HELEN BARR. Transporting Chaucer (original) (raw)
Related papers
Chaucer’s Volumes: Toward a New Model of Literary History in the Canterbury Tales
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2007
Th e battle between the Wife of Bath and her fifth husband, Jankyn, in which she ''rente out of his book a leef, / For which he smoot me so that I was deef,'' 1 enacts the spectacular failure in transmission that results when a coercive literary tradition collides with an audience whose resistance finally wells over into violence. In addition to its commentary on the effects of antifeminist writings in the Wife's autobiographical prologue-the focus of most recent criticism on the Wife of Bath-the battle also figures the very structure of literary tradition, whose motive force is the dynamic interaction of repetition (emulation, imitation) and rupture, 2 as an overt rivalry. As she tells it, the Wife It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge those whose responses to this essay (or to the papers it draws on) have shaped my thinking:
“Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream through Middle English Romance,” Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), pp. 140-160., 2009
Full Text: [(essay date 2009) In the following essay, Driver provides an overview of the various medieval sources that influenced A Midsummer Night's Dream and examines how they are rendered in past and contemporary performances.] Who may been a fool but if he love?"The Knight's Tale," 1.1799 This essay provides a brief overview of the several medieval sources that inform William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream (MND) and looks at their rendering (or not) in past and contemporary performance. Modern memory retains some vestigial sense of the underlying sources of Shakespeare's play, though the main intention of modern directors is to make Shakespeare relevant to present-day audiences. It is fascinating, however, to observe how many of the medieval underpinnings remain, even in modern production. 1 The influence of medieval romance, in particular, on MND seems clearly evident. While the many Chaucerian references in MND are well known, much discussed, and will be briefly summarized, this essay focuses on the influence of Middle English romance on Shakespeare's play, especially of the romance Huon of Burdeux 2 in shaping the supernatural characters and of Geoffrey Chaucer's comic masterpiece "Sir Thopas" on Shakespeare's representation of Bottom and on the Pyramus and Thisbe play. Though the medieval sources are themselves not precisely fixed, their characters, plots, and to some extent their language are appropriated and transformed in Shakespeare's drama, influencing (perhaps often unconsciously) modern performance, which is also malleable, shifting shape each time the play is staged or filmed. "Like textual variants, historical subtexts cannot easily be performed," as Diana E. Henderson has pointed out, but understanding more about the medieval texts influencing Shakespeare's plays "may lead us back not solely to the remembrance of things past but also to historically informed analogies within the present, a careful use of history that adds more drama." 3 This, then, is a reading of the play primarily through the lens of medieval romance, with which Shakespeare and several of his famous contemporaries seem to have been quite familiar, a reading that further examines several aspects of "late modern collaborations with an early modern Englishman's vision of his country's late medieval past." 4
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2012
the Gawain poet's Middle English (I think I would have preferred this section to be part of the introductory matter, but that is neither here nor there). Perhaps the most welcome addition is a section with two brief Old French Gawain romances, Le Chevalier a l'Epée and La Mule sans Frein, newly translated by Borroff herself, with bracketed summaries of passages not translated verbatim. One might have wished for additional selections, such as the seduction passages in Yder, but having the complete story arc of a romance makes comparison to Sir Gawain richer. These are followed by a selection from The Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Christmas feast, which not only gives students another prime example of the alliterative tradition but provides an interesting contrast in narrative approach to the Gawain poet. The "Criticism" section is admirably broad and as up-to-date as one could reasonably expect, spanning essays from 1958 to 2001 and covering a variety of topics, from descriptive and stylistic technique to Christian themes, numerology, heroism and courtesy, and the role of the female characters. Again, one might carp that a favorite or important work was excluded (for instance, I would like to have an excerpt from Larry Benson's Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), but the selections are well chosen. They are followed by a historical chronology of Arthurian works, beginning with William of Malmesbury, mixed in with important literary and historical milestones up to 1400. The edition closes with a selected bibliography that also strives for breadth and currency, with historical and cultural, as well as literary, topics in books and articles from 1923 to 2006. Borroff's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a welcome addition to the Norton Critical Edition series. The copyediting could have been a bit more careful (e.g., "La Chevalier" and the amusing "Studies in Medieval English Romance: Same New Approaches"), but, like all in the series, it is a handsome and readable publication. It can serve as a library resource for research papers in a Norton British Literature survey or as a textbook in courses on medieval literature, Romance, or Arthurian Legend. This translation remains a valuable entry into a work, as Borroff says, "crafted by an author whose vision of the human comedy we can still share and savor" (p. xxix).
THE CANTERBURY TALES And other Poems of GEOFFREY CHAUCER
preceding ages, not excepting his fellow-citizen Chaucer." 2. See introduction to "The Legend of Good Women". 3. Called in the editions before 1597 "The Dream of Chaucer". The poem, which is not included in the present edition, does indeed, like many of Chaucer's smaller works, tell the story of a dream, in which a knight, representing John of Gaunt, is found by the poet mourning the loss of his lady; but the true "Dream of Chaucer," in which he celebrates the marriage of his patron, was published for the first time by Speght in 1597. John of Gaunt, in the end of 1371, married his second wife, Constance, daughter to Pedro the Cruel of Spain; so that "The Book of the Duchess" must have been written between 1369 and 1371. 4. Where he bids his "little book" "Subject be unto all poesy, And kiss the steps, where as thou seest space, Of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Stace." 5. See note 1 to The Tale in The Clerk's Tale. 6. See note 1 to The Man of Law's Tale. 7. "Written," says Mr Wright, "in the sixteenth year of the reign of Richard II. (1392-1393);" a powerful confirmation of the opinion that this poem was really produced in Chaucer's mature age. See the introductory notes to it and to the Legend of Good Women. 8. The old biographers of Chaucer, founding on what they took to be autobiographic allusions in "The Testament of Love," assign to him between 1354 and 1389 a very different history from that here given on the strength of authentic records explored and quoted by Sir H. Nicolas. Chaucer is made to espouse the cause of John of Northampton, the Wycliffite Lord Mayor of London, whose re-election in 1384 was so vehemently opposed by the clergy, and who was imprisoned in the sequel of the grave disorders that arose. The poet, it is said, fled to the Continent, taking with him a large sum of money, which he spent in supporting companions in exile; then, returning by stealth to England in quest of funds, he was detected and sent to the Tower, where he languished for three years, being released only on the humiliating condition of informing against his associates in the plot. The public records show, however, that, all the time of his alleged exile and captivity, he was quietly living in London, regularly drawing his pensions in person, sitting in Parliament, and discharging his duties in the Customs until his dismissal in 1386. It need not be said, further, that although Chaucer freely handled the errors, the ignorance, and vices of the clergy, he did so rather as a man of sense and of conscience, than as a Wycliffite-and there is no evidence that he espoused the opinions of the zealous Reformer, far less played the part of an extreme and selfregardless partisan of his old friend and college-companion.
2015
Most manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have placed the fragment that begins with The Shipman's Tale after Fragment VI. Thus, it is usually found as Fragment VII in most modern translations of Chaucer's tales. Although it is the longest tale-cluster in Chaucer's tales, the order of this fragment is still controversial. For instance, Henry Bradshaw insists that this fragment should be moved ahead and placed after Fragment II. On the other hand, most scholars believe that breaking the order of the tales as it exists in the Ellesmere a Manuscript, and as Bradshaw hopes, might ruin the thematic relationship among the tales in different fragments. This research investigates the position of Fragment VII in multiple manuscripts. It evaluates various critical perspectives on the issue and recommend moving fragment VII to be placed after Fragment II. I argue that some amendments to the order found in the Ellesmere a Manuscript and the ones that follow its order might reinforce the thematic relationship among the tales and does not ruin it.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 41 [Edited book]
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020
Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the yearbook of the New Chaucer Society. It publishes articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). SAC also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chau cer-related publications.
“For yet under the yerde was the mayde”: Chaucer in the House of Fiction
The Chaucer Review, 2022
In a scene near the beginning of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, a maid child stands as silent witness to a conversation between a wife and a monk within the garden of a wealthy French merchant. By using her as an observer to the scene in the garden, Chaucer, perhaps for the first time in English literature, employs the gaze of a child to highlight the narrative of experience. In this article I explore the maid child as a sign of Chaucer’s experiments with perspective. Since Chaucer probably first wrote the Shipman’s Tale with the Wife of Bath as narrator, the maid child looks forward to the old hag in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. In placing or keeping her in the tale, Chaucer anticipates modernist experiments with perception, looking forward to Henry James, whose What Maisie Knew describes the gaze of another child upon the unsavory bartering of an adult world.
Chaucer: Real-Life Observation Versus Literary Convention
Chaucer in Context, chapter 1. , 1996
Argues that a historical approach to Chaucer's work does not depend on seeing the characters of the General Prologue as being based on real-life models or as constituting 'reflections' of reality.