Changing Chaucer

The Biennial Chaucer Lecture Changing Chaucer Richard Firth Green Ohio State University Let me begin by apologizing for the somewhat gnomic quality of my title. It’s the result of a scholarly subterfuge I suppose most of us have practiced at one time or another: the trick of being noncommittal when asked to provide the title for a paper we’re still months away from writing. If, last January, I was pretty sure I wanted to talk to you today about forms of metamorphosis in Chaucer, I was still unsure whether to choose The Franklin’s Tale or The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale as my primary text. The first, with its shapeshifting black rocks, would, I felt, be an appropriate choice for a talk in Boulder, Colorado, though I discovered to my chagrin not only that Chaucer himself never uses the word ‘‘boulder,’’ but that in Middle English it invariably denotes something we would probably refer to as a cobblestone, certainly nothing that could possibly be construed as a potential hazard to coastal shipping . The alchemical transformations of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, then, were looking like the better bet as the subject for a talk in a city that was, after all, founded on a gold rush, when I was struck by line 751. It offered me, I suddenly realized, the opportunity to move beyond alchemy itself into a wider consideration of Chaucerian metamorphosis. Let me read it to you in its immediate context: Whan we been there as we shul exercise Oure elvysshe craft, we semen wonder wise, Oure termes been so clergial and so queynte. (VIII [G]:750–52)1 I might equally well have stumbled across line 842 from the same tale: Nay, nay, God woot, al be he monk or frere, Preest or chanoun, or any oother wyght, 1 All Chaucer references are to The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., ed. L. D. Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 27 ................. 10286$ $CH2 11-01-10 13:53:02 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Though he sitte at his book bothe day and nyght In lernying of this elvysshe nyce loore, Al is in veyn, and parde, muchel moore. (VIII [G]:839–43) The key word shared by both these passages is, of course, elvysshe: alchemy is an elvish calling and the alchemist’s expertise is elvish. Now Chaucer famously describes himself as elvish in the prologue to Sir Thopas , and that passage has garnered a certain amount of critical attention (from John Burrow among others),2 but these two appearances of the word have excited far less comment. Beth Robertson, for instance, in her recent piece on Constance’s ‘‘elvyssh’’ power, alludes to the Thopas prologue but not the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.3 Most critics, if they notice the lines at all, seem to believe that elvysshe is merely a synonym for ‘‘devilish,’’4 though Lee Patterson and Lisa Kiser are notable exceptions. Patterson calls elvysshe a ‘‘loaded’’ term that draws attention to ‘‘the analogy between the poet and his alchemical yeoman’’ (an important insight, though not one I shall be exploring this afternoon);5 for Kiser, it suggests ‘‘the ease with which people can be led to believe in illusion as if it were truth’’ (for my immediate purposes, a more promising line of thought).6 Now, for some reason modern editors have been uncomfortable with the Canon’s Yeoman’s unequivocal statement that the alchemist’s expertise is an elvish one. They evidently don’t want to believe that he says what he quite patently does say. Skeat, substituting connotation for denotation , glosses both occurrences of elvysshe as ‘‘mysterious (but used in the sense of foolish)’’;7 Robinson glosses the second only as ‘‘strange 2 ‘‘Elvish Chaucer,’’ in The Endless Knot: Essays in Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff, ed. M. Teresa Tavoramina and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995): 105–11. 3 ‘‘The ‘Elvysshe’ Power of Constance,’’ SAC 23 (2001): p. 178. 4 I.e., Bruce A. Rosenberg, ‘‘Swindling Alchemist, Antichrist,’’ Centennial Review 6 (1962): p. 577. 5 ‘‘Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self,’’ SAC 15 (1993): p...