Chaucer, Geoffrey - E. Talbot Donaldson (essay date 1970)
E. Talbot Donaldson (essay date 1970)
SOURCE: “The Masculine Narrator and Four Women of Style,” in Speaking of Chaucer, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1970, pp. 46-64.
[In the following essay, Donaldson examines the way in which Chaucer “simultaneously” describes events from a number of different viewpoints while apparently seeing them from a singular point of view. In particular, Donaldson focuses on four of the women who become the object of the narrator's discussion: Emily (“The Knight's Tale”), May (“The Merchant's Tale”), Criseyde (Troilus and Criseyde), and the Prioress (“The Prioress's Tale”).]
Not long ago an American Chaucerian harshly reprimanded those modern critics who talk about Chaucer as if he had a complicated or difficult style such as Donne's or Pope's. Chaucer, Professor Bronson asserts, was ‘a poet who deliberately practised a style capable of being instantly followed by a moderately...
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