Dryden's The Cock and the Fox and Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale

In the Preface to his Fables of 1700 Dryden described the extraordinary latitude he had allowed himself in translating Chaucer: 'I have not ty'd my self to a Literal Translation; but have often omitted what I judg'd unnecessary, or not of Dignity enough to appear in the Company of better Thoughts. I have presum'd farther in some Places, and added somewhat of my own where I thought my Author was deficient, andhad not given his Thoughts their true Lustre.'¹ To some later readers Dryden's assumptions have seemed audacious and their consequences deleterious. The editor of a mid-nineteenth-century collection of Chaucerian adaptations opined that the 'versions of Chaucer which have been given by Dryden and Pope, are elaborate and highly-finished productions, reading exactly like their own poems, and not bearingthe slightest resemblance to Chaucer'.² Since this date many admirers of Chaucer, particularly those coming to Dryden's versions from a lifetime's familiarity with his sources, have recorded similar reactions. Dryden's Chaucerian versions have been felt to exhibit a brutality, a vulgarity, a marked misogyny, a loss of characterizing voice, a hardening of sensibility and coarsening of pathos wholly alien to the original. Even for sympathetic readers, Dryden's verse, vocabulary, syntax, cultural assumptions and expectations have seemed to mark his versions as entirely altered, as utterly and essentially different from the original,as transformations rather than translations of Chaucer.³

The presentation of these versions of Chaucer in the final volumeof the California edition of Dryden's works, where they are extensively annotated and printed en face with Chaucer's originals, and their presentation within the recent Longman edition of Dryden's poems, where the annotation is even more wide-ranging, reveals more clearly than ever before what an extraordinary process was involved in their composition, and how unusual is the relation between the seventeenth-century poems and their originals.⁴ It is immediately apparent that the conventional terms for discussing Dryden's translations, including the well-known categories of translation, paraphrase, and imitation derived from his own Preface to Ovid's Epistles of 1680, are insufficiently flexible to describe these works. The degree of approximation of Dryden's English to the original varies passage by passage, line by line, almost phrase by phrase. Some passages are modelled closely on Chaucer's, and some lines taken over almost verbatim, to an extent that is impossible when translating dead languages; but there are also long passages appearing to have little Chaucerian basis, and alterations are made to character and plot. It is as if Dryden were impelled to push his techniques, particularly of addition, to the extreme.

This, the case in various ways with all Dryden's versions of Chaucer, is acutely so in The Cock and the Fox. Dryden's poem is nearly 200 lines longer than The Nun's Priest's Tale, and many of the additions derive from, reflect, or respond to a range of works by a great many poets other than Chaucer (including, predominantly perhaps, Dryden's own earlier writings). Both Works and Poems refer to Homer, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, Shakespeare, Virgil, and especially Paradise Lost.⁵ Dryden brought to his poem almost as much as he found; a series of foreign narratives seems at times to have been grafted onto, or to run in shadowy parallel with, Chaucer's story. It is as if The Nun's Priest's Tale impelled Drydento revisit and rethink a lifetime's reading and writing. Much of the vocabulary and phrasing, if not quite what we would call 'allusive', seems to carry the traces of its use on other occasions, hinting at some very ancient and some very recent philosophical debates, theological controversies, and political events.⁶

A view of Dryden's poem and its relation to its original which runs strikingly contrary to the nineteenth-century editor just quoted was offered by Walter Scott in his 1808 edition of Dryden's works. Scott had been impressed by Thomas Tyrwhitt's suggestion that the source of...