Responding to ‘Section A’ Questions (2004) offers plenty of helpful guidance on how to tackle commentary questions. You will need to practise your analytical skills on short extracts from the texts you choose to study. This chapter serves as an example of the kind of approach to take when attempting a commentary. One article that will be useful in the course of this discussion is:
Strohm, Paul ‘Some Generic Distinctions in the Canterbury Tales’, Modern Philology (1971) 68, pp.321–22.
For critical discussion of the Knight’s Tale, see:
Cooper, Helen Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) [ISBN 0198711557].
Hanning, Robert ‘The Struggle between Noble Designs and Chaos: the Literary Tradition of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, Literary Review (1980) 23, pp.519–41.
Jones, Terry Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary. (London: Methuen, 2007) [ISBN 041377659X].
Knapp, Peggy ‘Chivalry and Its Discontents’ in Chaucer and the Social Contest. (New York: Routledge, 1990) [ISBN 0415901510].
Knight, Stephen and Terry Eagleton Geoffrey Chaucer. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) [ISBN 063113882X (pbk)].
Mann, Jill Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) [ISBN 0521097959].
Olson, P.A. The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) [ISBN 0691066930].
Patterson, Lee ‘The Knight’s Tale and the Crisis of Chivalric Identity’ in Chaucer and the Subject of History. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) [ISBN 0299128342].
This chapter will provide a sample commentary, as an illustration of how to approach Section A of the examination.
The compulsory Section A will typically consist of at least six passages or pairs of passages taken from the set texts. There will always be a passage or pair of passages from the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales (i.e. the General Prologue, Knight’s Tale, Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale) and one passage or pair of passages selected from among the lyrics. You will be asked to discuss two of the passages or pairs of passages, answering as directed. This section is designed to examine your knowledge of the texts, your ability to respond to the literary qualities of the language of medieval texts and your sense of the distinctive characteristics of the literature of the period. The rubrics will direct you to focus on areas such as style, tone and point of view. You will not be required to do any translation work, but you will be expected to show your knowledge of Middle English and the way in which literary effects are produced through the use of language.
It should be clear that this part of the paper differs from the kind of ‘practical criticism’ exercise you might already be familiar with. You will be applying close-reading critical skills of both a linguistic and a literary nature; in addition, you are expected to place these passages in various related contexts. This means that your critical reading should be informed by some of the following contexts:
In addition, your critical reading may carry a theoretical perspective. This might be very consciously and determinedly deployed because of your own theoretical stance, or specific critical approaches might seem to be invited by the nature of the extract you are considering.
This first section differs from those of other period papers, in that you will be expected to know the text from which the extract is derived and to use that knowledge where appropriate to illuminate the passage. It is, however, crucial that you answer the specific question as directed in the rubric and do not attempt a long-winded explanation of the place of the extract in the text as a whole. The questions are not conceived primarily as context questions. You will not gain much credit for merely showing knowledge of the plot. It cannot be emphasised enough that you need to tailor your answer to the specifics of the question. This may entail considering genre characteristics, analysing form, and relating passages to their specific historical context. General plot surveys will not score good marks. Everything you say needs to be directly relevant to the particular aspect you are being asked to focus upon.
There are no hard-and-fast rules about structuring your responses to a passage. A great deal of variation in responses is expected and allowed for. However, you should note that the questions are very specific and it is crucial that your answer be directly relevant to the question.
The following is a question based on a pair of extracts, one from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the other from the Miller’s Tale.
The comments that follow do not constitute an ‘ideal’ answer. Instead, they indicate a model of the kind of processes you might deploy to formulate a response.
Compare and contrast the styles of the following passages:
1.
And with that word Arcite gan espye
Wher as this lady romed to and fro,
And with that sighte hir beautee hurte hym so,
That, if that Palamon was wounded sore,
Arcite is hurt as muche as he, or moore.
And with a sigh he seyde pitously:
‘The fresshe beautee sleeth me sodeynly
Of hire that rometh in the yonder place,
And but I have hir mercy and hir grace,
That I may seen hire atte leeste weye,
I nam but deed; ther nis namoore to seye.’
(The Knight’s Tale)
2.
Now, sire, and eft, sire, so bifel the cas,
That on a day this hende Nicholas
Fil with this yonge wyf to rage and pleye,
Whil that hir housbonde was at Oseneye,
As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte;
And prively he caughte hire by the queynte,
And seyde, ‘Ywis, but if ich have my wille,
For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille.’
And heeld hire harde by the haunchebones,
And seyde, ‘Lemman, love me al atones,
Or I wol dyen, also God me save!’
(The Miller’s Tale)
Both of these passages are examples of narrative poetry, and both begin with a narrator and then shift from the narrative voice to the direct speech of one character.
Activity
One way of beginning to compare these two passages might be to consider the differences in each passage between the narrative voice and the speaking character – and you might find the similarities equally informative.
Another strategy for looking at the passages would be to place them in their respective genres and to identify the conventions that govern the genres.
The Knight’s Tale is a courtly romance, written (by and large) in the high style, about aristocratic characters. The Miller’s Tale is fabliau, written primarily in the low style, and its characters are of the lower classes. Thus, to focus on diction for a moment, Emily is identified in courtly, aristocratic terms as ‘this lady’, whereas Alison is identified simply as a ‘wyf’.
Activity
As you work through this example, you might want to take some time to familiarise yourself with some scholarly definitions of romance and fabliau, and the debates about the nature of these genres. One starting point might be Paul Strohm, ‘Some Generic Distinctions in the Canterbury Tales’.
Both passages present a lover in some sort of contact with the object of his desires; both include an example of the complaint (the lament). In the first, the conventions of courtly romance operate at their purest, even their most extreme: the contact between lover and beloved is purely visual and, even then, only works one way – Arcite can see Emily; she cannot see him. Corresponding to this, the language is highly emotionally charged, spiritual rather than physical. In contrast, the contact between Nicholas and Alison seems more reciprocal and the language is more physical, more sensuous, more down-to-earth (‘rage and pleye’, ‘queynte’, ‘haunchebones’), more concrete (the local colour of the reference to ‘Oseneye’).
The high style is elevated, often richly ornamented, rhetorically decorative, densely figurative; it may also be learned, allusive, knowledgeable, authoritative or imaginatively poetic in its texture. The low style is usually simpler, plainer, often barer of rhetorical effects, more down-to-earth in its diction, more straightforward and often colloquial in its syntax and structural organisations.
Activity
At this point, you should go through both passages, listing all the features of diction, syntax, rhetorical devices and so on, which seem to you to belong to each style.
The middle style is not, as you might expect, a homogeneous mixture, somewhere between high and low, but a deliberate juxtaposition of elements from both styles (Henryson’s Moral Fables are a good example of the middle style). You might like to consider the uses to which this middle style might be put and to what extent the Miller’s Tale is more usefully thought of as low or middle style.
Activity
Elaboration of these stylistic differences and their relation to genre might well be an important part of your overall strategy in comparing these two passages.
The subject matter of the romance is normally governed by the conventions of courtly love: the language focuses on Emily’s ‘fresshe beautee’; the knights are ‘wounded’, ‘hurte’, or slain (‘sleeth’), drawing on the conventional courtly love symbolism of love as wound or malady. Arcite sighs and yearns for his lady’s ‘mercy’ and ‘grace’. The last two terms draw on a fusion of feudal and religious imagery, typical of courtly love. On the other hand, the Miller’s Tale focuses less on romantic love than on sexual desire and perhaps particularly on the gap between these two. Its language thus adopts two distinct strategies: parody of the high style and the conventions of courtly love, and juxtaposition of this mock-reverential high style with deliberate vulgarity and bawdiness in the low style. Nicholas refers to ‘deerne love’ (the Middle English equivalent of fin’ amor, courtly love) and uses the word ‘lemman’, both of which terms draw on English conventions of courtly love, though precisely how courtly they would actually sound to a contemporary ear is a moot point.
Activity
You might like to consider their uses in other contexts – in some of the lyrics, for example.
The (often repeated) epithet ‘hende’ in front of Nicholas’s name calls on the conventions of popular romance (a debased form of high, or courtly, romance). The use of ‘hende’ here is ironic in several ways:
Activity
Consider some of the larger, contextual areas you might wish to draw on here, from your background reading. Spend some time studying the complexities of attitudes towards courtly love – or fin’ amor – in the English literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, bearing in mind that it is a late import from French culture, or look at the attitudes towards and presentation of women in the later Middle Ages.
The above analysis tends to imply a simple contrast between the Knight’s Tale as straight romance and the Miller’s Tale as parody of romance, but many commentators find the Knight’s Tale also, perhaps more subtly, parodic of romance conventions.
Activity
It is important for you to engage with the central issue of how much Chaucer is genuinely idealising the Knight and the values presented in his romance, and to what extent subtle parody or irony – either of courtly love or of other romance conventions – is present.
How might one provide evidence for these arguments, one way or the other?
This is a matter of fine shades and subjective judgment, as a quick survey of different commentators on the tale will soon reveal.
In considering this passage specifically, we might ask if there is not perhaps something pointedly unnecessary in the rather limp use of the comparative:
…if that Palamon
was wounded sore,
Arcite is hurt as muche as he, or moore.
Instead of intensifying the effect, the insistence on Arcite’s excessive pain in such a throwaway manner seems to undermine the seriousness.
Activity
Is there a hint of the ridiculous in a character so obviously alive protesting that he has been slain and then continuing to threaten that, without his lady’s favour, he will be dead? You might like to look for other traces of gentle irony in the treatment of the courtly lover in this passage.
You might also wish to move to a broader context by considering the pointedness of the juxtaposition of the two tales.
This pair of extracts is only one instance where passages from the second tale seem to comment directly on the first. The parallels are rather precise, particularly in the threats of the two lovers that they will die if they do not gain their desires. The sincerity and despair of Arcite contrast markedly with the mock-sincerity and manipulativeness of Nicholas. But the glibness of Nicholas’s lip-service to the conventions of courtly love could perhaps also mischievously reflect on the suffering and deeply-felt emotion of Arcite, suggesting something contrived.
The style and tone of the first passage are overtly serious, verging on the tragic; that of the second high comedy. No commentary on Chaucer’s work would be complete without an acknowledgement of the humour and wit of his style. The juxtaposition of the two passages also suggests the topos of ernest and game that runs throughout much of the literature of the period.
Activity
To what extent does this juxtaposition of ernest and game enhance the qualities of each. To what extent is one – the serious – undermined by or subsumed in the other – the comic?
Other forms of deflation are present – how many can you pick out?
A particularly delicious example is the rhyming pun on ‘queynte’ in the second passage. The rhyming pun is originally a formal rhetorical device found in aristocratic French romance. Homonyms – words with the same form, but different meanings – were rhymed in French courtly romance as a sign of high style. Chaucer here juxtaposes ‘queynte’ (‘ingenious’) – the intellectual subtleties of clerkes – with ‘queynte’ (‘cunt’), reducing not only Nicholas’s cleverness, but perhaps all intellectual pretensions, to crude lust.
Activity
But through all the ironies and deflationary devices, what is being deflated? Is it just Nicholas, or Arcite with him? Is courtly love the object of satire? Or is it the romance, as literary form? Does it go further than this? Are all human ideals being subjected to sceptical scrutiny?
And how seriously are we intended to take the religious references in the two passages? Do they in turn import a wider, religious context from which to view both fabliau lust and romantic love? Do they provide a context that ultimately destroys the fine distinctions between high idealism and crude appetite? Or do they operate quite differently in the two passages, importing perhaps a spiritual intensity to the first and a lighter comic note to the second?
At this point you will want to broaden out again and take into consideration some of the critical commentaries on these two works written in the last few years.
You could draw on a number of different, even conflicting, theoretical positions attempting to evaluate the Knight’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale in relationship to each other.
There are central critical debates about the attitudes of Chaucer towards his narrators and the values they embody in their narratives, values that are not only social, but also political and moral. Some knowledge of these debates should inform your reading of the tone and style of the passages under discussion. For views arguing that the Knight is an idealised portrait, see, among others:
More sceptical readings are offered by:
Compare:
We would stress again that the above does not represent an ideal, or an exhaustive, response. It merely suggests strategies you might follow. Of course, different responses to the extracts will develop in different directions and have different emphases.
Having completed this chapter, and the relevant reading and activities, you should be able to:
Choose a passage or pair of passages from Section A of a past examination paper. Write a response, and evaluate your answer on the basis of the criteria and guidelines given above.
For Section A of the examination, the Chaucer passages will be taken from the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales, which you will be expected to know thoroughly. There is a relatively extended bibliography for the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales in the general reading list in the Introduction to this guide. For Sections B and C, you will be expected to be familiar with a wider range of Chaucer’s works, including other Canterbury Tales and/or Troilus and Criseyde.
The Riverside edition has an extensive bibliography, which you should use to further your study of Chaucer. Titles in the bibliography will help you with historical contexts and with theoretical approaches to the various genres.