Religious Practice in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale: Rabbit and/or Duck?

Nothing in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale explicitly refers to fourteenth-century religious controversy. The tale is set in Asia, and in the past. This geographical and temporal dislocation, however, disguises only very thinly the extent to which the narrative is steeped in devotional issues greatly disputed by Chaucer's contemporaries. The tale manages to present both an orthodox, and a heterodox, account of religious practice. In so doing, it toys with the perceptions of the reader, rather like Jastrow's famous Duck-Rabbit illustration.¹ The observer of the duck-rabbit image produces either a duck or a rabbit, or alternates between the two; but nothing changes materially in the lines of the image itself. So too, in reading the lines of the verbal text of The Prioress's Tale, the duck of orthodoxy or the rabbit of heterodoxy are both present, depending on the interpretative presuppositions of the reader.² But while neither we, nor Chaucer's contemporary audience, can experience alternate readings at the same time, we can switch from one reading to another with increasing rapidity. As E. H. Gombrich argues, "We will also remember the rabbit when we see the duck."³ Polarity of interpretation shades into uncertainty of meaning; to the process of response, not to its summation.

It is exactly this phenomenon that Norman Rabkin explores in his essay on Henry V in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning. Audiences arriving for the first performance of Henry V in 1599 would have been unsure what to expect of the figure of Henry had they seen both 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV. From their knowledge of the first part, they would recall a broadly comic Hal, "potentially larger than his father, possessing the force that politics requires without the sacrifice of imagination and range that Bolingbroke has to pay." But if they had watched the second part, they would have seen "the study of an opportunist who has traded his humanity for his success, covering over the ruthlessness of the politician with the mere appearance of fellowship."⁴ Perhaps, if we were members of that 1599 audience, Rabkin argues, we hope that the new play will resolve our doubts, give us a single gestalt to replace the antithetical images before our mind's eye. "But instead, we are made to see a rabbit or duck . . . leaving the theatre at the end of the first performance, some members of the audience knew that they had seen a rabbit, others a duck. Still others, and I would suggest that they were Shakespeare's best audience, knew uneasily that they did not know what to think."⁵

Chaucer's Prioress's Tale poses a very similar problem of meaning dependent on the response of an audience to a work derived from material they already knew. But in this case, the audience's prior knowledge lay not in conflicting experiences of prequels to a new play, but in cultural knowledge of the values of liturgical practices and the keywords that describe them. What follows is not an intervention into The Prioress's Tale that simply poses a choice between an "orthodox" and a "Lollard" way of reading the poem. While I shall contend that the materials of the tale do present the potential for this interpretive polarity, my argument is more fundamentally concerned with the process of response: how the gestalt of previously acquired knowledge informs the reading of new phenomena; how in the case of The Prioress's Tale, the reconstruction of available cultural knowledge of social practice, most fundamentally its language, can help us to read the past in ways that the past might have recognized. I want to argue not so much for a particular reading of the tale as to show how the mode of narration and clusters of diction in The Prioress's Tale act as prompts for readers to interpret the poem depending on their prior cultural knowledge and values.

I make use here of a context of reception that is informed by the model of cultural linguistics based on...