Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale

Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Merchant’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales presents a moral derived from the merchant’s personality. The moral expresses the merchant’s opinion on marriage. Many critics have read this tale and interpreted its meaning in their own way. This modern interpretation of an old tale makes the merchant’s character still believable today. “The Merchant’s Tale” starts out in the town of Lombardy in Pavia. January, a 60-year-old knight …

…to the point that May can make January doubt what he is seeing with his own eyes. Although the Merchant intended this to be the moral of his tale, a more fitting moral would be, not to marry in haste. Had January courted a woman closer to his age and gotten to know her before marrying her, the same problem would’ve most likely not arisen and they would have had a long, happy marriage.