chaste. Thus, the last red and white dichotomy in The
Rape of Lucrece is the red of her honorable blood con-
trasted to the white of her bloodless and chaste body.
FURTHER READING
Augustine, St. The City of God. Translated by D. Knowles.
Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1972.
Donaldson, Ian. The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Trans-
formations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Dubrow, Heather. Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative
Poems and Sonnets. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1987.
Hendricks, Margo. “ ‘A Word, Sweet Lucrece’: Confes-
sion, Feminism, and The Rape of Lucrece.” In A Feminist
Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Dympna Callaghan,
103–118. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Jed, Stephanie. Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the
Birth of Humanism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989.
Kahn, Coppelia. “Publishing Shame: The Rape of Lucrece.”
In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works. Volume IV: The
Poems, Problem Comedies, and Late Plays, edited by Rich-
ard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 259–274. Oxford: Black-
well, 2003.
———. “The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” Shakespeare
Studies 9 (1976): 45–72.
MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Speech, Silence, and History
in The Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare Studies 22 (1994):
77–103.
Shakespeare, William. The Rape of Lucrece. In The Norton
Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al., 635–
- New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body
Enclosed.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of
Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Marga-
ret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers,
123–142. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Theodora A. Jankowski
“REEVE’S TALE, THE” GEOFFREY CHAUCER
(ca. 1390) “The Reeve’s Tale” appears in the fi rst
fragment (or group A) of “The CANTERBURY TALES,” after
the General Prologue, “The Knight’s Tale,” and “THE
MILLER’S PROLOGUE AND TALE.” It is followed by the
extremely short, and obviously incomplete, Cook’s
Tale. This fi rst group forms a tightly knit unit, in which
the various tellers respond to each other, under the
attempted orchestration of Harry Bailly, the Host. In
the GENERAL PROLOGUE TO THE CANTERBURY TALES, the
Reeve and the Miller, as is socially appropriate, are to
be found in the last group, together with the Sum-
moner, the Pardoner, the Manciple, and Chaucer the
Narrator. As the Miller disrupts the orderly, class-based
sequence of narrations suggested by the Host by inter-
vening directly after the Knight, so does the Reeve
speak deliberately after the Miller, and his motives in
doing so are made clear in his long Prologue.
Here the Reeve (a word indicating the Steward of a
manor), a man of choleric disposition and one of the
less likeable among Chaucer’s pilgrims, laments the
infi rmities associated with old age and reveals his ani-
mus against the drunken and overbearing Miller, who
has spoken before him and has allegedly offended him.
His harangue is rudely interrupted by the Host, who
reminds him that “The devel made a reve for to pre-
che” (l. 3903) and urges him to begin his story. The
tale proper begins, and it is clear from the start that it is
conceived as a riposte to the Miller, since the Reeve
fancies himself parodied in the portrait of the old and
gullible carpenter in the previous tale.
The narrative is set at Trumpington, near Cam-
bridge. Symkyn, a grasping and bold miller, lives there,
and he is equally in love with money and with his
(mostly imagined) social position. The long descrip-
tion of this character emphasizes his apelike face and
body, his boastful bearing, the excessive weaponry he
always wears, his outrageous thievery, and his family
pride. He fancies himself well-connected since his wife
is the illegitimate daughter of the parson, and the two
of them project their ambitions on their 20-year-old
daughter, Malyne (whose quick physical description
marks her as far from the conventional beauty of the
type), and on their small baby, who, though only six
months old, is already “a propre page” (l. 3972).
Having been sent by the master of their college to
have their corn ground, Aleyn and John, two poor
scholars of Cambridge, visit the mill. While the miller
foresees another opportunity to steal on the correct
measure of fl our, the two scholars are fatuously certain
that they will not be cheated, as they think their learn-
ing far outshines the miller’s native ingenuity. They are
determined to watch the miller’s every move, but he
proves more than a match for them: Not only does he340 “REEVE’S TALE, THE”