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Unit 10: The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Non-detailed Study): Discussion and Analysis-II

status level, and as the Miller parodied and highlighted the idealized nature of the Knight’s Tale by Notes
replacing its romance setting with gritty realism, so the Reeve’s Tale performs a similar treatment on
the Miller’s.
It is clear from the moment that the angry Reeve quietly fumes among all the jollity after the Miller’s
Tale that he is of rather a severe disposition, and there is nothing of the warmth and good humor of
the Miller’s Tale: there is no sign of an elaborate, enjoyable fabliau trick like Nicholas’ elaborate
(and, when you consider that John the Miller goes out to the country regularly anyway, rather
unnecessary) plan. What the Reeve narrates is brutal, animal, copulation:

Withinne a while this John the clerk up leep,
And on this goode wyf he leith on soore.
So myrie a fit ne hadde she nat ful yore;
He priketh harde and depe as he were mad.
There is a harder, more vengeful quality to this “quitting” tale, and, again, our attention is drawn to
the anger of the teller in the Canterbury framework–how far does the bile of the vengeful Reeve
seep into the telling of the story as Chaucer repeats it to us? Larry Benson supposes the Reeve’s
Tale, like the Miller’s, based directly on a French fabliau, since two surviving fabliaux offer close
parallels to Chaucer’s story, and yet the tone of the tale is quite different from that of the Miller’s.
What the Reeve’s Tale undoubtedly demonstrates is Seth Lerer’s observation that language becomes
gradually broken down, gradually devalued as the first fragment progresses. Where the Knight’s
courtly, formal language descended to the bodily noises of the Miller’s Tale, language in the Reeve’s
Tale seems replaced altogether for the most part-by action. Symkyn’s wife and daughter are not
persuaded into bed, or even seduced slightly, but just leapt upon. The denouement of the tale is a
dumbshow played out in the dark: silent sex, moving cradles, and, eventually a brawl involving
most of the participants on the floor. The graceful, formal, rhetoric of Theseus’ “First Mover” speech
already seems a long way away.
Note too that no-one-and this is different even to the Miller’s Tale-actually does any verbal persuading
in words in the Reeve’s Tale. The plot of the tale consists largely of moving things around: beginning
with the release of the clerks’ horse, followed by the hiding of their loaf of bread by the Miller, and
then, of course, the various movements of the cradle at the bottom of the bed. Instead of words, we
have another form of signification, in which objects carry certain meanings. The cradle, for example,
(a neat symbol, considering what happens in the bed it delineates!) is used to dictate which bed is
the miller’s and which not. The meaning and the value of words and speaking is central to the Tales
as a whole - and language in The Knight’s Tale became verbal exclamations in The Miller’s Tale,
and, in The Reeve’s Tale, is replaced by simple, physical signposts.
Note too that the two clerks speak in a Northern dialect of Middle English, which might be seen to
disintegrate the formality of the language even further: Chaucer, of course, claiming to repeat exactly
the words in which someone told the tale, meticulously transcribes the dialect into the direct speech
of the clerks.
“The feend is on me falle” (4288) the miller’s wife cries out as the miller trips and falls onto her, and
the idea of a fall–from grace, from the ceiling in a kneading trough, or from a horse – is key to the
final twists of each of the Canterbury Tales told thus far. In a more metaphorical sense, too, we can
see that the idea of man’s fall from paradise is replayed to some extent in the move from the romantic
Knight’s Tale to the bawdy, human tales of the Miller and Reeve: it is a post-lapserian, “real” world
we are presented with.
One final question is the question of justice. How far is the justice delivered on Symkyn deserved–
how far is it funny, how far a necessary justice, and how far is it trickery gone too far? Symkyn is
struck out cold by his wife at the end of the tale, and yet Chaucer carefully includes the detail of the
clerks beating him even when he lies unconscious. Do we laugh at this, or recoil from it? Whose

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