Chaucer′s Extraordinary Fabliau: The Merchant′s Tale

The six fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales are a notable artistic achievement. Of all of them, however, the Merchant's Tale is the most notable to show Chaucer's development of the scope of this genre. We will look briefly at the characters of the fabliau narrators who are crucial to Chaucer's drama of relationships in the course of the Canterbury pilgrimage framework. To distinguish the accomplishment of the Merchant's Tale, we will consider the relative merits of each of the other five fabliaux in the Canterbury Tales. The least flawed of the fabliau narrators, the Merchant will tell a powerful tale about an old man's lust turned into a hasty marriage gone wrong that aims its satire at the noble ruling class of the land, not the usual targets of Chaucer's or most other writers' fabliaux. Further, unlike the light-hearted and dismissable endings of the other Chaucerian fabliaux, the Merchant's Tale has what we will call an Act 6 of continued deception at all corners of the love triangle represented by the senex amans January, his young wife May, perhaps now pregnant after her tryst with Damyan in the pear tree, and the still present young lover Damyan. This triangle of mutual deception will continue into the unknown future under the male and female forces at odds as personified in the king and queen of fairies, Pluto and Proserpina.