Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins

Author / Editor
Thompson, Ann.

Title
Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins

Published
New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978.

Physical Description
239 pp.

Description
Elizabethan and Jacobean writers found Chaucer a major poet. The poems most frequently used--TC, KnT, and ClT--show that they regarded Chaucer as a romantic not a comic writer. He is used for a brief reference or quotation, a subsidiary source, or a full-scale plot. Shakespeare's use is the most extensive and interesting; e.g., "A Midsummer Night's Dream" uses four works in different ways; KnT, LGW, MerT, PF.
In "Troilus and Cressida" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen," Shakespeare picks out details from several different places in Chaucer's poems to concentrate an effect in a single scene rather than following his source through.

Chaucer Subjects
Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion.