Mertz describes documents and commentary that relate to the illustrations of the Canterbury pilgrims by William Blake and Thomas Stothard, the latter published by Robert Hartley Cromek. The materials belonged to antiquarian Francis Douce (1757-1834)…
Friar Lawrence of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet echoes Pandarus of TC. As rhetors, both are fond of apothegms; dramatically, each acts as a go-between; thematically, each reflects how truth escapes human efforts to capture it in fiction.
Mulryne, J. R.
J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds. War, Literature, and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp.165-89.
Mulryne assesses attitudes toward chivalry in early seventeenth-century shows and plays, including discussion of how Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen reflects the magnificence and human pain of KnT.
Perkins, Nicholas.
Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y. : D. S. Brewer, 2001.
Perkins examines the narrative strategies Hoccleve adopts--advisor, servant, court outsider, autobiographer, moralist, petitioner--as responses to the politically charged context of "Lancastrian poetry." This study identifies the political context in…
Ruud, Jay.
Barbara Olive and David Sprunger, eds. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature (Moorhead, Minn.: Concordia College, 2002), pp. 8-21.
Explicates works by three twentieth-century poets who have made Chaucer the subject of their work: Benjamin Brawley's sonnet "Chaucer" (1922), e. e. cummings's untitled sonnet from his collection "Xaipé" (1950), and Ted Hughes's "Chaucer" (1998).…
Shawver, Gary W., ed.
Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2002.
Critical edition of Usk's Testament, with introduction, commentary, and apparatus, including the source of Book 3--Anselm of Canterbury's treatise on divine foreknowledge and human free will. The introduction and commentary document the author's life…
In her poem "The Author's Dreame," Lanyer uses the medieval dream vision, allusions to Chaucer (HF) and other poets, and Renaissance and biblical tropes to criticize as well as praise her patrons; however, her authority is threatened by the use of…
Staunton, Kay.
Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama, eds. "A Poet and a Filthy Play-maker": New Essays on Christopher Marlowe. AMS Studies in the Renaissance, no. 14 (New York: AMS, 1988), pp. 23-35.
Staunton describes Shakespeare's allusions to Marlowe in As You Like It. Touchstone's and Rosalind's references to Troilus as a lover engage TC.
Usk borrowed from TC for his Testament of Love, often using quotations to describe his spiritual love for Margarite. Usk is a kind of Pandarus (deceiving, flattering, and self-serving), and his employment as a clerk sheds light on the reception and…
Walker assesses the three allusions to the Trojan War in NPT and argues that they underlie parallel concerns in Shakespeare's play. Shakespeare emulates Chaucer's skeptical attitude toward the Trojan War.
Cable, Thomas.
Yoko Iyeiri and Margaret Connolly, eds. And Gladly Wolde He Lerne and Gladly Teche: Essays on Medieval English Presented to Professor Matsuji Tajima on His Sixtieth Birthday (Tokyo: Kaibunsha, 2002), pp. 109-25.
Cable laments deterioration in the understanding of Chaucer's meter. He argues that too little attention has been paid to the loss of final -e in the fifteenth century, leading to misreading the poetry of Lydgate, Hoccleve, Barclay, and Hawes.
Cable, Thomas.
Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell, eds. Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 125-51.
Surveys twentieth-century developments in describing and analyzing the prosody of early English poetry, summarizing and assessing the views of Wimsatt and Beardsley, Halle and Keyser, Kiparsky, and others on meter, stress, ictus and their relations.…
Cable, Thomas.
Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell, eds. Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 177-82.
Critiques Youmans and Li's assessment of Chaucer's verse (in this same volume, pp. 153-75), urging metricists to avoid "importing phonological analyses" into theory of meter.
Gilbert, A. J.
A. J. Gilbert, Literary Language from Chaucer to Johnson (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: Barnes & Noble), 1979, pp. 29-62.
Close reading of KnT, focusing on elements such as syntax, diction, and imagery, shows Chaucer's dexterous use of high, middle, and low styles. The variety and combination of elements produce the tone of the poem and "naturalize" its philosophical…
Argues that Chaucer and several rhetoricians deliberately construct verbal portraits of the female body and feminize language to engage readers in the pursuit of textual pleasure; this engagement is predicated on a particular way of looking at,…
Proposes a Wittgensteinian approach to Chaucer's language that eschews the inherent limitations of linguistic description and stylistic analysis. The poet's works are about language.
Examines all fifteenth-century witnesses of WBP, which are available on CD-Rom (SAC 20 [1998], no.11). Some scribes still had a system for the use of final -e, here studied in strong and weak adjectives in early, mid-, and late-fifteenth-century…
Chapman, Don.
Jacek Fisiak, ed. Studies in English Historical Linguistics and Philology: A Festschrift for Akio Oizumi Studies in English Language and Literature, no. 2 (Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 37-49.
Describes the variety of ways Chaucer uses noun-adjective compounds to produce "strong connotations or heightened effects."
Foster, Edward E., and David H. Carey.
Aldershot; and Brookfield, Vt. : Ashgate, 2002.
Lists Chaucer's religious, ecclesiastical, and liturgical terms and proper names (about 500), alphabetically arranged by Chaucer's spelling and cross-listed. Many terms are defined at greater length than in a lexical dictionary. Others are lengthier…
Raymo, Robert [R.] .
New York : Grolier Club, 2000.
Brief descriptions of the 93 items in the exhibition, intended to present a "comprehensive view of modern representations of Chaucer and his work" (ii). Also includes a brief chronology of Chaucer's life, an index of major editions (between 1447 and…
Sammut, Alfonso.
[Valletta] : University of Malta, 1997.
Enumerative bibliography of Italian influence on English literature, arranged by English authors, Italian authors, and selected topics; 4022 items (about 400 pertaining to Chaucer), some with very brief annotations. Includes an index of scholars'…
Havely, Nicholas R., dir.
[Provo, Ut.]: Chaucer Studio, 2002.
Complete Middle English audio recording of HF, read by Ros Allen, Tom Burton, Nicholas Havely, Derek Pearsall, Felicity Riddy, and Paul Thomas. Includes three interpolated songs.
