The Mysteries and the Miller's Tale (The Canterbury Tales, Part 3.75 [?])

Let's have a look at perhaps why Chaucer, in his "The Miller's Tale," alludes so often to the incipient mystery plays of the late 14th century.

Transcript

Hello and welcome once again to the Classic English Literature Subcast, the stream for bonus episodes and interesting sidebars.  

Before today’s little sidebar, I’d like to give a great warm thank you to loyal listener Brayden – thanks for your very generous contribution to the show and thank you, especially, for your time and attention.  I’d also like to ask you all to subscribe to the show if you haven’t and follow it on all fine social media platforms.

As I was reading around for the most recent episode of the Podcast (that’s the one on early English drama, in case you missed it), I was reminded that Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” from the Canterbury Tales, makes some rather intriguing allusions to the mystery plays, particularly the plays Noah and the Flood and Herod the Great, with perhaps a soupcon of the Annunciation and the Fall of Man.  In the Canterbury Tales, the Knight tells the first story, and then the rude, drunken Miller says he will “quit” the Knight with a story of his own, but he cautions, “And eek men shal nat maken ernest of game.”  Don’t take a joke too seriously, basically.  But the word “game” here does double-duty: meaning not only “joke” or “trick,” but, apropos of this little episode: a play.

If you’re not familiar with the Miller’s Tale, it’s a type called a fabliau which originated in France but became popular in England during the 14th century.  Fabliaux were short verse tales, satirical, coarsely humorous (usually scatalogical, if not obscene) that offered a lively representation of everyday life.  The characters are usually lower-middle or working class, there’s usually an exceptionally gullible dupe victimized by a trickster figure.  Sex, violence, deceit, and avarice get their farcical treatment here – nothing too serious ever really results from the hijinks.  It’s just a game.

“The Miller’s Tale” revolves around the character of John the carpenter, his young wife Alison (hmm . . . there’s a familiar name), and a young scholar named Nicholas who rents a room with them. Nicholas the Spark, who knows astrology and sings just loverly, falls in lust with Alison and conspires with her to trick John into believing a great flood is coming so they can have sex. He convinces John to build three wooden tubs and hang them from the roof of their house, so that they can survive the flood by floating on them. Late that night, when John falls asleep in the tub, Nicholas and  Alison romp the night away. However, Absalom, a parish clerk who is also in love with Alison,but whom Alison finds vile, comes to her window and asks for a kiss. Alison agrees, 

And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,

And Absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers,

But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers.  

Absalon gets his revenge, when Nicholas tries to repeat the jape by burning the scholar’s farting posterior with a red hot poker.  The screaming wakes John who falls from the tub, breaking his arm. The townspeople come to see what happened and are amused when they hear the story of the flood.

Not a complex tale, bit gross, but can raise a chuckle.  But Chaucer makes a point, on several occasions, of referencing the scriptural plays that, at the end of the 1300s, were just on the cultural rise.  This story feels a bit crude for any spiritual gratification. Certainly, we get that Nicholas uses a great flood story to cuckold his landlord, so if Noah’s Flood was to wipe out sin, Nicholas’ Flood is to revel in it.  OK, ha ha, but I think Chaucer’s is cleverer than this mere reversal.

In the Chester play of Noah’s flood, we get a creditable retelling of the Genesis myth – Noah is good and faithful, his sons loyal, and his wife (far and away the most interesting and famous character) is a nagging shrew.  And I reckon it’s the wife that Chaucer is most interested in, too.

Medieval patriarchal attitudes (inherited from the ancient traditions) would find Mrs. Noah’s attitudes “unnatural.” She is a figure for horrified mockery.  She vehemently resists entering the ark – defying her husband and her sons and, indeed, God himself – because she does not wish to abandon her friends, her “gossips” (a contraction of the Old English word for “god-sibling,” the women who assist you in childbirth).  As the waters come, the gossips propose a final drink together before they perish:

The flood comes fleeting in full fast,             

On every side that spreadeth full far.

For fear of drowning I am aghast;

Good gossip, let us draw near.

And let us drink ere we depart,

For oftentimes we have done so.

For at one draught thou drink a quart,

And so will I do ere I go.

Noah's wife responds:

Here's a pottle of Malmsey good and strong;    

It will rejoice both heart and tongue.

Though Noah think us never so long,

Yet we will drink atyte.                         

So the word “gossip” connotes a quite strong emotional bond, and Mrs. Noah is angered by being forced, by men, to reject that bond.  She asserts her independence, even to the point of striking her husband, who meekly accepts her rage.　

Noah. Welcome, wife, into the boat. 

Noah’s wife. {slaps him} Have thou that for thy note!

Noah. Aha, Mary, this is hot! It is good for to be still. 

Chaucer’s twist on Noah’s Wife, Alison, plays on a similar, if more base, theme.  We are clearly told that she is young, beautiful, and vivacious (Chaucer often uses young animal metaphors for her, especially “colt”), plainly ill-matched to the aged and bumbling John the Carpenter.  Chaucer writes:

This carpenter hadde wedded newe a wyf,

Which that he lovede moore than his lyf;

Of eighteteene yeer she was of age.

Jalous he was, and heeld hire narwe in cage,

For she was wylde and yong, and he was old

And demed hymself been lik a cokewold.

He knew nat Catoun, for his wit was rude,

That bad man sholde wedde his simylitude.

Men sholde wedden after hire estaat,

For youthe and elde is often at debaat.

John knows that Alison resists him, that she prefers someone like the young, handsome, wily Nicholas, and accepts his advances after only token resistance (though it’s still troubling – his first advance is clearly what we would see as a Trumpian sexual assault.  She rebukes him, but acquiesces immediately after.  Hmm . . . .).  When John enters his “ark” (the tubs), she does not go.  Rather, she stays with Nicholas for a little sex, drugs, and rocknroll.  Chaucer uses John as a diminished Noah, rendering of Noah’s faith and patience as instead gullibility and cuckoldry.  Nicholas also, in some ways, performs knowledge, making a great deal of his studies and insights..  His literacy seems totemized by John, who is unlettered – remember, he’s never read Cato.  The carpenter has not read the Genesis text, wants desperately for his wife to join him in the life-preserving tub.  He can be tricked because he only knows the mystery play rendering of Noah’s wife.  And the mockery that Noah endures from his community while building the ark is mirrored by the town’s mockery of John’s humiliation and injuries.  If we squint, we can also glimpse callbacks to other mystery plays, like the Annunciation, in which Nicholas takes the Gabriel role, Alison that of Mary (heavily layered in irony), and John as Joseph, who would believe that his pregnant fiancee had not been messing about – so faith cast once again as credulity.  Or the Garden of Eden, with Alison as Eve (far less ironic I suppose) and Nicholas as the Tempter, the serpent (on the nose there, a bit).

Absolam, the young clerk-lover, offers another allusion to the mystery plays.  He too is a performer: and musician and singer.  Indeed, an actor too.  Chaucer tells us that he had played Herod on the stage:  

Somtyme, to shewe his lightnesse and maistrye,

He pleyeth Herodes upon a scaffold hye.

Some listeners may be reminded of Hamlet’s famous complaint to his actors that overacting “out-Herod’s Herod!”  He draws on the common association of the mystery play’s Herod as a ranting madman.  But Hamlet does Herod a little dirty here.  Throughout the mystery cycles, we can see that Herod actually emerges as a fairly complex character, of the kind of round, psychological characterization that Chaucer would develop with the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, and of which Shakespeare would prove the consummate master.  

The play Herod the Great, from the Wakefield Cycle but maybe even earlier from the York, retells the visit of the Magi to the Christ child and then the slaughter of the innocents – Herod’s massacre of children to thwart his usurpation.  To play Herod flatly, we certainly get the overheated villain – jealous, ruthless, vindictive – a character that begs to be heckled by the audience.  This sort of thing obviously develops into playing Herod for laughs, somewhat minimizing his evil in favor of comic effect.  So we end up with a rather strange character, one who is comic for his blusterous tirades, one who is perhaps tragically cursed by a madness (jealousy) that he is powerless to control.  When hearing the prophecy he admits: “I anger; I wote not what devil me ailes.”  At the conclusion of the play, when the murder of 144,000 children puts his mind to rest, he says, 

Thus shall I tech knaves 

ensampyll to take,

In thare wittes that raves 

sich mastre to make.

Now, I in no way intend us to feel any sympathy for this guy, but these lines add the potential for a dramatic dynamism to the character.

So, what’s it mean that Absalom has played Herod?  The jealousy, yes, obviously.  The “over-the-topness” inherent in the character: yes.  Chaucer gives us a quite lengthy description of Absalom’s foppery and pretensions.  But I never really felt he deserved the humiliating treatment he gets in the tale.  Yes, perhaps he’s a bit twee, but he doesn’t manhandle Alison as Nicholas does, and yet Alison constantly rejects him.  In fact, we can certainly see in him Chaucer’s ribbing of the courtly love manner (in fact, the Miller tells this tale as a crude counterpoint to the Knight’s preceding lofty romance).  He serenades Alisoun beneath her window:

 He syngeth in his voys gentil and smal,

  "Now, deere lady, if thy wille be,

 I praye yow that ye wole rewe on me."

Straight out of the troubadour’s guide to wooing.  But, alas, Alison loves the bad boy:

She loveth so this hende Nicholas

That Absolon may blowe the bukkes horn;

He ne hadde for his labour but a scorn.

And thus she maketh Absolon hire ape,

And al his ernest turneth til a jape.

So, it’s the earnestness that turns her off.  Absalom is too intense, too much, too performative.  In fact, like Herod, he seems possessed of a kind of madness.  He pines for her night and day – he’s obsessive, woe-begone.  He out-Herod’s Herod.  She responds much more readily to Nicholas’ raw physicality.  Nick acts, while Absalom performs, if you see my distinction.

So, the Miller’s Tale is just chock-full of performance tropes, from actual allusions to plays to the fact that the young men are musicians and scholars, that those same young men also perform to deceive, to the very notion that the Miller himself performs the tale he tells.  Right?  He’s telling the story orally, at least within the narrative frame, and very probably, most 14th century people heard the tale as an oral performance, a reading.  In the Miller’s Tale, it’s games all the way down.

Thanks for listening!