The central episode of the Merchant's Tale is like a fabliau, though of a very unusual sort: It is cast in the high style, and some of the scenes (the marriage feast, for example) are among Chaucer's most elaborate displays of rhetorical art. Though several of the tales are sexually explicit by modern standards, this one is especially so. It could have arrived in Europe through the One Thousand and One Nights, or perhaps the version in book VI of the Masnavi by Rumi.
The tale is found in Persia in the Bahar Danush, in which the husband climbs a date tree instead of a pear tree. The tale also shows the influence of Boccaccio ( Decameron: 7th day, 9th tale ), Deschamps' Le Miroir de Mariage, Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (translated into English by Chaucer), Andreas Capellanus, Statius, and Cato. In it Chaucer subtly mocks antifeminist literature like that of Theophrastus ("Theofraste").
" The Merchant's Tale" ( Middle English: The Marchantes Tale) is one of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
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