Apollo's Chariot and the Christian Subtext of The Franklin's Tale

I

Each of the fragments 4, 5, and 6 in the Ellesmere order of The Canterbury Tales contains two tales in which Christian values are contrasted with pagan ones. Christian submission in The Clerk's Tale is opposed to pagan hedonism in the Merchant's, magic to providence in the Squire's and Franklin's, and Roman justice to divine judgment in the Physician's and Pardoner's. Since the Squire's and Franklin's tales both have secular tellers and a pagan setting, it is not immediately obvious that they can be contrasted as secular and religious tales; nevertheless, it is the Christian basis of The Franklin's Tale that I wish to demonstrate in this essay. Indeed, the whole fifth fragment, it seems to me, develops as a considered progress from pagan ethics to Christian morality.

In consequence, The Franklin's Tale is best understood not on its own but as a response to The Squire's Tale.¹ Whereas The Squire's Tale is pagan, incomplete, and magical, the Franklin's sequel (and I use the word advisedly) is not merely complete in itself but a completion of the unity called fragment 5; it repudiates magic by treating it as mere illusion, and it contains a Christian subtext in its ostensibly pagan setting. Further, whereas the characters in The Squire's Tale are stereotypes—the feasting Oriental King, the courteous knight, the dawn-celebrating princess, and the lovelorn courtier diminished to falcon form—those that the Franklin portrays undergo a testing experience that demonstrates the folly of their preconceived ideas. Their understanding of the ideal of gentillesse changes and develops, and the tale reaches closure at the end of a linear narrative.² The Squire's Tale, on the other hand, offers stasis but no story, subjects but no psychology, situations but no resolutions.³

In what follows I argue, first, that the uncompleted part 3 of The Squire's Tale provides an intentional link between the two contrasting tales. Apollo whirls up, and The Squire's Tale breaks off. Another squire, Aurelius, prays to Apollo in vain and eventually mounts an ordinary live horse, not a magical automaton like the Squire's brazen horse, in order to meet not a real magician but an illusionist. By now Apollo, or the Sun, has declined into Capricorn at the end of the year, and the Christmas season, signaling the Incarnation of Christ, has come, even in a pagan world. The apparently extraneous "Christmas miniature" allows the reader to interpret the chivalric virtues of courtesy and trouthe in a deeper religious sense than might normally be expected in a secular romance.

II

After his impossibly ambitious list of plot proposals, the Squire launches part 3 with a grand rhetorical flourish: "Appollo whirleth up his char so high/Til that the god Mercurius hous the slye—" (ll. 671–72).⁴ But that is all there is of it. Is the aposiopesis an intentional trope of the Squire's, or did he suffer a catastrophic failure of imagination?⁵ In his discussion of the way Chaucerian irony works, as an interchange between text and reader, Howell Chickering refers to "the open-endedness of Chaucer's text, his habit of laying before us a do-it-yourself kit for assembling meanings."⁶ Part 3 is so open-ended that it invites us to participate in the assembly of absent meanings.

This invitation to speculate, or rather, to make interpretive decisions from incompletely presented facts, is doubtless related to Chaucer's own involvement in the pleadings of cases remanded to him, as justice of the peace for Kent, from manorial courts. Pointing out the complexity of the Franklin's concluding question, Who was most "fre"? Mary Flowers Braswell observes that "Chaucer not only invites but actually insists that his audience become pleaders, that they both articulate and argue a response to the facts he has presented."⁷ He insists, too, that they seek some resolution—and where better than in The Franklin's Tale that follows?—of the problems posed by the Squire's inconclusive narrative, which stops in mid-sentence.

The immediate questions we are no doubt expected to ask are, How would he have ended his sentence? and How would he have continued his tale? If he had intended to complete the sense of the second line with a phrase like "Ascendynge was," as in line 264, he would be commencing the third part of his tale with another periphrasis for the time of day when its events are to take place. As the Sun makes its way up the sky, the zodiacal circle turns till the mansion of Mercury is rising above the horizon. In lines 263–65, the Sun has passed its "angle meridional" (that quarter of its arc through which it passes between ten and twelve in the morning)—that is, the time is past midday—and Leo, though invisible at that time of day, is rising. But vague as this indication of time is, part 3 is yet vaguer. One would need to know which of Mercury's mansions, Gemini or Virgo, is meant and what time of year the Squire has in mind, since the Sun does not pass through the signs at the same time every day.

The Franklin's impatience with such circumlocutions is well illustrated by his parodic version of "till night fell," with its throwaway third line: on May 6, the young people disport themselves "al the longe daye" (l. 905) in Dorigen's paradisal garden, "Til that the brighte sonne loste his hewe;/For th'orisonte hath reft the sonne his lyght—/This is as muche to seye as it was nyght—" (V [F] 1016–18).⁸

A further ambiguity permits extrapolation of the Squire's part 3, for the unfinished couplet could also refer not, or not only, to the time of day but to the time of year. Skeat suggests that the lines be completed by the addition of "He entreth," interpreting them to mean that the Sun continues his upward, that is northward, course in the zodiac by which he daily approaches the zenith, until he reaches Gemini, the mansion of Mercury: a Chaucerian way of saying that two months have elapsed since the feast held when the Sun was in Aries.⁹ Hence the couplet is usually understood to suggest that the next phase of the tale, if there were such a phase, would take place in summer. The Sun enters Gemini in May and Virgo in August, both constellations being mansions of the planet Mercury.¹⁰ Cambyuskan's birthday feast, the receipt of gifts, and the lament of the forsaken falcon (who is destined to get her love back again) take place when the year is young; the harsher action of The Franklin's Tale reaches its climax of illusory magic in the depths of winter, when the Sun declines into Capricorn and "'Nowel' crieth every lusty man" (l. 1255).

An early example of a reader's attempt to limit the ambiguities occurs in the opening lines of The Flower and the Leaf. This poem, "the most charming of all the 'Chaucerian' love-visions, and the last to be expelled from the canon (1870)," begins with an imitation of the Squire's part 3, but one that attains closure:¹¹ "When that Phebus his chaire of gold so hy/Had whirled up the sterry sky aloft,/And in the Bole was entred certainly."¹² There is nothing of the slyly enigmatic Mercury here; Apollo has traveled no farther than Taurus, but there is no uncertainty about his arrival there. The Squire's Tale, however, stops in disarray, between signs, as it were. The contrast heightens our sense of its inconclusiveness, for in The Squire's Tale Apollo's chariot whirls up, presumably toward the mansion of Mercury, but never arrives. Lacking a verb for the last line, part 3 of The Squire's Tale is an incomplete sentence that demonstrates the unfinished nature of the tale it concludes. But if that were all, it might as well have been omitted, as it is from some dozen manuscripts, to allow the tale to break off, like The Cook's or The Monk's Tale, at a natural stopping place.¹³ In fact it provides a fitting transition from the rambling and "knotless" romance the inexperienced young Squire tells to the precise Breton lay provided by the mature Franklin.

The Complaint of Mars offers a clue to what the transition entails. In The Complaint of Mars, Chaucer translates the classical myth of the adultery of Mars and Venus and its discovery into astrological terms. Sunrise douses the light of the morning star; exposed and embarrassed, Venus flees from the torch of Phoebus illuminating the chamber where she and Mars have been in amorous conjunction. Because Venus circles the zodiac in half the time Mars does, the irate and enfeebled Mars fails to keep up with her as she hurries from Taurus, where Phoebus surprised her, into Gemini, where she tries to conceal herself in a dark "cave" (puteus, or Hellmouth) from the advancing light of Phoebus. This would suggest that Apollo in part 3 of The Squire's Tale may be whirling up his chariot in pursuit of Venus, who has fled into Mercury's mansion. This indeed is what happens in The Franklin's Tale, where Apollo's young worshiper, Aurelius, is in pursuit of Dorigen and to obtain her must go to the house of sly Mercury, or the magician.¹⁴

The myth cannot be pursued too far, of course, or we should find the magician desiring Dorigen for himself. For in The Complaint of Mars Mercury conjoins with Venus, and the result, according to a legend that Chaucer would have read in Ovid, is the birth of the dual-gendered Hermaphroditus. This development is not entirely without relevance to the situation in fragment 5, since Hermaphroditus stood for eloquence of a deceptive sort; as the offspring of Mercury and Venus rather than of Mercury and Sophia, he was dominated by adventitious ornament, which was deplored as bad rhetoric, rather than wisdom.¹⁵ The Franklin's praise and parody of the Squire's mistimed rhetorical flourishes are a notable feature of the juxtaposition of the two tales that make up the fragment.¹⁶

Howell Chickering's description of Chaucerian irony illuminates our understanding of the link between the two tales. Chickering contrasts the eiron, or knowing ironist, with the alazon, or braggart who does not perceive himself to be the butt of the irony.¹⁷ On the simplest level, when the Franklin praises the Squire's wit, the eiron is calling in question the pretensions of the alazon. But since, in Chickering's model, we as readers are constructing the irony as we perceive it, we recognize the further possibility that the Franklin's praise may, up to a point, be justified and then, on a deeper level still, that we cannot tell whether the Franklin is sincere or not. Alan Gaylord and Chauncey Wood argued that he was simply dazzled by the Squire's display of a courtliness to which he was eager but socially unable to aspire.¹⁸ But this is to reify the taleteller to an extent that inhibits the possibilities of verbal irony in the text. After the Squire's part 3 has broken off in unintelligible suspension, the rest of the page in the Ellesmere manuscript is blank. When the reader encounters text again the Franklin is commending the Squire's character and performance. But his praise remains enigmatic, because without a Chaucerian text to fill in Ellesmere's blank page we do not know whether he has been simply bowled over by the Squire's gentillesse and wit or whether he has reservations about them. The trouble is, his tale of the generosity of a group of arguably foolish characters supports either possibility!¹⁹

We cannot usefully fill gaps Chaucer, for whatever reason, has left; we can only interpret what we have. We do not know whether The Squire's Tale was always incomplete or, even if it was, whether Chaucer intended us to think the pilgrims regarded it as such.²⁰ However, Adam Pinkhurst, recently identified as the scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, added a note at the end of fragment l, "Of this Cokes tale maked Chaucer namoore."²¹ Pinkhurst's association with Chaucer and evident access to his papers make this annotation a fairly authoritative indication that the fragment was deliberately broken off as we now have it. The condition of the manuscripts suggests, similarly, that it is by no accident or mechanical loss that The Squire's Tale, too, ends as it does.²²

Chaucer then "completes" the incompletable by making a fresh start and substituting his own imitation of a Breton lay for the potentially limitless "oriental" kind of romance that works by accretion and repetition.²³ The Franklin's Tale is a paradigm of finished narrative that expounds a central idea and in so doing provides a critique of the Squire's inconclusiveness.²⁴ Shining Apollo gives place to sly Mercury. Here we have another example of Chaucer's "slye wey" of completing a narrative, which he overtly signals in the (apparently) incomplete Anelida and Arcite. ²⁵ Evidently it is no accident that the Squire's tale telling breaks off on the word slye. Slyly, Chaucer is about to introduce an ironic rebuttal of the narrative technique and romance culture that The Squire's Tale displays.

III

Of the stories with which The Squire's Tale will not conclude, the one we know least (and yet perhaps most) about is how Algarsyf won Theodora to wife, with the help of the brazen horse. Whatever Eastern or stellar possibilities their names may have, the Squire's characters are brought down to earth by the Franklin.²⁶ In his tale Algarsyf becomes Aurelius, and Theodora, Dorigen.²⁷ But in the Franklin's version Aurelius does not win Dorigen, in spite of his travels on horseback.

His first efforts are not promising. Not expecting Apollo to accede to his prayer for a two-year flood (l. 1062), he goes to bed as an invalid for two years and more (ll. 1101–3). Again, Chaucer's irony is multilayered. From a Christian perspective, a pagan's prayer to a pagan god cannot be effective. Aurelius does not know this, so he prays; at the same time, he does know it, and his bedridden response coincides with the time for which he prayed. Dorigen prays to God, not believing He will answer, and to her dismay gets what she asked for. She has rightly judged that it would be "agayns the proces of nature" (l. 1345) for the rocks to disappear but failed to allow for the illusion whereby they "semed" (l. 1296) to have gone.

Aurelius's prospects improve once he and his brother take horse for Orleans. The journey there and back is of course not the magical flight the Squire's brazen horse would have performed; such purely fantastical flights Aurelius enjoys in the magician's house without even leaving his seat (ll. 1205–8). Apollo can offer him nothing better than a barefoot pilgrimage to Delphos—a promise Aurelius makes and then wisely forgets when the rocks disappear. After two years in bed, a two years' walk, as it might well be, would have been fatiguing indeed. Instead, he and the magician take horse for the coast of Brittany.²⁸ We are reminded, when they get there, of their natural mode of travel by the verb descended, which is to be translated "dismounted," as Fisher suggests in his note to line 1242.²⁹ The word is also a pertinent reminder of the problems that might be involved in bringing the brazen horse back down to earth (ll. 320–23). In Eastern analogues, Kathryn Lynch points out, a rider is tricked into mounting the horse without knowing the secret of how to make it descend. By making the voluble knight too explicit ("Bidde hym descende and trille another pyn" [l. 321]), the Squire deprives the story—that according to the analogues should involve the horse—of its main plot.³⁰ Having thus curtailed the Squire's projected continuation, Chaucer substitutes the ordinary "hors" (l. 1183) that takes Aurelius to Orleans and back to the coast of Brittany. When the magician's magic apparently causes the rocks to disappear, Aurelius thanks him and Venus (not Lucina!) and hurries to the temple (Venus's?) to remind Dorigen of her promise (ll. 1304–6). It seems that use of his horse has done the trick for him as miraculously as the brazen horse would have done for Algarsyf, and without even piloting difficulties to cope with.

Of course this use of his horse would scarcely be noticed if it were not for the reminder of the brazen horse in The Squire's Tale. It would be taken for granted that Aurelius would have to use a horse to travel to Orleans and back. The point surely is that in The Franklin's Tale where magic is an illusion a horse is simply the normal mode of travel, whereas the Squire is satisfied with nothing less extraordinary than a magical flying horse, as seems to be demanded by his world of fantastical Oriental romance.

This brazen horse, however, was made in Italy (it is like a steed of Lombardy, an Apulian horse [ll. 193–95]) and has classical rather than oriental origins.³¹ However "horsly" it looks, it is at the same time a mechanical automaton, for "He that it wroughte koude ful many a gyn" (l. 128). "He" may have been Virgil, although the horse Virgil was reputed to have made had one quality the Squire seems not to have heard of: "He made also an hors of brasse, the whiche guarisshed and heled alle horses of all their maladyes and seknesses of whiche they were entechid, also sone as the seke hors loked on the hors of brasse."³² This sounds like the Mosaic story of the serpent of brass adapted for horses. The Squire's allusions, however, are classical rather than scriptural. The people in The Squire's Tale compare it to Pegasus (l. 207) or to the Trojan horse (ll. 209–10). The Squire's world is already tending westward. Geographically, fragment 5 will culminate in Brittany and England, the locale of The Franklin's Tale, for the Franklin "offer[s] a tale that brings the wonders of the Orient firmly under Occidental control."³³ There is no need to wonder how the courteous knight who rode the wondrous horse into Cambyuskan's court will return to his liege lord the king of India and Arabia after he has left it behind as a gift, for he is not going anywhere. Rhetorical devices are more important to the Squire than clues to future action—action that is indefinitely postponed anyway. Alan Ambrisco argues that what unifies the tale is not narrative but rhetoric, or more precisely the Squire's linguistic anxieties, symptomatic of a more serious failure of sympathy with his subject matter: he uses occupatio to suppress Mongol cultural and ethnic differences and allows his Orientals to behave like Europeans, thus masking his antagonism and intolerance with superficial displays of sympathy.³⁴

This intolerance of the "otherness" of the Eastern world indicates a movement in fragment 5 in the direction of Christendom, not merely of Western aristocratic values. For Chaucer the West belongs to the Holy Church and the East, as in The Man of Law's Tale, to the enemies of Christianity. He would no doubt have responded well to the paradoxes in Donne's "Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward," for Donne's imagery is medieval, but here in fragment 5 the attitude to West and East is the opposite of Donne's:

Hence is't, that I am carried towards the WestThis day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,And by that setting endlesse day beget;But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,Sinne had eternally benighted all.³⁵

That Christianity began in the East is an irony that Chaucer does not explore. The Franklin finds protection against disturbing Eastern influences in the reassurances of the Western Church. Although the magic that invests the gifts that the courteous knight brings to Cambyuskan's court is presumably benign, the Franklin is careful to speak specifically of "magyk natureel" (ll. 1125, 1155), referring to the mysterious workings of nature, since it is to be distinguished from spiritual, "black" or demon-inspired magic. The crowds that swarm to "gauren on" (l. 190) the horse of brass do not have these serious distinctions in mind when they conclude it is either a "fairye" (l. 201) or a juggling trick, "An apparence ymaad by som magyk" (l. 218). It is in keeping with the Franklin's more experienced and Christian perspective that, unlike the Squire, he should be suspicious of any magic and comfort himself with the assurance that "hooly chirches feith in oure bileve/Ne suffreth noon illusioun us to greve" (ll. 1133–34).³⁶

IV

Aurelius and the magician reach the coast of Brittany at the end of the year, where the magician's illusion is about to grieve the faithless Dorigen. But then comes a description of winter (ll. 1245–55) that culminates in the joyous cry of "Nowel!" John Fisher complains of these lines that "this Christmas miniature appears to have no connection with the plot."³⁷ Chauncey Wood, however, explains its importance in setting the likeliest date for the high tide apparently brought about but actually only predicted by the magician.³⁸ Significantly, it indicates how the year has advanced from the summertime at the end of The Squire's Tale. Instead the Sun gets into Capricorn, signaling the time of the Christian celebration of the Nativity, with which the Franklin's pre-Christian characters should, strictly, have nothing to do. The "Christmas miniature" is in fact a pivotal part of the Christian subtext to the Franklin's pagan story.³⁹ Indeed, it might be argued that here, if anywhere in fragment 5, the "knotte" (l. 401) or focal point that the Squire was unable to find has been reached.

When the question of the anachronistic Yuletide "insertion" in The Franklin's Tale was being discussed on Chaucernet, R. P. Miller commented:

The time-scheme set up in this section of the Tale strongly suggests that the date of the Clerk's "miracle" be set at January 6th—i.e. Epiphany. Epiphany (in Latin Manifestatio) celebrates the "showing forth" of the Truth upon which Christian salvation from the penal world is predicated. Chaucer's audience was certainly far better acquainted with the order of the Christian calendar than with the complexities of astrological ephemerae. Epiphany is referred to by the Church as the Manifestatio Christi. It is perhaps needless to add that the birth of Christ (the Rock?) was "agayns nature" (it is thus one of the articles of Christian faith described as unacceptable to the sapientia mundi, the "wisdom of the Greeks," in glosses to I Corinthians l, 22).⁴⁰

R. P. Miller's argument makes it clear that the magician's "miracle" was a spurious substitute for the true miracle of the Incarnation. The connection he makes between Epiphany and the season when the rocks disappear receives support from a passage in one of the saints' lives of Osbern Bokenham.

In the course of dating this part of his work to the beginning of the year 1445, when he received his commission to write the life of Mary Magdalen, Bokenham describes the descent of Phebus into Capricorn in a fifteenline astrological circumlocution that might have earned the admiration of Chaucer's Squire, although it was doubtless the Franklin who inspired it. Bokenham then expands Chaucer's Christmas miniature with a description of the Visit of the Magi:

                        Þat festful eueIn wych, as alle crystene men byleue,Thre kyngys her dylygence dede applyeWyth thre yiftys newe-born to gloryfyeCryst, aftyr hys byrthe þe threttende day.⁴¹

Epiphany, as Sheila Delany explains in her translation of Bokenham, commemorated three revelations: the homage of the Magi, the divine attestation at Christ's baptism, and Christ's first miracle at Cana, all supposed to have occurred on the same anniversary.⁴² Bokenham was undoubtedly acquainted with Chaucer's work and knew The Franklin's Tale ;⁴³ it is a plausible assumption that he consciously expanded on the Franklin's Christmas miniature in order to emphasize its Christian implications, in his Prolocutorye in-to Marye Mawdelyns lyf.

Sandra McEntire notes its pivotal position between Aurelius's bargain with the magician to create illusion and his misrepresentation of the result, whereby he turns Dorigen's playful offer into a binding promise. Christmas and Epiphany, she points out, "represent the challenge of faith against the appearances of false redeemers," and exegesis of Epiphany "highlights this key moment in salvation history when false powers and magic are to be rejected." Epiphany also represents the ability to discern what may be hidden from the eyes.⁴⁴

Aurelius of course is a pagan and would not have been one of the lusty men crying "Nowel" at this time of year. Instead, he wants the rocks removed, if not by flood, then by earthquake. To achieve what he acknowledges is impossible (l. 1009), he relies on Apollo's influence over the goddess Lucina, who exercises dominion in the heavens, over the sea, and under the ground. The Sun is naturally responsible for the phases of the Moon, but as planets fixed immutably to their respective spheres in the Ptolemaic system, they have to move at the same relative pace that God has allotted them. Therefore she cannot slow down so as to remain constantly at the full and thereby force Neptune to cover the rocks with a perpetually high tide. The Christian subtext of the tale, established by the Christmas miniature preceding the apparent disappearance of the rocks, suggests that Aurelius, benighted pagan that he is, can achieve nothing by relying on the Moon, since it is the Virgin Mary who really holds the sway that pagans attributed to Diana/Lucina. As the Dreamer in Pearl is reminded, "Þat emperise al heuenʒ hatʒ,/And vrþe and helle, in her bayly,"⁴⁵ while in the morality play Occupation and Idleness, praise of the Virgin Mary includes the lines: "Veni coronaberis in heuen most hy/As quene of heuen & emperes of hell/& Lady of al the world she is."⁴⁶ Lydgate, in his Life of Our Lady, writes: "O she that was of hevyn and erthe queen,/And of hell, lady and eke pryncesse."⁴⁷

It may therefore be remarked that when the Franklin enunciates his question of gentillesse at the end of his tale, "Whiche was the mooste fre?" true courtesy is only to be found in the Virgin Mary, certainly not, where Aurelius might locate it, in his "lady" Venus (l. 1304). Indeed, the link lines of the stanzas in section 8 of Pearl refer to the Virgin as "Quene of cortaysye." This phrase, Gordon's note explains, is equivalent to the theologians' Regina gratiae. ⁴⁸ To the characters in The Squire's and The Franklin's Tales, Courtesy is a secular concept in Romance; from a theological perspective, however, it is a symbol of divine Grace.

The folly of Aurelius's prayer to Apollo is suggested by its contrast with Chaucer's own prayer for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, An ABC.⁴⁹ Although a translation, "close but skilful," the poem seems to be a genuine reflection of Chaucer's devotion, which accordingly throws a lurid light on the ironies of Aurelius's pagan petition to satisfy an inordinate and illicit appetite:⁵⁰

Glorious mayde and mooder, which that nevereWere bitter, neither in erthe nor in see,But ful of swetnesse and of merci evere,Help that my Fader be not wroth with me.Spek thou, for I ne dar not him ysee,So have I doon in erthe, allas the while,That certes, but if thou my socour bee,To stink eterne he wole my gost exile.

(ll. 49–56)

The ground of Mary's intercession is the fact that Christ has written the "bille" of "acquitaunce" upon the Cross (ll. 59–60), and its effect will be that she will "bothe stinte al his grevaunce [God's indignation at our sin],/ And make oure foo to failen of his praye" (ll. 63–64).

The apparently otiose phrase "neither in erthe nor in see" reflects Mary's dominion as Queen of Earth and Star of the Sea (stella maris); elsewhere in the poem she is called "vicaire and maistresse/Of al this world, and eek governouresse/Of hevene" (ll. 140–42), and though she is not specifically called Queen of Hell, her influence in saving the petitioner from ending there is noted in line 56. The carol "Nowel" (the word is repeated six times in the refrain, requiring a rhyme in the fourth line of each of its six stanzas) has as one of the required rhymes "his moder emperesse of helle."⁵¹ Chaucer's reference to "Nowel" in The Franklin's Tale can hardly avoid evoking an association in the reader's mind with the Blessed Virgin.

Mary is compared to the sun (Phebus) in the fifteenth-century "aureate" lyric "O hie Emperice and queen celestiall," attributed in the manuscript to Chaucer:

ffor rycht as phebus with his bemys brychtIlluminate all this erd In longitude,Rycht so ʒour grace, ʒour beautee, and ʒour mychtAnournyt all this warld in latitude.⁵²

However high he whirls his chariot, Apollo's bright beams lack the penetration of Mary's grace and beauty.

Help from this source is both necessary and effective. In a pagan universe it must either come from the self-confident endeavors of a hero striving with whatever means are at his disposal to overcome great and sometimes insurmountable obstacles or not come at all for the helpless individual facing inevitable defeat. Algarsyf, one imagines, would be a hero of the former type;⁵³ Aurelius certainly exemplifies the latter. Neither Apollo, his horse, his brother, nor, in the end, the magician can really help him. He is seeking the wrong thing: a forbidden and therefore, ideally, unattainable lady.

True help might be obtained from the one Lady who is always approachable. So Custance in The Man of Law's Tale, facing execution, prays to God and Mary for "socour" (II [B] 640–44). The core of the Book of Hours was the Hours of the Virgin, a collection of prayers to be offered to the Blessed Virgin Mary at each of the canonical hours of the day. Accompanying a miniature of the events of the life of Mary would be the words "Deus in adiutorium meum intende. Domine ad adiuuandum me festina" (the opening lines of Psalm 69 [EVV 70]). Over and over again the devout religious would repeat them, reading his or her Book of Hours at matins, lauds, prime, tierce, sext, none, vespers, and compline.⁵⁴ The Man of Law's Tale demonstrates Chaucer's trust in the efficacy of such prayers: "Thus kan Oure Lady bryngen out of wo/Woful Custance, and many another mo" (II [B] 977–78). This resource is not available to the characters in The Franklin's Tale, or Dorigen might have cheerfully commended Arveragus to the same "Stella maris" who protected Custance in her drifting boat. However, the Grace that came through Mary underlies the moral optimism informing the happy ending that their mutual generosity ensures.⁵⁵

The first of the "Five joys of Mary" was the Annunciation. Widely represented in medieval art, music, and architecture and celebrated at one of the four great Marian feasts (the others being Purification, Assumption, and Nativity), it "embodies the central doctrine et homo factus est."⁵⁶ The fact that "the Word was made flesh" (John 1:14) was elaborated into a tradition that Mary conceived through the ear when she listened to the Angelic salutation. Chaucer hints at this idea in the ABC: "the Holi Gost thee soughte/Whan Gabrielles vois cam to thin ere" (ll. 114–15). The allusion is clearer in The Siege of Jerusalem: "Without hosebondes helpe saue þe holy goste/A kyng & a knaue child ʒo conceyued at ere" (ll. 103–4);⁵⁷ and "A salutacioun to vre lady" in the Vernon MS is even more specific: "Blessed be, ladi, þy Right Ere:/Þe holygost, he liht in þere,/fflesch and Blod to take" (ll. 217–22).⁵⁸

A miniature of the Annunciation in the Bolton Hours shows a dove and a homunculus flying down a beam of light toward the head of the Virgin, on her right hand side, while she listens to a kneeling angel delivering the salutation, and the fingers of God are extended above them in blessing (Figure 1). Thus the involvement of the Trinity in the Conception is represented.

Fig. 1.

York Minster Archive MS Add 2, f. 35v. (England, fifteenth century). Reproduced by kind permission of York Minster from the CD Images of Salvation: The Story of the Bible Through Medieval Art, gen. ed. Dee Dyas, Christianity and Culture (York: University of York, 2004).

Further examples are adduced by John Friedman, who discusses Nicholas's seduction of Alison in The Miller's Tale as a parody of the Annunciation and reproduces from the visual arts a number of Annunciation scenes of a kind with which Chaucer would doubtless have been familiar.⁵⁹ All the similarities Friedman mentions between Nicholas and Gabriel, such as their physical attractiveness and their musical and verbal ability, apply equally well to Aurelius, except, of course, that Aurelius is not successful. Chaucer was doubtless familiar, also, with parodies of the Annunciation, wherein a demon magically disguised as Gabriel attempts to seduce women. Joseph, especially in the miracle plays, which Chaucer certainly knew, concludes that somebody pretending to be an angel had duped Mary into having relations with him. It is possible that a similar fear underlies Arveragus's question, "Is ther oght elles, Dorigen, but this?" (l. 1469). He means, I take it, Are you telling me that you have already given yourself to Aurelius?⁶⁰ He then, like Joseph, accepts the situation but wants the affair kept secret. It is at least as easy to see allusions to the Annunciation and its consequences in The Franklin's Tale as it is to see a parody of it in The Miller's Tale.

Aurelius's two speeches to Dorigen meet a response quite opposite to Mary's reception of the Angelic salutation, for they bring her anything but joy. In his first speech (ll. 967–78), Aurelius asks Dorigen to take pity on his love pangs, which she indignantly refuses to do but then in fun sets what seems to both of them an impossible condition. Instead of "ave gratia plena" (Hail, Mary, full of grace [Luke 1:28]), Aurelius despairingly asks, "Is ther noon oother grace in yow?" (l. 999). On the second occasion he "saluwe[th]" her (l. 1310) with the astounding news that the rocks have been removed and reminds her that she owes it to her own gentility to keep her promise. He appeals to her grace rather than claiming his right, in a courtly counterpart to the religious doctrine, based on Psalm 144:9 (EVV 145), that God's mercy exceeds his right.⁶¹ But Aurelius's appeal is disingenuous, because an enforced favor is no favor at all. In fact he is elevating right above mercy, for believing him to be in the right Dorigen cannot, as a noble lady committed to the courtly code of "trouthe," break her word, even though keeping it will nullify her marital promise to her husband and so perpetuate the separation that the removal of the rocks was designed to prevent.⁶² Her dismay follows the realization that she should never have listened to Aurelius in the first place.

In the season when lusty men joyously proclaim "Nowel," despairing Dorigen contemplates suicide. Her complaint (ll. 1354–1456), in which she blames Fortune for the consequences of her own folly, is both psychologically intelligible and comically indecisive and yet, Gerald Morgan argues, morally serious.⁶³ Unlike Hamlet, she seems unaware that the Everlasting has fixed his canon'gainst self-slaughter. But while claiming to prefer death rather than dishonor, she has no more intention of acting than if she had been a character in The Squire's Tale. She spins out her list of suicidal predecessors, which Chaucer derived from Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum, until Arveragus returns and she can confess her dilemma to him. She does not think to pray to God, as she did when she wanted the rocks removed, but names Him only in an imprecation on the thirty tyrants. However, in response to her husband's "freendly" question, she does call on Him to witness that she has told the truth and that her plight is "to [too] muche, and [if ] it were Goddes wille" (l. 1471). Fortune might conceivably have landed her in such a pickle, but surely God could not have wanted this to happen to her? Arveragus can only bid her trust to God's goodness: do what is right, and all may yet be well. One might say that a passage beginning in pagan despair has culminated (almost) in Christian hope.

Almost, for the Franklin's characters are still pagans. Mary listened and obeyed (Luke 1:38), but what was truly important about the Angelic salutation was that the divine promise came true and that the One promised was Truth Himself (John 14:6). Dorigen was deceived by a lie: "But wel I woot the rokkes been aweye" (l. 1338); and Arveragus's courtly but dangerously literalistic conception of "trouthe," "the hyeste thyng that man may kepe" (l. 1479), entailed complicity in the "untrouthe" of his wife.⁶⁴ He was talking in purely chivalric terms of loyalty to the principles of knighthood. But in Christian terms "trouthe" refers to God Himself. As Sir Francis Bacon famously remarked, "What is truth? Said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer."⁶⁵ Had he stayed, he might have discovered that his question, in the Vulgate "Quid est veritas?" answered itself: according to the famous anagram, it turns into "Est Vir qui adest." The lusty cry of "Nowel" in the tale is a salutary reminder, for it implies salvation, of the coming of Christ, as announced by the angel and welcomed by Mary.

V

One final point may be made to conclude my argument that the narrative trajectory of fragment 5 culminates in a Christian outlook. Who was the most "fre"? Everyone, or no one? Neither—the only possible answer is God. The Eternal One reveals Himself in temporal history. The Franklin's pointed and rather ludicrous insistence on two years as the period of Aurelius's infatuation deliberately marks his tale as one in which time counts in a way it does not in The Squire's Tale. That interminable tale is marked not by progress but by circularity, the recurrence of the seasons and the day, a kind of temporal stasis in which action is indefinitely postponed. The Franklin's Tale in contrast moves to an end envisaged at the beginning, the resolution of the conflict occasioned by Dorigen's rash promise, itself a consequence of the separate roles she and Arveragus have agreed on in their peculiar marriage contract.⁶⁶ This conflict reaches its climax in the apparent sinking of the rocks off the coast of Brittany.

The seasonal circularity of The Squire's Tale is in keeping with its pagan milieu; Christianity in contrast is a historical religion, moving from a beginning (Creation) to a predetermined end (Doomsday) via a historical climax (the Crucifixion). It is this linear progress that informs The Franklin's Tale, and if the rocks disappear soon after the season when "'Nowel' crieth every lusty man," it may be considered that the magician's illusion coincides, on January 6, with Epiphany, or in Latin Manifestatio Christi, the commemoration of that most significant and nonillusory event, the Incarnation.

God is "mooste fre" in His dispensation of grace to undeserving humanity. In a perceptive essay arguing that the happy ending of The Franklin's Tale violates moral expectations, R. D. Eaton points out that the sensual and materialistic characters seem to be forgiven far too easily, since their intentions and behavior are potentially so disastrous.⁶⁷ But the Divine generosity is lavish of unmerited grace. Justice is not overlooked but, rather, subsumed in God's mercy: "For gentil mercy oghte to passen right."⁶⁸

The Franklin's Tale is a comic romance set in a pagan world, but as a response to The Squire's Tale it moves beyond that world to suggest, in time, the timeless truths of the faith that preserves the foolish characters in spite of themselves, for what impels them is not Apollo's chariot but, rather, in Dante's words, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.