Tradition as Collaboration: The Public and the Private in 'The Physician's Tale'

The dialectical nature of the reception of ancient authors on the part of the medievals (Curtius) is exemplified through a reading of Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale in the light of the opposition between the categories of ‘the public’ and ‘the private’. The intertextual warp of the story of the unlucky maiden, based essentially on the Roman de la Rose, includes Livy’s version of Lavinia’s fate. For the Roman historian – as well as for Jean de Meun, Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, Gower’s Confessio amantis – the episode has an essentially public and political relevance: it is an indictment of the dangers and abuses of tyranny, and the Roman girl is a muted symbol, hardly characterized at all. My argument is that Chaucer’s interest, on the contrary, focuses, very humanly, on Virginia on on her interaction with her father Virginius, the real protagonist of the Physician’s Tale, in whose personal tragedy one would expect the ‘public vs private’ dichotomy to manifest itself with the sharpest relief. I contend instead that, with the vanishing of the ethical tension that distinguished Livy’s protagonist, the contrast between the naturally loving instinct of the father on one side, and the moral necessity of the sacrifice on the other, fails to resolve itself convincingly in an act of tragic heroism, owing to the insufficient development of the ‘public’ element of the dichotomy. While in the emotional climax of Virginius’ colloquy with his daughter – Chaucer’s wholly original contribution to the Livian tradition – the pathetic, melodramatic element is sharply and efficaciously foregrounded, his paterfamilias figure eventually reveals itself as authoritarian as that of the corrupt judge Apius himself. What emerges from Chaucer’s adaptation of plot, modus dicendi, context and purposes of his auctoritates, is a problematic, ultimately sceptical vision of life, but the final impression is of a somewhat unbalanced amalgam of characterization, psychological motivations and narrative structure, perhaps too heavily relying on pathos to allow the Physician’s Tale to bear comparison with the more mature masterpieces of the Canterbury Tales.