And Chaucer himself, in a later poem addressed to a mysterious figure he called “Bukton,” humorously advises his friend to “rede” the “Wyf of Bathe” and thus avoid the “trappe” of wedlock.
MIDDLE ENGLISH COMPENDIUM PLUS
But the Prologue that Chaucer wrote for the Wife dwarfs all the rest in length at 858 lines (the second-longest is the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue at a mere 166 lines plus some confessional material in his Tale itself).įurthermore, two other pilgrims, the Clerk and the Merchant, make references to the Wife and her thoughts about marriage in their own tales. He gave many of his pilgrims’ tales short prologues in which the pilgrims talk about themselves or argue with other pilgrims (the Wife does much of both). made hym brenne his book anon right tho.”Ĭhaucer himself was clearly mesmerized by the Wife of Bath. In a rambling Prologue to her Tale, the Wife, describing her sexual adventures as a youthful bride with her first three rich but elderly husbands, declares, “I laughe whan I thynke / How pitously a-nyght I made hem swynke.” It is hard not to admire her forthrightly expressed appetites and her entrepreneurial energy in using her “quoniam” (it means what you think it means) to perhaps hasten the deaths that left her a wealthy and respectable widow with the time and means to travel at her leisure to sacred sites.Īs for her late fifth husband, 20 years her junior and an Oxford dropout named Jankyn, their marriage, as she describes it, consisted of her successful battle for the “maistrie ,” as she pried him away from his “book of wikked wyves,” a compendium of classical and biblical stories about women making their husbands’ lives miserable: Eve, Delilah, Clytemnestra, Socrates’ Xanthippe who “caste piss upon his head.” The Wife boasts: “I. Raunchy, boisterous, wine-tippling, and determined to have her way in relationships with men, the 40-ish, five times-married (starting at age 12) Wife is the most vividly realized of the thirty-odd pilgrims from various walks of life, including Chaucer himself, who people the poem with their personalities and storytelling as they ride from London to Canterbury Cathedral and the shrine of the “hooly blisful martir” St. The Wife of Bath is everyone’s favorite character in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
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