ABSTRACT
In the anonymous Tale of Beryn appended to the Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner pays a night-time visit to Kit, a barmaid in the pilgrims’ Canterbury inn. As modern studies of politeness by Penelope Stephen C. Brown and Levinson and of ‘civil inattention’ by Goffman sufficiently demonstrate, such rules are by no means unfamiliar today. In this chapter, the author argues that these are the rules that govern the behaviour of the dreamer in The Book of the Duchess. The problem is one of ‘san et corteisie’, of politeness, and in the face of it Geoffrey Chaucer employs one of the chief strategies of courtesy, that is, indirectness. In their discussion of the language of politeness, Brown and Levinson single out ‘indirect speech acts’. Chaucer’s poem may be described as a very extended indirect speech act. Chaucer wishes to ‘go on record’ with an expression of sympathy, but at the same time he wishes to honour Gaunt’s privacy by ‘being indirect’.
