POETRY AS CONJURING ACT: THEFRANKLIN’S TALE AND THE TEMPESTby Sherron KnoppAnd whan this maister that this magyk wroughte Saugh it was tyme, he clapte his handes two,And farewel! Al oure revel was ago.(Franklin’s Tale V 1202–4)Our revels now are ended. These our actors(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air.(The Tempest 4.1.148–50)Shakespeare scholars have pointed out since 1978 that the verbal echo ofrevels ending that links The Tempest to the Franklin’s Tale extends beyondsuperficial coincidence to include striking similarities of plot, characters,and themes. R. Ann Thompson, in the first book-length study ofChaucer’s influence on Shakespeare, saw enough similarity between themagic show in the Franklin’s Tale and Prospero’s wedding masque to arguefor definite Chaucerian influence.1Apparently unaware of Thompson’sargument, John Simons made a similar case for a connection between thetwo works in 1985: in both, a magician dispels spirits that he “has con-jured up for the delight of his audience”; in both, the line about revelsending is followed by a passage that reinforces the fact that “the ‘actors’are merely spirits.” To these parallels, he added two larger ones: magic isintended to prevent a shipwreck in the Franklin’s Tale, while it causes ashipwreck in The Tempest; magic is used to further adulterous desire inthe Franklin’s Tale, while it is used to protect chastity in The Tempest.2Twoyears before Simons’s article, Richard Hillman had already in fact claimedthe Franklin’s Tale as “a major source” for The Tempest.3For Hillman, thecentral magic of the Franklin’s Tale is “nearly a mirror-image of Prospero’sgreat trick,” and Dorigen’s tearful complaint about the rocks bears strik-ing resemblance to Miranda’s distress over the storm.4Hillman sees strongparallels not just between the magic show in Orléans and Prospero’s wed-THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2004.Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA03_38_4_2ND 3/25/04 1:11 PM Page 337ding masque, but between the two magicians and their active involvementin themes of suffering, release, and redemption. Most recently LewisWalker has used Hillman’s analysis as a starting point for “an even richerand more detailed account of the relationship” between the two works.5That Shakespeare drew on Chaucer for The Tempest seems no longer amatter requiring proof. Yet the parallels in plot, characters, and themethat Shakespeare scholars have pointed out do not really illuminate theart of either poet, much less do they suggest the kind of profound cre-ative conversation that (for example) medievalists routinely assumebetween Chaucer and Boccaccio in Troilus and Criseyde, or betweenChaucer and Dante in the House of Fame—relationships in which specificparallels are the least interesting and informative component. As DorothyBethurum Loomis has observed: That Shakespeare read [Chaucer] and used him is indubitable,but his real influence is better judged by similarities in tone andsituation . . . than by verbal parallels here and there. . . . It mustbe recognised, too, that the alchemy of a genius like Shakespeare’stransmutes whatever it uses to another metal entirely, so that it isdifficult to speak of “influence” in any normal sense.6Arguments about such relationships are, of course, less easy to document,and may seem always charged with an aura of imaginative speculation,but that is the limb I intend to walk out on in this paper, as I will arguenot against the similarities between the Franklin’s Tale and The Tempestthat Shakespeare scholars have pointed out since 1978, but beyond them,to a shared engagement on the part of both poets with the status ofpoetry as illusion and conjuring act. For reasons that stretch backthrough Augustine to Plato, this is a troubled status for both poets. Onthe one hand, the projections of poetry, like those of magic, dazzle withan immediacy that feels compellingly real and potentially transformative.On the other hand, the illusions they rely on are fraudulent and causefor damnation.While it is a cliché in Shakespeare criticism to see Prospero as a stand-in for Shakespeare the artist, Chaucerians almost without exception resistidentifying the clerk magician of Orléans with the medieval poet.“Chaucer means to define himself against this figure,” V. A. Kolve writes,to prove himself “no trafficker in appearances-for-their-own-sake, no ven-dor of easy fantasies, no lousy juggler, no clerk of Orléans.”7The identi-fication of literary art with illusion has deep roots in the Platonic/Augustinian poetic theory of the Middle Ages, and it is no accident thatthe Franklin’s relentless indictments of magic echo medieval indictmentsof poetry: THE CHAUCER REVIEW33803_38_4_2ND 3/25/04 1:11 PM Page 338SHERRON KNOPP339swich folyeAs in oure dayes is nat worth a flye—For hooly chirches feith in oure bileveNe suffreth noon illusioun us to greve.(V 1131–34).8Augustine’s indictment of Virgil’s Aeneid in Book 1 of the Confessions pro-vides the terms for such indictments: the wanderings of Aeneas (errores)are literally untrue, portrayed in fictions that are empty illusions (figmentavana, spectaculum vanitatis), and the pleasure they produce is madness(dementia).9The voice that caught Shakespeare’s ear in the Franklin’s Tale,however, is one that, for an instant, literally revels in the “sighte merveil-lous” (V 1206) that the magician conjures in Orléans. Derek Pearsallstands alone among Chaucerians when he calls the magic show “analmost gratuitous exhibition of Chaucer’s delight in his own poetic pow-ers” and the clerk magician “an early Prospero,” but his remark is only apassing comment.10I want to pursue the implications of this remark, toargue that Shakespeare’s response to the Franklin’s Tale—and to theCanterbury Tales more broadly—extends, as I have said, beyond super-ficial similarities to a profound shared engagement with issues of poetictheory. Although the clerk magician is only a minor figure in theFranklin’s Tale, Hillman is right in his claim that “his importance is easyto undervalue.”11Shakespeare recognizes his importance accurately whenhe associates Prospero with him in the lines about revels ending, and, inso doing, Shakespeare arguably points us towards a more early modernChaucer than contemporary scholarship has yet