Seth Lerer

What Chaucer Did to Shakespeare: Books and Bodkins in Hamlet and The Tempest

This article is less concerned with what Shakespeare did to Chaucer than with what Chaucer did to Shakespeare: that is, how the experience of reading Chaucer, in certain cultural and bibliographical contexts, engaged Shakespeare throughout his career, not only providing sources but provoking his imagination. Like so many of his sources and inspirations, Chaucers poetry came to Shakespeare not as a performative tradition but as a published book. We take a close look at Thomas Speghts 1598 volume, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, reprinted in 1602, the only edition to appear in Shakespeares lifetime. And we examine, in particular, Chaucers treatment of the death of Julius Caesar in the Monks Tale, in order to show how Chaucers handling of this political assassination provoked Shakespeares exploration of this subject in his own Julius Caesar, as well as in Hamlet and The Tempest.

Essays From The English Institute 2015: Figure

When members of the Board chose the keyword “figure” for the first meeting of the English Institute away from Harvard in a generation, they were aware that they would be hosting a weekend’s discussion of the term at Yale, a place once closely associated with thinking about figuration in language. With all the differences that always marked the members of the so-called Yale School, it is also true that each of them was interested in figuration. Paul de Man, reading Friedrich Nietzsche, had insisted on “the figurality of all language.”1 Barbara Johnson, in one of the first books to emerge from the School, described the protocols of rhetorical reading with unmatched clarity:

What was medieval English

The simple answer to the question of my title is that medieval English was the vernacular language spoken and written by men and women in the British Isles from the period of the initial Germanic invasions in the fifth century through the rise of the Tudor dynasty in the early sixteenth. While Old and Middle English differed markedly in their vocabulary, sound, and grammar, they share – at least from our twenty-first-century hindsight – features that distinguish them from Modern English: a sound system that made, in particular, the pronunciation of long stressed monophthongs relatively stable until the Great Vowel Shift in the fifteenth century; an initial, and then subsequently dissipating, use of grammatical gender in nouns; an elaborate, and also dissipating, case system; a distinction between the singular and plural (and then informal and formal) forms of the second-person pronoun; a vocabulary descending from the Germanic dialects, augmented by French and Latin after the Conquest; and, finally, a set of literary forms (epic, romance, hagiography, lyric) whose idiom and subject matter distance them from post-Renaissance, post-Reformation imaginative writing. The more complicated answer is that medieval English was but one of several languages spoken and written during this period: a vernacular that took second place to Latin in the institutions of intellectual debate; that took a back seat to French in the cultures of court and government; but