Commentary Displacing Text: The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Scholastic Fable Tradition

Abstract

Commentary Displacing Text: The Nun's Priest's Tale and the Scholastic Fable Tradition Edward Wheatley Hamilton College Although Th, Nun; P,m,; 1;,1, ;, on, ofth, best-known beast fables in European literature, its structure threatens to preclude it from a genre known primarily for its brevity and simplicity. The fabular part of the tale-the fox's capture and release of the cock Chauntecleer--occupies less than half of the tale, while the first three-fifths are devoted largely to the description of the old woman, her rooster, his dream, and the debate surrounding its interpretation. Why is the conventional fable narrative sequestered in the final half of the work? Would Chaucer's medieval audi­ ence have been able to make more of the overall structure of the tale than we can? In a two-part article in Speculum Robert A. Pratt found that the fable itself is closely related to one of Marie de France's popular fables, Del cok e del gupil,1 while the earlier portions of the tale come largely from the fourteenth-century Roman de Renart le Contrefait and branch 2 ofthe Roman de Renart.2 Amid numerous similarities to these sources, many significant differences also emerge, three of which provide a starting point for this study: 1 In his editions ofChaucer's work, Thomas Speght clearly categorized The Nun's Priest's Tale as a beast fable by choosing the following rubric for the work: "Of a Cocke and an Henne: the morall whereof is to embrace true friendes, and to beware of flatterers"; Derek Pearsall, ed. , The Nun's Priest's Tale, A Variorum Edition ofthe Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer, vol. 2, pt.9 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 198 4), p.139.Not only does Speght"s rubric provide an all-too-clear fabulistic moral, but it also translates the conventional Latin construction for fable titles, "De ...et ...," into which the names of the animal characters are inserted.Eight manuscripts, including Ellesmere and Hengwrt, give the tale titles including the phrase "ofthe cock and hen": MSS Bol, Cn, Dsl, El, Ha 4, Hg, Ln, Ma. See Sir William McCormick andJanet E.Heseltine, The Manuscripts ofChaucer's Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). 2 Robert A.Pratt, "Three Old French Sources ofthe Nonnes Preestes Tale," Speculum 47 (1972): 1.422-44 and 2.64 6--68. 119 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER 1. In both sources, the fox has entered the farmyard before Chaun­ tecleer's dream, thus showing the reader that even as the dream oc­ curs, it is in the process of coming true. In The Nun's Priest's Tale the fox first appears after the dream and the chickens' debate. 2. Only in The Nun's Priest's Tale does Chauntecleer alone recount his dream; in both Reynardian texts, the narrator recounts it (though in the Roman de Renart Chauntecleer later repeats it to his wife, Pinte3). 3. In the beast epics, the main conflict unfolds between the cock and the fox, but in The Nun's Priest's Tale, Chaucer "has made the rivalry of the cock and hen more important than the rivalry of cock and fox," according to Pratt.4 These three differences between the sources and Chaucer's tale intensify the focus upon Chauntecleer's dream, not as the narrator's exploration of a gallinaceous psyche but as a textual paraphrase of a dream that is "written" by a rooster and denied the authority granted it by the narratorial voice in the French text. The dream-text itself, not the early arrival of the fox described in the sources, raises the specter of the predator in Chaucer's tale. Ultimately, the lengthy interpretation of the dream distracts both the char­ acters and the readers from the threat of the fox, at least until the fox begins to act upon that threat. Alongside Pratt's examination of The Nun's Priest's Tale's fabular and beast-epic source history, some scholars have taken steps toward providing a historical contextualization of the tale as a fourteenth-century beast fable; it has been compared to patristic definitions of fable and examined in relation to aspects...