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Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alan T. Gaylord
Alan T. Gaylord*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College Hanover, N. H.
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Extract

In this paper I wish to suggest in broad outline a hypothesis concerning the unity of Fragment vu of the Canterbury Tales, based upon the thematic significance of the terms, “sentence” and “solaas.” I will not attempt to explicate any of the tales here, nor elaborate very fully upon their interplay of theme; rather, in introducing such a hypothesis, I will concentrate on the place inquiry must start: with the way Harry Bailly puts his own terms to use. This evidence will be drawn from the links, and lends itself to a fuller understanding of Chaucer's intent in putting Harry into the foreground of this series of tales, even as it leads towards the discovery of Chaucer's own principles of craft.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , May 1967 , pp. 226 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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Footnotes

*

First presented in abridged form before the English 3 group at the 1964 meeting of the Modern Language Association.

References

1 In his edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 11. All Chaucer quotations and references will be from this edition.

2 I am preparing a separate paper, in which I shall examine these two terms more fully, putting their Chaucerian contexts next to those from other authors to provide contemporary documentation for their use.

3 One of the most helpful discussions of such a technique in romance literature, distinguished from overt moralizing, is in Eugène Vinaver, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, i (Oxford, 1947), lix–lxvii. See also D. W. Robertson, Jr., “Some Medieval Literary Terminology, with Special Reference to Chrétien de Troyes,” SP, xlviii (July 1951), 669–692: and Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, 1962), pp. 315–317.

4 See the discussion of “Chaucer and Literary Allegory” in Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer, pp. 365–369. And cf. the present author's “Chaucer's Tender Trap: The Troilus and the ‘Yonge, Fresshe Folkes’,” EM, xv (Rome, 1964), 29–36.

5 Cf. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: “Harry is consistently blind to the sentence of what he hears, and this situation was undoubtedly created by Chaucer as a jocular warning to his audience to avoid a similar blindness” (p. 275). See also R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Austin, Texas, 1955), pp. 85–95.

6 It is charming to find the French humanist, Pierre Col, trying at the beginning of the 15th century to convince Christine de Pisan (who approaches literature with responses much like Harry Bailly's, if only more eloquent and slightly more verbose) of precisely this point: “pour toutes solucions prie a tous et toutes … qu'i le lisent auant quatre fois du moins et a loisir pour mieulx l'entendre” (in Charles Frederick Ward, The Epistles on the Romance of the Rose…, Univ. of Chicago diss., 1911, p. 74). Christine is a literalist, not even able to understand how an author may “blasmer” foolish love by having foolish personae praise it; Pierre insists that “l'en ne doit pas prendre ainssy les mos a la letre, mais selons les mos precedans et l'entendement de l'aucteur” (pp. 64 f.)—a relatively simple procedure which is being extended in the above argument to cover Chaucer's intent in Fragment vii. When the reader exercises his responsibility to the text, even with the apparently shocking Roman, the proper sentence will emerge: “Je dy que qui bien lit se Hure, et souuent pour le mieux entendre, il y trouuera ensaignemans pour fouir tous vices et ensuir toutes vertus” (p. 67). In fact, Pierre even offers a testimonial to the efficacy of quadrupled efforts: “En vérité, je cognois homme fol amoureux lequel pour soy oster de foie amour a emprunté de moy le Rommant de la Rose, et luy ay oy jurer par sa foy que c'est la chose qui plus li a aidié a s'en oster” (p. 71)!

7 From Bk. xiv of the Genealogia Deorum Gentilium; in Charles G. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry, Library of Liberal Arts, No. 82 (New York, 1956), p. 62. See also Bernard F. Huppé and D. W. Robertson, Jr., Fruyt and Chaf: Studies in Chaucer's Allegories (Princeton, 1963), pp. 3–26.

8 Saint Augustin el la fin de la culture antique, Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d'Athènes et de Rome, cxlv (Paris, 1938), 304. In his discussion of patristic propaedeutics based on the classical exercitatio animi, Marrou traces an aesthetic leading to the studium sapientiae whose features will reappear in the writings of both Col (who quotes Augustine during his debate with Christine de Pisan) and Boccaccio; cf. Ch. vi, “Reductio Artium ad Philosophiam. ii. Exercitatio Animi,” pp. 299–327.

9 “The Façade of Bawdry: Image Patterns in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale,” ELH, xxxii (September 1965), 303–313.