Chaucer's Rehersynges: The Performability of 'The Legend of Good Women'
- Author / Editor
- Quinn, William A.
Chaucer's Rehersynges: The Performability of 'The Legend of Good Women'
- Published
- Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994.
- Physical Description
- x, 253 pp.
- Description
- Explores the humor and "tonal delights" of LGW, examining the poem as a script for oral performance; argues that the F version was written for oral presentation; the G version, a revision, for manuscript publication.
- Quinn reads each of the legends for "pseudo-sacrilegious" humor, considering relations to sources, rhetorical embellishments, and comic themes. He conjectures about emphases Chaucer may have employed in performance and explores the comic range of the legends, from slapstick to "smarmy cynicism." Quinn concludes by examining how KnT, PhyT, and SNT preserve "significant manifestations of Chaucer's own rehearsals."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Legend of Good Women.
- Knight and His Tale.
- Physician and His Tale.
- Second Nun and Her Tale.