Throughout Chaucer’s, ‘the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,’ and Sheridan’s, ‘the Rivals,’ Both Authors Present Their Characters as Thoroughly Deceptive in Their Pursuit of Their Desires

Throughout Chaucer’s, ‘The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,’ and Sheridan’s, ‘The Rivals,’ both authors present their characters as thoroughly deceptive in their pursuit of their desires.

For example, in the case of The Wife of Bath, Chaucer consistently presents her as determined to gain mastery and sovereignty over her husbands which is emphasised when she announces that she shall, ‘Be maister of my body and my good.’ It is interesting to notice how she almost bullies or blackmails her husbands into complying with her wishes as she mentions how, ‘I swoor that al my walking out by nighte/Was for t’espie wenches that he dighte.’ Here, although during the fourteenth century it was the absolute duty of the wife to obey and please her husband, as he was her master, she is openly defying his actions. She previously mentions how, ‘My fourthe housbonde was a revelour;/That is to seyn, he hadde a paramour;/And I was yong and ful of ragerie.’ Therefore, it could be argued that that, ‘She (The Wife) is unable to see that her tactics are actually reinforcing all the stereotypical medieval ideas about woman as cruel, emotional and sexually voracious.’ However, her fourth husband’s actions drives her to adopt the façade of a suspicious wife in order to prevent her husband from his affairs with various other women, which she explicitly opposes, which can be argued as being rather hypocritical. She uses her disguise as the good wife, who suspects her husband is having an affair, alongside the various threats of blackmail to coerce her husband into finally accepting his marriage and focus on pleasing his wife. This proves that in this case, Chaucer portrays the Wife of Bath as deliberately adopting a false way of life and mannerisms to coerce her husband into complying with her desires, whereby the critic Knight claimed that, ‘The Wife’s clever use of power means that she is able to escape male domination.’

This is also seen in the case of the Captain Jack Absolute throughout, ‘The Rivals,’ whereby Sheridan writes how this character deliberately adopts the disguise of Ensign Beverley in order to gain Lydia Languish’ hand in marriage. This is explicitly revealed by Fag during Act I, Scene I, when he mentions, ‘Captain Absolute and Ensign Beverley are one and the same person.’ He then goes on to claim how, ‘My master is in love with a lady of a very singular taste; a lady who likes him better as a half – penny Ensign than if she knew he was son and heir to Sir Anthony Absolute, a baronet of three thousand a year!’ Through Fag’s explicit revelation, the audience are able to learn that Captain Jack Absolute has had to alter his identity from a wealthy young gentleman to that of a poor, yet ambitious young man, similar to those characters within the romantic novels that Lydia Languish reads for leisure. Therefore, in this case, Sheridan deliberately alters Captain Jack Absolute’s