Pathos, Chivalry, and Romance

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter investigates the interest shown by Joseph and Thomas Warton, Richard Hurd, and others in the ‘wild’, ‘pathetic’, ‘romantic’, and distinctly ‘medieval’ aspects of Chaucer’s work. It explores the contradiction between two accounts of ‘Chaucer’: one that saw him as emerging into the light of ‘nature’ from a dark age of ill-metred romance (as mocked in the tale of Sir Topas), and another in which he was seen as ‘wild and fantastical’ and as a model for modern poems that might fall into the ‘romantic’ category. The chapter explores the relative neglect in the eighteenth century of Troilus and Criseyde and offers a full account of George Ogle’s version of The Clerk’s Tale, examining both its status as a moral fable and Ogle’s framing of that fable in such a way as to complicate its moral perspective. The chapter also documents the way in which, for some readers, it was the Chaucer ‘who left untold / The story of Cambuscan Bold’ who appealed most strongly: The Squire’s Tale, unfinished as it was, was considered by many as Chaucer’s ‘capital poem’. The chapter examines attempts to complete the tale by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Boyce, George Ogle, and others.