The Influence of Plautus and Latin Elegiac Comedy on Chaucer's Fabliaux

Abstract

During the formative stages of Chaucerian study in the period spanning the first half of this century, the fabliaux were largely ignored due to the bawdy nature of this material. In more recent history, there has been a growing interest in the genre, spurred on by the work of scholars of the Old French fabliaux such as Nykrog, Muscatine, and Bloch. But, although much focus has been placed on the relationship between Chaucer's fabli- aux and the vernacular analogues of his tales, scant attention has hith- erto been paid to the important Classical and Medieval Latin influences underpinning them. The deep Classical and Medieval Latin elements of his fabliaux, in both their theoretical and performative contexts, are just as necessary to a full assessment of his comic invention as are the Old French variety. This is especially clear since the Canterbury Tales in general are so saturated in the written literary tradition on which Chaucer so avidly and learnedly drew. Thus what is true of the whole is equally applicable to the part. When considering the Old French and Chaucerian fabliaux in juxtapo- sition, it becomes clear that while both sets of tales are influenced by the underlying oral nature of their core source stories, the written Latin mate- rial that Chaucer knew so well, both directly and indirectly, is vitally, inex- tricably, and undeniably linked to his comic poems. Although Edmond Faral remarked upon the relationship of Roman and Medieval Latin Elegiac comedy to the Old French fabliaux, he met with much resistance from his colleagues. 1 Similarly, although these con- nections are so much easier to delineate in the case of the English fabli- aux, Chaucer's tales have not often been viewed within the larger frame of the Western comic tradition. Pearsall and Ruggiers have commented upon the inherent interest in examining the comic theories of the Antique commentators in relation to the Canterbury Tales, but no com- plete study has been undertaken. 2 Plautus' work has almost never been