Chaucer's Dante: allegory and epic theatre in the Canterbury Tales (review)

146 Reviews As will be obvious, this slender yet cogent study should interest classical, medieval and Renaissance scholars in its shrewd central thesis that for the medieval Christian reader classical antiquity was: 'historically past but still vital in its ability to illustrate the fundamental forces in history and human nature ... which Christianity ... has discerned' (p. 7). J. S. Ryan Department of EngUsh University of N e w England Neuse, Richard, Chaucer's Dante: allegory and epic theatre in the Canterbury Tales, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xi, 295; R.R.P. US$42.00. Neuse's main argument is that Chaucer is best approached as a poet w h o knew, understood, and recast Dante's essential views of history and human dignity. In the notes, as well as in the body of his argument Neuse takes insights from the specialized literature to illuminate and recontextualize readings of The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales, claiming that 'Dante's Pilgrim is ... recapitulated, in whole and in part, by Chaucer's many pilgrim tale-tellers' (p. 5). Neuse then focuses on two generic questions to see how the ptigrims engage in soul-searching. Thefirstquestion asks, how far each poet writes in what can be seen as an allegory that does not undervalue the literal, historical, individual worth of those pilgrims and their existential settings. The second, what is the essence of an epic theatricality, opens up a textual space for such concerns with the ambiguous, gappy, and ephemeral image of man as it reflects, in a refracted way, the image of God. Neuse explores the classical and early Christian precedents to these two medieval poets. H e reads Virgil, Seneca, Ovid, and Augustine in the light of their imitators and thus brings into focus the aptness of the re-created genres in Dante and Chaucer. Both the Italian and the English poet questioned the closed, Augustinian version of individuality and history and used the generic codes of their classical predecessors to enliven and embody a perspective derived from Boethius. This occurs as the allegory substantiates the literal level as the stuff of dynamic history and human specificity. It also occurs as the two poets set their main characters into motion in a situation where the voices of thetextare generated by the social, chronological and geographical setting. As a consequence, both the Comedy and the Tales persistently undercut neat geometrical patterns of formalized doctrine, while yet remaining truetoessential Christian beliefs. The manifest differences between the two works do not signal radical disjunctions between the poets. Rather, Neuse argues, such problematics indicate mutual concerns which his intertextual readings develop. The repeating Reviews 147 term in Neuse's readings is 'ambiguity' and it is aesthetic ambiguity which allows each poettofindspace for the physical and psychological individuality of human beings in God's created universe. For Neuse, Chaucer's own two tales, Sir Thopas and Melibee, become key points of contact in the inter-textual exercise that exists between the Comedy and The Canterbury Tales. Each articulates key thematic and theatrical revisions of the Italian epic. Similarly, new readings of other tales work to lift Chaucer's achievement to the level of Dante and both poets are seen as engaged in major epistemological recreations of the classical tradition. Norman Simms English Department University of Waikato Ormrod, W. M., The reign of Edward 111: crown and political society in England 1327-1377, N e w Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xiii, 280; 13 plates, 2 genealogical tables; R.R.P. US$30.00. Edward Ill's long reign has attracted much less attention from English historians than the catastrophic short reigns of Edward II and Richard II. N o scholarly biography of Edward III has been published since the eighteenth century, although his son the Black Prince, earned three studies in a single anniversary year and even his squalid mistress, Alice Peners, cut afigureas The Lady ofthe Sun. Yet constitutional historians have long recognised that the medieval parliament took its shape and substance in Edward Ill's reign and aU writers on war and chivalry have shared something of Froissart's enthusiasm for the victor of...