The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts

The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts Anne Middleton University of California, Berkeley TCLERK'S TAU ofG,iselda h,s become in modem times pe,haps The Canterbury Tales' supreme test ofits readers' interpretative powers. It taxes more than any other their capacities to re-enter with sympathy and informed understanding the values and ideals of an age insistently different from their own: it insists on its "otherness" from all our habits ofreading, our customs ofapproval, and our wishes for comfort. Though critics differ widely as to which course ofdiscipline will best enable us to enter the tale as properly informed readers, nearly all are agreed that we must give up something-some modern prejudice, or skepticism or ignorance or indifference, toward a medieval trait or habit of thought. Acts ofinterpretation commonly set about a dual course ofinstruction to take us across the chasm: to wean us away from that something which is ours, and to supply us with something "medieval," information we did not know or are unable to apply, to take its place. We are, most of us, willing to undertake this discipline because the tale is plainly worth it: it fascinates and strangely delights even those who, freighted with that needless burden of modernity, are at the same time distressed by it. That same delight and fascination, and the same urgent critical discussion about what the tale asks ofus, and what it asks us to renounce, has, however, been an inextricable part of the literary history of the tale since the fourteenth century. Every reader from Petrarch on has been forced by it to confront some "modernity" in himself-the habits or values he holds as a reader-that must be ex­ plained. For many ofthese readers, the value and pleasure ofthe tale lies precisely in thatdifferenceor distance from us: the effort required to close that distance, though variously described, seems to reveal the moral beauty and the emotional benefit of the fable. For them, the act of 121 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER interpretation reveals not only its "sentence," but its "solas." It is not, therefore, the tale itself, but several fourteenth-century efforts to give it a context for enjoyment and use, that is the main concern of this essay. The exercise is not an attempt to supply previously missing data toward a historically accurate interpretation, a correct reconstruc­ tion of its meaning in the fourteenth century-even if such a reading were possible: most of the information I shall survey has been available to Chaucerians since Severs' masterfully thorough account ofthe sources of the tale.1 It is, rather, an effort to trace several medieval acts of literary criticism which surround the story, and became in Chaucer's hands part of the Clerk's contribution to the Canterbury game. In creating the Clerk's fastidiously "obeisant" response to Harry Bailly's invitation to "pley," Chaucer invites us to examine literary questions closely analo­ gous to the moral and spiritual challenge issued by the tale itself. The story asks us to find the meaning and serious use to us of Griselda's patient suffering; the act and circumstances of telling it raise, for Chaucer and all antecedent writers of the tale, the equally urgent critical issue-central to Chaucer's ruminations on his art throughout his poetic career-ofhow woe can be delightful, how "ernestful matere" becomes, through "art poetical," an object of pleasure as well as use. The Clerk's performance is rivalled only by the Nun's Priest's as the most "literary" offering on the pilgrimage, the most thoroughly infused with play upon the very terms of literary value by which it may be enjoyed. It is those terms and canons of value, rather than the narrative sources which they sustain, that are the subject of this essay. Chaucer's sources for The Clerk's Tale have long been known: he used both Petrarch's Latin prose version of Boccaccio's final tale in the Decameron, and at least one French adaptation of the Petrarch text, in composing the story. Since Severs' concern was to establish in detail the relations between the versions of the narrative, he offers little analysis...