Trees and Cuckolds: "The Arabian Nights" and "The Canterbury Tales"
When Chaucer moved to Italy in 1389, he began working on the literary work that would eventually become the quintessential Middle English work. However, The Canterbury Tales are influenced heavily both by the Decameron and The Nights. As Helen Cooper wrote in her analysis of the Tales, Chaucer likely read the Decameron in 1372 during his first envoy to Italy (Cooper 11). Like the Decameron and the Nights, The Canterbury Tales is structured as a frame story. However, the variety of stories in the Tales is much closer to those in the Nights than the Decameron. As Correale and Hamel point out, the storytellers in the Decameron are required to stick to a theme for each of the ten days (22). The Tales have no such constraint, with the various characters telling stories ranging from the bawdy to the noble, much like the Nights.
While Chaucer’s “The Squires Tale” and use of the Ebony Horse almost certainly have direct ancestry from the Nights, one of the best examples of cultural difference comes from comparing Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale” to the Nights’ “The Story of the Simpleton Husband.” Irwin describes the “Merchant’s Tale” as a “bawdy story about the cuckold, the lovers and the pear-tree,” and how it has direct roots in the Middle East (96). Irwin believes Chaucer’s tale may have derived from the Persian Mathnawi Discourses, from sermons by Jalal al-Din al-Rumi—a sufi master from the 13th century—as well as the “Simpleton Husband” (96). When examining the “Simpleton Husband,” it is easy to see the connections.
In the tale, a Cicisbeo—or professed gallant—gives a married woman an ultimatum: “give me possession of thy person and satisfy my need in the presence of thy husband; otherwise I will never again come to thee” (Burton). Not wanting to lose her paramour, the wife brings her “foolish” husband to a picnic, and hides her lover in a Sarddb—an underground vault (Burton; Le Strange 337). She then convinces her husband to climb the tree, during which time the lover comes out and “taking the woman by the legs, [began] shagging her” (Burton). Though the husband sees the act, the wife is able to convince him that it was his own “phantasy.”
This section takes on an interesting religious notion, as Allah remains the primary focus for much of the text. However, after the husband sees the adultery, he stops speaking of Allah, instead turning his attention to supernatural beings. When he decides to depart with his wife, he says that the place “’tis full of Jinn and Marids.” Jinns (or genies) are amoral supernatural beings, much like angels but with free will. By alluding to them, the husband says there is magic afoot. However, the invocation of Marids—the most powerful form of Jinn—takes on a wholly negative meaning, as they are evil spirits.
May climbing the pear tree to see Damian in "The Merchant's Tale"
This supernatural element carries over into “The Merchant’s Tale,” which revolves around a young wife, May, cuckolding her sixty-year-old husband and former knight, January. May’s paramour, the squire Damian, hides in a pear tree after her husband becomes blind, into which May climbs. The story takes on a supernatural element, when the king and queen of Fairyland saw this instance of the Knight’s “owene man shal make hym cokewold” (Benson 2256). They resolve to stop it, giving January back his eyesight, who, upon looking into the tree, is furious at his wife. To save May from harm, the fairy queen intervenes, causing May to reply, “I have yow holpe on bothe youre eyen blinde,” and “God woot, I dide it in ful good entente” (Benson 2370; 2375). January is convinced by May, that what he saw was merely a “strugle” to cure his blindness and they depart happily (2372). The magic element thus allows moral intervention from something other than a strictly divine place.
In these stories, the usual religious themes are conspicuously absent, with the authors using magic to explain how the husbands discover the trysts. By omitting the divisive religious element, the Nights’ original story takes on a neutral element, allowing Chaucer to appropriate it for the moral, rather than religious goal. This moral, which is present in many of the stories derived from the Nights, is “there is no such thing as a faithful woman” (Irwin 99). Boccaccio and Chaucer seem attracted to these stories, possibly because of their mostly non-religious content, but more likely because this misogynistic moral is as resonant among European audiences as it is among Eastern readers.
