Seven speakers and a teller

The Merchant

The General Prologue gives him a forked beard, motley, a Flemish beaver hat and a voice that sounds ‘alwey’ of profit; it also gives him a secret, ‘Ther wiste no wight that he was in dette’, and withholds his name. He manages appearances for a living. In his own Prologue the management fails: two months married, he tells strangers his wife would outmatch the fiend, sets her against ‘Grisildis grete pacience’, calls marriage ‘the snare’ (1227), and then promises, in the Tale's least kept promise, to say no more of his own sorrow.

Everything in the Tale passes through him. The ironic praise of marriage is his; the digressions that delay the plot are his; the courtly style he cannot sustain is his reach for a class he resents. The class rule holds every essay steady: January's story, told by the Merchant, written by Chaucer. When a line drips with contempt, ask which of the three is holding the pen, and remember the revisionist case on the Critics page that even his portrait may be more neutral than it reads.

January

A wealthy knight of Pavia, sixty years old, a lifetime ‘wyflees’ and lecherous, who decides that marriage will give him an heir, a cleansed soul and lawful appetite in one purchase. His specification is exact: a bride under twenty, mouldable ‘as men may warm wex with handes plye’ (1430), taken like ‘tendre veel’ over old beef (1420). He silences good advice, ‘Straw for thy Senek’ (1567), chooses ‘of his owene auctoritee’ (1597), and worries only that marriage will be ‘myn hevene in erthe here’ (1647), bliss enough to forfeit the other heaven.

The Tale punishes the fantasy through the body: the wedding-night portrait of bristles ‘sharp as brere’ (1825) and coltish morning song, the sudden blindness, the jealousy that keeps a hand on his wife always. Yet the garden scene complicates the satire. His speech to May mixes protested love with a bribe of deeds and inheritance, and contains his one honest sight of himself, ‘the unlykly elde of me’ (2180). Whether the ending leaves him contemptible, pitiable or both, and whether his final belief in May is deception or a chosen peace, is one of the text's richest debates.

May

Introduced late, named later, ‘of smal degree’ (1625), and given almost no interior life on the page: the poem's most important decision about May is how little it lets us hear her. At her own wedding she is looked at, her beauty like an enchantment (1743); in the marriage bed she is ‘as stille as stoon’ (1818); her verdict on the wedding night arrives only through the narrator, ‘She preyseth nat his pleying worth a bene’ (1854). Her obedience is total in form, ‘she obeyeth, be hir lief or looth’ (1961), and empty in substance.

Her agency, when it comes, is all craft: the letter read and destroyed in the privy, the wax impression of the key (2117), the tears and the oath in the garden, ‘I am a gentil womman and no wenche’ (2202), sworn while Damian waits in the branches. Armed with Proserpina's ‘suffisant answere’ (2266), she takes the Tale's last victory and keeps it. Victim, agent, or the fabliau's machinery in a courtly dress: the case for each is on the Critics page, and the exam question, how far it is possible to sympathise with her, has no safe answer.

Damian

The squire who ‘carf biforn the knight ful many a day’ (1773), struck at the wedding feast by Venus's brand and laid low with textbook courtly lovesickness: the swooning, the secret complaint ‘in manere of a compleynt or a lay’, the silk purse at his heart. The narrator mourns him, ‘O sely Damian, allas!’ (1869), and damns him in the same breath: the ‘famulier foo’, the ‘naddre in bosom sly untrewe’ (1786), the serpent already inside the household and, soon, the garden.

What makes him useful in an essay is how fast the courtliness peels off. Accepted, he is instantly cured; he preens, crouches, counterfeits the key ‘prively’ (2121), and his part in the tree needs only one line, ‘Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng’ (2353). No devotion survives contact with opportunity. January praises him as wise, discreet and secret, and every word is true in exactly the wrong sense.

Placebo and Justinus

The debate about the marriage is staged between two brothers whose names are their arguments. Placebo, ‘I shall please’, is the courtier's vice made flesh: he boasts that he has never contradicted a lord, compares January to Solomon, and blesses the ‘heigh corage’ (1513) of an old man taking a young wife. Justinus, the just man, answers with Seneca, with a checklist of wifely vices, and with the debate's only lived evidence, his own marriage: ‘I wot best wher wringeth me my sho’ (1553). His warning is precise, a young wife will outlast an old man's capacity to please her, and his second speech turns sardonic: she may be ‘your purgatorie’ (1670). He even cites the Wife of Bath (1685), a joke across the narrative layers that essays should notice. January hears the flatterer, dismisses the friend, and the plot is the consequence.

Pluto and Proserpina

The fairy king and queen who keep the garden are the plot's second mismatched marriage: an old god who ‘ravisshed’ a young bride, quarrelling on the grass about the sexes. Pluto argues from Solomon that no woman is true and vows to restore January's sight at the moment of betrayal; Proserpina strips the authority bare, Solomon ‘a lechour and an ydolastre’ (2298), and vows May her ‘suffisant answere’. Both keep their oaths, which is why the ending happens at all: sight and speech collide at the pear tree, and speech wins.

For an essay, the gods do three jobs: they replay the January and May marriage at a mythic octave; they dramatise the antifeminist debate inside the Tale so that the poem argues with itself; and their pagan presence in a nominally Christian story measures how far the Merchant's materials have slipped his control.