Chaucer's
Retraction is the final
section of The Canterbury Tales. It is written as an
apology, where Geoffrey Chaucer asks for forgiveness for the
vulgar and unworthy parts of this and other past works, and seeks absolution
for his sins.
Wherfore I biseke yow mekely, for the
mercy (I ask for mercy)
Of God, that ye preye for me that crist
have (the mercy of god, you pray for me)
Mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes;/ and (mercy on me
and forgive my guitless)
Namely of my translacions and enditynges
of (translations and writings of)
Worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in (worldly … which
I take back)
My retracciouns:/ as is the book of Troilus;(in my retractions as
is the book of
the book also of Fame;
the book of
The xxv. Ladies; the book of the duchesse;
The book of seint valentynes day of the parlement
of briddes; the tales
of counterbury,
Thilke that sownen into synne;/ the book
of the
Leoun; and many another book.
A retraction is similar to a palinode. A palinode or palinody
is an ode in which the
writer retracts
a view or sentiment
expressed in an earlier poem.
It is
not clear whether these are sincere declarations of remorse on Chaucer's part,
a continuation of the theme of penitence from the Parson's Tale or simply a way to
advertise the rest of his works. It is not even certain if the retraction was
an integral part of the Canterbury Tales or if it was the equivalent of a death
bed confession which became attached to this his most popular work.
Retractions,
often called palinodes,
were common in works of this era and the nature of some of Chaucer's works
(such as those dealing with the Church) possibly needed forgiveness. The book
of the Leoun seems to be an unknown work by Chaucer. With the retraction he
manages to call an end and complete what is otherwise regarded as an unfinished
work. It concludes as a prayer:
That thanke I oure lord Jhesu Crist
and his blisful mooder, and alle the
seintes of hevene,
bisekynge hem that they from hennes forth
unto my lyves ende
sende me grace to biwayle my giltes,
and to studie to the salvacioun of my
soule,
and graunte me grace of verray penitence,
confessioun and satisfaccioun
to doon in this present lyf,
thurgh the benigne grace of hym that is
kyng of kynges and preest over alle preestes,
that boghte us with the precious blood of
his herte;
so that is may been oon of hem at the day
of doom that shulle be saved.
Qui cum patre et spiritu sancto vivit et
regnat deus per omnia secula. Amen.
Chaucer's
Retraction
Chaucer concludes his tales with praise to Jesus Christ. "Now preye I to hem alle that herkne thai litel
tretys or / rede, that if ther be any thyng in it that liketh hem, that /
therof they thanken oure Lord Jesu Crist, of whom procedeth / al wit and al
goodnesse." Chaucer's Retraction, l.1-4.
He adds that if anyone does not understand these tales, then it is due to his ignorance and not his
intention, which was to fully capture the goodness of Christ in tale. He requests pardon from Christ for any problems there may be with the text. He hopes to be granted mercy and kindness so that he may ascend to
heaven at his time and concludes the long tales of Canterbury
with this final line: "So that I may been oon of / hem at the day of doome that shulle be saved. Qui cum patre,
&cetera." Chaucer's Retraction, l.29-30
The Parson's Tale and Chaucer's Retraction
The Parson’s Prologue
By the time the Manciple’s
tale had finished, the sun had set low in the sky. The Host, pronouncing his initial
degree fulfilled, turns to the Parson to “knytte up wel a greet mateere”
(conclude a huge matter) and tell the final tale. The Parson answered that he
would tell no fable – for Paul, writing to Timothy, reproved people who turned
aside from the truth and told fables and other such wretchedness.
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What the Parson
promises is morality and virtuous matters - and jokes that he does not know of
the alliterative poetry tradition of the South. He leaves his tale, he says, to
clerks, for he himself is not “textueel”. Everyone agreed that it was the best
way to end the project, and asked the Host to give the Parson the instruction
to tell the final tale. The Host did so, hasting the Parson to tell his tale
before the sun went down.
The Parson’s Tale
The Parson’s tale
is not actually a tale as such, but a lengthy medieval sermon on the subject of
penitence. The first part of his sermon defines the three parts of penitence –
contrition, confession and satisfaction, and expounds at length (with several
biblical examples) the causes of the contrition.
The second part of
the sermon considers confession, which is the truthful revelation of the
sinner’s sin to the priest. Sin is then explained as the eventual product of a
struggle between the body and soul for dominance of a person – and therefore
there are two types of sin: venial (minor, smaller sins) and deadly (serious
sins).
The third part of
the sermon considers each of the seven deadly sins as branches of a tree of
which Pride is the trunk. Pride is the worst of the sins, because the other
sins (Ire, Envy, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Lechery) all stem from Pride.
Each sin’s description is followed by its spiritual remedy – and the Parson
states the rules for oral confession.
There are a number
of conditions to penitence, including the intensity of the sin committed, the
haste to contrition and the number of times the sin was committed. The fruit of
this penitence is goodness and redemption in Christ. Following this short
return to the subjects of penitence (and satisfaction), the final lines seem to
suggest, by way of images of the sun and the morning, a vision of Paradise:
bodies which were foul and dark become brighter than the sun, the body,
formerly sick and feeble, becomes immortal and whole, and in a place where
no-one feels hunger, thirst or cold, but is replenished by the perfect
knowledge of God. This paradise, the final lines of the tale conclude, is only
attainable through spiritual poverty and by avoiding sin.
Retraction: “Heere
taketh the makere of this book his leve”
The narrator,
speaking in the first person, prays to everyone that reads this “litel tretys”
(little treatise – probably the Parson’s tale) that, if they like anything they
read in it, they thank Jesus Christ. If they find anything that displeases
them, moreover, they are to put it down to the narrator’s ignorance, and not to
his will – he would have written better, if only he had the cunning.
The narrator then
asks the reader to pray for him that Christ has mercy on his sins and forgives
him in his trespasses, and particularly of his translations of worldly
vanities: the book of Troilus, the book of Fame, the book of the twenty-five
ladies, the book of the Duchess, the book of the Parliament of Birds, and the
tales of Canterbury – those that “sownen into synne” (tend toward sin).
However, the
narrator thanks Christ for his translation of the Boece and other books of
saint’s legends and homilies, hoping that Christ will grant him grace of
penitence, confession and satisfaction, through the benign grace of the King of
Kings, so that he may be “oon of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved”
(one of them at the day of doom who shall be saved).
The book ends with
a short Latin prayer and Amen, before announcing that the book “of the tales of
Caunterbury, compiled by Geffrey Chaucer” has ended, adding “of whos soule
Jhesu Crist have mercy”.
Analysis
One of the biggest
questions about the Tales as a whole is precisely how they end. Throughout his
works, and even within the Tales (look, for example, at the interruptions of
Sir Thopas and the Monk’s tales) Chaucer proves that he knows how to create a
false ending, a trick ending, which ends by not ending, by not concluding. The Canterbury Tales ends on a decidedly pious and religious
note, first with the Parson’s lengthy sermon, and then with a retraction
written as “Chaucer”. The Parson’s sermon, a translation from a medieval work
designed to advise clergy in the salvation of souls, would be a plausible
medieval sermon – there seems nothing in it that is ironic: it is a perfect
example of its genre.
Yet can the Parson’s
sermon seem anything other than just another genre? In a work which has
anthologized genres – we have already read beast fables, saint’s lives,
fabliaux, Breton lays, and all manner of other stories – and problematised
them, drawing attention to their speaker’s voice as something (as the Pardoner
points out) ventriloquized, can we really be expected to take the Parson’s
voice seriously?
Critics disagree
wildly about the answer to this question. The same problem applies to Chaucer’s
retraction – which, as in the Man of Law’s prologue, blurs the line between the
Chaucer writing the Tales (who has also written the Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Criseyde, and so on) and the fictional Chaucer who
is a character within the pilgrimage. Is the Chaucer who writes these tales
just another constructed voice?
Or, perhaps, is
the Retraction of the tales a genuine one? Chaucer, in this theory, genuinely
was dying and was unable to finish the work – or for some reason, felt the need
to immediately retract it, as he genuinely believed that it did come too close
to sin. Thus, before the Host’s plan was complete, he concluded the tale with a
pious sermon and then a Retraction: no-one could therefore accuse the Tales of
being unchristian. Is it a death-bed confession?
A Retraction is a
fairly usual way for a medieval work to end, and perhaps that points us to the
aforementioned effect: its very normality is perhaps a clue that Chaucer’s
intention is not pure and simple. For it could be read simply as another “funny
voice” – the voice of the Chaucer who told Sir Thopas: could be read as comedy
rather than penance. Moreover, as E.T. Donaldson has firmly stated, the use of
the Parson’s Tale as an interpretative key to unlock the whole of the Tales is
problematic, particularly when you consider the deliberate religious
provocation of tales like the Miller’s, the Wife of Bath’s and the Merchant’s.
The tales by no means seem to be written to a purely Christian agenda - though
Christianity is undoubtedly a key theme.
End-points in
Chaucer are difficult to definitively interpret, and perhaps this dichotomy was
intended by Chaucer himself. Perhaps this ending is simply one way of closing
down the Tales – the Manciple’s tale, of course, has been only the most recent
in a line of tales which reiterate the advice of these final fragments to hold
one’s peace, and know when to fall silent. Is this Chaucer, on an imaginary,
real or literary deathbed, punningly, holding his peace, but also being “at
peace”? One thing is for sure: understanding the ending of the Tales seems a
fitting encapsulation of the complex problem of interpreting the work as a
whole.
Chaucer's Retraction
[In Chaucer's Retraction, which
comes at the end of the Parson's Tale, Chaucer asks that all who hear or read
"this litel trettys" pray that Christ have mercy on him, specifically
because of his translations and compositions of "worldly vanities."
He specifies his major works, including one, The Book of the Lion (which has
not survived), "and many another book, if they were in my remembrance, and
many a song and many a lecherous lay." Among his major works he includes
the Tales of
Beginning
students may find a translation
of Chaucer's Retraction useful.
The
authenticity of the Retraction has been challenged -- by modern rather than
nineteenth century scholars. One might have expected F.J. Furnivall, no admirer
of religion, to have rejected its authenticity, but neither the free-thinking
Furnivall nor the orthodox Reverend Doctor Skeat questioned the authenticity of
the Retraction. Even Manly and Rickert, who doubted it was genuine, conceded
that the evidence for the legitimacy of the Parson's Tale and Retraction
"is as good as for any part of the CT" (M-R 4.527).
Some critics have held that
Chaucer never intended the Tales to end with the Parson's Tale and the
Retraction, arguing that some scribe added them on to Chaucer's own incomplete
copy of the Tales. This is an attractive solution for those who would prefer to
ignore the problems the retraction riases, but there is no basis for this
argument (see the comments by Siegfried Wenzel in The Riverside Chaucer,
pp. 954-55 or in The Canterbury Tales, pp. 473-74), other than the
critic's discomfort with so medieval a conclusion. We might wish that Chaucer
had left it out, to spare our modern sensibilities. But he did not. As E. T.
Donaldson put it. "Logical as ever, Chaucer did what was best for his
soul" (Chaucer's Poetry, sec. ed., 1975, p.1114).
For the sake of his soul
Chaucer had to repent the works that "sownen into synne." It is
sometimers argued that Chaucer never allowed the
But he that
hath mysseyd, I dar wel sayn,
He may by no wey clepe his word agayn.
Thyng that is seyd is seyd, and forth it gooth,
Though hym repente, or be hym nevere so looth. (MancT IX.353-5)
The theme of these lines is the
same as that which appears in Thomas Gascoigne's account (in his Dictionarium
theologicum, ca. 1457) of Chaucer's repentance in his last years. That
account comes more than a half a century after the fact and one may well
suspect that it derives from Chaucer's Retraction itself rather than from some
one such as Chaucer's son Thomas, who himself had died (in 1434) more than a
decade before Gascoigne wrote.
What is interesting here
therefore is not the account of Chaucer's so-called "Deathbed
Repentance" but rather the context in which that account is placed -- in a
discussion of repentance that comes too late, after the damage has been done
and when it is too late to remedy the consequences of the act. Gascoigne uses
the example of Judas, who bitterly repented his betrayal of Christ but who
could not undo what he had done; he tried to return the thirty pieces of silver,
but it was too late because the damage had been done and "he could not
revoke his act nor remedy its evil consequences."
Chaucer appears but briefly in
Gascoigne's work, at the end of the discussion of Judas, as a kind of
"Modern Instance":
Thus Chaucer
before his death often exclaimed "woe is me, because now I can not revoke
nor destroy those things I evilly wrote concerning the evil and most filthy
love of men for women and which even now continue to pass from man to man. I
wanted to. I could not. And thus complaining, he died. This Chaucer was the
father of Thomas Chaucer, knight, the which Thomas is buried in Huhelm near
For a
full discussion and an edition of Gascoigne's account, see Douglas Wurtele,
"The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer," Viator 11 (1980), 335-59.
Whatever the truth of
Gascoigne's account (and most modern biographers allow it little credit), he
provides a valuable gloss on the Retraction or at least on how he, a chancellor
of
Thyng that is
seyd is seyd, and forth it gooth,
Though hym repente, or be hym never so looth.
Be that as it may, the
Retraction ends the
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