Wanton Wife of Bath, The

DESCRIPTION: "In Bath a wonton wife did dwell, As Chaucer he did write." She dies. Adam tells her that, as a sinner, she has no place in heaven. She points out his sins; he flees. Similarly Jacob, etc.. Finally she is admitted to heaven because she knows of Christ.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1600? (June 26, 1600 Stationer's Register entry for "The Wanton Wife of Bath"); before 1681 (Bodleian Wood E 25(93),Douce Ballads 2(241a))
KEYWORDS: death wife accusation humorous Hell
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (13 citations):
Percy/Wheatley-ReliquesOfAncientEnglishPoetry III, pp. 333-338, "The Wanton Wife of Bath" (1 text, of the short version; Percy printed this in the first edition of the Reliques, but dropped it in his later editions, so Wheatley puts it in an appendix)
NorthCarolinaFolkoreJournal, Betsy Bowden, "The Oral Life of the Written Ballad of The Wanton Wife of Bath," volume XXXV, Number 1 (Winter-Spring 1988), pp. 40-76, "The Wanton Wife of Bath" (2 texts, of the long and short versions, plus two broadside prints of the short)
ADDITIONAL: Thomas Evans, _Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative, with Some of Modern Date_, new edition, revised and enlarged by R. H. Evans, W. Bulmer and Co., 1810, Volume I (available on Google Books) #LXXI, pp. 277-283, "The Wanton Wife of Bath" (1 text, the short version)
RELATED: Versions of Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale"
E. Talbot Donaldson, _Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader_, Second Edition, the Donald Press Company, 1958, 1975, pp. 191-230, "The WIfe of Bath's Prologue" and "The Wife of Bath's Tale"
Larry D. Benson, general editor, _The Riverside Chaucer_, third edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1987 (based on F. N. Robinson, _The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer_, which is considered to be the first and second editions of this work), pp. 105-122, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale"
Mark Allen and John H. Fisher with the assistance of Joseph Trahern, editors, _A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer_, Volume II, Part 5A+5B, _The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale_, University of Oklahoma Press, 2012 (volume 5A is the Introduction and Text; 5B the notes)
John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, _The Text of the Canterbury Tales_ (in eight volumes), University of Chicago Press, 1940
MANUSCRIPT: Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS. Peniarth 392D (the Hengwrrt Manuscript, considered to be the best text of the Canterbury Tales, typically cited Hg), folios 58-72
MANUSCRIPT: San Marino, Henry Huntington Library MS. 26.C.9 (the Ellesmere Manuscript, El), folios 71-76
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS. 198 (the Corpus Manuscript, Cp), folios 100-114
MANUSCRIPT: Cambridge, University Library, MS. Gg.4.27 (Cited as Gg), folios 212-227
MANUSCRIPT: Princeton, Princeton University Library MS. Firestone Library 100 (Helmingham; cited as He), folios 77-91
Roud #V13472
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Wood E 25(93)= Douce Ballads 2(241a), "The Wanton Wife of Bath," F. Coles (London), 1624-1680; Harding B 3(18)= Harding B 3(19), Harding B 3(23), J. Evans (London), 1780-1812; also Douce Ballads 4(30), T. Evans (London), 1790-1813; also Harding B 3(22), T. Batcherar (London), 1817-1828; also Douce Ballads 4(29)= Harding B 3(20), J. Pitts (London), 1819-1844 ; also Douce Ballads 3(107b), unknown, n.d.
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "I've Buried Three Husbands Already (Wherever There's a Goose There's a Gander)" (topic)
cf. "The Good-Looking Widow" (topic)
cf. "Flying Fame" (tune in some of the versions)
NOTES [1945 words]: This is not Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," but it's based on it, making it a sort of post-medieval romance. There are two versions, the shorter being the earlier; more on this below. In both versions, it's both poorer and cruder than Chaucer's tale, of course, and the long version, at least, far less feminist and less interesting. The shorter version is truer to the Wife, who can turn Scripture to her ends, but it doesn't use much of the Wife's tale.
Based on that lack of credentials, I don't think it traditional, but Betsy Bowden thinks it passed through oral tradition, so it's in here. I don't trust her logic, though; in essence, she claims that there are variations in the text of the prints, so there must be oral tradition represented. But except for the rewrite that produced the long version, which hardly counts, the only variants she actually describes are very small -- the sort that not-very-accurate printers would produce when typesetting mostly from memory. I really think this is a song sustained entirely by print, though it was presumably sung to sell broadside copies.
Bowden describes the two versions of the piece. The longer version (650+ lines) with which Bowden closes her article (Appendix II), is to a large extent a sermon, and very dull; it is entitled "The Wife of Bath Reformed and Corrected, Giving an Account of her death, And of her journey to heaven, How on the road she fell in with Judas, who led her to the gates of Hell," etc. (Bowden calls it the "New Wife of Bath"). The Wife eventually gets to heaven, but the amount of religious blather along the way is close to intolerable. Under no circumstances will I believe that *that* went into tradition. Bowden, p. 41, claims that it was created by around 1700, based on the earlier version, to get past the censors.
The shorter is a legitimate broadside, about 140 lines; Bowden prints that as her Appendix I based on a broadside by Pitts. It too is mostly moralizing, but at least it won't kill you with boredom, though still a little too repetitive for my taste. The shorter is the version cited in the description; the long version includes the interlude with Judas and the visit to the devil.
Bowden claims a total of 54 prints of one or the other version (27 of each, in fact, although she does not catalog them), but some of these are duplicates. She found copies at Cambridge, the Bodleian at Oxford, and the Harvard Library.
If any of Chaucer's characters would take on a life of her own, it surely would be Alison, the Wife of Bath; even in Chaucer manuscripts, her Prologue and Tale were the most heavily-glossed part of the entire Canterbury Tales (Turner, pp. 146-147). Many of these, of course, were anti-feminist attacks on a woman who could and did think for herself -- the same fate that happened to the original version of this broadside!
Chaucer/Allen/Fisher have a section on adaptions and responses to Chaucer's tale of the Wife. On pp. 36-37, they report that the "earliest [re-use of the Wife's tale] (before 1600), the Wanton Wife of Bath, makes several appearances through 1778.... This ballad tells an engaging story of the Wife talking her way past St. Peter to get into heaven. The beginning of the ballad was sung in two plays,,, in Act 2 of Thomas Jevon's The Devil of a Wife (1686), first three stanzas only, and as Air 10 (first two stanzas only) in Charles Coffey's redaction The Devil to Pay (first published 1738). The phrase 'wanton wife' associated with Bath also appears in An excellent new medley (1620, STC 17777.5...), although we are told little more than than 'in Bath a wanton wrife did dwell, / She had two buckets to a well'.... The ballad itself was recast and expanded in 1700 under the title The New Wife of Bath to include a trip to hell.... Alfred Tobler... suggests that the two ballads are independent productions."
Turner, p. 154, declares this "The most avidly read and longest lasting" of the works based on the Wife of Bath's story. She notes that there were two instances of printers being punished for publishing it. In 1600, printers Edward Aldee and William White, and seller Edward White, were fined for selling it. All copies were burnt, and it was declared "disorderly" (Turner, pp. 154-155). In 1632, Henry Goskin was actually imprisoned for printing it, "because in it 'the histories of the Bible are scurrilously abused'" (Turner, p. 155).
It is interesting to speculate about why Aldee and the Whites were punished, and Goskin punished so severely. I seem to recall that Edward White got in trouble on other occasions for printing works without registering them with the Stationer's Company, but (as in the Aldee/White case) that could only result in a fine. Why was Goskin punished? Turner, pp. 156-158, thinks that, in both cases, the problem was the Wife's resistance to authority. That mattered in 1600, when Essex's rebellion against Elizabeth I was in the air, and perhaps even more in 1632, when resistance to the autocratic Charles I was stiffening.
The longer version, in Turner's view, was Scottish and written around 1700. It sometimes calls the wife "worthy" rather than "wanton." "It is clearly advocating a Protestant understanding of redemption, in its focus on faith and grace -- rather than confession and forgiveness of sins" (Turner, p. 156). "The rewriting... circa 1700 removed some of its oppositional, subversive tendencies, both by swapping Alison's 'wanton'-ness for 'worthy'-ness and, more significantly, by making her religiosity fit with contemporary Scottish Protestantism" (Turner, p. 159). No wonder it's deadly dull....
The logic of the piece is quite solid if you don't bring an anti-female opinion. The Wife can points out sins by Adam, Jacob, Jonah, Judith, Thomas, etc. -- even Peter. When she accuses Peter, Jesus defends both, letting the wife into heaven.
It is interesting to find a reference to Judith, whose story is in the Apocrypha, not the Old or New Testament. The Anglican Church did not absolutely reject the Apocrypha to the extent other Protestant churches did, but it didn't build doctrine on it. Could it be that the tale on which the poem is based predates the Reformation?
I love the fact that the Wife ends up a lawyer in Heaven. It's perfect.
In addition to her NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal article, Bettsy Bowden in 2017 published The Wife of Bath in Afterlife: Ballads to Blake, Lehigh University Press. Reviews show that it includes a section on this piece -- but the book is very expensive, and has minimal folk connections, so I haven't pursued it.
Note: I've listed as "related" versions of Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale." But there are probably thousands of editions of the Canterbury Tales, and about eighty manuscript copies. So I've decided to list only the four most important modern editions of Chaucer (none of them retellings or modernized versions, although two have modernized the orthography), and the most important manuscripts.
The scriptural characters with whom the Wife contends are as follows:
ADAM: The line "Thou wert the cause of all our woe" of course refers to the Fall, told in Genesis 3. The line blaming him for sin "in pleasure of thy wife" does not, I think, refer to sexual relations before the fall; all Adam's and Eve's children were born after they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. I think this means that he listened to his wife's advice to eat the forbidden fruit (see Genesis 3:6, 12).
JACOB: Jacob's deceptions were many and various; the stories about him are not at all edifying. One could lay many charges against him. Probably the one here is based on his tricking his brother Esau out of his birthright (Genesis 25:29-34), then, when his blind father Isaac was dying, Jacob pretended to be Esau to steal the blessing Isaac meant for Esau (Genesis 27). He also deceived his father-in-law Laban, although Laban was cheating Jacob at the same time.(Genesis 29-30).
LOT: This should have preceded Jacob. After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and his daughters fled to the hills, and Lot refused to leave his desert habitation. His two daughters, seeing no other way to have children, got him drunk and slept with him; the peoples of Moab and the Ammonites were said to be offspring of this union (Genesis 19). Lot did not deliberately sin, but his children were certainly incestuous.
JUDITH: This should have come after David and Solomon. It's from the Book of Judith, which is extremely historically inaccurate fiction. The general Holofernes is invading Judea, and Judith, a beautiful widow, comes on to him then murders him. This assuredly never happened; the chronology is nonsense.
DAVID: The specific reference here is to David seducing Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and having Uriah killed to cover his crime (2 Samuel 11). There are hints of other crimes on David's part -- not least, rebelling against Saul -- but this is the one that was explicitly acknowledged.
SOLOMON: 1 Kings 11 lists Solomon's errors, including having 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11;3), as well as many foreign women. With all that to occupy his time, little wonder he let Israel crumble! And, as the Wife says, the foreign wives "turned away his heart after other gods" (11:4).
JONAS (JONAH): Presumably a reference to Jonah fleeing his prophetic calling in the first chapter of the book of Jonah.
THOMAS: In the account of the Gospel of John, the Apostle Thomas did not see see the risen Jesus as early as the other disciples, and did not believe in the resurrection until Jesus met him personally (John 20:24-29). Hence the name "Doubting Thomas."
MARY MAGDALENE: We don't really know much about Mary Magdalene except that Jesus cast "seven demons" out of her (Luke 8:2; repeated in the spurious Mark 16:9) -- but she was widely believed to have been a prostitute, based possibly on a false equivalence with Luke 7:36-48, since that woman and Mary of Bethany both anointed Jesus's feet (Mary of Bethany's act of so doing is in John 12:1-8). Then all you have to do is equate Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene and suddenly Mary the demon-possessed becomes the same as a unnamed woman who may have been a prostitute! But they believed it in the Middle Ages. The Wife further conflates Mary Magdalene with the Woman Taken in Adultery in "John 7:53-8:12," another spurious passage but one in which Jesus wrote on the ground while the woman's accusers stole away. There is a very real similarity to that story and this: Many come to accuse the Wife of Bath of sin, but she reveals the sin of each of them. What the Wife would have done if some lesser personage had shown up, whose sin was not known, I have no clue.
Although the Wife's description of Mary Magdalene is entirely false to the Bible, we should probably add that Catholic tradition did include most of these details -- e.g. the account in the famous Golden Legend is about 5% Biblical and 95% non-historical but similar to elements of the Wife's story here.
PETER: Peter's denial of Jesus before the crucifixion is told in all four gospels, with differences in details; the basic account is Mark 14:29-30 (the denial foretold), 14:66-72 (the denial itself).
PAUL: Paul's persecution of the church is narrated in Acts 7:58-8:3, 9:1-2; Paul admits to it in various of his letters.
The Wife's mention to wandering sheep is probably an allusion to the parable of the Lost Sheep/the Ninety and Nine, Matthew 18:12-14/Luke 15:3-7. The "one poor silly word" that brought a thief to paradise is surely a reference to the repentant thief to Luke 23:39-43. The Prodigal Son forgiven by his father is Luke 15:11-32. - RBW
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