The "Shipman's Tale" and the Fabliaux

Abstract

Of all the traditions that Chaucer drew upon while assembling the Canterbury Tales, one of the most influential was that of the fabliaux, the short bawdy tales in verse that flourished in thirteenth-century France. The offered not only a number of skillfully worked out narratives but also a set of well-tested conventions of subject and style whose spirit Chaucer could adopt even when he found his specific story material elsewhere.1 He exploited this model in various ways: both by emphasizing the qualities that set these tales apart from other contemporary genres, and by enlarging the sphere of the fabliau by incorporating poetic material of very different sorts within the stories of adulterous intrigue. In one instance, however, the tale now assigned to the Shipman, the relationship to the is particularly problematic. This tale too is quite plainly modeled on its predecessors; so closely, in fact, that J. W. Spargo, in the best-known study of its analogues, judged it to be a verbatim translation from a French fabliau that has since been lost.2 It shares the most common theme of the French tales, the story of a cuckold and a seducer, and it is the only one of Chaucer's fabliaux that is actually set in France. But the Shipman's Tale departs from the conventions of the genre in a great many ways that Spargo did not consider, and while Chaucer's use of the in this poem is evident, it does not follow the pattern of any of his other tales. The very texture of the poem is different from what one expects of a ribald story. It has none of the accustomed bawdiness of the other fabliaux, and the adulterous affair is nearly smothered by details in the lives of the characters completely extraneous to the plot. Its most striking qualities are a pervasive verbal humor of a sort that does not occur in the French fabliaux, and a structure in which the commercialization of sexual dealings, not the conventional triumph of one character over another, seems to be the major point. It is also unlike all of Chaucer's other comic tales, therefore, in that it is not well suited for a satire of another pilgrim;