Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare.
- Author/Editor
- Davis, Alex.
- Title
- Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare.
- Published
- Davis, Alex. Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. [xiii], 297 pp.; 11 b&w illus.
- Review
- Attending little to Gower and his works, Davis's book explores interwoven complexities of inheritance, succession, moral legacy, and literary patrimony in the late medieval and early modern imaginary. It covers a wide range of poetry, prose, and drama by Chaucer, Lydgate, Hoccleve, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bunyan, along with less-studied works such as the Latin "Ordo de Ysaac et Rebecca," the "Tale of Gamelyn," and the genealogies and Great Picture of Anne Clifford. Tension between inheritance and emergent commercialism is Davis's focus in chapter six where he addresses, primarily, Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" (with brief mention of Gower's Constance narrative) and Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice.' In this context, Davis discusses Gower's depiction of fraud ("Triche") in the international wool trade ("Mirour de l'Omme," 25237-55 and 25369-80) as straightforward "conservative estates satire" and "flat condemnation" (237-38), contrasting it with the "much more innovative" (235) and complicated "Libelle of Englyshe Polycye" and the "[v]ery nearly trenchantly paradoxical" (239) "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep" by Lydgate. For Davis, MO stands as representative of the "complaints . . . found in innumerable sermons and homilies produced throughout the Middle Ages" (234), a depiction of trade as "alien entity within traditional medieval culture" (247), and, lacking paradox or tension, it seems, not quite premodern. Elsewhere in the book, Gower is mentioned only twice in passing: the poet presents Henry as conqueror by force in "Cronica Tripertita" (103n17) and, at a moment in "H. aquile," the poet offers a "paradoxical formulation [that] balances competing intuitions of change and continuity" (109), perhaps a bit premodern after all. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Mirour de l'Omme
Cronica Tripertita
Minor Latin Poetry