Domestic Opportunities: The Social Comedy of the Shipman's Tale

Abstract

Domestic Opportunities:The Social Comedy of the Shipman’s Tale Cathy Hume The Shipman's Tale and its comic equation of sex and money have long been read as a commentary on the late medieval merchant. Gardiner Stillwell and Albert H. Silverman saw the Tale as "a satire upon the merchant's serious, sober, business-like manner of living."1 V. J. Scattergood thought that it is pervaded by a mercantile ethos, which is being exposed as limited and worldly. Others have taken the view that it portrays the merchant's business practices as dubious and the impact of commerce on individual souls as damagingly sinful.2 At the same time the Shipman Tale's depiction of late medieval bourgeois life and mercantile practices has been praised for its realism and made the subject of detailed economic analysis.3 Although such analyses often recognize the merchant's wife as the most interesting character in the tale, much less attention has been paid to her situation—either as it functions within the narrative or insofar as it reflects the Tale's historical context.4 The closest analogues to the Shipman's Tale, Boccaccio's Decameron 8.1 and Sercambi's Novella 19, end with the adulterous wife tricked out of payment for sex by her lover's double-dealings, humiliated by him in her own home in front of her husband and servants, and morally condemned in the bargain.5 Chaucer, by contrast, allows the wife to keep the money, avoid all exposure, and finish the tale happy and uncensured. Moreover, he transforms the story from one about a lover's plan to dupe the avaricious object of his desire (where the focus, and our sympathy, is with the male lover) into one about a housewife's endeavors to pay her dress bill without arousing her husband's annoyance. This transformation means that the Shipman's Tale is distinctively focused on the wife's domestic situation and the opportunities it provides. The wife successfully uses her various roles as a bourgeois housewife to persuade the monk to lend her money, have sex with him without being found out, and finally keep the money for herself. Although these stratagems have been little noted by critics who see the [End Page 138] main source of comedy in the Shipman's Tale as punning language, much of the tale's comedy is created by the wife's clever manipulation of her roles: as hostess, social networker, housekeeper, business assistant, and status symbol. These roles appear to reflect late medieval expectations of wives and wives' real behavioral practices, as evidenced by late medieval advice literature for wives and by letter collections. Moreover, the financial arrangements between the merchant and the wife, which are crucial to the comic denouement in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale, differ from those in the analogues but are apparently similar to those of historical married couples in late medieval England. I intend therefore to argue in this article that the Shipman's Tale is a social comedy about a bourgeois wife's roles, and that that comedy is generated from contemporary social practices and expectations. In the course of my argument, I hope also to shed some light on why the word cosyn is repeated so frequently in the Tale; why the lover is a monk, when monk-lovers do not appear in the analogues or in almost any other fabliau; and why there is a child in the garden scene. The Wife's Roles: Hostess The merchant's wife is introduced in the third and fourth lines of the Shipman's Tale as follows: A wyf he hadde of excellent beautee; And compaignable and revelous was she. (VII 3–4)6 The entertaining, sociable side of the wife's personality is central to her presentation, and from the very outset there is a suggestion that these qualities may tip over into the illicit: compaignable and revelous could mean mere conviviality, or, in this context, juxtaposed with her beauty, could be euphemisms for promiscuity.7 In the Tale's opening lines this aspect of the wife is presented as an expensive inconvenience for her husband—"wo is hym that payen moot...