Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

295 Pages·2008·1.49 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Geoffrey Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Editorial Consultant, Holly A. Crocker
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations:
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales—New Edition
Copyright ©2008 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction ©2008 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales / edited with an introduction by
Harold Bloom—New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern criticial interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7910-9618-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400. Canterbury Tales. 2. Tales, Medieval—History and
criticism. 3. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title:
Canterbury tales.
PR1874.G456 2008
821’.1—dc22 2007049158
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
“As just as is a squyre”: The Politics of
“Lewed Translacion” in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale 3
Fiona Somerset
The Opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue to
The Canterbury Tales: A Diptych 23
Colin Wilcockson
Chaucer’s Parson and the Specter of Wycliffism 31
Katherine Little
“The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption”: Martyrdom
and Imitation in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale 59
Lee Patterson
The “Elvyssh” Power of Constance: Christian Feminism
in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale 109
Elizabeth Robertson
“Mark him wel for he is on of þo”: Training the
“Lewed” Gaze to Discern Hypocrisy 143
Fiona Somerset
vi Contents
“Of Goddes pryvetee nor of his wyf”:
Confusion of Orifices in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale 163
Louise M. Bishop
Changing Chaucer 179
Richard Firth Green
The Creation of Consent in the Physician’s Tale 203
Lianna Farber
Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Fart:
Noise in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale 217
Peter W. Travis
Symkyn’s Place in the Reeve’s Tale 239
William F. Woods
Chronology 265
Contributors 269
Bibliography 271
Acknowledgments 275
Index 277
Editor’s Note
My brief, but pungent, Introduction brings together Chaucer and
Shakespeare, partly by the prompting of that great master of paradox,
Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
Famous for its opening, the General Prologue is investigated for its
numerology by Colin Wilcockson, while Katherine Little discovers in
Chaucer’s Parson a shadow of Wycliff’s Lollard Heresy.
The learned Lee Patterson discourses ably in Chaucer’s anti-Semitic
Prioress Tale, which is held to be a masterpiece of authorial self-restraint,
while Elizabeth Robertson enables herself to analyze “Christian Feminism”
in the Man of Law’s Tale.
Fiona Somerset praises Chaucer’s slyness in employing lewdness to
expose hypocrisy, while Louise M. Bishop charmingly explores the delightful
confusion between female orifices in the Miller’s Tale.
In Richard Firth Green’s witty reading, the Canon Yeoman’s Tale
demonstrates Chaucer’s dismissal of alchemy, after which Lianna Farber
fashionably finds in the voice of the virtuous Virginia, in the Physician’s Tale,
a political as well as a personal aspect.
The Summoner’s Tale’s version of the Dantesque “making a trumpet of
the breech” is ingeniously expounded by Peter W. Travis, after which William
F. Woods studies psychic emptiness in the Reeve’s Tale.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The CanTerbury Tales (1386)
E
xcept for Shakespeare, whom he profoundly influenced, Chaucer is the
major literary artist in the English language. My favorite Chaucer critic still
remains G. K. Chesterton, who wrote many years before the critics included
in this volume. Chesterton—poet, storyteller, ironist—was himself a
Chaucerian pilgrim. His wonderful book Chaucer (1932) is popular and
simple, as he intended, and seems to me to embody the spirit of Chaucer.
I like it that there are more than fifty references to Shakespeare in the
book, because only Shakespeare (in English) deserves to set the measure for
Chaucer. Chesterton, a fierce Catholic polemicist, had a tendency to baptize
Chaucer’s imagination but I think (contra Chesterton) that Shakespeare
learned from Chaucer how to achieve a purely secular kind of transcen-
dence. Chesterton liked to think of Chaucer as a continuator of Dante, but
Chaucer’s true original was Boccaccio. Chaucer the Pilgrim is a sly parody
of Dante the Pilgrim, an irony that Chesterton did not want to see. Yet
Chesterton wonderfully observed that “the Chaucerian irony is sometimes
so large that it is too large to be seen.”
Chaucer’s mastery of psychological realism was grounded upon his
ironic sense that the chivalric ideal was a lost illusion, to be affirmed only
in the mode of nostalgia. Everything that existed represented a falling away
from a more generous vision, though Chaucer, profoundly comic in his genius,
declined to become a master of regret. Chesterton’s own fictions and poems
move me because he had learned from Chaucer to long for this abandoned
field of romance. Acutely paradoxical as he always was, Chesterton may have
missed Chaucer’s irony when it is directed against precisely such longing. The
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