The Cook's Tale
The Cook's Tale is part of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
Summary
Perkyn Revelour is a London apprentice who prefers dancing, drinking and gambling to his work. His master dismisses him. Perkyn goes to live with a companion whose wife keeps a shop as a cover for prostitution.
The surviving tale breaks off at this point. It is more than an introduction to Perkyn, but it supplies no completed plot or moral resolution. Later scribes sometimes added material or placed Gamelyn after it; those additions should not be presented as Chaucer's surviving conclusion.
Source
Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Website: synopsis, context and link to the text.
Close reading and comparisons
The opening portrait uses comparisons with a goldfinch, a berry and a hive of honey to present Perkyn's appearance and appetites. These are examples of figurative description within the tale, distinct from a reader's later interpretation of its unfinished plot. Read Chaucer's wording alongside the modern English gloss in Harvard's interlinear text, especially lines 4365–4378.
- Metaphor, Metonymy, Simile, Analogy and Symbol helps distinguish an explicit comparison from a symbolic reading of an event.
- The Squire's Tale offers another surviving narrative that stops before its announced adventures are completed. Compare what each text actually supplies before imagining a conclusion.
- Narrative and Interpretation provides a route into the difference between the narrator's characterisation and a reader's judgement.