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Robert J. Meyer-Lee
Goshen College
Email: meyerlee at aya dot yale dot edu
In many—perhaps most—cases, the conditions of the material witnesses to Middle English texts are such that the most basic questions of literary study can be difficult to answer. Often, the initial question is not “what does this text mean” but “of what does this text consist.” In this situation, one must eventually confront the daunting question of what degree and range of interpretation is justifiable given partial and ambiguous evidence regarding the exact contents or form of a text.
In my paper, I explore the ramifications of one specific piece of ambiguous evidence in the manuscript witnesses to the Canterbury Tales: the disposition of the tales in Fragments IV and V, and, in particular, the uncertainties about the placement of the first tale in Fragment V, the Squire’s Tale. Unlike other fragment divisions, the one between IV and V is not, in fact, attested in the manuscripts; there is no real uncertainty that the Squire’s Tale was linked to a preceding tale, but rather uncertainty as to exactly which tale stood at the other end of the link. The decision—in, say, the Riverside edition—to represent this uncertainty as a fragment break therefore is not interpretive restraint but a profound interpretive choice. It represents as merely incidental—as not meaningful—the placement of the Merchant’s Tale before the Squire’s Tale, of the Host turning from the Merchant to the Squire in the severed link between the tales, and of any significance of the two fragments’ overall sequence of Clerk-Merchant-Squire-Franklin. These consequences, I argue, are quite radical: they represent a far-reaching editorial response to a crux that may just as plausibly have been resolved by choosing the most likely preceding tale (the Merchant’s) and representing the sequence as a continuous, unbroken fragment of four tales.
With this fragment cemented back together, one may notice that it forms a sequence in which the occupation of each of the tellers has some biographical relation to Chaucer. What then emerges is an intertwined exploration of masculine occupation (specifically, of the nature and consequences of the economic “social persons”—as Elizabeth Fowler terms it—that would have been available to Chaucer) and authorial identity (especially as it derives from considerations of the value and purpose of fiction). The Merchant-Squire transition—that which the Riverside obscures—is thus pivotal, representing a thematically overdetermined juxtaposition of Chaucer’s mercantile paternal heritage and his aristocratic youth.