The Wife of Bath by Marion Turner

Author:Marion Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

This long sentence begins with three subordinate clauses (whan that …; Of which …; This is to seyn …) before Alison reaches the delayed main clause—‘Than maystow chese.…’ These qualifying clauses increase the readers’ sense of anticipation while also demonstrating Alison’s absolute control over her material and over her interlocutor. They also contribute to our sense of Alison as an exuberant speaker, whose ideas expand, digress, and spill over. In miniature, this structure represents her refusal to be contained, to get to the point and then recede. Her language is also appealing: she continues the metaphor of listening as drinking that she had started in her previous sentence, while also introducing a metaphor for herself, describing herself as a ‘whippe.’ Her diction and versification are also notable, especially her aurally striking juxtaposition of a line made up entirely of ten monosyllabic words with a line containing only four words, one of which has five syllables, another three: ‘And whan that I have toold thee forth my tale / Of tribulacion in mariage.’ Throughout the sentence, her sense of self comes across in her insistence on the first person—‘whan that I have toold’; ‘I am expert’; ‘I shal abroche.’ In that final phrase, she insists on her control of the future, although at this point it cannot be certain—but she stakes her claim to imagine and to determine what will happen. She creates a world through her speech.

Falstaff’s brilliance at world crafting also dominates his speech. Here is an example:

I know not: here he is, and here I yield him, and I beseech your Grace let it be book’d with the rest of this day’s deeds, or by the Lord, I will have it in a particular ballad else, with mine own picture on the top on’t (Coleville kissing my foot), to the which course if I be enforc’d, if you do not all show like gilt twopences to me, and I in the clear sky of fame o’ershine you as much as the full moon doth the cinders of the element (which show like pins’ heads to her), believe not the word of the noble. (2 Henry IV, IV.iii.45–54)

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