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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Nearly half a century has passed since Kittredge made his famous critical pronouncement that Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims “do not exist for the sake of the stories, but vice versa.” Despite occasional objections, Kittredge's observation has received wide general acceptance and its application to the tales by him and subsequent critics has yielded many fruitful insights into the direction of Chaucer's art. The Nun's Priest's Tale, however, apparently defies analysis along the lines suggested by this statement, for the Priest is not described in the “General Prologue” but is merely mentioned as one of three priests travelling with the Prioress. With this fact in mind, R. K. Root has rejected the Nun's Priest completely: “Neither in the General Prologue nor in the links which fit the tale into its framework has Chaucer taken any pains to characterize the ‘gentil Preest’ who tells this tale. So we may dismiss him without ceremony, and imagine ourselves face to face with Chaucer.”
1 Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1915), p. 155. This view has been challenged by Kemp Malone, who states “it would be a great mistake to interpret a given story as serving primarily to characterize its teller as an individual” (Chapters on Chaucer, Baltimore, Md., 1951, p. 211). Most of Malone's fellow critics, however, have seen fit to disregard this injunction. So much attention has been devoted to this aspect of Chaucer's art in recent years that almost no character mentioned in the “General Prologue” has wanted for a critic to explain why he tells the tale he does.
2 The Poetry of Chaucer (Boston, 1922), p. 208.
3 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed., Fred N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 13–14. Paull F. Baum has stated that he finds Robinson's contention “hard to understand, since the narrator has no character in the General Prologue, but is only one of three innominate priests accompanying the Prioress” (Chaucer: A Critical Appreciation, Durham, N. C, 1958, p. 221). E. Talbot Donaldson has also minimized the importance of the Priest: “Aware that in the personality of the satirist will always exist grounds for rebutting the satire, Chaucer carefully gives us nothing to work on in the character of the Nun's Priest: there is no portrait of him in the General Prologue, and the introduction to his tale reveals only the most inoffensive of men” (Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader, éd., E. Talbot Donaldson, New York, 1958, p. 944).
4 At least two critics, however, have accepted Robinson's contention. R. M. Lumiansky has declared that the “subtle antifeminist theme [of The Nun's Priest's Tale] makes it appropriate for a cleric under the ‘petticoat rule’ of the Prioress” (Of Soniry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the “Canterbury Tales,” Austin, Texas, 1955, p. 105). J. Burke Severs has maintained a similar point of view: “It is delightfully appropriate that the Nun's Priest should narrate the cock's story, reluctant though he is (as he says) to report ill of ladies; for priests, as the Wife of Bath declares (11. D 688-710), find it easy to speak disparagingly of women, and this particular priest's professed reluctance becomes amusingly comprehensible when we remember that he is subject to the authority of a woman who is present, the Prioress” (“Chaucer's Originality in ‘The Nun's Priest's Tale’,” SP, XLIII, 1946, 37). Both Lumiansky and Severs, however, fail to expand their observations along the lines suggested by this paper.
5 All references to The Canterbury Tales are from Robinson, op. cit.
6 “Chaucer's Nun's Priest Again,” PMLA, lxiv (1949), 242. Sherbo is also troubled by Harry Bailly's surly manner towards the Nun's Priest. A man of such ecclesiastical importance, he argues, would not allow himself to be spoken to in such a disrespectful fashion: “The whole picture of this priest making his way on an English Rosinante, meekly suffering the rude familiarity of the Host, is inconsistent with the dignity and importance of the position accorded him …” (p. 242). The host, however, is merely following the lead of the Prioress. She has not provided the Priest with a mount suitable to his station and has undoubtedly shown him little respect or consideration on the pilgrimage. Under such circumstances there is little reason why the Host should feel inclined to grant the Priest such deference. Despite his extensive learning, the Priest lacks the boldness of character to assert himself openly and must be content with reestablishing his lost dignity and natural male superiority in the tale he relates.
7 A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (New York, 1959), p. 99.
8 Donaldson (p. 944) has spoken of the Nun's Priest's detachment from the story he tells: “he can survey the world as if he were no part of it, as if he were situated comfortably on the moon looking at a human race whom he knew and loved wholeheartedly but whose ills he was immune from.” The Priest has apparently suffered too long at the hands of his superior, however, to be either this disinterested or this objective.
9 On the Sources of the Nonne Prestes Tale, Radcliffe College Monographs, No. 10, Boston, 1898, pp. 63–64.
10 James R. Hulbert, “The Nun's Priest's Tale,” Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, eds., W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago, 1941), p. 645.
11 In an essay concerned with the possible political implications of The Nun's Priest's Tale, J. Leslie Hotson has noted the sharp difference between Chaucer's Chauntecleer and the unimposing rooster of the analogues: “While none of the other variants gives Chauntecleer any color, Chaucer lavishes colors on him, until the lordly cock seems more splendid than Nature warrants” (“Colfox vs. Chauntecleer,” PMLA, xxxix, 1924, 774). Hotson explains this metamorphosis, however, by identifying the rooster with Chaucer's benefactor, Henry of Bolingbroke (later Henry IV).
12 Charles Dahlberg has stated that one of “the most traditional … equations in Christian literature is that connecting the cock with the priest” (“Chaucer's Cock and Fox,” JEGP, LIII, 1954, 282). He (p. 286) also points out that the rooster's “colors, red, black, azure, white and gold, are those which are associated with the priestly life.” Dahlberg fails, however, to identify the cock with the particular Priest who is telling the tale.
13 There have been many expressions of this point of view. Hotson (p. 776) states that “Chauntecleer … fell through vanity and blindness caused by flattery.” Root (p. 216) calls the rooster “your typical pedant and egotist,” while Charles A. Owen, Jr., completes the condemnation of the fowl, calling him a “stupid cock” (“The Crucial Passages in Five of the Canterbury Tales: A Study of Irony and Symbol,” JEGP, LII, 1953, 309).
14 Petersen, pp. 94–95.
15 Although he fails to explain the reason for this change, Severs has indicated this shift of focus in the tale. He (p. 28) states that Chaucer “does not conceive of his tale as the story of an overweening fool who, repeatedly warned, fails to heed and in consequence justly suffers for his folly. Instead, he conceives of it as the story of a husband who, ill advised by a wrong-headed but charming wife, permits his better judgment to be eclipsed and in consequence justly comes to grief.”
16 While there is no way to establish definitely whether the Prioress to whom the Priest is so unhappily attached was actually modeled upon a living person, J. M. Manly suggests that Chaucer might have had in mind Madame Argentyn, a nun of the convent of St. Leonard's at Bromley, a small community adjoining Stratford-Bow, when he drew his portrait of the Prioress, Madame Eglentyne. Whether Madame Argentyn was ever Prioress of this Benedictine nunnery is unknown, although Manly suspects that she might have been. Chaucer had visited this convent as a youth in 1356 in the retinue of Countess Elizabeth of Ulster, the wife of Prince Lionel (Some New Light on Chaucer, New York, 1926, pp. 202–212).
17 Mortimer J. Donovan has offered an allegorical explanation for the presence of the widow, contending that Chaucer sought to identify her with the Church (“The Moralité of the Nun's Priest's Sermon,” JEGP, LII, 1953, 505). Dahlberg (p. 285) makes the same identification. While there is some evidence Chaucer might have had such an allegorical purpose in mind, he apparently had this more immediate reason for changing the sex and situation of the cock's owner.
18 For an interpretation of The Prioress' Tale from this point of view see Baum, pp. 75–79. Another critical view of the Prioress is given in Richard Schoeck's “Chaucer's Prioress: Mercy and Tender Heart,” in Chaucer Criticism: The Canterbury Tales, eds., Richard Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame, Ind., 1960), pp. 245–258.
19 Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediœval Sciences, Revised Edition (New York, 1960), p. 227.
20 Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1957), p. 238.