[Footnote 1: Pope has departed at the outset from the conception of
Chaucer. The purpose of the tale which the wife of Bath tells is to show
that women love, above all things, to govern; and her personal history,
which she relates in the prologue, is an account of the means by which
she reduced her husbands to submission. It was not her own matrimonial
woes, which had been slight enough, that she was about to set forth, but
the miseries of those whom it is her boast to have worried into
obedience to her will. As Pope correctly renders the original, she
states that the pains referred to the smart she had inflicted on her
husbands; and, far from alleging that "dear-bought wisdom" had taught
her that matrimony to a woman was a life of suffering, she thanks God
that she has been married five times already, and declares that directly
her fifth mate is dead, she will marry a sixth.
When my husband is from the world i-gone,
Some Christian man shall wedde me anon.]
[Footnote 2: "Twelve" in the original.]
[Footnote 3:
Beside a welle Jesus, God and man,
Spake in reproof of the Samaritan:
"Thou hast i-had five husbandes," quoth he,
"And that ilk-man, which that now hath thee
Is not thine husband." Thus he said certain;
What that he meant thereby I cannot sayn,
But that I axe why the fithe man
Was not husband to the Samaritan?
The question is addressed to those who deny the validity of second
marriages, and she asks them to explain upon their theory why the fifth
man was not properly the husband of the Samaritan woman, when there is
the authoritative declaration of Scripture that he was.]
[Footnote 4: Pope alone is responsible for the second half of this line,
which in its present application has an unbecoming levity. There was a
pardoner in the company, a person who got his living by selling
indulgences, and by displaying the pretended relics of saints, who says
that he was about to marry, but that he shall abandon his intention now
that he learns what despotic authority wives exercise over husbands. The
wife of Bath, unabashed, informs him that what she has told is nothing
in comparison with that which is to follow:
Abide, quoth she, my tale is not begun.
Nay, thou shalt drinke of another tun
Ere that I go, shall savour worse than ale.
And when that I have told thee forth my tale
Of tribulation in marriage,
Of which I am expert in all my age,
That is to say, myself hath been the whip,
Then might thou choose whether thou wilt sip
Of thilke tunne that I shall abroach:
Beware of it ere thou too nigh approach.
These dramatic touches omitted by Pope give life to the piece, and
individuality to the characters.]
[Footnote 5: In the original,
I shall say sooth of husbands that I had,
As three of them were good, and two were bad.
She meant that the two were rebellious in comparison with the three who
were her slaves; for in speaking of the entire five, at the commencement
of the prologue, she added,
And all were worthy men in their degree.
Pope has fallen into an inconsistency. He states that the three old
husbands were those who "were just tolerable." Yet when he comes to
describe the youngest of the two, whom he here calls "bad," he makes the
wife of Bath exclaim,
Now for my fifth loved lord, the last and _best_,
In Chaucer she distinctly denies that he was the best, but says she
_loved_ him best, and proceeds to explain the reason, which is that
women always value those most who treat them with harshness or
indifference.]
[Footnote 6: This trait in the wife of Bath's character is brought out
more distinctly by Chaucer:
Me needeth not no longer doon diligence
To win their love, or do them reverence.
They loved me so well, high God above!
That I tolde no deynte of their love.
A wise woman will busy her ever in one
To gete her love, there she hath none.
But synnes I had them wholly in my hand
And synnes they had me given all their land,
What should I take keep them for to please
But it were for my profit or mine ease?
"I tolde no deynte of their love," means I set no store by it; "ever in
one" is always; and "take keep" is take care.]
[Footnote 7: The wife of Bath's first lesson in the art of domestic
government is a panegyric upon the advantages of sturdy lying, in which
Pope has not gone beyond the original:
Ye wise wives that can understand
Thus should ye speak, and bear them wrong in hand;
For half so boldely can there no man
Swere and lie as a woman can.
"To bear them wrong in hand" is to affirm wrongfully or falsely. The
phrase "to bear in hand" for "to asseverate," was still frequently used
in the reign of Charles II.]
[Footnote 8: The wife of Bath accuses her old husbands to their faces of
having delivered this kind of railing lecture to her when they had come
home at night "as drunk as mice." The drunkenness and the railing are
alike inventions of her own, but she appeals to her niece, and Jenkin,
the apprentice, to bear witness to the truth of her assertions. The
version of Pope is not so vivid, so lively, or so close to nature as the
original, and he has nearly passed over one of the most prominent
characteristics of the speech. When the wife of Bath taunts her husband
with the reproaches she pretended he had heaped upon her, she
intersperses her repetition of his objurgations with abusive and
disdainful names by way of comment upon his monstrous sentiments. Old
caynard or villain, Sir old lecher, thou very knave, lorel or worthless
fellow, old dotard schrewe or sinner, old barrel full of lies, Sir old
fool, are some of the appellations by which she marks her opinion of the
doctrines she fathers upon him. After reciting his alleged complaint,
that women concealed their vices till they were married, she adds that
the maxim is worthy of "a schrewe," or scoundrel. When she imputes to
him the declaration that no man would wed who was wise, or who desired
to go to heaven, she follows it up with the wish that thunder and
lightning would break his wicked neck. When he is charged with having
said that there were three things that troubled earth, and that a wife
was one of them, she hopes that the life of such a villain will be cut
short. When she taxes him with quoting the proverb that a house not
water-tight, a smoky chimney, and a scolding wife drove men from home,
she retorts upon him that he is himself a scold, and intimates that his
years are an aggravation of the vice. This is not only natural as the
sort of scurrilous language which the wife of Bath would have used if
the drunken invectives had been real, but was part of her plan for
bringing her husbands into subjection. Her indignant recriminations were
intended to browbeat them into meekness.]
[Footnote 9: She enlarges in the original upon this device, which was
one of her capital resources. She quotes the proverb, that he first
grinds who comes first to the mill, and upon this principle, when she
had done wrong, she began by attacking her husband;
Or elles I had often time been spilt.
The poor man thus suddenly assailed stood upon the defensive,
endeavoured to vindicate his innocence, and was heartily glad to hold
his tongue on condition of receiving forgiveness for faults he had never
committed.]
[Footnote 10: By pretending that she went out to watch her husbands she
got the opportunity for indulging in freaks and jollity with her
youthful friends.
Under that colour had I many a mirth.
For all such wit is given us of birth;
Deceipt, weeping, spinning, God hath give
To women kindely while they may live.
And thus of one thing I avaunte me,
At th' end I had the bet in each degree,
By sleight or force, or of some maner thing,
As by continual murmur or chiding.
"Kindely" is by nature.]
[Footnote 11: In the original,
With empty hand men may no hawkes lure.
When the falconer had let fly his hawks, and wanted them to return, he
was commonly obliged to entice them by some bait. The tassel, or tercel,
was the male of the peregrine falcon, and was noted for its docility and
gentleness. It would seem as if this species would obey the summons of
the trainer without any other inducement, for when Juliet calls after
Romeo, and he does not instantly reappear, she says,
O for a falconer's voice
To lure this tassel-gentle back again.
[Footnote 12: In Chaucer she states that her husbands would grant all
her demands to soothe her into good humour:
That made me that ever I would them chide.
For though the pope had seten them beside,
I nold not spare them at their owne board,
For, by my troth, I quit them word for word.
As help me very God omnipotent,
Though I right now should make my testament,
I owe them nought a word, that it nis quit;
I brought it so aboute by my wit,
That they must give it up, as for the best,
Or elles had we never been in rest.
For though he looked as a grim lion,
Yet should he fail of his conclusion.
Pope has omitted the latter half of the lines and thus obliterated one
of those nicer traits of nature with which the original abounds. Men put
on the grimness of the lion, and think to prevail by strength, but women
conquer by pertinacity. The majority of men grow weary of perpetual
conflict, and purchase peace by concession; but women of the stamp of
the wife of Bath wilt wrangle for ever, and prefer endless discord to
the subjugation of self-will. Dryden, adding to Virgil's thought, has
expressed the idea, AEn. v. 1024:
Ev'n Jove is thwarted by his haughty wife,
Still vanquished yet she still renews the strife.]
[Footnote 13: Chaucer represents her as still youthful:
And I was young, and full of ragerie,
Stubborn and strong and jolly as a pye.]
[Footnote 14:
The flour is gone, there nis no more to tell,
The bran as I best can, now must I sell.]
[Footnote 15: In the original she does not say that she set his marrow
frying, but that she fried him in his own grease, by stirring up in him
the tormenting jealousy which his faithlessness had first engendered in
herself.
I made him of the same wood a cross.
Not of my body in no foul manere;
But certainly I made folk such cheer,
That in his owne grease I made him fry
For anger and for very jealousy.
By God, in earth I was his purgatory,
For which I hope his soule be in glory.
For God it wot, he sat full still and sung,
When that his shoe full bitterly him wrung.
There was no wight save God and he that wist
In many wyse how sore I him twist.
This is a life-like portrait of a man tortured by inward pangs, and
affecting an air of indifference while he did not dare to complain, from
the consciousness that his greater offence would expose him to a
crushing retort.]
[Footnote 16: In the character which Chaucer gives of the wife of Bath
he says,
And thrice had she been at Jerusalem;
She hadde passed many a strange stream;
At Rome she hadde been, and at Boulogne,
In Galice at Saint Jame, and at Cologne.
The reputed tomb of Saint James was at Compostella, in Galicia, and was
a favourite resort of pilgrims. The wife of Bath may be supposed to have
joined these expeditions quite as much from a love of roving and novelty
as from superstitious motives.]
[Footnote 17: Chaucer says he was buried under the rood-beam, or as it
is usually called the rood-loft, which was placed on the top of the
screen that separated the chancel from the nave. The name was derived
from the rood or cross that stood in the centre with the effigy of our
crucified Lord, and having on one side an image of the Virgin, and on
the other of the apostle John. Pope buries the deceased husband in the
churchyard, and the root is a wooden cross which has been erected upon
his grave.]
[Footnote 18: Artemisia, wife of Mausolus, king of Caria. On the death
of her husband, 352 B.C., she erected a monument to him at
Halicarnassus, which, from the beauty of its architecture and sculpture,
was considered one of the seven wonders of the world. The Romans, says
Pausanias, called all their most magnificent tombs _mausolea_ after this
monument to Mausolua, and hence our modern term mausoleum. There is no
mention of the tomb of Mausolus in Chaucer.]
[Footnote 19:
I trow I loved him beste for that he
Was of his love daungerous to me.
We women have, if that I shall not lie,
In this matter a queynte fantasy.
Wayte, what thing we may not lightly have,
Thereafter will we soonest cry and crave.
Forbid us thing, and that desire we;
Press on us fast, and thenne will we flee.
With danger outen alle we our ware;
Great press at market maketh dear chaffare.
"Daungerous" in the second line means sparing, and in the last line but
one, "with danger" signifies with a scarcity. Then, says the wife of
Bath, we must produce all our own wares to give in exchange. At the date
of her fifth marriage she was forty and the bridegroom was only twenty.
Everything is now reversed. Her first husbands had endowed her with all
their property that they might buy a young wife in their old age. She,
in turn, that she may procure a young husband, gives him
all the land and fee
That ever was me give therebefore;
But afterward repented me full sore.
Her aged mates had worshipped her, and she repaid them with disdain. In
her mature years she is infatuated by a youth, and he, who has no relish
for the homage of a matron of forty, slights her just as she had done
her early husbands under similar circumstances.]
[Footnote 20: It would seem from Chaucer that the youth was a native of
Bath, and had returned there when he had completed his education at
Oxford:
He some time was a clerk of Oxenford,
And had left school, and went at home to board,
With my gossib, duelling in our town:
God have her soul, her name was Alisoun.
"My gossib" is my godmother, and the wife of Bath, whose christian name
was also Alisoun, had been named after her. Pope, by turning "_my_
gossip" into "_a_ gossip," has done away with the special relationship,
and employed the word in its modern sense of a lover of tittle-tattle.]
[Footnote 21: In Chaucer she adds a more powerful motive:
what wist I where my grace
Was shapen for to be, or in what place?
In other words, as she explains shortly afterwards, she was in search of
a lover who might succeed the fourth husband whenever he died.]
[Footnote 22: "To perform a station," says Richelet, in his French
Dictionary, "consists in visiting with devotion one or several churches
a certain number of days and times, and praying there in order to
propitiate the wrath of God, and obtain some favour from his mercy." The
wife of Bath in the original says, that she attended vigils,
processions, preachings, miracle-plays, and marriages, besides making
pilgrimages, but "stations" are not included in her list. The Roman
Catholicism of Pope had rendered the word familiar to him.]
[Footnote 23: The expression "I can't tell how" implies that the
intimacy on the part of the wife of Bath was accidental, whereas it
appears from Pope's context, and still more from the original, that it
was a deliberate design:
Now will I telle forth what happed me.
I say that in the fieldes walked we
Till truely we had such dalliance
This clerk and I, that of my purveyance
I spake to him, and saide how that he
If I were widdow, shoulde wedde me.
For certainly I say for no bobaunce,
Yet was I never withouten purveyance
Of mariage, ne or no thinges eke;
I hold a mouse's heart not worth a leek,
That hath but oon hole to sterte to,
And if that faile then is all i-do.
The acknowledgment that while married to one man she is always engaged
to a second, seems to the wife of Bath to have nothing discreditable in
it, and she only fears lest she should expose herself to the charge of
vanity in asserting that she can command a succession of admirers.]
[Footnote 24: No Englishwoman would talk of laying her husband in his
urn, not to mention that the phrase is a mixture of incongruous ideas,
the "laid" being applicable to burial, and the "urn" to burning. When
the wife of Bath speaks of her departed husband she says,