"Chaucer of All Admired the Story Gives": Shakespeare, Medieval Narrative, and Generic Innovation.
- Author/Editor
- Gieskes, Edward.
- Title
- "Chaucer of All Admired the Story Gives": Shakespeare, Medieval Narrative, and Generic Innovation.
- Published
- Renaissance Papers 2009, ed. Christopher Cobb (Rochester, NY: Camden House/Boydell & Brewer, 2009), pp. 85-109.
- Review
- In a section on Shakespeare's "Pericles," this article has extended analysis of Gower's reception in early modern English print and drama, with little on the CA per se. Gieske refrains from enumerating Shakespeare's "direct debts" to Chaucer and Gower at the verbal level, focusing rather on the "structural and narratological . . . the ways Shakespeare's post-1600 plays react to medieval antecedents as they experiment with alternative principles of construction" (85). His approach engages not only with the medieval sources, but with "Renaissance" Chaucer and Gower as Shakespeare would have known them in print (85, 95). Three plays are chosen for analysis: "Troilus and Cressida," the "kaledeidoscopic . . . chaotically structured" "Pericles" (86, 87), and "The Two Noble Kinsmen." The "capaciousness" of "Pericles" is prefigured in Robert Greene's "Vision" of 1592, where the sleeping poet is visited from beyond the grave by Chaucer and Gower. The "merry"-appearing Chaucer speaks for literature valued as "solaas," while the stern, Cato-like Gower makes the case for moral "sentence," with Gower preferred by the dreamer (96, 97). Both "ancient" poets defend their perspective by producing a sample poem, with an "adaptation" of the Confessio's "Apollonius narrative" voiced by Gower (101). A slightly different, equally prestigious "Renaissance Gower" is found in the Preface to Berthelette's 1532 edition of the CA, where Berthelette promotes the poem as "pleasant" and "easy," but also having "great auctorite perswadynge unto vertue" (99-100). Shakespeare's Gower "diverges" from the "dour moralist" of Greene's "Vision" (100), but more importantly, Shakespeare uses the "cultural capital" (99) of Gower's early modern reputation to authorize an experimental new dramatic genre prefigured in The Tale of Apollonius. The playwright "redeploy[ed] . . . vast ranges of time and space . . . [blending] the resources of capacious medieval narrative" with contemporary stage presentation (101,102). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2009
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis