John Gower and Chaucer's Fabliaux.
- Author/Editor
- Green, Richard Firth.
- Title
- John Gower and Chaucer's Fabliaux.
- Published
- Green, Richard Firth. "John Gower and Chaucer's Fabliau." In Richard Firth Green and R. F. Yeager, eds. "Of latine and of othire lare": Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2022). Pp. 82-100.
- Review
- Green offers a fresh take on an old chestnut, the "quarrel" between Chaucer and Gower, seeing their interaction not as a "battle of the books," but rather as Chaucer's "way of establishing a rival claim to the use of Ovidian material" (98). Green probes "a group of tales in the 'Confessio' ["Geta and Amphitrion," "Vulcan, Mars, and Venus," "Babio and Croceus," "Hercules and Faunus"] that have been taken to represent Gower's own attempts at treating fabliauesque material to see what they can tell us about his attitude to the genre, and how it might diverge from Chaucer's" (83). In the process he examines two fabliau-like schoolroom Latin plays, Vitalis of Blois' "Geta and the Comedia Babionis," that Gower must have read as a boy and re-worked into the CA as moral exempla. Gower, he concludes, "could never have brought himself to render either of them straight;" he "thoroughly disapproved of the schoolboy humor of these Latin comedies" (89)--and hence, Green posits, also of Chaucer's tales of the Miller and the Reeve, each of which Gower parodied in, respectively, his "Babio and Croceus" and "Hercules and Faunus"--"the influence having flowed from Chaucer to Gower" (95). Gower's response shows him turning to Ovid, "sanitizing" away (97) the disreputable bits, and offering these fabliau-like exempla as a better model for Chaucer to follow. Chaucer's response is the "Man of Law's Prologue," and the "Manciple's Tale," which latter "perhaps we should read . . . as Chaucer's answer to the "Tale of Hercules and Faunus" (99). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations