(ca. 1272–1283)
The only extant FABLIAU written in English before CHAUCER, Dame Sirith is a poem of 450 lines composed in a mixed meter—predominantly in six-line TAIL RHYME stanzas rhyming aabccb (similar to Chaucer’s TALE OF SIR THOPAS), but sometimes switching to octosyllabic (eight-syllable) couplets— a fact that some scholars have proposed suggests the poet was trying to convert an earlier text into stanzas. Composed in a southern West Midland dialect ofMIDDLE ENGLISH, the poem is written almost completely in dialogue, and the single surviving manuscript of the poem has marginal notes indicating several speakers:Wilekin,Margeri, and Dame Sirith, with other unmarked lines for a narrator. These details indicate that the poem was intended for some sort of dramatic performance, either one involving four actors or, perhaps more likely, a dramatic reading by a minstrel who might assume different voices for the various characters. Like all fabliaux, Dame Sirith is concerned with sex and trickery: a lustful clerk (student) who in the end tricks a gullible wife into an act of adultery. As the poem opens, the clerk Wilekin visits Margeri, and after some hesitancy reveals to her that he has loved her for many years, and, now that her husband is out of town, pleads that she grant him his desire.Margeri is scandalized and refuses him, swearing by the King of Heaven never to be unfaithful. She continues to refuse even when Wilekin promises to be secret, and begs her to have mercy. Wilekin’s language parodies the conventional terms of COURTLY LOVE—the long service of the lady, the secrecy of the affair, the purity of his intentions, the danger of dying from love, and the need for the lady’s mercy. But it is clear that his motivation is pure lust.
Advised by a friend to ask help of the old bawd Dame Sirith,Wilekin visits her and tells Sirith of his need. At first she feigns not to know anything about such matters, but when Wilekin offers her a large reward and promises to keep her role secret, Sirith agrees to help him.She takes her dog and feeds it mustard and pepper to make tears flow from its eyes, telling the confused Wilekin that this will win his lady. She takes the dog and visits Margeri, whom she convinces that the dog is Sirith’s own daughter, transformed into a bitch by a vengeful cleric whose love she refused. The terrified Margeri begs Sirith to run and find Wilekin before the same fate befalls her, and Sirith quickly fetches the clerk, telling him coarsely as he goes in to Margeri to “till” her well and stretch her thighs. The poem ends as Sirith addresses the audience directly, offering her services to anyone who may need them—for a fee. The fabliau was a popular form in France between 1150 and 1320, with some 150 examples of the genre surviving from that period. But Dame Sirith is the only English fabliau to survive. However, its existence, plus the fragment of an analogue called the Interludium de Clerico et Puella (Interlude of the cleric and the girl) from about 50 years later, and the survival of several later ballads that seem to be based on fabliau plots, have led some scholars to conjecture that fabliaux existed in oral form in England, but were not typically written down until after Chaucer’s tales gave them some legitimacy.
Bibliography
■ Busby, Keith. “Dame Sirith and De Clerico et Puella,” in Companion to Early Middle English Literature, edited by N. H. G. E. Veldhoen and H. Aertsen. Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1988, 69–81.
■ Furrow,Melissa.“Middle English Fabliaux and Modern Myth,”English Literary History 56 (1989): 1–18.
■ Hines, John. The Fabliau in English. London: Longman, 1993.
■ Lewis, Robert E. “The English Fabliau Tradition and Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale,’ ” Modern Philology 79 (1982): 241–255.
■ Salisbury, Eve, ed. The Trials and Joys of Marriage. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002.
■ Von Kreisler, Nicholai. “Satire in Dame Sirith and the Weeping Bitch.” In Essays in Honor of Esmond Linworth Marilla, edited by Thomas Austin Kirby and William John Olive, 379–387. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970.