The Pilgrim's Tale - Attribution

Attribution

John Bale attributed The Courte of Venus and The Pilgrim's Tale to Chaucer in his Illustriam maioris scriptores...summarium, noting that he saw a quarto edition of The Courte of Venus that included The Pilgrim's Tale, probably Gibson's printed edition of ca. 1536-1540. However, Bale changed the ascription of authorship for Curiam Veneris (his Latin name for The Courte of Venus) to Robert Shyngleton/Singleton ("Robertus Shyngleton, astrorum et theologie peritus, sacerdos, composuit") in his notes in Index Britanniae scriptorum, although his later, 1559 edition of the Illustriam kept it as Chaucer's. It is possible that Shyngleton was the compiler of The Courte of Venus and probably the author of its Prologue (in the Douce fragment) as well as The Pilgrim's Tale. Little is known about Shyngleton, except that he was an Oxford-educated Roman Catholic divine, who may not have graduated. He may have become a Protestant; he was for a time a chaplain to Anne Boleyn, who was sympathetic to the English Protestants. He was tried for treasonable utterances in 1543 and hanged in 1544 with Germain Gardiner and John Larke, an event recorded in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments. Bale recorded that Shyngleton was said to have written a Treatise of the Seven Churches; Of the Holy Ghost; Comment on Certain Prophecies; and Theory of the Earth, which was dedicated to Henry VII and has elsewhere been called Of the Seven Ages of the World. None of these texts exist in print, but Bale wrote that Gibson printed "Shyngleton's De VII Ecclesiis and De Spiritu."

Thomas Wyatt the Elder was also suggested as the author of The Pilgrim's Tale in the sixteenth century, and five of the poems in The Courte of Venus are definitely his. Francis Thynne, adamant that The Pilgrim's Tale is Chaucer's, denied the Wyatt attribution in his Animadversions upon the Annotations and Corrections of Some Imperfections of Impressions of Chaucer's Works... and claimed that his father, William Thynne, prepared a printed version of Chaucer's works including The Pilgrim's Tale, but Henry VIII would not extend his protection to it because of the reaction he expected it would elicit from the bishops. There is no other record of this Thynne edition; some scholars believe it never existed.

Others have speculated that some real Chaucerian poems may have been included in some versions of The Courte of Venus, but those that have survived are not Chaucer's, except perhaps the Prologue, but this is only a remote possibility. Russell Fraser speculates the following: "About the time of Anne Boleyn's fall in 1536, and concurrent with the Lincolnshire rebellion, Sir Thomas Wyatt recast a number of his poems. Wyatt's revisions were secured by Thomas Gybson, and printed soon afterwards as The Court of Venus in a volume with The Pilgrim's Tale. But the Tale was obnoxious to the clergy, and finally to the Crown, and in the suppression of the volume, which probably followed speedily after publication, the Court, because of its unlucky association with the Tale, was also suppressed" (45).