Shakespeare and Chaucer: Influence and Authority on the Renaissance Stage

Abstract

Over the course of Shakespeare’s career, plays written for the commercial theatre were increasingly being published and read as literary works. This dissertation argues that Shakespeare’s own complex response to the changing status of dramatic texts can best be discerned in his engagements with the figure who represented vernacular literary authority itself, Geoffrey Chaucer. Renaissance readers venerated Chaucer as a prodigious polymath, a proto-Protestant, and, above all, the authoritative founding father of English literature. Whereas ambitious early modern poets like Edmund Spenser were eager to claim their own place in a Chaucerian tradition, Shakespeare’s adaptations and appropriations of Chaucer’s works reveal not only an acute awareness of the precarious position of plays within this literary tradition but also a deep ambivalence about the incommensurability of stage and page as media of dramatic representation. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the most explicitly Chaucerian play of the period, Shakespeare and Fletcher treat The Knight’s Tale with a mixture of reverence and hostility, thematizing the challenge of adapting a culturally authoritative poem for the commercial stage. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the two parts of Henry IV, Shakespeare adopts framing techniques from Chaucer’s works in order to explore the literary possibilities of drama, even as the deployment of these techniques on stage reveals a tension between poetic ambition and theatrical pragmatism. The iconoclastic Troilus and Cressida, by emphasizing an antagonism between auctor and actor, vandalizes the poetic authority of its Chaucerian and Homeric sources; yet, in doing so, the play posits its own vision of a distinctly theatrical longevity. This dissertation argues that Shakespeare throughout his career found Chaucer most valuable not as a model to be imitated, but as an interlocutor to think with (and against) at a critical cultural moment when theatrical scripts were becoming “literature.”