Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in The Canterbury Tales by Laura Kendrick (review)

REVIEWS ers but also by internal policing which keeps his discussion ofthe fissured, inconsistent, and fragmented Chaucerian text remarkably unfissured, con­ sistent, and unfragmented. Jordan's introductory historical sketch, for example, presents a fourteenth century concerned with the very issues which preoccupy critical theorists at the end of the twentieth, yet cannot acknowledge its own status as rhetorical fiction. He does not understand that the twentieth-century (or fourteenth-century) shift of interest from "reality" to description also has disturbing implications for his own au­ thoritative discourse as an epitomizing historian. The blurbs on the dust jacket of this thought-provoking book contain lavish praise fromJohn Hurt Fisher and V. A. Kolve, Chaucerians who also must havefound plenty to disagree with inJordan's approach. I expect that Chaucer's Poetics and the Modern Reader will stimulate widespread the­ oretical reflection, although not agreement, among Chaucerians. For that reason I consider it an important and even praiseworthy book. JOHN P. HERMANN University of Alabama LAURA KENDRICK. Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in The Canter­ bury Tales. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University ofCalifor­ nia Press, 1988. Pp. xi, 215. $28.00. As Charles Muscatine pointed out in 1972, thefourteenth century was an age of "crisis." The long economic depression, fueled by the Black Death and severe famine, the Peasants' Revolt, oppressive legislation, and the deepening of anticlericalism, took its toll on English society, and the writings ofthe major Ricardian poets reflect this. Chaucer's own response, according to Muscatine, was the irony with which he laced his poetry and mocked the contradictions of medieval life. Ultimately his humor allowed him to face society's chaos. In Chaucerian Play, Laura Kendrick takes this thesis a step further: "Laughter," she notes, "is man's way of asserting his superiority or mastery in difficult situations, his way of dealing with the Fall, that is, with his knowledge ofhis ownimperfection, his ignorance and weakness." To this end Chaucer (perhaps influenced by the works of the French fabulists) fashioned certain of his Canterbury Tales so as to "mock and dethrone" the authority that repressed him, kill off the bad "father 253 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER figure," and allow the "child" to triumph. These stories (labeled by Ken­ drick "churls' tales") alternate with those told by the "gentils": "serious 'pathetic' fictions that emphasize accommodation to exterior reality/mo­ rality at the expense of overt satisfaction of individual desires." For the medieval reader, playing all the roles-both good and bad-in such a drama aided him in the working through of private anxieties. For Chaucer, creating this fictional world consoled him during his own personal crises, enabling him to "go on serving"in the royal household andgovernment. In effect, the comedy of The Canterbury Tales acted as therapy, allowing the individual who identified with its patterning some control over his life. The first few chapters of this book address levels of interpretation necessary for comprehending this pattern. In "Reading for Sentence Versus Reading for Solas," Kendrick uses The Miller's Tale to analyze the distinctly different planes from which a poem can be understood: "gentils" reading up for "solas"; churls, down for "sentence." Focusing on the term "Goddes pryvetee" (Mz/T3164), which (depending on the reader) could refer either to God's "mysteries" or to his "private parts," Kendrick treats the tale on both upper and lower plane, then extends her analogy to art history, examining explicit depictions of the M�donna and Child and of the Nativity from the standpoint of baseness and refinement. A "gentil," for example, might see the V irgin, her breast exposed, as a symbol of the Sponsa and thenaked Christ as the Logos-the Word made Flesh. Thebad­ intentioned viewer, however, was certain to note the erotic suckling, the prettyyoung wife, and the cuckolded husband. The Miller,byannouncing hisintentionto tell "a legend and a lyf," has aroused theexpectations ofthe "gentils." The fabliau he tells subverts them. In chapter 2, "The Spirit Versus the Flesh in Art and Interpretation," Kendrick examines the long­ standing tradition among Chaucer scholars to emphasize the serious, ignoring the "goliardic and jongleuresque play" that "periodically un­ masked and deconstructed it." Chapter 3, "Power and Play...