Friendship, Association and Service in The Manciple’s Tale

Friendship, Association and Service in The Manciple’s Tale Stephanie Trigg University of Melbourne Like many of the tales told on the way to Canterbury, The Manciple’s Tale offers a closely observed meditation on power relationships . More precisely, I suggest that this tale is specifically concerned with the difficulties involved in performing a series of subordinate and overlapping roles in hierarchically organized structures: that is, the roles of courtier, servant, and poet. Like many other commentators, I read the tale as self-reflexive, though rather than finding an expression of purely poetic anxiety, I identify an anxiety that is primarily social, about how to speak—or write—in the context of courtly service or literary patronage. In my reading, the tale dramatizes, though it does not resolve , the question of when and how to speak to one’s superiors. But I also want to foreground the Tale’s thematic and moralizing concern with the question of friendship, to suggest that the idea of a relationship among equals provides a powerful counterpoint to the Manciple’s interest in the relationships between servant and master, and between courtier and lord. This counterpoint is almost always problematic, however: at what point, if ever, can the discourses of friendship overlap with those of service? And what are the social and political implications of such crossover? To summarize: I want to argue that the tale sets up two principal axes of relationship among men: a horizontal axis of friendship, or at least of homosocial identity; and a vertical axis of service. At the same time, the tale’s narrative works to confound that distinction. The resultant uncertainty dramatizes Chaucer’s own position as poet and servant. Like the Manciple perhaps, he too is writing, or telling stories, for both his superiors and his friends. Many recent critics foreground the self-reflexive aspects of this tale, in its context as the penultimate contribution to the storytelling context 325 ................. 10286$ CH13 11-01-10 13:54:39 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and as the ultimate narrative in the collection. It can easily be read as foregrounding the problem, even the mortal danger, of speech and truth-telling. On that reading, and in the context of a concern with master/servant relations, and with respect to the genre of etiological narrative, the fate of the crow constitutes a cautionary tale with the most profound consequences for courtiers. Thinking to please his master Phoebus, the crow says the wrong thing, and is both punished and dismissed from his lord’s service. And once we foreground the crow’s role as storyteller or as singer, his case is even more extreme: thinking to please his patron, the crow sings the wrong song, and is not only punished and dismissed, but loses his poetic gift. The fact that this gift was bestowed on him by his master, the god of music, has the dramatic effect of debasing him further. As the master raised him up and bound him to service in the cage, so he can dismiss him and release him, make him not only unemployed but unemployable. In considering this relationship, we must revisit one of the most suggestive essays on the Manciple’s Tale, written by Louise Fradenburg in 1985. In this essay Fradenburg uses Lacanian theories of subjectivity-inprocess to develop an argument about late medieval courts as ‘‘historical spaces produced by, and producing, certain kinds of relationship between certain types of subjects and others.’’1 In this context, there is no ‘‘given’’ kind of discourse or subjectivity at court. Rather, the mode of master, like the mode of servant, is continually being negotiated, either informally, in the day-to-day encounters of the household, or more formally , in the rhetorical or narrative productions of the court poet. Fradenburg is principally concerned with psychoanalytic relations and linguistic structures, but if we insist on thickening our sense of the sociohistorical frame of the tale, we can see how much more acute the situation becomes in a context where the vernacular is in process of becoming an acceptable medium for court poetry and court discourse, in a period of radical social change and class mobility. If...