Probably the most important precedent relative to "Mrs. Bullfrog" and the other marriage tales of Hawthorne is Geoffrey Chaucer's collection, found in his Canterbury Tales (late 1380s-1390s). According to F. N. Robinson's text, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), there are seven tales, not completely connected but constituting a series that apparently was prepared in a kind of final form by Chaucer. These were labeled "The Marriage Group" by Professor George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard, who called attention to this series' sequential pattern, which separates them from the other Canterbury Tales.

These seven are concerned "with a single subject or topic, the seat and conduct of authority in married life." The seven narrators or tale-tellers in "The Marriage Group" are: the Wife of Bath, the Friar, the Summoner, the Clerk, the Merchant, the Squire, and the Franklin. Perhaps the two best-known...