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The Pardoner's Ale and Cake

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert E. Nichols Jr.
Robert E. Nichols Jr.*
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Hammond, Ind
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Extract

The pardoner's lines in the Introduction to the Pardoner's Tale contain the nucleus of nine decades of concentrated debate. Aleslake and drynke represent but two of the elements spinning about the core of controversy. Alestake has led numerous commentators to conclude that the Canterbury caravan halted (in or) at a roadside inn and there heard a revealing narrative from one of their fellows. Partial dissenters concede a momentary pause at the pub but contend the pilgrims retook the road before the Pardoner finished his (Prologue or) Tale. Some opposing critics refuse to concede even a momentary respite. Commentary on drynke has gravitated similarly toward three conflicting forces: Some attribute the Pardoner's self-revelation to drunkenness, others see him as loose-tongued but just lightly tipsy, and still others consider him stone sober throughout.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 7 , December 1967 , pp. 498 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 Quotations from Chaucer are from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), unless otherwise noted.

2 Frederick J. Furnivall, Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Pt. i (London, 1868). Quoted by William W. Laurence, Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales (New York, 1950), p. 101, who suggests readers do not “yearn for [such] accuracy.”

3 George L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1915), p. 213.

4 Gordon H. Gerould, Chaucerian Essays (Princeton, 1952), p. 57.

5 See Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. William F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York, 1958), pp. 415–438. Also A. Werner, “Chaucer's ‘Pardoner's Tale’: African Analogue,” N&Q, 2nd Ser., iv (29 July 1911), 82, 83.

6 Canterbury Tales, ed. John M. Manly (New York, 1928), p. 617. Dorothy MacBride Norris, “Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale and Flanders,” PMLA, XLviii (Sept. 1933), 641. Paull F. Baum, Chaucer: A Critical Appreciation (Durham, N. C., 1958), p. 49.

7 Andrew Borde, Introduction to Knowledge, Ch. viii. Quoted in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. W. W. Skeat, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1924), v, 275.

8 In raising objections to Carleton Brown's hypothesis of two distinct exempla (The Pardoner's Tale, ed. Carleton Brown, Oxford, 1935, pp. xv ff.) Charles E. Shain looks for harmony through sermon patterns and rhetoric in “Pulpit Rhetoric in Three Canterbury Tales,” MLN, lxx (April 1955), 239.

9 Gerould, p. 68.

10 Alfred Kellogg, “An Augustinian Interpretation of Chaucer's Pardoner,” Speculum, xxvi (July 1951), 473.

11 Charles A. Owen, Jr., “The Crucial Passages in Five of the Canterbury Tales: A Study in Irony and Symbol,” JEGP, iii (1953), 304.

12 Robert K. Root, The Poetry of Chaucer, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), pp. 222, 223, suggests that the “Host has been so wrought upon by the pathos of the Physician's Tale of Virginia, that he feels it absolutely essential to his physical well-being that he hear a ‘merry tale’.” But see E. Talbot Donaldson, Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York, 1958), p. 927, for the view that there exists “more vitality in the Host's exaggerated reaction to the [Physician's] story than there is in the story itself.”

13 Chaucer: The Pardoner's Tale, ed. Nevill Coghill and Christopher Tolkien (London, 1958), p. 92.

14 Howard R. Patch, On Rereading Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 166, calls it Chaucer's “most unsparing couplet.” Compare I Cor. xv.56, “Now the sting of death is sin.”

15 Leo J. Henkin, “The Pardoner's Sheepbone and Lapidary Lore,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, x (1941), 507.

16 Garland Ethel, “Chaucer's Worste Shrewe: The Pardoner,” MLQ, xx (Sept. 1959), 224.

17 James Sledd, “By Seint Ronyan,” Medieval Studies, xiii (1951), 226–233. Cites support of Robinson, Brown, Hamilton, and Frost.

18 Alphons Bellesheim, History of the Catholic Church of Scotland, ii, trans. O. H. Blair (London, 1887), 11. Quoted in Sledd, p. 233.

19 John M. Manly and Edith Richert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ii (Chicago, 1940), 326–328.

20 James E. Cross, “On the Meaning of ‘a-Blakeberyed’,” RES, N. S., ii (1951), 374, reviews editorial discussion of the word and identifies it with truancy.

21 De Miseria Humane Conditionis, Bk. ii, Ch. xvii, ed. Michele Maccarrone (Lucani, 1955), pp. 51–52: “Nunc autem gulosis non sufficiunt fructus arborum, non genera leguminum, non radices herbarum, non pisces maris, non bestie terre, non aves celi, sed queruntur pigmenta, comparantur aromata, nutriuntur altilia, capiuntur abesa, que studiose coquuntur arte cocorum, que laute parantur officio ministrorum. Alius contundit et colat, alius confundit et conficit, substantiam vertit in accidens, naturam mutat in artem, ut saturitas transeat in esuriem, ut fastidium revocet appetituum, ad irritandem gulam, non ad sustentandam naturam; non ad necessitatem supplendam, sed ad aviditatem explendam …”

22 The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes, ed. Thomas Wright (London, 1841), p. xlii: “Abjicimvtur itaque et demerguntur a profundis sagiminis, ibique tarn diu decoquuntur ut pingues fiant per accidens, quod esse non potuere per substantiam …”

23 John Wyclif, How the Office of Curates Is Ordained of God, Ch. xix, in The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, ed. F. D. Matthew, EETS, O.S. 74 (London, 1880), pp. 154, 511, n.

24 Manly, p. 619.

25 Wyclif, Of the Leaven of Pharisees, Ch. vi, ed. Matthew, p. 19.

26 Robinson, p. 730.

27 Wyclif, Sermones, ed. Iohann Loserth, Wyclif Soc, iii (London, 1889), 194.

28 Donaldson, p. 313.

29 England in the Age of Wycliffe, 4th ed. rev. (London, 1948), p. 305.

30 Ibid., p. 175.

31 Wyclif, De Papa, Ch. vi, ed. Matthew, p. 465.

32 P. 213. Italics mine.

33 Skeat, p. 277.

34 Wyclif, Of the Leaven of Pharisees, Ch. iii, ed. Matthew, p. 12.

35 Wyclif, De Eucharistia Tractatus Maior, Ch. i, ed. Iohann Loserth, Wyclif Soc. (London, 1892), pp. 15, 16: “… Nichil enim horribilius quam quod quil bet sacerdos celebrans facit vel consecrat cotidie corpus christi; nam Deus noster non est Deus recens nec corpus suum cum sit summe sacrum atque perpetuum est sic sacramentale vel novites faciendum, sed nos sacredotes facimus et benedicimus hostiam consecretam que non est corpus dominicum sed efficax eius signum.”

36 Percy Van Dyke Shelly, The Living Chaucer (Philadelphia, 1940), p. 319.

37 Robert P. Miller, “Chaucer's Pardoner and the Scriptural Eunuch,” Speculum, xxx (1955), 195.

38 Albert C. Friend, “Analogues in Cheriton to the Pardoner and His Sermon,” JEGP, liii (July 1954), 385.

39 Alfred L. Kellogg and Louis A. Haselmayer, “Chaucer's Satire of the Pardoner,” PMLA, lxvi (March 1951), 253.

40 P. 668.

41 John xix.34, The Holy Bible, Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, iv (Oxford, 1850), 292.

42 Miller, p. 196.

43 David C. Fowler, Prowess and Charity in the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes (Seattle, Wash., 1959), p. 14.