Chaucerian Theatricality by John Ganim (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER lia), Ypolita binds The Knight's Tale to The Clerk's Tale because her name puns on the geographical residence ("Ytaille" and "Poo"- Italy and the Po) of Petrarch, author of the source of The Clerk's Tale (p. 114); the Cook's names, Roger and Hogge ofWare, link him to Roger Bacon ("hogge" = hog = bacon) and thus to the "alchemical fraternity that binds the Canterbury book from start to finish" (p. 118); the Host's reference to the Pardoner as "beel amy" allusively elides Guillaume's "enfant bel" (1.1488) and Jean's "beaus douz Amis" (1.7237) in the Romance ofthe Rose. In the end, one must wonder what, by these standards, would fail to qualify as an intertextual allusion or pun. Although few readers are likely to agree with Frese's exaggerated estimation of Chaucer's intertextuality, most will no doubt continue to grant him some degree of it with or without this kind of evidence. But Frese's thesis concerning the privileged authorial status of the Ellesmere manuscript is riskier and based in large part on tenuous astronumerical references. Unfortunately, her wordplay arguments do not shore up this thesis. This book hasno separate listof works cired.With Sheila Delany (SAC 12 [1990]: 242), I appeal to publishers to reinstate the bibliography. As Dolores Frese works so hard to establish, texts are made ofother texts. The easier our access to one another's work, the better. SUSAN SCHIBANOFF University of New Hampshire JOHN GANIM. Chaucerian Theatn·cality. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 1990. Pp. x, 163. $27.50. John Ganim's second book engages a range of critical drama, playing some of the most venerable views of Chaucer against some of the freshest. Invoking by turns Kittredge's Human Comedy, Bakhtin's plays of lan­ guage, and the historical pageants of the annalistes, Ganim undertakes a double exploration, characterizing The Canterbury Tales in terms of both fourteenth-century theatrical practice and twentieth-century theatrical metaphor. His goal is "a relatively minimal revision" of"the metaphors of Chaucer criticism": 136 REVIEWS Instead ofthe metaphor of"drama," I propose that of"theatricality." My intention is to orient contemporary critical positions, largely those that grow out ofthe dramatic metaphor, towards some long-neglected materials such as urban and court spectacle and certain forms of late medieval performance. I also seek to preserve the most powerful contributions ofthe arguments for the unity ofthe Canterbury Tales while accounting for some ofthe obvious contradictions in those arguments. [P 4] Like The Canterbury Tales, the eight chapters dedicated to this ambitious program read paratactically. Written and revised over a period of years, assuming diverse perspectives, they create their own polyglossia, for any given chapter will both complement and qualify its predecessor. This critical parataxis shares at least one function with Chaucer's similarly structured poem, that of calling into question any monolithic vision of art or society. By the end of chapter 1-in asking, Whose theater is this?-Ganim has begun to suggest how difficult his questions will get. We may view The Canterbury Talesas a Bakhtinianpopular drama.But if we value the role of audience, we dismiss the carnival as fiction, for Chaucer's fictional churls had no place in his real-life performance milieu. The pilgrims thus "repre­ sent, in some fashion, a 'future' audience...that his poetry seems to call into being" (p. 13); from the future's perspective, it is Chaucer's real-life courtly audience that becomes the fiction.Yet when the complex questions raised by the text give way to what we know of the medieval literary public-and its taste for the pious and straightforward-there appears a broad gap between Chaucer's art and his audience: thus, "The ways in which he plays with the distance between intention and reception" (p. 14) will become the "chief focus" of Chaucerian Theatricality. The second chapter, "Bakhtin, Chaucer, Carnival, Lent"-reworked from a powerful paper read before the New Chaucer Society in 1986identifies ways in which the "popular" literary dialects emergent in the Chronicle of Lanercost and Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne can be usefully compared to Chaucer'spoeticdiction. Ganimintends...