FOOTNOTES:
[1] Pope has departed at the outset from the conception of Chaucer. The purpose of the tale which the wife of Bath tells is to show that women love, above all things, to govern; and her personal history, which she relates in the prologue, is an account of the means by which she reduced her husbands to submission. It was not her own matrimonial woes, which had been slight enough, that she was about to set forth, but the miseries of those whom it is her boast to have worried into obedience to her will. As Pope correctly renders the original, she states that the pains referred to the smart she had inflicted on her husbands; and, far from alleging that "dear-bought wisdom" had taught her that matrimony to a woman was a life of suffering, she thanks God that she has been married five times already, and declares that directly her fifth mate is dead, she will marry a sixth.
When my husband is from the world i-gone,
Some Christian man shall wedde me anon.
[2] "Twelve" in the original.
Beside a welle Jesus, God and man,
Spake in reproof of the Samaritan:
"Thou hast i-had five husbandes," quoth he,
"And that ilk-man, which that now hath thee
Is not thine husband." Thus he said certain;
What that he meant thereby I cannot sayn,
But that I axe why the fithe man
Was not husband to the Samaritan?
The question is addressed to those who deny the validity of second marriages, and she asks them to explain upon their theory why the fifth man was not properly the husband of the Samaritan woman, when there is the authoritative declaration of Scripture that he was.
[4] Pope alone is responsible for the second half of this line, which in its present application has an unbecoming levity. There was a pardoner in the company, a person who got his living by selling indulgences, and by displaying the pretended relics of saints, who says that he was about to marry, but that he shall abandon his intention now that he learns what despotic authority wives exercise over husbands. The wife of Bath, unabashed, informs him that what she has told is nothing in comparison with that which is to follow:
Abide, quoth she, my tale is not begun.
Nay, thou shalt drinke of another tun
Ere that I go, shall savour worse than ale.
And when that I have told thee forth my tale
Of tribulation in marriage,
Of which I am expert in all my age,
That is to say, myself hath been the whip,
Then might thou choose whether thou wilt sip
Of thilke tunne that I shall abroach:
Beware of it ere thou too nigh approach.
These dramatic touches omitted by Pope give life to the piece, and individuality to the characters.
[5] In the original,
I shall say sooth of husbands that I had,
As three of them were good, and two were bad.
She meant that the two were rebellious in comparison with the three who were her slaves; for in speaking of the entire five, at the commencement of the prologue, she added,
And all were worthy men in their degree.
Pope has fallen into an inconsistency. He states that the three old husbands were those who "were just tolerable." Yet when he comes to describe the youngest of the two, whom he here calls "bad," he makes the wife of Bath exclaim,
Now for my fifth loved lord, the last and best,
In Chaucer she distinctly denies that he was the best, but says she loved him best, and proceeds to explain the reason, which is that women always value those most who treat them with harshness or indifference.
[6] This trait in the wife of Bath's character is brought out more distinctly by Chaucer:
Me needeth not no longer doon diligence
To win their love, or do them reverence.
They loved me so well, high God above!
That I tolde no deynte of their love.
A wise woman will busy her ever in one
To gete her love, there she hath none.
But synnes I had them wholly in my hand
And synnes they had me given all their land,
What should I take keep them for to please
But it were for my profit or mine ease?
"I tolde no deynte of their love," means I set no store by it; "ever in one" is always; and "take keep" is take care.
[7] The wife of Bath's first lesson in the art of domestic government is a panegyric upon the advantages of sturdy lying, in which Pope has not gone beyond the original:
Ye wise wives that can understand
Thus should ye speak, and bear them wrong in hand;
For half so boldely can there no man
Swere and lie as a woman can.
"To bear them wrong in hand" is to affirm wrongfully or falsely. The phrase "to bear in hand" for "to asseverate," was still frequently used in the reign of Charles II.
[8] The wife of Bath accuses her old husbands to their faces of having delivered this kind of railing lecture to her when they had come home at night "as drunk as mice." The drunkenness and the railing are alike inventions of her own, but she appeals to her niece, and Jenkin, the apprentice, to bear witness to the truth of her assertions. The version of Pope is not so vivid, so lively, or so close to nature as the original, and he has nearly passed over one of the most prominent characteristics of the speech. When the wife of Bath taunts her husband with the reproaches she pretended he had heaped upon her, she intersperses her repetition of his objurgations with abusive and disdainful names by way of comment upon his monstrous sentiments. Old caynard or villain, Sir old lecher, thou very knave, lorel or worthless fellow, old dotard schrewe or sinner, old barrel full of lies, Sir old fool, are some of the appellations by which she marks her opinion of the doctrines she fathers upon him. After reciting his alleged complaint, that women concealed their vices till they were married, she adds that the maxim is worthy of "a schrewe," or scoundrel. When she imputes to him the declaration that no man would wed who was wise, or who desired to go to heaven, she follows it up with the wish that thunder and lightning would break his wicked neck. When he is charged with having said that there were three things that troubled earth, and that a wife was one of them, she hopes that the life of such a villain will be cut short. When she taxes him with quoting the proverb that a house not water-tight, a smoky chimney, and a scolding wife drove men from home, she retorts upon him that he is himself a scold, and intimates that his years are an aggravation of the vice. This is not only natural as the sort of scurrilous language which the wife of Bath would have used if the drunken invectives had been real, but was part of her plan for bringing her husbands into subjection. Her indignant recriminations were intended to browbeat them into meekness.
[9] She enlarges in the original upon this device, which was one of her capital resources. She quotes the proverb, that he first grinds who comes first to the mill, and upon this principle, when she had done wrong, she began by attacking her husband;
Or elles I had often time been spilt.
The poor man thus suddenly assailed stood upon the defensive, endeavoured to vindicate his innocence, and was heartily glad to hold his tongue on condition of receiving forgiveness for faults he had never committed.
[10] By pretending that she went out to watch her husbands she got the opportunity for indulging in freaks and jollity with her youthful friends.
Under that colour had I many a mirth.
For all such wit is given us of birth;
Deceipt, weeping, spinning, God hath give
To women kindely while they may live.
And thus of one thing I avaunte me,
At th' end I had the bet in each degree,
By sleight or force, or of some maner thing,
As by continual murmur or chiding.
"Kindely" is by nature.
[11] In the original,
With empty hand men may no hawkes lure.
When the falconer had let fly his hawks, and wanted them to return, he was commonly obliged to entice them by some bait. The tassel, or tercel, was the male of the peregrine falcon, and was noted for its docility and gentleness. It would seem as if this species would obey the summons of the trainer without any other inducement, for when Juliet calls after Romeo, and he does not instantly reappear, she says,
O for a falconer's voice
To lure this tassel-gentle back again.
[12] In Chaucer she states that her husbands would grant all her demands to soothe her into good humour:
That made me that ever I would them chide.
For though the pope had seten them beside,
I nold not spare them at their owne board,
For, by my troth, I quit them word for word.
As help me very God omnipotent,
Though I right now should make my testament,
I owe them nought a word, that it nis quit;
I brought it so aboute by my wit,
That they must give it up, as for the best,
Or elles had we never been in rest.
For though he looked as a grim lion,
Yet should he fail of his conclusion.
Pope has omitted the latter half of the lines and thus obliterated one of those nicer traits of nature with which the original abounds. Men put on the grimness of the lion, and think to prevail by strength, but women conquer by pertinacity. The majority of men grow weary of perpetual conflict, and purchase peace by concession; but women of the stamp of the wife of Bath wilt wrangle for ever, and prefer endless discord to the subjugation of self-will. Dryden, adding to Virgil's thought, has expressed the idea, Æn. v. 1024:
Ev'n Jove is thwarted by his haughty wife,
Still vanquished yet she still renews the strife.
[13] Chaucer represents her as still youthful:
And I was young, and full of ragerie,
Stubborn and strong and jolly as a pye.
The flour is gone, there nis no more to tell,
The bran as I best can, now must I sell.
[15] In the original she does not say that she set his marrow frying, but that she fried him in his own grease, by stirring up in him the tormenting jealousy which his faithlessness had first engendered in herself.
I made him of the same wood a cross.
Not of my body in no foul manere;
But certainly I made folk such cheer,
That in his owne grease I made him fry
For anger and for very jealousy.
By God, in earth I was his purgatory,
For which I hope his soule be in glory.
For God it wot, he sat full still and sung,
When that his shoe full bitterly him wrung.
There was no wight save God and he that wist
In many wyse how sore I him twist.
This is a life-like portrait of a man tortured by inward pangs, and affecting an air of indifference while he did not dare to complain, from the consciousness that his greater offence would expose him to a crushing retort.
[16] In the character which Chaucer gives of the wife of Bath he says,
And thrice had she been at Jerusalem;
She hadde passed many a strange stream;
At Rome she hadde been, and at Boulogne,
In Galice at Saint Jame, and at Cologne.
The reputed tomb of Saint James was at Compostella, in Galicia, and was a favourite resort of pilgrims. The wife of Bath may be supposed to have joined these expeditions quite as much from a love of roving and novelty as from superstitious motives.
[17] Chaucer says he was buried under the rood-beam, or as it is usually called the rood-loft, which was placed on the top of the screen that separated the chancel from the nave. The name was derived from the rood or cross that stood in the centre with the effigy of our crucified Lord, and having on one side an image of the Virgin, and on the other of the apostle John. Pope buries the deceased husband in the churchyard, and the root is a wooden cross which has been erected upon his grave.
[18] Artemisia, wife of Mausolus, king of Caria. On the death of her husband, 352 B.C., she erected a monument to him at Halicarnassus, which, from the beauty of its architecture and sculpture, was considered one of the seven wonders of the world. The Romans, says Pausanias, called all their most magnificent tombs mausolea after this monument to Mausolua, and hence our modern term mausoleum. There is no mention of the tomb of Mausolus in Chaucer.
I trow I loved him beste for that he
Was of his love daungerous to me.
We women have, if that I shall not lie,
In this matter a queynte fantasy.
Wayte, what thing we may not lightly have,
Thereafter will we soonest cry and crave.
Forbid us thing, and that desire we;
Press on us fast, and thenne will we flee.
With danger outen alle we our ware;
Great press at market maketh dear chaffare.
"Daungerous" in the second line means sparing, and in the last line but one, "with danger" signifies with a scarcity. Then, says the wife of Bath, we must produce all our own wares to give in exchange. At the date of her fifth marriage she was forty and the bridegroom was only twenty. Everything is now reversed. Her first husbands had endowed her with all their property that they might buy a young wife in their old age. She, in turn, that she may procure a young husband, gives him
all the land and fee
That ever was me give therebefore;
But afterward repented me full sore.
Her aged mates had worshipped her, and she repaid them with disdain. In her mature years she is infatuated by a youth, and he, who has no relish for the homage of a matron of forty, slights her just as she had done her early husbands under similar circumstances.
[20] It would seem from Chaucer that the youth was a native of Bath, and had returned there when he had completed his education at Oxford:
He some time was a clerk of Oxenford,
And had left school, and went at home to board,
With my gossib, duelling in our town:
God have her soul, her name was Alisoun.
"My gossib" is my godmother, and the wife of Bath, whose christian name was also Alisoun, had been named after her. Pope, by turning "my gossip" into "a gossip," has done away with the special relationship, and employed the word in its modern sense of a lover of tittle-tattle.
[21] In Chaucer she adds a more powerful motive:
what wist I where my grace
Was shapen for to be, or in what place?
In other words, as she explains shortly afterwards, she was in search of a lover who might succeed the fourth husband whenever he died.
[22] "To perform a station," says Richelet, in his French Dictionary, "consists in visiting with devotion one or several churches a certain number of days and times, and praying there in order to propitiate the wrath of God, and obtain some favour from his mercy." The wife of Bath in the original says, that she attended vigils, processions, preachings, miracle-plays, and marriages, besides making pilgrimages, but "stations" are not included in her list. The Roman Catholicism of Pope had rendered the word familiar to him.
[23] The expression "I can't tell how" implies that the intimacy on the part of the wife of Bath was accidental, whereas it appears from Pope's context, and still more from the original, that it was a deliberate design:
Now will I telle forth what happed me.
I say that in the fieldes walked we
Till truely we had such dalliance
This clerk and I, that of my purveyance
I spake to him, and saide how that he
If I were widdow, shoulde wedde me.
For certainly I say for no bobaunce,
Yet was I never withouten purveyance
Of mariage, ne or no thinges eke;
I hold a mouse's heart not worth a leek,
That hath but oon hole to sterte to,
And if that faile then is all i-do.
The acknowledgment that while married to one man she is always engaged to a second, seems to the wife of Bath to have nothing discreditable in it, and she only fears lest she should expose herself to the charge of vanity in asserting that she can command a succession of admirers.
[24] No Englishwoman would talk of laying her husband in his urn, not to mention that the phrase is a mixture of incongruous ideas, the "laid" being applicable to burial, and the "urn" to burning. When the wife of Bath speaks of her departed husband she says,
He is now in his grave and in his chest.
[25] This couplet is an exaggeration of the original:
I followed ay my dames lore,
As well of that as of other thinges more.
[26] Tearing garments, and throwing dust upon the head was a custom with some ancient nations, but was not an English habit, and there is no allusion to it in the text of Chaucer:
When that my fourthe husband was on bier,
I wept algate, and made a sorry cheer,
As wives musten for it is usage;
And with my kerchief covered my visage;
But, for that I was purveyed of a mate,
I wept but small, and that I undertake.
The hard-hearted selfishness which does not bestow a thought upon the dead, being solely intent upon enjoying existence with the living, comes out in a yet more odious light when she narrates her feelings at the funeral. Her mind is entirely taken up with the young clerk, and mainly with admiration of his figure:
When that I saw him go
After the bier, methought he had a pair
Of legges and of feet so clean and fair
That all my heart I gave unto his hold.
[27] She does not in the original profess "to repent it still," and for the excellent reason that, after a period of rebellion on the part of the clerk, he had become a puppet in her hands, and had rendered up both himself and his chattels to her undisputed management.
[28] The wife of Bath says she insisted upon going from house to house, according to her former custom, and the clerk set his face against the practice. His instances from Roman story were directed against this special failing, and were not general declamations on the virtue of Roman matrons and Gracchus' mother. The clerk told the gossiping, intriguing dame that Simplicius Gallus left his wife for ever, merely because he caught her looking out of the door with her head uncovered. He told her of another Roman that in the same manner deserted his wife because she one day went to see a game without his knowledge. His quotation from Holy Writ is not "some grave sentence," but the particular sentence of Ecclesiasticus which says, "Give the water no passage; neither a wicked woman liberty to gad abroad." When the context has been generalised the lines which follow have not the accumulative sting of the original, where they are an additional example of the evil consequences of suffering women to rove about. Pope has further weakened their force by supposing them to have no higher authority than the opinion of the clerk. In Chaucer they are given as a proverb, and the husband urges them with triumph because they convey the general experience of mankind. The language is stronger than in Pope. Instead of mildly pronouncing that the man who suffers his wife to visit "halwes" or the shrines of saints "deserves a fool's cap," the proverb declares that he "is worthy to be hanged on the galwes."
[29] The clerk in the original reads with greater assiduity than "oft at evening."
He had a book that gladly night and day,
For his desport he woulde read alway.
After describing the contents of the book the wife of Bath adds,
And alle these were bound in one volume;
And every night and day was his custume,
When he had leisure and vacatioun
From other worldes occupation,
To reden in this book of wicked wives.
This portion of the narrative in Chaucer is exceedingly pleasant and natural. The wife says that she paid no regard to the clerk's Roman precedents, his quotations from Scripture, his old saws and proverbs.
Ne I would not of him corrected be;
I hate him that my vices telleth me.
The contempt with which she treated his exhortations drove him utterly mad, and it was then that he betook himself to reading all the literature he could find that bore upon the vices and frailties of women. The evidence of their general perversity with which his studies supplied him consoled him for the ungovernable disposition of his own wife, and he used "to laugh away full fast" over the record of their obstinacy and evil doings. He had the sweeter satisfaction of revenge. His mirth galled his imperious, froward wife, and when he read aloud the endless detail of female iniquities, backed up by the authority of great names, she could restrain her rage no longer, and the storm burst forth under which the wretched clerk succumbed.
[30] Pope has omitted a stroke of humour; for in the original, she naturally mistakes the rank and age of St. Jerome.
And eke there was a clerk sometime in Rome
A cardinal, that highten St. Jerome.—Warton.
[31] This passage acquaints us with the writers who were popular in the days of Chaucer.—Warton.
Warton takes no account of the fact that Chaucer was only enumerating the authors which furnished arguments against women. Valerius is a tract by Walter Mapes, which bears the title "Epistola Valerii ad Rufinum." St. Jerome's denunciations of matrimony are in his treatise "Contra Jovinianum." Tertullian wrote strongly against second marriages; and severe animadversions upon female vices or weaknesses have a large place in his works. "Who is meant by Chrysippus," says Tyrwhitt, "I cannot guess." Ovid's Art of Love, and the Letters of Eloisa and Abelard are known by name to all the world.
[32] This line is not in Chaucer.
[33] If Pope intended to follow the original, "good" means "good legends."
[34] The wife of Bath, having laid down the maxim that it is impossible for any clerk to speak well of women, except it be of the saints, indignantly inquires,
Who painted the lion, tell me, who?
and with an oath she adds,
If women hadde written stories,
As clerkes have within their oratories,
They would have writ of men more wickedness,
Than all the mark of Adam may redress.
"Than all the mark" is than all that bear the mark or image of Adam. Pope's version, in which the wife asks the question and tamely answers it, is flat in comparison with the scornful repetition of the emphatic "who?" Yet he has employed this reduplication of a predominant word at ver. 397, where it has much less effect. Judiciously used, there is force and beauty in the turn, as in the couplet from Addison's translation of Ovid:
Her sisters often, as 'tis said, would cry
Fie, Salmacis, what always idle, fie:
[35] Pope, misapplying the original, has adopted an image which is astronomically false. Chaucer spoke the language of astrology, and said that each of these planets fell in the exaltation of the other; for a planet was in its exaltation when it was in the sign of the zodiac, where it was supposed to exercise its greatest influence, and fell, or was in its dejection, in the sign where it exercised the least. Mercury, the god of science, was in his exaltation in Virgo, where Venus, the goddess of love, had no sway. Venus was in her exaltation in Pisces, and there Mercury was in his dejection. A man could not be under the government of incompatible planetary powers, and since scholars served Mercury,
Therefore no woman is of clerkes praised.
[36] This line was followed by a poor couplet, which Pope afterwards omitted:
How Sampson's heart false Delilah did move,
His strength, his sight, his life were lost for love.
Then how Aleides died whom Dejanire, &c.
[37] Eryphile, bribed by a necklace, prevailed upon her husband Amphiaraus to join the expedition against Thebes, although he assured her it would be fatal to him. Clytemnestra lived in adultery during the absence of her husband, Agamemnon, at the siege of Troy, and, on his return, she and her paramour entrapped and murdered him.
[38] Some writers have pretended that Lucilia, the wife of Lucretius, the poet, gave him a love potion which drove him mad.
[39] Chaucer says nothing of the blushes of the wife of Bath, which were not at all in her character.
[40] Who, exclaims the wife of Bath, could imagine
The woe that in mine hearte was and pine?
And when I saw he nolde never fine
To reden on this cursed book all night,
All suddenly three leaves have I plight
Out of this booke that he had, and eke
I with my fist so took him on the cheek,
That in our fire he fell backward adown.
And he upstert as doth a wood leoun,
And with his fist he smote me on the head
That in the floor I lay as I were dead.
And when he saw so stille that I lay
He was aghast, and would have fled away.
Till atte last out of my swoon I braide;
O hastow slain me, false thief I said,
And for my land thus hastow murdered me?
Ere I be dead, yet will I kisse thee.
"Pine" is pain; "fine" is cease; "plight" is plucked; "wood" is mad; and "braide" is awoke. Pope has dropped the natural circumstance of the clerk's terror when he fancies he has killed his wife. This alarm brings out more strongly the hypocrisy of his virulent dame in pretending that the blow he gave her on the head, after she had torn the leaves out of his book and knocked him backwards into the fire, was with the deliberate design of murdering her to get possession of her property.
[41] Pope's translation is mawkish, and his "adieu, my dear, adieu!" destroys the point of the story. The wife of Bath seconds the blow with reproaches instead of with terms of endearment, nor does she consent to be pacified until the clerk surrenders at discretion. Had she relaxed before her conquest was complete, she would have lost the opportunity of establishing her dominion. After the line, "Ere I be dead, yet will I kisse thee," Chaucer thus continues:
And near he came, and kneeleth fairadown,
And saide, Deare sister Alisoun,
As help me God, I shall thee never smite;
That I have done it is thyself to wite;
Forgive it me, and that I thee beseke;
And yet oftsoon I hit him on the cheek,
And saide, Thief thus muchel I me wreke
Now will I die, I may no longer speak.
But atte last, with muchel care and woe
We fell accorded by ourselven two;
He gave me all the bridle in mine hand
To have the governance of house and land,
And of his tongue, and of his hand also,
And made him burn his book anon right tho.
"To wite" is to blame; "I me wreke" is "I revenge myself;" and "tho" is then. As soon as the poor clerk consented to have no will of his own, and to be governed like a school-boy by his master, the dame declares,
God help me so, I was to him as kind
As any wife from Denmark unto Inde.
It must have been holiday time with him, notwithstanding, when the wife of Bath set out on one of her pilgrimages, and left him in peace at home.