With The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer had come out with an extensive narrative project that included tales told from a variety of working-class people. Most of the tales have focused on marriage, highlighting and critiquing various aspects of marital relationships between men and women. Chaucer began the seventh fragment of the Tales with the Shipman’s Tale. This is the tale that involves a merchant’s wife who, in exchange for money, cheats on him with a monk. For the Shipman’s tale, Chaucer utilizes the genre of the fabliau, which the other pilgrims would have gotten used to because of some of the other pilgrims’ fabliaux. Through this tale, Chaucer is showcasing the transactional natures of the main relationships as a means of critiquing the institution of marriage by making visible its commercialized aspects.

Within the language of the tale we see the monetization rampant within the characterizations of the main figures of the tale much before the narrative delves into the financial transactions that will take place. The Shipman begins his tale by introducing the merchant, a man “That riche was, for which men helde hym wys” (2). Men held the merchant as a wise man because he was rich, thus equating wealth with wisdom. The text is thus beginning a portrait of financial stability and success in the merchant, a portrait that is incomplete without his wife. The way the text approaches the wife’s description is by categorizing her personality in terms of how it affects the merchant financially. The wife takes up a part of the merchant’s finances, her sociability and affinity for clothing costing him, a man whom the narrator pities: “But wo is hym that payen moot for al!” (10). Thus, the merchant and his wife’s marriage is categorized in terms of the amount he makes and the amount he must spend to uphold his wife’s lifestyle. The text highlights the importance of a person’s relationship with money through the character of Don John. An interesting part of his characterization—besides his relationship with the merchant, which this paper will delve into in a moment—is his relationship with the merchant’s household, specifically with the people who worked in the house. The text highlights how his Don Jon’s main appeal towards them was in his financial expenditures; he would tip them well, so they loved him. This relationship with the workers, which is based in money, would later on help him have an affair with the merchant’s wife without anyone suspecting him. The Shipman is showcasing the power of money and how it can distort your image in people’s minds. By further examining the language of commercialization within the text, the cracks in the relationships between these main characters begin to show.

The relationship between Don John and the merchant is at first described as a bond similar to that of marriage. They have been knit together in “eterne alliaunce,” a description that cements the homosocial bond between these men as one that is unbreakable and pure, untainted by money (40). However, the rest of the tale poses a challenge to this bond through the introduction of the merchant’s wife. When speaking to the wife, Don John explains that his close bond with the merchant has been a way to get close to her, that the reason he referred to the merchant as his cousin was to get closer to the merchant’s wife. All the aforementioned eternal alliances and bonds of brotherhood seem artificial then, a cheap business tactic on the part of the monk to get to the merchant’s wares—of which the wife is a part. Their business-like, transactional relationship comes to a head when Don John asks for the hundred francs from him and the merchant replies, “My gold is youres, whan that it yow leste, / And nat oonly my gold, but my chaffare” (284-285). Not only does the merchant offer up his gold to the monk, but also all of his “chaffare,” or his merchandise/goods, which make up his household. The wife has been implicated as a part of his household from the beginning of the tale, and keeping with this description illuminates another level of this offer that showcases the merchant also unconsciously offering up his own wife. With this reading then, it is evident that Don John does, indeed, end up fulfilling this financial transaction by paying him back his wares, i.e., giving him back his own wife.

Within the relationship between Don John and the merchant’s wife, we begin to see the intermingling of money, sex, and marriage. They exchange an oath when promising to not give away each other’s secrets: “For on my portehors I make an ooth / That nevere in my lyf, for lief ne looth, Ne shal I of no conseil yow biwreye” (131-133). This moment reads like an oral signing of a document, one that will confirm their newer, more intimate relationship. The wife even refers to their bond as an “alliance,” mirroring the language used in the description of the brotherhood between Don John and the merchant, and thereby bringing attention to the arbitrariness of these bonds. In exchange for the hundred francs that the wife asks of him, “This faire wyf acorded with daun John / That for thise hundred frankes he sholde al nyght / Have hire in his armes bolt upright; And this accord parfourned was in dede” (314-317). This agreement stipulates that the wife will have sex with Don John in exchange for the money, and we then see them “perform” this agreement in bed. This scene presents itself as that of prostitution, and on the page it definitely is; however, when examined through the broader lens of marriage, this passage takes on a newer meaning. The final line that reads “And this accord parfourned was in dede” is a key to unlocking this line of interpretation (317). Don John and the wife perform the sealing of the deal in bed, with language that harkens to the consummation of a marriage. Consummation is an integral part of a marriage ceremony, and has been used to prove that monarchs had sealed the deal on their marriages. In this scene, we see the performance of the agreement of matrimony, proof that they will stick to their promises to each other. This brings to light the performativity laden within societal rituals that, at their core, have transactional and commercial natures.

In a direct juxtaposition to the previous pairing, the language surrounding the marriage between the merchant and his wife begins to resemble a commercial partnership. When the wife first speaks about her husband to Don John, she discusses how “he is noght worth at al / In no degree the value of a flye. But yet me greveth moost his nygardye” (170-172). She is utilizing the language of value and worth and placing him lower than the status of a fly, which opposes our earlier view of him as a wealthy, and therefore wise man. This contradiction begins to make sense when she speaks of his “nygardye,” or miserliness, presenting him as a man who dislikes spending all that money that he has. His worst fault is that he is like a miser, hoarding his money and not spending it. In the same breath, she speaks of how he does not even have sex with her. These two things seem separate, but are in fact being given the same amount of attention here. The wife’s descriptions of her husband reveal how much he has been failing in the marital arena. By not consummating their marriage, he does not allow them to fulfill the roles ascribed to a married couple, thus relegating himself to not being worth anything in the eyes of society. Later on in the tale, we see the merchant express a kind of paranoia that the pilgrims would have already been familiar with from the other tales: “For everemoore we moote stoned in drede / Of hap and fortune in oure chapmanhede,” meaning that they merchants are always dreading chance and unforeseen occurrences (237-238). Although he speaks of the fear merchants feel, this paranoia of having everything in order financially mirrors that of having everything in order in the home/in a marriage. This fear is the reason why he then asks his wife to look after the house and be an honest and good hostess. The merchant’s approach to his marriage is similar to his approach to his businesses: he is afraid of losing it and so does not even try to enjoy its perks. The wife understands this, and so decides to use it to her advantage. The lie she tells her husband when he confronts her about the money Don John gave her is, “For, God it woot, I wende, withouten doute, / That he hadde yeve it me bycause of yow, / To doon therwith myn honour and my prow” (406-408). She’s stating that she thought Don John had given her the money as a favor to the husband in order to advance her honor and, as a result, his own. This excuse works on a few different levels: The first is how she invokes their bond of brotherhood by shifting the focus from her relationship with Don John to her husband’s relationship with him. She paints Don John as the close friend and cousin once more, a role that he had begun to play, but that she finished for him. The second is the way in which she brings it back to the question of the merchant’s household, something he has always made sure would be the pinnacle representative of himself. By showcasing how this exchange of money was for the benefit of the household, and thus of his image, the wife cleverly plays to the merchant’s ego and sidesteps any reason for doubt. To further cement the lie, she tells him to “score it upon my taille,” thus offering up her tally, her body, and her tale in exchange for the money (416). Although she has been stretching the truth and sweetening the lie, there is still some truth in her excuse. Due to her position as the representative of her husband’s household, all the ornamentation she bought for herself with that money will also work as ornamentation for the merchant’s household, thus cementing him as a well-endowed figure whom people will regard as wise. She plays to his weaknesses perfectly whilst also having achieved the material manifestations of wealth and physical manifestations of sex she had craved for so long.

The Shipman’s Tale represents eye-opening interjections between sex, trade, and money that work simultaneously to critique various human relationships. Chaucer gave this tale to the Shipman because the Shipman is someone on the outskirts of society who has a broader view of how these relationships work through a commercial/transactional lens. Like in the other fabliaux found in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer utilizes the genre to interrogate marital bonds, but in this tale, he’s putting even more pressure on marriage as a socio-economical institution. He shows how the contractual nature of marriage is not unlike a business partnership, but with one person who has significantly more power over the other. When examined through the lens of the Shipman’s Tale, the lines that separate marriage and prostitution also begin to blur due to this notion of consummation that acts as the seal to the marital agreement. Marriage becomes the combination of friendship, sex, and trade on a good day, although it loses friendship in marriages like the ones depicted in the other tales. Going off the wives presented in the rest of The Canterbury Tales, we see that even if marriage is a transaction, it is not an even one. Although the wife gets money for her clothing, she is still stuck in an unhappy marriage. The other wives depicted in the tales get a roof over their heads, but they’re physical embodiments of the sex their husband has bought, the body that Januarie from the Merchant’s Tale couldn’t wait to claim as his. The Shipman’s Tale highlights the arbitrariness and commercialization of the institution of marriage and how the patriarchal systems that created it have done so at the cost of women’s agency.