according to the Middle English Dictionary, is a counterfeit coin imported from Luxemburg. So it is that Chaucer, by means of Harry’s irrepressible flights of thought, makes Prudence Griselda’s step-sister at the start of the Monk’s “Prologue” and the portly cenobite the fraternal twin of the rake-thin logician by the end of it.

V

Harry’s thoughts also return to the Tabard at the end of “The Merchant’s Tale.” Galled by May’s betrayal of January, the Host discloses more about his home-life than he did after he heard about Griselda but less than he does when he praises Prudence:

Once again Chaucer tunes the Host’s reaction to the pitch of the tale he has just heard and the teller who told it. The Merchant had prefaced his narrative by declaring that he fervently wished he were “unbounden” (E 1226) from the “shrewe” (E 1222) who is his wife. After he finished, Harry admits that he likewise “reweth soore” being “teyd” to the “labbyng shrewe” who is his mate. The Merchant had also said that after two months of marriage he has suffered more pain from “the wo that is in marriage” (D 4), as the Wife of Bath had called it, than any single man could feel in a lifetime, even if he were stabbed in the heart:

Nevertheless, he goes on, he will say not a word more about his own “soore” and “soory herte” (E 1244). In the endlink, Harry similarly divulges his own conjugal unhappiness and then bridles his tongue. In one of the wonderful scenes of side-road drama in the Tales, we watch him build up a good head of steam as he vents about womankind generally and his wife in particular: wives, he says, are “as bisy as bees” in deceiving “us sely men” with “sleightes and subtiltees;” his wife is a veritable warehouse of vices. All the while, he is glancing, one intuits, from pilgrim to pilgrim; at just this moment, his eye meets the Wife of Bath’s. His momentum carries him forward; rather than temper his diatribe, he includes Alice in it. But he also takes steps to walk it back. He can’t stop himself from owning that he’d be happy to be free of Goodlief, yet he tries to seal the confession by saying he is making it “in counseil.” He then imposes a belated gag order on himself.20 It would be foolish to continue in this vein, he tells the pilgrims, because someone—he won’t say who—will share his indiscretions with his spouse, since women know how to traffic in such “chaffare.” And when it comes to that kind of barter, the fact is, he concedes, that he is a fool; he’d have about as much chance of outwitting his wife as his audience has of not knowing who he thinks her informant will be, his own stab at circ*mspection notwithstanding. Harry does, after all, make a show of declining to identify by name the person (or persons) he’s talking about, even though there is no one beside the Wife, the “labbyngest” shrew of them all, that he plausibly could mean. Perhaps he hopes he is demonstrating for her the wisdom of knowing when to speak and when to preserve confidentiality; Alice, though, might rather see his Johnny-come-lately discretion as an illustration of how to finger a suspect without pointing at her.21

As a young wife, Alice had traded sex for dominance; later, when her comeliness was not enough to satisfy her fourth husband, she requited his philandering by publicizing his “counseil” (D 538) and his “pryvetee” (D 542). By swapping gossip for her body as the merchandise she plied for profit, the Wife entered that spectral marketplace in which words have the same value as things. Harry certainly includes the Wife among those women who know how to “outen such chaffare;” the phrase he uses clearly recalls this moment of fictitious commodification in her history of her fourth marriage.22 Within the context of the assemblage we call “The Merchant and his Tale,” however, the Host’s exasperated anticipation of an exchange of information between anyone and his wife is a translation of the businessman’s profiting from the exchange of “sheelds,” an equally shadowy transaction in which fluctuations between rates turn time, money, and credit into goods that are no more a tangible product of labor than the tidings of rumormongers.23 Indeed, by labeling the commerce he foresees “chaffare,” Harry effectively marries the Merchant to the Wife, who now stands in for the unnamed woman he actually wed two months before.24 From one point of view, Harry’s metaphor, which fabricates this transgressive coupling, reformulates the violation of artistic decorum in the tale that occurred when Justinus made Alice of Bath an ally of his argument against wedlock;25 from a wider perspective, the trope is an emblem of the Merchant’s numerous infractions against the law of genre. Beyond the tale, however, Harry’s own economics, the ease with which he can substitute one wife for another, because all women are devious by nature, looks to Alice’s standing in for Goodlief in the “Prologue to the Monk’s Tale.” By that point, the Wife has become, truly, after her fashion, as exemplary as Griselda; she is the wife of all “sely,” sorry husbands in the Canterbury Tales. Her exemplarity, which she gains through the reader’s experience of compiling references, echoes, and overtones scattered throughout the work, translates Griselda’s, which is conferred on her by authority, just as Prudence’s lengthy domestic homiletics translates Griselda’s reserve and the Wife’s garrulousness.

With the Envoy still ringing in his ears, the Merchant feels compelled to offer his personal commentary on the tale the Clerk has told; his bride of two months, he informs the pilgrims, has already proved she is as unlike Griselda as any woman can be:

Were the Clerk to respond to this bitter application of his story, he could point out that by highlighting his wife’s malice and cruelty, the Merchant has made her a female Walter. It would follow that he must be one of those two or three Griseldas the Clerk had said you might find in a town. The inference would fit the logic of the Merchant’s avowals (and broadly balance the Host’s casting the Clerk as a bride), but of course it is absurd: how can a man who has complained so vociferously about his spouse be Griselda’s alter ego? It remains absurd even after the Merchant implies by saying he will say no more about his suffering that, finally, he will forbear and shoulder his misery in silence. If he cannot match Griselda’s patience, however, he evidently does believe that he can be her exemplary peer; he magnifies his own experience to the point where it becomes a general statement about the married man’s fate, and he amplifies his wife’s malevolence until it takes on satanic proportions. He does for himself and the woman he thought would be his helpmeet, that is to say, what the Clerk did to the Wife of Bath and her husbands in the Envoy.26 In intention the irony of the Clerk’s enlisting Griselda as Alice’s aide-de-camp and the Merchant’s impulse to typify his lot move in opposite directions, yet in this instance, opposites, as Pynchon once put it, have lost their oppositeness. The symmetries that emerge as the Clerk ends and the Merchant begins their very different tales of domestic tribulation, which again pivot about the idea of timely speech and silence, are signals that Chaucer has not simply coupled them; he has made them translate each other. The retiring scholar who is in transit from the physical to the spiritual is like and is nothing like the guarded entrepreneur whose situation is always fluid because his wares are always in transit between ports.27

VI

The concept that the Merchant’s portrait, prologue, tale, and epilogue all transpose into different keys and time signatures is revision. In each segment, however, second sight doesn’t operate as one might have expected; instead of bringing about clearer understanding or moral improvement, the chance to see again results in a decision to close one’s eyes, or to try to close someone else’s, to something that has already been seen.28 The verbal counterpart to this ocular revisioning is what Karla Taylor has called reticence:29 as in a revised draft, we encounter repeated attempts to unsay or dissociate oneself from what one has said—the Merchant, in effect, would buy back disclosures and then erase the transaction from the ledger.

In the “General Prologue,” both kinds of revision shape his portrait. The thing that catches Chaucer’s eye before anything else is the cut of the man’s jib:

The care that one can guess the Merchant has devoted to the grooming of his forked beard is set in relief by the colorful suit of motley he wears; we sense already that this is a person who wants those who regard him to see that he is a man of style. The smart figure he presents as he rises high in the saddle—his legs aflank his mount mirror the forking lanks of his beard—leads the eye to the beaver hat that sits fashionably atop his head. But the basting that connects his attention to his form as he rides to the fact that his hat has been imported from Flanders sparks the suspicion that, despite the precision of each detail, the Merchant is not an easy man to keep in focus. The idea the narrator’s observations share is motion, both real and implied. As with the Clerk’s going into logic, but in a much more oblique way, the forking of the Merchant’s beard, his sitting up in the saddle, the importing of his hat, then the drop to his elegantly laced boots, all point to the horse he rides; we can almost see him rise up and settle down with each pace. The man who holds the reins, however, seems uninterested in his progress, whether toward Canterbury or toward redemption; his mind is fixed instead on the tides of channel commerce.30 He desires that sea lanes between Middleburgh and Orwell be kept free from pirates or other impediments to trade; currents become currency when we learn next that he is proficient in selling ècus in exchange. Shipping, cash and carry, the outflow and buy-back of goods, the surge and fall of prices: these, far more than the wool and cloth that the Merchant likely transports, are the material out of which Chaucer tailors his jouncing financier.31 All his activities, his “bargaynes,” his “chevyssance,” in fact seem designed to bring to mind another diligent moneymaker. Unlike the Man of Law, however, who turns his profits on and through land, the Merchant does not seem busier than he is. Chaucer tells us instead that “This worthy man ful wel his wit bisette / Ther wiste no wight that he was in dette” (A 279–80).

Whether the Merchant is in debt—he almost certainly is—is not as important as the fact that no one knows the color of the ink in his account books.32 So proficient is he in cultivating opaqueness that Chaucer ends the portrait by providing another illustration of it:

The “forsooth” in the penultimate line I’ve quoted seems to verify that the Merchant is the “worthy man” that Chaucer pronounced him four lines before; the symptomatically loose syntax of the final couplets, however, allows us, perhaps inclines us, to think the Merchant’s worthiness is a more limited derivative that extends only to the “estatly” manner in which he manages his affairs.33 Either reading is possible; our inability to determine which of them better answers to the quality the narrator esteems duplicates our inability to be sure about the Merchant’s solvency. His skill at frustrating attempts to see him clearly is confirmed by Chaucer’s parting, just short of self-canceling, remark: sooth to say, he cannot say what the man’s name is. No doubt the Merchant has one; Geoffrey apparently has asked around to learn it. But the truth of the matter, it seems, is that the Merchant is able to keep it from being found out, no matter how hard anyone searches. The man is the blur we see when we look at him; he is the surmise anyone he meets will have to make, because “no wight” will be able to discern if he is as flush as he appears, or more so, or less. The feeling his capacity to remain obscure in plain sight generates—that there is an inside to the Merchant, which may or may not be empty, a feeling that the want of a name to call him by reinforces but does not prove—is his version of the Clerk’s looking hollow, and thereto soberly.

In the prologue to his tale, the Merchant acts out the movement from self-display to concealment which gives his portrait its surface impression of depth. The embittered husband opens the window on his plight at home, then shutters it, lest the pilgrims think his tale might reflect his own affairs. After he ends his story, with a suggestive appeal to the holy family minus the husband, “God blesse us, and his mooder seinte Marie” (E 2418), Chaucer has Harry repeat the pattern; he acknowledges his wife’s many faults, then bethinks the glance into his marriage he has given his companions, because he’d not want one of them to return to Southwark with a tale to tell about him. Like the Merchant, Harry would un-husband himself if he could, but adds, retrospectively, as we have seen, that he has divulged this wish in confidence. He all but singles out the Wife of Bath, but hedges the accusation by never openly naming her as Goodlief’s prospective gossip. These instances of his post hoc tongue-curbing, we now understand, translate Chaucer’s telling us that he cannot tell us the Merchant’s name.

In his tale, the subtle sleight that May orchestrates to cuckold January is only the most conspicuous example of a second look that dims vision and stunts speech. A latter-day Eve, coiled around Damian atop the pear tree in the garden, May does not seduce an Adamic January into eating fruit that reduces knowledge because, like adding a negative number to a sum, it causes him to know the nothing that is evil, when before he knew only good. She snake-charms a stooping, already fallen foolish old man who, given back his sight, needs only a second to fall again. May convinces her spouse to have faith in her by closing his eyes to the evidence of the things they have seen; she “struggled” with Damian, she tells him, because:

She induces her Janus to look ahead by not looking back; the hazy phantasms he imagines he saw were only a “glymsyng, and no parfit sightes” (E 2383).34 Her explanations work; they leave her twice-hoodwinked husband metaphorically blind and literally dumbfounded. January tells her in clear terms that he did see:

But once she persuades him that “he that mysconceyveth, he mysdemeth” (E 2410), he eats the pear she offers him, embraces her deception, and has nothing more to say. She leaps down from the tree, and “This Januarie, who is glad but he?” (E 2412).

Other episodes in the tale dance the same two-step of revelations re-veiled. The Merchant enumerates the many good qualities of wives in his encomium on marriage at the beginning of his tale; May blots out everything he says by the end of it. Placebo argues the advantages, Justinus the disadvantages of an old man marrying a young woman; January disregards both and does what he intended to do all along. First alone, then in concert with May, Damian acts so that January might not see the coupling they plan; when he catches them in the act, May dupes him by playing a Rebecca to his Isaac. Pluto restores January’s sight; Proserpina gives his wife the words that induce him to reaffix the scales that had fallen from his eyes. Everything the Merchant narrates he narrates under the sign of impending deletion. Chaucer lets us see the strike-through lines as they are made; they become the Merchant’s mark, the signature that identifies his story as a translation of his desire to blear the eye that looks at him by showing what he was blind to before.

VII

When Chaucer has the Host turn again to his life with Goodlief after the “Melibee,” he transforms his own unsuccessful attempt to discover the Merchant’s name into Harry’s waggish efforts to give one to the Monk:

The many choices he puts on offer as if they were goods the cenobite might choose among, not to mention the “Daun Piers” Harry comes up with when he echoes the Knight’s interruption of the Monk’s sleep-inducing cavalcade of tragedies (“Wherefore, sire Monk, or daun Piers by youre name” B² 3982), might nudge a reader to remember the convent to grange commerce that the still nameless cell-keeper conducts as an outrider.

Indeed, if we take the longest as the last of the Host’s three disclosures about his home-life (I like to think of them as the a-, b-, and c- versions), the fact that Chaucer appended it to his own tale-telling prompts the thought that he would have us view him, at least from one angle, as an amalgam of the Merchant and the Clerk, with a dash of Monk and Host thrown in for satiric seasoning. Son of a wine-merchant, Controller of the Port of London, friend of philosophical Strode, Chaucer shares the scholar’s shamefastness, the businessman’s reticence, and the monastic’s girth. After the Prioress’s tale, he tries to make himself as small and inconspicuous as he can; he hopes that Harry might continue to overlook him and thus escape being called on to speak:

But the Host does see him, even though he has kept his head down and “unto no wight dooth … daliaunce” (B² 704), because Chaucer takes up a good deal of space:

The poet’s taciturnity and disinclination to meet Harry’s eye, which I think reprise the innkeeper’s attempt to muzzle himself after he meets the Wife’s at the conclusion of the Merchant’s tale, does not move the Host to try to discover Chaucer’s name but to wonder what kind of man he is. The larger purview of the question—“what man artow?” gestures towards one of three questions Augustine said philosophers ask of things—has the effect of affiliating Chaucer with the Clerk, whom the Host also tweaks for not speaking to others: “This day ne herde I of youre tonge a word” (E 4).35 From this standpoint, Harry’s subsequent infantilization of Chaucer, besides looking back at the Prioress’s “litel clergeon” and forward to “childe” Thopas and to Sophie in the “Melibee,” rescripts his feminization of the Oxford logician and anticipates his own neutering by Goodlief.36 But when Harry adds that Chaucer’s aloofness makes him seem “elvyssh,” he sets in motion another set of implied associations.37 Geoffrey, it would seem, like the Merchant and the Clerk, has a special connection to the Wife of Bath. Beyond heralding the very eldritch queen Thopas says will sleep “under my goore” (B² 789), Harry’s word causes us to remember Alice’s explanation of the disappearance of elf-queens and fairies, with which she prefaces her tale, so that she can pay back the Friar’s laughing at the length of her “preamble.” And we remember her story of fay maidens, a magical old woman, and miraculously restored youth. In plump Chaucer, we realize, the Wife’s full-bodied resolve to have her say, regardless of whether others interrupt, no matter what they think, nestles alongside the reed-thin Clerk’s preference for silent soliloquy; in the poet, her need to talk about herself is translated not only by his own bashfulness about telling the only tale he says he knows (itself a revision of the Merchant’s reticence), but also by his defensive apology for having to tell the indecencies of scoundrels like the Miller and Reeve.

At the same time, Chaucer’s bulk links him to the Monk. Both men in fact speak of solemn matters, but their words weigh on Harry in very different ways. The cleric makes his eyelids droop from the drone and drag of an endless series of dispiriting, remediless downfalls, the talentless rhymer rouses him with the uplifting prose of Prudence’s salutary counsel. Yet this latter Harry Bailly is the same Harry Bailly who just before had accused Chaucer of turning fluff into dross; it is not the serious “Melibee” that he finds ponderous and inert but the airy revel that is “Sir Thopas”—the “rym dogerel” (B² 925) he says “is nat worth a toord” (B² 930). By making the Host interrupt his first tale, a red-penciling that transforms “tempus tacendi” from advice into interdiction, Chaucer evokes in one way the Wife’s rip, in another the Clerk’s editorial interventions, in another the Merchant’s revisions, and in yet another the Knight’s imminent interruption of the Monk. In so doing, he in effect answers Harry’s question about him: Chaucer is the poet in whom light is heavy and heavy is light. He is the poet for whom court and town, the comic and the didactic, follow and disarticulate one another. He is the poet who turns a joke about his “waist” into a discussion about wasting time, which leads to a serious meditation about the differences in the Gospels.38 He is the poet in whom “sentence” translates “solaas,” “game” “ernest.”

If the Clerk is in transit, if the Merchant’s revisions reflect the unconfiding yet open face of the commercial man, Chaucer revises himself in the transition from “Thopas” to “Melibee.”39 We have already seen him try to evade blame for rehearsing the Miller’s tale; when he asked those readers who might object to “turne over the leef and chese another tale” (A 3177), Chaucer spoke more as poet than pilgrim, and he addressed an audience outside the fiction rather than the pilgrims in it. In the “Introduction to the Melibee,” however, the poet and the pilgrim are inseparable, the audience is an audience of pilgrims and readers alike, and the mode of address is oral and written together:

Instead of excusing himself for repeating scandalous fabliaux, Chaucer now defends his right to tell his story to its end; he is trying to forestall Harry from interrupting him again.40 Yet the thrifty tale he’s about to tell also requires him (pace the Man of Law) to repeat what someone else has said. With the “Melibee,” however, the repetition is the repetition of translation, not of verbatim reportage. Even though Chaucer’s words aren’t the same words we may have heard, his sentence, he assures us, nowhere differs from that of “this tretys lite,” which he seems to have before him as he writes out “this murye tale.” In fact, the ratios that simultaneously equate and acknowledge the differences between Chaucer’s “Melibee” and the free rendering into French that Renaud de Louens made of Albertinus de Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii are the same ratios that correlate the differing accounts of the evangelists:

Chaucer may well nod here toward the Wycliffite justifications for an English Bible; what is certain is that when he raises the issue of his own status as an author, he identifies his poetics as a poetics of translation. And he will soon translate this moment, in which translation translates interruption, when his most colorful surrogate, Chaunticleer, caps his poetic summa with his glorious tragi-comic rendering of “mulier est hominis confusio:” “Madame, the sentence of this Latyn is, / ‘Womman is mannes joye and al his blis.’”

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