Proem to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales - William Caxton

 Proem to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales - William Caxton

It is perhaps fair to consider Caxton as the originator of literature in English. The marketplace for books existed before Caxton but his contributions to reproduction and dissemination created real change. The links made here between marketing and literature are deliberate. Although the study of literature has always been about ideas, even, and perhaps especially, when the reader believes it is only for the purpose of entertainment, literature itself is a condition of the marketplace. Books are, first and foremost, commodities. I have given away books that I have read and that action has brought accusations of ‘trying to buy friendship’. The accusations reveal one truth; the connection between books and monetary value. 

Caxton’s prologues are worth reading for the light they shed on an evolving process. The Prologue to The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy is an effusive paean to Caxton’s aristocratic supporter, Margaret of York. The long list of titles and attributes is sycophantic. By contrast, The Proem to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is pure sales pitch. He sets out the story of how he has arrived at better source material for this improved edition, criticising his 1476 edition as flawed. He presents his new edition as a benefit to the reader and to Chaucer. It may well be true; but it is also a salesman’s stratagem. (Anyone really interested in Caxton’s approach to salesmanship should also read his Prologue to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. The presentation of the importance of the figure of Arthur is fascinating.)

It is interesting that The Canterbury Tales are preceded by a Proem, rather than a Prologue. A prologue is a speech before, whereas a proem is closer in meaning to a prelude, a play before. It is a song or tale before. Here, then, Caxton begins Chaucer’s collection of Tales with a tale of his own; the tale of how this edition came to press. The word tale derives from tell, which has origins in counting and calculating numerically. The teller of a tale is the one who orders the narrative, in the sense of giving order to. The ambiguities arising in the meaning of order and in the meaning of tell are. . . telling.

In his proem, Caxton is inscribing one of the fundamentals of salesmanship. A story sells a product. How much of contemporary commodity capitalism is driven by association with story? We no longer buy the book or the toy of the movie. We buy goods with likenesses tangentially associated with narratives, as though a Marvel Comic character cup will draw us closer to the tale we have been entertained by. Caxton’s revised edition of the Canterbury Tales has all the marks of a ‘Director’s Cut’.