Browse Items (16472 total)

Chaucer's poetry should be regarded as aural rather than oral. Aural poetry is less formulaic and digressive than poetry composed extemporaneously, but it too has special characteristics since it was to be heard and not read. TC reveals Chaucer's…

Several passages in TC indicate a covert incestuous strain between Criseyde and Pandarus, the "senex amans" who uses Troilus to fulfill vicariously his own sexual fantasies.

The word "hazelwode" in Pandarus's proverbs ridiculing the lovers' fatuous hopes indicates Chaucer's familiarity with the miraculous powers attributed to hazel in Celtic divination and healing rites.

Although recent criticism tends to classify Chaucer as an Ockhamist/nominalist, a close study of his most philosophical poem, TC, indicates that his thought was traditional and scholastic.

The ludic responses depicted in these two lines bear out Barry Windeatt's assertion that Chaucer's "displacement of tragedy by comedy" at the end of TC took its inspiration from Dante's "Commedia."

By altering the proverb in TC 4.588 from "day" to "nyght," Chaucer ironically foreshadows the beginning of Troilus's period of unrest.

Male-male intimacy evokes opposing reactions, positive or homophobic. Analyzes male-male bonds from biblical, classical, and medieval literature, including several English and French romances, together with chronicles attacking Edward II's and…

Schowerling investigates the influence of Chaucer's TC on four writers of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Writers and works discussed include Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," Sidnam's paraphrase of TC, Shakespeare's "Troilus and…

Tallies John Keats's early references and allusions to TC in his letters to Fanny Brawne and assesses how his lyric "What can I do to drive away" follows Chaucer's poem in representing the "rhythmic experience of pain passing into sweetness and…

Chaucer plays on his audience's awareness that Boccaccio (not Lollius) is the true source of TC; he also engages in similar play between the pagan setting of the poem and its Christian message.

Reads KnT and TC as "tales of fortune's fools" in which the traditional themes of romantic love and knightly chivalry are undercut by verbal play and the trivialization of notions of pity, mercy, grace, and love.

Criseyde's garden and Pandarus's home are integrated symbolically with the theme of mutability in TC. Both sites display Pandarus's dream of circumventing mutability and figure his attempts as a go-between to shape an unchanging earthly union in the…

Four puns not previously uncovered in the poem are "astoned" (5.1728), "inne...oute" (5.1519), "in armes" (2.165), and "ese" (2.1659). The last three have sexual suggestiveness.

Criseyde's sexually charged endearments for Troilus in bk. 3 of TC provided amusement for Chaucer's contemporary audience, adding new dimensions to Criseyde's character.

Through his poetic wit Chaucer makes Criseyde resemble a religious, even Christ. These suggestions add to the irony of the love.

Reads TC allegorically, with sustained attention to astrological imagery, characterization, narrative structure, the biblical Book of Daniel, and the Augustinian theme of the transference of power.

Calchas's speech at the beginning of book 4 extends and enlarges the perspective of the narrative grown increasingly narrow during the course of books 1-3. Whereas in TC 1-3 the lovers are portrayed as increasingly confined--both spatially and…

Suggests that Pandarus's phrase "ye haselwodes shaken" (TC 3.890) might be paraphrased as "you offer food to pigs."

Comments on the portentousness of the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn and on the moon as the cause of the rainstorm in TC 3.624-28, when Criseyde decides to stay at Pandarus's home.

Discusses various critical readings of TC 3.1093 and suggests that the line should be read "at once ironically and without irony."

A Modern English translation in rhyme royal stanzas, based primarily on F. N. Robinson's text.

Praises the stylistic appropriateness of Astr to its youthful audience, showing how Chaucer adapts the lexicon, syntax, and rhetoric of Massahalla to be more suitable to his ten-year-old son, Lewis. Chaucer relies on native rather than Latinate…

Comments on the conventional nature of the imagery and diction of Ros and argues that the poem was composed to "compliment" and "delight" the child-bride of Richard II, Princess Isabelle of Valois, on the occasion of "her entry into London in 1396."

A feminist reading of the Wife of Bath's personality and behavior, focusing on her married life, her sexual attitudes, and linguistic usage.

In SNP the identification of "ydelnesse" as a diabolical agent anticipates the dramatic rejection of pagan images later in the tale.