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7. Spenser’s Muiopotmos and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale Most readers would probably agree with the editors of the Spenser Variorum that ‘‘in writing Muiopotmos[: or The Fate of the Butterflie] Spenser could hardly have been unconscious of Chaucer’s mock-heroic poems, but that he was not engaged in a studied imitation of them.’’1 As evidenced in Muiopotmos , Spenser’s specific interest in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale lies somewhere between sustained allusion and incidental reminiscence; it is persistent but elusive. The relationship between these poems includes but extends beyond general similarities of genre, theme, and plot and the odd detail, such as the name of Clarion, which is likely motivated by that of Chauntecleer.2 Precisely because the two poems are similar in general ways, their marked differences serve to define their artistic means and moral visions. For a prime example, Spenser significantly varies Chaucer’s conspicuous use of rhetoric in relation to the ideologically sensitive themes of fortune and free will. Indeed , we might say of Muiopotmos, as has been said of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, that ‘‘the real hero of the poem is rhetoric,’’ yet it is a different type of rhetoric, used for different reasons and with tellingly different effects.3 When set beside Muiopotmos, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale illuminates the characteristics that make Spenser’s poem a Renaissance and, more exactly, a Reformation work. Calvinist thought informs the meaning of Spenser’s poem, distinguishing it from Chaucer’s, even while casting in suggestive relief the nature of his relation to Chaucer and the uses he made of Chaucer’s work. In the Prologue of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Harry Bailly scorns the Monk’s fatalistic stories, which, he remarks, are ‘‘nat worth a boterflye’’ (3980). He measures the Monk’s fatalism by a butterfly; in Muiopotmos, a butterfly’s fate becomes the ambivalent measure of a human being’s.  The Nun’s Priest’s Tale offers a world simultaneously sober and comic, cheerful despite its threats, and despite its pitfalls wonderfully secure.4 In it, the distinctions between human and animal are constant and definite; in the 109 110 Reading the Allegorical Intertext figure of Chauntecleer we might be aware of a man’s ‘‘chicken nature,’’ of his feathered wives and feathery rhetoric, of his pride and weakness, but we are never allowed to lose sight of the ridiculous and genuinely risible fact that Chauntecleer is a rooster. The tone of Chaucer’s Tale never falters; it instructs and alerts but does not puzzle or threaten us. We would not say after reading this Tale, ‘‘We are as chickens to the gods; they pluck us for their sport.’’ From the outset of The Tale, a moral norm is present in the life of the simple widow, by contrast a reminder both of the Wife of Bath and of the Prioress (4014–16, 4024–36). The villainous fox who lurks in a ‘‘bed of wortes’’ (herbs, cabbages) and the tumultuous hue and cry raised at his heels after he seizes Chauntecleer are tonal corollaries of this norm. The farcical chase of ‘‘daun Russell’’ near the end of the Tale engages the entire natural world in an effort to rescue a chicken, or still more ironically, in headlong pursuit of a fowl (Middle English ‘‘foul’’) and a fox. Here the ‘‘verray hogges ’’ follow hard after the suggestively (not to say, bawdily) named Malkin, and a reference to peasant rebellion follows—and could only follow— directly after a flash of parodic wit playing on Vergil’s use of apian imagery:5 The gees for feere flowen over the trees; Out of the hyve cam the swarm of bees. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille. (4581–85) In this mock epic chorus from ‘‘Old MacDonald,’’ now animated for adults, the fox has real teeth, but there is really no chance of his using them with finality: ‘‘Nowe, goode men, I prey yow herkneth alle: / Lo, how Fortune turneth sodeynly / The hope and pryde eek of hir enemy!’’ (4592–94). Reliably , fortune sides with our rooster-protagonist. The fox serves as a correlative to Chauntecleer’s pride and in this way as an extension of it. Dan Russell comes uninvited, but without Chauntecleer ’s active cooperation, his flattery would be ineffectual. Chauntecleer’s problem lies less in oversight than in willful blindness...

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