by Stuart Kelly
We will not complain of Dante’s miseries: had all gone right with him as he wished it, he might have been prior, podestà, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours—and the world had wanted one of the most notable works ever spoken or sung.
Geoffrey Chaucer
{c. 1343–1400}
EVEN THOUGH The Canterbury Tales is unfinished, it has an ending. After the Parson’s Tale has concluded, there is the so-called Retraction: “Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve.” As if in response to the Parson’s treatise on repentance and confession, Chaucer asks the reader “for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes.” Specifically, he wishes pardon for having written “many a song and many a leccherous lay,” including his Troilus and Criseyde, the unfinished Book of Fame, the incomplete XXV Ladies (presumably The Legend of Good Women), The Parlement of Fowls, The Book of the Duchess, and the mysterious Book of the Leoun, of which no copies survive. Likewise, we are exhorted to avoid the fragmentary Canterbury Tales, “thilke that sownen into synne,” and which the reader of the “Retraction” is presumably holding.
Instead, we are directed to the translation of Boethius’ The Consolationof Philosophy, as well as “othere bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun.” Presumably these included Chaucer’s own translation of Origen’s homily on St. Mary Magdalene, and “Of the Wreched Engendryne of Mankynde,” a translation of Pope Innocent III’s De Contemptu Mundi, which are mentioned in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women. Although the former is lost completely, the Parson’s Tale which the chastened reader has just finished contains material derived from that papal encyclical. More curiously, Chaucer also mentions a Life of St. Cecilia in his list of ennobling works: surely this might be the selfsame saint’s life that is narrated by the Second Nun in The Canterbury Tales?
Another peculiarity about the “Retraction” is its similarity in sentiment to the depiction, by the poet Thomas Gascoigne, of Chaucer’s deathbed spiritual terrors. He is supposed to have cried out, “Woe is me! For I shall not now be able to revoke or destroy those things that I have wickedly written concerning the wicked and filthy love of men for women, and which shall now be passed down for ever from man to man, whether I wish it or not.” Did Gascoigne know the “Retraction,” and place similar words in Chaucer’s mouth? Or is the “Retraction” itself a later addition to The Canterbury Tales that wrestles to conform the exuberant miscellany to the piety of the age?
Though The Canterbury Tales indeed contains moral exempla, saints’ lives, and religious treatises, they occur alongside scurrilous fabliaux and scatological farce. As John Dryden wrote: “all human life is here.” The sincere Parson must ride alongside the hypocritical Pardoner, the “verray parfit, gentil knight,” and the inebriated Miller. Whatever Chaucer was planning for the Canterbury pilgrims, the imminence of death may have led him to hastily pen a disclaimer: in its incomplete form, it might well appear more irreverent than if it had been finished.
Like much medieval literature, The Canterbury Tales has a framing narrative. Opening at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, the Prologue introduces a group of characters on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket in Canterbury. The innkeeper, Harry Bailly, suggests a storytelling competition to pass the time. Each pilgrim will tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back, with Harry Bailly acting as compère and arbiter. In the ten fragments we have, twenty-three of the pilgrims have told a story, and only one, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, has told two. Some characters from the Prologue—the Yeoman, the Plowman, the five Guildsmen—have said nothing; and another pair, the alchemist Canon and his sly Yeoman, have joined the group, with the Canon’s Yeoman offering a story about a mendacious Canon who is categorically not his master.
Simple arithmetic would suggest that there could have been as many as 132 tales in the work. This neat scheme, however, quickly unravels. By drawing straws, Bailly suggests that the first story be told by the Knight, who duly entertains the company with a romance about the ill-fated rivalry between Palamon and Arcite for the love of Emily. At the end, Bailly congratulates the Knight and asks the Monk to begin his Tale: however, the drunken Miller decides that he can outdo the Knight, and launches into the notoriously bawdy tale of the carpenter, his wife, and a randy student. This aggravates the Reeve, who thinks he is being mocked, and who retorts with a similarly ribald offering about the seduction of a miller’s wife and daughter.
Not only are stories parried between the tellers, upsetting Bailly’s notional ordering, they are also interrupted. When Chaucer himself is called upon, he narrates a “drasty” old piece called “The Tale of Sir Thopas.” The elegant English versifier, who has practically invented the iambic pentameter, surprises the audience with a clunking, naïve, doggerel exercise. After nine hundred lines Bailly thunders, “Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee,” claiming that Chaucer’s “rymyng is nat worth a toord!” Humbled, Chaucer instead gives them a heavily allegorical prose homily, “The Tale of Melibee.”
Because of the fragmentary nature of the text, we cannot now tell if the unfinished Squire’s Tale and Cook’s Tale were cut short by the host or another pilgrim or by Chaucer’s own death. Some of the pilgrims prevaricate about their choice of story: the Monk tells a series of tragedies, though he also plans to tell the life of St. Edward. The Man of Law eventually tells of Constance, a Roman princess betrothed to the sultan of Syria, on the condition of his conversion; though he worries about choosing such a theme since Chaucer “hath toold of loveris up and doun / Mo than Ovide made of mencioun” (despite the fact that the poet “kan but lewedly / on metres and on rymyng craftily”). “What sholde I tellen hem,” he wonders, “syn they been told?”
The Canterbury Tales has, by some critics, been seen as a gallimaufry into which Chaucer could accommodate various works. The Knight’s Tale, based on Boccaccio’s epic Teseida, was composed before the Prologue; so too was “The Tale of Melibee.” Had he lived, “lost” works other than the complete Canterbury Tales might have survived, since Chaucer was happy to recycle older material into the rag-bag Tales. The Knight might have given us The Book of the Leoun, and the Wife of Bath might have stunned the misogynists with her version of Origen on Mary Magdalene.
It is not, however, the tales of the tellers, but the tellers’ own tales that seem the most grievous loss. Though it is anachronistic to imagine a novelistic shape surrounding The Canterbury Tales, it is enticing. The characterization is immensely vivid. Moreover, this is revealed not just in the accumulation of detail—the wart on the Miller’s nose, the “gat-toothed” Wife of Bath—but in the pilgrims’ words and interrelationships. The Wife’s tale, about the loathly lady and women’s desire for “sovereignty,” tells us as much about her as her biographical prologue. She and the Clerk reach some accommodation between them, despite the opposing viewpoints of their tales.
Only the broadest outline of a shape for The Canterbury Tales can be deduced. Harry Bailly promises a free meal for the winner of the storytelling competition: who would win, and how they were chosen, we cannot know. Although claims have been made for the Parson’s Tale being an apposite ending, with the Celestial Jerusalem replacing the temporal Canterbury Cathedral, the circular structure implied by the rules of the storytelling suggest the true end is back at the Tabard Inn. Canterbury acts as a fulcrum in the narrative, and we can only speculate about whether or not any of the pilgrims radically changed their ways as a consequence of their pilgrimage.
Chaucer has supplied us with obvious villains—the hypocritical Pardoner, for example—as well as potential victims for their fraudulent deceits; such as the Wife of Bath with her five inheritances. The Pardoner himself may be a possible dupe for the mysterious Canon (whose Yeoman relates the story of how a Canon tricked venal priests). There are characters who represent earthly and heavenly justice in the Man of Law and the poor Parson. There is comic relief along
side chivalric splendor; bourgeois pretensions offset against unworldly meditation; sly misogynists trumped by an assertive widow. Chaucer has prepared all the elements of a plot, but we have none of the narration.
The poem was sufficiently new and popular that other writers exploited it after Chaucer’s death. The “Tale of Beryn” is included in some versions as the Merchant’s Tale, and a popular, though anonymous, Canterbury Interlude told of the Pardoner’s attempts to seduce a bar-maid, Kit the Tapster, ending in his humiliation. The poet John Lydgate, in the fifteenth century, introduced his Siege of Thebes with a prologue telling how he met up with the Canterbury Pilgrims, who asked him to read his magnum opus. Neither Harry Bailly nor Geoffrey Chaucer interrupt the work.
What, then, is the significance of the “Retraction”? How seriously should we take Chaucer’s claim that he earnestly repented the lewd and profane elements in the Tales? It is not as if the reader goes unwarned about the bawdier moments in the Tales; or that the drunken tellers go uncriticized. Given the irony that pervades the whole of the poem, it is tempting to award it no more significance than the parody of Chaucer the pilgrim, stuttering out his moldy tale. One might even point to the end of Troilus and Criseyde as evidence of a similar practice, where the poet bids envoi to his “litel bok,” praying that it is not misunderstood and that the folly of the pagan lovers is suitably noted.
The “hale and hearty” bluff image of Chaucer that has accreted over the centuries would encourage the reader to dismiss the “Retraction” as a final winking glimmer of irony. And yet, if we think of the author, stricken by who-knows-what disease or injury, certain in the knowledge of his imminent demise, is it really so unlikely that, at that pitch, he would have preferred to hear The Consolation of Philosophy rather than the rich evocation of the world he was about to leave? Or that, to save his own soul at the Pearly Gates, he might have suspected St. Peter to be a rather harsh literary critic?
François Villon
{1431–c. 1463}
FUGITIVE. BRAWLER. THIEF. The man who stole five hundred gold écus from the College of Navarre. The murderer of a priest. A condemned felon, thrice imprisoned, and once sentenced to death. Member of the criminal fraternity the Brotherhood of the Coquille. Genius.
Other poets—Byron, Rimbaud, and Swinburne, for example—have struck the bad-boy pose, and glorified in being “accursed,” “bohemian,” or “rebellious.” François Villon was not carefully constructing an image or conforming to a literary stereotype. He really was a delinquent and a killer, a crook and a convict, who even wrote ballads in the secret language, jobelins, of the gangs. He was born François Montcorbier (or Des Loges: who he originally was is as slippery as his later identity is iconic), and, if we believe his self-descriptions in his most ambitious poem, Le Testament, his family had never had much money. When his father died he was placed under the guardianship of Guillaume de Villon, the chaplain of Benoît-le-Bétourné, and took his surname. What his benefactor thought of this switched identity is not known. In Le Lais, a shorter version of Le Testament written five years before, he dedicates his fame to Guillaume de Villon; and, with the dark irony that typifies his work, refers to it as “the honor of his name.”
Villon was sent to the University of Paris in 1449, and was made a master of arts in 1452. Three years later he was involved in a fight, in the cloisters of Saint-Benoît, that led to him running his sword through a priest. His friend’s claim that he acted in self-defense led to his acquittal in 1456. In the same year, along with Guy Tabary and Colin de Cayeux, he burgled the College of Navarre. When Tabary confessed to the crime and implicated his co-conspirators, Villon went on the run, eventually drifting into the orbit of Charles d’Orléans. The duke was sufficiently impressed by Villon’s poetry during a competition that he had personal copies made. He could not, however, prevent him being imprisoned again, for the Navarre robbery, by the bishop of Orléans. Villon was freed during the amnesty to celebrate the accession of Louis XI in 1461. He then was accused of affray against a papal notary, and was sentenced to be “hanged and strangled”: the sentence was again commuted, to exile, and after 1463 no more about him is heard. Rabelais claims that he traveled to England, though there is no evidence for this.
Villon’s major work, Le Testament, is a mixture of spiritual autobiography and mordant bequests, a poetic will written humorously under conditions in which any other person might be considering doing the same thing seriously. As he asks for forgiveness, he conjures up the prostitutes and villains of his career. His pious imprecations are counterpoised with streetwise asides, his sincerity is laced with double entendres. Villon writes in the most exacting and complex ballade form, embedding acrostics at the beginning of the line with rigorous rhyme schemes at the end. In such a formal framework, his wit nonetheless proves itself irrepressible, and his gruesome cadenzas on the corruption of flesh are bound in perfect cadences.
One looks in vain for a psychological unraveling, or an apologia pro vita sua. When he revised, expanded, and rewrote Le Lais as Le Testament, Villon changed his legacy to Guillaume de Villon: instead of his fame and name, he leaves his library. Only one item is specifically named, a poem by Villon called The Romance of the Devil’s Fart, a work where the interest of the theme compensates for any stylistic infelicity. The poem is lost, but we know that Villon was involved in some undergraduate prank, involving the theft of a landmark door-sign from the ill-reputed house of one Mademoiselle de Bruyère, the so-called Pet au Deable, or Devil’s Fart. If the poem were ever rediscovered, we might at least know the origins of his pathological dual career in rhyme and crime.
There is even the possibility that Villon knew the poem was lost when he left it to his guardian. In Le Testament, he mentions that Guy Tabary transcribed The Romance of the Devil’s Fart, and one doubts that they were on particularly good terms during his spell in prison. Villon similarly bequeaths his sword to a friend, Ythier Marchant, while informing him it is currently in the pawn shop. Villon would hardly be nonplussed that his earliest work had not survived: throughout his works, the transitory sway of the world impresses frequently. As he put it in one of his most haunting lines, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?”—“But where are last year’s snows?”
John Skelton
{1460–1529}
ERASMUS CALLED JOHN SKELTON “that light and glory of English letters,” the printer William Caxton praised his “polysshed and ornate termes,” and the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Louvain agreed, conferring on him the title of poet laureate. It is understandable that all these congratulatory encomia and admiring references went to his head.
In A Ryght delectable tratyse upon a goodly Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, Skelton considers his literary accomplishment. He is welcomed into the Court of Fame by Gower, Lydgate, and Chaucer. He modestly accepts their thanks for having made the renown of Britain “encrese and amplyfy,” even though it “welny was loste when that we were gone.” The Queen of Fame assures him that “by the preemynence / Of laureate triumphe, your place is here reservyd,” and asks Occupation to tell them “what Skelton hath compilid and wryton in dede” so that “we wyll understande how ye have it deservyd.”
What follows is an extensive list of Skelton’s poems, prose works, and translations, which constitute the basis for his admission into the Court of Fame. Over thirty of them are lost, suggesting that his sense of his own importance to posterity might be somewhat elevated. His treatises on government—The Book of Honourable Estate, Good Advysement, and Sovereignty, a noble pamphlet—presumably written when he was tutor to Prince Henry, have all perished. His play Academios and an interlude, Virtue, have vanished. We know little about his moral tracts—How Men Should Flee Sin, The Book to Speak Well or be Still—and less about his religious writings, such as The False Faith and the Devout Prayer to Moses’ Horns. What The Ballad of the Mustard Tart or The Epitome of the Miller and his Jolly Companion or The Pageants in the Joyous Garde were about, we cannot know. His e
rotic Repete of the Recule of Rosmundisbowre has disappeared as completely, as has his New Grammar.
Nonetheless, his vision ends with:
All orators and poetis, with other grete and smale,
A thowsande, thowsande, I trow, to my dome,
Triumpha, triumpha! They cryid all aboute.
Of trumpettis and clariouns the noyse went to Rome.
Skelton gave his name to a verse form, the Skeltonic, a hasty, tumbling meter used for comical poems. He describes it in Collyn Clout, saying
For though my ryme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rayne-beaten,
Rusty and mothe-eaten,
Yf ye take well therwith
It had in it some pyth.
Several of the poems that have survived are in this slight and sprightly form. “To make suche trifels it asketh sum konnyng,” he averred in the Garlande of Laurell, granting even the least of his writings a modicum of wit and skill. That he should now be best known for them, rather than his mass of panegyrical, theological, political, theatrical, romantic, and linguistic endeavor, would doubtless infuriate him.
Camillo Querno
{fl. 1513}
WHEN GIOVANNI DE’ MEDICI became Pope Leo X in 1513, he established himself as a patron of the arts and literature. He also intended to leave an architectural legacy, and his sale of indulgences to finance the rebuilding of St. Peter’s precipitated Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, the foundation of the Reformation. His contribution to literary posterity was perhaps not as drastic, but was no less embroiled in bad judgment.
According to Paulus Jovius, who was made a knight by Leo as a token of respect for his history writing, one Camillo Querno had heard that the new pope was an aficionado of poetry. Consequently, he set out from his native Apulia to present his verse to the pontiff. Accompanied by a harp, he recited the twenty thousand verses of his execrable epic The Alexias to the vicar of Rome, who promptly made him his poet laureate, in reward for his brass neck rather than his golden tongue. The poem perished, but the poet enjoyed a certain notoriety.
