"The 'Manciple's Tale': Parody and Critique."
- Author/Editor
- Hazelton, Richard
- Title
- "The 'Manciple's Tale': Parody and Critique."
- Published
- Hazelton, Richard. ""The 'Manciple's Tale': Parody and Critique."." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62.1 (1963), pp. 1-31.
- Review
- Hazelton discusses the Manciple's Tale's relationship to its sources: Ovid, Machaut, and Gower. In the second half of his article he argues that Chaucer set out particularly to mock Gower's tale of Phebus and the crow in the CA. Not only do Chaucer and Gower share the same plot details, but Chaucer picks up on a number of Gower's stylistic tics, including his habit of calling the stories "ensamples" and the pedantic use of "my sone." There must have been a serious rivalry between the poets, as Chaucer contrasts Gower's "romance blandishments . . . courtly cliché, hollow rhetoric and sterile moralizing" (25) to his own "comic realism" (25). Chaucer associates his own authorship with the lewdness of the Manciple and with the brazen honesty of the crow. [CvD]
- Date
- 1963
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
- Confessio Amantis