The Pardoner in Canterbury: Class, Gender, and Urban Space in the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn

Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400 without bringing his pilgrims to the goal of their pilgrimage, the city of Canterbury with its cathedral's relics of St. Thomas a Becket. Within a few decades, however, several anonymous fifteenth-century poets had contributed their own additions to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and one of them provided a vivid comic description of the pilgrims' sightseeing activities after their arrival in Canterbury, most memorably of the Pardoner's misadventures with a tapster, or barmaid, named Kit. This story precedes the inserted, non-Chaucerian Tale of Beryn in one fifteenth-century manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (the Northumberland manuscript), and is known both as the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn and as The Canterbury Interlude. The Northumberland manuscript dates to the second half of the fifteenth century. The Prologue to the Tale of Beryn, however, has been plausibly associated with the then most recent Canterbury jubilee, and has therefore been dated a half-century or so earlier than the manuscript, to approximately the year of that celebration, that is, to the 1420s (Brown 1991, 152-53; Bowers 1992, 57).Criticism of the Prologue to theTale of Beryn has focused almost exclusively on how "Chaucerian" it is or is not. Some critics, for example, have suggested that, because it is concerned with the Pardoner's sexual pursuit of Kit the tapster, the Prologue can serve as evidence that Chaucer's early readers (and even Chaucer himself) understood the Pardoner as physiologically normal and straightforwardly "heterosexual" (Benson 1982; Green 1982; Patterson 2001, 659 n.84) rather than as the sexually ambiguous and troubling figure other critics have found in him (McAlpine 1980; Sturges 2000, 152-68; Burger 1992; Dinshaw 1989, 156-84; Dinshaw 1999, 100-42). John Bowers, on the other hand, has suggested that one particularly Chaucerian aspect of the Prologue is precisely that it requires a reading of its Pardoner as an anatomical or spiritual eunuch, as Chaucer's own Pardoner is for such earlier critics as Curry and Miller (Bowers 1985, 30; Curry 1960; Miller 1955). Even critics who are not focused on defining the Chaucerian Pardoner's genital status or erotic preferences also tend to interpret (and to judge) the Prologue on the basis of its fidelity to Chaucer: E. J. Bashe, Karen A. Winstead and Frederick B. Jonassen, for instance, find the Prologue distinctively Chaucerian, while Stephen Kohl and Jean E. Jost find it just as distinctively un-Chaucerian (Bashe 1933; Winstead 1988; Jonassen 1991 and 1992; Kohl 1983;Jost 1994).There has, however, been virtually no criticism considering the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn as a literary work in its own right, one that responds to the specific concerns of its own period and culture. This critical failure is certainly understandable: the Prologue is a deliberate addition to The Canterbury Tales, and its relation to Chaucer cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, the Prologue should be considered not only as a response to Chaucer, but also within its own late medieval, urban social context. This is to say that the Prologue is in need of a reading that asks not only how faithful its author is to Chaucer's intentions, but also how its author uses Chaucer to serve his own contemporary ends. From this perspective, the question is not so much how Chaucerian the Prologue is, but how adaptable Chaucer is to the needs of a later poet concerned with his own cultural circumstances. Specifically, I would contend that the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn reorients The Canterbury Tales to a consideration of class and gender as played out in terms of late medieval urbanization and the specific urban spaces of the city of Canterbury.1My argument begins with a consideration of three such spaces: the city walls, the cathedral itself, and, most importantly, the mercantile space of the inn where the pilgrims stay and where the Pardoner pursues Kit, spaces that historically define the development and representation of the medieval city. …