The ‘Parson's Tale’ and the Quitting of the ‘Canterbury Tales’

Abstract

For most of Chaucer's readers theParson's Taleprovides a conclusion to theCanterbury Talesthat is at best drab, at worst a betrayal of all that is thought to be most Chaucerian. Even sympathetic readers find it something to argue away rather than interpret, a strategy that finds its logical fulfillment in the unsympathetic claim that Chaucer is not really responsible for the tale at all. Manly expressed this view with admirable forthrightness: ‘the Parson's Tale… was probably never composed by Chaucer, the two uncomposed fragments of penitential treatises found in our MSS under that designation being at best only loose materials, translated by Chaucer for future use, and copied by his literary executor as the Parson's Tale only because Chaucer's chest contained no other piece of prose that seemed appropriate to the Parson.’ While few contemporary critics would have the temerity to engage in these bibliographical speculations, many of Manly's assumptions are in fact still with us. On the question of originality and date, for instance, Professor Donaldson has recently described the tale as ‘apparently translated by Chaucer from the Latin of some manual directed at helping priests in the performance of their spiritual duties,’ and adds that 'scholars generally agree that the translation was made at an earlier stage in Chaucer's career. ‘ On the work's coherence — or lack of it — another recent commentator has approvingly quoted a remark first made in 1901 by Mark Liddell: ‘none of the Latin, English, or French treatises on this subject that I have seen (and I have examined a great number in the hope of finding the source of Chaucer's work) is so confused and disproportioned as Chaucer's is.’ Similarly, in commenting on ‘the disjointed nature of the links' between the part on penance and that on the sins, Morton Bloomfield speculates that this ‘indicates an early stage in the combining. Chaucer, who left theCanterbury Talesunfinished, would probably have provided the proper links, but he did not have time. ‘ While this view of theParson's Taleas journeyman's work completed early in the poet's career is not entirely unanimous, it is close to a consensus.