Man of Law

Like the others, I found it difficult to locate the Man of Law's Introduction, Prologue and Tale within Chaucer's oeuvre. I kept searching for the sly remark or damning bit of exposition that would unhinge the tale for me, and show the trajectory of Chaucer's intent; I couldn't accept that it was simply a straightforward hagiography. My reflexive search for irony attests to the truth of Spearing's wry and witty observation... "many academics are evidently interested in the quality and nature of Chaucer's poetry only in so far as they can claim that it is intended to be bad" (Spearing 145).

Personally, because the introduction was so incredibly self-referential ("I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn/that Chaucer, though he kan but lewedly/on metres and on rymyng craftily/hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan" l. 46), I found it hard to slow my impulse to give it a postmodern spin. It seemed to me that Chaucer could be parodying and thus parrying the figure that the public would go on to misinterpret him as: the moral Chaucer, given staid and starchy breath in the form of the narrator. Chaucer also litters the tale with little tags (such as "and wel rede I [in my source] he looked bisiliy" 1095) that worry away at the narrative, perpetually bringing its artifice and his authorship back into focus. It seems to be a caricature of "Chaucer the scribe," blindly notating all that follows in his pages.