The "Slidynge" Yeoman: The Real Drama in the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale"

Abstract

Though the Canon's Yeoman's Tale has received considerable critical attention in the past few decades, readers have been unable to agree about whether this problematic tale coheres in the way the rest do. The problem lies in the seemingly incompatible roles the Canon plays in the two parts: in Prima Pars he is a misguided scientist who is his own chief victim, and in Pars Secunda he is a cynical swindler. One solution to this problem, advanced first by Tyrwhitt and developed later by Manly, is that Chaucer wrote the second part as an address to the notorious canons of St. George's Chapel at Windsor and then added it to the Canterbury Tales by creating the fiction of the Yeoman's joining the pilgrimage.1 Such an approach, however, assumes that Chaucer has neglected the relationship between the tale and its teller, an otherwise inviolable principle in the Canterbury Tales, simply to make room for a preexistent tale about a charlatan-alchemist. It seems to me that no reading of the CYT has resolved the problem of its narrative coherence because of misunderstandings of the temperamental nature of the Yeoman and of the inadvertent drama that develops as he tells his tale. Chaucer's real interest is surely not in the Canon but in the performance of the Yeoman, who, still addicted to alchemy, vacillates between hope and despair. Emotionally and intellectually, the Yeoman is as slidynge, as unstable, as the stone he pursues. Rightly apprehended, the real drama of this tale lies not in their joining the pilgrimage but in the Yeoman's revelation of himself.2 The Yeoman begins his first tale with the intention of simply ridiculing one of the Canon's failed experiments; the first tale seems only to enkindle his anger, and so he tells a second, more revealing story. To protect himself from guilt by association, he nervously insists that the swindling Canon is not his master. But by