Character and Circumstance in 'The Franklin's Tale'

Description: Speed gives a careful reading of FranT based on the Franklin's statement of contradictory intentions in his prologue: to tell a Breton lay and to render his tale plain and simple because he has never studied rhetoric. Presenting a romantic fairy tale as an intellectual exercise is a seemingly impossible literary task.; Speed argues that "the events of the tale...are presented as a series of problems, and these are worked out in terms of the logical and generic possibilities of the roles played by the characters at different stages and the circumstances in which they occur."