Sailing the Seas of Literary History: Gower, Chaucer, and the Problem of Incest in Shakespeare's "Pericles."
- Author/Editor
- Johnston, Andrew James.
- Title
- Sailing the Seas of Literary History: Gower, Chaucer, and the Problem of Incest in Shakespeare's "Pericles."
- Published
- Johnston, Andrew James. "Sailing the Seas of Literary History: Gower, Chaucer, and the Problem of Incest in Shakespeare's 'Pericles'." Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 41.3-4 (2009): 381-407.
- Review
- Johnston's essay is a sophisticated analysis of the motif of incest and its relations with literary form and literary tradition in Shakespeare's (and George Wilkin's) "Pericles," but it has almost nothing to say about the life or poetry of John Gower: the "Gower" of his title is the choric figure of the play, a complicated device: "Perhaps the least dramatic and at the same time the most explicitly medieval of Shakespeare's innovations in the play" (385). Johnston discusses at some length Chaucer's widely-accepted, putative allusion to Gower in the "Man of Law's Prologue," but not the poet Gower or his works--not even his "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre"--except to state that this account in the "Confessio Amantis" "served as Shakespeare's principal source" (385), that the Chorus speaks in the "very metre the historical Gower" used in CA (386), and that Gower, like Chaucer, tells a tale of Constance in a frame narrative (394), discussing only Chaucer's version. Johnston does comment very briefly on the relation between Gower's and Shakespeare's respective versions of the incest riddle of the story, saying that the riddling form in Shakespeare "constitutes a presence through insistently foregrounding a form of absence" (402), and arguing that Chaucer is, analogously, an absent presence in the play: "Behind Shakespeare's depiction of Gower there always looms the invisible figure of Chaucer" (396). Gower, it might be said, is present but absent. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2009
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion