Browse Items (16470 total)

Reviews scholarship concerning Chaucer's visits to Spain and considers ways he may have encountered Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor, orally and/or in manuscript.

Both in his emphasis on particular Christian issues and in his stereotyping of Jews, Dominican writer Robert Holcot reflects the lack of Jews in England. Holcot may have influenced Chaucer's understanding of Jews.

Assesses Chaucer's response to ancient poetry, especially as Chaucer (like Dante) fuses the ancient with more recent models while pursuing the ancient concern with the tragic sorrows of love. Wetherbee comments on aspects of BD and HF, examines the…

Andreas explores the "interplay of serious and comic materials" in the "best work" of Chaucer and Shakespeare, commenting on the use of KnT in A Midsummer Night's Dream and on Shakespeare's adaptations of Chaucer's comic figures in his mechanicals.

Traces the "progressive desacralization" of the "Matter of Thebes" from KnT to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The gods have power in KnT, but they diminish comically and then tragically disappear in Shakespeare's…

Sensitive to contemporary political events, Shakespeare parodies Spenser's Tears of the Muses in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In addition, the dream of the elf queen in Chaucer's Th is the source of Bottom's dream, as well as Arthur's dream in Faerie…

Emerson's allusion in "The Poet" to the lecture on gentility in WBT attributes the sentiment to Chaucer (rather than to the Wife), concentrates on the fire's brightness, and suggests that the passage refers to "good blood in mean condition." Since…

Assesses why Hoccleve, the first person who attempted to establish Chaucer as the Father of English poetry, failed to "claim his own position as direct lineal heir in this literary genealogy."

Shakespeare's alterations of KnT in A Midsummer Night's Dream and (with John Fletcher) in Two Noble Kinsman resulted from the exigencies of the stage and produced works of a new tenor and thematic emphasis.

Assesses the influence of Chaucer and CT on Longfellow's poem, commenting on the poets' differences in sexual attitudes and concerns with mimetic realism and observing that Longfellow sought to become Father of American Poetry. Critical approaches to…

Joyce was re-reading CT while revising Ulysses. Chaucerian influence extends beyond allusion to parallels of linguistic conception, encyclopedic reference, and form. The works share elements of tone, a sense of place among the great works of…

Although based on Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, "Amoryus and Cleopes" (1449) was clearly influenced by TC in diction and style. Metham's amelioration of tragedy simplifies Chaucer's complex and ambiguous combination of de casibus tragedy and…

Assesses the intertextual relationship of Lydgate's "A Balade in Commendation of Our Lady" with TC and with Alan de Lille's "Anticlaudianus," exploring how aureate diction contributes to the poem's "connection between poetry and redemption in…

A teaching edition of "The Siege of Thebes," with introduction, marginal glosses, textual and explanatory notes, select bibliography, and glossary. The introduction and notes clarify Lydgate's engagement with KnT, the frame of CT, and TC and discuss…

Surveys various translations of Statius into English and comments briefly on how Chaucer's use of Statius is reflected in later English tradition.

The death of England's Prince Henry sparked a "sense of near-nihilism" and prompted Shakespeare and Fletcher to question chivalry in The Two Noble Kinsmen. This interrogation anticipates modern readings of KnT--the source of the play--as a…

Assesses "incongruity in the sheer quality of style" in Pericles, especially the Gower passages, suggesting that Shakespeare was inspired by Thopas--Chaucer's experiment in incongruity produced from the "inferior art" of an earlier tradition.

Jasper examines Petruchio's use of clothing as a form of gender control in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, comparing it with similar uses of clothing in versions of the Griselda story-Boccaccio's, Petrarch's, ClT, and John Phillips's "The…

"Checklaton" (jacket fabric) is recorded only in Chaucer's Thopas, Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and "A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland"--an indication that Spenser wrote the latter.

Kennedy examines how Spenser fused aspects of Chaucer's Thopas and SqT with features of Ariosto's Innkeeper's Tale (Orlando Furioso 28) in creating his Squire of Dames, found in books 3 and 4 of Faerie Queene.

According to Knapp, the "emerging lay bureaucracy at Westminster" is closely aligned with vernacular literary production and a major factor in understanding Ricardian and Lancastrian cultures. As is evident in the career and writings of Hoccleve,…

Viewed in light of A Midsummer Night's Dream, KnT is "more comic" than traditionally assumed; its cyclic pattern of "proliferating catastrophes becomes humorous."

The "accumulation of Chaucerisms" in Henryson's Orpheus encourages readers to posit a fallible narrator; the gap between tale and moralization can be seen as an artful effort to dissuade readers from too easily accepting the premise that meaning is…

Includes discussion of the influence of KnT on Shakespeare's play, focusing on the play's structure and its concern with "reconciling a faith in cosmic order with our experience of life's apparent chaos" (256).

TC inspired both Albert Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare's play is a "more serious and comprehensive reading" of TC, particularly its fusion of comedy and tragedy, than is…