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: a hypertext edition of the poem with the Middle English glossed where you need it, the contexts that made it, and the critics who have quarrelled over it since.
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Three ways in
A hypertext edition
Skeat’s public-domain text with hover glosses for the Middle English and margin notes that flag what a first reading should catch.
ContextsThe world behind the Tale
Chaucer’s 1390s, the marriage group, fabliau and romance, and the antifeminist tradition the Merchant leans on.
CriticsThe debate
How readers have argued about the Merchant and his tale, from the earliest responses to recent readings, linked at their sources.
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.