Page 129 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes Yet here is Chaucer, in the mouth of the Squire, promising to tell the story of incestuous Canacee. It
is certainly true that the Squire’s plan for the rest of his tale looks as if it might take four pilgrimages
of its own to complete–the Squire, the son of the Knight, certainly inherited his father’s long-
windedness–and some critics have argued that the Franklin breaks off the tale (either with irony or
with faux modesty and compliments) only to prevent the pilgrimage from having to endure all of it.
Yet critics–who have paid scant attention to the Squire’s Tale, often disregarding it as unfinished–
have yet to come up with a fully persuasive explanation of why it is the promise of incest which
seems to motivate the abrupt termination of the Squire’s Tale.

William Kamowski has also pointed out that the abridgement of the Squire’s Tale
precedes an abridgement of the Host’s original tale-telling plan.

In fact, at the very moment when the Squire breaks off, an apparent reshaping of the grand plan for
the Canterbury Tales also takes place. Harry Bailly reminds the Franklin, “wel thou woost / That
ech of yow moot tellen atte leste / A tale or two, or breken his biheste” (696-98). Evidently the
Host’s original plan for four tales apiece will not be realized. It seems more than coincidence that
the Host trims his own colossal ambition so soon after the aborting of the Squire’s grand plan,
which is too large to be realized within the framework of either the Host’s storytelling contest or
Chaucer’s frame narrative.

What elements of the romance are present in this fragment?

There are lots of interesting avenues for exploration and interpretation with the Squire’s Tale, yet it
only seems fair to conclude that the critical work on the Tale remains, like the Tale itself, frustratingly
inconclusive.

14.2 The Franklin’s Tale

14.2.1 Prologue to the Franklin’s Tale

The old Bretons, in their time, made songs, and the Franklin’s Tale, the narrator says, is to be one of
those songs. However, the Franklin begs the indulgence of the company because he is a “burel man”
(an unlearned man) and simple in his speech. He has, he says, never learned rhetoric, and he speaks
simply and plainly–the colors he knows are not colors of rhetoric, but colors of the meadow.

14.2.2 The Franklin’s Tale Text

The Franklin’s Tale begins with the courtship of the Breton knight Arviragus and Dorigen, who came
to be married happily. Their marriage was one of equality, in which neither of the two was master or
servant; and the narrator comments specifically that when “maistrie” (the desire of the Wife of Bath
and the women in her tale) enters into a marriage, love flaps its wings and flies away.
However, soon after their marriage, Arviragus was sent away to Britain to work for two years.
Dorigen wept for his absence, despite the letters that he sent home to her. Her friends would often
take her on walks where they would pass the cliffs overlooking the ocean and watch ships enter the
port, hoping that one of them would bring home her husband. However, although her friends’
comforting eventually started to work, Dorigen remained distressed by the grisly, black rocks visible
from the cliff-side, near to the shore. She asked God why he would create “this werk unresonable”

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