Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar: The Dreamer in Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess'

Author / Editor
Bartlett, Lee A.

Title
Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar: The Dreamer in Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess'

Published
Thoth 15.1 (1974-75): 3-11.

Description
The dreamer's apparently inept, clumsy responses to the knight's complaint result not from sympathetic tactfulness, but rather from his ignorance of courtly love conventions. His recognition of the transience of all earthly things in the knight's story of victory and bereavement in love affords him momentary release from his own suffering.

Chaucer Subjects
Book of the Duchess.