Some Critical Remarks on the Man of Law’s Tale

This mode is predominantly courtly and didactic, and it was unquestionably the chief basis of Chaucer's reputation among his contemporaries and in the Renaissance. Of course in many works, the Knight's Tale for one, the distinction between moral seriousness and comic realism is by no means absolute, and the greatness of Troilus lies in the balance maintained between the two modes. Nevertheless, a distinction exists, and for those members of Chaucer's audience who lacked his comic vision, the two sides of his poetry must have been difficult to reconcile. . . .

The Man of Law's fragment may be considered Chaucer's response-half in earnest, half in game-to such an attitude. Having arrived at a point where two roads converged, Chaucer characteristically managed to travel both by writing a straightforward tale of "moralitee and hoolynesse" framed by links in which the point of view of those who insist that poetry deal exclusively with such subjects is deftly satirized. The result is paradoxical and ironic: a pilgrim who is shown to be something of a fool and perhaps also something of a knave turns out to have extremely straitlaced notions about literature and tells an impeccably moral tale. It is a response that Chaucer would not expect everyone to understand completely, least of all the very people who had provoked it. It would not have been the first time that he wrote to please his audience while managing, for different reasons, to please himself.

Alfred David, “The Man of Law vs. Chaucer: A Case in Poetics,” PMLA 82 (1967): 218-9

Like those other [rhyme royal] tales, the Man of Law's Tale can be seen as an exploration of the narrative possibilities of a certain genre of writing, undertaken by Chaucer not to expose the limits of that genre--though this may be a side-effect of the pressures to which he subjects it--but genuinely to explore, and at the same time test and temper, to "prove," the powers of English as a literary language, capable of a more complex operation in its influence upon the reader than mere entertainment or edification.

Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London, 1985), 259

We may note in passing that it is altogether appropriate that in seeking a medium for his romantic adaptation of Trivet's prose version of the tale of Constance, Chaucer turned to poetry; it is equally appropriate that he used rhyme royal which, with its intricate, formal rhyme pattern, its air of deliberately contrived and somewhat aloof artistry, is well adapted to the dignified and exalted poem which is so carefully decorated with the various rhetorical devices that we have been considering. As late as the sixteenth century, the heroic couplet, which Chaucer might have used for the Man of Law's Tale, but did not, was thought to be unsuited to convey the majesty of high poetry; thus we find Gascoigne writing in 1575: "As this riding rime [by which he means heroic couplets] serveth most aptly to wryte a merie tale, so Rythme royall is fittest for a grave discourse."

Edward A. Block, “Originality, Controlling Purpose, and Craftsmanship in Chaucer's Man of

Law's Tale,” PMLA 68 (1953): 586

The common law prescribed and maintained the structure of medieval English society, a structure that was fundamentally patriarchal (gender asymmetrical, dominated by men). This law expresses patriarchal ideology, and the Man of Law is its incarnation. It is no surprise, then, that the Man of Law should tell a tale of a woman thoroughly subject to "mannes governance" and dependent upon patriarchal protection; we shall find, concomitantly, that the disjunctions in his performance occur at moments when woman's role and identity in this structure emerge as problematic. I shall argue that these lapses reveal the limits, and thus the workings, of patriarchal ideology: those gaps and disjunctions reveal the energy of suppression and exclusion, and the efforts at reconciliation of contradictions, that are necessary to patriarchal ideology's construction of itself as a seemingly seamless, coherent, and natural whole. As we shall see, the Man of Law has a profound stake in suppressing threats to the patriarchal order - in defining these threats as unnatural and outside the realm of humanity. They are the "unkynde abhomynacions" (medieval etymologies derived the word from ab-hmninibus, "away from humankind"): "tyrannical" women and tales of incest.

Carolyn Dinshaw, “The Law of Man and its “Abhomynacions,’” Exemplaria 1 (1989): 119

[The Man of Law’s Tale] offers a feminine virtue brought into existence by male authority….However edifying Constance’s suffering may be, it is a function of the sexual authority of men, just as, at the level of narrative form, her exemplary role is a function of the generic authority of hagiography.

Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 284-85

Constance is not simply a victim. She is "Everywoman," who suffers because that is the human condition, and her passivity is what orthodox Christianity recommends as a response to the human condition. . . . In the Man of Law’s Tale, there are three passages, on in each division of the poem, that comment explicitly on Constance's relation to man or to men generally. All three of these passages are incongruously vulgar; yet the fact that they are so obvious, that there are several, and that they are so symmetrically placed, argues for a deliberate rhetorical function....[they are] attempts to jar the reader. By making the literal level of the text disharmonious in style, tone or content, they direct the reader's attention to other levels of meaning. [1. The amplification of Constance’s sorrow on her departure from Syria; 2. the “holiness aside” stanza; 3. the senator’s remark about the knife]

Sheila Delany, "Womanliness in the Man of Law’s Tale," Chaucer Review 9 (1974): 63-4

The Man of Law’s Tale then is a pathetic romance inasmuch as it invites us to contemplate the adventures of a long-suffering heroine. It deliberately tells us how to feel through a rhetorical persona, so that we are kept at a comic distance from sad and slightly funny events largely by his exaggerated antics. It has many of the characteristics of a Greek romance.

But in the strict sense of the word, in the eyes of God and of the Christian dispensation, this pathetic romance is a comedy, a Christian comedy. It has a happy ending. Just as Constance returns to her earthly father at the end of the tale, so she is to go to her proper home, heaven, at the end. God's grace conquers all--but only for those who can trust in Him throughout all suffering. "Joye after wo" (l.1161) is what we pray for and what we can hope for.

Morton W. Bloomfield, "The Man of Law’s Tale: A Tragedy of Victimization and a Christian Comedy,"

PMLA 87 (1972): 388

The issues raised by the Lawyer's alterations, therefore, while they may be overtly sociological, are fundamentally aesthetic and ethical: Chaucer has devised the Man of Law’s Tale, it will be argued, as an exposure of the publicly sentimentalizing sensibilities of his age. . . . By having the Lawyer and his heroine parody this devotional aesthetic--which, in its specifically emotional dimension, may be referred to as Late Gothic pathos--Chaucer compels us to recognize that the issues raised by self-displaying sentimentality are not only aesthetic and ethical; they may also become spiritual.

Hope Phyllis Weissman, "Late Gothic Pathos in The Man of Law’s Tale," Journal of Medieval and

Renaissance Studies 9 (1979): 134

Yet the sultaness and Donegild's attempted appropriation of so-called male roles evokes a further--and perhaps more forceful--resituation of woman as man's submissive opposite. Against these viragoes and the transgressive women who serve as their exemplars, from Semiramis back to Eve, the Man of Law advances Custance. Unlike the "mannish" woman, who crowds the preserve of maleness, Custance is repeatedly differentiated as female Other throughout the narrative. In fact, I would argue that Custance plays an integral role in the Man of Law's project to construe and expose woman's insidious desire to achieve similitude to man. Custance is not only an emblem of submissiveness, as Delany observes, but a reassuring symbol of all that is not-man. At crucial points in his narrative, the lawyer uses Custance to reinforce woman's proper difference from man, a task he has rendered urgent by his exposure of woman's perverse desire and ability to mask her outlaw status and masquerade as inlaw, as man.

Susan Schibanoff, "Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer's Man of Law's

Tale," Exemplaria 8 (1996): 59-96

But this constancy does not necessarily remove our discomfort with her character, nor should it. And to understand why, we must return to our earlier analysis of value and exchange, elements necessary to break the tale's deadlock of "excess" and "possession." Strictly speaking, constancy is not a value-it cannot be valued because it can never really exist in relation to anything but itself; it moves nothing forward temporally or spatially, as Custance's travels land her where she started, and as the eyes of this tale, like the blind Briton's "eyen of [the] mynde" (552), are always on the beyond, on moral equations that transcend, rather than inform, this world. Constancy emerges from the same zero-sum mentality that we saw earlier characterized in more commercial terms; it is reproductive but not productive. It converts; that is, it gives for goods received-joy after woe, woe after joy-but it is itself ungenerous and ungenerative.

Kathryn Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy: East and West in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,”

Chaucer Review 33 (1999): 419