Contemporary Literary Criticism | Kushner, Tony - Allen J. Frantzen (essay date 1998)

Allen J. Frantzen (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: Frantzen, Allen J. “Alla, Angli, and Angels.” In Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from “Beowulf” to “Angels in America,” pp. 264-92. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Frantzen examines the representation of Anglo-Saxon identity in Angels in America in terms of Kushner's sexual identity politics.]

Rome, not Northumbria, is the center of The Man of Law's Tale, and celibacy, not marital bliss, is the Man of Law's preferred mode for Christ's holy ministers. Chaucer's text looks neither to the vernacular tradition of married clergy that the Wycliffites sought nor to the celibate clerical world demanded by Roman canon law and espoused earlier by the Anglo-Saxon church of Ælfric and by Norman reformers. Instead, the Man of Law's heroine is a product of Chaucerian compromise. She practices what might be thought of as serial chastity....

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