Deference and Difference : Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes
- Author / Editor
- Straker, Scott-Morgan.
Deference and Difference : Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes
- Published
- Review of English Studies 52: 1-21, 2001.
- Description
- Lydgate appropriates Chaucer not so much to pay tribute as to distance himself from anticlericalism, to redeem the narrative and monastic voice, and to assert its freedom from authority, as represented by Harry Bailly. Lydgate's apparent compliance allows the monastic identity to address unwelcome truth to secular authority. While the prologue to the "Siege" is self-confidently naive, the body of the poem articulates the inability of rhetoric to affect history.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion.