English
M.A. Conference Paper
Supervisor:
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
2nd
Department Reader: John Tucker
Outside
Member: Lloyd Howard
April 7
2003
Wrestling
for the Ram: Competition and Feedback in Sir Thopas and The Canterbury Tales
Baba
Brinkman
0135748
The Canterbury Tales is a series of diverse narratives framed within the
context of two organizing principles: a pilgrimage and a competition. The
competition is established in the General Prologue, and each of the twenty-four tales that make up the
bulk of the text is in effect an entry. The competition is most conspicuous in
the frame narrative, consisting of the introductions, prologues, and epilogues
to the tales, as the pilgrims offer comments in the form of criticism or
support for each speaker's entry. The guidelines that determine one's standing
in the competition, however, are never clearly explained; they emerge instead
from the feedback offered by the pilgrim audience. The purpose of this essay
will be to explore the significance of competition and feedback in The
Canterbury Tales, by applying
historical evidence of literary competition in the fourteenth century to a
discussion of the frame narrative, especially the prologue and epilogue to
Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas. This
may reveal the extent to which Chaucer's competing pilgrims reflect or parody
his experience of poets competing under the patronage system of Medieval
England.
In his initial description of the protagonist
of the ill-fated Tale of Sir Thopas,
Chaucer includes, among many mock-romantic(1) embellishments, an interesting
detail: "Of wrastlyng was ther noon his peer, / ther any ram shal
stonde"(740).(2) Drawing attention to Sir Thopas' prowess at wrestling is
no more or less peculiar a gesture than the descriptions offered earlier in the
Tale of his "semely
nose"(729) and his origins "at Poperyng"(720),(2) yet Chaucer
and I, ostensibly, have a reason to do so. As Larry D. Benson points out,
"by Chaucer's time, wrestling was not considered a knightly
sport,"(919) and the only other reference to it in the Canterbury Tales occurs in the description of the Miller in the General
Prologue, "At wrastlyng he would
have alwey the ram"(548). Chaucer is thus aligning Sir Thopas--or maligning
him--with the churlish Miller, and undermining his status as a knight. To read
this reference allegorically, I could point out that the entire Canterbury
Tales is framed as a kind of literary
wrestling for the ram, with the competitors substituting their tales for brawn
and a free supper for their prize instead of the traditional sheep. I could
then suggest a whole network of implications regarding Chaucer's opinion of
knights and churls and their relative prospects when wrestling in literary
and/or physical contests. (4) Such allegorical readings of Sir
Thopas, however, often cause more
confusion than they resolve. Some critics, such as Lee Patterson and George
Williams, have attempted to offer sincere arguments based on the content of Sir Thopas, which by most accounts is a parody, and I mention them only as
examples of the thin ice I hope to avoid skating.(5) Although Chaucer may have
had any number of readings in mind, his reference to wrestling for the ram was
probably just another instance of ironic mock-praise of Sir Thopas, ubiquitous
in the Tale.(6) Like Seth Lerer, I
can only make sense of the Tale of Sir Thopas as "a literary text whose meaning inheres not in
the details of its narrative or characterizations but instead in the simple
fact of its existence [in the Canterbury Tales]…We make its meaning pedant on the externals of
literary drama or generic environment"(95
added emphasis).
Much
has already been said of the literary drama and generic environment of Sir
Thopas. The relatively complex interspersal
of forms surrounding the Tale--the
prologue in rhyme royal, the Tale
itself in tetrameter tail-rhyme stanzas, the Thopas/Melibee link in pentameter couplets (including a reference to
"geeste" or alliteration), and the Tale of Melibee in prose--has understandably drawn critical attention
towards the question of Sir Thopas'
formal difference within the Canterbury
Tales.(7) It is usually discussed in
the context of Chaucer's lifelong evolution as a poet experimenting with
different forms derived from different traditions. This has been the subject of
a number of studies already, and I am indebted to Lee Patterson and Alan
Gaylord for their incisive inquiries. Specifically, Gaylord's article,
"The Moment of Sir Thopas"
locates the poem precisely in relation to Chaucer's other work, and his
pioneering role in the creation of a national literature:
By concentrating on
its dramatized idea of language, we will arrive at a point where we may
reformulate some questions about the literary English Chaucer was inventing… a
proper understanding of the moment of Sir Thopas--its context in Fragment VII, in the Tales, and in Chaucer's poetic career--can serve to
re-direct us to his linguistic and stylistic behavior in all that he wrote.
(312)
This focus on Chaucer's interior
"linguistic and stylistic behaviour" must be supplemented by an
awareness of the social and historical context of poetry's production and
distribution in Chaucer's time. Furthermore, just as the Canterbury Tales must be read in the context of Chaucer's long career
as a poet, Sir Thopas can only be
understood in relation to the Tales
as a whole, which dramatizes what Peggy Knapp calls "a competing
community"(1). The storytelling competition established at the beginning
of the Canterbury Tales has also
been the subject of some limited critical speculation.(8) Derek Pearsall
rightly observes the prominence of the competition in comparison to the other
framing device, the pilgrimage:
It might be argued
that in planning to bring the pilgrims back to Southwark, and in making the
point of their journey the completion of the tale-telling competition and the
awarding of the prize to the winner, Chaucer has relegated the religious
pilgrimage to a secondary role. (240)
Indeed, the religious pilgrimage seems
conspicuously understated throughout the bulk of the Canterbury Tales, especially in light of the competitive antagonisms
dramatized at every turn throughout the frame narrative. In a general sense,
Katherine Gittes points out that "using a storytelling contest as a device
to generate stories is reminiscent of other frame narratives like the Seven
Sages, which uses stories as part of
a debate"(121). What I am interested in, however, is not Chaucer's use of
a storytelling competition as a device simply to generate stories, but as a
device to draw attention to formal and thematic differences between the stories
generated, and the range of audience response to these differences.
Furthermore, the presence of a prize, "a soper at oure aller cost"(GP
799),(9) however remote from the bulk of the text, raises questions about the
effect of financial motivations on the composition of poetry, a concept Chaucer
was no doubt familiar with. Finally, Patterson reminds us that the storytelling
competition is "a contest that gives full play to social antagonisms and
grants unexpected authority to the voices of the socially ignoble"(122).
This forces us to consider where else
in late medieval England, besides perhaps in a wrestling match, a Miller could
hope to compete on equal footing with a Knight.
The
division of Chaucer's career into two periods, respectively influenced by
French and Italian verse, has been a commonplace of criticism for centuries. As
Pearsall demonstrates in The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, this sometimes facile-sounding division is
relatively well supported by the existing evidence, and cannot be easily
discarded. During the first period, while in service to Prince Lionel and later
the royal household, Chaucer completed or was working on The Romaunt of the Rose, The Book of the Dutchess, and The House of Fame, all three of which are written in tetrameter couplets
derived from French romance models.(10) These poems all show signs of a
distinctively literary aspiration to elevate verse from its traditional existence
strictly for the purpose of oral performance; however, it is impossible to
dissociate Chaucer's function as poet during this time from the culturally
ascribed role of court "maker." The court maker's poetry
"distinguishes from the more noisy and general performance recital of
'gestes' by professional minstrels"(Pearsall 186), and would probably have
eschewed accompaniment and been received in court with greater attention.
Pearsall elabourates this distinction as follows: "the role of the poet in
this age of residual orality (when the conventions of oral delivery continue
still to be dominant) is not that of the old performer-minstrel, but that of a
new kind of performer-participant, part of the group, not a mere
entertainer"(173). Still, the performer-participant poet of court making
was constrained within a prescribed linguistic framework by the expectations of
the practice: "the "maker" offered a ritualistic rehearsal, with
minute variation, of familiar tropes of socially valuable modes of speaking and
feeling"(Patterson 119). Also, the octosyllabic line has a distinctively
sing-song quality, and this early poetry of Chaucer's was still much closer to
the style of minstrelsy than the pentameter he would later adopt as his
preferred form of expression.(11)
The
transitional role occupied by the court maker, somewhere between minstrel and
man of letters, had frustrating consequences for any poet in Chaucer's England
with aspirations towards patronage.(12) Richard Firth Green's definitive book, Poets
and Princepleasers, provides a
comprehensive view of the historical context for this question. In the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, the minstrel had been responsible for the performance
of both music and poetry; however, by Chaucer's time this role had been split
and "the traditional role of the professional minstrel was usurped…by a
new breed of amateur household poet"(Green 103). Minstrels continued to
receive aristocratic and royal patronage, but strictly in their socially
devalued capacity as musicians, mere entertainers.(13) The amateur household
poets, or makers, of which the young Chaucer was no doubt one, did not inherit
a share in the court's munificence along with the minstrel's role as performing
poet. Green explains this in light of recent changes in the tastes of the
aristocracy, who were growing increasingly involved in literary pursuits,
including both an interest in history and the classics, as well as in games of
courtly love poetry.(14) As a result of this change, the performing poet was no
longer seen as someone separate from and unequal to the court audience, which
stripped the role of its mystique as well as its financial reward. As Green
points out:
The reason for this
is not difficult to understand: whereas a man may be willing to pay entertainers
to play before him, he will be less ready to reward directly companions who
join with him in communal play…The minstrel might cry 'largesse' quite openly,
but not the circumspect household poet. (127)
Because of this newly communal and thus unrewarded
status, the court poet could not hope to win patronage simply for the
composition of frivolous verse, instead "the writer's only hope of
receiving an actual payment for his work lay either in writing to a specific
commission or in preparing a suitably impressive presentation copy"(Green
203). Both of these were formidable tasks, and records of their actual
occurrence are rare, at least in England.
Taking
into account Chaucer's upbringing in the midst of this transition, scholarship
has been divided over his possible receipt of literary patronage. External
evidence is unequivocal; no record exists of his having ever accepted money for
his poetry: "amongst the nearly five hundred surviving Chaucer
life-records edited by Crow and Olson, not a single one gives him the title of
poet or links him with any kind of poetic activity"(Green 6). However,
Chaucer's work shows some internal evidence of his having written under the
auspices of royal or aristocratic benevolence. Throughout Chaucer's work there
are subtle and not so subtle manifestations of what Joseph Loewenstein has
dubbed "the bibiliographic ego," further defined by Kathryn
Kerby-Fulton as: "any manifestation of authorial self-consciousness which
serves to establish, protect, or market the author" including occasions of
"overt literary mendicancy"(Kerby-Fulton 79). Kerby-Fulton's paper
"Langland and the Bibliographic Ego" looks at some of the more
prominent examples in Chaucer's work, such as the "Prologue to the Legend
of Good Women" and the "Complaint to his Purse." She rightly
observes that the former instance "provides scope for some delicate
grumbling about the plight of the poet in the world of courtly
patronage"(80) and the latter appears to have been "written to entice
patronage"(82). It remains entirely possible, however, that Chaucer never
actually received any direct remuneration for his poetry, and internal
references to patronage may instead represent what Kerby-Fulton calls
"rhetorical applications of petitionary conventions"(82). Whichever
side of the debate over literary patronage
one enters, what is certain is that Chaucer spent most of his life employed in
some capacity by the royal family, either as a courtier or in a variety of
official roles. Whether these appointments were in any sense connected to his
literary abilities is also widely contended; on the one hand, poetry may have
won him favour and attention, and on the other, his official duties would have
prevented him from writing poetry, as Pearsall observes:
"There is no
suggestion that his annuities and gifts and offices were the reward for his
poetry; indeed the job at the customs, with its stipulation that Chaucer must
keep the records in his own hand, might well have stopped a lesser man from
writing poetry altogether. (180)
In addition to the probability that Chaucer
was never paid to write poetry, we must also admit the possibility that he was
offered a commission or patronage position and turned it down, preferring to
write on his own time unconstrained by "the obsequiousness that went with
the acknowledgement of patronage"(Pearsall 189).(15)
Chaucer's early experiences with the
competition between poets engaged in court making, then, was not necessarily
marked by a system of direct financial reward for the best verse, instead, the
social competitions being enacted for political rather than literary favour
were refracted through the literature. This was manifested in various ways,
including the everyday diversions such as those detailed by Green: "Some
medieval games, it is true, seem to have existed solely as a vehicle for
flirtation…but more interesting are those which involved some kind of literary
skill: the setting of riddles, for example, or even the competitive
improvisation of verses"(116). Thus, when Green speaks of "the
cutthroat competition for court patronage,"(104) he is describing a place
where there exists a single source of wealth, the lord or "stremes hed /
of grace"("Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan" 43), below whom all
courtiers are competing supplicants. This was where Chaucer found his audience,
aptly described by Pearsall as his "listening and reading public, whose
tastes and responses both acted as an encouragement in the task of writing and
also had an influence in shaping the manner in which that task was carried
out"(178). Participation in the "game" of court poetry, however,
does not necessarily mean Chaucer was its prisoner, as we find in the writing
of later poets under the Tudors. For someone as discerning about his art as
Chaucer, the very idea of patronized poetry would probably have entailed some
difficult compromises, a tension examined by Steven Justice in
"Inquisition, Speech, and Writing."(16) Justice observes:
"patronage employment, while recognizing and rewarding talent, underemploys
it, stupefying the beneficiary," and this "both marks the experience
of meritocratic advancement and displays the fissures in meritocratic faith in
the bureaucratic culture of late-medieval England"(5). (17)
This disagreement between faith in the possibility of meritocratic advancement
and frustration at the narrow confines within which merit is measured was one
of the defining themes of the era. It is often reflected explicitly in
Chaucer's poetry, for instance in his treatment of the idea of
"gentilesse" as social merit in The Wife of Bath's Tale and "Gentilesse."
For the court maker, in his newly defined
role as a performer/participant before peers, the measure of artistic
"gentilesse," or poetic merit, would have come from one source:
audience feedback. In Paul Strohm's words: "the idea of art without
audience would probably have seemed either contradictory or absurd to Chaucer,
if in fact he could have entertained it at all"(47). For Chaucer, it was
clearly the audience that licensed the poet to speak, as revealed by his
various references to the fate of speakers who have "noon audience"
and are shamed into silence (Melibee 1045/"Nun's
Priest Prologue" 2801). Indeed, Chaucer often seems virtually obsessed
with the power of the audience, as noted by Lerer in Chaucer and His Readers: "throughout his major narratives Chaucer
presents a class of readers and writers subjected to the abuse of their
audience"(3). This is no doubt because, at least at court, poetic merit
was measured by the speaker's ability to engage the audience. This audience was
also no longer as passive in its feedback responses as the audience of a
minstrel two centuries before, according to Green:
The essential
mystery had gone out of the story-teller's role; no longer could he exploit the
theatrical possibilities of a privileged position to manipulate the response of
an admiring audience. Chaucer's literary abilities did not set him apart from
his fellows at court; on the contrary, they gave him an entry into an
aristocratic society thoroughly conversant with the conventions binding the
poet's imaginary world and confident in its role of literary arbiter. (111)
The additional presence of a patron or lord
would in effect have magnified the poet's sense of subjugation, since the
audience would in that case become something more than a "literary
arbiter," licensing the poet not only to speak, but also to eat and remain
alive. Even in the absence of an actual authorizing patron or lord, the idea of a patron still pervades Middle English poetry
written for social equals, as most of Chaucer's seems to have been.(18) Given
the effect of patronage systems on medieval society and literature,
constraining discourse within well-defined rings while intensifying
competition, it is easy to imagine Chaucer finding an obvious analogy in the
low country sport of wrestling for the ram. Both necessarily entail getting
dirty in a way that Chaucer seems to have taken steps to avoid. On the other
hand, the model of the meritocracy, even if it only exists as an ideal riddled
with fissures, seems preferable to most others when competing for public
auditory space.(19)
The
second "period" of Chaucer's poetry is strongly influenced by the
Italian poets, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Pearsall describes Chaucer's
first encounter with the great poets of the Italian Renaissance (probably
around 1373) as a kind of awakening for him, imagining the very moment when he
(Chaucer) first came into contact with them and was suddenly overwhelmed. This
attractive fictionalization is based on an appraisal of the impoverished state
of literature in England during Chaucer's youth, and the sudden and remarkable
impact the Italians had on the poetry he was writing. Part of this awakening
was "the revelation to [Chaucer] of an acknowledged nobility in the
vocation of poet, in which he was in the service of neither court nor church,
neither an entertainer nor a propagandist"(Pearsall 103). Equally
liberating for Chaucer was the discovery of iambic pentameter. The outcome of
his encounter with Italian poetry, especially Boccaccio's, was an apparent
determination to import this literary treasure to England.
"Chaucer's
career as a poet can be seen, and very significantly seen, as the achievement
of something comparable for the English language, and equally as effecting, in
England, the transformation of the bard and trouvere into the 'man of letters', the poet with a public
voice in the commonwealth." (Pearsall 104)
Chaucer would also have encountered the
notion of "laureation" for the first time in Italy. Green notes the
significance of laureation not just to Chaucer, but to general literary
history: "One of the most important events in the history of the poet's
search for recognition was the formal laureation of Petrarch by Robert of
Sicily in 1341"(209). Petrarch himself actually arranged for his own
laureate coronation in imitation of the Roman tradition, with some crucial
errors noted in Earnest Hatch Wilkins' Life of Petrarch:
In the days of
imperial Rome there had been held on the Capitoline, once in every five years,
a multiple contest that included a contest in poetry, the winner receiving a
crown of oak leaves. According to the inaccurate tradition that Petrarch
accepted, the crown was of laurel, and the last poet to have received it was
Statius. (24)
Petrarch himself was thus responsible for
establishing the laurel crown as a symbol of poetic prominence, and we have him
to thank for a title much preferable to "poet oakiate". The palpable
result of Petrarch's coronation was that it made him "the most famous
private citizen then living"(Wilkins 29), something that could hardly have
been lost on Chaucer or any other practicing poet. Lerer defines laureation as
"the public, official sanction of poetic prowess"(30 emphasis added). The idea of poets aspiring
to "prowess," which necessarily entails competition, would not have
been anything new for Chaucer the courtier, but the association of prowess with
true prestige and even literary immortality was something he would previously
have found only in the classics, and only in continental literature. According
to Pearsall the effect of this change is witnessed by The House of Fame, which, although written in the tetrameter form of
his early poetry, reveals Chaucer's changing view of the poet's potential role
in English culture. Entering the House of Fame, Chaucer sees, "the great
poets of the past stand upon pillars in rows…The honour given to poetry in
being placed in such majestic surroundings comes directly from Chaucer's
contact with the Italian poets and would be unimaginable in any previous
writing in England, at least in English"(Pearsall 117). It is also in the House
of Fame that the laurel makes its
first appearance in English literature.(20) The social aggrandizement of
laureation stood in sharp contrast to the meager rewards and limited freedom
Chaucer had previously associated with poetic prowess. Laureation was to
patronage what courtly making was to wrestling in the mud for a ram. In these
ascending spheres of competition, each successive increase of potential reward
requires exponentially greater ability and tenacity to reach the prize. Because
of this, Lee Patterson views Chaucer's emulation of the Italians and aspiration
to become a "poete" as a losing battle. Patterson reads the Tale
of Sir Thopas as a sign of surrender,
defaulting Chaucer into "an identity that is inevitably in opposition to
that of courtly "maker" but that can now lay no claim to the august
title "poete"(123).
In
light of the humour and exquisite lightness of Sir Thopas, however, I am unable to read it as an act of resignation. Chaucer did
not fail in his ambition to become
a "poete," as opposed to a "maker," because he never
entertained serious aspirations to laureation. Piero Boitani describes
Chaucer's ironic posturing before the laurel in similar terms: "In the House
of Fame, Chaucer promises-humorously
and humbly-to kiss the laurel, Apollo's tree," however, "Chaucer does
not proclaim-and he never will-that he will be crowned with laurel"(156).
For Chaucer, the figure of the laureate poet was something to be reached for,
but never to be grasped. This is because the laureate poets were from other
times and other places, and the concept would have been incompatible with the
type of literature produced in England before Chaucer.(21) This is especially
ironic considering the concerted effort on the part of Chaucer's fifteenth
century inheritors to write him into the role of England's first laureate,
something that was only possible after his death. (22) However,
Chaucer's own engagement with the Italian literary models was not concerned
with a trophy such as laureation as an end; instead it was simply a means to
imagine the poet's vocation outside the confines of court making.(23) On the
other hand, Chaucer was no more able to escape his historical context than any
other poet, which caused the humanist, literary initiative inspired by
Boccaccio and Petrarch to become conflated with tropes of court making and
patronage in his later work. The epitome of this melange is the Canterbury
Tales, and it is in light of these
various spheres of poetic competition that I propose to read Sir Thopas.
Throughout
the frame-narrative of the Canterbury Tales the pilgrims offer each other feedback in the form of
opinionated responses, dramatizing the newly defined role of the audience of
peers in licensing each poet to speak. By transforming the homogeneous
courtiers of the court maker's audience into a handpicked cross-section of
medieval England's most diverse class, Chaucer increases the possibilities for
narrative variety as well as character development in the frame. One pilgrim
stands out, however, both in his abstention from the contest and his ubiquitous
influence in guiding its course: the Host. It is the Host who first suggests
the literary competition that makes up the Canterbury Tales, and he is thus responsible for delineating the rules
and for introducing the prize, the ram for which they will be wrestling:
And which of yow
that bereth hym best of all--
That is to seyn,
that telleth in this caas
Tales of best
sentence and moost solaas--
Shal have a soper
at oure aller cost. (GP 796)
Chaucer also informs us in the General
Prologue that the Host is delegated
the role of judge and mediator of the contest:
And that he wolde
been oure governour,
And of oure tales
juge and reportor,
And sette a soper
at a certeyn pris,
And we wol reuled
been at his devys
In heigh and lough;
and thus by oon assent
We been acorded to
his juggement. (813)
The role of the Host in the Canterbury
Tales is therefore analogous to that
of a patron at court, with significant differences.(24) As the pilgrims'
"governour" and dispenser of "juggement" there is no question
that the power of a patron is in his hands in this contest; however, the Host
is merely guardian of the purse, not the actual source of wealth, and he enjoys
his influence "by oon assent" which can hardly be said of any
medieval ruler.(25) Since the feedback following each tale comes most
consistently from the Host, he becomes a spokesman for the audience as a whole,
as indicated by The Parson's Prologue: "oure Hoost hadde the wordes for us all"(67). This may be
read as an effacing usurpation of the audience's voice, or simply as a
narrative device employed by Chaucer for the sake of brevity, allowing him to
funnel the effects of audience feedback into the mouth of a single character,
saving him twenty-eight speeches. The governance of the competition, however,
is not democratic, and in the end it will only be the Host's voice that counts.
Ironically, the Host's most ruthless exercise
of his power occurs in the instance of Sir Thopas. He begins in the Prologue to Sir Thopas by
mocking Chaucer and commanding him to "telle us a tale of
myrthe"(706). Chaucer meekly obliges with a "rym I lerned longe
agoon"(70), a brilliantly crafted yet grotesque parody of tail-rhyme
romance poetry, which ironically also deprecates aspects of Chaucer's own
practice. The Tale of Sir Thopas
is not allowed to finish, however, since the Host rudely interrupts in the
middle of the action with his now critically notorious outrage: "namoore
of this, for Goddes dignitee…/ Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche. / Now swich
a rym the devel I biteche! / This may wel be rym dogerel"(919).(26) What
has just occurred is the failure of a poet to please either his audience or his
patron, which results in immediate censor and censure. This is, of course, a
carefully constructed dramatization on Chaucer's part, as noted by Gaylord
"unlike other elements, the Thopas seems to have been composed in order to have been
interrupted"(1979 p83).(27) Scholars tend to put more emphasis on the
formal causes of the interruption than the reasons relating to content.(28)
This is obviously because the sanctions imposed by the Host are formal,
"thou shalt no lenger ryme. / Lat se wher thou kanst tellen aught in
geeste, / Or telle in prose somewhat"(932); however, I would suggest the
reasons have as much to do with content--or rather lack of content--as with
form, as indicated by "thou doost noght elles but despendest
tyme"(931). Generally when a speech is "wasting time" it has
more to do with emptiness of meaning than unsatisfactory style. The obvious
relevance of both form and content to the link is acknowledged by Benson when
he writes, "the subject of the Thopas-Melibee unit is not so much the difference between art and
meaning (solaas versus sentence) as it is the need to combine the two"(32).
Benson is right to draw attention to "solaas" and
"sentence" in this instance, because "best sentence and moost
solaas"(798) were the original criteria established by the Host in the General
Prologue for the judging of the
tales. The Host's interruption of Sir Thopas thus reveals it as exemplary of the kind of tale that
does not make the cut, failing to fulfill the criteria of "sentence"
and "solaas." Without this harsh feedback, the reader would be left
ignorant of the significance of these criteria. It is particularly interesting
that the Host's response to Sir Thopas is to bar Chaucer not from speaking, but from rhyming, since this
suggests a definite formal hierarchy by which the tales are being judged.
Evidently rhymes are at the pinnacle, followed by "geeste," or alliterative
verse, and finally prose, which is valued "at the leeste,"(934) since
it represents a complete withdrawal from formalized expression.(29) By this
reckoning there is a minimum aesthetic standard that one has to meet to be
allowed to compete using rhymes, and the minstrelsy associated with tail-rhyme
romance does not meet that standard.(30) Considerable critical attention has
also been directed to Chaucer's decision to deliver the worst tale himself,
since Sir Thopas should indeed
represent "The Poet's Tale." However, to me this says as much about
his sense of humour as his sense of authorial identity, and conjectures about
what he "means" by this gesture risk shattering the same thin ice
skated by earnest interpretations of Sir Thopas' playful narrative details.
Just as poetic merit was determined in
Chaucer's England by the feedback of the audience and patron, the Host's
feedback in the Canterbury
Tales functions as fictional quality
control, determining poetic merit among the pilgrims.(31) So far I have been
using the word "feedback" simply to indicate the praise and blame
responses Chaucer employs throughout the frame narrative to give a sense of
relative standing in the competition. There is, however, a greater depth to the
function of feedback within the Canterbury Tales. There has recently been considerable research in the
physical, natural, and social sciences into the operation of "feedback
loops," some of which may add to our understanding of Chaucer's use of
feedback in the Tales. A feedback loop
is any cycle or system in which some part of the output is returned to the
beginning, affecting further output. Feedback loops have been identified
throughout the natural world, from population ecology and capitalist economics
to behavioural psychology and political science. These feedback loops come in
two distinct forms, positive and negative. Positive feedback loops amplify
themselves indefinitely, since their output increases their input, which in
turn further increases their output. The classic example of a positive feedback
loop is the whine of microphone feedback through a power amplifier. In
literature, an excellent description of positive feedback occurs in
Shakespeare's Hamlet, when Hamlet describes his parents' relationship before
his father's murder: "Why, she would hang on him / As if increase of
appetite had grown / By what it fed on"(1.2.143). Positive feedback loops
can also be found at work historically among poets engaged in social and
literary competition. Anthony Marotti's New Historicist article on Elizabethan
court poetry, "Love is not Love," contains one such example:
Sidney's
(exaggerated) social prestige enhanced the contemporary value of his sonnet
collection, elevating the form in the hierarchical literary system. But…the
equation could work the other way: just as social status could bring aesthetic
merit in its train, so aesthetic merit could confer a kind of social prestige.
This belief is yet another version of the wish for a social system in which
abilities count more than birth, and gentlemen are made not born. (418)
In this example, social prestige and literary
aesthetic merit reciprocally amplify one another, in an escalating attempt on
the poet's part to write himself into laureateship; this is another variation
of the meritocracy theme found in Chaucer's "Gentilesse."
The
second model is the negative feedback loop, which has a stabilizing rather than
an amplifying effect. A negative feedback loop is defined in The Academic
Press Dictionary of Science and Technology as "any control system in which feedback is used to compare
actual performance with a standard representing the desired
performance"(Morris 812). This is an exact description of the Host's
feedback within the Canterbury Tales.
The actual performance of each pilgrim is measured against the performance
desired by the highly demanding audience. This seems to strike at the heart of
the function of Sir Thopas within the
Canterbury Tales, since Sir Thopas
represents the tale that strays
furthest from the standard of desired performance within the competition, which
is why it is interrupted the most rudely. By staging this great ironic
self-sacrifice of his own poetic persona, Chaucer seems to be establishing a
system of quality control that reflects directly on the rest of the tales. This
relationship goes beyond simple contrast, since the example of Sir Thopas' serves as a signpost or deterrent for the other
pilgrims, actively contributing to the success of the other tales in the
competition. (32) This is precisely what research has shown negative
feedback loops are meant to do: "when negative feedback is employed, the
system with feedback is found to possess improved characteristics relative to
the nonfeedback version"(Considine 1204). Although Chaucer lacked the
terminology I have been using to describe these dynamics, it would not have
been terribly difficult for him to deduce the basic principles of feedback from
observing competition among poets at court. (33) A later analogue
can be seen in Charles Darwin, whose observations of finches on the Galapagos
Islands allowed him to deduce the theory of evolution through natural
selection. The competition that leads to evolution in Darwin's theory is also
driven by a series of feedback loops, operating at the level of population
genetics. (34) It was Chaucer's genius to weave these crucial
elements of active competition and feedback into his masterpiece, making it a
static text that paradoxically also seems to be evolving.
Thus
far I have argued that Chaucer's framing of the Canterbury Tales as a storytelling competition, with the inclusion of Sir
Thopas as a negative feedback loop,
reflects in various ways his experience of competition among poets in late
medieval England. This reading views the text as primarily reflective, but it is also in some respects prescriptive. Although he seems loathe to admit it--"Chaucer
never claims anywhere in his canon that he has written something wholly
new"(Koff 37)--Chaucer was most likely aware of the relatively
unprecedented innovation of his poetry in the English language.(35) He was
probably also aware that he was being imitated fairly early on, and there is a
well-documented awareness in Chaucer's work of the ability of literature, both
in style and content, to proliferate through its influence.(36) Since the Canterbury
Tales seems to have been Chaucer's
final project, it is reasonable to assume he was writing it with a mind towards
its possible influence on English literature after his death. Observing the
various literary trends at work during his life, Chaucer may have picked up on
competition and audience feedback as important factors in the continuing
development of English literature, which is often prone to stagnation, as he
well knew. The historical role of active and opinionated audiences in shaping
medieval literature is one of the foremost themes of Green's Poet's and
Princepleasers:
That the
aristocratic audiences of the fourteenth century were generally more literate,
more knowledgeable about literary matters, more familiar with the conventions
of love poetry, and more likely to include practicing poets than those of
earlier centuries, might be held to account for some degree of artistic
self-consciousness in the poets who catered to them, might indeed be seen as a
stimulus towards greater literary sophistication and technical brilliance.
(113)
Chaucer's emphasis on competition and the
importance of audience feedback could therefore be read as prescriptions, a
kind of blueprint for how to build towards a continually evolving ideal of
literature.(37) The Canterbury Tales could
therefore be read as a form of literary Utopia, in which all members of society
are potentially brilliant poets, regardless of vocation, able to perform and
also to provide the audience feedback necessary to ensure a high standard of
performance.
My emphasis on Chaucer's emphasis on the
necessity of competition and audience feedback in poetry may seem exaggerated,
or, in the context of Sir Thopas,
masochistic; however, Chaucer and I, ostensibly, have good reason to do so.
When evaluating the usefulness of competition and audience response, it is
important to consider the possible outcome of their complete removal from
poetry. This is not difficult to do, for us, because there is considerably less
emphasis on these elements in poetry today than there was in Chaucer's time,
(38) partially because we associate poetry with reading as much as
reciting. For Chaucer, however, writing "is virtually synonymous with
"speche" and "tunge,"(Gaylord 1981 p322), and the inevitable
and palpable consequence of relaxed competition and disregard for the
audience's response was the further proliferation of doggerel. This is what
prompted Chaucer to remind us of "the oft-forgotten presence of the
audience in the literary equation, and the ability of that audience to redefine
or even to reject outright a literary text"(Daileader 27). Furthermore, I
would argue that the Host's response to Sir Thopas, though considerably dramatized, is directly based on
Chaucer's personal experience as a young poet. It is, in essence, a staging of
every performing poet's worst fear. Although we associate him with high-esteem
and veneration, "the father of English poetry," Chaucer's early
experiments with verse are unknown to us, and it is unlikely that the Romaunt
of the Rose, attributed to the late
1360s, sprang fully mature from his pen. It is easy to imagine the young
Chaucer, eager to play the games of courtly making, reciting his verses to some
opinionated individual, who thought nothing of putting him forcefully in his
place. As brutally scornful as the Host is of Chaucer in the Thopas/Melibee link, the comedy of the scene seems to come from a
mature place, beyond any fear of ever incurring such a tirade again. From this
privileged vantage, at the end of a life dedicated in no small degree to the
composition of literature and the study of versification, Chaucer would have
been free to reflect on the ultimate value of early encounters with hostile
audiences during his struggle to distinguish himself. It was, we might say,
with the ram in his hands that Chaucer composed his ode to wrestling.
Endnotes:
1 - Alan Gaylord, in his article,
"Chaucer's Dainty 'Dogerel': The 'Elvyssh' Prosody of Sir Thopas," was the first to propose that Sir Thopas is a mock-romance: "If there are such things as
epic pretensions, are there also romance pretensions? … the metaphor points
directly to the Maker. "Romance pretensions" refer to the imagined
prowess of the poet of romance"(103). This mockery of "imagined
prowess" is central to my understanding of the Tale.
2 - "Skeat glosses the word ram here as "the usual prize at a wrestling
match"; and stonde as
"to be placed in sight of the competitors." (Williams 148)
3 - George Williams suggests the possible
phallic implications of Sir Thopas' "semely
nose" in A New View of Chaucer,
and Alan Gaylord draws attention to the anticlimactic juxtaposition of "al
biyonde the see,"(Thopas, 719)
and "the prosaic town of Poperyng"(p.90) in his article
"Chaucer's Dainty 'Dogerel': The 'Elvyssh' Prosody of Sir Thopas"
4 - I will refrain from dividing Chaucer up
into the "pilgrim," "poet," and "man," partially
for the sake of brevity, and partially because the boundaries between these
various personae are always permeable, or, as Derek Pearsall argues,
nonexistent: "[Chaucer] is not someone somewhere else manipulating the 'I'
for rationally explicable strategic purposes; he is the [pilgrim], as much and as fully as he is Chaucer. To recognize this is to recognize the
essential fluidity of Chaucerian narrative"(87).
5 - George Williams' reads Sir Thopas as an extended allegory for Richard II's rivalry with
John of Gaunt. Williams sees Sir Thopas as "what an undergraduate would
call a 'pansy,' or perhaps a 'queer'"(147), representing Richard II,
interpreting Sir Thopas' effeminacy in the Tale as an attempt by Chaucer to curry favour with John of
Gaunt (represented by Sir Oliphaunt). Lee Patterson's article, "What Man
Artow," explores the imagery within the Tale relating to childishness and elvishness, locating the
significance of Sir Thopas in
Chaucer's ongoing struggle to redefine himself as an author.
6 - Mock-praise, or blame through praise, is
one of the seven forms of irony defined by Beryl Rowland in his introduction to
Earle Birney's Essays on Chaucerian Irony: "The essence of rhetorical irony was to blame by praise and
frequently involved the use of insinuatio or dissimulatio to control
the listener's response" (xvi Rowland's emphasis). Rowland also points out
briefly the other forms of irony at play in Sir Thopas: "Sir Thopas exploits verbal, dramatic, and structural ironies as
well as irony of values in order to tilt at the excesses of both the language
and content of a hackneyed literary form and at the extravagance and
artificiality of chivalric sentiments"(xxiv).
7 - The octosyllabic tail-rhyme stanzas
Chaucer used for Thopas occur
nowhere else in the Canterbury Tales,
nor in any other surviving text of Chaucer's. The landmark 15th
Century manuscripts of Chaucer's works, Hengwrt, Ellesmere, Cambridge Dd.4.24,
and Cambridge Gg.4.27, all accentuate the form of the Tale of Sir Thopas with "a distinctive design involving bracketing,
juxtaposing lines, and punctuating bobs"(Tschann, 2). These manuscripts
divide the text into two and sometimes three columns representing the two
different rhyme schemes followed by the Tale, aabaab, and aabaabcbbc. The first column contains
the "a" rhymes, the second the "b" rhymes, and the third,
only occurring in those five aberrant stanzas with the short "bob"
line, contains the "c" rhymes. As Judith Tschann's study of this arrangement
makes clear, the effect highlights the already obvious difference of Sir
Thopas from the rest of the
manuscript text, as well as further confusing the already confused progression
of the narrative, since the lines can more easily be read out of order.
However, "more often than not the ordering of the lines makes little
difference,"(Tschann, 9) and this further exaggerates the sense of
nonsense in the Tale. It is
impossible to say whether this layout was an innovation of the editors of these
manuscripts, or was derived from their exemplars, possibly written in Chaucer's
hand, but whether engaged by reception theory or authorial intent, the contrast
is no less significant.
8 - Paul Strohm's Social Chaucer discusses the framing of the Canterbury Tales as the result of a "literary imperative, which
is to create a socially diverse group drawn from the most dynamic
fourteenth-century social strata, whose social and vocational conflicts will
provide good possibilities for staging a diverse collection of tales."
(68)
Besides the possible connotation of a
"free lunch," Chaucer's choice of prize creates a competitive
framework with no runners up, where everyone loses (but doesn't lose much)
except the winner, who is never announced.
9 - Pearsall cautions: "References to
Chaucer's debt to the French poets may suggest a cunning mosaic made out of
their leavings, and Chaucer is not at all unwilling on occasion to encourage
this fiction, as in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (F. 66-83). But in reality he makes all new and in so
doing makes the French poets, rather unfairly, seem stilted and
contrived"(85).
10 -Interestingly enough, in the
Canterbury Tales he has fully adopted
the pentameter, yet he maintains a strong sense of the orality associated with
minstrelsy by framing the tales as performances by the pilgrims: "however
much the tale-telling game may be refracted through a literary sensibility, it
remains in its fictive enactment a series of minstrel-like oral
performances"(Patterson 125).
11 - See for instance Green: "there is
very little evidence that the enlightened attitude towards literature implied
by the very word 'patronage' was commonly to be met with in medieval courts;
the king might employ tailors, armourers, goldsmiths, tapestry-makers, and
painters; he did not, on the face of it at least, employ poets"(11).
12 - "By the end of the fourteenth
century the minstrel had virtually lost whatever claim he had once had to a
share in the literary life of the court. As a musician, however, he remained in
great demand. (Green 105)
13 - "The increasing literary
sophistication of the aristocracy in the late middle ages inevitably had a
marked effect upon the kind of literature produced for courtly entertainment.
The most important differences between the work of the minstrels and that of
the court poets arise from a radical change in the relationship between the
author and his audience"(Green, 110).
14 - There is something ennobling, almost to
the point of artistic glorification, in the possibility that Chaucer may have
refused offers of patronage, preferring to employ himself in toiling over
"the formulaic activity that [he] performed at the Port of London as he
audited the wool customs"(Justice 6) while continuing to write verses in
his spare time uncompensated. Although it may seem idealistic, putting
anachronistic premiums on Chaucer's desire for creative freedom that may not
have been imaginable at the time, there is no evidence to prove that this was
not the case. The nuances of Chaucer's sense of licensing audience and patron
are made maddeningly complex by this view, in light of the Book of the
Dutchess, but it remains too
appealing to discard (though not too appealing to regard as suspect).
15 - Although Justice's discussion of scribal
patronage rather than literary patronage, the effect would have been the same,
since payment in both cases requires conformity to the limitations of the work
being patronized.
16 - An interesting analogue occurs in
Anthony Marotti's article, "Love is not Love," in his discussion of
the ideal of meritocracy in the poetry of courtly love in Elizabethan England:
"It created a situation of open competition and regard through merit that
served as an ideal not only for love relationships but also for other kinds of
social transactions"(416). As Marotti explains, the presence of an
unmarried female monarch with a fondness for love poetry strongly affected the
generic standards used to determine poets' merit within the court. This
involved a different patron, but the same dynamics of competition as Chaucer's
time.
17 - Strohm: "Although current consensus
regards Chaucer as writing mainly for social equals, we would, as Elizabeth
Salter reminds us, be wrong to deny him any audience in the inner circles of
the court." (51)
18 - Some contemporary (to us) examples of
"art forms" that occupy public space based on a view of merit
completely removed from considerations of competition and audience spring
rudely to mind.
19 - This is noted by Piero Boitani in Chaucer
and the Imaginary World of Fame:
"Thus, the evergreen laurel appears for the first time in English poetry,
its shade protecting the mysterious song, the 'vois memorial' of the
Muse"(156).
20 - Lerer points to the Clerk's Prologue, where the Clerk pays tribute to "Faunceys
Petrak, the laureit poete"(31), emphasizing from the start that Petrarch
is dead: "What strikes us here is not so much a critical description of
the man or of his works but a simple fact. Petrarch is dead. He…shows us most
pointedly that to become such a laureate-and in fact to be a poet at all-is to
be dead…Poetry, it has been said, is something that goes on only in the perfect
tense…"Poseye" to Chaucer and his contemporaries was a literary
project toward which the living could only aspire"(30).
21 - In "Writing Like the Clerk:
Laureate Poets and the Aureate World" Lerer details the fascinating
conflation of the words "aureate" and "laureate" in the
minds of Fifteenth Century Chaucer imitators such as Lydgate, who came to
associate the benefits of laureation more and more with financial gain, and created
an entire mythology around Chaucer's role as England's first laureate, which,
of course, he wasn't. "Chaucer is the laureate because of his finesse with words, and it would seem that by
the later fifteenth century laureate and
aureate have become virtually
interchangeable terms"(Lerer's emphasis 47). The association of poetic
prowess with getting paid, however, is not something we can hold Chaucer
accountable for.
22 - It could be argued that this emphasis on
process over product finds its clearest expression in the Canterbury Tales, a religious pilgrimage that ends before the shrine
is reached, and a storytelling contest without a winner.
23 - For my reading of the Host, I am
indebted to Lerer's discussion of the Clerk's Prologue: "I suggest we read it as an allegory of
commission, that is, as an exploration of relationships of power and
powerlessness that define the quality of patronized literature. To do so, I
suggest, too, that we see the Host as Chaucer's patron of the piece, as
something of a sovereign of the Canterbury court"(31).
24 - In the Clerk's Prologue, the Host reiterates his authority and the pilgrims'
promise to yield to it: "for what man that is entred in a pley, / He nedes
moot unto the pley assente"(10). As Benson's footnote concurs, this is a
reminder that they are involved in a game with specific rules, broken at the
participants' peril.
25 - Gaylord draws attention to the word
"dogerel" with the observation: "insofar as surviving written
evidence can tell, Harry Baily has here invented a word. Familiar, all too
familiar, as its meaning and exemplars may be today, at the moment of the
utterance of Sir Thopas it must be
taken as indicating something extraordinary"("Dogerel" 85).
Whether Chaucer invented the word, or was simply the first to record it, it is
appropriate that Sir Thopas exists
as our first definitive example of what doggerel rhyme looks and sounds like.
Gaylord's comment that today doggerel is "all too familiar" seems to
imply that the appraisal of rhyme as crappy or stupid requires a modern
sensibility, but I would argue that Sir Thopas suggests otherwise, and probably reflects a relatively
common attitude towards much of the era's vacuous rhyme.
26 - Patterson remarks that although Sir
Thopas' "inconclusiveness is
sanctioned"(126) it is hardly aberrant, and "recalls all the other
incompletions that stud Chaucer's poetic career" (125). For a discussion
of Sir Thopas within the context
of the Canterbury Tales, the
relevant texts for comparison are the Cook's Tale, the Squire's Tale, and the Monk's Tale, all of which are interrupted or incomplete. Briefly, the Cook's Tale is cut off after less than a hundred lines, ending
fragment I; however, the lack of any response from the other pilgrims suggests
that it was either lost or never completed. The Squire's Tale is interrupted by the Franklin, who effaces his
disrespectful censorship with cajoling flattery, causing the incident to be
overlooked by both the Squire and Host, and depriving it of dramatic emphasis.
The closest analogue to Sir Thopas might
be the Monk's Tale, which is ended
by the Knight with the same assertive words, "namoore of
this!"(2767), however, the Monk's narrative seems to have reached closure,
and is ended with the standard "Explicit Tragedia," which implies he hasn't been interrupted at all. At
any rate, the Knight's criticism of the Monk's Tale has none of the vehemence of the Host's response to Sir
Thopas, and does not diminish the
stark dramatic contrast in which the Tale and the Thopas/Melibee
link stand to the rest of the Canterbury Tales.
27 - Gaylord suggests that the Host
"speaks only of the form and
effect of the rhyme,"(1979 p85, original emphasis) and C. David Benson
seems to concur: "at the beginning of the link, the Host makes clear that
his reasons for stopping Thopas
all have to do with style. He criticizes the form of the poem and not its
content"(34).
28 - I don't mean to suggest that this is an
appraisal of the relative value of verse and prose in general. Rather, the
hierarchy is established within the specific context of this competition. Such value judgements are necessarily
provisional, determined by the external circumstances within which the forms
exist.
29 - For Chaucer, simply writing in
tetrameter would have felt like a throwback to his earlier carrier. Although
this is not concrete evidence (though what is?), critics have used the
transition from tetrameter to pentameter to date Chaucer's poetry, assuming he
would not revert to tetrameter after having "transcended" it:
"There is no real temptation to place the House of Fame after the Parliament of Fowls, since there is little likelihood that he would have
gone on working in the octosyllabic couplet, with all its limitations, after he
had 'invented' the pentameter"(Pearsall 110). In this case, Sir Thopas would stand as the sole exception.
30 - The Oxford Dictionary of Current
English describes
"feedback" as "public response to an event"(317), the same
response that I have argued was experienced by Chaucer as instrumental to the
determination of merit in various literary spheres. What is truly remarkable,
however, is that the word "feedback" does not exist in the OED. This means it is a recent coinage, but presumably the
concept of feedback, as distinct from simply "response," which does
not necessarily have any effect, is much older.
31 - Another way Sir Thopas adds to the aesthetic merit of the system as a whole
is simply by contrast, since it makes the rest of the Tales, and indeed most of Chaucer's poetry, look and sound
so good. In Gaylord's words: "The return of couplets is a return to fresh
air, and now, after the Thopas,
everything seems in sharper focus, more immediate and brimming with
life"("Dogerel" 104).
32 - For those who would argue that this
scientific approach was beyond Chaucer (please), I would point to his Treatise on the Astrolabe and well-documented interest in alchemy.
33 - If the models offered by the natural
sciences seem too far removed from application to literature and culture,
feedback is also studied by behavioral psychologists, who define it as
"any kind of direct information from an outside source about the effects
of one's behavior"(Morris 812). Certainly the Host's complaint in the Thopas/Melibee link that his "eres aken" would qualify as
a direct effect of Chaucer's "drasty speche"(923).
34 - Paul F. Baum emphasizes this in Chaucer's
Verse: "Chaucer's line is a
series of five iambs. For this line he had no native models - though a few
isolated specimens have turned up - and the means of relieving monotony he
either discovered for himself or deduced intuitively from foreign models. One
thing may be said with security, that modern English versification starts with
Chaucer. With him it was almost a de novo creation." (11)
35 - Pearsall: "Chaucer was also
beginning, during these years [mid-1380s], to win a measure of public
recognition as a poet. Some of this recognition is in the form of poetic
imitation"(130).
36 - Benson has also picked up on this
possibility: "in the larger contrast between Melibee and Thopas,
Chaucer is not comparing bad to good, but illustrating different ways of using
language… we can be sure that neither represents the poets own ideal of
literature"(43 my emphasis).
37 - Two notable exceptions to this gross
generalization are Spoken Word or Slam poetry, and hiphop lyrics, both of which
are written for recitation in highly competitive oral settings, where the
audience's reaction actively determines the fate of each speaker.
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