A Vocabulary for Chaucerian Comedy: A Preliminary Sketch

Published: J. B. Bessinger and R. Raymo, eds. Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 193-225.

Description: Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics" and "Rhetoric" and the Costinian "Tractate" can be used to anatomize comedy in CT.; Identifying and cataloguing plot motifs and character types points to the conclusions that comedy as a genre provides both a learning experience and a catharsis of the attractiveness of the "ugly, untoward" emotions; that in comedy plot is subordinate to character; and that comedy's effectiveness rests upon the degree of inner plausibility of the work itself rather than upon the degree of accurate imitation of the macrocosm.; Reprinted in Jean E. Jost, ed. Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays (Garland, 1994), 41-77.