Proverbs, Sententiae, and Exempla in Chaucer's Comic Tales: The Function of Comic Misapplication

Abstract

CHAUCER'S comic tales contain, both in the speeches of the characters and in the form of comments by the various narrators, a substantial number of proverbs, sententiae, and exempla. The frequency with which these monitory elements' occur, the fact that they appear to be almost entirely Chaucer's original contributions to the tales, and the importance of their function in comic characterization, in narrative structure, and in the control of narrative tone combine to suggest that they were employed by Chaucer with the conscious purpose of enhancing the comic effect of the tales. The proverbs and sententiae in Chaucer's poetry have been thoroughly catalogued,2 and in recent years the increased interest in his use of various rhetorical forms, including sententiae and exempla, has led to a number of keen analyses of the narrative consequences of the use of these forms in individual tales,3 but the broader question of the nature of the comic potentialities that Chaucer recognized in monitory elements, per se, has received little notice. Since the matter is of interest both to the study of proverbs and to the appreciation of Chaucer's comic art, I have sought in the following pages to describe what appears to be, for Chaucer, the most important of these comic possibilities and to illustrate its function in the comic tales. An immediately obvious fact is that Chaucer's use of monitory elements is at variance with normal mediaeval literary practice, in which, as the works of Chaucer's contemporaries both in England and on the Continent demonstrate, these elements are employed in a fashion that is for the most part serious. The popularity of proverbs, sententiae, and exempla in the Middle Ages, as Huizinga and others have pointed out, has its basis in the mediaeval fondness for subsuming particulars under reassuringly encompassing general statements of truth, a predilection which finds expression, similarly, in the widespread favor accorded to maxims, adages, dicta, and mottos.4 The value, and hence the popularity, of proverbs derives from the fact that they are, at least ostensibly, such expressions of wisdom, a characteristic they share with both the sententia and