¹ I first heard this term applied to these tales by Robert W. Frank in a speech delivered at the MLA Annual Convention in Madison, Wis., 1957. Needless to say this category has no clear-cut limits. We could, for instance, add the Prioress' Tale to the list if we wish. Some pathetic tales are more pathetic than others and involve us emotionally more than the MLT does.

² We might perhaps make an exception for the Second Nun's Tale as a Saint's life; or somewhat of an exception for the Clerk's Tale as part of the marriage group—if we can accept the marriage group hypothesis. But the latter is still more than vaguely discomforting even as an example of wifely patience and as a tale in the mouth of the clerk.

Back of the MLT lies a variant of The Maiden without Hands folktale type (Aarne/Thompson, No. 706). But the folklorist antecedents of the tale are not my concern in this essay, in spite of the fact that they do help to explain some of the features of the present tale.

³ Cf. the remark attributed to Charles Chaplin, “Comedy is life in long shot and tragedy, life in close-up.” We are both I's and he's—tragic from our own perspective and comic to others. Cf. Brecht's suggestion that humor is a “Distanzgefühl” (referred to in TLS, 8 Aug. 1968, p. 838).

There is some parallel here to the emotional effect of the grotesque. See Wolfgang Kayser, Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Oldenburg : G. Stalling, 1957), trans. Ulrich Weisstein, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington : Indiana Univ. Press, 1963), and Victor Erlich, “A Note on the Grotesque, Gogol: A Test Case,” To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), pp. 630–33.

⁴ For Constance's apostrophes, see 11. 274–87; 451–62; 639–44; 813–19; 826–33; 841–54; 855–57; 858–61 ; (841–61 Constance first to Mary, then to her son, and finally to the Constable, all, incidentally, Chaucer's additions); 1105–13.

⁵ A common Chaucerian gambit, the most famous example of which occurs in Troilus ii.666–85 when the persona answers the objection that Criseyde certainly fell in love with Troilus quickly. For further examples, see Troilus iii.491 ff., 1681 ff.; Knight's Tale, 11. 1881 ff.; Franklin's Tale, 11. 1493 ff., etc.

⁶ Cf. the Yiddish folk figure of the nebbish.

⁷ ii, 7. See the interesting discussion of this tale in Stavros Deligiorgis, “Boccaccio and the Greek Romances,” CL, 19 (1967), 97 ff. This tale is closely related to the MLT in its spirit and organization in a mirror-image way; yet it would not be classified as belonging to its folktale type. Note Northrop Frye's definition of comedy: “normally an erotic intrigue blocked by some opposition and resolved by a twist in the plot known as ‘discovery’ or recognition” ; “Comic Myth in Shakespeare,” Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 46, 3rd Ser. (June 1952), Sec. 2, p. 55. On the role of inversion and mirror image in myths, see the brilliant remarks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology, trans. Sherry Ortner Paul and Robert A. Paul, Cape Editions, I (London: Cape, 1967), 34–39.

There is possibly a direct analogue to our tale in The Decameron v, 2, about Gostanza, although not very close. See Thomas H. McNeal, “Chaucer and the Decameron,” MLN, 53 (1938), 257–58.

Miss Jeanne Krochalis points out to me the transformations of a similar victim theme in a large part of Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide where Enide endures much after she and her husband leave the court until the end of the story with its celebration of joy at the earthly (as opposed to the heavenly) court. Here the concentration on Erec rather than Enide, the absence of a rhetoricizing persona, the downgrading of the persecution all give the tale a happy, earthly ending. But I suspect that there is a parody of the tragedy of the victim and saint's life lurking in the background of part of Chretien's poem.

⁸ On the characteristics of the classical romance and its related genre, the aretalogy, see Rosa Söder, Die apo-kryphen Apostelgeschichten und die romanhafte Literatur der Antike, Würzburger Studien zur Altertumswissenschaft, iii (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1932).

⁹ The Greek Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1953),

Introd., pp. 7–8.

¹⁰ Le cose tutte quante

Hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma Che l'universo a Dio fa simigliante

Dante, Paradiso 1.103–05

¹¹ See Robert T. Farrell, “Chaucer's Use of the Theme of the Help of God in the Man of Law's Tale,” NM, 71 (1970), 239–43. Farrell has put his finger on an important aspect of the tale, related to saints' lives, but he uses the term “figura” (p. 243) in an unusual fashion to describe Constance's role in this theme.

¹² Omitting the pathetic tales already mentioned, the only other tales in CT which are stanzaic are Sir Thopas, where the metrical unit varies and is parodie, and Monk's Tale, which if not pathetic, certainly is linked to the contempt of the world tradition. Troilus and Criseyde seems to be an exception to this principle, but I now think the meter is another distancing device such as I discussed in my article “Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde,” PMLA, 72 (1957), 14–26. However, in Troilus Chaucer also brings us very close to the characters, whereas in MLT he never allows us to approach the emotional.

¹³ “Periodic Syntax and Flexible Meter in the Divina Commedia,” Romance Philology, 21 (1967–68), 17. I am in general indebted to Scaglione's insights for some of my metrical comments. To my colleague Professor Zeph Stewart I am indebted for the observation that the run-over effect is also more common in the Aeneid when emotion rises.

¹⁴ “Robinson edition, p. 691. See Robert Enzer Lewis, ”Chaucer's Artistic Use of Pope Innocent m's De miseria humane conditionis in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale,“ PMLA, 81 (1966), 485–92. Lewis sees the use of Innocent's work mainly, though not entirely, in emphasizing the joy after woe and woe after joy theme, which certainly plays an important part in the tale.

¹⁵ The prologue is largely concerned with an apostrophe to the hatefulness of poverty and thence by opposition passes to rich merchants as a kind of preparation for the merchants who appear in the first stanza of MLT. Most scholars have found the connection between the prologue and the tale only vaguely appropriate. I must say I do not see how the theory set forth in this article will enable us to solve this question.

Cf. John A. Yunck, “Religious Elements in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale,” ELH, 27 (1960), 250. Yunck sees the fundamentally religious quality of the tale (e.g., “God, then, in His providential care of His servants, is the protagonist of the Man of Law's Tale,” p. 259) although I cannot fully understand why he calls it “A romantic homily.” See above, n. 11.