Aristotle, in the Poetics, names six elements that make up a tragedy — which is really just any kind of “story:” plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. Plot comes first, and by a wide margin, because plot is the representation of human action — what people actually do, not what they merely think or say about themselves. Character is the second most important part of a story.
The Prioress Tale has plot AND character. Aristotle also draws a distinction that’s held up well across twenty-five centuries: a complex plot involves a reversal of fortune, or a moment of recognition, some point where a character — and the audience along with them — discovers something that reframes everything that came before. In Hamlet, for example, the moment of recognition occurs when Hamlet confirms Claudius’s guilt during the play-within-a-play he puts on. The reversal of fortune happens when Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, turning his chance for revenge into a fatal downward spiral.
A simple plot has a change of fortune too, but without either of those elements. Fate just shifts, in a straight line, without any dramatic turn.
The Prioress’s Tale is a simple plot. Innocent child. Evil deed. Divine miracle. Execution. There’s no reversal buried anywhere in it, no recognition scene, nothing resembling the complex moral weight of something like Hamlet. Jews are evil. No doubt that this could possibly be an incorrect judgment. Or that the Jews would actually have empathy of the boy who was singing and didn’t understand the words.
There’s a scene in the movie Casablanca where in Rick’s Café, the Nazi guests start singing the German national anthem. The French guests start singing the French national anthem. Their voices rise, until the French contingent overpowers the Nazi vocals and the café is closed down by the Nazis. There are lots of ways to handle conflicts around a song, aren’t there?
Aristotle also says a plot needs a beginning, middle, and end, unified and of a length sufficient to represent the action without losing the audience’s attention — and on that count, the Prioress’s tale does what it needs to. It’s tightly built. It just isn’t complicated.
But the interesting question is never really “is this plot simple or complex?” The interesting question is what a plot this simple is doing, and what is it telling us about the narrator who chose to tell it this way?
On its surface, the Prioress Tale reads as a story about faith rewarded with a miracle; don’t forget, the boy keeps singing even after his throat is cut. But if we take a closer look — which is what reading classical literature demands of us — notice what’s missing: the tale never once explained why anyone hates this particular child enough to kill him. It just says a Jew killed him.
The only motive offered is that Satan entered the hearts of the men involved — which is to say, no human motive is offered at all. And that absence is the clue. This is a story about hatred. Hatred that doesn’t need, and isn’t given, any argument to support it. Pure evil, attributed to being Jewish. Hmm.
And therein lies the reason I like Aristotle: his second point in stories: character. Character development is critical to a complex plot. In order to have a reversal or recognition, the character has to reflect the complexity of being human.
Where does that happen in this story? Do you see it anywhere? Or do you see simple abstract representations of humans—villains, innocence, supernatural spirits. Prejudice is shown to us, plain and simple. Showing is always more powerful than telling, but through the telling of this tale, the Prioress shows what she truly is: a woman full of hatred for Jews disguised as Christian belief. The simple plot becomes one of the most powerful expressions of showcasing what true antisemitism really is: invisible to the person who has it within them. A true classic.