Abstract
C. David Benson says that: “Perhaps the most extreme disjunction of teller and tale is the contrast between the rough, murderous Shipman of the General Prologue and the cool, sophisticated art of the Shipman’s Tale.” The author of the present article hopes to be able to show that there is a link between the character of the Shipman and the nature of the tale told by him, and that this link is provided by, among other things, the medieval understanding of cosmopolitanism. The problem of cosmopolitanism was no doubt important for Chaucer, who himself may be thought of as embodying this social phenomenon, being a well-traveled man, like several of the pilgrims he shows in The Canterbury Tales, and being a man who was deeply influenced by at least three foreign cultures and languages, while showing little interest in his native English tradition. Naturally, I do not intend to subscribe to the view that Chaucer was a typical, rootless cosmopolitan. On the other hand, the matter of the so called worldliness, in the context of Chaucer’s work, seems to offer many shades of meaning, ranging from appreciation to condemnation.
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Notes
- 1.
J. Cunningham writes about Chaucer’s Knight the following: “The other great point of interest … is the very extensive journeys he had made: only one other pilgrim is recorded as having covered anything like this sort of distance—the Wife of Bath!” (Cunningham, 1989, p. 45). It is remarkable that he does not take the Shipman’s travelling into account, perhaps because the Shipman hardly ever travels on land, and maybe also because he is such an off-putting character that one can hardly think of him as a pilgrim.
- 2.
In fact, the modern Carthage is an important enough suburb of the big city of Tunis, but in Chaucer’s times it seems to have been no more than a fishing village, not far from Tunis.
- 3.
The Cornish word for “oak” may be indeed “dar,” or “derwen,” like in Welsh, which seems to be related to the Slavic word represented by the Russian “derevo,” or the Polish “drzewo,” and also to the English word “tree,” that is, to words that denote trees in general.
- 4.
For example, the Polish leader of the so called National Democracy, Roman Dmowski (1864–1939), a man with very patriotic, or even nationalistic, views, was renowned for his excellent command of French and English.
- 5.
Cf. G. G. Coulton’s statement: “…Chaucer, with incurable optimism, sees chiefly a Merry England to which the horrors of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, and Tyler’s revolt are but a foil” (Coulton, 1993, p. 11).
- 6.
I mean the line “O gentile Engletere, a toi j’escrits” [O gentle England, it is to you that I write], quoted by G. G. Coulton (p. 5). The line comes from Gower’s French poem Mirour de l’Omme, and it is probably significant that Gower is at his most patriotic when he writes in French.
- 7.
It denotes the sweet briar, or sweetbriar rose, in itself perhaps not a very elegant flower, it often grows wild. Considering that there was no well known saint Eglantine, and the word “eglantine,” etymologically speaking, means “thorny, prickly,” the name seems rather inappropriate for a nun.
- 8.
Bruges is a Flemish city in today’s Belgium, but in Chaucer’s times it was part of the County of Flanders which, in theory, belonged to France, even though in practice it was almost independent. Bruges was also one of the most important centres of the international trade in the late medieval Europe.
- 9.
This gave rise to the hypothesis that The Shipman’s Tale was originally intended for the Wife of Bath, who does represent quasi-feminist views (cf. Cawley, 1976, p. 361 n.).
- 10.
It is also significant that she is afraid of her husband’s anger should he discover that his wife is short of money: “And if myn housbonde eek it myght espye, I nere but lost;” (Cawley, 1976, p. 366 [ll. 184–185]).
- 11.
In fact only in Johan Payne’s English translation, the original Italian uses the euphemistic “cattiva femina”—bad woman (Giavardi, 1972, p. 503).
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Wicher, A. (2017). The Matter of Cosmopolis. Multi-Cultural Motifs in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Work (With a Special Emphasis on The Shipman’s Tale and the Character of the Shipman). In: Mydla, J., Poks, M., Drong, L. (eds) Multiculturalism, Multilingualism and the Self: Literature and Culture Studies. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61049-8_8
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