Allegory, Irony, Despair: Chaucer's Pardoner's and Franklin's Tales and Spenser's Faerie Queene, Books I and III
Allegory, Irony, Despair: Chaucer's Pardoner's and Franklin's Tales and Spenser's Faerie Queene, Books I and III
The most complex and compelling interpretations of earlier texts are to be found in writers who imitate and revise, not only their content, but also their forms. Awareness of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale and especially of its “old man” is brooding and pervasive through much of Book I. It conspicuously and ironically involves the Redcrosse Knight's recurrent encounters with mirrors of himself that he fails to recognize and it also begins with the old man Archimango and climaxes in the related character of Despair. Chaucer referred to the restless wish of an old man to Augustinian despair, which is the inverse of pride, an abyss of guilt, self-tormenting, and self-destruction.
Keywords: Chaucer, Franklin, Spenser, self-destruction, imitate, texts, despair, old man, self-tormenting
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
