from The Canterbury Tales

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Consider this an open challenge: I defy anyone to show me a more raucous, spirited, spicy rant on marriage than the Wife of Bath’s monologue in The Canterbury Tales. We’ve had over six hundred years to improve on Chaucer’s triumphant creation, but it’s never been done. Not even Shakespeare’s shrewish Kate (before her taming) can hold a candle to Chaucer’s Alison. She’s a kind of Mae West of the Middle Ages—loud, lusty, and eminently lovable (though, some might add murderous, as there are suggestions that she killed off her husbands).

In her celebrated Prologue, Dame Alison holds forth on how to get the upper hand in marriage, both in and out of the sack. Her philosophy is simple: women should have complete sovereignty over their men. And her tactics are sure-fire: “Until he paid his ransom to me, I wouldn’t give him my nicety.” Alison’s is a manifesto of a certain pro-sex, pro-power, pro-marriage feminism—on her terms, of course—whose wit and enthusiasm more than make up for its sometimes dubious ethics. After reminding men that “with an empty hand, you may no hawks lure,” she concludes with a prayer on behalf of women for “husbands meek, young, and fresh in the bed.” A final note: I modernized the following passage to remove the difficulties of Chaucer’s medieval English, but you should definitely read it in the original and in its entirety. This is but a taste.

Experience, even if it were no authority
In this world is right enough for me
To speak of the woe that is in marriage.
For, gentlemen, since I was twelve years of age
Thank the Lord who in Heaven does live
Husbands at church I’ve had me five . . .

God bade us to grow and multiply,
And that good teaching well know I! . . .
That wise king Solomon
He had more wives than one
Ah, would that God let me,
Be as oft refreshed as he!
But that gift of God he gave all his wives
Has no man one such that is now alive . . .

To make the perfect student, you must go to many schools,
And to make the perfect work, you must use a lot of tools,
Five husbands later, you know I am no fool!
So bring on the sixth, wherever he may be
For some keep chaste, but they sure are not me! . . .

Though my life you might well want to scold
Well you know that no household
Has every vessel made all of gold.
Some are wood, but have their place,
God loves us all in different ways . . .
So I’ll bestow the flower of my age
In the acts and fruit of marriage.
Tell me, to what other conclusion
Were members made of generation?
And so perfectly were they wrought?
It could not all have been for nought . . .

And why in all the books is it said
That the husband must pay his wife in bed?
And what should he use for the payment
If he doesn’t use his privy instrument? . . .

In wifehood I will use my instrument
As freely as the Lord it hath me sent.
If I hurt anyone, Lord give me sorrow,
My husband will have it both eve and morrow.
When I find one ready to pay the debt
I’ll marry that man, that you can bet.
He’ll be my debtor and my slave
And all his suffering he will have
Upon his flesh, while I’m his wife
I have the power for all my life . . .

I say in true, five husbands I had
And three were good, and two were bad.
The three good men were rich and old
But to the bond of marriage could hardly hold
And you know what I mean, without it told!
And help me God, I laugh when I consider,
How much I asked them to deliver! . . .

Now of my fifth husband I will tell
May God never send his soul to Hell,
And yet he was to me most severe
And made me pay a price so dear
That my ribs will feel it till my dying day.
But in our bed he was fresh and gay
And could me so truly understand
That when he wanted my belle chose at hand
Though he beat my every bone to pain
He could win my love again and again . . .

He was, in truth, but twenty years of age
And I was forty, and lust within me raged! . . .
And truly, as my husbands told me,
I had the nicest little thing that ever might be! . . .
So I followed my inclination
By virtue of my constellation
That made me never want to forgo
Giving my chamber of Venus to a good fellow.

—modernized by Jack Murnighan