The Physician's Tale.
- Author/Editor
- Corsa, Helen Storm, ed.
- Title
- The Physician's Tale.
- Published
- Corsa, Helen Storm, ed. "The Physician's Tale." A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer., 2, part 17 . Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987
- Review
- Corsa summarizes earlier views of the relationship between PhysT and Gower's "Virginia" in her account of the analogues of Chaucer's tale (pp. 4- 8). She describes Gower's version as a "more or less faithful paraphrase of Livy" (p. 7) and emphasizes the "political moral" of the tale and the lesson on the king's need for self-control, citing Fisher (1964) and Peck (1978). "Scholars generally agree," she writes, that Gower's "can be neither source nor scion" of PhysT (p. 7), and she suggests that the two poets wrote their separate versions "perhaps almost simultaneously" (p. 3). Her "Survey of Criticism" (pp. 28-41) includes references to several earlier comparisons of the two tales (pp. 29-30, 32 and 38), and Gower is mentioned in the notes to lines 5, 35, 122, 139-64, and 240. Judging on the basis of the references to Gower, the index to this volume is not complete, and though Carol Weiher's article on "Chaucer's and Gower's Stories of Lucretia and Virginia" (ELN, 14 [1976], 7-9) is mentioned on p. 5, it is not included in either the index or the bibliography. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1]
- Date
- 1987
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations