Manuscript evidence indicates that only after Chaucer's death did editors assemble copies of individual tales and links to arrange the fragments (reflecting various stages of development in Chaucer's plan) into their differing ideas of a coherent…
Ramsey, Roy Vance.
Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982): 133-54.
Statistical analysis shows CT MSS Hengwrt and Ellesmere as the work of two scribes of closely similar hands, who possibly trained under the same master. The Ellesmere scribe himself is probably "the source of much of the editing" in that MS.
The eight manuscript portraits of Chaucer and the three of Hoccleve are described. Those of Chaucer in Ellesmere and Harley 4866 are possibly independent copies of a common ancestor, now lost. All other portraits of Chaucer depend on their…
Sherbo, Arthur.
Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982): 154-55.
Antiquary Samuel Pegge, writing in "Gentlemen's Magazine" of June, 1758, quotes LGW MS in his possession. The text is close to that in British Library Additional MS 9832, but Pegge's was probably a different, now lost, MS.
This fourteenth-century MS carries the notation "Ch," perhaps for "Chaucer," before fifteen of its 310 French lyrics. Wimsatt edits the "Ch" poems and ten others from the collection to illustrate the kind of French poetry that Chaucer might have…
Longo, John Duane.
Dissertation Abstracts International 42 (1982): 4444A.
The medieval understanding of "translatio" comprises not only recasting in another language but also literary interpretation. In drawing on the "Roman" (already richly allusive), Chaucer adapts Jean de Meun's "mirouer" technique for works of various…
Burnet, R. A. L.
Notes and Queries 227 (1982): 115-16.
Although Ann Thompson's "Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins" explores parallels between TC and LGW and "The Merchant of Venice," it does not note the Chaucerian echoes in Portia's warning of Bassanio (5.1.23Off.), which is similar to…
Cooper, Helen.
Leeds Studies in English 13 (1982): 104-23.
Wyatt's awareness of the power of direct language is Chaucerian, as is the flexibility of his use of rhyme royal. Unlike Chaucer, however, Wyatt is a poet of the contraries existing within the individual, and whereas Chaucer advocates a stable mind…
Downer, Mabel Wilhelmina.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1982): 1537A.
Significant Victorian writers, concerned with social problems as encountered in the past as well as in their own day, revolutionized Chacuer's reputation.
Jeske, Jeffrey M
Victorian Poetry 20 (1982): 21-32.
Clough arranges a group of tales, each representing a position in a debate between proponents of idealism and of naturalism. Like CT, these tales not only exist in a state of tension with each other but actually contradict the philosophical…
Shaw, Priscilla D.
Dissertation Abstracts International 42 (1982): 3169A.
Besides Brooke's "Tragicall Historye," TC seems a significant source for Shakespeare's play. Although verbal parallels are scanty, speeches comparable in rhetoric, imagery, and theme appear in greater density than could be mere conventions of…
Stouck, Mary-Ann.
American Benedictine Review 33 (1982): 276-91.
The innovative material in the first three books of Capgrave's "Life" is indebted to the fifteenth century's interest in Chaucer's "elevated" and pious passages, especially those in TC. Stylistically, however, Capgrave's attempt to emulate his…
Strohm, Paul.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 3-32.
Few of Chaucer's primary audience (men like Sturry, Clifford, Clanover, Montagu, Vache, Scogan, Bukton, Gower, Strode, and Usk) survived him or were still active after his death. His fifteenth-century audience was more broadly dispersed but more…
Despite belittling remarks by some of his characters about the matter of composing in English, there is no evidence that Chaucer himself is embarrassed to use English as his medium of composition.
Hess, Lynn,and Caroline Duncan-Rose.
J. Peter Maher and others, eds. Papers from the Third International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, vol. 13. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, 4th series. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1982), pp. 293-322.
A structural analysis of discourse and narration in CT reveals that tense shifting heretofore considered a flaw by some, is actually a manifestation of Chaucer's extraordinary ear for idiom and his careful exploitation of his audience's feel for…
Speght's edition of Chaucer (1602) included an extensive glossary of "hard words." Later lexicographers, including the editors of the OED, have missed the fact that Jacobean dictionaries of "hard words" borrowed extensively from Speght--entries,…
It is commonly held that a large number of Old French loan words in Middle English were literary borrowings. However, a study of a restricted group (designating articles of dress and fabrics) shows that most such words were current before the…
Barney, Stephen A.
Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel, eds. The Wisdom of Poetry (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan University, 1982), pp. 189-223.
Surveys the sources of Chaucer's lists and examines them for the effects they create, for the rhetorical ends they accomplish in undermining or leavening the direction of a tale or poem, as in TC, Anel, FrT, Rom, WBT, PardT, MkT, MkPT, MerT, Mel,…
Brewer, Derek.
Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk, eds. Acts of Interpretation (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 119-27.
Praises E. Talbot Donaldson as a great textual scholar, using TC to explain Donaldson's ideas on rhyme and meter and discussing the final -"e" and the five-stress verse. The reliability of scribes is examined.
Brewer, Derek.
London and Basingstoke: Humanities Press; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Macmillan Press, 1982.
A collection of Brewer's previously published articles which discuss Chaucer's relationships to the "literary culture of his own times and to our present attitudes." For one new essay, "The Archaic and the Modern," search Tradition and Innovation…
