Chaucer’s “Rehersynges”: The Performability of The Legend of Good Women by William A. Quinn (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER WILLIAM A. QUINN. Chaucer's "Rehersynges": The Performability of The Legend of Good Women. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994. Pp. x, 253. $55.95. Chaucer's "Rehersynges" assumes that Chaucer performed The Legend ofGood Women for a court audience and makes its object the recovery (insofar as that is possible) of that performance. To this end, Quinn distinguishes between texts as objects to be read and as scripts to be performed. While Chaucer made a comparable distinction-witness his prayer that none "myswrite" the Troilus or "mysmetre {it} for defame of tonge" and that it be understood wherever it is read "or elles songe"-his formulation of it does not imply, at least not in the lines cited, that hearing produces a different understanding from reading. In contrast, Quinn assumes that written texts are inherently more indeterminate than oral utterances. Since he views public readings as dramatizations of a script, he treats a perfor­ mance as an intentional interpretation that diminishes indeterminacy. Au­ thorial performances produce authoritative interpretations; they, not texts, are the proper object of scholarly inquiry. One need not appeal to Derrida to doubt the oral necessarily less indeter­ minate than the written, for just as a performance could settle the question, say, of whether or not the praise of good women in The Legend of Good Women is intended to be earnest or ironic, so a performance could so change its registers, so vary its voice, as to guarantee indeterminacy. Still, the burden of proof falls on those who suppose indeterminacy the goal of a script or a text, given that auditors and readers must and quite uncon­ sciously do presuppose that statements make sense in order to decode them. Unfortunately, this linguistic fact does not permit the conclusion that a Chaucerian performance would have clearly expressed what he meant, for the disparities in social status and political power between Chaucer and his court audience must have insured, at least upon occasion, a need either to obscure or to defuse some of the implications of his text (as in Alceste's lectures on proper kingship). As Donald Howard (among others) pointed out, in all probability this need is one of the sources of Chaucer's self-disparaging persona in his texts (scripts), texts that always exceed their demeanor. Quinn supposes that Chaucer created some of his works primarily as scripts for performing; others, as texts for readers. Chaucer's court poetry belongs in the former category; the Tales of Canterbury, in the latter. (Quinn even ventures, in passing, the hypothesis-shades of the rhyme272 REVIEWS royal Knight's Tale-that there were two versions of the Troilus, an original script for performance and a rewritten text for reading.) Surely, Quinn is right to judge Chaucer's first-person narratives, those dream visions we traditionally suppose Chaucer read at court, generally his most scriptlike. Still, one hesitates to assume oral performance merely from its ostensible marks-most notably, a first-person narrator and direct address to an audience-since they are often aped by texts written solely for armchair consumption. Chaucer's most pronounced mimicry ofthese marks is found in The Tale ofSir Thopas, a parody of the minstrel's art intended, you will no doubt agree, for a readerly book. There is, of course, no denying that Chaucer's court audience must have influenced his rhetoric, but to what end? Just as the Prologue to The Tale ofMelibee raises the possibility that the distinction between oral and written narratives was for Chaucer one with­ out a difference-within three lines it refers to telling and writing the tale-so it insists on distinguishing the significance of a text from its rhetoric. Where a gap is assumed between sense and significance, not every variation in the letter's performance will be supposed to vary the "sen­ tence." At the same time, we ought not to imprison ourselves in Chaucer's idealizations by concluding that his texts/scripts can only have the signifi­ cance his theory and intention assign them. The immediate difficulty for twentieth-century readers with settling is­ sues of interpretation by appealing to Chaucer's performative...