Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare
- Author / Editor
- Tambling, Jeremy.
Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare
- Published
- Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004.
- Physical Description
- 233 pp.
- Series
- Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, no. 72.
- Description
- Tambling reads several late medieval and Renaissance texts in relation to Walter Benjamin's notions of melancholy and Freudian concepts of death, as well as allegory and history. Individual chapters treat "Piers Plowman," Hoccleve's "Complaint and Dialogue," Lydgate's "Fall of Princes," Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," and Shakespeare's "Henry V"I and "Richard III." A separate chapter - "The Knight Sets Forth: Chaucer, Chrétien and Durer" (pp. 64-93) - discusses "madness, complaint and violence" in KnT, focusing on exploration of the "reasons for destructiveness in people so committed to order." Tambling compares Arcite's melancholy to the love-madness in Chrétien's "Yvain," reads the "modern instances" of MkT as a critique of KnT, and comments on relations between KnT and Albrecht Durer's print "The Knight, Death and the Devil."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Knight and His Tale
- Monk and His Tale.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.