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Chaucer: A Parliament of Critics It is pleasant, while scanning the history of Chaucer's literary reputation, to recall his self-sufficient remark outside the House of Fame: "I wet myself best how I stonde." His contemporaries did not praise a humorist but a sage ("0 Socrates!") or a votary of Venus. The Restoration's best critic and verse-technician responded warmly to the poet but regretted that his verse was "not harmonious to us." The author of Don Juan thought him "obscene and contemptible"; Coleridge found him "exquisite and tender." Arnold's decision that Chaucer lacked "high seriousness" is often noted, gloomily, by critics to whom he appears quite serious enough, and a consummate comedian to boot. Fond as Chaucer was of the consoling identity of old and new, his famous enigmatic irony will be useful to him now if he is looking down on a kind of Chaucerian Great Year in which criticism, eulogistic and otherwise, is busy recapitulating centuries of diverse opinion. Of special interest, since it combines criticism with a new edition of the poems in a consistently normalized but not modernized spelling (quoted in the extracts below) is E. T. Donaldson's Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York: The Ronald Press, 1958, pp. vi, 1001, $6.50). About three-quarters of The Canterbury Tales, the complete Troilus and Criseide, and a good selection of the minor poems are included, with a spirited commentary treating Chaucer as a highly sophisticated poet who can at times seem almost of one substance with God the Creator. Donaldson avoids the sort of criticism which has "recently been reading Chaucer primarily as an exponent of medieval Christianity," but he never~ tbeless finds plenty to say about the poet's religion and discovers intimations of divinity in Chaucer's funniest poems: an engaging critical attitude. The current supply of Chaucerian books illustrates other possibilities, however. One chapter of Mary Giffin's Studies on Chaucer and His Audience (Hull, P.Q.: Les Editions "L'Eclair," 1956, pp. 127, $4.75) builds from a single Hne in The Parliament of Fowls a historical explanation of the poem and of its composition for a small, exceptionally perspicuous audience. Professor J. A. W. Bennett's The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1957, pp. x, 217, illus., $4.50) is a gloss roughly equal in size to the one Macrobius made for Cicero's Dream oj Scipio--a commentary Chaucer says he pored over until he dreamed of the bird~ assembly itself. Paull F. Baum, in Chaucer: A Critical Appreciation (Durham , N.C.: Duke University Press [Toronto: Burns and MacEachern], 1958, pp. xiv, 230, $7.50), castigates Bennett for this elaborate treatment and "professional Chaucerians" at large for their gratuitous aggrandizement of a comfortably talented, even brilliant man of the world. Thus happy readers may compare a Chaucer almost godlike in intelligence and compas~ 92 J. B. BESSINGER sian (Donaldson), a skilled craftsman trimming four of his rhyme-royal poems to restricted audiences (Miss Giffin), a philosopher-bard who amalgamates courtly love-verse and the most profound themes of the mediaeval Christian polity (Bennett), and "an amateur of genius" whose uneven literary productions are a challenge to the sympathetic critic (Baum) for reasons lamented by the poet himself in his Parliament: For bothe I hadde thing which that I nolde, And eek I ne hadde that thing that I weide. A short view of such varied criticism might begin by compari.ng Baum and Donaldson on a few common subjects, and then notice what they and Bennett do with (or to) The Parliament of Fowls. The distinction between Chaucer the poet and "Chaucer" the fictive narrator in the Tales and other poems is crucial but delicate. Donaldson believes we must separate poet and pilgrim, the latter dependent on the former though never in a stable ratio. ''The pilgrim Chaucer constantly falls a victim to his faith in a simple one-to-one correspondence between the various facets of reality." With Donaldson as guide, then, the reader joins the pilgrimage as an exercise in double audition, during which he must constantly twiddle the dials of his dramatic...

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