Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan Gaylord ed. by Susan Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné (review)

Alan T. Gaylord, Professor Emeritus of Dartmouth College, is a Chaucerian who merits a festschrift. Susan Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné have succeeded in assembling a band of highly respected scholars to pay tribute to Gaylord’s achievements in the fields of Chaucerian and Middle English studies: achievements most emphatically, though by no means exclusively, connected with the issue of performing Chaucer’s texts. The facet of “performance” that one most readily associates with Alan T. Gaylord is the practice of reading Chaucer aloud. Indeed, Gaylord’s Kalamazoo seminars on how to present Chaucerian verse to an audience and how this kind of presentation matters in terms of understanding and interpreting Chaucer’s texts have entered the world of scholarly legend. It comes as no surprise, then, that the volume embraces a notion of “performance” that follows closely in the footsteps of the approach so successfully championed by Gaylord himself.

This lends a certain coherence to the collection, though some readers would have been grateful for a more analytical and theorized take on the issue of performance. After all, “performance” has long ceased to be a scholarly field solely concerned with the theatricality or the public delivery of texts. The concept of performance has spread considerably beyond those original confines, so that nowadays notions of “the performative” have invigorated medieval studies in topics ranging from manuscript study to liturgy, from court culture to the rhetorical and disputational practices embedded in medieval Latin school texts. In other words, it could have been interesting to meditate on how these proliferating notions of performance relate to the more traditional understandings of the concept, such as the “staging” or “reading aloud” of literary works.

Elise E. Morse-Gagné’s introduction offers generous and intelligent praise of Alan T. Gaylord, elegantly fulfilling the particular demands of the festschrift genre. Ann Astell pays tribute to Gaylord’s Robertsonian origins by exploring the relevance of the Gospels to The Prioress’s Tale. One example is Matthew 21:15–16, which depicts Jewish leaders chiding the children of Jerusalem for celebrating Jesus’ entry into the city; another is a parallel passage in Luke 19:40, in which Jesus counters Jewish criticism of the disciples with the words “If these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” In a beautiful interpretation of a literally central moment in Troilus and Criseyde, Winthrop Wetherbee expands the notion of the performative to the textual as he demonstrates how Chaucer, drawing on Dante’s Paradiso, succeeds in creating a moment of spiritualized love right before the climax of the consummation scene in Book III. Thomas Ohlgren evokes the image of a ghostly performance as he traces Robin Hood elements in a story from Thomas Walsingham’s Chronicon Angliae, in which the bishop of Lincoln, Henry Burghersh, atones for past sins by appearing in the green garb of a forester in the dreams of his former men-at-arms. The deceased ecclesiastic demands that the ills he did to his tenants during his lifetime be redressed. In a rhetorical tour de force, Betsy Bowden shows excellent horse sense by helping clarify the equestrian recklessness that Arcite displays on his victory ride after winning his tournament in various versions of the story related in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. Howell Chickering’s excellent contribution draws, among other things, on Elizabethan Chaucer criticism in order to examine the exact nature of Chaucer’s so-called “riding rhyme,” the highly flexible precursor of the more restricted iambic pentameter. Chickering persuasively argues that Chaucer employs his version of decasyllabic couplets in the service of a narrative style that is particularly attentive to specific speech rhythms; this style achieves, moreover, a singular form of transparency by deemphasizing rhyme. Susan Yager offers an interesting analysis of the Host’s blunt rhymes and demonstrates how Harry Bailly is singled out through his idiosyncratic...