4—
Epic Theater:
The Comedy and The Canterbury Tales
(The Knight and the Miller)

In terms of genre, I have argued so far, The Canterbury Tales takes its place in the line of epic, particularly as that has been redefined by Dante's allegorical poem. In this chapter I want to pursue the argument by exploring another feature common to both poems. This is also part of epic tradition—hence my use of the phrase "epic theater"^[1] —but in the works under consideration it is developed, as I intend to show, to a point of special structural and thematic significance.

When Aristotle praised Homer for the basically dramatic character of his epics, the link between epic and drama was perhaps not altogether obvious. Homer, Aristotle writes,

deserves our admiration for many reasons, but particularly because he alone of the (epic) poets is not unaware what it is one should be composing [himself]. Namely, the poet himself ought to do as little talking as possible; for it is not by virtue of that that he is a poet. Now the others are on stage themselves, in competition, the whole time, and imitate but little and occasionally, whereas he, after a few words by way of preface, immediately brings on stage a man or a woman or some other character, and not one characterless but (all) having character.^[2]

[1] Chapter 2 of Michael Lynn-George, Epos: Word, Narrative, and the "Iliad, " is entitled "The Epic Theatre: the Language of Achilles" (pp. 50–152), but it deals exclusively with the "theater of language."

[2] Poetics 60a5–11, trans. Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument, pp. 619–20.

Whether Dante or Chaucer ever read this passage we do not know, but they might have done so in William of Moerbeke's Latin translation of the Poetics (1278).^[3] In any case, the idea that the Homeric epics represent the true origin of Greek drama was probably familiar to them from a text like Evanthius's De Fabula (fourth century A.D. ), which was widely known in the Middle Ages.^[4] Evanthius wrote that

although . . . those who have gone through ancient documents find that Thespis was the first inventor of tragedy and believe that Eupolis together with Cratinus and Aristophanes is the father of old comedy, nonetheless Homer, who is the most ample source of almost all matters poetical, also provided the examples for these songs and prescribed, as it were, a certain law for their works: he is shown to have made the Iliad on the model of a tragedy, the Odyssey in the image of a comedy. For after he established such a great example, highly ingenious imitators reduced to order and divided up what until then was being written with boldness but without polish or any of the seemliness and lightness of touch that became the practice afterward.^[5]

The original reason for considering the Homeric narratives the very model and fountainhead of drama would seem to be their role in bridging the gap, as it were, between an oral and a literate stage in Greek society. A modern scholar comments on the Poetics passage as follows:

To Aristotle's mind Homer is not really so much a narrator as a dramatist . He is just that epic poet who narrates least and dramatizes most. Aristotle does not dodge the paradox, he states it boldly—even, perhaps, with a little too much insouciance . Homer, he says, uses straight narrative only for a brief prologue, then immediately "brings on stage" a "character" (who then takes over and speaks for himself). The other poets remain on the stage themselves all the way through. But how else, after all, should a narrative poet behave? The paradox is certainly not a sign of different "strata" in the Poetics . It is inherent in Aristotle's conception of Homer as a man between two worlds: epic poet, but also precursor and in a sense inventor of the drama. If this is treason to the epic as such, it springs from allegiance to a greater cause, that of poetry as a whole, of which tragedy is the exemplar and Homer was the first prophet.^[6]

As "a man between two worlds" Homer represents for Aristotle a

[3] Unknown to scholarship until the twentieth century. See Guillelmus de Moerbeka, De Arte Poetica, Praefatio, pp. 11ff.

[4] See Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, p. 26.

[5] My translation. See Evanthius, De Fabula, pp. 14–15.

[6] Else, Aristotle's Poetics, p. 620.

link with an earlier stage of the culture when the verbal arts were regarded as essentially performative. The special status of the Homeric epics in Athenian society is accordingly attributable to their dramatic character, the fact that they bring to life and keep alive in the present, as only dramatic tragedies will be able to do, a heroic past in its human individuality, where no one is characterless but all have character (ouden aethes all' echonta ethos ). The polemic against Homer of Aristotle's teacher Plato would seem to support this idea. It is based on the conviction (as Eric Havelock has argued) that Homer stands for a concrete, rhythmic mode of cultural transmission that Plato sought to replace by a more abstractly philosophic paideia .

Plato's attack, accordingly, focuses on Homer's mimesis, by which he understood, in Havelock's words, the oral poet's

power to make his audience identify almost pathologically and certainly sympathetically with the content of what he is saying. And hence also when Plato seems to confuse the epic and dramatic genres, what he is saying is that any poetised statement must be designed and recited in such a way as to make it a kind of drama within the soul both of the reciter and hence also of the audience. This kind of drama, this way of reliving experience in memory instead of analysing and understanding it, is for him "the enemy."^[7]

The very characteristic, in other words, that for Plato is an objectionable survival of preliteracy becomes for his disciple Aristotle a mark of Homer's superiority to later epic poets, who lacked his understanding of "the poet's duty: that is, to imitate (mimeisthai = poiein ), not merely to talk (legein )."^[8]

In the Europe of Dante's and Chaucer's time a shift similar to that marked by the Homeric poems was taking place, from a largely oral to a largely literate kind of society. If this rough parallel allows for any inferences regarding the "mimetic" character of the Comedy and the Tales, they seem rather more plausible for the latter than for

[7] Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, p. 45. Havelock believes that Plato quite consciously developed the term mimesis to denote "the basic psychology of the oral-poetic relationship between reciter and listener or between reciter and the material recited, and the corresponding characteristics of the oral-poetic 'statement'" (p. 57, n.22). In origin, mimesis referred, not to "copy" or "imitation," but to "theatrical representation," mimos meaning "actor," "mime," or the performance by same. For all its differences in emphasis (on which see Else, Aristotle's Poetics, pp. 93–95), Aristotle's mimesis is in some ways a formalistic version of Plato's.

[8] Else, Poetics, p. 621. And cf. John Kevin Newman, The Classical Epic Tradition : "The distinction made by Brecht . . . between his epic drama and Aristotelian drama must not obscure the extraordinary tribute which the very notion of epic drama pays to Aristotle's insight into the dramatic tendencies of the Homeric epos " (p. 40).

the former. In The Canterbury Tales the Chaucerian poet presents himself at once as minstrel performing for a "popular" audience (Sir Thopas ) and as bookish translateur (Melibee ). The poet of the Comedy does of course speak, and stage himself, to his audience, but he usually addresses it as "reader." What I have called the theatrical character of these works is thus an effect less of their cultural-historical situation than of a particular poetics. One of the "norms" of epic narrative, as Thomas Greene has shown, is its alternation of different kinds of dramatic scenes.^[9]

My discussion of "epic theater" accordingly focuses, in the first instance on the inner constitution of the works concerned and largely slights their historical context, including such intriguing questions as their relation to the actual drama of the time and late-medieval ideas about the staging of plays, especially Seneca's, in antiquity. An example of the latter especially relevant to my notion of epic theater is to be found in the early-fourteenth-century commentary on Seneca's Hercules Furens by the English Dominican Friar Nicholas Trevet:

And note that tragedies and comedies were customarily recited in the theater in the following manner. The theater was a semicircular platform in the midst of which there was a small structure called the stage, consisting of a scaffold on which the poet declaimed verses; beyond this scaffold there were mimes who imitated the declamation of the verses by corporeal gestures, adapting them to whatever character might be speaking.^[10]

The spectacle of the poet on a scaffold stage declaiming his verses while mimes act out their different roles by bodily movements—this fits well with our discussion in the preceding chapter of the poet's allegorical self-multiplication. In addition, the mimes serve as an apt metaphor for the audience that simultaneously reads and participates in the epic theater.

The distinction between "mimetic" and "diegetic" narrative, to use the Aristotelian terms,^[11] can be clarified by the distinction Keir

[9] See the chapter "The Norms of Epic" in Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven .

[10] Vincentius Ussani, Jr., ed., Nicolai Treveti Expositio Herculis Furentis, p. 5 (my trans.). For an excellent discussion of the knowledge of Seneca and his theater in the fourteenth century, see Renate Haas, "Chaucer's Monk's Tale."

[11] Cf., e.g., Poetics 59a17, Else, Poetics, pp. 569ff.

Elam draws between what he calls the "ostended" world of drama and the "represented" world of narrative:

Classical narrative is always oriented towards an explicit there and then, towards an imaginary "elsewhere" set in the past and which has to be evoked for the reader through predication and description. Dramatic worlds, on the other hand, are presented to the spectator as "hypothetically actual" constructs, since they are "seen" in progress "here and now" without narratorial mediation. Dramatic performance metaphorically translates conceptual access to possible worlds into "physical" access, since the constructed world is apparently shown to the audience—that is, ostended—rather than being stipulated or described.^[12]

The epic obviously cannot dispense with "narratorial mediation," but it does have various ways of creating a textual counterpart of an "ostended world." One is the elaboration of larger-than-life characters, the mere invocation of whose names can import into the narrative, Atlas-fashion, the aura of an entire world. Then there are the gods, not only participants in the action, but also spectators; hovering over the reader as well as the heroes, they hint at a world theater encompassing all.

Indeed, central to "epic theater" is the idea of an action presented as being observed even as it takes place, and the awareness of being observed of those involved in the action. The action, in other words, is also a transaction with an audience of gods or other characters. And this transaction parallels in various ways the implicit relationship between the narrative and its audience of readers or listeners. There is of course never more than a parallel here; the narrator never quite "disappears" into the characters, the reader never quite merges with the fictive audience. But in its relation to the reader the text will constantly strive for a self-exhibition like that of its characters; like them it will, in Aristotle's words, always have character and never be characterless (i.e., a mere function of the plot).

Narrative theatricality, in other words, involves a heightened reflexiveness, a heightened self-consciousness; and this self-consciousness in turn generates a more than usual "audience participation," permitting readers to accept characters as analogues of themselves, physical, social, yet inward and desiring they know not what or

[12] Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, pp. 109–10.

why.^[13] Thematically, the epic theater of the Comedy and The Canterbury Tales points to a goal beyond the human image, to an apprehension of the human person or subject in its concrete, worldly manifestation.

What, now, is the place of the Comedy in the line of descent from the "theatrical" Homeric epic? With the advent of Christianity we would expect the spectator gods to be displaced by the all-seeing eye of God, the "sighte above," as the Knight calls it (I.1672). But that is not exactly what happens in Dante's poem. By the end of the Paradiso it is apparent that the tripartite cosmos is also a world theater (like Seneca's, cited in the next chapter), except that the spectators now are not the gods but the saints seated in the celestial Rose, which is really a vast amphitheater or colosseum,^[14] where they have an unobstructed view of everything: looking up, they see God's face; looking down, they can observe the human scene.

This last detail is, however, already made evident in canto II of the Inferno, during the so-called "prologue in heaven," which unobtrusively points ahead to the amphitheater of the Paradiso . There Lucy asks Beatrice:

ché non soccorri quei che t'amò tanto,
ch'usci per te de la volgare schiera?
Non odi tu la pieta del suo pianto,
non vedi tu la morte che 'l combatte
su la fiumana ove 'l mar non ha vanto—?
                                                          (104–8)

(why have you not helped him who loves you so
that—for your sake—he's left the vulgar crowd?
Do you not hear the anguish of his cry?
Do you not see the death he wars against
upon that river ruthless as the sea?)

Her questions indicate that in their activities, in their struggle with visible and invisible foes, even in the expression of their most intimate feelings, the inhabitants of the Comedy 's cosmos are seen and heard by a heavenly audience.

That heavenly audience is important. It means, in the first place, that the various scenes which the Pilgrim confronts, and by which the Comedy, like the classical epic, advances, are a drama that is

[13] For a discussion of theater as the source of our ideas of selfhood, see Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity .

[14] Cf. Singleton's on Par . XXX, pp. 502f., and on Par . XXXII.116.

judged by human, not by fixed unearthly standards. In the second place, it means that it is not just a "drama of the mind," in Francis Ferguson's phrase,^[15] but a historical drama of sorts with a cast of thousands, though it has its origin and, we might say, its raison d'être, in the autobiographical fiction that is its central plot. Let us look more closely at this fiction.

It looks at first as though what is involved is a simple split—common in autobiographical and confessional literature—of the Dantean "subject" into two, an earlier and a later, Pilgrim and Poet. This is essentially how Singleton and those, like Gianfranco Contini, who follow him, view the matter. For them the "I" of the Comedy is divided into an allegorical Everyman figure and a real individual on a literal journey through the otherworld. I cite at length from Singleton's well-known discussion of this point, first, because he endorses the idea for which I am arguing here of Dante's basically dramatic approach to his fiction, and second, to show that his simple dichotomy of the Comedy 's subject does not do full justice to Dante's fiction.

In a sense it might be regretted that somehow a curtain does not fall at the end of Canto II Inferno to mark off the first two cantos of the poem for the prologue which they are. Such a marker would serve to point up some fundamental distinctions as to time and place in the poem, distinctions which must be grasped if we are to see the true nature and outline of its allegory. Just there, at that point, some such device would help us to realize that in the prologue scene we are set up on the stage of this life; that on this first stage we may speak of the actor or actors in the first person plural, as "we," even as the poem suggests in its first adjective. This is the way of our life, the life of soul, this is our predicament. It ought to be the scene we know best, the most familiar scene in the world—and in the poem. Here lies the way of our life. The features of it, the things here that we can make out; a hill, a wood, these beasts, all have their existence there where the fiumana runs which Lucia sees from Heaven. . . . Here we are in no space-occupying place. Then: curtain—to rise again on the first act of this play, on a scene before the doorway to Hell which is an abyss that is space-occupying and which, on Dante's map, may be located. The change in scene is not only a change in place. Time has changed. For we do not forget that this is a remembered journey (and hence may not really be given in dramatic form). The man who went that way has now returned. His journey was

[15] See Francis Ferguson, Dante's Drama of the Mind . In The Idea of a Theater, Ferguson singles out the Purgatorio as a notable example of narrative that is essentially theatrical: "In this part of the Divine Comedy, it is evident that, though Dante was not writing to be acted on a stage, he appeals, like the great dramatists, to the histrionic sensibility, i.e., our direct sense of the changing life of the psyche" (p. 18).

there and it was then. And time in yet another sense has changed. Of the scene and of the journey in the prologue we might say "our life." Not so beyond the door. The journey beyond is too exceptional an event to bear any but a singular possessive. It was then, and there, and it was his journey. Whereas in the prologue (even though the tense is past) in so far as we might see this as "our" journey, it takes place, as to time, in a kind of "ever-present," with Everyman as actor.

And yet, no sooner have we imagined a curtain at this point than we could wish it away. It might help us with certain essential distinctions. But the poet has not wanted there any such discontinuity as it might suggest. His problem was not Augustine's "how shall I tell of movements of soul in concrete images." His language is already given to the poet and he uses it with full assurance. His problem is to manage to leave this scene, which is not space-occupying, and to attain to that scene which is; to remove a wayfarer from this scene, where he functions in a mode open to a plural "we," on to a scene and a journey where his role is a most singular one. "Our" journey must become "his" journey, "his" must arise out of "our." A literal and very real journey of a living man, a man in a body of flesh and bone, is to be launched forth from a place that does not occupy space. A curtain cannot help, indeed can only defeat. Only a movement within poetic ambiguity at its fullest power could bring about an organic transition in these terms.^[16]

As with almost everything else Singleton has written on the Comedy, this strikes me as extraordinarily interesting and illuminating even when, or precisely when, it provokes disagreement. Here he describes with great cogency how the opening cantos of the Inferno serve to establish a dual relationship between the reader and the Pilgrim-protagonist of the Comedy . On the one hand, that is, the reader is drawn into an identification with the Pilgrim as one of "us," and with Everyman, who finds himself where all, at one time or another, find ourselves. On the other hand, the reader is distanced from the Pilgrim by the sense that he is a literal other, "a man in a body of flesh and bone" who does not fit into any of the categories of a strictly (or radically) allegorical poem. The intriguing phrase by which Singleton seeks to explain the Pilgrim's transition from Everyman figure to mysteriously individuated character fits, I believe, with my discussion in chapter 1 of Dante's attempts to incorporate the human body into his poem. A "movement within poetic ambiguity at its fullest power" might well be an equivalent of the "gaps" that

[16] "Allegory," pp. 9–10, in Dante's "Commedia "; also Gianfranco Contini, "Dante come Personaggio-Poeta della 'Commedia,'" pp. 33–62.

allow the reader to create an extratextual reality as a kind of "supplement" to the text.^[17]

There are, nonetheless, certain aspects of Singleton's discussion that strike me as questionable. The first thing is his curious division between the first two cantos and the rest, with the claim that the former are allegorical, the latter literal. No sooner has he drawn the line than he goes on to erase it, for the obvious reason that, whatever else it may be, the otherworld journey is undeniably allegorical. But why should he want to insist on a distinction that is so clearly unfounded? Granted that the events and the landscape described in the "prologue" belong to the realm of allegory, it makes no sense to regard the "I" speaking there as distinct from the "I" speaking in the later cantos. And why should this "I" refer any less to a particular individual than the one speaking during the actual pilgrimage?

Singleton's division is designed, I believe, to establish the Dantean "I" as both in control of and controlled by the scheme of biblical allegory that he regards as determinative in the Comedy (see chapter 2). Thus he curtains off—even if he then wishes the curtain away—the allegorical (Everyman) self from the real (de Man's "empirical") self, because his theory compels him to find within the poem a "literal" Dante who remains uncontaminated, as it were, by the allegorical fiction. And once he has found this literal, real self, that is to say, the Pilgrim, within the poem, he can identify him with the Poet outside the poem, the only significant difference between the two being that one has completed the journey whereas the other is still on it. And the same maneuver that allows Singleton to insist on the fundamental identity of Pilgrim and Poet in reality also allows him—against the evidence, as we have seen in earlier chapters—to insist on the strict separation between Pilgrim and Poet throughout the Comedy, until they are finally "merged" at the conclusion.

Now, if we take seriously, as I believe we should, the idea of the narrative as a kind of theater, we arrive at the conclusion that, given the autobiographical fiction, the voice speaking to us in the first person is, from first to last, a voice inside the poem's imaginary theater,

[17] This idea of the readerly "supplement" I derive from Wolfgang Iser, "The Play of the Text," in Languages of the Unsayable, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, pp. 325–39. For Iser, this supplement is not just a function of particular textual "gaps" but rather a normal result of the "play of the text," which, he says, "can be acted out individually by each reader, who by playing it in his or her own way produces an individual 'supplement' considered to be the meaning of the text" (p. 336).

while we (readers) constitute an audience analogous to that seated in the celestial auditorium. Putting it in slightly different terms, from the very opening line of the poem the "I" that addresses us is merely one, if the most dominant, of a variety of roles played by the poem's subject: poet-narrator, Florentine citizen, pilgrim, Everyman or "man in general" (Contini), and so forth. Somewhere among or behind these roles there also lurks the "real," historical individual we refer to as Dante Alighieri, but at no point can we identify that individual with any one role or any combination of these roles.

This multiplex, indeterminate persona would seem to be implied in Virgil's remark to the Pilgrim after the latter's ecstatic vision on the third terrace of Purgatory:

         "Se tu avessi cento larve
sovra la faccia, non mi sarian chiuse
le tue cogitazion, quantunque parve."
                                    ( Purg . XV.127–29)

         ("Although you had a hundred masks
upon your face, that still would not conceal
from me the thoughts you thought, however slight.")

A hundred masks is just what we would expect our Pilgrim-Poet to wear in the course of his journey through the hundred cantos of his poem. Here in Purgatory, where there is tremendous consciousness of the ways in which human existence is a matter of artifice, these masks can be acknowledged. And that masks are not mere playthings but are fraught with implications and consequences for their wearers is indicated in a simile applied to the flowers and sparks of the Empyrean changing before the Pilgrim's eyes,

        come gente stata sotto larve,
che pare altro che prima, se si sveste
la sembianza non süa in che disparve.
                                      ( Par . XXX.91–95)

        (just as maskers, when they set aside
the borrowed likenesses in which they hide,
seem to be other than they were before.)

In the selva oscura at the beginning of the Inferno, however, the crisis is precisely that of a man shocked by the realization of his masklike existence. He is filled with terror at the thought of having lost his authentic self somewhere along life's way, a terror—paura (I.6, 15,

19, etc.)—of his situation that Michael Goldman ascribes to the self-alienation of the actor:

The actor's body is possessed by something other, that is at once the particular object of his mimesis and a vaguer, more numinous source. I would say that it corresponds to otherness itself in its threatening aspect, all that generality of terror man has tried, apparently from his earliest days, to enact so as to control.^[18]

That generality of terror can in this case be seen as the Inferno, which the Pilgrim will shortly enter, though it will be the shades (ombre ) there that will enact its threatening otherness. In making the Inferno the first stage of his epic theater Dante could draw on a tradition especially strong among early Christian writers like Lactantius and Augustine, which saw the theater as a place where demons take possession of the human soul and induce in the spectator "a miserable madness."^[19]

By entering the Infernal theater, the Pilgrim risks madness and demonic possession, and certainly in the first canticle that risk never disappears altogether. But in the course of his engagement with the shades the Pilgrim-actor gradually overcomes his sense of self-alienation. By the end of the Inferno he has, like Macbeth, "supp'd full with horrors" and is capable of feeling a sense of community even with the inhabitants of that monstrous world. The Pilgrim experiences otherness less and less as a threat because in his growing self-awareness he recognizes his own Protean nature—"che pur da mia natura / trasmutabile son per tutte guise" ("who by my very nature am / given to every sort of change," Par . V. 98–99)—and above

[18] Michael Goldman, The Actor's Freedom, p. 11. Goldman speculates about a special association between primitive drama and the spirits of the dead; e.g., "Drama probably began with ghosts, with prehistoric impersonations intended to transfigure the malice of spirits—to indulge, placate, or wrestle with the dead, to turn Furies into Eumenides" (p. 27).

[19] "miserabilis insania"; I am quoting from Augustine's Confessions, III.ii, p. 101, in the Loeb ed., trans. William Watts (1951), vol. 1, where he describes his own experience of attending stage plays. On this entire subject, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, in which he states that Augustine condemns the theater strictly on the grounds of practical morality because it encourages every form of vice (p. 64); but this is contradicted by his own demonstration that Augustine, following Lactantius, consistently links the theater with demons, and by Augustine's denunciation of actors, his praise of the Romans for "having banished from the number of [their] citizens all actors and players" (City of God II.29, p. 73). Tertullian wrote an antitheatrical tract, De Spectaculis (ca. 198). On Tertullian, see Barish, p. 63f.

all an inescapable doubleness, the actor's self-consciousness but also the sign (Gemini) imprinted on his genius at birth:

O glorïose stelle, o lume pregno
di gran virtù, dal quale io riconosco
tutto, qual che si sia, il mio ingegno.
                                  ( Par . XXII.112–14)

(O stars of glory, constellation steeped
in mighty force, all of my genius—
whatever be its worth—has you as source.)

The Canterbury Tales continues the Comedy 's theatricality and thematizes it. I will discuss the tales of the Knight and the Miller as examples of this theatricality and of certain opposed views about the theater that continued into the fourteenth century and beyond. First, however, let us look at the basic features of The Canterbury Tales as "epic theater."

An obvious difference from the Comedy is the absence of an overtly autobiographical fiction, even though the role of the poet-pilgrim continues to be pivotal, as we have seen. Another obvious difference is that in place of an otherworld stage, Chaucer has the literal stage of inn and roadside familiar to fourteenth-century theatrical genres like the morality and mystery plays.^[20] On this stage, which is a lot like Elam's "hypothetically actual" world in that it is "ostended" rather than described, Chaucer's pilgrims are alternately both players and audience. In the act of telling their tale, the pilgrims find themselves at "center stage" and confronting the others as audience. The tale becomes their script, by and through which they perform and in a sense exhibit themselves to their audience.^[21] In the absence of stage directions this self-exhibition is of course limited and indirect. But a definitive indication that we are to think of them as physical presences in the course of their tale-telling is the General Prologue, whose portraits constitute an "illustrated" catalogue of the dramatis personae who will eventually appear "on stage." The gap between the pilgrims' portraits and their tales necessitates a conscious exercise of the reader's memory, and this might be considered an analogue

[20] In this connection see the comments by Claude Gauvin, "Le théâtre et son public en Angleterre au Moyen-Age et à la Renaissance," especially pp. 58–59 on the "placea" or acting area, frequently on the same level as the spectators and not separated from them by other than a symbolic barrier.

[21] Latin fabula means both "drama, play" and "tale, story, fable"; I return to this point later.

to an audience's experience of a literal performance, in this sense at least, that the tale-teller is not a disembodied voice but an individual with a set of physical and other characteristics.

I have not forgotten the caveats in chapter 1 against treating literary characters as though they had an existence independent of the text. I am obviously contending that epic theater like that of The Canterbury Tales encourages, if not a confusion between characters in fiction and actual persons, at least an increased sense of an analogy between them. So it does not seem self-contradictory to think of the Canterbury pilgrims as standing in a variety of relations to their narrative. Some, for example, seem more "inside" their narrative than others, as though they were engulfed by it or were dreaming even as they were telling it. Something like this last seems to me the case with the Wife of Bath's Tale, which perhaps not so incidentally ends with a wish fulfillment in the bedroom. It is generally assumed that this wish is really the Wife's and that the Old Hag's becoming young again is her self-projection. But there are other possibilities. The young knight, for instance, and his enforced quest to discover what it is that women most desire, could well be an "unconscious" self-projection that subtly criticizes her Prologue's self-presentation with its pretense that she knows her desire.

Let us turn now to the group of pilgrims—Chaucer, the Second Nun, the Nun's Priest—that are not given a portrait. Of these Chaucer the pilgrim, reporter, and poet is obviously the most important and makes himself felt throughout as a presence, like Dante the pilgrim-poet, and in analogous fashion.^[22] There has been considerable debate about this Chaucer, his character and his role in the poem, and that this debate is appropriate, that the reader is meant to treat Chaucer's "personality" as a puzzle alongside that of the other pilgrims, is evident from the scene in which the Host, who has apparently not noticed him before, turns to Chaucer with the abrupt question, "What man artow?" (VII.695). At this point Chaucer becomes another figure on the poem's stage, and the answer to the Host's ultimately unanswerable question is now his burden, as it is that of each pilgrim-teller to announce and reveal himself. The

[22] See the comments on Chaucer the pilgrim-poet as "the single evaluating mind placed in the center of the dramatic situation" of The Canterbury Tales, by Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse, pp. 70ff., and Donald Howard's discussion of Chaucer the poet-performer in The Idea of The Canterbury Tales, p. 194f., and "The Narrative Now," pp. 78ff.

Host's question, in other words, is like an echo of the unspoken one that hangs over Dante's Pilgrim at the very beginning of the Comedy and causes him so much terror. In both poems it is the starting point of the pilgrimage, its tentative answer (or answers) the distant goal toward which the respective pilgrimages move.

The Host's words to Chaucer also give a hint of the latter's physical appearance, precisely what the reader has lacked so far to round out his sense of the poet as pilgrim and player:

He in the waast is shape as wel as I;
This were a popet in an arm t'enbrace
For any womman, smal and fair of face.
                                               (VII.700ff.)

The picture of a slightly rotund "popet" should not, perhaps, be taken entirely at face value, but the hint of a faintly ambiguous sexuality ("smal and fair of face" has two possible referents) allows us to "see" the poet's presence in child Thopas with his "lippes red as rose" and "semely nose" (VII.726, 729). That this is at least in part a comic mask, a playful self-caricature, is itself an important index to Chaucer's personality in The Canterbury Tales .^[23]

The other two pilgrims with no portrait might of course have received one had Chaucer lived to complete his poem, though we cannot be sure of that. In any case, the absence of a portrait of the Second Nun would seem to have a certain logic. After forty-five lines in which the Prioress emerges in her full individuality and disregard for the rules of her order, the mere mention of her "chapeleyne" in a line and a half (I.163f.) suggests that here is someone who at any rate aspires to be equal to her nun's habit.

The case of the Nun's Priest is more complicated. Not only is there no portrait of him in the General Prologue, but there is even some question whether he is just one of three priests attending the Prioress.^[24] The Host's words to him after he has told his tale (VII.3450ff.) do little to illuminate the mystery of the Priest's appearance, for they are markedly similar to his words earlier to the Monk (VII.1934ff.), surely a very different type. The Nun's Priest's Tale thus implicitly raises certain questions in relation to the the-atrical principle of The Canterbury Tales . What kind of evidence, for instance, does a given tale provide about its teller? How necessary

[23] For a discussion of this passage from a different perspective, see Lee W. Patterson, "'What Man Artow?'"

[24] See various editors' notes to I.164.

is collateral evidence—regarding appearance, social background, personal habits, attitudes—to confirm or at least corroborate the impression of a teller's character as derived from his tale?

The "disembodied" Nun's Priest accordingly serves a dual function in The Canterbury Tales . First, he helps to establish the ultimate undecidability of all these questions about character. Second, the bodiless Nun's Priest underscores, paradoxically, the importance of physical appearance as an index or basis of character. Where there is no body we are bound to invent one. Thus, though his tale is delivered by a voice seemingly from nowhere, we are at once grateful for and tantalized by the Host's reference, at the conclusion of the tale, to the Priest's large neck and chest (3456). Is it intended literally? ironically? How does it square with our sense of the Priest's physical dimensions as conveyed by his tale?

It may be that the Nun's Priest is intended as just that figure of indeterminacy that makes theatrical play possible, the "nobody" who can represent or "stand in" for anybody.^[25] This capacity for theatrical representation is of course not purely negative, but must in turn appeal to the audience's sense of potentiality, such as is dramatized in Shakespeare's Bottom, who believes himself capable of playing any role he chooses (A Midsummer Night's Dream II.ii). The unspecified or "blank" persona of the Nun's Priest, in other words, acts as a lure for the reader, enticing him or her (!) to identify with it mimetically, to use Bruce Wilshire's terms.^[26]

In her book Narrative as Performance Marie Maclean points out that aside from empathy, the theatrical performer is also subject to "the gaze and measurement of others,"^[27] the others in the case of The Canterbury Tales being the pilgrims, who constitute the immediate or "narrative audience." This audience has behind it, or stands in for, a second or "authorial audience" consisting of the readers of the text. The complexity of interdependence that obtains between Chaucer's pilgrims and their twofold audience is caught perfectly by Maclean's observation about narrative performance, which according to her involves

an intimate relationship which, like all such relationships, is at once a co-operation and a contest, an exercise in harmony and a mutual display of power. It is both "act" and interaction, and implies a contract, a recognition

[25] See Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity .

[26] Wilshire, Role Playing, passim.

[27] "Performance," she writes, "always implies submitting to the gaze and measurement of others"; see Marie Maclean, Narrative as Performance, p. xi.

of obligation and expectation, thus acknowledging the rules which govern the interplay. The two parties to the agreement, the narrative performers and the narrative audience, must be seen in relationship to the text and to each other.
(Pp. xii–xiii)

Co-operation and contest, exercise in harmony and mutual display of power—these phrases seem an apt characterization of the tale-telling game in The Canterbury Tales, and at the same time they make clear that this game can serve as model for the relationship between Chaucer's epic theater and the "live audience" of his readers. As there is among the pilgrims, so an implied contract or agreement governs the latter relationship, with the poet-narrator acting in the role of mediator or negotiator who anticipates the readers' resistance or calls upon their goodwill. For the contract is clearly a provisional one, constantly subject to renegotiation and reinterpretation, as befits the kind of theater that is being enacted, open-ended, improvisational, akin to carnival and various types of festival.^[28]

In what follows I focus on the tales of the Knight and the Miller and the way that by their very opposition they initiate this theatrical process. The opposition between the tales is more than stylistic; it is as if the Miller had suddenly entered the lists against the Knight in order to challenge his entire vision and version of self and society. And though the Knight himself does not respond—the Reeve, we might say, serves as his ironic proxy—the combat of wits will continue in one form or another throughout the pilgrimage and with all the weapons that the theatrical medium can supply. Significantly, furthermore, the opposition between the first two tales revolves to a considerable extent around their very different notions of theater.

In the Knight's Tale, this notion is most fully represented by the amphitheater built for the tournament between Palamon and Arcite:

swich a noble theatre as it was
I dar wel seyn in this world ther nas.
The circuit a myle was aboute,
Walled of stoon, and dyched al withoute.
Round was the shap, in manere of compas,
Ful of degrees, the heighte of sixty pas,
That whan a man was set o degree,
He letted nat his felawe for to see.
                                                           (1885–92)

[28] On this, see Carl Lindahl, Earnest Games . My view of the implications of game and festivity in The Canterbury Tales differs radically from Lindahl's.

In its monumental circularity and the unobstructed view it provides for its occupants, this theater recalls the celestial Rose that, as we saw above, is also a kind of colosseum from which the blessed can view the events in the world below. Both structures are obviously classical, that is, Roman, in inspiration and represent a microcosm of the human society in each poem.^[29] Each structure also creates the idea of a "world theater" along the lines of the classical epic discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In the Comedy, as we have already seen, it is the whole of human history that is played out before the eyes of the elect, who themselves at one time were players on the world's stage. In the Knight's Tale the world theater has the much more limited function of being the staging ground for an aristocratic tournament "For love and for encrees of chivalrye" (2184) and for the benefit of the Athenian populace. Just as God the Prime Mover is above the Rose, so the gods are above Theseus's amphitheater,^[30] and, more important, three of the principal gods have temples dedicated to them on the periphery of the amphitheater.

Rose and amphitheater, then, define the respective worlds of their poems, and I suggest that the parallels and contrasts between the two are sufficiently striking to raise the possibility that the Knight's Tale is in a number of ways an antithesis to the Comedy . In order to explain what I mean by this, I must digress for a moment and refer the reader to Francis P. Pickering's important but neglected thesis, first published in 1967,^[31] that all medieval narrative, whether historical or fictional, involved a choice between two models: an Augustinian, the history of the City of God on earth, and a Boethian, also Christian in spirit, yet essentially secular and dynastic. The premises of the Augustinian model include these:

That history began with the Creation, and that from the Fall of the Angels until beyond the Day of Judgment it is foreordained by the triune Godhead. God's providence is responsible for the course of all that happens in time. But the only events which ever become history within this system are those which the Church elects to remember, and on which it has passed its verdict. The memorable history of the world since Christ's Ascension is Church history, sub specie aeternitatis it is "Heilsgeschichte." In respect of datable events, there are for instance the Church's Councils and the victories of the

[29] On the rose in Paradiso XXXIII as a microcosm of the family of man—the "society" of the Comedy —see Joan Ferrante, The Political Vision, p. 306f.

[30] Venus's tears fall into the lists when she sees that her knight Palamon has been captured (2663–67).

[31] Francis P. Pickering, Augustinus oder Boethius ?

faith itself over the heathen. There are the res gestae of those heroes which the Church canonised or declared martyrs.^[32]

In this scheme, furthermore, Fortune is "little more than a talisman, of pagan Rome, now fallen and superseded by the Rome of Peter and Paul" (p. 177). The Boethian model, contrariwise, focuses precisely on the problems posed by a seemingly arbitrary Fortune and in so doing is able to deal with just the secular, dynastic history that Augustine in the City of God dismisses as irrelevant. But even though Boethius's focus is on the problematic, confused realm of secular history dominated by Fortune, he still finds in it a divine order as expressed by this descending "hierarchy of instances": God and his Providence ; the Fate of all temporal things and beings—including man; Fortune ; the Free Will of Man . And it is Pickering's contention that the Boethian model, derived from the Consolation of Philosophy, "was known to every medieval author as being the only one available for works of non-theological content, for the rational interpretation of 'real' history . . . for the composition and interpretation of all kinds of fictions " (p. 181f.)

Pickering's thesis, with whose general applicability I am not here concerned, clarifies two fundamental points about the Knight. First, in the General Prologue he sees himself as part of the Augustinian paradigm of history, as a fighter for "the victories of the faith over the heathen," rather than for some spiritually ambiguous dynastic cause. Though he may have too much humility to present himself as a hero of Heilsgeschichte, he probably looks upon the "felaweshipe" of the Teutonic order, with which he banqueted and fought against the Russian infidels (I.52–55), the way the Arthurian Grail knights saw themselves, namely, as a portion of the City of God on earth.^[33] Second, as tale-teller, the Knight makes precisely the kind of choice Pickering says a medieval author must make. His tale is "Boethian" in the sense that its pagan characters have, aside from their gods,

[32] Francis P. Pickering, Literature and Art in the Middle Ages, p. 174.

[33] Ibid., p. 193, speaking of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Grail community; see also Jean Frappier, "Le Graal et la Chevalerie." The religious meaning of "Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre" (I.47) thus not only is plausible on historical grounds—the Knight is not connected with any campaigns in France—but would also fit in with his self-interpretation. Certain battles in which the Knight took part were by no means unambiguous; on this see C. Mitchell, "The Worthiness of Chaucer's Knight," and Terry Jones, Chaucer's Knight . It could hardly be otherwise, and Chaucer may have expected his knowledgeable readers to be aware of complexities the Knight would not acknowledge.

only a philosophy outside the Christian theological framework to guide and console them.^[34] And this accounts for the Knight's refusal to tell where Arcite's soul went upon his death:

     His spirit chaunged hous and wente ther
As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher.
Therfore I stynte, I nam no divinistre;
Of soules fynde I nat in this registre,
Ne me ne list thilke opinions to telle
Of hem, though that they writen wher they dwelle.
                                                                         (2809–14)

Surely Dante is among those whose opinions the Knight prefers to ignore,^[35] since his Comedy is always ready to raise doctrinal difficulties, especially regarding pagans, and to insist on the vital role that pagans play within a Christian framework of history. The Knight's Tale points entirely in the opposite direction, and the amphitheater is a perfect emblem of this opposition. Its temples and the gods enshrined in them define, as we have seen, the limits of the tale's pagan world. The Knight is intent on keeping the pagan world neatly framed and apart from his own.

The idea of history, furthermore, that is enacted in his theater differs fundamentally from the Comedy 's. In the latter, there are no privileged performers: all, high or low, Christian, Jew, or pagan, can be heroes or villains. In the Knight's Tale, on the contrary, the only players who count are aristocrats: others may have supporting roles, but for the most part they merely make up the multitude and serve as spectators for the aristocratic spectacle. And from the Knight's point of view this is a very consciously staged, ritualistic spectacle

[34] This is a tricky point. Boethius was of course a Christian, and the Consolation presumably implies, in the final analysis, something very close to the Augustinian scheme of providential history. Notoriously, however, the Consolation also avoids any overtly Christian references, so that it could be used as representing "pagan" philosophy. Pickering cites Konrad's German adaptation (ca. 1170) of the Chanson de Roland as an example of a work in which Boethianism is equated with pagan wisdom: "In any well-organized work of Augustinian conception, the philosophy attributed to the heathen may be based on the best secular philosophy available, in Boethius"; see "Historical Thought and Moral Codes in Medieval Epic," in H. Scholler, ed., The Epic in Medieval Society, p. 15.

[35] By way of contrast to the Knight's professed ignorance about the fate of pagans after death, his immediate source, the Teseida, describes Arcite's ascent to the eighth sphere (an episode Chaucer had used in his other "pagan" epic, the Troilus [1807ff.; cf. Tes . XI.1–3]).

whose rules are well defined and strictly enforced. For all that, however, it involves an unpredictable, ominous element; indeed, an atmosphere of potential disaster hovers over the entire theater.

Its source is the gods, and their menace is portrayed in the temples on the periphery of the amphitheater. These temple interiors with their frequently sinister statues and murals have some of the atmosphere as well as some fairly specific echoes of Dante's Inferno . Accordingly, when the Knight, in describing the temples, suddenly resorts to the formula "Ther saugh I"—a frequent formula in the Comedy^[36] —eight times in short succession (1995; cf. 2005, 2011, 2017, 2056, 2065, 2067, 2073), he takes on the air of a Dantean tourist in hell, with this difference: he does not need to descend to the otherworld, since as far as he is concerned hell is already where the pagan gods are. A further difference from Dante's pilgrim is that the Knight's gaze is entirely impassive; it merely registers and remains wholly unmoved by the horror or absurdity of what it beholds.

This unemotional, nonempathetic spectatorship characterizes, of course, the old warrior's entire attitude toward the world of his tale. He is clearly determined to keep it at a distance from himself, in part, at least, because of a suspicion of the theater—of which the temples are an integral part—and its potentially devastating effect upon the unguarded viewer. We are, in other words, in the intellectual and spiritual ambience of Tertullian and other early Christian polemicists who regarded the theater as an essentially pagan institution diabolic in origin.^[37] In the City of God Augustine views it, in

[36] Dante's oft-repeated vidi, vid'io is of course not unique to the Inferno, but in conjunction with the various echoes of that canticle in the entire passage, there can be little doubt that, as he catalogues the imagery of the temples, the Knight imagines himself in a Dantean hell, especially in the temple of Mars; cf., e.g., the forest painted on the wall (1975ff.), clearly inspired by the forest of suicides in Inferno XIII. Boccaccio is the intermediary here, of course; Boitani has pointed out various echoes of the Inferno in the Teseida, especially where the gods are concerned: see Chaucer and Boccaccio, pp. 38ff. The Knight's formula replaces vide(vi) in the Teseida VII (32ff.), where it is used for the personified prayers to Mars and Venus. As epic formula it recalls Aeneas's eyewitness account of the destruction of Troy (Aen . II, 499, 501), on which see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, p. 175.

[37] On Tertullian, see n. 19 above. His spirit is alive in Chaucer's time and place, 19, in Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, pp. 97ff. The Knight would have found plenty of hints of such an antitheatrical attitude in his source, the Teseida, which, it has been suggested, reflects Boccaccio's antiquarian interests in pre-Christian Rome even as the plot points to a Christian bias against the ancient Roman theater. The gods' intervention leading to Arcite's death has ampleprecedent in Latin epic, but as James H. McGregor has pointed out, the fact that it takes place, in demonic form, during a ludus in the theater, shows the influence of those who, like Tertullian, saw the theater as dedicated to the worship of demons. See James H. McGregor, "Boccaccio's Athenian Theatre."

the words of one modern authority, as "a false temple, or antitemple, standing in mocking antithesis to the true temple, . . . inhabited by demons . . . and dedicated to the overthrow of humanity."^[38]

Against this threat, the Knight—whose Augustinianism we have discussed—must fortify himself with a coldly ironic stare, especially when the theater literally fulfills its demonic role, at Saturn's instigation, as a "furie infernal" bursts from the ground and causes Arcite's fatal fall from his horse.^[39] This sudden peripeteia, followed by Arcite's final illness, his moving speech of farewell to Palamon and Emily (2765–97), his death and the violent grief of young and old (2817)—all this fits into the pattern of tragedy to be examined in the next chapter, and we can amplify the comments made there about the Knight's interruption of the Monk's tragedies. For it is clear that even Arcite's extremely simple "tragedy" is anathema to the Knight:^[40] whenever his own voice enters by way of comment, it is to deflate the aura of tragedy and to demonstrate his own utter emotional detachment.^[41]

This, the Knight seems to say, is the only way of dealing with the spectacle of pagan theater, or, in the larger perspective, of history. One must contemplate it with the calm objectivity of one who is totally uninvolved because as a Christian he knows himself to be free of the demonic forces that, in the guise of the gods, can still enthrall the pagan soul . But to know oneself free of them is of course not to say that they cannot once more take possession of one's soul, and it is therefore imperative to remain vigilant against that eventuality.

For all that the Knight attempts to seal off the world of his tale from any contact with his own experience, it is evident that what I have described as the spectacle of pagan history is in essence the

[38] Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, p. 63f.

[39] For the source in the Teseida of this episode, see McGregor, "Boccaccio's Athenian Theatre."

[40] Arcite lacks even the rudimentary tragic stature attributable to most of the protagonists in the Monk's Tale.

[41] Cf. 2743–61 (the clinical details of Arcite's fatal illness); 2809–16 (the account of his death): 2820–26, 2835–36 (humorous, flippant comments on grieving women).

Knight's vision of profane, secular history, the history that is distinct from Augustinian Heilsgeschichte, the struggle of the City of God in time. Profane history, in other words, is still, at bottom, demonic, or at least one where the "furie infernal" may erupt at any moment. In the face of that threat, however, the situation is not completely hopeless. There is one character capable, not of preventing the furies, but of controlling them. That is of course Theseus. Like the Knight, Theseus refuses to be drawn into the "tragedy" of Arcite's death. Instead, he proceeds by all means at his command to regain control of the "theater" that, as ruler of Athens, he directs and of which he is the center. Until the accident, Arcite and the tournament were part of this political "theater," and Theseus's chief concern now is to make them once again a part of it. So that the accident will not dampen the cheer of his guests (2703), therefore, he organizes allnight revels (2715ff.), decrees that all rancor and envy must stop (2731f.), gives gifts, holds a three-day feast, and then conveys the royal guests out of town (2735ff.). After the death, he is quickly comforted by his father's platitudes (2837) and loses no time in organizing the funeral pyre (2853ff.). While laying out the body, it appears for a moment as though he succumbs to the emotion of the occasion:

He leyde hym, bare the visage, on the beere;
Therwith he weep that pitee was to heere.
And for the peple sholde seen hym alle,
Whan it was day, he broghte hym to the halle,
That roreth of the criyng and the soun.
                                                                 (2877–81)

But stripped of their modern punctuation (in this case the period after 2878),^[42] the lines more than hint at the theatricality of Theseus's tears.

It is difficult indeed to determine what attitude the Knight has

[42] A parallel ambiguity occurs a little later in the Knight's Tale:

By processe and by lengthe of certeyn yeres,
Al stynted is the moornynge and the teres
Of Grekes, by oon general assent.
Thanne semed me ther was a parlement
At Atthenes . . .
                                                          (2967–71)

Some modern editors put a period after "teres," presumably to avoid the obvious implication that all the tears shed for Arcite could be considered theatrical.

to this kind of political theater. We may smile at Theseus's unwavering attention to its ceremonial niceties and its thinly veiled opportunism, as when he summons Palamon, who is still in mourning and has no inkling of what is going on (2977–78), to the Athenian parliament, "To have with certein contrees alliaunce, / And have fully of Thebans obeisaunce" (2973–74), by having him marry Emily. And we may smile at his theatrical posturing before delivering his oration to the same parliament (2981–86). But it does appear that Theseus, as the one who orchestrates the theater of which he is himself the principal focus, is a model for the Knight in his undertaking to master his narrative and his audience.

The first part of this undertaking need not concern us in any detail, since it has been discussed by a number of commentators. I am referring to the deliberate, rhetorically self-conscious ways in which the Knight reduces the Teseida not only in length but also, especially, in the vitality and dramatic autonomy of its characters.^[43] Starting with his literal and symbolic conquest of "al the regne of Femenye" (866), the Knight's Theseus achieves an analogous dominance over the people around him. The second part of the Knight's undertaking, the mastery of his audience, has also received ample critical attention, especially his excessive use of occupatio, the rhetorical ploy of describing something while in the act of saying that one will not describe it. The many occasions when the Knight interrupts his narrative to address the pilgrims directly likewise demonstrate his desire, mingled with an ironic condescension, to hold their attention.^[44] It is here that the Knight's ambiguous attitude to the pilgrim audience suddenly mirrors that of Theseus toward the Athenian crowd. This crowd is waiting outside the ducal palace for a proclamation while Theseus is "at a window set, / Arrayed right as he were a god in trone" (2529–30). Below, meanwhile, "an heraud on a scaffold made an "Oo" / Til al the noyse of the peple was ydo" (2533–34), and then delivers Theseus's message. This brief scene is fleetingly recapitulated by the Knight, 140 lines later, in his own role as narrator. After he has described the crowd's frenzied reaction to Arcite's victory:

[43] For a detailed recent discussion of what the Knight—or Chaucer—has done with his Boccaccian source, see Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio ; Boitani also comments on the flatness of the Knight's characters.

[44] Most notably at lines 885–92, 1347–54, 1520–24, 1531–39, 1623–26, 1663–72, 2110–16, 2206–8, 2284–88, 2447–49, 2681–82, 2811–14.

Anon ther is a noyse of peple bigonne
For joye of this, so loude and heighe withalle
It seemed that the lystes sholde falle
                                                                (2660–62)

he goes on to admonish his own audience:

But herkneth me, and stynteth noyse a lite,
Which a myracle ther bifel anon.
                                                            (2674–75)

His words insinuate an ironic equation between the pilgrims and the Athenian crowd; both have the characteristics that make a theater audience so objectionable: incessant noisiness, readiness to be swayed by emotion, addiction to spectacle and the spectacular ("Which a miracle"!). But beyond these ironies there is also, surely, more than a slight hint of a connection between the Knight's exhibitionism as a performer and Theseus's near-blasphemous self-elevation.

The scene in which the Miller, over the objections of the Host, insists on his right to speak next, has been discussed earlier. Nonetheless, I want to refer to it yet again to underline how perfectly it exemplifies a kind of theater diametrically opposed to the Knight's, and one, furthermore, that will be fully exemplified by the Miller's own tale. In this theater, first of all, there are no performers who are elevated above all the other performers. By the same token, no performer is in complete control of the performance—first, because each performer has a chance to be at center stage and no role is absolutely fixed, and second, because there is no radical separation between performers and spectators, so that spectators can at any moment become a part of the performance.

It is not hard to imagine the Knight reacting to the Miller's intrusion into the Host's protocol as an example of "the cherles rebellyng" (2459), a matter for which, in the Knight's Tale, Saturn takes credit. "The multitude," as a recent observer of Western society might put it, though the Miller is of course nothing like Ortega's "mass man."^[45] Technically, to be sure, "the Millere is a cherle, ye know wel this" (3182) and "told his cherles tale" (3169); but the

[45] "The multitude," writes Ortega, "has suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society. Before, if it existed, it passed unnoticed, occupying the background of the social stage; now it has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character" (Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, p. 8).

poet-narrator's mock-apology on this point is, rather, a way of reinforcing the inclusiveness of the pilgrims' theater, its readiness to yield center stage to all, aristocrats, churls, and others. What the narrator does not say, and does not need to say, is that in "quiting" the Knight's Tale the "churl" initiates a transformation of social and literary values that marks The Canterbury Tales as a whole.

The characters of the Miller's Tale reflect his approach to theater as play, a form of inspired improvisation in which the performer seeks to engage the audience's active participation in the performance. Each of the characters at one point or another in the tale occupies center stage, making us see the world through his or her eyes. In addition, the characters represent a variety of social classes, from the "knave" Robin to the parish clerk Absolon, and the carpenter, John, who for all that he is "a riche gnof" (3188), knows himself inferior to the "poure scoler" Nicholas: "What! thynk on God, as we doon, men that swynke" (3490).

The lowly shot-window—it only reaches up to Absolon's chest (3696)—of the carpenter's house, might be said to function as "center stage" in the theater of the Miller's Tale. Early in the tale, indeed, when Absolon stations himself by this window to serenade Alison (3695), who is in bed with her husband, it functions rather like the window in the Knight's Tale at which we saw Theseus "set, / Arrayed right as he were a god in trone": it allows communication between performer and audience even as it establishes a discreet barrier between them. Later, however, on the fateful night when Absolon reappears at the window to beg a kiss, it still frames the performers like any proscenium arch, but now it also opens up to allow direct contact between the characters, who are, interchangeably, performers and audience. And here, at center stage, the three principals of the Miller's Tale take turns in making an entrance, as it were, and delivering a statement in truly theatrical fashion, that is, not just with words but also by physical gesture and action.

Alison's "statement" in sticking her rear out the window is clear enough, though we might question whether it is aimed just at the "romantic" Absolon or, ultimately, at all men and their unceasing quest for "taille" (VII.416). Absolon's response to her with the "hoote kultour" (3776) would seem to signify all the repressed anger men feel toward women and which, in the Knight's Tale, they express in violence toward the rivals for the object of their desire. Nicholas's statement, finally, seems akin to that of the demon Barbariccia in

Inferno XXI, who "had made a trumpet of his ass," ("avea del cul fatto trombetta," 139); Singleton's comment on the conduct of the other demons in the preceding lines seems perfectly apt for Barbariccia's fart as well: a gesture, he calls it, "of complicity and delight at the prospect of the adventure ahead, in which the devils are going to trick Virgil and Dante."^[46] Only a slight change in the wording is needed to fit this to the demonic Nicholas's performance at the window. He is expressing his complicity and delight at the apparently successful adventure in which he and Alison tricked the old carpenter and Absolon. There is further reason to suspect the invisible presence, in this scene, of Dante's demon, whose name means "curly beard": after planting his kiss Absolon "thoughte it was amys, / For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd" (3736–37), and Nicholas, who cannot very well have heard Absolon's unspoken reflection, exclaims "A berd! a berd! . . . / By Goddes corpus, this goth faire and weel" (3742–43).

Nicholas is "demonic" in his apparent knowledge of the unspoken (and, we might add, of the unseen), and in the more precise sense of his systematic, meticulous way of inverting all the norms, sacred and profane, of his society. As such, he reflects an aspect of the Miller especially prominent in the General Prologue portrait, the physical features that make him like an embodiment of the infernal, demonic side of the mystery plays—like Noah's Flood—to which his tale alludes. His mouth is a virtual hell-mouth, traditionally represented by "a greet forneys" (I.559) in the mysteries. The various animal associations of his facial features suggest the animal masks worn by the "demons" in the mysteries. By his appearance, in other words, the Miller seems to stand for the comically profane and grotesque elements of the mystery plays that oppose and burlesque the sacred event, "Goddes pryvetee."^[47] As a sideshow performer, too, the Miller comes to seem a comic subverter of social norms: at least his wrestling, his lifting doors off their hinges or breaking them down with his head, and his playing the "goliardeys" can easily be imagined as so many ways of exposing the pryvetee usually hidden under masks and conventions or kept behind locked doors.

[46] There the other demons press their tongues between their teeth "as signal for their leader Barbariccia" (138: "verso lor duca, per cenno"). Singleton's comment is taken from the Commentary on the Inferno, p. 377.

[47] See the excellent articles by Margery Morgan, "'High Fraud': Paradox and Double-Plot in the English Shepherds' Plays," and Linda E. Marshall, "Sacral Parody in the Secunda Pastorum ."

In the perspective of the Miller and his tale the demonic is of course not perceived or felt as such, but is, rather, considered part of the natural order or course of things. Thus, what in the Knight's Tale is feared as a potential source of disaster—the spontaneous, the accidental, the erotic, like the sudden glance of a woman—is in the Miller's Tale simply a facet of the unaccountable plenitude of creation. Indeed, as the scenes at the shot-window demonstrate, it is precisely the fortuitous and seemingly demonic that cause poetic justice to prevail:^[48] Nicholas and carpenter John are punished for their respective presumptions, and Alison is spared, since, as the Miller asserts in his prologue, a wife is an intimate part of "Goddes pryvetee" (3164).^[49] Repudiating the Knight's opposition between Augustinian and Boethian accounts of the way of the world, the Miller remains true to the premises of the mystery cycles to which he owes much of his own being and presents in his tale a Boethian fortune working an apparently providential justice.

The Miller's theatrical critique of the Knight's Tale begins with a reduction of the latter's monumental political theater to the intimate dimensions of the carpenter's household, where literally everyone can play. The broader setting of the Miller's Tale suggests a comic translatio studii but also the reduction of the fabled center of ancient civilization to contemporary small-town Oxford with its humble "street-theater," whose spirit rules the tale. Of the various specific allusions to the mystery plays in the Miller's Tale the following is particularly significant because it is also one of a number of echoes of the Knight's Tale.^[50] "Somtyme, to shewe his lightnesse and maistrye," Absolon "pleyeth Herodes upon a scaffold hye " (3383–84; my italics), recalling the moment when "an heraud on a scaffold made an 'Oo!'" (2533) to silence the Athenian crowd. The juxta-position of these two scaffolds, one belonging to the homely "epic theater" (in the Brechtian sense!) of the mysteries, the other to the

[48] Is there a special connection between farting and the demonic? The example of Luther would suggest there is. And at the end of the Summoner's Tale the lord calls farmer Thomas a "demonyak" (III.2240) for having thought of the problem of fart-distribution. I assume the lord alleges the inspiration of the devil not just for the problem in "ars-metrik" (2222).

[49] As center of attraction, Alison also illustrates the democracy of sexual desire: "She was a prymerole, piggesnye, / For any lord to leggen in his bedde, / Or yet for any good yeman for to wedde" (3268–70).

[50] The most outrageous of these is "Allone, withouten any compaignye," l. 2779 in the Knight's Tale, l. 3204 in the Miller's.

"political theater" of classical epic, defines the theatrical distance between the respective tales. And of course this is a matter, not just of the scaffolds, but also of acting styles and rapport with the audience. Playing the ranting tyrant of the mysteries, Absolon is like the "heraud" who is Theseus's mouthpiece, but his audience knows from his manner of playing the part—made more absurd, surely, by his high-pitched voice^[51] —what kind of character he represents, something the Athenian audience could scarcely infer from the herald's decorous "Oo!" In the same vein, furthermore, Absolon's eagerness to impress his audience with his lightnesse and maistrye as an actor sums up in one phrase the paradoxical ambitions of the small-town dandy and the Athenian ruler.

Absolon's desire to demonstrate maistrye also serves broadly as a parody of the Knight's preoccupation with various kinds of mastery in his tale, his evident desire to impose himself on his audience,^[52] his covert identification with Theseus, who so effectively dominates the world of the tale. And it is here that the Miller's Tale once again presents a startling contrast, for the Miller includes himself in his tale quite overtly and as a strictly marginal figure. I am referring to his namesake and mirror image, carpenter John's servant, Robin, "a strong carl for the nones," who lifts the door of Nicholas's room off its hinges. We already know the Miller's name from the Prologue to his tale (3129), and in the General Prologue we learned that the Miller is a "stout carl for the nones" for whom there "was no dore that he nolde heve of harre, / Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed" (545, 550–51). Assuming the Robin in the tale is a deliberate self-portrait, however, the Miller obviously sees himself in a rather different way from the brash figure presented in the General Prologue. This Robin is a humble "knave" who is himself somewhat of a dupe as he kneels outside Nicholas's door:

An hole he foond, ful lowe upon a bord,
Ther as the cat was wont in for to crepe,
And at that hole he looked in ful depe.
                                                       (3440–42)

[51] See l. 3332, "Therto [i.e., to a rubible or fiddle] he song some tyme a loud quynyble." On the figure of Herod, see Roscoe E. Parker, "The Reputation of Herod in Early English Literature."

[52] In addition to his use of occupatio, there are his numerous addresses to the audience, most notably at lines 885–92, 1347–54, 1520–24, 1531–39, 1623–26, 1663–72, 2110–16, 2284–88, 2447–49, 2681–82, 2811–14.

His position is faintly anticipatory of Absolon's later at the window, and however deep he looks he sees only what Nicholas wants him to see. Later, speaking to the carpenter, Nicholas singles out Robin and the maid as among those excluded from the divine scheme of salvation:

But Robyn may nat wite of this, thy knave,
Ne eek thy mayde Gille I may nat save;
Axe nat why, for though thou aske me,
I wol nat tellen Goddes pryvetee.
                                                            (3555–58)

Of course, it is just this humble pair who are saved, at least from the comic catastrophe at the carpenter's house, because by some irrational scruple John thinks to save them from the flood by sending them off to London on an errand (3630–31). It may be no more than a coincidence that the maid and Noah's wife in the Towneley cycle are both named Gill.^[53] In any case, it seems entirely congruent with the spirit of the Miller's Tale to suggest that as this lowly pair trudge off to London we subliminally perceive them as a latter-day Mr. and Mrs. Noah embodying the fate of mankind.

For all its marginality, then, the figure of Robin in the Miller's Tale is of wide-ranging significance. It suggests the potentially multiple roles of the tale-teller as participant and spectator in his own tale. A final question concerns the contrast between this Robin, the apparent innocent, and Robin the extroverted, aggressive, crude "janglere" who tells the tale. Despite their outward similarities, are these not different, even antithetical characters? In a sense, that is certainly undeniable, yet I argue that they also belong together, that it is in fact the triumph of the theatrical conception of character that it can yoke apparently antithetical elements together in a believable union.^[54]

[53] See Processus Noe cum Filiis, l. 219 and note, in A. C. Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle

[54] It should be clear that this is not a question of different perspectives on the Miller: for instance, the Miller's sense of himself as member of a despised profession, a virtual outsider in his society, over against the society's view of him as a crude intruder. On the low status of the medieval miller, see G. F. Jones, "Chaucer and the Medieval Miller," p. 11. This point seems to be largely substantiated by the voluminous study of the miller in history by Richard Bennett and John Elton, History of Corn Milling . The authors observe that the medieval miller "was little, if at all, raised above the lowly status of the slave who sat behind the mill of Pharaoh" (p. 106f.). For a recent discussion of the social and economic status of Chaucer's Miller, whichcomes to slightly different conclusions while admitting that given the present state of historical research the matter cannot be resolved, see Lee Patterson, "'No man his reson herde'"; see particularly p. 467 and p. 490, n. 25. Patterson makes, I think, an important point in noting that millers took part in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (467ff.). The connection, incidentally, between mystery plays and the Miller and his tale becomes quite ironic if Lydgate's poem "Against Millers and Bakers" (cited by Jones, p. 11) is correct in asserting that millers had no guilds—and thus presumably could not perform in the mysteries. Bennett and Elton, p. 114f., do record an instance of a guild of millers in York in the fourteenth century, but this guild had no hall of its own and seems to have been an exceptional case.

Virtually from his first appearance on the road to Canterbury we see the two Robins in the figure of the Miller. When the Knight has finished his tale and the Host exclaims, "trewely, the game is wel bigonne" (3117), the Miller immediately seizes upon the theatrical implications of his words and

     in Pilates vois he gan to crye,
And swoor, "By armes, and by blood and bones,
I kan a noble tale for the nones,
With which I wol now quite the Knyghtes tale."
                                                                     (3122–27)

The Miller here reenacts that union of game-playing and theater that V. A. Kolve's book on medieval drama has described so felicitously:

When the drama [of the Church] moved into the streets and the market place, into a milieu already the home of men's playing and games, it was redefined as game and allowed to exploit fully its nonearnest, gratuitous nature. . . . It was a special kind of game . . . in which a peasant is made a king or knight, and after it is over becomes once again a peasant.^[55]

The Host has not yet caught on to the Miller's idea of game and attempts to stop him on the grounds of social precedence. But when the Miller threatens to "go my wey," the Host yields the stage to him: "Tel on, a devel wey! / Thou art a fool; thy wit is overcome" (3134–35). If we now expect "a prototype of the traditional raging, frothing, pompous Pilate," as K. B. Harder has characterized him, we will be disappointed.^[56] The "janglere and goliardeys" eager to

[55] V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, p. 19.

[56] K. B. Harder, "Chaucer's Use of the Mystery Plays in the Miller's Tale, " p. 194. This is "Robyn the rybadour" with his "rusty wordes," whom Langland's Truth would expunge from the book of the living along with whores, dice-players, and "folk of that ordre": cf. W. W. Skeat, ed., Piers the Plowman, vol. 1, C. Passus, ll. 73–79. In the Roman de la Rose, ed. E. Langlois, vol. 3 (Paris, 1921), l. 12129, Robin(s) is the name of the traditional conductor of village dances; see note on p. 238 of this edition.

impress with his "lightnesse and maistrye" is only one side of the Miller.

Or rather, the Miller has his lightness as well as his maistrye . I am referring to the side of him that is humorous, humble, and reasonable and able to articulate an astonishingly enlightened view of marriage, as witness his diplomatic words to the angry Reeve. "Leve brother Osewold," he tells him,

Who hath no wyf, he is no cokewold.
But I sey nat therfore that thou art oon;
Ther been ful goode wyves many oon,
And evere a thousand goode ayeyns oon badde.
That knowestow wel thyself, but if thou madde.
Why artow angry with my tale now?
I have a wyf, pardee, as wel as thow;
Yet nolde I, for the oxen in my plogh,
Take upon me moore than ynogh,
As demen of myself that I were oon;
I wol bileve wel that I am noon.
An housbonde shal nat been inquisityf
Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf.
So he may fynde Goddes foyson there,
Of the remenant nedeth nat enquere.
                                                                      (3151–66)

I have quoted the entire speech because its irreverent, slightly blasphemous banter can cause us to overlook just how extraordinary it really is. The idea of marriage it implies, as the joke of the last four lines underscores, accords the wife her full measure of independence, and—once we get beyond the purely sexual equation^[57] —godlike mystery. Marriage, in other words, is not like the yoking together of two oxen before a plow, but a union of free persons respecting the otherness of the other.

Even if the sentiment is not considered startling in itself, it surely is coming from the Miller, to the point that it forces us to revise the impression we have developed of him up to now. And for the purposes of this revision there is perhaps no more appropriate model than the one the Miller presents of marriage as a multiplicity—"Goddes foyson"—united into one without losing the heterogeneity of its constituent parts. In the General Prologue portrait these heterogeneous elements take on a self-proliferating, grotesque life of

[57] See Bernard F. Huppé's interesting analysis of this "remarkable piece of blasphemous wordplay" in A Reading of the Canterbury Tales, p. 78.

their own, so that it is as though we were seeing multiple exposures of the Miller at once. Using his head to break down a door (551), he becomes the ram that is also his as a prize in wrestling (548). The wart on the tip of his nose with its hairs "reed as the brustles of a sowes erys" (556), together with the black and wide nostrils, the large mouth, and the "berd [that] as any sowe or fox was reed" (552), creates the surreal effect of one face superimposed on another. It is not until the final detail, the bagpipe played by the Miller, that the entire portrait stands revealed as one great synecdoche, a mask. Made of a sow's bladder, shaped like a gut and phallus, and classified by Machaut among the "instrumens des hommes bestiaulx,"^[58] it is the Miller's comic double, another example of his self-multiplication. But the bagpipe makes clear that the Miller's portrait is not just another Geryonic image.^[59] Like a theatrical mask, it is hollow and receives its animation from a source not its own but behind and inside it: "A baggepipe wel koude he blowe and sowne, / And therwithal he broghte us out of towne" (565–66). That blowing and sounding is what transforms a mere image into a "living" character, just as Zephirus's "sweete breeth" (5) brings to life the springtime landscape and arouses folk, who suddenly "longen . . . to goon on pilgrimages" (12).

In his comic apology before he starts his tale, the Miller speaks as one who is aware of himself as wind instrument and mask, whose sound is not entirely his own:

"Now herkneth," quod the Millere, "alle and some!
But first I make a protestacioun
That I am dronke; I knowe it by my soun;
And therfore if that I mysspeke or seye,
Wyte it the ale of Southwerk, I you preye."
                                                                           (3136–40)

[58] Cited by G. F. Jones, "Wittenwiler's Becki and the Medieval Bagpipe," p. 213. For further information on medieval bagpipes, see E. A. Block, "Chaucer's Millers and Their Bagpipes"; also D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer, index, s.v.; and, finally, the excellent article on bagpipes and music in Shakespeare by L. J. Ross, "Shakespeare's 'Dull Clown' and Symbolic Music."

[59] Cf. K. L. Scott, "Sow-and-Bagpipe Imagery in the Miller's Portrait." Scott's view of the Miller is uncharitably moralistic. I share her prejudice against bagpipes but do not hear the Miller's voice as a porcine "squawl" (p. 290). Robert Boenig, "The Miller's Bagpipe," suggests that the bagpipe was a courtly instrument more appropriate to the Knight than to the Miller; though not altogether convincing, the argument suits my point about the Miller's bagpipe.

The sound, then, of his bagpipe that "broghte us out of towne" is like the sound of his voice in that its source is ultimately mysterious, coming from without and within. And it is by way of these sounds issuing from bagpipe and mask that Chaucer sets out to recover, I believe, the original theatrical idea of the human person expressed in the presumed etymology of persona as per-sonare (or even per-se-sonare ), "to sound through oneself," which was familiar during the medieval centuries especially because it was cited over and over from Boethius's influential tract On the Dual Nature and One Person of Christ :

Wherefore if Person belongs to substances alone, and these rational, and if every nature is a substance, existing not in universals but in individuals, we have found the definition of Person, viz.: "The individual substance of a rational nature." Now by this definition we Latins have described what the Greeks call hupostasis . For the word person seems to be borrowed from a different source, namely from the masks which in comedies and tragedies used to signify the different subjects of representation. Now persona "mask" is derived from personare, with a circumflex on the penultimate. But if the accent is put on the antepenultimate the word will clearly be seen to come from sonus "sound," and for this reason, that the hollow mask necessarily produces a larger sound. The Greeks, too, call these masks prosopa^[*] from the fact that they are placed over the face and conceal the countenance from the spectator: para tou pros tous opas^[*] tithesthai . But since, as we have said, it was by the masks they put on that actors played the different characters represented in a tragedy or comedy—Hecuba or Medea or Simon or Chremes,—so also all other men who could be recognized by their several characteristics were designated by the Latins with the term persona and by the Greeks with prosopa .^[60]

The etymology that Boethius gives is not connected, so far as one can see, with his definition of person as "the individual substance of a rational nature." It seems to be there, rather, to indicate what his philosophical formula eliminates or replaces: a theatrical conception of person as a mysterious matter of masks and sounds that at once conceal and identify the human individual.

Boethius's abstract, essentially Aristotelian definition is itself one climax of a centuries-long discussion of the concept persona in the

[60] Trans. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand (under the title Contra Eutychen et Nestorium ) in the Loeb ed., Boethius: The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, pp. 85–87. For the influence during the Middle Ages of Boethius's formulation, see, among others, James H. Hoban, The Thomistic Concept of Person and Some of its Social Implications ; Mary H. Marshall, "Boethius' Definition of Persona and Mediaeval Understanding of the Roman Theater.

course of which it would seem the theatrical element is progressively pushed aside in favor of the philosophical.^[61] We can see this happening in Cicero's influential discussion of the subject in Book I of De Officiis —very likely familiar to Dante and Chaucer—where he distinguishes between two personae or "characters" with which, he argues, all of us are endowed (duabus quasi nos a natura indutos esse personis ):

One of these is universal, arising from the fact of our being all alike endowed with reason and with that superiority which lifts us above the brute. From this all morality and propriety are derived, and upon it depends the rational method of ascertaining our duty. The other character is the one that is assigned to individuals in particular. In the matter of physical endowment there are great differences: some, we see, excel in speed for the race, others in strength for wrestling: so in point of personal appearance, some have stateliness, others comeliness. Diversities of mental disposition are greater still.^[62]

Now, there is no question that for Cicero every human being is constituted by or as the interplay of these two personae, the first representing what he calls universa natura with its ethical and rational imperatives, the second propria nostra natura, our individual bent or genius, be it physical, intellectual, or temperamental. Neither persona, in short, exists by itself, and the attempt to give up either one of them is a surrender of our very humanity. But that the idea of the theatrical mask is not far from Cicero's mind is clear from his discussion of the second persona . This, he says, is assigned to us by nature, but then he goes on to say that it is also chosen by the individual:

Every one, therefore, should make a proper estimate of his own natural ability and show himself a critical judge of his own merits and defects; in this respect, we should not let actors display more practical wisdom than we have. They select, not the best plays [fabulas ], but the ones best suited to their talents. Those who rely most upon the quality of their voice take

[61] For an account of Latin persona and its semantic evolution, see Hans Rheinfelder, Das Wort "Persona, " especially the first chapter. Rheinfelder, p. 31, points out that during the Middle Ages the theatrical meanings disappeared from the Romance equivalents of Latin persona —presumably because of Christian hostility to the theater. (Boethius's tract is written in part to refute Nestorius's contention that Christ had both a twofold nature and a twofold person, divine and human.)

[62] Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (London: William Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1913), p. 109. In the last sentence I have silently amended Miller's translation, which confusingly renders animis with "character."

the Epigoni and the Medus; those who place more stress upon the action, choose the Melanippa and the Clytaemnestra; Rupilius, whom I remember, always played in the Antiope, Aesopus rarely in the Ajax. Shall a player have regard to this in choosing his role upon the stage, and a wise man fail to do so in selecting his part in life ?^[63]

Clearly, Cicero's idea of the individual as constituted by the interplay of two personae is in many ways still a theatrical one. Indeed, I think it is enormously suggestive for the interplay of the first two tale-tellers in The Canterbury Tales, who could be said to stand for or lean toward one and the other of the two personae respectively. The Knight tends toward the pole of the universa natura that raises man above the beasts and enables him to discover his moral obligations. Contrariwise, the Miller is close indeed to the second, propria nostra natura, given us by nature and yet, paradoxically, also chosen, precisely as if it were (what it ultimately is) a mask.

By a happy accident, concerning our idea of epic theater, in Cicero's Latin the word for play and story is the same, allowing us once more to envision Knight and Miller as actors choosing the fabula most suited to them (sibi accommodatissimas ). The Knight's, as we have seen, perfectly expresses his urge for domination, control, maistrye, above all, perhaps, in the intellectual sphere. The Miller's, reminding us, in Yeats's terms, of "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor," allows its characters to act out their particular bent, whatever it might be, without passing judgment on them. At this point we also need to remind ourselves, however, that as "plays" the tales are no pure self-expression or self-reflection, but also places, like Dante's three realms, for the encounter of otherness in all its various guises. This means that the pilgrim-performers run the risk, if not of madness and possession, then of a new insight, a change of heart. But these are matters that are left to the reader's intuition. The important point, it seems to me, is that once the interplay between Knight and Miller has been set going, it continues for the rest of the journey.

[63] Italics in the last sentence are mine. Trans. Walter Miller, p. 117. The two additional personae mentioned later by Cicero (p. 116f.) look more like an afterthought than an integral part of his discussion.