Structure and Intention in the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales

STRUCTURE AND INTENTION IN THE FIRST FRAGMENT OF THE CANTERBURY TALES WILLIAM C. STOKOE, JR. N OT the least attraction of Professor Wilson's recent interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale appearing in these pages is his opening statement : "The Knight's Tale is a masterpiece.'" Very few students of Chaucer would take exception to it, and furthermore it expresses admirably the attitude of scholars who have recently published studies of that tale. There has long been agreement that The Canterbury Tales is a masterpiece, and the General Prologue is likewise so regarded. But following it and the Knight's Tale without a breakin fact with the closest kind of linkage Chaucer used- are the Miller's Prologue and Tale, the Reeve's Prologue and Tale, the Cook's Prologue, and fifty-seven lines of the Cook's unfinished tale. This 4422-line group of tales and links (designated Fragment I by Professor Robinson whose text I am using) is more than a repository for one or two masterpieces: it is a masterpiece itself. As there is no need to press the claims of the General Prologue or the Knight's Tale, much of what follows will be a discussion of the other parts of Fragment I, though not with the purpose of declaring them individually masterpieces. The aim is to discover the artistic integrity of the group as a whole. Professor William Frost in another recent interpretation of the Knight's Tale' stops just short of a similar purpose. To support his interpretation he cites briefly several features of the Miller's Tale. The procedure here, however, will not be to argue for one or another interpretation of the Knight's Tale by reference to other tales but to discover how carefully Chaucer has interconnected all the parts of the group and to demonstrate if possible how in this group as in any work with a unified theme the whole transcends the sum of the parts. I Professor Frost calls the Miller's Tale "the principal external means by which the Knight's Tale is made dramatic and given a certain artistic distance both from the reader and from the poet of the Canterbury Tales" (p. 304). I should agree were I looking as he 1H. S. Wilson, uThe Knight's Tale and the Teseida Again," UniveTsity of Toronto Quarterly, XVIII, Jan" 1949, 131. 2William Frost, "An Interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale," Review of English Studies, XXV, Oct., 1949, 289-304. 120 Vol. XXI, no. 2, Jan., 1952 THE CANTERBURY TALES, FIRST FRAGMENT 121 was only at the Knight's Tale in its immediate context; but looking at the first group of tales as a whole, one is committed to the principle that one part is as important as another to the whole, at least until a lack of artistic unity is demonstrated and one part emerges as more worthy of attention than its complete context. Chaucer's method of uniting The Canterbury Tales is dramatic, particularly in Fragment I, and has been recognized and praised often for that quality. In the Miller's Prologue, for instance, there is a sharp clash between Robin Miller and Osewold the Reeve. There is also an exchange of strong language between the Miller and the Host. This is serious because it threatens the existence of the agreement by which the pilgrims are bound under the Host's rule, but it goes deeper. The Miller insists profanely on telling his tale for a reason sufficiently strong to overbalance the risk of incurring the Host's penalty. He is about to do more than give a picture of marriage which will contrast with that the Knight paints in lines 3101 to 3106.' He has listened to the Knight's whole tale with the strongest interest, not a sympathetic interest but the sharper attention of "a janglere and a goliardeys" (I. 560) who will contend for the prize in a contest of story-telling. Thus in a study of the unity of Fragment I it is important to know his interpretation of the Knight's Tale-not the interpretation of Chaucer's courtly or literary acquaintances nor that educed hy the best...