The Nuns Priest's Tale

Presented light-heartedly, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale follows the exploits of a boastful rooster named Chanticleer. In line with Chanticleer’s pride, and readiness to accept flattery, the tale provides an insightful moral. Namely, the Nun’s Priest wittily reminds the audience that, “being careless and negligent and trusting and flattery”, can lead to no good--in Chanticleer’s case, near-death. This moral, the tale as a whole, and other noteworthy themes, are brought about by the tale’s fable form, and by various literary elements. In particular, the Nun’s Priest use of dialogue, voice, and Chanticleer’s stories and brush with death present a meaningful tale. While at first seeming to be besides the point, a little nuptial bickering leads both to a better characterization of the main character, and to additional themes. Waking from a nightmare, Chanticleer tells his favorite wife, Partlet, that he had dreamt of himself being pursued by a “hound” like beast. The two then argue over the importance of dreams, with Partlet claiming that Cato once said to, “[t]ake no heed of” them. As a result, this drawn out dialogue seems to represent the usual dynamic between a husband and a wife--a somewhat basic human theme. The Priest even offhandedly remarks, in a very
For it’s no coincidence that the protagonist is a proud rooster who boasts a comb that, “is redder than fine coral and turreted like a castle wall”, and the antagonist a fox who is “full of sly wickedness”, Chanticleer’s image comes with notions of pride, and that of the fox, sneakiness and devilishness. Consequently, the nature of the fox’s and of Chanticleer’s personality types--ones based in reality--are caricaturized, and the moral more easily