Spenser Reading Chaucer: Another Look at the 'Faerie Queene' Allusions
- Author / Editor
- Higgins, Anne.
Spenser Reading Chaucer: Another Look at the 'Faerie Queene' Allusions
- Published
- Journal of English and Germanic Philology 89 (1990): 17-36.
- Description
- Spenser's indebtedness to Chaucer is several times acknowledged in "The Faerie Queene," but only in a curious, ambiguous way, "reducing rather than elevating Chaucer's reputation." Chaucer, for example, was hardly the poet of "warlike numbers" that Spenser claims. And Spenser's completion of SqT is in fact a revision of KnT with a new, Renaissance ideology. Perhaps Chaucer's tolerance and skepticism made Spenser quietly rebel against his predecessor, affirming instead the values of the elite class.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion.