Southwark, the suburb across London Bridge (later home to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), was a rowdy place of brothels, bearbaiting, and bars; there was plenty of competition for travelers on their way to Canterbury, and by proposing his storytelling contest to the pilgrims, the Host is obviously thinking about how he can secure the custom of this group, as a group, after the conclusion of their pilgrimage. By installing himself as leader and judge, whose word is law, Harry is also transforming a “felawshipe” into a de facto monarchy (hence comparable, however obliquely, to Chaucer’s England under its embattled ruler, Richard II).

That the Host, though only an urban bourgeois, will prove a monarch who embraces both narrative and social decorum becomes clear when, after the conclusion of the first tale (told by the Knight, the highest-ranking secular pilgrim), he asks the Monk,* an analogously respectable Churchman, to tell the next story, “sumwhat, to quyte with the Knightes tale” (p. 166)—that is, a tale as elevated in style and subject as its predecessor (albeit presumably on a religious subject). (“Quyte” can mean to pay back, redeem, achieve balance, or get even, depending on the context.) But at this point the social and rhetorical journey of The Canterbury Tales turns sharply in new directions. Robin, the drunken Miller, insists on speaking next and, in response to the Host’s articulation of his program for the tale-telling contest: “Abyd, Robin, my leve brother, / Som bettre man shal telle us first another” (p. 166), calls the latter’s bluff by asserting that he will speak now or leave the company. Harry, in a pinch more businessman than king, gives in rather than lose a customer, and the result torpedoes his proposed top-down telling order; the Miller, who has already announced, “I can a noble tale for the nones, / With which I wol now quyte the Knightes tale” (p. 166), brings class-based anger into the pilgrimage, expressed via the discursive weapon of corrosive irony: His sarcastic descriptor, “noble tale,” echoes, and in echoing mocks, the earlier reported judgment of the pilgrims (but especially of the “gentils everichoon,” those far above the Miller in status) that the Knight has told “a noble storie, / And worthy for to drawen to memorie” (p. 166). His rejoinder will be anything but noble in content, and with it he will “quyte” the Knight’s epic romance of classical antiquity, not by matching it, but by exposing to ridicule its pretensions and class biases.

The Miller announces that he will tell a “legende and a lyf” of how a clerk cuckolded a carpenter, a raunchy fabliau with blasphemous echoes of the Gospel narrative of Joseph and Mary, “a Carpenter, and... his wyf” (p. 166). But another pilgrim, the Reeve (an estate manager who is also a carpenter by craft) becomes incensed at what he perceives to be an insult to women and to himself. He confronts the Miller, who rebuffs the attack with more vicious humor, this time equating the divine providence (“goddes privetee”) with the private parts of a wife and arguing facetiously that a husband should not attempt to know too much about either, as long as he has access to “goddes foyson” (“God’s bounty”) on both fronts.

By this point it is clear that the tale-telling competition proposed and refereed by Harry Bailly has metamorphosed into a contest of a very different, much less sociable nature. Language has begun to demonstrate its capacity to annoy and destroy as well as to create and delight, and its availability as an instrument of both inter-class warfare (Miller versus Knight, in a dim and discreet echo of the Great Rising of 1381) and intra-class rivalry (the respective positions of Millers and Reeves within the manorial economy would tend to make them frequent opponents, though both of humble status). As important, tale-telling will receive its impetus not only, or even primarily, from the choices of the pilgrimage’s “monarch,” but also from the desire or need of one pilgrim to reply to inaccuracies or insults perceived in another’s story; tale follows tale not as a manifestation of social decorum but as an ongoing process of reception, interpretation, judgment, and reciprocation.

I have thus far omitted from this analysis of Fragment I of The Canterbury Tales the role of the narrator, which is crucial to the process I have outlined because it is through the narrator’s act of supposedly memorial reconstruction that we know what we do about the status, character, and appearance of his fellow pilgrims: “Whiche they weren, and of what degree; / And eke in what array that they were inne” (p. 4). The series of “portraits” of the pilgrims are perhaps the single most famous part of the poem, and it is important to state at once that they are not portraits drawn from life—not, that is, descriptions of Chaucer’s contemporaries as he carefully observed them in their respective professional, vocational, or artisanal capacities. Instead the portraits enact something more complex: The narrator’s “erotics of memory”—that is, his recollection of particular things he especially liked or disliked about the pilgrims—fitted into an overall taxonomy of “estates” (social statuses) that he (and behind him Chaucer the poet) gleaned from the popular literary form called “estates satire,” which purported to reveal and excoriate the characteristic vices (or, less often, praise the ideal virtues) of the different estates. The problem with the narrator’s descriptions is that they sometimes reveal the erotics of memory and the classifications of estates satire pulling in opposite directions (as, for example, with the Monk,* Prioress, and Friar, all of whom the narrator likes while giving us abundant, if stereotypical, reasons why he, and we, should not). To complicate matters further, characters such as the Monk,* Friar, Pardoner, and Wife of Bath show signs of being themselves thoroughly familiar with the accusations directed at their respective cohorts by estates satire, and of gleefully mouthing or enacting them in a spirit of holiday fun, or to outrage the simple souls who take seriously such categorizations. One effect of the portraits in “The General Prologue” is to impose on us a double task of interpretation: On the one hand we’re invited to judge the pilgrims, and on the other to judge the narrator’s representation of them, to seek out inconsistencies and obvious instances where attraction (for example, to the Prioress’ dainty mouth) or repulsion (such as to the Miller’s big mouth and the wart on the tip of his nose) support or subvert estates satire commonplaces.

So much for the frame into which Chaucer put the opening tales of his collection. The tales themselves form a brilliant sequence featuring radically different narrative styles and social points of view, but also thematic interconnections and a progressive revelation of language’s efficacy as an instrument of mastery in a competitive world. “The Knight’s Tale,” based on Boccaccio’s early epic romance Il Teseida, is a serious meditation on the uses and limits of unfettered political power when it is threatened by external enemies, by the irrationality of erotic passion, by the unpredictable, irresistible actions of Fortune, and above all by the provocations to intemperate, tyrannical behavior that the just ruler must resist in exercising his authority. Theseus, duke of Athens and mighty conqueror, is faced with the dilemma of how to deal with Palamon and Arcita, two Theban princes who fall into his hands after he has defeated Creon, ruler of Thebes, and destroyed his city. The tale chronicles the continual policy adjustments he must make in attempting to solve this problem (even as the Host will have to make analogous adjustments to keep the Miller in the pilgrimage), thanks to his prisoners’ being enamored with his ward, Emily, and their resultant dispute over her, which leads to escapes, disguises, potentially deadly duels, and finally, under the Duke’s supervision, a tournament battle between the two lovers, each with one hundred followers, in an arena built for the occasion by Theseus. (The circumstances surrounding this battle provide the Knight an occasion to offer a distinctly nonidealized depiction of chivalry—that is, professional combat-in action.) As the tale’s narrative unfolds, it contrasts the struggle between mortal anger and prudential restraint that the Duke must wage within himself with the extravagant, unrestrained rhetoric and deeds of Palamon and Arcita, whose desires and flights of eloquence about their unjust fate as Theseus’ prisoners serve to emphasize both the imprudence and the powerlessness of their situation.

When the gods (representing both human passions and the universal forces that radically restrict humanity’s control over its fate) thwart Theseus’ plan by destroying Arcita, the tournament victor, the Duke must finally rely on language’s persuasive power to achieve politically satisfactory closure. His final speech to the grieving Palamon and Emily (adapted by Chaucer from Boethius’ influential, late-classical treatise The Consolation of Philosophy), after justifying Arcita’s untimely death as the working of Divine Providence, urges the young couple to marry, thus making “of sorwes two / O parfyt joye” (p. 162)—and, in the process, insuring that the Duke will “have fully of Thebans obeisaunce” (p. 156).

The Miller’s parody of “The Knight’s Tale” reconceives the rivalry of Palamon and Arcita for Emily’s hand as a competition—between Nicholas, a clever, fast-talking, and entirely self-interested university student, and Absolon, a dandified parish cleric with a delusory attachment to the ridiculous rituals of romantic love—for the body of Alison, beautiful and earthy young wife of John, who is Theseus reimagined as a foolish old carpenter with whom Nicholas boards in Oxford.