Structure and Intention in the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales

Abstract

Not the least attraction of Professor Wilson's recent interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale appearing in these pages is his opening statement: “The Knight's Tale is a masterpiece.” Very few students of Chaucer would take exception to it, and furthermore it expresses admirably the attitude of scholars who have recently published studies of that tale. There has long been agreement that The Canterbury Tales is a masterpiece, and the General Prologue is likewise so regarded. But following it and the Knight's Tale without a break-in fact with the closest kind of linkage Chaucer used-are the Miller's Prologue and Tale, the Reeve's Prologue and Tale, the Cook's Prologue, and fifty-seven lines of the Cook's unfinished tale. This 4422-line group of tales and links (designated Fragment I by Professor Robinson whose text I am using) is more than a repository for one or two masterpieces: it is a masterpiece itself. As there is no need to press the claims of the General Prologue or the Knight's Tale, much of what follows will be a discussion of the other parts of Fragment I, though not with the purpose of declaring them individually masterpieces. The aim is to discover the artistic integrity of the group as a whole. Professor William Frost in another recent interpretation of the Knight's Tale' stops just short of a similar purpose. To support his interpretation he cites briefly several features of the Miller's Tale. The procedure here, however, will not be to argue for one or another interpretation of the Knight's Tale by reference to other tales but to discover how carefully Chaucer has interconnected all the parts of the group and to demonstrate if possible how in this group as in any work with a unified theme the whole transcends the sum of the parts.