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Tellers, Tales, and Translation in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales 1st Edition Warren Ginsberg
‘marked by wit, learning, intelligence, and that rarest of critical virtues, good judgement . . . a genuine guide whose abundant information and good sense make it a sure foundation for series work on The Canterbury Tales. Although especially useful for those, on any level, studying Chaucer for the first time, experienced Chaucerians will find it a helpful companion to The Riverside Chaucer. For teaching or research this is now the first book on The Canterbury Tales to consult after reading the text itself.’
Studies in the Age of Chaucer
‘Cooper’s guide is a more powerful book than any previous aid or introduction to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It presents the lively generous mind of a serious scholar and a sensitive reader.’
Notes & Queries
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‘a well-written and reliable guide through a mass of material that largely transcends the limitations of its form to offer critical analysis of lasting value.’
Archiv für das Stadium der neueren Sprachan und Literaturen
Oxford Guides to Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
THIRD EDITION ■
HELEN COOPER
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION
The idea for a series of guides to Chaucer originated in a sense that medieval studies in general and Chaucerian studies in particular had advanced to a point where a reappraisal of his poetry was both possible and necessary. The three volumes are devoted to the shorter poetry, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Canterbury Tales. We see these books as fulfilling a role comparable to the introduction to a good edition, but at greater length than would be possible there. The kind of line-by-line expository material that the notes to an edition would contain is included only where such matters are of wider importance for an understanding of the whole text or where recent scholarship has made significant advances. We hope to provide readers of Chaucer with essential and up-todate information, with the emphasis falling on how the interpretation of that information advances our understanding of his work; we have therefore gone beyond summarizing what is known to suggest new critical readings.
The original plan for the series was designed to provide some degree of consistency in the outline of the volumes, but it was part of the project from the start that there should be plenty of room for each author’s individuality. We hope that our sense of common interests and concerns in our interpretation of Chaucer’s poetry will provide a deeper critical consistency below the diversity. Such a paradox would, after all, be true to the nature of our subject.
1989
Helen Cooper A. J. Minnis
Barry Windeatt
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO THE THIRD EDITION
I began work on the first edition of this book over thirty years ago, when Oxford University Press, in the person of Kim Scott Walwyn, asked me to draw up a scheme for a series of authoritative guides to Chaucer. I did not quite realize what I was letting myself in for. It may be that she did not realize either; but she remained consistently encouraging, patient, and broad-minded. The Press found excellent people to replace her after her sadly early death, and I worked with them for the lightly revised second edition and this more thoroughly revised third. I thank them too; but I am more than happy to remember Kim’s part in bringing to birth both the series and my own volume within it.
To have asked any of my medievalist friends to comment on the draft of such an extensive work would have been taking unfair advantage of their willingness, so all its original errors were on my own head. Over the years, however, various colleagues have noticed mistakes that I have been able to correct; and James Simpson waived his right to anonymity as reader for this new edition, and I am very grateful for his comments. Other colleagues—Alexander Murray (for history), Colin Day (for chemistry), Charlotte Morse, John Alford, Edwin Craun, Ruth Morse—commented on other sections of the original; and V. A. Kolve, and more recently Elizabeth Robertson and Richard Firth Green, gave me access to work of theirs that had not yet been published. Over the years I have also profited more broadly from the conferences of the New Chaucer Society and the many conversations I have had there. The undergraduates who have crossexamined me on the Tales in tutorials, and urged fine readings of their own, have provided a stimulus to excellence of which I can only have fallen short. Of my graduate students, I should give particular thanks to Megan Murton, whose work is acknowledged in the course of this book.
My greatest debt, however, was to my husband, for his unstinting encouragement of my career when such things were far from being taken for granted, and for his help with word processing when that was still in its infancy. That there were far fewer infelicities than in the original drafts I owe to his sharp eyes. He helped me every page of the way, and remained sufficiently interested in the
Tales in spite of it all to reread them at the end. He would be pleased, and as a scientist slightly bemused, that a publication of this kind could still be updated so as to have value after so long. The last word of thanks, however, must go to my daughters, for their tolerating Chaucer as an extra member of the household for so much of their young lives, and for bearing with a mother who, as the youngest described it, ‘sits upstairs writing and writing and writing. Her book has taken far too long.’
CONTENTS
Abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
Bibliographical Note 6
The Canterbury Tales 9
Date 9; Text 11; Genre 14; Sources and Analogues 15; Structure 24; Themes 26 Style: Language, Rhetoric, and Prosody 33
FRAGMENT I
The General Prologue 39
Date and Text 39; Genre 40; Sources and Analogues 42; Structure 44; Themes and Style: A Guided Tour of the General Prologue 46, The Knight 47, The Squire 49, The Yeoman 50, The Prioress 50, The Monk 52, The Friar 53, The Merchant 55, The Clerk 56, The Sergeant of Law 57, The Franklin 58, The Guildsmen 61, The Cook 62, The Shipman 62, The Doctor of Physic 63, The Wife of Bath 64, The Parson 66, The Ploughman 67, The Miller 68, The Manciple 69, The Reeve 70, The Summoner 71, The Pardoner 72, The Tabard 75
The Knight’s Tale 77
Date 77; Text 78; Genre 79; Sources and Analogues 81, 1. Boccaccio: The Teseida 81, 2. Boethius 84, 3. Minor Sources: Statius, the Ovidian Tradition, the Roman de la Rose, Dante, English Romance 87; Structure 89; Themes 92; A Note on Astrology 100; The Tale in Context 101; Style 104
The Miller’s Tale 109
Prologue 109; Date and Text 111; Genre 112; Sources and Analogues 113; Structure 116; Themes 118; The Tale in Context 120; Style 122
The Reeve’s Tale 126
Prologue 126; Date and Text 127; Genre 127; Sources and Analogues 128; Structure 130; Themes 131; The Tale in Context 133; Style 134
The Cook’s Tale 137 Prologue 137; Date and Text 138; Genre 138; Sources and Analogues 139; Structure, Themes, and Style 139; The Tale in Context 140
FRAGMENT II
The Man of Law’s Tale 143
Introduction 143; Date and Text 145; Genre 147; Sources and Analogues 148; Structure 150; Themes 151; The Tale in Context 155; Style 157; Epilogue: A Textual Note 159
FRAGMENT III
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue 161
Date and Text 161; Genre 163; Sources and Analogues 164; Structure 170; Themes 172; The Prologue in Context 176; Style 178
The Wife of Bath’s Tale 180
Date and Text 180; Genre 180; Sources and Analogues 181; Structure 185; Themes 186; The Tale in Context 188; Style 189
The Friar’s Tale 192
Prologue 192; Date and Text 192; Genre 193; Sources and Analogues 193; Structure 195; Themes 196; The Tale in Context 198; Style 199
The Summoner’s Tale 201
Prologue 201; Date and Text 201; Genre 202; Sources and Analogues 202; Structure 204; Themes 204; The Tale in Context 206; Style 207
FRAGMENT IV
The Clerk’s Tale 209
Prologue 209; Date and Text 210; Genre 212; Sources and Analogues 213; Structure 216; Themes 218; The Tale in Context 222; Style 225
The Merchant’s Tale 228
Prologue 228; Date and Text 229; Genre 230; Sources and Analogues 230; Structure 233; Themes 234; The Tale in Context 238; Style 240
FRAGMENT V
The Squire’s Tale 245
Prologue 245; Date and Text 245; Genre 247; Sources and Analogues 248; Structure 250; Themes 251; The Tale in Context 254; Style 256
The Franklin’s Tale 259
The Ending of the Squire’s Tale: The Squire–Franklin Link 259; Date and Text 260; Genre 261; Sources and Analogues 262; Structure 264; Themes 265; The Tale in Context 271; Style 273
FRAGMENT VI
The Placing of the Fragment 277
The Physician’s Tale 278
Date and Text 278; Genre 278; Sources and Analogues 280; Structure 281; Themes 282; The Tale in Context 286; Style 288; The Physician–Pardoner Link 290
The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale 291
Date and Text 291; The Prologue: Sources and Analogues 291; The Prologue: Structure, Themes, and Style 293; The Tale: Genre 295; Sources and Analogues 295; Structure 297; Themes 299; The Tale in Context 303; Style 304
FRAGMENT VII
The Placing of the Fragment 309
The Shipman’s Tale 310
Date, Attribution, and Text 310; Genre, Sources, and Analogues 311; Structure 312; Themes 313; The Tale in Context 315; Style 316
The Prioress’s Tale 319
The Shipman–Prioress Link 319; Date and Text 319; Genre 320; Sources and Analogues 321; Structure 324; Themes 325; The Tale in Context 328; Style 330
The Tale of Sir Thopas 333
Prologue 333; Date and Text 333; Genre, Sources, and Analogues 335; Structure 338; Themes and Style 339; The Tale in Context 342
The Tale of Melibee 344
Prologue 344; Date 346; Text 347; Genre 347; Sources 348; Structure 350; Themes 351; The Tale in Context 355; Style 356
The Monk’s Tale 359
Prologue 359; Date 361; Text 361; Genre 363; Sources and Analogues 364; Structure 367; Themes 368; The Tale in Context 371; Style 372
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale 375
Prologue: Text 375; Prologue: Themes 376; Date and Text 377; Genre 377; Sources and Analogues 379; Structure 383; Themes 385; The Tale in Context 388; Style 390; Endlink 393
FRAGMENT VIII
The Placing of the Fragment 395
The Second Nun’s Tale 396
Date 396; Attribution and Text 396; Genre, Sources, and Analogues 397; Structure 398; Themes 399; The Tale in Context 401; Style 404
The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale 407
Date and Text 407; Prologue 408; Genre 409; Sources and Analogues 410; Structure 412; Themes 413; The Tale in Context 416; Style 417
FRAGMENT IX
The Manciple’s Tale 421 Prologue 421; Date and Text 422; Genre 423; Sources and Analogues 424; Structure 426; Themes 427; The Tale in Context 430; Style 432
FRAGMENT X
The Parson’s Tale 435 Prologue 435; Date 438; Text 439; Genre, Sources, and Analogues 440; Themes 443; The Tale in Context 446; Style 449
Taking Leave: Chaucer’s ‘Retractions’ 451
Imitations of the Canterbury Tales 1400–1615 455 Filling in the Gaps: The Cook’s and Squire’s Tales 456; Tales for the Pilgrimage: Beryn, The Siege of Thebes, Two Ploughman’s Tales 458; The Non-Canterbury Tales: The Pilgrim’s Tale, The Cobbler of Canterbury, Greene’s Vision 462; The Afterlife of Individual Tales 464
General Bibliography 473 Index 477
ABBREVIATIONS
ChR Chaucer Review
EETS Early English Text Society
ELH English Literary History
ELN English Language Notes
ELR English Literary Renaissance
ES English Studies
JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology
MÆ Medium Ævum
M&H Medievalia et humanistica
MLN Modern Language Notes
MLQ Modern Language Quarterly
MP Modern Philology
MS Medieval Studies
NLH New Literary History
NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen
N&Q Notes and Queries
PMLA Publications of the Modern Languages Association
RES Review of English Studies
SAC Studies in the Age of Chaucer
SP Studies in Philology
UTQ University of Toronto Quarterly
Introduction
The object of the third edition of this book, like its original, is to give an up-todate summary of what is known about the Canterbury Tales, together with a critical reading of each tale. To help with locating areas of discussion, the whole work and each of the tales are discussed under the same series of headings; many of these would have been familiar to Chaucer and his readers, but they are broad enough to encompass more recent critical and theoretical frameworks. The form such issues took throughout the Middle Ages is summarized by the pupil who asks for literary instruction in Conrad of Hirsau’s twelfth-century Dialogue on the Authors:
I want you (O teacher) to explain briefly and in summary form what we must look for, namely, who the author is, what he has written, the scale of his work, when he has written it, and how, that is whether it is in prose or verse, with what subject-matter or intention each has begun his work, what end the composition has in view. I also want to find out about what is the difference between a poet, a writer of history, and a writer of discourse, between explanation and exposition and detailed study and transference of meaning, and to find out the nature of prose, verse, fable, the figures which are called tropes, and any other question that must be asked concerning ecclesiastical or pagan authors. A brief answer to all these questions seems to me to constitute a way in to the understanding of authors important and unimportant alike.
All of those questions remain basic to an understanding of the Canterbury Tales, and this book aims to provide at least some answers. The responses invited are however often uniquely complicated in the Tales, as Chaucer so rarely writes in a voice that can be identified simply as his own. However much he keeps control of every line of the tales, they are told in voices that are explicitly not directly his; and even the interjections of Chaucer as pilgrim are rarely those that as their creator he would wholeheartedly endorse. Identifying his ‘intention’ is therefore problematic; but substituting the ‘intention’ of the pilgrim who tells the tale can be still more misleading, especially for readers now who take for granted the
grounding of every speech in the psychology of the speaker. There are occasions when Chaucer offers something analogous to that, so that the intentions of (for instance) the Wife of Bath in her prologue (to argue against men’s views of women—against antifeminism, though that is not a word she could have used), the Summoner (to insult the Friar), or the Pardoner (to make money), are clear enough, whether or not they are adequate to the tale that follows (and often they are not); but those intentions are never psychological in the modern sense of their being unique to the individual and their life experiences. More often, the ‘intention’ of a tale is coupled to its genre rather than to individual psychology, though the genre may well be chosen for its appropriateness to its speaker—or perhaps more accurately, the speakers may well be chosen for their appropriateness to the tales Chaucer wants to tell. The term he uses for the low-class comic tales known to us as fabliaux was ‘cherles tales’, and that principle—a mixture of social, cultural and moral placing—is the first determinant of their tellers. This appropriateness of teller to genre (or sometimes in the Tales, its notable and deliberate inappropriateness) emerges in the more formal of Conrad’s questions, as part of the large field of study defined as rhetoric, what writing could do and how one might do it.
One of Conrad’s questions that has necessarily concerned everyone involved in the transmission of Chaucer’s text, from the earliest scribes to the creators of online textual platforms, is what the author wrote. It took several centuries for something resembling a consensus to be reached that some tales and linking prologues present in some manuscripts were not by Chaucer at all, or what the order for the tales should be in a work that never completes its promised shape; and although most of those issues have now attained widely accepted answers, many questions remain over the readings of individual lines upwards.
In addition to those matters of Conrad’s that will have concerned Chaucer’s original audiences and readers, whether consciously (for the more educated) or not (since the choice of English for the Tales makes them potentially accessible to every speaker of English, though what we know of their early readers indicates a predominance of gentry, townsmen, and clerics), there are other issues that have moved more recently to the foreground of the understanding of literary studies, Chaucer included. Feminist theory has highlighted an area of interest that was already present in medieval culture, as witnessed by innumerable texts but which has only recently begun to receive its proper share of attention, even though an accusation against Chaucer of being too much ‘wommanes friend’ was made within about a century of his death (by Gavin Douglas, the Scottish translator of Virgil, to explain his misrepresentation of the Aeneid). Historical approaches to the Tales in the sense of identifying specific incidents or individuals have been familiar for well over a century, but the work’s grounding in broader social issues such as play a key role in New Historicism has increasingly shown a different kind of
importance. Finding a balance between the social and political background and the work itself is not however a straightforward business. It is common now for the history to take priority, with the tales as a series of footnotes or illustrations to larger political or social movements; but those movements are best handled in studies that focus less closely on the tales themselves, and there is no point in reproducing in detail here work done finely elsewhere. This volume by contrast puts the work itself and the extraordinary skill and power of its writing at the centre, with the historical context as supporting material. That is what made Chaucer so central in the history of English poetry in the six and more centuries since his death. Furthermore, his continuing relevance to the social and ethical conditions of the twenty-first century is now moving to the centre of critical debate, whether or not those conditions could have been familiar to Chaucer or his pilgrims. Those debates too are given a place here, though they are set within the cultural and intellectual parameters familiar to him and his earlier readers.
The basic structure of the third edition of this volume is accordingly the same as in the previous editions, but with some changes of emphasis or additional material. After a revised introduction to the whole work, changes are concentrated on those immediately relevant for a reading of each tale. Since so much of the more recent criticism on the Tales has been of the broader theoretical or political kind that looks beyond the particularity of the tales, in many cases the most extensive alterations and updatings appear in the tale bibliographies rather than in the original text.
The structure for the discussion of the work as a whole, and of each tale, is as follows.
Date. I give arguments for the approximate dating of each tale in the course of Chaucer’s career or the composition of the Tales where these are available, and record hypothesis where it seems plausible.
Text. There are some eighty surviving manuscripts of part or all of the Tales, and no two of them say quite the same thing. As it is all too easy to base an argument on a disputed reading or a passage of doubtful authenticity, or on structural patterns adopted by editors on flimsy manuscript evidence, I try to note those variants that are not always visible in modern edited texts but that could significantly affect interpretation as well as the sense or the style. I also indicate the kind of glosses that accompany each tale, and if these are ever likely to be Chaucer’s.
Genre. The Canterbury Tales is unique among story-collections for its generic variety—a variety often insisted on in the links between the tales, which provide some of the earliest such commentary in Middle English. Medieval Latin treatises on poetry devoted plenty of space to generic definitions, but in relation to classical rather than vernacular kinds; and the generic accounts written of French, Provençal, or Welsh poetry have no Middle English equivalents. Such
distinctions seem to have been taken for granted in England without any requirement for formal definition, on the basis of content alone. Some of Chaucer’s most interesting individual tales do however mix genres within themselves, a process that itself shows an acute sense of generic difference. A sense of genre, to judge from the many comments made on the subject within the work, was thus crucial to Chaucer’s conception of the Tales, and he is indeed exceptional among Middle English writers for his interest in, and alertness to, the differences of literary kinds available to him. Generic difference in the premodern period was closely tied to ideas of rhetorical appropriateness, decorum—a word applied to the variety of the Tales from the sixteenth century forwards. I try to give some indication of its function and effect, not least in relation to the social embrace—the polity—of the pilgrim company.
Sources and analogues. Chaucer draws his stories from a remarkably wide range of origins, from French, Latin, and Italian as well as English, and from all the cultural varieties that those languages encompass. Where specific sources are known for the individual tales, I give summaries and an account of Chaucer’s use and adaptation of them. I also discuss the sources of illustrative material, major authoritative aphorisms, and so on. Where no sources are known, I try to reconstruct the literary context in which he was working. The most extensive change since the original edition of this volume relates to the sources for the whole conception of the Tales.
Structure. Narratology has tended to be an under-studied area of the Tales, though the stories are often intriguingly structured, both in the arrangement of their narrative material and in their tendency to play games with fictive forms. I discuss the ground plan of each tale, how structure can affect meaning, their reliance on narrative, speech, or commentary, and the interest in the process of storytelling that Chaucer shows.
Themes—thematics and ‘sentence’. Chaucer does not write full-scale allegory; it is however very difficult to write a story that does not carry some meaning beyond the bare events recounted, and which shapes how those events are told. The term ‘themes’ has tended to become degraded since the original writing of this book; but that literature should have a ‘sentence’, a set of meanings informing its shape and content, was a recognized principle of composition in the Middle Ages—hence the emphasis on it by Conrad of Hirsau’s student quoted at the start of this introduction. These meanings are often overt, expressed in digressions, comments from the narrator or the pilgrims, or concluding moralites, but those are not always supplied; and even when they appear to be, disagreement is often still an option, sometimes an implied requirement. Chaucer is generously open to all kinds of experience, but he maintains a clear ethical core, even if his historically conditioned ethics are on occasion at odds with our own (one might cite the anti-Semitism of the Prioress’s Tale as being the most egregious example, were it not that it is still so widely current). In this
section, I look at the relation of such matters to the narratives that contain them: at the inner meanings that shape the tales, whether they are made explicit or not. The ways in which tale and teller can affect each other are also discussed here.
The tale in context. The tales of the Canterbury sequence could stand as autonomous short stories or narrative poems, but they do not: they are placed within a larger work, and each tale affects the others and is affected by them. This section studies the additional meanings and resonances that result from their being part of the larger scheme.
Style. The style—or styles—of each tale can be as distinctive as its genre or its themes, and they are indeed an integral part of such things, reinforcing the social elevation or moral identity of both tale and, often, its teller. Chaucer has an especially interesting range of styles at his disposal, not only because of the range of his sources, but because the composite nature of English, deriving from its dual origins in Germanic Old English and Latin-derived French, was just reaching its full range of potential contrasting registers in his own lifetime; and this gave him a richness of choice of vocabulary and style unparalleled in any other language, and never so fully exploited elsewhere until Shakespeare. I analyse aspects such as the choice of words and images, the verse forms, rhetorical heightening, and characteristic syntax of each tale.
In addition, I provide separate discussions of the linking passages or prologues. One characteristic of the links is the quantity of critical or theoretical comment they contain, and I have tried to bring out this emphasis.
Such a division into separate areas of discussion is a matter of convenience, and the most frustrated or sceptical reader will still not be as conscious as I am of the artificiality of some of these boundaries. How Chaucer treats a source is inseparable from what he wants to say; we seldom read the tales as isolated units, without being aware of the Reeve’s breathing fire at the Miller, or the Merchant’s glancing over his shoulder at the Wife of Bath. I have tried to arrange the material so that it is possible to find the discussion of a specific point where it would most reasonably be expected, but the sections, like the tales, are not watertight units, and there are plenty of spills and leaks.
I have not attempted to give a complete survey of critical viewpoints on the tales, though the annotated bibliographies at the end of each section record some of the lines of battle. My own approach emphasizes primarily Chaucer’s literary and stylistic awareness, his sheer multifariousness, rather than readings that see the tales as dramatic speeches by their tellers, as allegories of orthodox Christian teaching, or as footnotes to political events, though I have learnt much from such interpretations. But there are as many interpretations of Chaucer as there are readers; he is supremely skilled at providing material for an almost infinite variety of readings (though he would be startled at some of the inter pretations he has produced). It is impossible, therefore, to write a definitive study of the Tales, and I am very much aware of that impossibility.
The scholarship on the work is vast; I have had to make a large number of omissions in the course of selecting material, and there will inevitably be other accidental ones. But more importantly, Chaucer is not the kind of author on whom it is possible to be definitive. The Tales itself is unfinished; its possibilities are endless. I have tried to keep the sense of the work’s open-endedness, even where it has led me down some unexpected paths. I do not expect that every reader will follow me along all of them, though some (such as the claim of protofeminism in the Clerk’s Tale) have in the event become well trodden since the first edition of this book.
The interpretations given in the main text are my own, though the running bibliographies, discussed below, note significant inspirations and precursors as well as interesting disagreements. Chaucer is not the kind of writer on whom there can ever be a last word, as the continuing abundance of criticism testifies.
The opening quotation is abbreviated from Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogue on the Authors, extracts ed. A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, with the assistance of David Wallace, in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375 (Oxford, 1988, 1991), pp. 40–1.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
All citations from Chaucer in this book are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson, and keyed to its numbering. This established itself as the definitive edition when it was first published in 1987; other editions published since then have generally adopted its numbering system or at least incorporated it alongside their own, so readers using other more recent editions should still not have too much problem in locating citations. In my original writing, I also kept alongside me the eight volumes of Manly and Rickert, with their comprehensive lists of textual variants; Skeat’s magnificent edition; and a number of volumes of the never-completed Variorum Chaucer. Of more recent single-volume editions, I have most consistently consulted that of Jill Mann, supplemented by that of David Lawton. As no edition of a work such as the Canterbury Tales can replace the manuscripts, I have also relied heavily on facsimiles, especially those of Hengwrt and Ellesmere; and I have frequently consulted those and other manuscripts available online, and occasionally the manuscripts themselves. Full details of the printed editions I have used, including the old Chaucer Society prints, are given below. An increasing number are available in digital form.
I have profited from reading many excellent critical works on the Tales as a whole, and some of the most important for the development of criticism of the work are outlined in the following chapter. These are given a full reference at their first mention and are listed in the General Bibliography at the end of this
volume; I give abbreviated references to them in the bibliographies to individual tales when I owe them a specific debt, or where their discussion is of particular importance. An outline of Chaucer’s recurrent sources is also given there, as a locus for basic information about them. Each section of the discussion of the individual tales is also followed by its own brief annotated bibliography. This stands in for footnotes to specific items used in compiling the section; suggests further reading; gives some indication of older lines of interpretation that have fashioned modern views of the tale in question; and indicates intersections with current preoccupations. Articles relevant to just a small number of tales are given a full reference in the section bibliographies at first mention, and either a cross-reference or an abbreviated reference sufficient to identify the source on later mentions.
As the URLs for online publications are rarely stable, I suggest search terms where these are not obvious.
Textual Bibliography
All quotations from Chaucer in this book are taken, unless otherwise specified, from The Riverside Chaucer, general editor Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987; Oxford, 1988; 3rd edn. intro. Christopher Cannon, Oxford, 2008), and I have profited greatly from the scholarship of its many contributors. This edition is itself based on the second edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston and Oxford, 1957). Retaining the Riverside numbering in this book eases access to almost all criticism before 2020.
The number of online editions and manuscript facsimiles is constantly increasing, so readers are advised to check for the latest updates. There are in addition a number of printed editions under way, notably of Chaucer’s complete works, that had not appeared in time to be taken into account for this volume, including those by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge), and by Christopher Cannon and James Simpson (Oxford).
The following is an alphabetical selection of other editions of the Tales:
Boenig, Robert, and Andrew Taylor (eds.), Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Peterborough, Ontario, 2008). A student edition with thorough glossing and an appendix of ‘background documents’.
Kolve, V. A., and Glending Olson (eds.), The Canterbury Tales: Seventeen Tales and the General Prologue (New York, 2018), is the third in a sequence of Norton editions containing an increasing number of tales, all with selected source and background texts; the first edition, with nine tales, appeared in 1989.
Lawton, David (ed.), The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (New York, 2020), with associated ebook and audio recording, is excerpted from his complete Norton Chaucer (2019), which itself replaces E. T. Donaldson’s Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York, 1958) (which excluded the prose works).
Manly, John M., and Edith Rickert (eds.), The Text of the Canterbury Tales (8 vols., Chicago, 1940). This describes the manuscripts and records all textual variants.
Mann, Jill (ed.), Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (London, 2005). Excellent edition that combines scholarship and readability, with particularly generous annotations and commentary.
Skeat, W. W. (ed.), The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (7 vols., Oxford, 1894–1900). Although his scholarship is often outdated, Skeat is still a lucid and valuable source of essential information.
A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Norman, Okla., 1979–2002) is a multi-volume edition, never completed, under the general editorship of Paul G. Ruggiers. Volumes on individual tales are listed in the appropriate tale bibliographies.
Selected Manuscript Facsimiles and Transcripts
Ellesmere: The New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile and its accompanying volume of essays, The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino, Calif., and Tokyo, 1995). Also useful is The Ellesmere Manuscript Reproduced in Facsimile (2 vols., Manchester, 1911), reprinted as The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A Working Facsimile, with introduction by Ralph Hanna III (Cambridge, 1989). Also online at the Huntington Library website.
Gg.4.27: The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Facsimile of Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27, with introductions by M. B. Parkes and Richard Beadle (3 vols., Cambridge, 1979–80). Also online at the Cambridge University Library website.
Hengwrt: The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Variorum I, Norman, Okla., 1979). Also online at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; and with comparison with Ellesmere and other information on CD-ROM ed. Estelle Stubbs, The Hengwrt Chaucer Research Edition (Scholarly Digital Editions, 2002).
Chaucer Society transcripts edited by Frederick J. Furnivall, now available in a variety of reprints and now also all digitized online:
[Cambridge University Library] Cambridge MS Dd.4.24 (1901–2).
[Corpus Christi College, Oxford] Corpus MS [198] (1868–77).
[British Library] Harleian MS 7334 (1885).
[British Library] Lansdowne MS [851] (1868–77).
[Petworth House, Sussex] Petworth MS (1868–77).
The Canterbury Tales
DATE
The writing of the Canterbury Tales occupied the last dozen or so years of Chaucer’s life. He probably started work on it in the later 1380s; the latest of the few references it contains to specific events are to the final decade of the century. He died in 1400, and it is not known whether he continued working on it until his death. Within this period, all dates are conjectural, and are discussed separately for each tale in the course of the book. Two of the tales, the Knight’s and Second Nun’s, were written at some earlier date, and from time to time early composition has been suggested for a number of the others. Many were probably written before a specific place in the sequence was assigned to them, or a specific teller; the General Prologue need not have been written first, nor need the articulating device of the pilgrimage have given Chaucer the idea of writing a storycollection.
The year 1387 was for long taken as the date of the pilgrimage. This particular pilgrimage, however, is fictional, and Chaucer himself does not date it; the opening of the work could locate it in any sweet April of the later fourteenth century, or of the Middle Ages. The work’s placing between contemporaneity and timelessness is peculiarly ambivalent. The spring opening is followed by a number of references to such specific matters as the nefarious financial activities of the pardoners who claimed association with the hospital of St Mary Rouncesval, the location of the wool staple, and, in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, the English Rising of 1381. Other more coded references to political events have been increasingly suggested for the work in tandem with the rise of historicism. Lollardy, England’s first homegrown heresy, in which Wyclif and his followers mounted a challenge to both ecclesiastical institutions and beliefs, gets one passing reference, though it leaves its traces in the text in more covert ways, not least in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Strong arguments are being made to link the work with its context in the contemporary politics of both London and Europe. Yet one would never guess from a reading of the Tales alone just how troubled were the years in which it was composed: years of social and political unrest that led to the execution of several of Chaucer’s close associates and culminated in
the deposition of Richard II. Chaucer himself moved out of range of the worst troubles, to Kent; and that too may be reflected in the shift of focus of the Tales, from the courtly narratives and concerns of the dream visions and Troilus to the pilgrimage route to Canterbury and its motley travellers.
Yet the Tales does belong to the late fourteenth century, and detail after detail registers the broader context of its historical moment. One is reflected in Chaucer’s own move, away from the court whose traditional French culture is so evident in his earlier poems to the more aggressive, mercantile, and predominantly male culture of the city. Many smaller details seem trivial, though their later cultural effects were enormous: the work contains almost the first English references to the recent inventions of paper, the prerequisite for both bureaucracy and mass literacy; and of the mechanical clock, which was to alter the conception of time from being a subset of eternity or an element of Creation, such as were signified by the canonical hours or the movement of the sun, to being a mechanized commodity under human ownership. The work marks the moment when it was still possible to believe in the principle of a stable and unified Church, however imperfect in practice—this was the era of the Great Schism with its two rival popes—even while it documents the gap between personal piety and institutional corruption. It is poised on the divide between a world conceived in terms of a stable and Godgiven feudal hierarchy, and a society disrupted and energized by the pressures of social mobility at every level from the peasantry to the crown, by the demographic collapse following on the Black Death, and by the continuing rise in the importance of money and professional function rather than land or rank in the social machinery. The divide is represented in the reluctance of both the ‘cherles’ and the moneyed bourgeoisie of the Tales to accept any humble place assigned to them, in the satire on the corruption rife within the Church, in the ability to ask questions of a kind disallowed by official doctrine as to the nature of the providential ordering of the world, in the stress on the qualities of the good ruler. The work is more concerned with ethics, both personal and political, than with political events; but the ethical questions it considers are both the timeless ones of fallible human beings living in an unstable world, and those raised by the frightening breakdown of hierarchy and stability in late fourteenthcentury England.
W. W. Skeat (ed., Works of Chaucer, iii. 373) calculated the 1387 date out of the need to find a year when a pilgrimage that started on 17 April (see Tales II. 5) would not include a Sunday; but the whole argument rests on an anachronistic notion of realism. Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, N.J., 2019), is the most detailed account of Chaucer’s life in his political context both in London and abroad. David Wallace studies the political implications of Chaucer’s Italian connections in his Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif., 1997). His Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction (Oxford, 2017) is an admirable short introduction to the essentials of his context and his poetry.
Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), gives an account of the events of Chaucer’s own life, and, in contrast to the work of Turner and Wallace, urges his avoidance of political involvement. He also discusses the significance of Chaucer’s move away from the court in his ‘The Canterbury Tales and London club Culture’, in Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 95–108.
Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), analyses Chaucer’s social and political affiliations, and the Tales as a model of contemporary social diversity. Other kinds of contextualization are provided by Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York, 1978), on connections with Western Europe; by Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), on the popular piety of the later Middle Ages; and in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis, Minn., 1992).
There has been a proliferation in recent years of multiauthor companions that give an overview of fourteenthcentury contextual aspects of Chaucer’s life and works, in particular his political, social, literary, and intellectual backgrounds; chapters from these are cited below in the individual tale biographies. One that gives more attention than many to the integration of all these backgrounds into the Canterbury Tales and his other poetry, along with information on such matters as his language and poetics, manuscript copying, and his later reception, is Geoffrey Chaucer in Context, ed. Ian Johnson (Cambridge, 2019).
TEXT
There are fiftyfive surviving manuscripts that appear once to have contained the complete Tales, though some of them are now damaged. A further twentyeight contain one or more individual tales, or survive in such fragmentary form that it is impossible to tell whether the remaining leaves once belonged to a manuscript of the whole work or to a copy of a single tale. In contrast to our own tendency to anthologize the tales we regard as the liveliest or with the greatest human interest, medieval scribes who selected individual stories preferred to select those of more moral or religious import or the tales of pathos.
The texts vary in multitudinous small details and some major ones, and attempts to reconstruct Chaucer’s original, or the copy of his work that served as archetype for the earliest manuscripts, have met with only partial success. Some variants are due to miscopying, but the nature of others suggests that Chaucer himself was still in the process of making alterations, additions, and excisions to his work. A few manuscripts contain marginal glosses, some shared, some unique to the particular manuscript; it is still subject to speculation as to whether Chaucer himself was responsible for any of these. Furthermore, it is not known whether he had a final arrangement in mind for the order of the tales, and so whether any of the extant manuscripts preserve an order that has any authorial
justification. This is not something that would have troubled his early readers unduly, though there were a number of attempts to supply links between tales where the manuscripts did not. There are accordingly some recent editorial moves towards presenting the text as a single continuous unit, to give more of a sense of the textual continuity most readers would have encountered before modern editorial intervention became normal practice.
There is however more consistency of order among the manuscripts than this might suggest; and the recognition that the tales clump together in comparatively stable groupings is a genuine aid to critical understanding. They show where Chaucer makes connections, and, almost as importantly, where he does not; and they help to limit the kind of freeforall criticism implied by suggesting rearrangements for the tales beyond any manuscript justification. All the complete manuscripts start with the General Prologue and end with the Parson, and most of the tales move around in constant ‘groups’ (originally designated by the alphabetical ‘Chaucer Society’ arrangement offered in Skeat’s great edition, but rarely employed now), or alternatively ‘fragments’ (ordered by number, as given in the Riverside Chaucer and retained in some more recent editions). These appear in the manuscripts in two widespread orders, differentiated only by the different places assigned to Fragment VIII (the Skeat/Chaucer Society’s G). Since the ‘Fragment’ terminology and ordering have become effectively canonical in recent years and are used in almost all the criticism of the past few decades, I have retained it in this volume. It is shown here with the Chaucer Society scheme alongside:
Fragment I (A) General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook
Fragment II (B1) Man of Law
Fragment III (D) Wife, Friar, Summoner
Fragment IV (E) Clerk, Merchant
Fragment V (F) Squire, Franklin
Fragment VI (C) Physician, Pardoner
Fragment VII (B2) Shipman, Prioress, Sir Thopas, Melibee, Monk, Nun’s Priest
Fragment VIII (G) Second Nun, Canon’s Yeoman
Fragment IX (H) Manciple
Fragment X (I) Parson
In the alternative manuscript ordering, Fragment VIII appears before VI, to give an order Franklin–Second Nun–Canon’s Yeoman–Physician–Pardoner–Shipman. Fragments I and II appear together as a unit in almost all manuscripts; Fragments VI and VII consistently follow that order, as do IX and X. By contrast, Fragments IV and V (Clerk–Merchant–Squire–Franklin) are frequently broken up, and the four tales are often separated, but there are compelling reasons for believing that they too should form a single sequence. The positions of these four tales and of
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PART TWO CHAPTER I
IT is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the “ancestral piles” of England. The United Statesian, particularly, surrounded from birth by all that is commonplace and atrocious in architecture, is affected by the grey imposing Fact, brooding heavily under the weight of its centuries, with a curious commixion of delight, surprise, and familiarity. All the rhapsodies of the poets, all the minute descriptions of the old romanticists, train the imagination, bend it into a certain relationship with the historic decorations of another hemisphere, yet stop short of conveying an impression of positive reality. The product of a new world, a new civilisation, as he stands before the carved ruins of an abbey’s cloisters, or the grey ivy-grown towers and massive scarce-punctured walls of an ancient castle, feels a slight shock of surprise that it is really there. But the surprise quickly passes; in a brief time, with the fatal adaptability of the American, it is an old story, a habit. He examines it with curiosity, intelligent or vulgar, according to his rank, but novelty has fled.
Maundrell Abbey stands in the very middle of an estate six miles square. The land undulates gently from the gates to the house, woods on one side of the drive, a moor on the other. At the opposite end of the estate are several farms, a fell of great height, and several strips of woods, in the English fashion. Not far from the Abbey, on a steep low hill set with many trees, are a chapel and a churchyard.
As Cecil and Lee drove toward their home at the close of an August day the bride forgot the bridegroom in her eagerness to knit fact to fancy. The moor was turning purple, the woods close by were full of sunlight, a wonderful shimmer of gold and green; with no hint that they too, before the greed of man fell heavily upon them, may have
been as dark and solemn as the forests of California. Now and again she had a glimpse of a grey pile and a flash of water.
They reached the top of a hillock of some altitude, and Cecil ordered the coachman to pause. Lee rose in her seat and looked down on the Abbey. It was quite different from the structure in her brain, but no less satisfying. All that was in ruin was a long row of Gothic arches, so fragile that the yellow sunlight pouring through seemed a crucible in which they must melt. The rest of the building was an immense irregular mass at the back, but continued from the cloisters in a straight severe line, which terminated in a tower. Weeds and grass sprang from the arches, ivy covered the tower; before the Abbey was a lake, on which swans were sailing; peacocks strutted on the lawns. The fell behind was turning red; in a field far away were many cows; over all hung the low powdered sky, brooded the peace and repose, which, were one shot straight from the blue, one would recognise as English.
“It is the carving that makes the cloisters look so fragile,” said Cecil. “They will stand a long while yet. The crypt, which is now the entrance hall, and a stone roof which once covered a part of the church and is now over the drawing-room, are all that is left of the original Abbey, except two stone staircases. The tower is Norman, and as there is a tradition that a Maundrell owned these lands before the Church, when the latter was despoiled, and Henry VIII. gave the estate to another Maundrell, it took the family name. Oliver Cromwell left precious little of the Abbey, but it was rebuilt in the reign of Charles II., and there is nothing later than the succeeding reign. That chapel on the hill dates from Henry VIII. only. We have service there on Sundays. Our vault is underneath. Only the old abbots and monks are buried in the graveyard. Well? Are you satisfied?”
Lee nodded and smiled. She was so well satisfied that she hoped to lose herself in the pleasurable sensation of a dream realised, and forget certain disappointments and tremors. She had indulged in the dream of an enthusiastic welcome by the tenantry, triumphal arches, and other demonstrations of which she had read; for Cecil was the heir of this splendid domain, and he was bringing home his bride. But they had driven from the station as unobtrusively as two guests
invited for a week’s shooting. Tiny had said to her the day before her departure for England:
“Make up your mind not to expect anything over there, and you will save yourself a great deal of disappointment. When you feel a chill settling over you, shake it off with the reflection that English ways are not our ways. They are the most casual people in the world, and their hospitality, although genuine, is so different from ours, that it seems at first no hospitality at all.”
Lee deliberately forced these words into her mind as Cecil lifted her from the carriage and she passed between two rigid footmen into the crypt of the Abbey. The vast dim columned greyness of the crypt was beautiful and impressive, and surely it was haunted in the midnight by indignant friars, but, save for the approaching butler, it was empty.
“Aren’t your father and stepmother at home?” asked Lee, as Cecil joined her.
“Father’s probably on the moors, and Emmy always lies down in the afternoon,” said Cecil indifferently. “We’ll go straight up to my old rooms. I hope you’ll like them, but of course if you don’t, you can take your choice of the others.”
They followed the butler up an immense stone staircase, then down five long corridors, whose innumerable windows framed so many different views of the grounds that Lee felt sure nothing less than a reel of silk would guide her back and forth. The corridors were lined with pictures and cabinets and curiosities of many centuries, but Lee barely glanced at them, so absorbed was she in wondering if the Abbey were a mile square. Cecil’s rooms were in the tower, and the tower was at the extreme right of the building’s front, but those corridors appeared to traverse the entire back and every wing. At length they passed under a low stone arch, ascended a spiral stone staircase, entered a small stone room fitted up with a desk, a sofa, and two chairs, and Cecil said:
“Here we are.”
“Well, I shall be glad to rest. Isn’t there a short cut to the grounds? If there isn’t, I’ll have to take all my exercise indoors.”
“There’s a door at the foot of the tower And you’ll be a famous walker this time next year. You Californians are so lazy.”
He opened the door of the bedroom, a large old-fashioned severelyfurnished room with a dressing-room beyond. Lee, who was luxurious by nature and habit, did not like it, but consoled herself with the charming landscape beyond the window.
“Do you think you’ll like it up here?” asked Cecil anxiously. “I’d never feel at home anywhere else. I insisted upon these rooms when I was a boy, because Charles II. hid in them once for a week; but another reason why I like them now is because they are out of earshot of all the row—Emmy’s house-parties are rather noisy.”
“Oh, I am sure I shall love it, and I like the idea of being quite alone with you; but do let me fix them up a little; I should feel like a nun.”
“Do anything you like. And if that room is hopeless, there are any number of boudoirs to choose from. This is the only part of the Abbey that isn’t full of windows. And your maid will sleep quite close. We’ll have a bell put in.” He took out his watch. “It’s just five. I’ll send you tea at once, and then go and look up father. You’d better lie down until it’s time to dress for dinner.”
“Well, for Heaven’s sake, come back for me, or I’ll not move.”
Cecil pinched her cheek, kissed her, and departed. Her own maid had refused to cross the ocean, and Cecil had written to the housekeeper requesting that a new one might await them. The girl arrived with the tea-tray, asked Lee for her keys, and without awaiting orders, began at once to unpack the trunks that had arrived with the travellers. She accomplished her task so swiftly and so deftly, that Lee, with a long train of inefficient maids in mind, reflected gratefully that she would doubtless be spared any personal effort for the thousand and one details which went to make up the physical comfort she loved.
The maid laid a wrapper over the back of a chair, dragged the trunks into the antechamber, returned, and courtesied.
“Will your ladyship take off your frock and rest awhile?” she asked.
Lee gave a little jump. It was the first time she had been so saluted. It made her feel a part of that ancient tower, she reflected, with what humour was in her at the moment,—more at home. The maid undressed her, and she lay down on the sofa in the sitting-room to await the return of her lord. The maid, remarking that she should return at seven to dress her ladyship for dinner, retired.
CHAPTER II
ALTHOUGH Lee was happy, she had a hard fight with an attack of tearful repining. Surrounded all her life with demonstrative affection, each homecoming after a brief holiday an event of rejoicing and elaborate preparation, this chill casual entrance into a huge historic pile—apparently uninhabited, and as homelike as a prison—flooded her spirits with an icy rush. Cecil, who had been so close to her, seemed to have mounted to a niche in the grey staircase, and turned to stone. The domestic machinery appeared to run with the precision of an expensive eight-day clock. Were her future associates equally automatic? She remembered the inexcitable Mr. Maundrell, and shuddered. Perhaps even “Emmy” by this time was a mere machine, warranted to have hysterics at certain intervals. Surely a woman who would not sacrifice her routine to receive a petted stepson after two years’ absence and a stranger in a strange land—and so important an addition to the family as her daughter-in-law—must be painfully systematised.
“However,” thought Lee, curling herself down in the hope of a nap, “I can hold my own, that is one comfort. Thank Heaven, I have been brought up all my life to think myself somebody, and that I have plenty of money; it would be tragic if I were a timid, nervous, portionless little person.”
She heard a light step, and the agreeable sibilation of linings and flounces. In a second she had run to the mirror in her bedroom. Her hair was smooth, and the wrapper of white camel’s hair and blue velvet sufficiently enhancing. There was colour in her cheeks, and the only suggestion of fatigue came from a vague shadow beneath her lashes. She felt that she had nothing to fear from the critical eyes of the other woman.
“May I come in?” Lady Barnstaple had rapped and opened the door simultaneously. “How do you do? Are you tired? You look abominably fresh. And how tall you are! I thought you’d be in a
wrapper, so I didn’t send for you. Lie down again, and I’ll sit here. These chairs are stuffed with bricks.”
She was a short woman, with a still beautiful figure above the waist; it was growing massive below. Her colouring was nondescript, but her features must once have been delicate and piquant; now they were sharp, and there were fine lines about the eyes, and weak determined mouth. Her cheeks were charmingly painted, her hair elaborately coiffed; she wore an airy tea-gown of black chiffon, with pink bows, in which she looked like a smart fluffy doll. Her carriage, short as she was, would have been impressive had it not been for the restlessness of her manner. If she had come to England with a Chicago accent, she had sent it home long since. Her voice was abrupt and unpleasing, but its syllabic presentment was wholly English, and her manner was curiously like an Englishwoman’s affectation of American animation. Her eyes, for some time after she entered the room, had the round vacant stare of a newly-arrived infant. When the exigencies of conversation removed this stare, they flashed with the nervous irritable domineering character of the woman. It was some time before they were removed from Lee’s face for an instant. Lee was tired, but she obeyed the instinct of the savage who scents a fight, and sat upright.
“You won’t stay in this hole, of course—one might as well live in a dungeon—there is one at the bottom of the tower, for that matter. In the only letter that Cecil condescended to write me after his engagement, he said he wanted his old rooms to be ready for him, and he hoped I wouldn’t put any guests in them. But of course you can’t stand them. Fancy not being able to turn round without falling over a man! You’d be at each other’s throats in a week.”
“Isn’t there another room underneath these that I could fix up as a sitting-room? I like this tower.”
“Fancy, now! I believe there is a lumber-room, or something; but what can you do with a tower-room with walls five feet thick, and such windows? Of course I don’t know your tastes, but I must have fluffy airy things in bright colours about me, and floods of light— through pink shades, nowadays,” she added, with a bitter little laugh.
“What a lovely complexion you have! I had one too, once, but it’s gone!—it’s gone! I don’t know whether I’m pleased or not that you’re a beauty. Barnstaple assured me that it was impossible you could be, that Cecil must be mad—the English children are so pretty; but I thought it unlikely that Cecil would sacrifice his chances of a fortune for anything less than downright beauty. Of course you’ll be a great card for me. I can make out a lot of you; but on the other hand it’s disgusting having anything so fresh forever at one’s elbow. Repose is not the fashion now, and of course you are a bit of a prude—young married women who are in love with their husbands are always so fiercely virtuous!—and of course you haven’t half enough money; but I can see that you will be a success. We all know that you’re clever, and they like clever people over here, and your voice isn’t nasal—it’s really lovely. It’s a thousand pities—a thousand pities that you couldn’t bring Cecil a fortune!” Her voice gave a sudden querulous break. “He could have had one—probably a dozen—for the asking, and I think the Abbey should have been his first consideration. He won’t inherit a penny from Barnstaple, and Heaven knows what I’ll have left! He can’t possibly keep it up on what you and he have together—your house in town will take every penny—and he’ll either have to break the entail and sell it, or rent the moor, and cut the rest up into farms, and perhaps let the Abbey itself. I should turn in my grave, for the Abbey is the one real love of my life—”
Her restless eyes had been moving about the room; they suddenly met her daughter-in-law’s. Lee had very beautiful eyes, but they were capable of a blue-hot flame of passion at times. Lady Barnstaple blinked rapidly; her own seemed scorching under that blue-fire.
“Oh, of course, it doesn’t signify! Nothing really signifies in this world. I really didn’t mean to be nasty, but I always flare up when the Abbey is in question—and then that old superstition!—But bother! I really want to be nice! Do tell me about your clothes. If you had sent me a lining I could have ordered everything for you in Paris. I shouldn’t have minded running over a bit.”
“My things were made in New York, and will probably answer.”
“Oh, of course! New York’s every bit as smart as Paris, only it eats your head off. Have you many jewels?”
“Very few—compared with the shop-window decorations of New York and English women.”
“We do overload ourselves,” said Lady Barnstaple amiably. “I’ve seen women turn actually grey under the weight of their tiaras. Still, unless you blaze at a great party, you are simply not seen. But of course the Barnstaple jewels are mine till I die, and I sold all my own after having them copied; you could wear some of those if you liked, although, being fresh from the other side, you’d probably scorn imitations.”
“I certainly should.”
“Oh, you’ll get over all that! We are all shams nowadays.”
“You are certainly frank enough.”
“A mere habit—a fashion. Everybody shouts all he knows just now. We even talk of things at the table that would quite shock—Chicago, for instance. And as for your poor little San Francisco—there are the most amusing points of resemblance between the Americans and the English middle-class.”
“Then perhaps you would not mind telling me if you would have taken the trouble to meet us this afternoon if I had brought a million with me.”
“Dear me, no; not if you had arrived at such an unearthly hour. I assure you I did not intend to be rude, but I always sleep from half after four to half after five. I don’t take my tea with the others.”
“And there would have been no demonstration, I suppose.”
“Well—yes, frankly, perhaps there would have been. Barnstaple did say something about it, but I told him I couldn’t think of affording it, and I couldn’t. Don’t be bitter about it; but we need money—money —money so horribly.”
“I am not bitter in the least. I merely asked out of curiosity.”
“Oh, my dear, when one is young and beautiful one would be a fool to be bitter about anything. You probably think me a devil, but if you knew what my life has been! To-day I’m in one of my moods. I’m sorry it happened so, and I hate myself for being nasty, but I can’t help it. I haven’t any particular reason for being; they just come down on me, and I want to scratch everybody’s eyes out. I may be as cheerful as a lark, and as amiable as a kitten for a week. You have no idea what a popular little person I am!”
Lee’s anger had passed, giving way to a commingling of curiosity, disgust and pity. Was this a sample of engrafted America? She asked if there were any other English-Americans staying at the Abbey.
Lady Barnstaple scowled, and the scowl routed what little youth she had left. “I’m not on speaking terms with a single American but yourself and Lady Arrowmount, and I barely know her. I adore the English, but the jealousy and rivalry of other Americans! But I’m sent in ahead of the ones I hate most! I am!—I am! It’s been war to the knife between three of us for years now, and I’ve got to go under, because I haven’t the money to smash ’em. That is one reason why I’m a bit off my head about Cecil not having married a million. With a rich and beautiful— But here comes your maid. I must go to mine. I’ll swear you shall think me an angel to-morrow.”
CHAPTER III
LEE found no time to think that night. As soon as her maid had left her, Cecil entered from his dressing-room and said that his father would like to see her for a moment before they joined the guests in the library.
“I saw Emmy for a few minutes, and she said she had been to see you—and many complimentary things.”
“How kind of her!”
“Didn’t you like her? Most people do.”
“It’s not polite to criticise your relations, but I may be excused, as she is my countrywoman first. I have been carefully brought up, and I never before met that sort of American. Of course the Middle West is very new, and it is hardly fair to criticise it, but I should think twenty years or so of England would have done something more than remove her accent.”
Cecil smiled. “American women are so popular in England that I fancy they grow more and more American as the years go by. I don’t know much about it.”
“It is rather odd having to stand just behind a stepmother whom I shouldn’t think of knowing at home.”
“Of course there are no distinctions in regard to Americans over here; it is all personality and money. Emmy hasn’t much of the first in a large sense, but she knows how to make herself popular. People find her likeable and amusing—even the women, because, of course, she is so different from themselves; and she is really the best-hearted little creature in the world. I see you don’t like her, but wait a little; perhaps she was nervous to-day.”
“I am not going to be so commonplace as to quarrel with my motherin-law, but I certainly shall not like her. As you would say, she is not my own sort.”
“Neither am I,” said Cecil laughing, “but you like me.”
“We represent the fusion of the two greatest nations on earth. Why do not you tell me that I am looking particularly well?”
They were traversing one of the long corridors. Cecil glanced uneasily about, then put his arm round her and kissed her.
“I am doing my best to live up to the American standard, and tell you once a day how much I love you, and how beautiful you are. When do you think you will take it for granted?”
“Never! never! Are you proud of me to-night?”
“You never looked lovelier—except when we were married. You nearly knocked me over then.”
“What a pity I can’t wear a wedding-veil on all state occasions.”
“I have a suspicion that as you are a bride you should wear white for a time.”
“All my day summer frocks are white, and I simply won’t wear it at night. I shall take full advantage of the fact that I am an American.”
She wore a wonderful gown of flame-coloured gauze, more golden than red, and so full of shimmer and sheen, that she had reflected, with some malice, it would outblaze all of Lady Barnstaple’s jewels, and had concluded to wear none.
“To-morrow and the next day I am going out with the other men, and you are coming to luncheon with us on the moor—at least Emmy and the others generally come when the weather is fine; but on Sunday I’ll show you over the Abbey. I’d like to do it myself, but I’m afraid we can’t get into the state bedrooms until the guests are gone.”
“Are they in the rooms that kings and queens and all the rest have slept in?”
“You are improving. How is it you didn’t say ‘kings and queens and things’? I’m afraid they are. This house is all corridors and rooms for entertaining and boudoirs; there are not more than twenty-five bedrooms. Here we are.”
They entered a small room furnished as a study, and Lord Barnstaple entered from the adjoining bedroom almost immediately. He looked rather more impassive and rather more cynical, but hardly ten years older. His monocle might never have been removed. Somewhat to Lee’s surprise, he not only kissed her, but shook her warmly by the hand.
“So another American is my fate, after all,” he said. “You see, I suspected as much the day I left. Have you ever had hysterics?”
“Never!”
“I almost hope you have a temper—oh, you have, you have, with those eyes!” He chuckled. “Turn it loose on her! Give it to her! Gad! but I’d like to see her well trounced! She doesn’t mind me, but you’re a woman, and young, and beautiful, and—nearly twice her height. Gad! how she’ll hate you! But trounce her—trounce her! Don’t give her any quarter!”
Cecil laughed, “Why do you sow these seeds of discord in the family?”
“Oh, we’ll keep out of the way. But fancy Emmy limp and worn out, and not daring to call her soul her own! ’Twould be the happiest day of my life! But I’m famished.”
They entered the library only a moment before dinner was announced. It was a very long room breaking the series of corridors, and only three times their width. Its panelling was black, and its books appeared to be musty with age; above the high cases were many Maundrells; even the furniture looked as ancient as the Abbey. But flooding all was a pink glare of electric light.
The room was full of people, who regarded the bride with descriptive curiosity. Lady Barnstaple was flitting about, her expression in perfect order, her superlatively smart French gown quivering with animation. She came at once toward Lee, followed by a tall goodlooking young man, whom she presented as Captain Monmouth.
“What a love of a gown! I’m so glad you know how to dress!” she exclaimed. “You are to go in with Miss Pix,” she added to her stepson.
Cecil drew his brows together “Why do you send me in with Miss Pix?” he muttered angrily. “You know she bores me to death.”
“To punish you for not marrying her You can’t get out of it; she expects you.”
Lee overheard the conversation. So did Lord Barnstaple, who was laughing softly at his son’s discomfiture. She had no time to question him, for they went down at once to dinner, and his attention for a time was claimed by the woman on his left. Cecil was on the other side of the table, some eight or ten seats down. Lee studied his partner attentively while talking with Captain Monmouth, who sat on her right.
The immense room looked like the banqueting hall of kings, but, so far as Lee could judge—and she had one half of the guests within her visual range—the young woman with the dreadful name looked more the traditionally cold haughty aristocrat, for whom such rooms were built, than any one present. The others appeared to have nothing of the massive repose of their caste; they seemed, in fact, to vie with each other in animation, and they certainly talked very loud and very fast. But Miss Pix had that air of arrested development peculiar to the best statuary. Her skin was as white as the tablecloth, her profile was mathematically straight, suggesting an antique marble or a sheep. Her small flaxen head was held very high, and her eyelids had the most aristocratic droop that Lee had ever conceived of.
“Who is she?” the bride asked her companion, who appeared to be an easy and untraditional person. “And why is she so different from the rest—with that name? She looks like one of Ouida’s heroines— the quite impossible ones.”
Captain Monmouth laughed. “Her father was a brewer, disgustingly rich. Her parents are dead. She and her brother—dreadful bounder —have been trying to get into Society for years—only been really successful the last three. Lady Barnstaple took ’em up, for some reason or other. She’s usually rather nasty to new people. Only girl, and has three millions, but doesn’t marry and isn’t popular—scarcely opens her mouth, and has never been known to unbend. Fancy it’s
rather on her mind that she wasn’t born into the right set. So she fakes it for all it’s worth, as you Americans would say. I do like American slang. Can you teach me some?”
“I know more than I’ve ever dared to use, and you shall have it all, as my husband disapproves of it. I think Miss Pix has done rather well. She is what we would call a good ‘bluffer.’”
“Quite so—quite so. The women say all sorts of nasty things about her—that all that white is put on with a brush or a sponge or something, as well as that haughty nostril; and that she has had the muscles cut in her eyelids—ghastly thought, ain’t it? Nature gave her that profile, of course; can’t have the bridge of your nose raised— can you?—even with three millions. It’s the profile that made all the trouble, I fancy. She’s livin’ up to it. Must be deuced aggravatin’ to be born with a cameo profile and a Lancashire accent. No wonder she’s frozen.”
“Has she got rid of the accent?”
“Oh, rather! She was educated in Paris with a lot of swagger French girls. She’s quite correct—in a prehistoric way—only she overdoes it.”
His attention was claimed by the woman on his other side, and Lee asked Lord Barnstaple:
“What did Lady Barnstaple mean? Did she want Cecil to marry that Miss Pix?”
“Didn’t she! She never worked so hard for anything in her life. She was ill for two weeks after Cecil went off. It wouldn’t have been a bad thing. I’d have wanted it myself if she hadn’t. I like you—always did— but I wish to gad you had more money! Don’t you think you’ll discover a gold mine on that ranch of yours some day?”
Lee laughed, although the sensation of dismay induced by Lady Barnstaple’s visit returned at his words. “I’m afraid not. Sulphur and arsenic and iron are as much as can be expected of one poor little ranch.”
“Perhaps we can sell the springs to a syndicate—who knows? Syndicates are always buyin’ things and givin’ seven figgers for ’em. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. The next old Jew or brewer that wants to get into Society we’ll send for and tell him that the ranch at seven figgers is our price for a week’s shooting at the Abbey and three dinners in town,” and he gave his ungenial chuckle.
“You aren’t all really as bad as that over here, are you?”
“Oh, we’re mixed, like you Americans. We’re all right so long as we don’t need money; but, you see, we need such a cursed lot of it— several thousand times more than the nobodies who sit outside and criticise us. It’s in our blood, and when we can’t get it one way we try another. We all cling to certain ideals, though: I’ve never gambled with a parvenu. It’s true I made an ass of myself and married one, but I pulled up just after. Miss Pix is the only other that has got inside my doors. That’s the one point Emmy and I agree on: I have my ideals”—he laughed again—“and, like all upstarts, she despises other upstarts. Monmouth is the only person in the house except Miss Pix without an hereditary title, and he’s grandson of a duke, and a Guardsman. Some of the smartest women of the day are untitled, but Emmy won’t have ’em. Wonder who she’ll have this time five years?—Second-rate actors and long-haired poets, probably.”
Lee wondered at even a dilapidated set of ideals, and at a pride— and pride was written all over him—which would permit him to live on a woman’s money. Of course he may have argued that Lady Barnstaple was paying a fair yearly rent for the title and the Abbey, but it was an old-world view-point, to which it would take a long period of habit to accustom the new. She wondered if she had any right to despise a man who was a mere result of a civilisation so different from her own, but felt unindulgent. In the United States, if a penniless man married for money, he had the decency to affect the habit of the worker, if it were only to write alleged poems for the magazines, or to attach himself to a Legation.
After dinner she went with the women into another immense room, also panelled to the ceiling. Each panel was set with a portrait, several of which she knew at a glance to be the originals of bygone
masters. Their flesh tints were uniformly pink: Lee glanced upward. The stone ceiling, arched and heavily carved, was set with electric pears. It was an irritating anomaly.
Lee thought the women looked very nice, and wondered if she was ever to be introduced to anybody. Emmy was flitting about again— rather the upper part of her seemed to flit as if propelled by the somewhat unwieldy machinery below. She looked indubitably common, despite her acquired “air” and the exquisite taste of her millinery; and Lee wondered what these women—who, well-dressed or ill, loud-voiced or semi-subdued, delicately or heavily modelled of face, intensely modern all of them, looked what they were, and as if they assumed the passing fad in manners, even the fad of vulgarity, as easily and adjustably as a new sleeve or a larger waist—could find in this particular American to their fancy.
“Do sit here by me!” A young woman on a small sofa swept aside her skirts and nodded brightly to Lee. She had sat opposite at dinner, and spoken across the table several times to Captain Monmouth, whom she addressed as “Larry.” She had a large open voice and a large open laugh, and, to use an unforgettable term of Lord Barnstaple’s, she rather sprawled. But she was exquisitely fine of feature and cold of colouring, although charged straight up through her lithe figure with assumed animation or ungoverned nervousness, Lee could not determine which. The bride sat down at once.
“You are Lady Mary Gifford,” she said smiling. “I asked Captain Monmouth who you were.”
“Oh, did you ask who I was? How nice! I wish everybody in the room was talking about me as they are about you. But my day for that is past. Would you guess I was twenty-four?”
Lee shook her head, smiling. In spite of the persistent depression within her, she found her new friends very interesting.
“Twenty-four, not married, and only sixty pounds a year to dress on! Isn’t it a tragedy? I wish I were an American. They’re all so frightfully rich. At least, all those are that come over here; they wouldn’t dare to come if they weren’t.”
“I have dared, and I am not—not as you count riches.”
“No—really now? But of course you’re joking, Cecil Maundrell simply had to marry a ton——”
Lee laughed, with a nearer approach to hysteria than she had ever known. “Would you mind not talking about that?” she said. “If ever I know you as well as I hope I shall, I’ll tell you why.”
“Fancy my being so rude! But I’m quite horribly outspoken, and Cecil Maundrell’s so good-looking, of course he’s been discussed threadbare. Of course we all knew the Abbey must go to another American, and we’ve been so anxious to see you. Emmy is a duck, but she’s not a beauty—few Americans really are, to my mind. They just ‘chic it’ as the French painters say. Everybody is simply staring at you, and you’re so used to it, you don’t appear to see them. You’re going to be a great success. I know all the signs—seen ’em too often!”
“Well, I hope so. I suppose an American failure would be painfully conspicuous.”
“Oh, wouldn’t she! Tell me, is it really true that you have different grades of society, as we have—an upper and middle-class, and all that sort of thing? Some of the Americans over here have always turned up their noses at Emmy, and it seems so very odd—you are only a day or two old; how can you have so many distinctions? Of course I know that some are rich and some are poor, which means that some are educated and some are not, but I should think that would make just two classes. But Emmy is—has been—awfully rich, and yet she has had a hard fight with two or three other Americans that are dead against her. She hasn’t it in her, poor little soul, to be quite as smart as Lady Vernon Spencer and Mrs. Almeric Sturt—you could be!—but she’s ‘popular,’ and unless the Abbey burns down— oh, it’s the sweetest thing in England, and the shootings are famous! But do explain to me.”
“About our social differences? Of course to be really anybody you must have come from the South, one way or another.”
“What South?—South America?”
Lee endeavoured to explain, but Lady Mary quickly lost interest, and made one of her dazzling deflections: it was evident that more than three minutes of any one subject would bore her hopelessly. But Lee had realised in a flash the utter indifference of the English to the most imposing of the new world’s family trees. The haughty Southerner and the raw Westerner were “varieties,” nothing more. She might be pronounced better style than her stepmother, and doubtless would be more respected, but no one would ever think of looking down the perspective of each for the cause. She felt doubly depressed.
CHAPTER IV
SHE awoke late next morning, after a restless night Cecil had risen without disturbing her and gone to his grouse. In a happier frame of mind she would have indulged in a sentimental regret at this defection, but now she only wanted to be alone to think; and to think she must get out-of-doors.
The maid was in the outer room awaiting orders, and went for her tea at once. Lee hurriedly dressed herself, and while she was attacking her light breakfast told the girl to go down to the foot of the tower and see if the outer door could be opened. At the end of a halfhour the rusty key and hinges had been induced to move, and Lee, having convinced herself that no one was in sight, left the shelter of her tower and went hastily toward the woods.
The air had a wonderful softness and freshness, and the country showed a dull richness of colour under a pale sky. The woods looked black as she approached them, but within they were open and full of light. There were no majestic aisles here, no cavernous vistas, but, in their way, they were lovely, as many trees massed together with a wilderness of bracken between must always be.
Lee selected as secluded a spot as she could find, and sat down to think. She was terrified and depressed and homesick, and longed passionately for some one of her “own sort” to whom she could present the half of her troubles, and with whom dissect her uneasy forebodings. Cecil was not the man to whom a woman could take her daily worries. He would be a rock of strength in the great primary afflictions of life; he looked after her as carefully as if she were blind and lame; and she had not been called upon for an independent decision since the day of her marriage. Moreover, she was firmly convinced that no man had ever loved a woman so much before; but, she had admitted it with dismay more than once, there was a barrier. It was humiliating, almost ridiculous, that she, Lee Tarleton, should live to confess it, but she was just a little in awe of her husband. Why, she had not been able to guess until yesterday, for
