ABSTRACT
In The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer presents, for the last time in the Canterbury sequence, a study of the desire for profit and its influence upon ethical values and human relationships. In The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, Chaucer not only discusses the influence of potential profit upon the individual’s perception of his world. The interruption of the Canon and his Yeoman into the established Canterbury group serves Chaucer’s dramatic and poetic purposes. The ambivalence toward alchemists in general and the Yeoman’s ambivalence toward his Canon in particular make it difficult to determine the Canon’s character or his motives. The Yeoman’s ambivalence and his need to reject responsibility for his own loss explain the critical problem of a second canon in the second part of the Tale.
