The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer by E. Talbot Donaldson (review)

98Rocky Mountain Review perspicacious critic, ever penetrate the text with stylistic acumen. In reading, the male is left exhausted, excised, taxed to a resultant degree of realizing the limits of an intellectual economy of letters in the marketplace" (79). If women 's "disseminatory power" is so great, if it can rival and overgo the superman 's textual labors, then other cultural revisions must follow. The abyss of thoughtlessness separating mind from body, self from other, consciousness from unconsciousness, and woman from herself can become infinitely fluid and playful, until, in a Cixousian world we would not live in opposition, but in differences; we would not think in terms of polarities, but in dreams of the risible body. The strength of Conley's book is to make these dreams open to us, to further Cixous' own fluctuations. What Cixous gives us, as Conley says, is an "infinite belief in transformations" (15). For Cixous, writing can be the site of real social production, of reversed metamorphoses, of women's libidinal liberation. PATRICIA S. YAEGER Harvard University E. TALBOT DONALDSON. The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 139 p. Chaucer wrote well; Shakespeare read well. Hardly startling observations, one might think. Yet in The Swan at the Well, E. Talbot Donaldson amply demonstrates that ignoring these assumptions has debilitated the development of a full comprehension of Chaucer's influence on Shakespeare. A reworking of his Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr, this book continues Donaldson's efforts to resist and refute critical positions that oversimplify either the literary and historical contexts of literature or a great writer's relationship to these contexts . As a distinguished editor, critic, and teacher of medieval literature, Donaldson is rightly annoyed when Shakespeareans looking for the playwright 's debt to Chaucer assume that the earlier works have "settled — one might almost say static — meanings that are available to any reader" (2). Ultimately, Donaldson is most interested in the two writers' similar visions of love and laughter — whatever their dangers — as central to human life. This concern, of course, carries the same risk as more specific source study, that of attributing to influence a parallel reference accessible independently to both writers. Donaldson avoids this trap through a carefully constructed — and engagingly written — argument that includes identification of previously overlooked parallels, analysis of similar rhetorical strategies used to similar ends, and a consistently sensitive reading of works. Donaldson begins by establishing that the rude mechanicals' playlet of Pyramus and Thisbe was influenced by "The Tale of Sir Thopas." Beyond specific echoes, Donaldson finds that both works exhibit not simply parodie skill at its sharpest but also the awareness that any burlesque of bad art finally parodies good art as well. This insight, supported by comparison with the Pyramus and Thisbe story in The Legend of Good Women, allows Donaldson to examine both writers' use of similar strategies to avoid melodrama in their serious treatments of young lovers, Troilus and Criseyde and Romeo and Juliet. Where Chaucerian influence on Shakespeare is widely accepted, Donaldson Book Reviews99 focuses on less tangible resemblances. Looking at A Midsummer Night's Dream next to The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's IhIe, Donaldson attributes to both artists a sympathetic but unsentimental vision of both the follies and the pleasures of romantic love. But the two writers are not always perfectly kindred spirits. Donaldson also demonstrates that when Shakespeare returns to The Knight 's Tale — collaborating with Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen — the play's vision is darker than that of the poem. (Donaldson follows the generally accepted attributions.) Where The Knight's Tale ascribes its characters' misfortunes to chance and the squabbling vanity of planet-deities, Shakespeare's portions of The Two Noble Kinsmen return the horrors portrayed on Chaucer's temple walls to "where they started, in the hearts of people" (53). Among the strengths of these discussions is Donaldson's exposure of the silly conclusions critics have been led to by unexamined assumptions about women, and identification of such myths becomes central to Donaldson's comparison of Troilus and Cressida to Troilus and Criseyde. In examining these two retellings of the same materials, Donaldson...