The dream-frame ("envelope") of PF reveals Chaucer's struggling with the problems of poetic composition, particularly of fusing form and context. The poem's unity is a function of the narrator's stance, more divorced from the poem's subject (Love)…
The Prioress is neither aristocratic, as Bowden, Manly, and Robinson argue, nor classless as Sister Madeleva posits, but a proto-Cockney and, thus, a typically round, contradictory Chaucerian character. With East London associations and dialect (her…
Dame Alice embodies the "bossy woman" who wishes to be mastered in bed, demands freedom outside it, but only finds her ideal in fantasy. Her fourth husband failed to master her in bed; the fifth refused her freedom outside it; only the knight in WBT…
Alice misunderstands the sacramental nature of Christian marriage--which requires perennial mutual affection and joining of wills, not self-centered egoism--creating a serious obstacle to the sacrament's efficacy in producing grace. Alice does not…
Wurtele, Douglas (J.)
Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 66-79.
Alongside January's outright parody of "Canticum Canticorum," a web of allusions thereto sets up an ironic juxtaposition of May and the Virgin Mary, reinforcing the bitterness permeating MerT; these subtle allusions also reflect the Merchant's desire…
Caroline Spurgeon's (1925) attribution of the first German essay on Chaucer to J. J. Eschenburg (1793) is inaccurate. Karl Friedrich Flogel published a short Chaucerian essay a decade earlier in "Geschichte der komischen Literatur" (1784-87). …
In his apprentice years as a poet Chaucer must have spoken and written in French, the language of the court; hence he was commissioned to write BD on the reputation of this (now lost) French poetry. Possibly the memorial was written in English for a…
Chaucer sets up Criseyde's behavior, from first love to betrayal, as a reflection on woman's perilous social state. In so doing he questions the judgment passed on her by a male-centered society and religion, even though it is represented in his own…
Green, Richard Firth.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 201-20.
Throughout TC Chaucer uses the social play of "luf-talkying" as a vehicle for irony and as a means of establishing man's inability to attain an ideal. Troilus plays the love game too earnestly and so is both truly comic and, in terms of final…
Constance is not, as Delany (1974) claims, a character who embodies and recommends self-degradation and abject submission to power in all its forms. What is important is that Constance discovers in the course of her experience that Providence, not…
Griselda's several robings and disrobings are used to suggest the difficulty of knowing the constant reality behind shifting appearances. The behavior of Griselda and Walter becomes more coherent through the different meanings they see in clothing: …
In the Merchant and MerT Chaucer objectifies his own cultural bias against women and his own interest in financial profit. The Merchant is like January (Janus was the god of merchants), and Chaucer (born into a family of merchants) is like the…
Chaucer uses "the winds of Fortune" as a metaphor to organize the genre and to define the characters. Troilus' perception of Fortune shifts from the divine to Criseyde, assuring his fall. The narrator opposes Pandarus' attitude in accepting the…
Benson, C. David.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 308-15.
Guido's "Historia Destructionis Troiae" uses an objective historical tone, mixed with outbursts of personal lamentation. From this Chaucer developed his narrator, a philosophical historian who is affected as a man by his own story, to accent in TC…
In CT Chaucer defines and redefines "myrie tale." Ultimately it is neither mere entertainment, nor pure instruction, not even sentence and solace. A truly "myrie tale" must be "fructuous," i.e., truly edifying. Only ParsT fits, for poetry is…
Havely, Nicholas R.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 337-45.
The Friar's varied activities are recounted in terms that have both commercial and non-materialistic applications. Ambigous diction points toward deeper questions about the use of wealth and, together with the sexual innuendoes and the enumeration…
Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims saw Madame Eglentyne as the Virgin's handmaiden, reflecting in her foibles and virtues the Queen of Heaven, whose "amor vincit omnia" (love conquers all). Support for the existence of the Marian echoes includes the…
Nolan, Charles J.,Jr.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 363-72.
Pity blends the language and structure of amorous and legal complaints. Legal bills, like "The Bill of Complaint" in the second part of Pity, have a tripartite structure: address, statement of grievance, and prayer for remedy. Recognition of this…
Chaucer increases Boccaccio's emphasis on the social situation of the lovers to dramatize the separation between personal and public lives. Pandarus, ever conscious of the social context, trains Troilus as the "literary" lover. The action reflects…
Recent proposals that Alisoun and Jankyn may have murdered her fourth husband are analyzed and rejected. Their quarrel arises not from mutual guilt but from Jankyn's suspicions about Alisoun, and from his association of murder and female lust. Such…
If the Pardoner is taken as a hermaphrodite, it is easier to approach the question of how he can explain his false practices and still expect his listeners to be taken in by them. According to late medieval writers, the hermaphrodite's dual nature…
A previously uncollected analogue emerges in the form of a joke in Kansas. Structural parallels include the motivating action, the consummation in a tree, and the refusal of the husband to believe the evidence of his own eyes.
By constantly breaking the dramatic illusion, the Nun's Priest forces his audience to consider the implications not only of his storytelling but of storytelling itself. The interruptions of his narrative, the comparisons of chickens and people, the…
