Gaylord. Alan T.
Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 300-315.
By deliberate excision lines 1188-1203 of LGW can be reduced from decasyllables to octosyllables, illustrating the different effects of the lines, especially the longer "breath" of the decasyllable.
Heffernan, Carol Falvo.
Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 332-40.
Walter and Griselda embody qualities to be found in medieval discussions of tyrants and "commune profit," but they go beyond abstract ideas as characters in their own right.
Chaucer's punning in ShT is complex, some puns depending upon the eye ("tale," "tallynge") and others upon the ear alone. The Shipman imports into English a foreign form (the fabliau) and foreign (especially French) financial words "that hadden…
An automaton "who is both theologically and in ordinary human terms...dead," the Pardoner, whose sexuality emphasizes his deadness, may yet be redeemed in the words of the Old Man.
Psychoanalytical criticism provides an unsatisfactory view of BD. The structure is rhetorical and Chaucer "leaves the dialectic unresolved, the syllogism of consolation incomplete."
Latin, rather than OF, sources, especially the twelfth-century "Isengrimus," provide parallels with NPT. The fifteenth-century Low German "De vos und de hane" was derived orally from the "Isengrimus." Possibly Chaucer heard an analogous English…
The problem of ascertaining Chaucer's audience(s) is complex, running from the fictional one of GP to the real audiences of the poet's day to the audiences of the present.
The poems to Scogan, Bukton, and Vache, and those to Richard II and Henry IV provide evidence of the makeup of the audience, with whom the poet shared an interest in good manners and good humor.
Birds as the participants in the "demande d'amour" game are comic, as is Nature the judge: her ineptness is both risible and serious, as traditionally she is limited by the Fall.
"The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode," the ME translation of de Guilleville's "Pelerinage de la vie humaine," leads to an emendation of Chaucer's lyric, which should probably read (lines 38-39): "So litel shal thanne in me be founde / That but…
In translating Bo from the original Latin and a French translation, Chaucer often adapts a word from the latter to create new concepts, especially with English gerunds.