Gothic Chaucer

Abstract

What is the general nature of Chaucer’s works and its relation to his times? The Canterbury pilgrims know what they want: entertaining stories giving sentence (or doctrine) and solaas (or mirth). For them, story-telling is an agreeable game, or it conveys serious information—not both at the same time. The Knight and Harry Bailly the innkeeper, good representative men, express these common-sense ideas (CT, i, 788–801). Like many such ideas, on examination they appear less clear. The first testing comes in The Miller’s Prologue. All pilgrims, but especially, says Chaucer, the gentils, think The Knight’s Tale ‘noble’. Then the Miller also proposes to tell what he too describes as a ‘noble’ tale. It will be, he says, ‘a legende and a lyf’, that is, a saint’s life—probably the most generally popular fourteenth-century genre—but his ‘legend’ will be of a carpenter and his wife. Everyone assumes that the Miller’s tale will be a lewed dronken harlotrye’, so we can expect parody, at least, and the literal-minded Reeve expects slander. Despite the protests, we may assume that as a tale it is solaas. Yet most of the audience oppose it and we can assume no such organic relationship between sentence and solaas as that suggested by the Horatian dulce et utile, or by the Neoclassical ‘instruction by delighting’, which has been familiar since the Renaissance and is often urged, if in perverse ways, even in the twentieth century.

Lo here the forme of olde clerkis speche In poetrie, if ye hire bokes seche.

First published in Writers and their Backgrounds: Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Derek Brewer (London, 1974) pp. 1–32.