Games and High Seriousness: Chaucer

Published: Lanham, Richard A. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 65-81.

Description: Chaucer's "detached role" in CT establishes his "characteristic attitude toward human behavior--the rhetorical attitude," which views social interaction as a series of roles played in accord with conditional games. Comments on the Host, the Wife of Bath, and the Clerk as game players in CT, and considers Pandarus's roles as a "controller of games" in TC, where language "almost always conceals an ulterior motive" and where society creates three characters who, tragically, operate with differing sets of assumptions about their roles.

Alternative Title: Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance.

Chaucer Subjects: Canterbury Tales--General; Wife of Bath and Her Tale; Clerk and His Tale; Troilus and Criseyde