Shipman’s Tale, The

   by Geoffrey Chaucer

(ca. 1390)

   The Shipman’s Tale is one of several FABLIAUX included in CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY TALES. As such it is a comic tale of deception and adultery lampooning the licentiousness of the clergy, the deviousness of women, and the blind materialism of the merchant class. Most scholars agree that Chaucer originally intended the tale for The WIFE OF BATH, but reassigned it to the Shipman when he found a more appropriate tale for the Wife. Thus there is little in the tale to link it particularly to the pilgrim Shipman narrator.

   The tale tells the story of a wealthy merchant from St. Denis and his beautiful wife, though the narrative suggests the merchant is far more focused on his business than on his spouse. A monk, Dan John, visits the merchant’s lavish estate frequently, and is thought to be the merchant’s cousin. One day the monk visits when the merchant is busy in his counting house. He and the wife engage in thinly veiled flirtatious banter, during which the monk reveals an attraction to the wife,while she in turn complains that her husband neglects her and that he will not even give her the 100 franks she needs to pay a debt. She hints that she will show her gratitude in every way imaginable if the monk will give her the 100 franks. Dan John promises to help her, helping himself to a foretaste of his reward by stroking her “flanks.” The merchant is about to travel to Flanders on a business trip when the monk asks him for a loan of 100 franks.Having obtained the loan, the monk goes to see the wife.After paying her the money, he enjoys her sexual favors.When the merchant returns from Flanders, his financial situation forces him to ask the monk for the repayment of his loan. The monk informs the merchant that he has already repaid the debt, having given the money to the merchant’s wife during his absence. The merchant mentions the matter to his wife that evening, expressing his embarrassment at having asked Dan John to repay the loan when he had already paid her. He asks his wife what has happened to the money, and she tells him she has already spent it on rich attire for herself, claiming that for the merchant’s own honor, he should ensure that his wife is fashionably dressed. As for the money, she tells the merchant he can “Score it on my tail [tally]”— with the double meaning that he can put it on her tab as something she owes him, or she can pay him back by giving him her “tail.”

   The story is based on the motif of the “lover’s gift regained” — an extremely popular plot device that appears in numerous medieval analogues, including one from BOCCACCIO’s DECAMERON (the first story of the eighth day), and remains popular in the oral tradition of jokes even to the present time. The French milieu of the tale (as opposed to the very English setting of The MILLER’S TALE and The REEVE’S TALE in Oxford and Cambridge) might suggest that this story is earlier than those, perhaps Chaucer’s first attempt in the fabliau genre, and therefore closer to the French fabliaux that Chaucer used as models. Critical views of the tale have examined it as a comment on the bourgeois ethos of the merchant class, and have seen the imagery making as the equation of sex and money, of human relationships and financial transactions. The Shipman’s Tale has also been considered as the first tale in Fragment 7 of the Canterbury Tales, the largest collection of coherently linked tales in the text, and one with a tremendous variety of literary genres, retrospectively drawn together through ironic commentary in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale that concludes the fragment.

   Bibliography

   ■ Benson, Larry, and Theodore Andersson, eds. The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux: Texts and Translations. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

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

   ■ Howard, Donald. The Idea of The Canterbury Tales. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

   ■ Silverman, Albert H. “Sex and Money in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Philological Quarterly 32 (1953): 329–336.