Cook’s Tale, The

   by Geoffrey Chaucer

(ca. 1390)

   The Cook’s Tale immediately follows the REEVE’S TALE in all manuscripts of CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY TALES. In the prologue to the tale, the London Cook, Roger ofWare, commends the Reeve for his tale and sets about to match it with one of his own. Though Chaucer seems to have broken off after only 58 lines of the tale, it is clear from the contemporary setting, the working-class characters, and the gambling and prostitution in the story that it would have been another FABLIAU, like the preceding REEVE’S and MILLER’S TALES.

   In the fragment a miscreant apprentice named Perkyn Revelour robs from his master to pay for his gambling and other vices.His master dismisses him, and he moves in with a fellow dissolute, whose wife runs a shop. In the final couplet of the fragment, we are told that the shop is merely a front for the woman’s real livelihood, which is prostitution.

   We cannot know what Chaucer intended with this tale: whether he left it unfinished on purpose or intended to finish it but never got around to it, or whether in fact he completed it but most of it has not survived.Whatever the case, there are a number of 15th-century continuations of the story by scribes or lesser poets who wanted to complete the tale. None of these “continuations” seems in any way to reflect Chaucer’s intent for the text.

   Bibliography

   ■ Benson, Larry, et al., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987.

   ■ Kolve,V.A. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984.

   ■ Partridge, Stephen. “Minding the Gaps: Interpreting the Manuscript Evidence of the Cook’s Tale and the Squire’s Tale,” in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, edited by A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna. London: British Library, 2000, 51–87.

   ■ Scattergood, V. J. “Perkyn Revelour and the ‘Cook’s Tale,’ ” Chaucer Review 19 (1984): 14–23.

   ■ Woods,William F. “Society and Nature in the ‘Cook’s Tale,’ ” Papers on Language and Literature 32 (1996): 189–205.