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Shakespeare and Chaucer: Dream Visions and Dramatic Designs City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2018 Shakespeare and Chaucer: Dream Visions and Dramatic Designs Michael Plunkett The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2945 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SHAKESPEARE AND CHAUCER: DREAM VISIONS AND DRAMATIC DESIGNS by MICHAEL PLUNKETT A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 © 2018 MICHAEL PLUNKETT All Rights Reserved ii Shakespeare and Chaucer: Dream Visions and Dramatic Designs by Michael Plunkett This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ____________________ __________________________________________________ Date Richard C. McCoy Chair of Examining Committee ____________________ __________________________________________________ Date Eric Lott Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Richard C. McCoy Mario DiGangi Ammiel Alcalay THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Shakespeare and Chaucer: Dream Visions and Dramatic Designs by Michael Plunkett Advisor: Richard C. McCoy This dissertation explores echoes of Chaucer's dream visions in two of Shakespeare's late plays, Cymbeline and The Tempest, and in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare turns to Chaucer's dream visions, particularly The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame, not to use them as narrative sources, but to appropriate conventional elements of artistic self-exploration and self-definition in them. Chaucer's dreamers, who are also writers, read classic stories in bed, dream dreams that react to those stories, and then wake up and write new poems that report on what they have read and dreamed. Shakespeare, this dissertation argues, engages these meta-poetic moves from Chaucer's dream visions, working them into his dramatic designs, parodically in The Taming of the Shrew, integrally in Cymbeline and The Tempest, and, in so doing, explores and defines his own poetic sensibility in relation to that of Chaucer, his most important literary precursor in English. Shakespeare vies with Chaucer as a rival in the reception and adaptation of classical Roman literature, favoring a darker, more disturbing vision of the influence of the great Augustans, Ovid and Virgil, on the craft of English poetic composition, particularly in the representation of women; he also vies with his rival poet- playwright, Ben Jonson, reputed the rightful heir to Chaucer, as well as the better classicist, as a rival Chaucerian, pitting his creative engagement with the unruly elements of Chaucer's artistic self-portraiture against Jonson's efforts to uphold his great authority. iv Acknowledgements For generous, patient, and expert help with this dissertation, I am grateful to Rich McCoy, Mario DiGangi, and Ammiel Alcalay. I also wish to thank my parents, Michael Plunkett and Marian Kerr, and my partner, Stephanie Ly. v Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction…1 Chapter 2: Chaucer and The Taming of the Shrew…20 Chapter 3: Cymbeline’s Answer to The Book of the Duchess...50 Chapter 4: Cymbeline’s Answer to The House of Fame...89 Chapter 5: The Tempest and The House of Fame...119 Chapter 6: Shakespeare and Jonson, Rival Chaucerians…151 Epilogue...174 Works Cited…178 vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The classic studies of Chaucer's influence on Shakespeare – Shakespeare's Chaucer, by Ann Thompson, and The Swan at the Well, by E. Talbot Donaldson – primarily explore Shakespeare's use of two of Chaucer's greatest literary works – The Knight's Tale and the epic romance Troilus and Criseyde – as narrative sources. Shakespeare wrote a direct dramatic adaptation of each of these works, putting Chaucer's medieval stories on the early modern stage: He adapted Troilus and Criseyde into his nasty, irreverent tragicomedy Troilus and Cressida, and, in collaboration with John Fletcher, he adapted The Knight's Tale into The Two Noble Kinsmen, a fascinating late-career effort. In addition, Shakespeare used these same principal texts out of Chaucer as subsidiary narrative sources, reimagining the world of The Knight's Tale in A Midsummer Night's Dream – even the title sounds like 'Knight's Dream,' as though the play were an answer, in a lighter strain, to the epic tale – and relying on various aspects of Chaucer's romantic tragedy, Troilus and Criseyde, for his own, Romeo and Juliet. Thompson and Donaldson demonstrate that Shakespeare read Chaucer's poetry with care and attention, and that he had different methods of adapting his predecessor's narrative poetry into plays for the English Renaissance stage. If there is a common theme between the landmark studies by Thompson and Donaldson, it is the theme of Chaucer's darkness. The central thesis of Thompson's book is that Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists thought of Chaucer as a "serious, romantic" writer, and were less invested in his "comic naturalism" than readers today might imagine (58). For his part, 1 Donaldson's arresting third chapter explores Shakespeare's preoccupation, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, with the "pessimism," and even the "horrors" of The Knight's Tale, rather than its depiction of chivalric nobility or its investigation of medieval philosophical ideas, as readers might expect (53, 56). In this stage version of The Knight's Tale, Donaldson argues, Shakespeare picks up on the darkest aspects of his source and intensifies them, raising the dramatic stakes of the medieval story. Where most readers today, when they think of Chaucer, would think of the bawdier parts of The Canterbury Tales, The Miller's Tale, for instance, or The Wife of Bath's Prologue, it seems that Shakespeare and his contemporary poet-playwrights would have sooner thought of his most serious poetry, particularly The Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, and, in Shakespeare's case, would have seen them through a dark lens. Certainly, Troilus and Cressida, one of Shakespeare's most disturbing plays, intensifies the darkness of a serious, romantic Chaucerian narrative source. My sense is that, after the Knight, the most significant figure from The Canterbury Tales, in connection to Shakespeare, is the Wife of Bath. First, Donaldson demonstrates the Wife's influence on Shakespeare's conception of Falstaff in the final chapter of The Swan at the Well. Building on Donaldson's discussion, in the chapter devoted to Chaucer in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom loads this famous female figure with enormous significance, setting Chaucer's contribution to Western literature second only to Shakespeare's, which, he says, it prefigures, with the Wife of Bath at the center of that contribution. For Bloom, Chaucer "anticipates" Shakespeare's artistic breakthroughs in the representation of "inwardness," "self-consciousness," and psychological depth in literary characterization with his two "most inward and individual" characters, the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, the latter Chaucer's "great vitalist," just like "her only child," Falstaff (112). In Bloom's terms, as influential as they are notorious, Chaucer lays 2 the groundwork for Shakespeare's invention of the human: Before there could be an Iago or an Edmund, there had to be a Pardoner, and before there could be Bloom's cherished, life-drunk John Falstaff, there had to be a Wife of Bath; in this reading, the most significant aspect of Shakespeare's Chaucerian inheritance is, not direct or indirect narrative sources, but a literary form of proto-modern self-consciousness. In a collection Donaldson co-edited while he was working on The Swan at the Well, Chaucerian Shakespeare: Adaptation and Transformation, the Wife of Bath assumes a subtler significance. In one chapter, Frances Gussenhoven argues that The Taming of the Shrew, a play the classic studies do not take up, is Shakespeare's composite dramatic adaptation of The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, appropriating aspects of both the framing narrative, involving Alison's marriages and her bracing perspectives on life and love, and of the tale itself (69-79); meanwhile, Judith J. Kollmann makes the same claim about a different play, likewise neglected in this connection – The Merry Wives of Windsor – while, at the same time, demonstrating that play's structural congruity with The Canterbury Tales as a whole and pointing out many shared thematic concerns between the two texts, such as issues related to marriage and the values of the middle class (47-48, 50-61). These early essays on Shakespeare's integral, divergent adaptations of Chaucer's wife stories strike me as the most significant supplements to what Thompson and Donaldson establish in the classic studies of Chaucer's influence on Shakespeare. That these essays show Shakespeare reworking Chaucer's framing device in The Canterbury Tales, and, at the same time, a story within that framing device, in more than one play, distinct from the ones traditionally associated with this question, suggests an extraordinary level of creative attention to Chaucer's works on Shakespeare's part. I also want to acknowledge them here because,
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