Chaucer's 'Shaply' Guildsmen and Mercantile Pretensions
- Author / Editor
- Gastle, Brian W.
Chaucer's 'Shaply' Guildsmen and Mercantile Pretensions
- Published
- Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99 (1998): 211-16.
- Description
- The portrait of the five guildsmen in CT is a critique of "petty bourgeois pretensions to political power." Though each was "shaply for to been an alderman," the guildsmen were not members of the professions from which aldermen were elected. Their dress, like their wives' aspirations for social climbing, makes them subjects for derision.
- Chaucer Subjects
- General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.