The Conclusion of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale: Readings and (MIS)Readings

In the view of many readers, over many centuries, the concluding lines of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale (G, 1428-81) convey a tone different from that found in the preceding 874 lines, and the difference may set these lines apart from the obvious satirical purposes of the tale. Though for the most part unaware that these lines had been an object of particular interest in earlier times, twentieth-century critics have given much attention to them. Early in the century these critics attempted to identify the sources of the lines more precisely and to discover what Chaucer's treatment of the sources revealed about the lines and their relation to his satirical purposes and intentions. In the latter half of the century, when a reading of Chaucer as a conservative and orthodox thinker was emerging, critics took pains to emphasize that the lines sustain or reinforce the satirical tone of the tale.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the lengthy history of the reading and (mis)reading of these lines, from the late fifteenth century to the present, and to explore the remarkable shift in the readings over this period. While there have been dissident voices both then and now, recent readings of these lines are, by and large, a complete reversal of the reading of them in late medieval and early modern times. It is both interesting and ironic to observe how, in the history of these readings, past and present readers have found assurances in these lines for the views of alchemy that have prevailed in their own worlds. As we shall see, the sharp divide between the contrasting readings of these lines is the eighteenth-century, when the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment led to a repudiation of alchemy.

The Early View

In a valuable 1984 study of Chaucer's reputation among students of alchemy in early modern England, Robert Schuler called attention to the independent circulation of the final lines of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale in five sixteenth-century manuscript anthologies of alchemical writings. Manuscripts of this kind exist in some abundance, having been assembled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for and, in many cases, by students of alchemy, obviously to permit extended study of the numerous treatises contained in each book. Of those that have been examined and catalogued, five contain some portion of lines 1426-81 of the tale, as Schuler has shown, all of them in the Sloane Collection at the British Library (MSS. 320, 1723, 1092, 1098, 3580B). ¹ Until the many other anthologies of this kind are thoroughly examined and cataloged, we cannot be sure that all the extant copies are now known. Even so, these five anthologies provide sufficient basis for concluding that alchemists in early modern England thought Chaucer's lines deserved reading in conjunction with other alchemical writings from a variety of sources. As Schuler has established and as is apparent from Chaucerian pseudoepigrapha found in another sixteenth-century alchemical anthology, ² they regarded Chaucer as a fellow-student of the art (or science).

That point is especially clear when we examine the textual condition of these five excerpts. In his otherwise thorough and insightful study Schuler did not examine the nature of these texts in order to determine the sources from which they were copied. As a result of not having explored this question and, as well, of putting too little credence in his own evidence, Schuler ventured a dubious conclusion. Rather than indicating that sixteenth-century alchemist-scribes may have thought them "a distinct alchemical poem" (307), as Schuler suggests possible, the sources from which they took these lines, in conjunction with other evidence, attest that the scribes were fully aware that they were copying an excerpt from the Canon's Yeoman's Tale. This conclusion, which I shall demonstrate in detail in a moment, indicates that from an...