Page 16 - DENG502_PROSE

Prose

Notes other prose tale, the Tale of Melibeus, is equally inappropriate to Chaucer, who tells it. Chaucer
apparently assigned this tale to himself in a moment of ironic humor. At the same time it must be
kept in mind that the modern reader’s impatience with these two tales is likely to be much greater
than was that of Chaucer’s contemporaries. In the fourteenth century both the materials and the
method of them were familiar and approved, and many of Chaucer’s readers doubtless received
them as highly respectable and meritorious performances.
Both of these prose tales are really translations. The Tale of Melibeus is a translation of a French
treatise, Le Livre de Melibee et de dame Prudence, probably made by Jean de Meun, on the basis of a
Latin work, Liber Consolationis et Consilii, by Albertano of Brescia. The Tale is not much more than
a bundle of quotations of a generally moral and sententious character, bound together by a simple
thread of allegorical narrative. Melibeus is a rich man of the world who finds himself ill-treated by
his enemies and who is elaborately counseled by his wife, Dame Prudence, on such topics as the
choice of friends and advisers, on avenging wrongs, on the use of riches. The characters are not
realistically conceived, and the wife of Melibeus is the source of all wisdom in the story because
Prudentia, Justitia,’ Philosophia, and the other virtues were traditionally allegorized as feminine.
The Tale has some resemblance to the type of didactic romance made popular in the sixteenth
century by Guevara’s Dial of Princes, the quotations being derived not merely from scriptural and
patristic sources, but many of them from classical and post-classical literature. But the romantic
and narrative interests of the Tale are held severely in hand and the main purpose of the story was
to serve as a container for numerous aphoristic and sententious quotations. From the point of view
of Chaucer as a writer of prose, the chief interest of the Tale lies in the fact that it is freely and
idiomatically written, and that it thus shows how much easier Chaucer found it to translate from
French than from Latin.
The other of Chaucer’s two pious tales is not unlike the Tale of Melibeus. It likewise is obviously a
translation, but the immediate source is not known. Whatever this immediate source may have
been, it was almost certainly written in French and was closely followed by Chaucer in his
translation. Like the Tale of Melibeus, the Parson’s Tale is idiomatically expressed in a simple,
straightforward, and unmannered style. Like the Melibeus in another respect, it is quite without
personal or dramatic coloring in the body of text, although occasionally, as in the satirical passages
on extravagance in dress, the conventional themes of medieval sermonizing are treated with some
vivacity. But the main personal interest of the Tale lies in the fact that it is followed by the well-
known retractions of Chaucer, in which he revokes his “Endytinges of worldly vanitees,” and
calls attention to his “othere bokes of Legendes of seintes and omelies and moralitee and devocioun.”
Both the Melibeus and the Parson’s Tale come safely under the head of medieval works of devotion,
and it is quite probable that a good many similar pious writings of Chaucer have been lost. If so,
some of them were pretty certainly written in prose, for in this kind of writing, prose had established
for itself an unquestioned position.
Chaucer’s remaining English prose work is a kind of medieval text-book, written for his little son
Louis, who was at the time of the “tendre age of ten yeer” and who had shown evidences of ability
to “lerne sciencez touchinge noumbres and proporciouns.” This Treatise on the Astrolabe, like
Chaucer’s other prose writings, is merely a translation, or adaptation, the original in this case
being a Latin version of a text in Arabic. Chaucer has omitted parts of his Latin source and has re-
arranged the materials to suit himself, but his translation of the Latin is often literal. Although the
exigencies of the subject-matter compelled him to use a good many Latinized technical words, the
style on the whole, thanks perhaps to Chaucer’s efforts to adapt it to a child of ten, is simple and
much more idiomatic than the style of the translation from Boethius. The work was popular in
Chaucer’s day, as is shown by the unusual number of twenty-two early manuscripts still extant in
various libraries.

10 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY