Browse Items (16472 total)

Elaborates on the distinction between "natura naturans" and "natura naturata" in relation to their Greek, Latin, and Germanic etymology, and examines uses of the words "nature" and "kynde" in BD, HF, PF, and Rom to show the tendency of each word's…

Assesses and combines various attempts to define Chaucerian "resonance" as a term of intertextuality and the reception of Chaucer; also summarizes each of the twelve essays included in this special number of Comparative Drama. For summaries of the…

Addresses performance texts associated with the early Elizabethan Inns of Court ("closet dramas, translations, masques, and orations"), arguing that they reflect four Chaucerian "paradigms of play" ("Chaucerian Self-Fashioning," "Chaucerian…

Argues "that Chaucer's treatment of devils, damnation, and hell" in CT "resonates" in "Doctor Faustus," focusing on the yeoman-devil and "the force and binding implications of illocutionary acts" in FrT, as well as on "interesting parallels" between…

Identifies narrative, linguistic, and thematic similarities between Chaucer's KnT, MilT, and RvT and Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus," and argues that the brutal treatment of Lavinia in Shakespeare's play resonates with the aspects of courtly love…

Focuses on depictions of Dido in HF and in Shakespeare's "Titus," arguing that "Shakespeare found in Chaucer's "House of Fame" a medieval vernacular model for . . . [the] Virgilian-Ovidian hybridity" of the character, and showing that the two works…

Shows that Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" and the anonymous "Taming of a Shrew" feature skeptical parody of Stoic certainty about distinguishing reality from illusion or dream. As in HF, the "framing fictions" of the plays "make a show" of…

Argues that allusion to Apollo in TC conveys an ambivalent attitude toward literary authority by affiliating it with sexual violence, an ambivalence that Shakespeare echoes in "Troilus and Cressida." Both writers use Apollo to problematize…

Suggests that Shakespeare's title, "The Winter's Tale," adapts a possessive form associated with Chaucerian narratives--the x's tale--" and identifies similarities between the play and ManT. Focuses on the works' attention to linguistic…

Compares Emelye of KnT and Emilia of Shakespeare and Fletcher's "The Two Noble Kinsmen," arguing that Emelye's desire for a non-patriarchal subjectivity is developed in her literary descendant--that "monastic connotations in Chaucer's depictions of…

Identifies complex intertextual relations among KnT, the story of Amis and Amiloun, Shakespeare and Fletcher's "Two Noble Kinsmen." and archival references to two lost Tudor plays, "Palamon and Arcite" and "Alexander and Lodowick, "exploring…

Demonstrates that Chaucerian estates satire in CT influenced the development of dramatic "city comedy" at the turn of the seventeenth century. Shows that in his "Ho" plays Dekker adapts Chaucer's London topographies, characterizations, themes, and…

Shows that in his pamphlet "A Strange Horse-Race," Thomas Dekker quotes FranT "to illustrate hospitality" and the force of "binding oaths"; in his play "The Shoemaker''s Holiday," he "drew on Chaucer's Franklin for material about credit and debt."…

Explores how resonance with CT in '1 Henry IV, 1.2, "communicates the pre-Reformation otherness of the world" and raises questions about "cultural distance and appropriation" that circulate among the essays collected in this special issue of…

Contrasts the sorrows of the Dreamer and of Alcyone with that of the Man in Black in BD, arguing that the first two serve to elevate the intensity of the latter. Then examines the epideitic praise of Blanche/White as a form of personification that…

Explores unanswered questions about Chaucer's knowledge of Petrarch and use of Petrarchan material in TC 1.400-420 and in ClT, focusing on close reading of Chaucer's "deviations" from Petrarch's Sonnet 132 in his translation of it in TC, with…

Argues that the image of the mirror of January's mind in MerT (4.1577-87) derives from the "Roman de la Rose" and connects with Chaucer's garden setting to underscore the selfish narcissism of January's distorted love-seeking.

Surveys the status of the complaint as a formal genre in classical and in medieval French, Provencal, Italian, and English traditions as background to discussing Chaucer's uses of the genre in BD, TC, Mars, and elsewhere. Focuses on Chaucer's…

Shows that Chaucer's depiction of Fame in HF has several parallels with the depiction of her in the French "Ovide moralisé": use of anaphora in amplification of Ovid's original, Fame's role of judge and her "aura of authority," and overt concern…

Argues that in HF Chaucer achieves "symbolic cohesion" and unity by combining the narrator's Virgilian epiphany of a "higher sense of duty" (his response to the Aeneas/Dido exemplum) with the Boethian imagery of philosophical ascent (effected by the…

Explores how Dante and Petrarch provide a "schema for understanding" the modifications Chaucer made to the view of love in Boccaccio's "Filostrato." The "Vita Nuova" offers a "hierarchy of love," analogous to that in TC even though Chaucer may not…

Chaucer's distinction between "makere" and "poete" is found elsewhere in medieval writings. Serving both to separate classical from contemporary and to distinguish artistic quality from moral seriousness, the distinction suggests the relationship…

Theorizes differences between grammatical/rhetorical invention and Romantic ideas of creativity and originality, commenting on Chaucer's TC and, passingly, on his Adam Scriveyn, as well as on Petrarch's adaptation of Boccaccio's tale of Griselda,…

In his translation of KnT, Dryden imposed a number of pictorial effects--colors, emblems, icons, static scenes, and landscapes--to transform Chaucer into a seventeenth-century gentleman.

In Panfilo's tale of Ser Ciappelletto in the "Decameron," we are directed to respond, disapproving, to that character's hypocrisy, but the Pardoner, in the tradition of philosophical nominalism, so confuses the differences among word, intent, and…