Introduction: Chaucerian Resonances in Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare and Beyond

This special issue is dedicated to Chaucerian resonances in early modern drama. It is therefore useful to begin by posing the question: what is Chaucerian resonance? In a work of 1987, Alcuin Blamires offered one possible answer. Drawing on the definition of resonance as the “reinforcement or prolongation of sound by synchronous vibration,” he used this term to describe how Geoffrey Chaucer imbued “narrative with harmonies and discords so as to build imaginatively vibrant structures from the simplest of inherited stories.”¹ For Blamires, resonance captured not only “the spoken, oral dimension of [Chaucer’s] art,” but also the “‘stereo’ effect . . . and enhancement of significance [he] created through . . . adroit echo[es].”² As Blamires conceived it, Chaucerian resonance was an intratextual narrative phenomenon primarily manifesting as verbal repetition within Chaucer’s canon. It is fortuitous that Blamires fostered no “intention of campaigning to found a critical School of Resonance” along these lines, however, for there was already a competing definition of Chaucerian resonance in circulation.³ An earlier piece authored by Judith H. Anderson and published in English Literary Renaissance in 1985 repeatedly employed the term resonance when connecting Edmund Spenser’s suggestive use of words, phrases, names, and even plots in The Faerie Queene and The Shepheardes Calender with the Middle English poetry of Chaucer. In Anderson’s formulation, Chaucerian resonance becomes synonymous with “Chaucerian flavor” and can be used, for example, to describe “distant echo[es]” (sometimes ironic or parodic) of Chaucer’s poetry in the works of others.⁴

It is, broadly speaking, an Andersonian stance on Chaucerian resonance that has most often been assumed by subsequent critics: this terminology has been used more or less exclusively to describe acts of Chaucerian reception by later artists.⁵ When identified as such, so-called Chaucerian resonances have often been linguistically grounded, focusing on later writers’ re-use of individual words or phrases memorably found in Chaucer’s canon.⁶ Yet the Chaucerian resonances identified in recent scholarship have not been strictly confined to verbal repetition. The language of resonance is sometimes deployed by critics seeking to convey those particular qualities—including formal features or thematic preoccupations—that mark a text as pseudo-Chaucerian.⁷ At other times, the term resonance has been used in a more figurative sense to imply the continued relevance or legibility of Chaucerian subjects and tropes in varied reception contexts.⁸

In 2019, more than thirty years after her first publication on Chaucerian resonance, Anderson returned to the topic and attempted to theorize resonance more explicitly in a chapter written for Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete. Noting that the term, somewhat paradoxically, “suggests degrees of presence” yet also “implies an experience that is affective, subtle, suggestive, and, probably for some readers, at times too elusive to accept,” she worked through instances of Chaucerian resonance in Spenser’s works.⁹ Anderson’s most recent examples are not limited to, or even primarily motivated by, instances of verbal similarity; indeed, she cautions that “we can sometimes miss echoes of Chaucer in Spenser simply because modernising—linguistic translation—has occurred.”¹⁰ Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Anderson’s 2019 piece, however, is its characterization of Chaucerian resonance as a cumulative consequence of “clusters of recollection” across a text—a formulation not so far removed from Blamires’s “‘stereo’ effect,” though Anderson steers this concept well beyond the closed circuits of Chaucerian self-referentiality.¹¹ And Anderson’s is not the only recent attempt to theorize the meanings of Chaucerian resonance. A 2019 piece by Helen Barr that appeared along with Anderson’s chapter in Rereading Chaucer and Spenser likewise makes a case that resonance is a helpful concept for interrogating the dynamics of Chaucerian reception. Chiefly interested in exploring Chaucerian resonance as an acoustic metaphor, Barr uses it—in ways that are distinct from but complementary to Anderson—to ask “how . . . we [might] account for hearing not one, but at least two (or more?) poets simultaneously.”¹²

Our own understanding of what constitutes Chaucerian resonance...