ABSTRACT
Chaucer’s own Tale of Sir Tkopas, like that of the Monk and unlike those of the Cook and the Squire, breaks off not by apparent accident but by evident design. The Monk’s series of tragedies is interrupted for the tedious-ness of its unrelieved melancholy; Chaucer’s jigging romance is interrupted for its absolute tediousness. As a ‘Canterbury Tale’, the prime offence of Sir Thopas is that it has no narrative interest. It has a story, but that is by no means the same thing. The story, instead of being ingeniously prolonged (again like that of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale), is unbearably diffuse: there is but a half-pennyworth of sack to an intolerable deal of bread.
