And Speketh so Pleyn: The Clerk's Tale and its Teller

Abstract

Not many Canterbury Tales disturb Chaucer's readers as much as the Clerk's. Long ago, Lounsbury, a spokesman for many, said the Tale's central idea was too revolting for any skill in description to make it palatable. 1 Yet the suffering Griselda and the con temptible Walter must have had some appeal, for the fourteenth century's greatest poets, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer, were each sufficiently attracted to try his hand at describing their marital travails. The tale, in fact, has been repeatedly retold since Boccaccio ended the Decameron with it, but no telling, certainly not Boccaccio's or Petrarch's, has evoked as vitriolic a response as has Chaucer's.2 Readers of some versions even praise the tale. One suspects, then, that the way the tale is told, perhaps more than its central idea, accounts for the reader's reaction to it. In Chaucer, the trials of Griselda and Walter are told by the Clerk, and it is his telling, I think, that has divided the critics so passionately. The Clerk, of course, recites a story he learned from

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