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The Canterbury pilgrims

Chapter 13: FOOTNOTES:
By Percy MacKaye
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About This Book

Set in late fourteenth-century England, the comedy assembles Chaucer as a participant and observer among a lively company of pilgrims and additional historical figures gathered at an inn before a shrine-bound journey. The drama presents a sequence of character sketches and comic set-pieces—tavern brawls, bargains over relics, songs, and diversions—while interweaving debates about piety, social custom, and religious reform. Acts and musical antiphons structure shifts from boisterous caricature to moments of reflection, and the ensemble dynamic exposes contrasting social types and tensions between ritual, politics, and personal folly.

ADDENDA

1. The accompanying reproduction of the original Hymn to St. Thomas, of which the last verse only is sung by the pilgrims in Act IV, is authentic in words and music.

The author is sincerely indebted to Professor Kittredge, of Harvard University, for tracing and securing, through the various courtesies of Mr. Albert Matthews (of Boston), Mr. Frank Kidson (of Leeds), Mr. J. E. Matthew (of S. Hampstead, London), and Mr. Wilson (of the British Museum Library), a copy of this almost inaccessible document.

The words are taken from Vol. 13, p. 240, of Dreves’ “Collection of Sequences and Latin Hymns.” The music is copied from the “Sarum Antiphonal” of 1519.

In regard to the music, Mr. Wilson writes: “Each of these Antiphons (i.e. each verse of the hymn) is sung once before, and once after, each psalm. Here there are five; and at the end of each is the catchword of the psalm. The first is ‘Dominus regnavit’; the second, ‘Jubilate,’ and so on.”

Mr. J. E. Matthew writes: “The catchword is not sufficient, in every case, to identify the psalm, but I have indicated all the psalms having such beginnings.[1] The lines ‘Gloria et honore coronasti,’ etc. (part, of course, of the 8th Psalm: ‘Thou hast crowned him with glory and honour’), form no part of the service in the ‘Sarum Antiphonal.’”

2. For valuable information and advice regarding the chronology of the “Canterbury Tales” as affecting this play, the author also gives sincere thanks to his friend, Mr. John S. P. Tatlock, of the University of Michigan.

3. The following dates will reveal certain anachronisms in the text of his play, which the writer, for dramatic purposes, has ignored:—

Oct. 1, 1386: Chaucer was elected Knight of the Shire for Kent, which office he still held in April, 1387.

Dec. 31, 1384: Wycliffe died.

1386: John of Gaunt left England for Castile.

4. According to Chaucer scholars, the third wife of John of Gaunt was probably a sister of Chaucer’s wife. Upon this probability, though it could not have been a fact until after 1387, the author bases his dramatic license of referring to Chaucer and the Duke of Lancaster as brothers-in-law.

PERCY MACKAYE.

New York, March, 1903.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The psalms, as indicated by Mr. Matthew, are as follows: Beginning Deus regnavit, xxiii, xcix; Jubilate, c, lxvi; Deus, Deus, meus, xxii, lxiii; Benedicite, The Song of the Three Children? (Apocrypha.) Laudate, cxiii, cxvii, cxxxiv, cxlvii, cxlviii.