Teacher area
Scheme of work
The sequence as taught in the department decks: whole-story orientation first, then close reading in order, with context lessons placed where the text raises them. Line ranges are Group E; the decks use class numbering, E minus 1212.
Phase one: orientation and the Prologue
The unit opens with the whole story in translation before any close work, so the Middle English never obscures the plot, and satire and tone are installed as the reading frame from the second lesson.
| Lesson | Focus | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | First encounter | Read the whole Prologue and Tale in translation for the story. Homework: plot summary in 150 words; identify the two obvious targets of the satire. |
| 2 | Tone and satire | Define satire precisely; the three divinely ordained orders and why the merchant class sits outside them; the General Prologue portrait and its mysteries. |
| 3 | The Merchant’s Prologue | Class-based attitudes to love and marriage; the Merchant’s two months of marriage; introduce the part (a) method. Homework essay: the Merchant and marriage in the Prologue, AO1 and AO2 only. |
| 4 | Context: the other pilgrims | The frame narrative and the company; where the Merchant sits among them; teller and tale. |
Phase two: the marriage debate
| Lesson | Focus | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Introducing January, the ‘worthy knight’ | E 1245 onward: sixty years wifeless, the decision to marry, the satire of the senex amans. |
| 6 | The marriage group; the debate opens | Wife of Bath, Clerk and the Envoy behind the Merchant’s first line; the mock encomium begins. |
| 7–8 | The marriage debate, stages two and three | The encomium’s praise of wives; Theophrastus quoted and ‘defied’; the biblical good wives; irony as structure. |
| 9 | January’s reasons (E 1393–1468) | The speech to his friends: heir, soul and appetite; the blossoming tree; heaven on earth. |
| 10 | Placebo (E 1469–1518) | The flatterer’s counsel; courtiership satirised; ‘heigh corage’. |
| 11 | Justinus (E 1519–1576) | Seneca and lived experience; ‘wher wringeth me my sho’; the warning January dismisses. |
Phase three: choosing May, marrying May
| Lesson | Focus | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 12 | The search for a wife (E 1577–1616) | The mirror in the market-place; ‘heigh fantasye’; love is blind set down early. |
| 13 | The choice of bride (E 1617 onward) | May named and priced; beauty catalogued; the one anxiety, heaven on earth twice over. |
| 14 | Justinus again (E 1655 onward) | The second warning, purgatory, and the Wife of Bath cited across the narrative frame. |
| 15 | The marriage (E 1689–1708) | The contract, ‘feffed in his lond’, and the sacrament performed at speed. |
| 16 | Context and consolidation | Merchants, marriage law and the fabliau revisited against the text so far. |
| 17 | The wedding feast (E 1709–1741) | The mythological feast; ‘tendre youthe’ and ‘stouping age’; Damian struck. |
Phase four: the tale's second half
The continuation follows the same pattern, close reading in sequence with a part (a) or part (b) task at each natural break; the section divisions below are the ones the decks use.
| Lesson | Focus | Content |
|---|---|---|
| · | The wedding night (E 1742–1865) | The bedroom portrait; May’s silence; ‘She preyseth nat his pleying worth a bene’. |
| · | Damian’s complaint and the household (E 1866–1981) | Courtly conventions deployed and undercut; the letter; ‘be hir lief or looth’. |
| · | The garden built; blindness strikes (E 1982–2115) | The walled garden and its traditions; Fortune the scorpion; jealousy; Argus. |
| · | The wax key and the gods (E 2116–2319) | The cliket copied; Pluto and Proserpina’s quarrel as the Tale’s internal debate. |
| · | The pear tree and the ending (E 2320–2418) | The climb, the restoration of sight, the suffisant answere, and the chosen belief. |
Standing activities
From the teaching-ideas file: read extracts aloud and build a class list of Middle English survival rules; cast the tale; write the Merchant's modern equivalent; students prepare and present sections; keep running lists of motifs (gardens, sight, wax), voices and tonal shifts; end every phase by planning a part (b) question from the bank against the text so far.