The Hypotext of Chaucer's Fabliaux

張梅雨

《復興崗學報》 55期 (1995/09) Pp. 1-14

並列摘要

The Canterbury Tales contains a number of stories generally categorized as the fabliau. The fabliau as a genre is characterized by a few fixed plots and racy humor around a couple of characters such as a beautiful wife, a jealous husband, and a young man. To make them even more fascinating, these humorous tales have many analogues written in French, German, Dutch, and so on. The question is: which is the original text that produced so many derivatives? So far few attempts to identify the parent texts of these fabliaux have met with success. The whirl of time has left us no trustworthy evidence to support an assertion that says, for instance, Chaucer's Shipman's Tale is a direct derivative of Boccaccio's Decameron. In this paper I propose the idea that maybe it is better for us to abandon the traditional way of source hunting in which we label one specific text as the source of another text; instead, we may look at Chaucerean and European fabliaux from a completely different perspective. Why don't we find the origins of the fabliaux in the genre itself? Thus, focusing on how the genre comes to function as a hypotext is what the paper set out to do.