The Pattern of Consolation in “The Book of the Duchess.”
- Author / Editor
- Lawlor, John.
The Pattern of Consolation in “The Book of the Duchess.”
- Published
- Speculum 31 (1956): 626-48.
- Description
- Argues that, modifying poems by Machaut to establish the narrator of BD as a comic, “doctrinaire” servant of love, Chaucer reveals how such a perspective is inadequate to “experience the experience . . . of perfection itself.” The Dreamer learns of the Black Knight’s loss of perfect, “fulfilled love” and is reduced to stunned pity, a complex elegiac move that conveys consolation rather than merely counselling it. Rejects the notion that courtly love necessarily entails adulterous passion.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Book of the Duchess
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations