There is no doubt that immoral people can come from all walks of life, high, low, rich, poor and everything in between - any of these can fall victim to the vices of the human spirit. When sex and money mix, a potentially dangerous (but thrilling, at least to an outside observer) spectacle can occur. But what happens when that bomb explodes? Geoffrey Chaucer is certainly a master at portraying the profane and squalid side of human nature, but as he demonstrates through The Shipman's Tale of The Canterbury Tales, sometimes a quiet murmur can have the same force as a great explosion. The Shipman's Tale doesn't need a big confrontation or public fire to make statements about the morality of human desires and the pursuit of them. Instead, an argument between a married couple in bed and an interesting twist on a marriage vow culminate in a story that has a lot to say about the nature of debt – monetary and otherwise – and the marriage of sex and money. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The Shipman's Tale is a short story with little plot but plenty of detail. The story of an unfaithful wife and her clueless husband being deceived by her lover is not new; in fact, speculation about Chaucer's source material will be discussed later. However, it is in the telling of the tale – the details given and left out, the attitudes towards infidelity, the assigning of blame or lack thereof – that launch The Shipman's Tale into the realm of academic study. The Shipman classifies the importance of details in the story in a way unknown to those avid listeners of bawdy tales. There are long descriptions of the merchant's generosity towards his friends, especially the monk: how he often entertains them at his home, gives them gifts, and so on. However, scandalous extramarital affairs (which, technically, turn the merchant's wife into a prostitute) receive as much hype as a shopping list. Instead, the plot doesn't seem aimed at the titillation of illicit affairs and "wykked wyves," but rather as a vehicle for extended wordplay and double entendres. Some Chaucer scholars have marked Shipman's Tale as a true fabliaux – that is, following the formula of bawdy trickster tales popular in France in which a clever trick is successfully performed or a frequent trickster receives due punishment. Peter Nicholson, however, argues that Shipman's Tale cannot be strictly fabliaux for the same reasons that the story itself is subject to academic scrutiny. The fact that the obscene story was "almost suffocated by details of the characters' lives completely extraneous to the plot" distracts the viewer's attention from the story itself and towards the other details of the story, such as the abundance of descriptions of the friendship between the monk and the merchant. (Nicholson 583) For example, there are six lines in total that deal with the actual relationship (lines 313-319) plus two previous lines that mention the lustful kiss (lines 202-203). Even just in the text located between these two passages, there are twenty-four lines (lines 224-248) in which the husband lectures the wife about business and money, and a thirty-five-line conversation (lines 257-292) in which the the merchant and monk discuss their friendship and monk asks for money. Even in the brief taboo scenes, Chaucer does not address the voyeuristic audience; adopts a method reminiscent of a Greek tragedian describing the off-stage death of a minor character. The critical business of the plot is almost an afterthought. One of the most surprising parts of this story, Nicholson says, is the “structure in which thecommercialization of sexual relations, and not the conventional triumph of one character over another, seems to be the main point.” (Nicholson 583) No character at the end of the story is portrayed as “right” or “wrong” – the narrator seems reluctant to place blame on anyone. Another reason to shy away from strict fabliaux etiquette is extended wordplay and double entendres, Nicholson says, which are not present in the typical Fabliaux model. For example, the discussion between the monk and the merchant just before the merchant's departure for Flaundres gives rise to a series of increasingly dirty double entendres, made funnier by two facts: first, the conversation is entirely serious; two, the husband is unaware of the meaning beyond the surface. One such example is that Daun John tells the merchant that he needs to borrow money "for certain beestes that I moste beye" (line 278) when in reality he is planning to use the money to barter sex with the merchant's wife. As the buyer of the monastery, it is perfectly reasonable for Daun John to purchase quantities of livestock; however, Chaucer here refers to the purchase of satisfaction for animalistic desires (Daun John's lust and his wife's greed). The merchant is, of course, clueless and happily lends him the money before heading out of town. Those animalistic desires and animal imagery in general are one of the four major realms of imagery outlined by Janet Richardson in Chaucer's The Facade of Bawdry: Image Patterns in the Shipman's Tale. The four “image groups” (Richardson 304) are animals, diet, commerce, and sex. It is through the interaction of these four spheres in such a way that the overall theme identified by Nicholson, which is the commercialization of sex, is realized. Richardson takes a slightly broader approach to his interpretation of the final theme: commerce is the ultimate image that the other three refer to, because the story focuses so heavily on the materialism that permeates the world of the bourgeoisie. It is the connections between these different sets of images that highlight the subtleties of a tale that may at first seem bland. Although there are many connections that Richardson has drawn from the text, I would like to focus on one in particular, namely the interaction between the lexicon of the image of sex and the lexicon of the image of commerce. As Richardson notes on page 306, the “cosynage” (though not of blood) between the merchant and the monk is well documented throughout the tale; many more jokes are given than the main plot points (for example, the adultery scene). Clearly, this relationship is something that Chaucer wants to use as a tool for his commentary. The goals of the two men differ: the merchant desires money and material wealth; and the monk desires sex, especially sex with his friend's wife. Both are made the same offer by the wife: sex in exchange for the money she owes. Without the traditional fabliaux ending in which some morality is enacted, however questionable, these two men remain on the reader's palate as morally equal. The monk essentially represents the animalistic and lustful nature of the human spirit and the merchant represents the greedy and materialistic side of the human spirit. Since identical situations are given, Chaucer equates lust and greed – commerce and sex. The equation of commerce and sex seems out of place in the bourgeois world of the merchant and his wife. They are used to hosting her business guests for dinners and banquets, no matter how much she protests that he is stingy with money. She certainly does not lack the essentials for living, namely food, shelter and clothing (even if she can afford to disagree on these 1965: 303-313.