The Merchant's Prologue and Tale
From Academic Kids
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- The central episode of the Merchant's Tale is like a fabliau, though of a very unusual sort: It is cast in the high style, and some of the scenes (the marriage feast, for example) are among Chaucer's most elaborate displays of rhetorical art. ©The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Another important question is to what extent the Tale is intended to reflect the Merchant's view of marriage, and to what extent it—accidentally or not—reflects that of Chaucer himself.
The main character, Januarie (a senex amans), is an old knight, gone blind from his age. He marries May largely out of lust, while she marries him for the inheritance after his death and because it would be socially unacceptable to refuse him.
Sexually unsatisfied by Januarie, May secretly sets up an affair with Damyan. One day, Januarie and May have sex in Januarie's garden (a locus amœnus), while Damyan is hiding secretly above them in a tree.
After their lovemaking, May requests a pear from the tree. As Januarie is blind and cannot get the pear, he lifts May into the tree. She is promptly greeted by her young lover Damyan, and the two of them then have sex in the tree: 'And sodeynly anon this Damyan / Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng.'
The gods Pluto and 'Proserpina' (or 'Proserpyne'), watching the affair, have a short argument in which Pluto condemns women's morality. He decides to grant Januarie his sight back, but Proserpine in turn grants all women the ability to talk their way out of anything, saying, "I swere / That I shal yeven hire suffisant answere / And all wommen after, for hir sake; / That, though they shulle hemself excuse, / And bere hem doun that wolden hem excuse, / For lak of answere noon of hem shall dien."
Januarie regains his sight just in time to see his wife and Damyan engaged in intercourse, but May successfully convinces him that his eyesight is deceiving him because it has only just been restored and that she is only 'struggling with a man' because she was told this would get Januarie's sight back.
Elsewhere
Harvard's interlinear translation. (http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/mert-par.htm)
Harvard's page (http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/canttales/mert/)
