The Squire as Story-Teller
- The Squire as Story-Teller
D. A. Pearsall
Lecturer in English, King’s College, University of London; editor of The Floure and the Leafe and the Assembly of Ladies (1962)
NOTES
1. “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” MP, IX (1911–12), 457; Chaucer and his Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1915), 204. There is no mention of the tale, for instance, in such an important book as D. W. Robertson’s A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, 1963), and E. Talbot Donaldson (to whose interpretative technique this paper is much indebted) dismisses the tale very briefly in Chaucer’s Poetry: an Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York, 1958) as “the fragment of a very respectable aristocratic romance, which few readers will wish longer” (923). Two very useful articles should, however, be mentioned: Gardiner Stillwell, “Chaucer in Tartary,” RES, XXIV (1948), 177–88, and Marie Neville, “The Function of the Squire’s Tale in the Canterbury Scheme,” JEGP, L (1951), 167–79.
2. Canterbury Tales, V. 362. All references and quotations are from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).
3. See A. C. Cawley, “Chaucer’s Summoner, the Friar’s Summoner, and the Friar’s Tale,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society (Literary and Historical Section), VIII (1957), 173–80; Earle Birney, “After his Ymage—the Central Ironies of the Friar’s Tale,” Med. St., XXI (1959), 17–35; Paul E. Beichner, “Baiting the Summoner,” MLQ, XXII (1961), 367–76; Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer, pp. 266–9; Earle Birney, “Structural Irony within the Summoner’s Tale,” Anglia, LXXVIII (1960), 204–18.
4. R. M. Jordan, in “The Non-Dramatic Disunity of the Merchant’s Tale,” PMLA, LXXVIII (1963), 293–9, informs us that the “so called dramatic principle” as structure in the Canterbury Tales is now vieux jeu and has been superseded by “an aesthetic principle which we are just beginning to understand” (298), but there may be excuse for another methodological exercise in the old vein to see if it is not completely worked out.
5. See Ruth Nevo, “Chaucer; Motive and Mask in the General Prologue,” MLR, LVIII (1963), 1–9. The analysis of materialistic values in the tales of the Merchant and the Shipman is also very acute.
6. These formulae in the Squire’s Tale are discussed, from different points of view, by Gardiner Stillwell, in the article cited above, and by R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Austin, Texas, 1955), 177–9. For general discussion of the modesty topos, see E. R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern, 1948), translated (by W. R. Trask) as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), 83–5, 132–3, 411–12; also my edition of The Floure and the Leafe and the Assembly of Ladies (Nelson’s Medieval and Renaissance Library, 1962), 68–71, 152.
7. V. 716–27. Compare the Franklin’s treatment of astronomical periphrasis, V. 1018.
8. For discussion of these passages in relation to the sentence of the tales, see D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer, 366–7.
9. This is how the Squire is described in the General Prologue (I. 92).
10. Compare the Franklin’s previously expressed contempt for judicial astrology as “nat worth a flye” (V. 1132).
11. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 721, note to line 667.
12. Haldeen Braddy, “The Genre of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale,” JEGP, XLI (1942), 279–90 (289).
13. Developed from the suggestion of Nevill Coghill, in The Poet Chaucer (London, 1949), that “the Squire, gathering himself for an almost endless recital, is choked by the praises of the Franklin” (123).
14. “The young man was not to be expected, after all, to win the Canterbury competition, but had as it were ‘passed’ in English,” Raymond Preston, Chaucer (London and New York, 1952), 273.
