Chaucer · Eduqas A Level
The Merchant’s Prologue and Tale
A knight of sixty marries a girl of twenty and builds a walled garden for what he has bought; a squire, a god, a goddess and a pear tree see to the rest. Chaucer’s bitterest comedy is the Eduqas pre-1900 poetry set text, and this site is built for studying it: the complete poem glossed where you need it, its themes and characters argued through, the contexts that made it, the critics who have quarrelled over it, and the exam it all points at.
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Six ways in
A hypertext edition
The complete set section in Skeat’s public-domain text, with hover glosses for the Middle English and margin notes that flag what a first reading should catch.
ThemesWhat the Tale argues about
Marriage, youth and age, sight and blindness, deception and the garden, each put as a claim with the lines that carry it.
CharactersSeven speakers and a teller
The Merchant, January, May, Damian, the two counsellors and the quarrelling gods, read as positions in the poem’s argument.
ContextsThe world behind the Tale
Chaucer’s 1390s, the marriage group, fabliau and romance, the antifeminist tradition, and the gardens behind January’s garden.
CriticsThe debate
Named critics from Kittredge to the ecocritics, organised as arguments to join rather than authorities to quote.
The examWriting under time
The two-part question, the class method for extracts and essays, and a bank of practice questions to plan against.
Reading Middle English
Read it aloud, or aloud in your head, and trust your ear before your eye: most lines give up their sense at the second hearing. The glosses on the text page carry you over the words that have moved or vanished since the 1390s. What the glosses cannot do is notice the irony for you, and in this tale the irony is the argument.
If you would rather meet the Canterbury Tales as stories first, the BBC animated adaptations shared for the class are half an hour well spent before the Middle English.