I. Boccaccio, Il Decamerone 8.1 571 (ed. Vittore Branca)

II. Boccaccio, Il Decamerone 8.2 575 (ed. Vittore Branca)

The Shipman’s Tale is a fabliau, a short comic story of financial and sexual deception firmly located in a bourgeois setting. Neither the prosperous merchant of St Denis, nor his attractive spendthrift wife are given names, and since the unscrupulous and lecherous monk is called Daun John, which was practically a generic name for a cleric, it has seemed to many scholars that Chaucer was trying to write something archetypal in the fabliau genre. Yet, paradoxically, the physical world of the tale – the layout of the merchant’s house and garden at St Denis, the details of his business trips to Bruges and Paris, the ways in which loans are raised and repaid at a mercantile and personal level – is precisely articulated and suggests that Chaucer took a lot of trouble to be exact and accurate, to give a contemporaneous authenticity to his story. There is a paradox too in relation to the place of the tale in the Canterbury sequence: after The Man of Law’s Tale, ostensibly to prevent the Parson from preaching Lollardy to the pilgrims, the Shipman offers to tell a tale (II, 1178–90), but most editors choose to place the tale as the first of Fragment VII. And again, there is some doubt as to whether the tale was originally intended for the Shipman: the ostensible identification of the teller with a woman, because of the pronouns “we,” “us,” and “oure” in lines VII, 10–19 which are spoken by a woman, has inevitably led to speculation that the tale might have been intended at one stage for the Wife of Bath. Chaucer had evidently done a lot of work on this tale but had not quite finished with it. The seemingly typical tale raises a great many problems, and the question of its sources is not the least of them.