The Pardoner's Tale Analysis

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The Physician's tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is fascinating not because of its content, but rather because of the role that it plays both for the Physician and for Chaucer the author. Initially seeming to be little more than a brief, depressing tale of beauty and loss, the story is later revealed to be both an ineffective veil for the Physician's flawed character and a window into the vanity of the pilgrims as a collection. Any poignancy that would otherwise exist regarding the knight Virginius and his pious daughter Virginia is completely torn asunder by the glaring contradictions, ironies, and duplicities of the Physician. This tale has little merit in terms of its message, but instead it is merely a ploy by the Physician …show more content…

He mourns the death of Virginia, wailing that it thoroughly upset him, yet he claims that "yiftes of Fortune and of Nature / been cause of deeth to many a creature. / Hire beautee was hire deth, I dar wel sayn." He completely misses the irony of the Physician's condemnation of agency used for evil and his victimization of the sole character that truly had the ability to do so. It is astonishing that this is lost on him, especially with the presence of such egregious 'lamentations' from Virginius such as "o deere doghter, endere of my lyf," which is a complete inversion of the true situation. Yet what the Host misses in terms of the irony of the letter he perceives in the irony of the spirit of the tale. He claims, "This is a pitous tale for to heere. / But nathelees, passe over; is no fors. / I pray to God so save thy gentil cors, / and eek thyne urynals and thy jurdones, thyn ypocras, and eek thy galiones, / and every boyste ful of thy letuarie; / God blesse hem, and our lady Seinte Marie!" He bemoans the death of Virginia for a number of lines, and then quickly dismisses this pity and says let us instead pray for the prosperity of this man's profession; the death of this innocent girl does not matter, but apparently praying for instruments such as urine analysis kits does. He is saying let us pray for life and prosperity, but let it be for those which are physical and tangible forms of them (the letters of them) rather than for what is truly intended by Christianity: spiritual life and prosperity in terms of love and peace (the spirit of them). This is an absurd statement to make, to so thoroughly sully the conventions of religion by mixing them with the corporeal; and if the host is not explicitly jabbing at the Physician here then Chaucer the author certainly

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