Ringing Chaucer's Bells: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
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Authors
Strand, Ginger
Issue Date
1987
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
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Abstract
In my reading of criticism about Shakespeare's
Troilus and Cressida, I have constantly found it assumed
that Shakespeare knew of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
when he wrote his play, but that his debt to the earlier
poet was not great. Certainly Chaucer was not
Shakespeare's only source, nor even the predominant one.
The Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare would have known were
quite different from the ones Chaucer knew. That the
story had gone through many transformations between the
fourteenth and seventeenth centuries has been shown by
Hyder Rollins in "The Troilus-Cressida Story from Chaucer
to Shakespeare". Following Chaucer's treatment of it,
the story was retold time and time again by less
sympathetic writers, until the characters' names became
synonyms: Troilus for a true lover, Cressid for a false
one, and Pandar for a bawd.
Description
ii, 57 p.
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License
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