“Man in the Middle”: Art and Religion in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale

THE BIENNIAL CHAUCER LECTURE 1988 The New Chaucer Society Sixth International Congress August 9-11, 1988 The University of British Columbia VANCOUVER "Man in the Middle": Art and Religion in Chaucer's Friar's Tale VA. Kolve University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles sOMETIIING VERY ODD h,s happened to The fum Pauline Aiken, "Vincent ofBeauvais and the Green Yeoman's Lecture on Demonology," SP 35 (1938):1-9, remains valuable; and a good deal of attention has been paid to the theological niceties of cursing. 23 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the mire, the horses and the hay. The image it brings to the mind's eye, imagining the scene, is resolutely literal. But the speech acts, full of affection, irritation, triumph, and joy, explicitly evoke that largertheologi­ cal landscape within which, for medieval man, all human activity is played out and ultimately judged. The rhetorical address is from the center to the margins, where real power resides: The cartere smoot, and cryde as he were wood, "Hayt, Brok! hayt, Scot! what spare ye for the stones? The feend," quod he, "yow fecche, body and bones .... The devel have al, bothe hors and cart and hey!" After a few thwacks on the horses' rumps he changes both the tone and the address of his language: "Heyt1 now," quod he, "therJhesu Crist yow blesse, And al his handwerk, bathe moore and Jesse! That was we! twight, myn owene !yard boy. I pray God save thee, and Seinte Loy1 Now is my cart out of the slow, pardee!" The lesson the devil draws from this is clear and succinct, no more nuanced here than in the analogues: "The earl spak oo thing, but he thoghte another." But the lesson Chaucer intended for the reader or listener surely goes beyond that. It is equivalent, I suggest, to the grand lesson of the Prologue to Piers Plowman, which creates in some 800 lines of rich, panoramic detail the portrait ofa "field full offolk"-bounded on one side by the Tower ofTruth, where God has his habitation, and on the other by the Dungeon of Falsehood, where the devil has his: heaven and hell imagined against the landscape ofthe Malvernhills.Themoralmeaningof that scene-an allegorical landscape withinwhich the whole action ofthe visio section of the poem takes place-is similar to that of the carter's troubles and ofBosch's worshipers ofhay. Men and women live, work, and play there as though the Tower and the Dungeon were unreal (italics added): A fair feeld ful of folk fond I per bitwene Of alle manere of men, J:,e meene and J:,e riche, Werchynge and wandrynge as pe worldaskep. 36 36 George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman: The B Vt?rsion (University of London: Athlone Press, 1975), pp. 227-28 (Prologue 17-19). 24 "MAN IN THE MIDDLE" The carter's parallel curse and blessing evoke as well the stage settings of medieval drama, as in those cycle plays whose pageant wagons or houses were spread out (in stationary performance) between heaven-tower and hell-mouth-those outer mansions establishing the cosmos and its moral coordinates, theological termini for everything that will occur between.37 The famous miniature byJean Fouquet that shows a saint's play in perfor­ mance (the martyrdom of Saint Apollonia) deploys scaffolds for actors and spectators alternating in a circle around the playing space, metaphysically defined by angels seated high on the left, their wings diaphanous and gilded, while hairy devils fill hell scaffold on the right, both above and below. 38 Morality plays staged "in the round" offered a no less insistent image of man in the middle, as figure 7 can make clear. A staging diagram appended to the text of The Castle of Perseverance (a play dated ca. 1400-25, its manuscript ca. 1440), it requires that a bed be made under the castle-tower in the middle of the circle. There "Mankind" will be born; there he will retreat, for a time, to a life of virtue; there he will die. His life (which constitutes the play's action) will move him here and there through­ out the surrounding space (the "place," orplatea), whose...