The Satyr Play: The Friar’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale

Geoffrey Chaucer’s attack on the clergy in his prologue to The Canterbury Tales takes on new life in the form of the rivalry between the Friar and the Summoner, who each take their turn following the Wife of Bath. In their antagonism towards each other, they both take up a comic story insulting the other’s profession and exaggerating the other’s characteristic faults, neglecting many of the greater aspects of the conversation in exchange for cruder jokes at each other’s expense.

Yet their neglect of the conversation is not wholesale, and their very rivalry is what forces them to include parts of the conversation in their tales.

The Friar has no care for debating the question of marriage or higher learning, remarking to the Wife of Bath regarding her Tale that “us nedeth nat to speken but of game, / and lete auctoritees, on Goddes name, / to proechyng and to scoles of clergye” (Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Fragment D, 1275-7). Rather, the Friar cares only for the game itself, for telling a fun story, and for making fun of the Summoner at the same time. Authorities and the higher learning they represent are not for travelers on the road. Even so the Friar does not wholly ignore the Conversation, nor does his tale lack its own merit. While he does not quote from ancient philosophical or historical sources as the Summoner will, he does follow after the Wife of Bath’s poetic authorities; just as she cites Dante’s Convivio, so the Friar, in his Faustian comic tale of a deal with a demon, compares his demonology to that of Virgil and Dante, saying “for thou shalt, by thyn owene experience, / Konne in a chayer rede of this sentence / Bet than Virgile, while he was on lyve, / Or Dant also” (Fragment D, 1517-20). While it may not be a tale of high chivalry debating matters of high sentence, the Friar’s tale certainly has its own position in the Western canon, following the poetic journeys into the Underworld of classical literature and serving as a recognizable precursor of the American Gothic stories of authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, where dark woods and roads teem with wandering demons in human guises, always ready to strike a deal.

The Friar’s slight deviation from the Conversation does not escape the notice of the Summoner, however, whose response is to “show up” his rival’s folk tale by providing a story composed largely of two well-crafted sermons, one on the vice of gluttony and the importance of fasting, the other on wrath, complete with many classical and biblical citations to prove his points, drawing on a story from Seneca, who had written a treatise on wrath, as well as two stories about the anger of the Persian kings Cambyses and Cyrus, on top of his references direct and indirect to Psalms, Exodus, Proverbs and Wisdom (Fragment D 1885-1903, 1933-4, 1988-1991, 2043-2084). While they are ironic insofar as the friar in the story giving them is doing so only to impress and convince his patrons to give their charity exclusively to him and not to share any of it with other begging friars, the sermons themselves are rhetorically well crafted and signal a return to higher matters in the conversation through the sermon form in which they are delivered and the lofty sources used. They may not contribute much to the larger debates about marriage or fate, but they are in content and form more obviously alike to the greater conversation than the Friar’s Gothic folk tale.Furthermore, while both tales deviate from the proper topics of the conversation, they do not exist in a vacuum. Both feature a challenge or deal with a miraculous resolution, as in the Wife of Bath’s tale, yet interestingly there is a increasing descent into the mundane with each tale, from a deal with a fairy, to a demon, to a king, while the consequence as well downscales in weight and impact, from a fairy-tale happily ever after (material and spiritual well-being), to the damning of a soul (spiritual well-being), to the winning of a new shirt (material well-being). This deviation bears a resemblance to the degrading of the Conversation earlier in the Miller’s, Reeve’s, and fragmentary Cook’s tales, suggesting an intentional pattern in Chaucer’s composition of The Canterbury Tales; in a manner similar to the Greek tragic poets who introduced a comic or satyr play after a trilogy of tragedies, this deviation into the comic acts as a reprieve for the audience, giving them the opportunity to relax and contemplate the heavier matter of the previous tales before the conversation is resumed. So too, then, the Friar’s and Summoner’s comic tales act as a reprieve while also maintaining a few threads of the conversation and furthering Chaucer’s mockery of the failures of the clergy.