Chapter 7
Answering the Riddle of the Cooks Tale
The murky case of the Cook s Tale presents a panoply of various issues relevant
to the discussion of the Canterbury Tales as a textually dynamic work with a
history of interaction. However, unlike the other cases discussed in the first several
chapters, the fragmented state of the tale, the cloudiness of Chaucer's role and
intentions, and the sheer variety of reader responses to the fragmented tale, both in
the criticism and in the textual history of the Canterbury Tales, make the case of
the Cook:~ Tale unique in many ways.
No other fragmented part of the Tales resulted in quite the range and number of
responses as the Cooks Tale. For instance, the "spurious links" are only in a small
number of manuscripts, which are all from the fifteenth century. Written around
1422, Lydgate's Siege ofThebes and its Prologue are in only five manuscripts ofthe
Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Interlude and the Tale of 8eryn are only in the
Northumberland manuscript. The fifteenth-century orthodox Ploughman s Tale is
only in Christ Church 152. The sixteenth-century proto-Protestant Plowman sTale
is not found in any medieval manuscript but in one early modern manuscript and
several printed editions. However, all but eight ofthe fifty or so complete manuscripts
ofthe Canterbury Tales have something to say about the Cook s Tale. What is more,
the scribes of 33 of the manuscripts interact in some explicit way, either through
paratextual glossing or additional text, with the fragmented tale, imaginatively
reshaping the path of the CookS Tale. l Recalling the challenge and contestation of
text-based games such as a riddle, David Lorenzo Boyd states, "the narrative [of
the Cooks Tale] was the focus of much fifteenth-century editorial creativity, for it
presented a gap, an irresistible challenge with which the book industry then had to
contend."2 The challenge the narrative gap poses remains, and to this day readers
continue to fill in the gaps in narratively and textually unique ways.
At the end of the first fragment or tale group "a" in the Canterbury Tales, the
Cook promises in his Prologue to tell a "litel jape" (I. 4329) in the same manner as
the Reeve and the Miller. However, he only begins to tell his tale. The canonical
text of the Cook s Tale begins by introducing the raucous and unsavory apprentice
victualer known as Perkyn the Revel our, the prototypical party animal and wedding
crasher, who "haunteth dys, riot, or paramour" (I. 4392). Perkyn shirks most of
[n addition to all the cases in which the scribe explicitly writes something that
interacts with the text, I also include the Ellesmere manuscript in which the scribe makes
no comment but leaves part of a page and a whole leaf blank before the next tale.
2
David Lorenzo Boyd, "Social Texts: Bodley 686 and the Politics of the Cook's
Tale," in Reading From the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature,
ed. Seth Lerer (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1996),85.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale
his apprenticeship duties and should never have been given his "acquitance"
(i.e., certificate of successful apprenticeship completion) by the master victualer,
but the master decides to send Perkyn on his way so he doesn't rub off on the rest
of the servants in the household. The master bids Perkyn to go with "sorwe and
with mischance" (1. 4412), and Perkyn leaves to take up residence with a friend of
his in what seems to be a brothel. With that, the tale ends abruptly right as it begins
to head down a rather seedy path with the lines,
to the fragmented tale and the narratives of explanation that seek to answer the
unanswerable question: why does the Cook's Tale end the way it does? The CookS
Tale, for the past 600 years, has been an undecipherable riddle that many have
tried to answer.
If it was indeed supposed to have an ending, two endings seem realistically
possible based on the potential narrative: either Perkyn continues his "riotous" and
rebellious ways in a comedy, or something will happen to Perkyn that will bring
the tale to a didactic and moralized conclusion. Regardless of where the tale was
supposed to go, various "involved
" as Rust might describe them, have
resolved the abrupt ending in several unique ways. As a riddle, a text-based game
of sorts, the hasty ending of the tale similarly demands solution. Since scribes
began copying the Tales, such sudden stops to tales have caused readers to react in
a variety of different ways ranging from silence, to invented interruptions, to the
utter revision of the tale through user-created input. Some of these user-created
inputs were original; some were appropriated from other, often unknown, sources
and added to the Canterbury story canon.
New-media theorist Nick Montfort cites the riddle as the ancestor to
contemporary forms of interactive fiction. He states, "the riddle is not only the
most important early ancestor of interactive fiction but also an extremely valuable
figure for understanding it, perhaps the most directly useful figure in considering
the aesthetics and poetics ofform today."5 Riddles are by definition unfinished texts
that demand interaction and subsequently completion. They propose questions
that readers then answer. I propose that the following riddle-like questions are in
play with the unfinished Cook:s Tale: For the critics, the question is what would
Chaucer want? For the early scribes, the question was how do we deal with this
incomplete text? For the present discussion, the question is how have scribes and
critics interacted with and reacted to Chaucer:S potential narrative with new texts,
imaginative explanations, or different contexts? In the following sections, I explore
the variety of interactive responses and solutions to the potential narrative of the
Cook s Tale, including the range ofscribal actions that negotiated the narrative gap
and the critics' own narratives explaining Chaucer's silence, and the tenuous place
inside and outside the Chaucer canon ofthe seemingly ubiquitous Tale ofGamelyn
as the conclusion to the Cook's Tale.
VA. Kolve, discussing the Cook:5 Tale in Chaucer and the Imagery of
'rative, states, "[w]e cannot hope to finish what Chaucer left incomplete, or
to resolve the problems he had not yet solved."6 Yet we have been doing just that
kind of interactive solving and narrative shaping for centuries through involved,
ergodic textual experiences first in the Tales' transmission and now in the criticism
that imagines what became of Chaucer's lost tale. Beginning with the earliest
examples, in the manuscripts containing the Cook :\. Tale there are at least four
142
Anon he sente his bed and his array Unto a compeer of his owene sort, That lovede
and revel, and disport, And hadde a wyf that heeld for contenance 1\ shoooe. and
for hir sustenance. (I. after the introduction of this "wyf' and her career as a prostitute, the
tale simply ends without a sense of closure, making it unpalatable to our modern
sense of an ending, but also apparently insufficient for a number of late medieval
writerly readers.
The tale quite clearly ends with the potential for much more narrative and no
sense of completeness, but it is not particularly evident why it ends where it does.
Why leave a tale like the Cook's so clearly unfinished? There has been no shortage
of explanations. It is possible that it was getting too dirty, so either Chaucer or
some censoring scribe stopped the tale in its tracks. It could be too that Chaucer
changed his mind after he had already begun composing the tale, deciding that
there was already too much raucous, bawdy comedy with the Miller and Reeve
preceding the Cook and not enough serious didacticism. He would have rewritten
a new tale, but he never got around to it. It is also possible that Chaucer never got
around to writing the ending of the tale because he had not yet decided whether
to continue down the seedy path of revelry, drunkenness, and prostitution or bring
the tale and its main character to a moral end for the edification of the reader. Of
course, the Cook's promise of a "jape that fil in oure citee" might indicate that the
tale will be a fabliau because the Cook uses the same terms when he describes
the events of the Reeve s Tale as a "jape of malice in the derk" (I. 4343, 4338).
However, as A.C. Spearing points out, Chaucer's plans for his narrative seem to
have been in a constant state offlux in all ofhis literary works. 3 Because Chaucer's
intentions remain in flux, so too must the Cook's. On the other hand, Chaucer
might have had an ending in mind but stopped because of some interrupting life
events such as sickness or death. There is also the proto-postmodern possibility
that, though it ends fragmented, it ends exactly how Chaucer wanted it to end.
Yet these are all only imaginative conjectures with little basis in the discernable
evidence of the manuscripts. They are all possible, but none proves particularly
more likely than the other. However, this plethora of potential explanations for
the tale ends fragmented fuels the new narratives that have been attached
Spearing, "Afterlife of the Canterbury Tales." See Chapter 4.
143
Rust, Imaginary Worlds, 9. Montfort, 1Wisry Little Passages, 37. VA. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery o/Narrative (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1984),257. 144
Playing the Canterbury Tales
types of scribal responses to the fragmented tale with some variation: 1) Silence.
Silence actually manifests itself in three separate ways in the manuscripts: the
scribe leaves the Cook s fragment out altogether; 7 ends the tale and begins the next
as if the Cook s Tale were complete;8 makes some marginal note that in spite ofthe
sudden end this is all the Cooks Tale that is available, and/or leaves a significant
amount of space blank (sometimes the remainder of a whole gathering) in hopes
that more tale will show Up.9 2) Movement. In BLAdditional MS 35286, the scribe
moves the Cook s Tale to after the Manciple s Tale in order to satisfy the Host's call
for the Cook to tell a tale in the Manciple's place. Apparently the drunken Cook
doesn't sober up quite enough to finish his tale. 3) A New Tale. In 25 manuscripts
of the Tales, scribes have added the Tale ofGamelyn. 4) Additional Text. In three of
the manuscripts, Bodley MS 686, Regenstein MS 564 (formerly the McCormick
MS), and Rawlinson Poetry MS 141, the scribes have added to the text in its initial
state in order to create for it two new moralizing narratives and conclusions, either
by appending new text to the end, as in the Rawlinson and Regenstein manuscripts,
or adding new text interlinearly, as in the Bodley manuscript.
What is most remarkable is the relative obscurity in the critical discourse of
these many ways of dealing with the fragmented tale in the early textual witnesses.
E.G. Stanley declares: "the lack of a formal conclusion [ ... ] inspired no scribe to
add an ending."lo Although one cannot be completely sure what Stanley means, his
statement seems to ignore the variety of ways that scribes did in fact end the tale,
but, more importantly, it suggests how critics only recently have considered scribal
additions worthy of serious attention. Such statements reveal why the interactivity
and mobile, textual play in the Canterbury Tales' early textual history has, on the
whole, gone unnoticed by most modem-day critics and why theorizing the textual
and narrative history ofthe Tales in terms of mobility and interaction is important
for students and scholars alike in order to better understand how Chaucer's work
was interactively experienced historically.
The following manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales lack some or all of the Cook's
Tale and Prologue for reasons other than the loss of leaves: Additional 25718, Bodley 414,
Harley 7335, Holkham 667, Paris Anglais 39, and Rawlinson Poetry 149.
There are 21 manuscripts of this ilk; for a full list, see Manly and Rickert, Text of
the Canterbury Tales, 2:169.
The only two manuscripts that leave space blank, almost in anticipation ofmore tale,
are the two most famous manuscripts of the Tales: the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts.
Sometimes even empty space can be meaningful if we read the meaning produced by the
bibliographic codes.
10 E.G. Stanley, "Of This Cokes Tale Maked Chaucer Na Moore," Poetica 5 (1976):
42. In another telling case, Edward Z. Menkin states that Gamelyn "is found in sixteen
Chaucerian manuscripts, generally following the fragmentary Cook's Tale." It is, in fact,
always following the Cook's Tale and in 25 manuscripts. See "Comic Irony and the Sense
of Two Audiences in the Tale of Gamelyn," Thoth 10 (1969): 41-53.
Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale
145
Of this Cokes tale maked Chaucer na moore (or did he?)
In spite of the variety of extra text added to bring the tale to some form of closure,
the tale is often simply left in its fragmented state. In 21 manuscripts, fewer than
the 25 manuscripts that include Gamelyn, the fragment simply ends, and the Man of
Law s Prologue begins. There have been at least four critical suggestions as to why
the tale ends the way it does and what exactly it was that Chaucer was thinking or
what was happening in his life at the time: 11 First, he never had a chance to finish
the Cooks Tale before he died in 1400, just as he never finished the Canterbury
Tales as a whole. Thus, there would and should have been an ending, but Chaucer
never had the chance to finish it. Second, the tale did have an ending, now lost,
because it was burned, lost, or censored. Third, Chaucer cancelled the Cook sTale,
but the scribes did not get the message. Fourth and finally, the tale ends exactly
where it is supposed to end.
Chaucer leaves other tales unfinished, such as his own pilgrim's Sir Thopas,
which is canonically interrupted by the Host; the Squire s Tale, which in some
texts is interrupted by the Franklin; and the Monk s Tale, which is interrupted by
the Knight in some cases; but none garners quite the range of interactive reader
responses as the Cooks Tale. These responses might be because the Cooks Tale
simply ends and drifts into the ether without a clear catalyst for its ending rather
than being interrupted by another pilgrim. This uncertainty and the lack ofa built­
in reason for ending is precisely why there have been so many additions and so
many explanations.
Manly and Rickert suggest that "only sudden illness or some other
insurmountable interference could have prevented him from going on."12 They
base this conclusion on the famous case of a scribe glossing the incomplete Cook s
Tale at the bottom of folio 57v in the Hengwrt manuscript. Other similar glosses,
perhaps all deriving from Hengwrt, can be found in Egerton 2864, Harley 7333,
and Royal College of Physicians 388. Recently, Linne Mooney discovered that
the scribe behind the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, the two most famous
and earliest manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, was a man by the name ofAdam
Pynkhurst. 13 Her evidence indicates that Chaucer knew this scribe well as early as
the l380s when Chaucer wrote his complaint "To Adam Scryveyn," who Mooney
argues is the same as Adam Pynkhurst. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that
Chaucer, in some capacity, supervised the production of Hengwrt. Mooney argues
that Pynkhurst likely began the manuscript under the direction of Chaucer, but the
evidence suggests that something happened, and Pynkhurst never received all the
pieces of the Canterbury work that he had expected or that Chaucer had promised.
What that something was and what pieces never reached Chaucer's scribe must
II
Daniel Pinti only classifies the responses as either finished or unfinished. See
"Governing the Cook's Tale in Bodley 686," Chaucer Review 30 (1996): 379.
12 Manly and Rickert, Text ofthe Canterbury Tales, 3:446.
13
Linne Mooney, "Chaucer's Scribe," Speculum 81 (2006): 97-138.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale
be left to speculation. The clearest example of scribal unease with the fragmented
tale occurs on and immediately after folio 57v, where the Cook:~ Tale suddenly
ends and then is followed by several blank pages, which were likely left blank
in hopes that more of the tale was on its way, for it would have otherwise been a
waste of perfectly good parchment. Below the last line of the Cook's fragment and
written in significantly lighter ink, the scribe says that "of this Cokes tale maked
Chaucer na moore." The difference in ink color suggests that this comment was
added sometime later after the rest ofthe tale never reached the scribe or was never
composed by Chaucer.
This particular piece of evidence does not of course indicate conclusively that
Chaucer supervised the production ofthe text. For instance, as demonstrated in the
previeus chapter, the scribe of Christ Church 152, working well after the middle of
the fifteenth century, leaves several leaves blank following the Squire sTale
in hopes that more of the tale would show up, where a later scribe would add the
orthodox of the two apocryphal Plowman's tales. In another late manuscript, the
as discussed in Chapter 4, glosses on folio 71 rafter
scribe of Northumberland
the last line of the Squire s Tale that "Chaucer made noo end of this tale." Clearly
Chaucer was long dead by the time that the Northumberland and Christ Church
scribes produced their texts. Regardless of Chaucer's role in the production of
the Hengwrt, the scribe thought there was more of the Cooks Tale to come, later
learned that there was not, and then backed up and wrote the explanation at the
bottom of the page. The same scribe, Pynkhurst, left space blank after the Cook~'
Tale and Squire:~ Tale in the Ellesmere manuscript, which was likely produced
after the Hengwrt. No similar note mentioning whether or not Chaucer had more
of either tale follows the fragmented tales in the Ellesmere.
Manly and Rickert come to the conclusion that something catastrophic must
have happened in Chaucer's life to prevent him from finishing based on the
textual case cited above and the idea that somehow Chaucer could never leave
his text incomplete intentionally since he was "too thoroughly master of his own
story-material to stop."14 Perhaps, part of Chaucer's genius was to be a master
of his own story material, as Manly and Rickert argue, and to present an open,
unfinished work in spite of his complete control of his narrative. Manly and
Rickert's conclusion demonstrates that the explanations for and meaning-making
interactions with Chaucer's incomplete text hinge on imagined narratives. Some
of these narratives are fictional narratives in the world of the Canterbury Tales
with new traversals that complete the tale, relocate the tale, or expand the frame
narrative; others are narratives of explanation or metanarratives used to describe
the conditions that would have produced what critics assume is an un-Chaucerian
conclusion. 15 Perhaps the abrupt ending was because of illness or death, or perhaps
Chaucer just put it aside, and he never returned to it. Critics such as Manly and
Rickert know better than anyone else just how fragmented and troubled the texts
of the Canterbury Tales are. It is thus rather curious of them to suggest in their
conclusion that illness and/or death caused this tale to remain fragmented in spite
of the dynamic nature of the texts of the Tales more generally, which is something
evinced by Manly and Rickert's own work. Though Manly and Rickert stop short
of painting a vivid picture, one can imagine such dramatized scenes as Chaucer
keeling over at his desk as he wrote the phrase "and swyved for hir sustenance."
Such imagined narratives for the history of the Tales' production make manifest
a desire to know Chaucer intimately, inventing for our own solaas the conditions
that have produced the unanswerable riddles of the Tales. Though critics are not
to admit it in writing, such imaginative speculation is indicative of a love for
Chaucer and his works and the natural desire to want to know what happened and
tales like the Cook's just stop.
Had Chaucer finished his narrative, critics such as Kolve have conjectured as
to the narrative path it might have followed. Kolve enters into the imaginative
speculation and riddle-solving mentality when he asks: "What sort of narrator did
Chaucer intend the Cook to be? What sort oftale did he intend for him to tell? What
formal and ethical relationship might such an intention bear to the Man ofLaw s
Tale, which followsT 16 Exploring these questions in his narrative answer for the
Cooks Tale, Kolve envisions the narrative he feels Chaucer meant to write. Based
on Chaucer's initial input, in what Kolve describes as the moral language the tale
takes in the description of the master victualer, the sententious precedent set by
other texts in Chaucer's oeuvre, and contemporary visual images of the Cook and
cooks, Kolve argues that the tale likely had, or was supposed to have, a moral
conclusion in spite of the Cook's promise of a "jape" (1. 4343). He, nevertheless,
also holds out the possibility that Chaucer intended a fabliau ending-an alternate
narrative. Because Kolve recognizes two very divergent paths that the tale
take, he seems to be envisioning mUltiple potential narratives stemming
Chaucer's initial, fragmentary input. What is more, whether moral, baWdY, or
something else, the potential narrative trajectories are indeterminate, open, and
configurable. Like Jorge Luis Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths," a proto­
hypertext of sorts, Kolve's metanarrative imagines a critical field of potential
fnrlrincr ",!>the l""rlina to radically different possible endings.
146
14
and Rickert, Text
"Metananative" is a loaded term. See Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). I am using it here slightly differently than it has
15
147
been used by most postmodem theorists. I am taking the individual morphemic parts at
face value. "Meta" means "beyond" or "after." Thus, my use of the term metanarrative is
meant to connote the narrative behind the narrative-the narrative that contextualizes thc
creation and production of another narrative. Rather than totalizing ideologies or systemic
explanations for all narratives, the metanarratives created by critics are localized to and
rooted in long-held beliefs about the way Chaucer's works wcre produced. It is akin to the
postmodem term in this case because the metanarratives explaining the fragmented Cook s
Tale often hinge on preconceived ideas of Chaucer's genius and complete control over his
"story-material. "
16 Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery o/Narrative, 257-8.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale
be left to speculation. The clearest example of scribal unease with the fragmented
tale occurs on and immediately after folio 57v, where the Cook's Tale suddenly
ends and then is followed by several blank pages, which were likely left blank
in hopes that more of the tale was on its way, for it would have otherwise been a
waste ofperfectly good parchment. Below the last line of the Cook's fragment and
written in significantly lighter ink, the scribe says that "of this Cokes tale maked
Chaucer na moore." The difference in ink color suggests that this comment was
added sometime later after the rest of the tale never reached the scribe or was never
composed by Chaucer.
This particular piece of evidence does not of course indicate conclusively that
Chaucer supervised the production of the text. For instance, as demonstrated in the
previt')us chapter, the scribe of Christ Church 152, working well after the middle of
the fifteenth century, leaves several leaves blank following the Squire's Tale likely
in hopes that more of the tale would show up, where a later scribe would add the
orthodox of the two apocryphal Plowman's tales. In another late manuscript, the
scribe ofNorthumberland 455, as discussed in Chapter 4, glosses on folio 71r after
the last line of the Squire's Tale that "Chaucer made noo end of this tale." Clearly
Chaucer was long dead by the time that the Northumberland and Christ Church
scribes produced their texts. Regardless of Chaucer's role in the production of
the Hengwrt, the scribe thought there was more of the Cook's Tale to come, later
learned that there was not, and then backed up and wrote the explanation at the
bottom of the page. The same scribe, Pynkhurst, left space blank after the Cook's
Tale and Squire's Tale in the Ellesmere manuscript, which was likely produced
after the Hengwrt. No similar note mentioning whether or not Chaucer had more
of either tale follows the fragmented tales in the Ellesmere.
Manly and Rickert come to the conclusion that something catastrophic must
have happened in Chaucer's life to prevent him from finishing based on the
textual case cited above and the idea that somehow Chaucer could never leave
his text incomplete intentionally since he was "too thoroughly master of his own
story-material to stop."14 Perhaps, part of Chaucer's genius was to be a master
of his own story material, as Manly and Rickert argue, and to present an open,
unfinished work in spite of his complete control of his narrative. Manly and
Rickert's conclusion demonstrates that the explanations for and meaning-making
interactions with Chaucer's incomplete text hinge on imagined narratives. Some
of these narratives are fictional narratives in the world of the Canterbury Tales
with new traversals that complete the tale, relocate the tale, or expand the frame
narrative; others are narratives of explanation or metanarratives used to describe
the conditions that would have produced what critics assume is an un-Chaucerian
conclusion. 15 Perhaps the abrupt ending was because of illness or death, or perhaps
Chaucer just put it aside, and he never returned to it. Critics such as Manly and
Rickert know better than anyone else just how fragmented and troubled the texts
of the Canterbury Tales are. It is thus rather curious of them to suggest in their
conclusion that illness and/or death caused this tale to remain fragmented in spite
of the dynamic nature ofthe texts of the Tales more generally, which is something
evinced by Manly and Rickert's own work. Though Manly and Rickert stop short
of painting a vivid picture, one can imagine such dramatized scenes as Chaucer
keeling over at his desk as he wrote the phrase "and swyved for hir sustenance."
Such imagined narratives for the history of the Tales' production make manifest
a desire to know Chaucer intimately, inventing for our own solaas the conditions
that have produced the unanswerable riddles of the Tales. Though critics are not
likely to admit it in writing, such imaginative speculation is indicative ofa love for
Chaucer and his works and the natural desire to want to know what happened and
why tales like the Cook's just stop.
Had Chaucer finished his narrative, critics such as Kolve have conjectured as
to the narrative path it might have followed. Kolve enters into the imaginative
speculation and riddle-solving mentality when he asks: "What sort of narrator did
Chaucer intend the Cook to be? What sort oftale did he intend for him to tell? What
formal and ethical relationship might such an intention bear to the Man ofLaw's
Tale, which follows?"16 Exploring these questions in his narrative answer for the
Cook's Tale, Kolve envisions the narrative he feels Chaucer meant to write. Based
on Chaucer's initial input, in what Kolve describes as the moral language the tale
takes in the description of the master victualer, the sententious precedent set by
other texts in Chaucer's oeuvre, and contemporary visual images of the Cook and
cooks, Kolve argues that the tale likely had, or was supposed to have, a moral
conclusion in spite of the Cook's promise of a "jape" (I. 4343). He, nevertheless,
also holds out the possibility that Chaucer intended a fabliau ending-an alternate
narrative. Because Kolve recognizes two very divergent paths that the tale might
take, he seems to be envisioning multiple potential narratives stemming from
Chaucer's initial, fragmentary input. What is more, whether moral, bawdy, or
something else, the potential narrative trajectories are indeterminate, open, and
configurable. Like Jorge Luis Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths," a proto­
hypertext of sorts, Kolve's metanarrative imagines a critical field of potential
forking paths, leading to radically different possible endings.
146
14 Manly and Rickert, Text ofthe Canterbury Tales, 446.
15 "Metanarrative" is a loaded term. See Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). I am using it here slightly differently than it has
147
been used by most postmodern theorists. I am taking the individual morphemic parts at
face value. "Meta" means "beyond" or "after." Thus, my use of the term metanarrative is
meant to connote the narrative behind the narrative-the narrative that contextualizes the
creation and production of another narrative. Rather than totalizing ideologies or systemic
explanations for all narratives, the metanarratives created by critics are localized to and
rooted in long-held beliefs about the way Chaucer's works were produced. It is akin to the
postmodern term in this case because the metanarratives explaining the fragmented Cook:S
Tale often hinge on preconceived ideas of Chaucer's genius and complete control over his
"story-materia!."
16 Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery ofNarrative, 257-8.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale
if the tale did continue as a fabliau in the same vein as the Miller and
Reeve's Tales, rone can imagine a metanarrative explaining how the Cook's Tale
was censored. This raises a second possible explanation argued by critics, which is
perhaps the mos;;t romantic; some argue that Chaucer did indeed complete the tale
but that the dOClUment with the ending was somehow lost, censored, or destroyed
before it reached the earliest scribes. 17 One might insert a rather salacious plot
here-akin to Slhakespeare's backstory in the film Shakespeare in Love. In another
critical speculattion, Donald Howard begins his discussion of the Cook's Tale in
the 1976 book Tfhe Idea ofthe Canterbury Tales with a riddle-like question, and
then fully imme:rses himself in the imaginative speculation and invention that the
Cook's Tale prOlmpts:
the common narrative pattern ofthe love triangle and imagines it as the end of the
Cook's Tale. Certainly, this ending is possible. However, what is most remarkable
about it is less what it says about the Cook's Tale and Chaucer and more what
it says about Howard's expectations of Chaucer and his narrative and a human
desire to solve riddles imaginatively and speculatively. Howard wants a love­
triangle plot. He invents it. It is meaningful in part because it directs and shapes
the development of the underdeveloped narrative; yet it is also meaningful in
what it says about what such gaps in works do to spur our imagination. The new
narrative traversal, complete with prostitution, adultery, and a love triangle set
in the seedy London scene is ready-made for the silver screen and a twentieth­
and twenty-first-century audience because it was created by a twentieth-century
interactor for Chaucer's incomplete fourteenth-century narrative. The point is not
to accuse Howard of any wrongdoing. One really cannot chide the critic for doing
the same thing readers have been doing for centuries, perhaps something that the
incomplete work demands of the writerly reader.
Susan Yager argues that Howard's theory for the Tales, as expressed in The
Idea of the Canterbury Tales, is something akin to the contemporary theory of
hypertext, but Howard did not have the language to put it in such tenns.20 Yager
summarizes the features of Howard's reading of the Tales as a proto-hypertext:
148
it was mot finished, even ifit was not finished, who can say? Possibly it was
finished but too scurrilous to be transcribed, and so went underground. Possibly
Chaucer or :someone else suppressed it, ripped it out of an early copy leaving
only what wras on the same folio with the ending of the Reeve's Tale. l8
After imagining these circumstances, Howard, recognizing the potential narrative
of the tale and rthe metanarrative of its censorship, creates his own narrative for
the incomplete ttale:
From the fiifty-seven lines we have of it we can recognize the beginning of a
plot quite lilke that of the three previous tales. There is an eligible female, the
"wife" mentlioned in lines 4421-4422; about her we learn the startling detail-it
is the last p.hrase in the fragment-that she kept a shop and "swyved for her
sustenance.'" There are perhaps to be, for the hand of this "swyving" lady,
two rivals: Perkyn Revelour, the sacked apprentice, and his "compeer" who
it happens ils the lady's husband. It stands to reason that the older man in the
picture miglht be the master vitailler described at the beginning, for the Cook
had professed that he will tell a tale about a hosteler (4360). More than that we
do not knowr.19
In fact, we know much less than Howard has narrated. Most of what he describes
above about thte wyf and the love-triangle plot is Howard's own interactively
produced Cante;rbury narrative. He produces a Cook's Tale with a unique traversal,
very much like the scribes who continued Chaucer's fragmented tales and work
through the addlitions of apocryphal material via textual transmission. He takes
John
dismisses the conclusion that it was censored for its bawdiness.
suggesting that tbe two preceding tales in Fragment I are quite bawdy themselves, and
Chaucer does warn his readers to "tume over the leef, and chese another tale" before the
Miller sTale, whi\ch might apply to all the tales after this point in Fragment L "The Cook's
Tale," in Sources ,and Analogues ofthe Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary
Hamel (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006),1:76.
18 Howard, idea ofthe Canterbury Tales, 244. 19 Ibid., 244-5. 149
Howard's concept of the Canterbury Tales as fluid and dynamic also entails its
nonlinearity or multilinearity. Howard wishes to dissociate himself from critics
who "tie analysis to ... the 'linear' experience of reading" (16), yet elsewhere he
refers to the "linear sequence" of the Tales, emphasizing the always-unfolding
"now" of the storytelling that readers experience (80). In distinguishing "'linear'
experience" from "linear sequence," Howard maintains a distinction between an
abstract concept of the Canterbury Tales and a reader's particular knowledge
of it. The open-ended relations that Howard finds among the Tales' themes and
stories, and between the "inner" tales and "outer" framework, are central to both
abstract idea and specific
but he does not refer specifically to links
or linkage. Instead, to describe inter- and intra-textual connections, Howard
repeatedly speaks oftexts that "hover" or "float" near others, for examnle when
he uses Robinson's term to describe Fragment VI. 21
20 One of the foremost proponents of the language and theory of hypertext is George
Landow whose book Hypertext has undergone multiple revisions since its initial publication
in the late 1980s. See the most recent revision: Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New
Media in an Era of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006). In spite of the
importance of the book, there are numerous aspects of new media textuality that Landow
omits from his study since it is singularly concerned with hypertext, which I argue is a
and in fact, perhaps, passe term that is too narrow for all the textual and interactive
forms of electronic text.
21
Susan Yager, "Howard's Idea and the Idea of Hvoertext." Medieval Forum 6
http://www.sfsu.edul-medievaWolume6/yager.html.
ISO
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale
Yager's comparison is useful, and her argument is quite convincing.
Howard's theory and hypertext theory fall short of fully exploring the potent;
"multi linearity" in the Canterbury Tales. Moreover, hypertext theory fails to
flesh out the user-produced narrative Howard himself creates in his (re)creation
of the Cook:I' Tale, Hypertext is predicated on a series of choices made by the
creator rather than the user. There are many conceptual and textual paths one can
take within the rhyzomatic structure of links, but usually it is the creator of the
hypertext alone who decides where the links go and what gets a link. To put it in
Aarseth's terms, which I describe in the first chapter, the author alone determines
the number oftextons and the connections possible to create a limited number of
scriptons. Therefore, hypertext is too limiting a term to express all the potential
forms of "involved" reading and interactivity exemplified by the addition and
continuation of the Tales' narratives and the multifarious reconfigurations of the
order of the pieces of Chaucer's work. Most importantly, the Canterbury Tales
is not a hypertext because Chaucer did not and could not pre-program the work
with a finite number of combinatory interactions. Rather, the work consists of
unfinished, potential narrative, which has a history of being open and configurable
beyond the scope of Chaucer's designs. What is more, hypertext theory tends
to limit itself to an electronic medium, thus posing difficulty in mediating the
historical distance between the Tales and contemporary hypertexts. Moreover,
Howard's immersion into and appropriation of the Cook's potential narrative is
the very form of involved, ergodic reading that I suggest breaks the hypertext
mold. Further, unlike the other examples of continuations and additions discussed
hitherto that are historically traceable to active reading experiences in past textual
'ansmission, the interaction with the potential narrative of the Cook seems to be
ongoing in criticism through the production ofnew narratives for the Cook and new
metanarratives for the textual condition ofthe tale. The argument for the censored,
lost pages that Howard forms from the potential narrative is pure speculation-a
romantic invention ofthe long-lost Chaucer text akin to the lost Aristotelian treatise
on comedy in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Arguments that fill in gaps
by imagining lost or destroyed documents that are not alluded to or referred to in
any other extant documents point primarily to our human desire to solve mysteries
and imaginatively interact with the cultural objects we love and love to figure out.
Not unlike the censorship argument, the third argument is that Chaucer
actually canceled the Cook's Tale, yet it somehow made its way into the collection
nevertheless. William Woods argues that Chaucer cancelled the Tale because
of the contemporary political dispute between Nicholas Brembre and John of
Northhampton, in which various guilds turned against the guild of victualers.22
However, the tale is too underdeveloped to suggest a conclusive connection.
Generally speaking, the possibility exists that the scribe ofthe earliest manuscr
included the Cook's Tale even though Chaucer decided to abandon or cancel it.
Since the earliest manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales were produced later in
Chaucer's lifetime or after he was dead, one cannot be certain that Chaucer was
alive when the manuscripts were produced even with the new evidence discovered
about Chaucer's scribe Adam Pynkhurst. Even if Chaucer was alive. how
he supervised a text like the Hengwrt is not yet known.
In his eighteenth-century edition of Chaucer, Thomas Tyrwhitt explains:
22 William F. Woods, "Society and Nature in the Cook's Tale," Papers on Language
and Literature 32 (1996): 189-206.
151
The COKES TALE is imperfect in all the Mss. which I have had an opportunity
of examining. In Ms. A. [Harley 7335] it seems to have been entirely omitted;
and indeed I cannot help suspecting, that it was intended to be omitted, at least
in this place, as in the ManCiple s Prologue, when the Coke is called upon to tell
a tale, there is no intimation of his having told one before. Perhaps our author
might think, that three tales of harlotrie, as he calls it, together would be too
much. However, as it is superficially certain, that the Cokes Prologue and the
beginning of his Tale are genuine compositions, they have their usual place in
this Edition. 23
Tyrwhitt, like the twentieth-century critics who would follow hIm, ImagIneS a
metanarrative in which Chaucer censored his own work and canceled the tale,
feeling he had perhaps exceeded his fabIiau limit with the Miller :v Tale and Reeve's
Tale. Other than the narrative evidence of the Manciple's Prologue, some critics
suggest that the tale was canceled because (and this demonstrates a common
desire to find perfection in everything Chaucer did), as M.C. Seymour states quite
definitively, "Chaucer left no work uncompleted."24
Seymour's statement could of course mean something else. That is, finally,
as some argue, that the tale ends exactly the way Chaucer wanted it to end-in
ambiguity and without closure. It is complete the way it is. Thus, according to
the proponents of this theory, even something that is superficially as lacking and
as the Cook's fragmented tale has behind it Father Chaucer's
Such a conclusion presents the
to believe that Chaucer was and remains
the master puppeteer pulling the strings and always in control. Stanley states that
the reason the tale ends where it does is because "there is no more for the [Cook]
to say on that subject."25 Moreover, according to Ji-Soo Kang, "The Cook:~ Tale
[ ... ] is fragmentary, yet it provides the reader with a curious sense of conceptual
conclusiveness to Fragment I, a feeling of finality, precisely because of its formal
incompleteness."26 Such arguments evince a desire to believe Chaucer did not
23
Thomas Tyrwhitt, ed., The Canterbury Tales o/Chaucer (London, 1775), clxxxiii.
Quoted in Stanley, "OfThis Cokes Tale Maked Chaucher," 44. Neither Tyrwhitt nor Stanley
mention the fact that many folia and whole gatherings have been lost or were omitted from
7335, which has resulted in the loss of many tales and not the Cook:~ Tale alone.
24 M.C. Seymour, "OfThis Cokes Tale," Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 259.
25
Stanley, "Of This Cokes Tale Maked Chaucer," 59.
26 Ji-Soo Kang, "The (In)Completeness ofthe Cook's Tale," Medieval Enfllish Studies
5 (1997): 157.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Talc
leave his reader hanging and rest on the comfortable notion that Chaucer intended
the singular, canonical text that editors have reconstructed for readers today. These
gaps and fissures are not unintended but evidence of Chaucer creating elaborate
and closed meanings with ingenious endings. In these views, he is a prototypically
postmodem author.
Jim Casey has perhaps the most prudent response to the question of what
was intended for the Cook s Tale. He concludes his essay "Unfinished Business:
The Termination of the Cook Tale" by stating, "ultimately, we may never know
what Chaucer had in mind for the CookS Tale. Without new textual evidence, all
speculation is suspect, and the commentary must remain, like many of Chaucer's
stories, open."27 Openness, then, is the only thing certain and definitive]
Chaucerian about the Cook:~ Tale as it exists canonically. Perhaps Chaucer ended
it the way he did precisely in order to encourage interaction with the open text.
Could it be that Chaucer crafted the work in order to demand us to enter into and
imaginatively interact with the narrative and textual world according to Rust's
model? Perhaps, with the potential narrative in place, Chaucer programmed his text
to be interactive, demanding non-trivial effort and reactive inputs from "involved
readers" either manifesting in the imagination of readers or on the pages of new
copies of the Tales. Nevertheless, this is perhaps just as much an imaginative
metanarrative as the rest of the explanations summarized here; the only certain
thing is not what Chaucer intended but what readers did and continue to do in the
narrative space where the rest of the tale ought to be.
What is perhaps most remarkable is how readers continue to do things in
the narrative space where an ending should be. Peter Ackroyd's retelling of the
Canterbury Tales, published by Penguin in 2009, adds to the narrative in order to
reinforce the interpretation that Chaucer wanted the tale to end where it does; this
version does so by adding an interruption by the Prioress. Ackroyd's retelling of
the Tales, as a whole, is unique in that it includes lengthy additions to Chaucer's
description, almost as if to function as a sort of explanatory footnote built into
the main narrative. For instance, instead of simply translating Chaucer's portrait
of the Physician in the General Prologue in which Chaucer praises the doctor for
being grounded in astronomy, Ackroyd adds a rather detailed section that imagines
Chaucer the narrator explaining medical astrology and dropping a bawdy joke
about the genitals lying in Scorpio. 28 The point is, where there might be a footnote
about medical astronomy in a more academic text, Ackroyd has invented a
Chaucer narrator willing to explain his fourteenth-century ways to his twenty-first­
century audience. Ackroyd's appropriative acts of explication through descriptive
amplification manifest particularly clearly at the end of the Cook s Tale. After the
Cook announces that "Peter" (Ackroyd's translation of Perkyn) has gone to live
with his friend and his wife the prostitute, the Prioress exclaims:
152
"Please, no more." "That's enough,"
Bailey said. "I don't mind dirty stories. But I draw the line at whores. Whatever are you thinking of, man? There are nuns among us." Roger was a little abashed. "I didn't mean to offend-" "Well, you have offended. Sit on your saddle and stay silent. Someone else will have to tell a s
27 Jim
"Unfinished Business: The Termination of Chaucer's Cook's Tale,"
Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 191. See Casey also for a thorough account of the variety of
speculative responses to the Cook's Tale.
28 Ackroyd, Canterbury Tales: A Retelling, 14.
153
Of course Harry Bailey's objection to whores seems a little arbitrary given the
Miller and Reeve's tales before this. Moreover, the fact that Ackroyd invents this
ending reinforces the notion that the tale ends as a riddle, still demanding writerly
readers like Ackroyd to answer that riddle with playful new additions. Of course,
such moves have not been particularly well received by some modem readers who
see such additions as corruptions of Chaucer's authorial intentions. A particularly
scathing review in the Spectator states, "this drawn-out version sounds like a
new curate trying out prot"imities to ingratiate himself with the local low-life. The
mystery of this book is why an accomplished writer like Peter Ackroyd should
have attempted such an approach in the first place."30 Of course this is the tension
inherent in all the additions to and interactions with Chaucer's Tales. There is
a long tradition of interacting with and adding to the Tales, yet such playful
interactivity is often received, rather, as corruption. It continues to be produced
and continues to be marginalized.
Movable Texts: New Meanings in New Contexts
One of the more elaborate responses to Chaucer's silence manifests itself in the
relocation of the tale after the Manciple Tale in BL Additional MS 35286. Manly
and Rickert suggest that this rearrangement is the unintentional work of a scribe who
accidentally shuffled the unbound gatherings ofhis exemplar within which the Cook s
Tale and Prologue were the first items. However, this relocation may have been a
conscious decision on the part of the scribe to reconcile the references to the Cook in
the prologue to the Manciple:~ Tale with the Cook's abruptly ended tale much earlier
in the frame narrative. Tn many ways, the reintroduction ofthe Cook in the Manciple:s
r'Y'f'''J(TUP seems to point towards the possibility that Chaucer intended to retract the
earlier fragmented Cook s Tale from Fragment I, leaving the Cook unmentioned until
he shows up much later in the Tales incapable of telling a tale at the Host's bidding.
The Cook, quite drunk in the Manciple s Prologue, becomes the butt of a series of
jokes played by both the Manciple and the Host. The Host notices the listless Cook
and implores him to tell a tale. The Host teasingly asks,
s
29
Ibid., 114. 30 Byron Rogers, "Instead of the Poem," Spectator 310, May 16, 2009, 38. 154
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Is that a cook of 10ndoun, with meschaunce? Do hym come forth, he knoweth his penaunce; For he shal telle a tale, by my fey, Although it be nat worth a botel hey. Awake, thou cook, quod he, God yeve thee sorwel What eyleth thee to slepe by the morwe? Hastow had fleen al nyght, or artow dronke? Or hastow with som quene al nyght yswonke, So that thow mayst nat holden up thyn heed? (IX. 11-19) The Host knows very well that the Cook, who "was ful pale and no thyng reed,"
cannot very well tell a tale because ofhis condition but continues to "joke and play"
with the drunk Cook for his "penaunce" (Ix. 4, 12). Meanwhile, the Manciple
joins the fun and keeps feeding the Cook wine to show that, in spite of his drunken
stupor, the Cook cannot stop drinking, demonstrating his uncontrollable gluttony.
Thus, with the Cook too drunk to speak, the Manciple tells a tale in the Cook's
place, and we never hear from the Cook again in the canonical text. However, in
Additional 35286, after the Manciple s Tale of Phoebus the Crow ends, the Cook
speaks as Chaucer the narrator tells us:
The cook oflondoun, whil the reve spak, For joye him thoughte he clawed him on the bak. Hal hal quod he, for cristes passion, This millere hadde a sharp conclusion Upon his argument ofherbergagel Wei seyde salomon in his langage, -Ne bryng nat every man into thyn hous;­
For herberwynge by nyghte is perilous. (1. 4325-32) These lines only make sense in the context of Fragment I of the Tales because
the Cook makes a direct reference to the two tales that canonically precede the
Cook's-the Reeve s Tale and the Miller s Tale. Such evidence might indicate that
the Additional 35286 scribe simply accidentally inserted the CookS Tale after the
Manciple s Tale because some of the gatherings had fallen out of order in the
exemplar. However, one must note that the prologue to the Cooks Tale begins
on the same page that the Manciple s Tale ends so one cannot blame the new
ordering on misarranged leaves in the Additional codex though the exemplar could
plausibly be quite another case. Nevertheless, I argue that this newly arranged
version of the Tales might just mark this particular scribe's effort to explain the
unexpected ending to the Cook s Tale by putting it in a very different textual
and narrative context in a clearly inebriated voice. In this new context, after the
audience has heard that the Cook is utterly intoxicated, perhaps this seemingly out
of context speech to the Reeve and Miller can be imagined as the byproduct of his
drunkenness. In this variant of the Tales, the references to the Miller and Reeve at
the very beginning of the prologue are perfectly acceptable if we imagine a barely
conscious, stumbling, and very confused Cook speaking up after he has just been
Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale
155
ridiculed publicly for his drunkenness. Moreover, if one imagines the Cook as
upset about the teasing that went on before the previous tale, this might very well
explain his desire to requite the Host and the Manciple when, in his own prologue,
he promises,
And therfore, herry bailly, by thy feith,
Be thou nat wrooth, er we departen heer,
Though that my tale be of an hostileer.
But nathelees I wol nat telle it yit;
But er we parte, ywis, thou shalt be quit. (4358-{)2)
Instead of telling of a "hostileer," the Cook begins to tell a tale of an apprentice
victualer, which is a related profession. Similarly, a victualer, a seller offoods, might
deal closely with a manciple, a purchaser of foods, and someone like the Cook, a
preparer offoods. 31 Perhaps, then, the Cook intends to requite both the Host and the
Manciple in the same tale. However, the reader is left with a rather underdeveloped
attempt on the Cook's part. The sudden ending, if one imagines the drunken Cook
of the Manciple s Prologue, makes sense. There is no more tale to tell because he
is too drunk to go on. Just as he is too feeble and listless to respond to the jokes of
the Host and Manciple in the prologue to the Manciple s Tale, the Cook is too drunk
to fully participate in the storytelling game with a full narrative and a clear requital.
He leaves us with potential narrative instead. The scribe of this manuscript does not
add new text to supplement the incomplete text as other redactors did in their joining
in the creation and transmission of the Tales. Instead, he rearranges the pieces of
the textual puzzle to create a new set of dynamics between tales, prologues, and
pilgrims. The incompleteness of the Cooks Tale and the adversarial position of the
Cook take on new meanings within a new context.
Gamelyn and its Context
The Tale of Gamelyn is by far the most substantial response to the sudden ending
of the Cooks Tale. Found in 25 medieval manuscripts,32 primarily in what Manly
31 See R.M. Lumiansky, "Chaucer's Cook-Host Relationship," Medieval Studies 17
(1955): 208-9.
32 The 25 manuscripts that include Gamelyn are: Harley 7334, Christ Church 152,
Laud 600, Royal 17.D.xv, Takamiya MS 8 (formerly Delamere), Trinity College Oxford
Arch. 49, Corpus Christi 198, Lansdowne 851, Sloane 1686, Egerton 2863, Harley
1758, Lichfield 2, Morgan 249, Cambridge Mm.2.5, Glasgow Hunterian U.I.I, Petworth,
Rosenbach \08411 (formerly Phillips 8137), Royal 18.c.ii, Laud 739, Sloane 1685, Barlow
20, Fitzwilliam McLean 181, Hatton Donat 1, Rawlinson C.86, and Cambridge l.i.3. One
seventeenth-century manuscript in the hand of the antiquarian Elias Ashmole (Ashmole
45) exists. In this manuscript, Gamelyn is the conclusion to the Cook's Tale; however, the
Cook's Tale, including Gamelyn, is the only part ofthe Tales copied in the manuscript. Other
than a standard explicit, "here begynneth ye Cokes tale, Gamelyn," the manuscript does not
156
the Canterbury Tales
and Rickert describe as the "c" and "d" groups of manuscripts, Gamelyn is the most
prolific apocryphal Canterbury Tale in the extant manuscripts of the Tales. In the
texts of the Tales, it is always placed in the voice of the Cook ifit is assigned to a
pilgrim at all and always follows the Cook's Prologue and the fragmented tale of
Perkyn. Moreover, it only survives in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and is the
most popular example of a Middle English metrical romance by measure of extant
manuscripts. Tn those 25 texts, the tale is generally either joined to the incomplete
Cook's Tale by a two-line link or simply begun without a link, generally with a
standard incipit, after the line "A shoppe, and swyved for hir sustenance." In one
case, BL Harley 7334, the tale actually ends several lines early with "Now lat hym
riote al the nyght or leve," which is then followed by a scribal note that Gamelyn
commences after this. This could be a sign of revision, censorship, or some other
textual act we may never fully recover. The usual link, which is fairly regular in
the 16 manuscripts that have the standard link to Gamelyn, reads: "bot here of I wil
passe as nowe / and ofyoung Gamelyne I will telle you.''3l The link suggests several
potential meanings for the Cook's abrupt conclusion. With the words "passe as now,"
the Cook might intend to take up the tale of Perkyn at a later time just as the Squire
in the spurious link in Lansdowne MS 851 says "bot I wi! here nowe maake a knotte
/ To the time it come next to my lotte" (11-12). But what would prompt the Cook to
"maake a knotte?" The Squire seems to end his tale because it has already gone on
much too long, but the Cook has just begun. Perhaps, the Cook who speaks in the
standard two-line Jink recognizes that the tale's path is headed in a seamy direction,
senses displeasure in his audience, and so decides to take his narrative down a new
road and tell a new tale and not "a liteljape that fil in oure cite" (T. 4343); at least that
is what the scribes or active readers might have imagined, recognizing the potential
narrative of the seedy, urban Cook's Tale. In a unique link found in the Lansdowne
text, this narrative desire to change course is evinced even more clearly when the
Cook breaks off and suddenly declares,
therone, it is so foule! I wil nowe tell no forthere For schame ofthe harlotrie that seweth after. A vel any it were thareof more to Bot of a knighte and his sonnes, my tale I wil forthe tell. record any link between the Cook's first narrative of Perkyn Revelour and the second of
Gamelyn. See A.S.G. Edwards, "A New Text of The Canterbury Tales?" in Studies in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Renaissance Texts in Honour ofJohn Scmtergood: The Key of
All Good Remembrance, ed. Anne Marie D'Arcy and Alan 1. Fletcher (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 2005), 21-8.
33
These manuscripts include: Egerton 2863, Harley 1758, Lichfield 2, Morgan 249,
Cambridge Mm.2.5, Glasgow Hunterian U.l.!, Petworth, Rosenbach 1084/1 (formerly
Phillips 8137), RoyaI18.c.ii, Laud 739, Sloane 1685, Barlow 20, Fitzwilliam McLean 181,
Hatton Donat 1, Rawlinson C.86, and Cambridge 1.i.3.
34 As in Chapter 2, all citations of spurious links from Lansdowne come from Bowers,
Continuations and Additions, 43-53.
Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale
157
In one of the most interactive-laden manuscripts of the Tales, the same manuscript
that has an image of Chaucer in an historiated initial handing his book off to his
absent reader with his pen, this scribe has imagined the Cook (or Chaucer) as
suddenly becoming disgusted with the trajectory of his tale. He has censored
himself. In this strange link, the Cook, the narrator of the tale and apparent
controller of its traversal, seems to be reading his own text and only takes control
when he has become too upset by the "schame of the harlotrie that seweth after"
in the potential narrative of the tale. It is almost as if the narrative was simply
unfolding without his control from his mouth, and now, somehow, he has decided
to grab hold of the reins and redirect the narrative away from the seedy scene in
London to the bucolic setting of Gamelyn. The Cook has changed the narrative
road he is on; however, it is not really the Cook's voice that dominates the link.
would he suddenly be repulsed by the story he initiates? Rather, this link
presents a profusion of voices, including those of Chaucer the author, Chaucer
the narrator, the Cook, and the interactive reader responsible for the link. Out
of all those voices, the one that rises to the surface is that of the individual who
composed the link. He (for he is very likely a male scribe) is the one who "will
nowe tell no forthere." He is the one who senses the narrative potential of the tale,
interacts with it in such a way as to express his opinion of "sentence" and "solaas,"
and reconciles the sudden ending of the Cook's Tale ofPerkyn with the Cook's Tale
of Gamelyn.
A third link was once found in a manuscript that is now lost, which belonged
to Sir John Selden in the seventeenth century. According to a reference in the 1653
book De Synedriis & Praefecturis luridicis Veterum Ebrceorum by Selden, the link
after the Cook's incomplete tale reads:
[...] A Shop and swived for her sustenance
And there withal he laugh and made chear
And said his tale as ye shullen after here
Here be!!inneth the Cokes tale of Gamelin [.
After the canonical line ending "swived for her sustenance," Selden states "statim
scripsit Chaucerus," or "Chaucer immediately wrote" the lines that follow in the
above quote. Statim strongly suggests that there was no apparent division, scribal
or otherwise, between the one line and the next. There is no incipit, explicit, or
35
John Selden, De synedriis & praefecturis iuridicis veterum Ebraeorllm tiber
secundlls (London: printed by Jacobi Flesheri, 1653),590; my emphasis on original material
in the Selden text. A book on Hebrew law is an odd place to discuss a Middle English
poem. However, Gamelyn has interested scholars for its connections to legal practice, and
Selden specifically refers to it here for its preservation ofAnglo-Saxon legal language. For
instance, see Edgar Shannon, "Medieval Law in the Tale ofGamelyn," Speculum 26
458-<i4. Beadle only examines the later printing of 1679. I have examined copies of both
to either the language
the 1653 and the 1679 editions, and there are no significant
itself or the use ofblackletter for the Gamelyn passages.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale
other marker indicating a return to the frame narrative. Selden, in this printed
edition of his transcription, does not separate the new lines with quotation marks.
The key couplet in this newly formed link, "And there withal he lough and made
chear / And said his tale as ye shullen after here," has been moved from its usual
place as the last lines of the canonical prologue:
Reading this new link as the words of Perkyn sets Gamelyn almost as if it was
a deeply embedded narrative. The layers this link creates present a version of
"Chaucer," as Selden assigns it, exploring polyvocality in an extreme and nuanced
way through a number of imagined and real script acts. However, the manuscript
is now lost. We only have the brief snippets, which Selden transcribed and which
were printed in 1653. There is no evidence to say conclusively who Selden
thought was speaking in the seventeenth century. More importantly, there is no
evidence to say what the scribe intended. Nevertheless, uncertaintv somehow
seems appropriate.
Unlike the most common, standard link, which quickly ends the first tale of
and begins the second about Gamelyn without much apparent reason, and
the Lansdowne link, in which the scribe, Chaucer, and/or the Cook seem morally
repulsed by that which has just been said about Perkyn, this lost Selden link is
the most narratively elegant no matter who is speaking. If one accept" Beadle's
argument, the feint on the part of the Cook mines the depths of the frame narrative
and the Host/Cook's relationship. On the other hand, if it is Perkyn who tells the
Tale ofGamelyn, the writer responsible for the link introduces another embedded
narrative into an already embedded narrative. Both potential interpretations reveal
a writerly scribe mediating the space between the very different tales of Perkyn
and Gamelyn.
The Tale of Gamelyn, as a work in its own right, fits within the genre of the
"outlaw" literary tradition, of which the stories of the greenwood outlaw Robin
Hood are the most famous. 39 Besides its connection to the Robin Hood tradition,
Gamelyn is most famous for its role as the source for Shakespeare's As You Like
It. The tale begins with the narrator telling his audience to listen to a description
of Gamelyn's father, Sire John of Boundes, who has three sons ofwhom Gamelyn
is the youngest. One day, Sir John falls ill and decides to settle his estate before he
passes. Therefore he calls on several "wise knyghtes" to divide his estate amongst
his three sons afler he dies. Most importantly, Sir John tells them:
158
And therfore, Herry Bailly, by thy feith,
Be thou nat wrooth, er we departen heer,
Though that my tale be of an hostileer.
But nathelees I wol nat telle it _
But er we parte, ywis, thou shalt be quit."
And therwithal he laugh and made cheere,
And seyde his tale, as ye shul after heere.
(1.4358-64; my emphasis on the material relocated in the Selden
the he when it is used in the couplet as found in the canonical Prologue
is the Cook. However, the personal pronouns in the couplet as it is deployed in
the lost manuscript that Selden cites are a bit more ambiguous. It would seem
that the he is possibly Perkyn. However, Richard Beadle argues in the essay
"John Selden and a Lost Version of the Cook's Tale" that it is the Cook speaking.
Based on the contentious situation presented later in the Tales in the Manciple~'
Prologue and the stereotypical disdain held between cooks and hostelers at this
time, Beadle argues that "it is here [in this link] that the [Selden manuscript]
brings the Cook back in person, for him to laugh and make good cheer, and
probably to set off on a different tack."36 He adds that the link might indicate
"that the Cook's sudden laughter, access of 'good cheer,' and a fresh start would
serve to introduce a tale of a quite different sort at this point, whilst at the same
time defusing a potentially contentious situation vis it vis the Host."3? In other
words, Beadle argues that this initial narrative is an "elaborate feint."38 There is
also another possibility; that is that the narrative of Perkyn is actually the frame
narrative for Gamelyn. The initial narrative may very well be an "elaborate feint,"
but the Cook seems to present the inner narrative of Gamelyn through the voice of
Perkyn instead based on the immediate antecedent to the personal pronoun. Thus,
whose voice is it? Simultaneously, it is presented as Chaucer's because he is the
narrator of the pilgrims' tales; it is the Cook's because it is he who tells the tale;
it might be Perkyn's as well based on one reading of the ambiguous pronouns;
yet it is most explicitly the interactive input, the script act, of a writerly scribe.
36
Richard Beadle, m 1 wol nat telle it yit': John Selden and a Lost Version of the
Cook s Tale," in Chaucer to Shakespeare:
in Honour ofShinsuke Ando, ed. Toshiyuki
Takamiya and Richard Beadle (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
3? Ibid.
38
Beadle states: "The Cook, having brushed briefly with the Host in the spirit of
this established enmity between their trades, then develops his prologue in the form of an
elaborate feint at launching a tale set in the London victualling trade, where the interests of
the cooks and the hostelers notoriouslv overlapped." Ibid., 64.
159
"I beseehe you knyghtes for the love
Goth and dresseth my londes amonge my sones thre.
And for the love of God deleth not amyss,
And forgeteth not Gamelyne my yonge sone that is.
Taketh hede to that oon as wei as to that
Seelde ye seen eny hier helpen his brother."
39
For more on the outlaw genre of narratives, see Maurice Keen, The Outlaws
of Medieval
(London: Routledge, 1961) and Joost de Lange, The Relation and
Development ofEnglish and Icelandic Outlaw Traditions (Haarlem: WiIlink, 1935).
40 All quotes from Gamelyn have been taken from The Tale of Gamelyn, in Robin
Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, cd. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo,
MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). Knight and Ohlgren base their edition on the
text in Oxford, Corpus Christi MS 198. However, there have been some critics who have
argued for the superiority ofBL Harley MS 7334 over the Corpus MS. For a summary of
160
the Canterbury Tales
The story of the father dividing his land amongst his children is a familiar
element, most famously used in Shakespeare's
Lear. As in Lear, the division
of the estate does not exactly go smoothly. The "wise knyghtes" do not follow
Sir John's dying wishes and only divide the land between the two older sons.
However, Sir John has not
died when they make this decision. Angered by
the knights' decision to divide his land against his wishes, he divides his estate
himself declaring:
[... ] Be Seint Martyne,
For al that yc han done yit is the londe myne;
For Goddis love, neighbours stondeth alle stille,
And I wil delen my londe after myn owne wille.
John, myne eldest sone shal have plowes
That was my faders heritage whan he was alyve;
And my myddelest sone fyve plowes of londe,
That I halpe forto gete with my right honde;
And al myn other purchace of londes and ledes
That I biquethe Gamelyne and aile my good stedes.
And I bisechc you, good men that lawe conne of londe,
For Gamelynes love that my quest stonde. (53-M)
However, Sir John soon dies, and "the elder brother giled the yonge knave,"
stealing young Gamelyn's inheritance and making him his servant. Some time
passes, and one day Gamelyn realizes his sad state:
Gamelyne stood on a day in his brotheres yerde,
And byganne with his hond to handel his berde;
He thought on his Iandes that lay unsowe,
And his fare okes that doune were ydrawe;
His parkes were broken and his deer reved;
Of allc his good stedes noon was hym byleved;
His hous were unhilled and ful evell dight;
Tho thought Gamelyne it went not aright. (81-8)
He strokes his beard, a sign that Gamelyn has come ofage, and decides to no longer
do his evil brother's bidding. The remainder of the tale is filled with a series of
adventures or episodes. The first is Gamelyn's initial fight with his brother, in which
his brother sends his men after Gamelyn. Gamelyn leaves them all in a heap and
goes to fight his brother himself, who is hiding in an upper room. Gamelyn tells his
the history ofthe modem critical editions ofthe Gamelyn, see Nila
"The Need for
'Re-editing' Gamelyn," InternationalJournal ofEnglish Studies 5
161-73. Vazquez
text. See "The Tale of
recently completed a new edition of Gamelyn based on the
Gamelyn: A New Critical Edition" (PhD diss., Universidade de Santiago de Compostela,
Other editions include W. W. Skeat's The Tale
7334. Daniel Neil's The Tale ofGamelvn: A New Edition
is based on the
".wprinv
the Riddle
Cook's Tale
161
brother to "com a litel nere, / And I wil teche thee a play at the bokelere" (135-6).
His brother does not fight Gamelyn and instead fools Gamelyn into thinking that
he will finally give Gamelyn all that their father bequeathed to him.
After this episode, the narrator
from the main plot to tell the story of
Gamelyn's success against a number ofopponents including a renowned champion
at a wrestling match, which again fits within the ubiquitous game theme of the
Tales. When he returns from the match, the brother has Gamelyn locked out, but
Gamelyn has already proven his physical prowess in the two previous episodes.
He breaks in and takes control of his brother's estate. After some feasting, the
brother's beguiling leads to Gamelyn being tied for quite awhile to a post in the
middle hall without food or drink. His brother decides to hold a feast and invite
various members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and other local officials, who all
believe the terrible and false stories the brother tells about Gamelyn. The clerics
and officials say to him such things as "it is grete sorwe and care boy that thou art
alyve" (484). Gamelyn and a servant named Adam plan to facilitate Gamelyn's
escape and ambush the feast. At the right moment, Adam cuts Gamelyn free, and
they proceed to beat up those at the party and shackle the evil brother. Gamelyn,
at this point disgraced in the eyes of the clerics and officials, becomes an outlaw.
Adam and Gamelyn decide to live in the woods, and once news of Gamelyn's
exploits becomes known amongst the woodland outlaws, they make Gamelyn their
"maister outlawe and crowned her kinge" (690). Eventually though, after being
hunted by the law and winning at trial with the help of his other, more benevolent
brother, Gamelyn leaves his life as the king of the outlaws and reenters society to
become the heir to his other brother's fortune. He eventually marries, and, so it
seems, he lives happily ever after. Nevertheless, he never receives the inheritance
that his father had intended for him. Like Chaucer's, it seems Sir John's intentions
will remain unfulfilled.
How then does a tale like this fit within the context of the Cook s Tale, in
the mouth of the Cook of London, in the voice of Chaucer, or simply within the
framework of the storytelling game and narrative path of the Canterbury Tales?
Certainly Gamelyn is not "a lite I jape that fil in oure citee" as the Cook promises
(1. 4343). Stephen Knight voices the long-held claim, in the introduction to
his edition of Gamelyn, that it is possible that "Chaucer himself had included
Gamelyn among his papers."41 If Chaucer had this tale in his so-called
as Knight suggests, it might have existed as a kind of free-floating textual
used by various early, actively involved readers of the Tales to supply a tale to
different pilgrims in different parl<; of the frame narrative and thus create new
versions of the Tales. However, this is not the case based on the extant document
witnesses. If Gamelyn is in a manuscript, it always follows the abbreviated
'''Harkeneth Aright': Reading Gamelyn for Text not Context,"
in Tradition and Transfonnation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 1999), 15. For what it is worth, Manly and Rickert call it "Chaucer's literary
chest" Text ofthe Canterbury Tales, 2: 172.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale
Cook s Tale and is very often explicitly assigned to the Cook if assigned to any
pilgrim in the various forms of paratext such as explicits, incipits, and running
headers. Some have suggested that the input of Gamelyn has a single ancestor,
and thus one interactive scribe's addition of Gamelyn multiplied via textual
transmission and spread without any basis in Chaucer's own literary creation.
Though this is possible, it is hard to believe that a professional scribe working in
the fifteenth century, especially in London, would not have had access to or at least
seen different versions of the Canterbury Tales-some with Gamelyn and some
without. Not because it was an accident or because nothing better was available,
I argue that Gamelyn creates a meaning-making path when placed in the context
of the Cook's fragmented tale and joined in the various ways discussed above.
Whether because of textual loss, intention, or some other reason, the Cook sTale
of Perkyn fails as it exists canonically. It is, as I argue, only potential narrative.
However, that potential narrative, in spite of Kolve's elaborate argument that it is
headed in a moral direction, seems to be headed toward the bawdy and the fabliau
as the Cook himself promises when he states that he will tell "a litel jape that fil
in oure citee" (1. 4343). The tale is preceded by two tales of the same genre. Thus,
one might imagine a narrative path in which the Cook's audience has tired of the
genre of tale told by the Miller and the Reeve. Once it becomes apparent that
the Cook is telling a similar tale and his audience has no interest in hearing such
a tale, he decides to take things in a radically different direction with Gamelyn.
Moving from London to the world of romance and outlaws, the Cook abandons
the fabliau for another form of merry storytelling, which includes adventure,
wrestling, and outlaws, and Gamelyn's own japes. Chaucer's pilgrim sets the
precedent for this kind of abrupt change with the shift from Thopas to Melibee.
The incomplete romance verse of Thopas is amended with the very didactic prose
treatise of Melibee. Though such a transition between the two Cook's tales exists
only in the text of the Lansdowne manuscript, the narrative of Gamelyn works
within the context of the initial Cooks Tale by introducing a new kind of narrative,
exemplifying a type of mirth and solaas different from the potential narrative
ofPerkyn.
In addition to the possible role of Gamelyn as a needed generic shift in the
frame narrative, Gamelyn's sidekick Adam, who figures even more prominently in
Shakespeare's As You Like it, might have offered early readers a point of contact to
connect the tale to the Cook in that both were in the business of food. Adam, who
in the tale is named Adam Spencere, is so named because of his job as a "spencere"
or the officer in charge of provisions or food, perhaps similar to the Cook or even
Perkyn the apprentice victualer in the fragment. Moreover, the setting for several
adventures in the tale involves food and/or feasts, connecting it to both the Cook
and the fragmented tale of Perkyn. In fact, in the late nineteenth-century book
English Writers: An Attempt Towards a History of English Literature, Henry
Morley suggests that Chaucer
not only resolved to make this one of his pilgrims' stories, but also to substitute it
for the one he had begun and laid aside as the Cook's Tale. For when he resolved
that the Cook should not follow the example of the Miller and the Reeve, it still
remained necessary that his story should be one that a man like the Cook might
be supposed to tell. He might be supposed to know one of the ballad stories
common among the people; and the exploits of Gamelyn were such as he could
very well enjoy, not the less for its having a chief character who was Spencer,
that is, cellarer or clerk of the kitchen. There might even be so much dramatic
truth in making the Cook run through the romance in ballad fashion, without
subtle elaboration, as to suggest a slight doubt whether Gamelyn may not after
all have been intentionally left as it is by Chaucer.42
162
163
Was it Chaucer? Was it one of the active readers who followed in his wake and
made meaning where Chaucer left only potential narrative? Even if Chaucer did
not "resolve" to make the connection between Gamelyn and the Cook, involved
readers, exploring the potential narrative of the tales and using an available textual
piece such as Gamelyn, actively produced the meaning-making relationships
that Morley wants to assign to Chaucer. No matter who initiated the inclusion of
Gamelyn, it exists in a number of medieval versions of the Tales, it did not come
about by accident, and it is not void of meaning and intentions. Whether or not
Chaucer wanted to include Gamelyn, either as it exists in the manuscripts or in
another place, one cannot ignore that it exists in 25 manuscripts, with varying
connections to the Cook, as a record of user interaction and the dynamic, ongoing
production of the Canterbury Tales in the fifteenth century.
Because the tale is in so many textual witnesses, some datable to the first decade
after Chaucer's death, critics have had a hard time making sense of its place in the
textual history of the Canterbury Tales. Thus, the critical history of Gamelyn is
perhaps just as diverse as the various ways in which it has been attached to the
Cooks Tale in the manuscripts. Urry was the first to include Gamelyn as part of
the Tales in print in his posthumously published 1721 edition. 43 Later that century,
Tyrwhitt excluded it from the canon. 44 In the nineteenth century, in spite of the
number of manuscripts in which Gamelyn is ascribed to the Cook, W.W. Skeat
42 Henry Morley, English Writers: An Attempt Towards a History ofEnglish Literature
(New York: Cassell & Co., 1887-95), 320-21.
43 See John Urry, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer [... ] (London, Printed for B.
Lintot, I 72 I).
44 Tyrwhitt explains his decision:
[The Tale ofGamelyn] is not to be found in any of the MSS. of the first authority;
and the manner, style, and versification, all prove it to have been the work of an
author much inferior to Chaucer. I did not therefore think myself warranted to
publish it a second time among the Canterbury Tales, though as a Relique of our
ancient Poetry, and the foundation, perhaps, of Shakespeare's As you like it, I
could have wished to see it more accurately printed, than it is in the only edition
which we have of it.
See Tyrwhitt, Canterbury Tales ofChaucer, clxxxiii.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale
seems to have taken some umbrage at the "stupidity of the botcher whose hand
wrote above it 'The Cokes Tale of Gamelyn. "'45 Numerous scribes did just what
Skeat describes as botchery. Yet most modem critics, following Skeat, have never
really considered Gamelyn as Chaucer's own alternative ending to the Cook's Tale
based on the internal evidence of the un-Chaucer-like poetic structure and what
most critics assume is an odd tale for a Cook from London to tell. In Skeat's 1884
edition of Gamelyn, he states,
In all the MSS. it is called the Cooke's Tale, and therefore I call it so in like
manner: But had I found it without an Inscription and had been left to my Fancy
to have bestow'd it on which of the Pilgrims I had pleas'd, I should certainly
have adjudged it to the Squire's Yeoman: who tho as minutely describ'd
Chaucer, and characteriz'd in the third Place, yet I find no Tale of his in any of
the MSS. And because I think there is not anyone that would fit him so well as
this, I have ventur'd to place his Picture before this Tale, tho' I leave the Cook
in possession of the Title. 50
164
There is, in fact, no connection between this Tale and any work of Chaucer,
and no reason for connecting it with the Cook's Tale in particular, beyond the
mere accident that the gap here found in Chaucer's work gave an opportunity
for introducing it. It is quite clear that some scribes preserved it because they
it worth preserving, and that it must have been found amongst Chaucer's
MSS. in some connection with his Canterbury Tales. 46
The conclusion that most reach, in order to reconcile the "apocryphal" status of
Gamelyn with its recurrence in the manuscripts, is that Chaucer perhaps wanted
to use Gamelyn at some point but never got around to putting it in his own words
since the rather crude poetic fonn could not be hisY Skeat suggests that perhaps
Chaucer had planned to fashion his own version of Gamelyn as the tale of the
Yeoman whose introduction in the General Prologue is not followed by a tale in
the collection of Tales. 48 Skeat conjectures,
The fitness of things ought to shew at once that this Tale of Gamelyn, a tale
of the woods, in the true Robin-Hood style, could only have been placed in
the mouth of him "who bare a mighty bow," and who knew all the usage of
woodcraft; in one word, of the Yeoman. And we hence obtain the additional
hint, that the Yeoman's Tale was to have followed the Cook's
a tale offresh
country-life succeeding one of the close back streets ofthe city. No better
can be found for it. 49
Urry, based on what he describes as his "fancy," places a picture of the Yeoman
on the first page of the Tale of Gamelyn, yet he retains the header and title that
attach it to the Cook. More recently, T.A. Shippey took up the Yeoman theory
and suggested that the Yeoman's tale of Gamelyn belongs after the Man ofLaw's
Tale. 51 In the "Man of Law's Epilogue," an unidentified pilgrim, conventionally
emended and named as the Shipman based on the single example in the extant
Selden manuscript, speaks 13 lines to introduce his tale. Aage Brusendorff argued
in 1925 that the speech ought to belong to the Yeoman. Brusendorff argues that
the Yeoman was often confused with the Squire since the Yeoman seems to be the
"Squire's Yeoman" rather than the Knight's Yeoman based on the ambiguous use
of the personal pronoun in the Yeoman's description in the General PrologueY
Because the Squire is named instead of the Shipman in the "Man of Law's
Epilogue" in several early texts, including Caxton's two editions, Brusendorff
concludes that the scribe responsible mistakenly read "Squire," where Chaucer
intended "Squire's Yeoman."
N.F. Blake, in contrast, begins with the premise that perhaps some of the early
manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales are in fact much earlier than scholars have
generally thought, and thus perhaps Chaucer toyed with the notion of concluding
or replacing the existing Cook's fragment with GamelynY Blake, who suggested
Urry, Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer, 36.
T.A. Shippey, "The Tale of Gamelyn: Class Warfare and the Embarrassments of
Genre," in The Spirit ofMedieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert
(New York: Pearson, 2000), 78-96.
52 See the following passage from the General Prologue:
Curteis he was, lowely, and servysable,
And carf bifom his fader at the table.
A yeman hadde he and servantz namo
At that tyme, for hym Iiste ride so,
And he was clad in cote and hood of grene. (1. 99-103)
See Aage Brusendorff's argument in The Chaucer Tradition (London: Oxford UP, 1925),
70-73.
53
N.F. Blake, "Chaucer, Gamelyn and the CooH Tale," in The Medieval Book and a
Modern Collector: Essays in Honour ofToshiyuki Takamiya, ed. J. Scahill et al. (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2004), 87-98. For an argument suggesting that the writing style ofthe Hengwrt
manuscript is more like that of the late fourteenth century and largely uninfluenced
the fifteenth-century secretary hand that dominates so many manuscripts after 1400, see
50
Skeat's supposition that somehow one needs personal experience to tell a tale is
perhaps a bit of a stretch. One could simply tell a tale that one has heard before
without ever having the actual experience of bearing a mighty bow. Skeat seems to
think that the tale is in the right place but in the voice of the wrong pilgrim. Urry
states similarly:
Skeat, Tale of Gamelyn, xiv.
Ibid.
47
Skeat describes this as the "variableness of the metre." Ibid., xxiii.
48
The Canon's Yeoman is, of course, a completely different yeoman who is not
described in the General Prologue but tells a tale after meeting up with the company of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. 49 Ibid., xv. 45
46
165
51
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale
the early date for the first manuscripts before Mooney's important discovery
of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere scribe, argues that even the supposedly "heavily
edited" manuscript Harley 7334, which happens to include Gamelyn, might be
from Chaucer's lifetime and might have crossed paths with the poet. 54 There is
no evidence to support this conclusion. In fact, the discovery of Adam Pynkhurst
might make Blake's arguments moot since Harley 7334 is such a different text
from the Hengwrt text, with which Chaucer seems to have been more closely
involved. Blake, nowever, argues that Chaucer may have supervised the Harley
text as well, whicn would indicate that Chaucer either intended the Cook:s Tale to
end with Gamelyn or experimented with it as a possible ending. Blake even reads
the much-quoted scribal note in Hengwrt that "of this Cokes tale maked Chaucer
na moore" to mean that of this particular Cook s Tale Chaucer did not compose
anything else, but there is another Cook's Tale, and it is Gamelyn.
The consensus in this cacophony ofcritical opinion is that there is no consensus.
Thus the critics p:articipate in the formation of new meanings parallel to those
early involved realders who continued and added to Chaucer's initial work. They
are faced with what appears to be a problem-a riddle or series of riddles to be
solved. Why is Gamelyn in so many textual witnesses? Why is it always the follow­
up to the Cook's Tale? The critical metanarratives explaining the conditions and
circumstances sunrounding the addition of Gamelyn, without much hard evidence,
are just as fictive amd just as imaginative as the actual involved-reader interactions
that had prompted the addition of Gamelyn in the first place.
to Lydgate in the header and the incipit of the tale canonically allocated to the
Manciple. While this spurious act may have been a misreading on the part of the
scribe, these textual oddities may tell us something about the concept ofauthorship
in play for the redactor of the Bodley 686 text. The unique text of Bodley 686
reveals a reader not necessarily concerned with presenting Chaucer's text, but
rather that of the res of the Canterbury Tales regardless of whether it was written
by Chaucer, Lydgate, or the anonymous redactor responsible for the extensive
additions to the Cook's Tale. The 45 new lines added by the interactor to the Cook's
Tale, unlike Gamelyn and the short ending discussed below, have been added
both interlinearly and to the end of the tale. Further, the lines are dissimilar to
the canonical text because they are written in distinctively long, alliterative lines,
which is quite different than the meter of the canonical Cook's Tale. The new text
is further distin2uished from the canonical text through the addition ofpersonified
such as "Waste" and "Drynke-more," which the writer uses
Immorality ofPerkyn's actions. The tale finallv ends:
166
New Conclusionsi for the Cook
While the most common scribal interaction with the narrative ofthe Cook's Tale is
to abandon its potential narrative or somehow transition to Gamelyn, two different
conclusions in three fifteenth-century manuscripts actually create some semblance
of a moralized narrative from the potential narrative of the canonical text. The
addition that has garnered the most attention is found only in Bodley 686, which
is a manuscript anso marked by the peculiar assignment of the Manciple's Tale
A.I. Doyle and M.B. Parkes, "A Paleographical Introduction," in The Canterbury Tales:
Geoffrey Chaucer; A Facsimile and Transcription of the llengwrt Manuscript, ed. Paul
Ruggiers (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1979), xix-xlix. Further, Kathleen Scott argues that
the illuminations in the Ellesmere manuscript are fourteenth-century in character. See "An
Hours and Psalter by Two Ellesmere Illuminators," in The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in
Interpretation, ed. Martin Stcvens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino, CA: Huntington
Library, 1995), 87- n19. However, both arguments must be subjcct to further scrutiny given
Mooney's convincimg discovery of the identity of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere scribe.
54
Cf. Germaime Dempster, who states that in the opinion of Manly, Harley 7334 is
"characterised by editing almost as bold and extensive as is found in any CT manuscript of
any date." See "MaInly's Conception of the Early History ofthe Canterbury Tales," PMLA
61 (1946): 400.
167
[... J A schoppe, and ever sehe pleyed for his sustenaunee.
What thoro we hymselfe and his felawe that sought,
Unto a myschefe bothe they were broght.
The tone y-dampned to presoun perpetually,
The tother to deth for he couthe not of clergye.
And therfore, yonge men, leme while ye may
That with mony dyvers thoghtes beth prycked al the day.
Remembre you what myschefe cometh ofmysgovernaunce.
Thus mowe ye leme worschep and come to substaunce.
Thenke how grace and govemaunce hath broght hem a boune,
Many pore rnannys sonn, chefe state of the towne. (86-96)55
In the canonical last line, the scribe emends the overtly sexual "swyved" with the
somewhat ambiguous word "pleyed." More importantly, the result of the playing
of Perkyn and the "wyf' is their death. The moral offered at the end is that one
should govern one's actions and keep "myschefe" in check.
For Daniel Pinti, governance is the key that unlocks both the moral of the tale
and its place as an example of Chaucerian reception. In "Governing the Cook's
Tale in Bodley 686," Pinti suggests that the moralizing lines added
something like a dialogue rather than the simulation of Chaucer's voice.
In other words, according to Pinti, there is no effort to make the additions pass as
Chaucer's own. Pinti states, "not even the most casual reader of the manuscript
could fail to notice that we are hearing a different narrative persona at this point."56
Following in the critical footsteps of Lerer's Chaucer Readers, Pinti argues that
s
55 All citations to the Bodley Cook s Tale refer to the line numbers in Bowers'8 edition:
John Bowers, "The Cook's Tale," The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations
and Additions.
56 Pinti, "Governing the Cook's Tale in Bodley 686," 381.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale
the redactor, through his additions, "opens up textual room to create a role for
himself as both a commentator on Chaucer's text and a follower in Chaucer's
poetic footsteps, a role which plays upon some of the distinctive expectations of
Chaucerian readers and writers."57 Pinti further argues that through the additions,
the scribe maintains governance over the text. The moralizing additions use
Perkyn's life as an example to teach governance to the reader. Pinti argues that
the scribe is following in the footsteps of Chaucer, yet he also maintains that the
scribe governs the text via the interlinear additions. In this way, it is an interactive,
game-like script act, which demonstrates the potential for the Tales to exist as a
communal textual environment open to an ergodic experience. Further, though
unknowingly, Pinti enters the discourse of script acts, games, and interactivity
stating that the allegorical figures and other new literary forms
a fabliau narrative] while instructing readers,"6O which echoes the game-like
theoretical notion of "strategies of containment" that I first discuss in Chapter
3 in terms of Lydgate's religious and social posturing and again take up in the
employed to offer the Plowman
previous chapter in regard to the various
a singular religious identity. According to Boyd, fabliau is a threat in this text
because the manuscript, he argues, was produced for an upper-class audience. The
use of allegorical vice figures, the narration of Perkyn's death, and the addition of
a didactic ending cancel any threat of such a 'jape" as the Cook initially promises.
Of course, Boyd is not particularly clear why the Miller and Reeve's tales are
not threatening and in need of "containment." Perhaps because they were already
complete, there was no hope to contain them. Instead, the incomplete narrative of
the Cook s Tale opens the tale for "containment" through completion.
A similar strategy of containment cancels the threat of fabliau in a far shorter
addition to the tale, which appears in two manuscripts of the Tales. Tn Regenstein
MS 564 (formerly the McCormick manuscript now at the University of Chicago)
and Rawlinson Poetry MS 141, the new conclusion is abrupt but definitively final:
168
do more than begin "to moralize" Chaucer's tale. In fact,
introduce a
concomitant fictional world that circumscribes interpretive parameters for
the reader, that suggest Perkyn and his story may be read from more than one
vantage point, and they do so by stylistically marking one vantage point as
Chaucer's, the other as his unanticipated co-author. 58
Pinti's language evokes the potential to enact multiple vantage points in a fictional
world distinct from the perspective of the initial text. This recalls Montfort's
suggestion that computer-based "Interactive Fiction" may one day "provide even
more appealing possibilities for the interactor. It may allow for a more co-authorial
role, or it may provide, by serving as a riddle in the richest literary sense, a more
and responsive type of systematic world."59 It seems, as I suggest in
Chapter I, actively involved readers were playing the role ofreader, producer, and
author with Chaucer's open and fragmented work centuries before such interactive
worlds took shape within the textual space of new-media works.
The contest for Chaucer's potential narrative and the writerly reader's
rhetoric in the moralized additions, as Pinti is right to suggest, are thematically
and textually tied to notions of governance. Governance is both the central
value promoted tlhrough the rhetoric of the new additions and something that the
interactor seeks tto impose on Chaucer's potentially unwieldy initial narrative.
Unlike other spurio~s texts, there is no effort to be like Chaucer; that is, the
interactor does nOlt pseudoepigraphically write as Chaucer might have written. The
lack of effort on the part of the interactor to make hislher work pass as Chaucer's
the disttinctness of the various script acts that make up the Cook s Tale in
Bodley 686 and also exemplifies the interactor' s perception of the res of the work
through marked additions to the verba. Tn a slightly different critical mode, Boyd
states that the intlerlinear additions in Bodley 686 function to "contain the threat
57 Ibid., 382-3.
Ibid., 381.
59 Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, 5.
58
169
And pus w[iJt[hJ hordom and briberie
Togeder pei used tyl hanged
For whoso evel byeth shal make a sory sale
And pus I make amende of my tale. 61
In the Regenstein manuscript, the four-line conclusion stands out because it is
the only part of the Cooks Tale that is on folio IOv. 62 However, because it is on
the verso of the page and in the middle of the gathering, there is no evidence that
it was added at a later date. In the later Rawlinson manuscript, the lines occur in
the middle of the page, again not offering any evidence that they were added by
the scribe as an afterthought. These lines have garnered far less attention than the
Bodley 686 additions. Even with such brevity, the new lines create new meanings
for the Cook and his tale that might
something of the Cook's middle-class,
mercantile aspirations as conceived by the writer responsible for this addition.
In this ending, the lines bring the tale to a sudden, unornamented, and
explicit conclusion. There is no ambiguity. Like the Bodley narration of Perkyn's
execution, the hangings in Rawlinson and Regenstein deny the potential fabliau
narrative via a narrative of an unambiguous and final conclusion. What is most
remarkable about this four-line addition, as compared to Gamelyn and the
extensive additions to Bodley 686 discussed above, is that the conclusion is so
final yet so minimal. Only the first two lines of the addition actually introduce new
narrative, yet all ofthese lines are packed with new meaning for the Cooks Tale.
60
Boyd, "Social Texts," 89. Boyd suggests that Bodley 686 was tailored for a wealthy
audience, and the scribe seems unconcerned with presenting the unfiltered words ofChaucer
to his audience.
61
Cited from the University of Chicago, Regenstein MS 564, fol. lOv.
62
The Man a/Law s Prologue follows immediately in the manuscript.
Playing the Canterbury Tales
Amwering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale
The interactor seems invested in the "economy oflanguage" through the economical
introduction of a concluding narrative and the use of economic language. In
the first line, the terms "hordom" and "briberie," which both involve the illicit
exchange of money for services of one sort or another, refer to the sins of Perkyn
and his friends. In the canonical text, there is little evidence that Perkyn's sins are
anything other than carnal sins of excessive merriment, lechery, and sloth. He is,
after all, called Perkyn the Revelour for a reason. Only the wife who "swyved for
hir sustenance" seems to fit the first sin the interactor describes, and her narrative
remains tantalizingly underdeveloped for her to function as an edifying example
of what not to do. Nevertheless, the conclusion ends with the moralizing and
economic-laden axiom (or "sentence" in the Middle English sense): "For whoso
evel byeth shal make a sory sal." This line best translates to mean something like:
"whoever buys into evil has made a bad purchase." The use of the words
and "sale" in the context of the particular sins mentioned in the first line and the
brevity of the sententious ending frame this addition as a strikingly economic and
economically deployed conclusion.
No one reason stands out as to why this short conclusion has been packed so
full of economic language to bring the tale to a moralized conclusion. Perhaps
the interactor formed the conclusion because ofhislher own particular interest in
economic language. Perhaps a scribe added the lines because a patron, perhaps a
patron of a mercantile profession, demanded a sententious ending of this sort. On
the other hand, the interactor responsible for the conclusion might have imagined
this as a fitting moral conclusion to be told by the Cook. It is a sudden break
from the developing narrative, which might suggest the Cook's inexperience with
sententious conclusions. Further, the Cook is of London and thus surrounded in
his everyday life by the exchange of goods and services in a vibrant mercantile
economy. He is of course on the pilgrimage to cook for London guildsmen,
including the "haberdasshere and a carpenter, a webbe, a dyere, and a tapycer"
363-4). Thus, perhaps, he fornls a sententious ending using the image of a
"sory sale" based on his own professional life purchasing food and the implements
to prepare that food and based on his
and conversation with the London
guildsmen for whom he cooks. In other words, the Cook of London appropriately
uses the economic language familiar to him from the London scene. Rather than
performing the moral voice ofa cleric, the Cook, in this short conclusion, sticks to
what he knows. Nevertheless, like Chaucer's fifteenth-century reader who decided
to participate in the production of Chaucer's text, we can only speculate what was
intended by the interactor in this case.
The final line of the conclusion, though it does not have recourse to economic
language, functions as a particularly revealing moment of interaction in which
the interactor's voice mixes with Chaucer's voice and the Cook's voice. In the
line: "And pus r make amende of my tale," the choice of the word "amende"
suggests something very different than had it said something like "an end" instead.
"Amende" denotes an action taken to change something for the better. In other
words, the narrator describes his short conclusion as a change. Moreover, who
is referred to by the personal pronouns "I" and "my?" On the surface, the first­
person voice is that of the Cook. It is of course Chaucer on several levels as well.
However, in a way, by making amends to the Cook's Tale, the redactor responsible
for this expansion of the story canon has made it his/her tale as well.
Most critics have not had much to say about the short conclusion in the
Regenstein and Rawlinson manuscripts other than that it is clearly moralizing
and clearly finalizing. Nevertheless, perhaps the most noteworthy reaction to
these four lines comes from the false description of the Regenstein manuscript
by a nineteenth-century book dealer. On a paper flyleaf later added to the codex,
someone has pasted a listing cut from an 1848 catalogue of the bookseller William
Andrews ofBristol. Book dealers are notorious for exaggeration, but this particular
case of
unveils the desire readers often have for "Chaucer's" work.
Twice the listing
that the manuscript dates from Chaucer's own
once in the heading stating "written in the Poet's life time" and once later on in the
description of the codex's significance stating, "there not being the slightest doubt
of its being written in Chaucer's life-time .... "63 Nevertheless, the manuscript is
datable to sometime around 1450, and someone has crossed out, in pencil, the
above falsehoods in the description in the copy pasted in the codex. However, the
manuscript is rather sparse. There are no explicits, incipits, or running headers.
Other than blue and red initials, which have deteriorated from both time and water
damage, there is no decoration. Thus, one can perhaps imagine why one might
be misled as to the manuscript's date. More likely, however, Andrews understood
the profitability of inventing the narrative of a manuscript from Chaucer's own
lifetime. Moreover, it was not only that it was from Chaucer's own lifetime, but
that "[t]his original and invaluable Manuscript includes [ ... ] also the lost portion
of the Cook's Tale, and other portions not to be found in any printed copy or
Manuscript."64 The promise of Chaucer's own lost conclusion is enough to justify
a hefty price. Yet value is not always monetary as it was for this nineteenth-century
book dealer. The readerly desire to figure out what Chaucer intended and/or to
a verbal expression to the polyvocal res of the fragment are value-laden
competitions played out in the rearrangement of., continuation and addition to the
valuable Canterbury Tales. Based on the sheer variety of
interactions with the narrative of something like the Cook's Tale both textually and
paratextually, Chaucer's intentions and his narratives carry a significant amount of
cultural capital that was, in a different historical and technological milieu before
modern ideas of copyright and singular authorship, free to be used and refashioned
according to dynamic notions of"sentence" and "solaas."
170
171
63 See the flyleaf in the Regenstein manuscript, or the Andrews's catalogue itself:
William Andrews, Catalogue (Bristol, 1848), 19.
64 Ibid.