10 - The Canterbury Tales II

Summary

Comedy of one kind or another is present in a large number of the Canterbury Tales, and pervasive in the links between tales, but we are concerned here with those tales where the narrative structure and expectations are those of comedy as a specific genre. There are six such tales, those of the Miller, Reeve, Shipman, Merchant, Friar, and Summoner, and a seventh, that of the Cook, which is left unfinished but which was certainly going to belong to the genre. The fact that we know this, from only fifty-eight lines, is an indication of the general firmness of the initial structure of expectation of Chaucerian comedy, the codifiability of the preliminary ground-rules, whatever strain or defiance those rules may be subjected to in Chaucer's subsequent development of the story. Anticipatory indications of the nature of a particular tale are often given by what we know or suspect of the character of the pilgrim who tells it, and the comic or satirically abusive prologues to five of these tales are important in creating expectation; but even without such clues we should know, from elements built into the narrative structure, the rules of the narrative game we were being invited to play.