... self-referentially ensures that his two Theseuses, one ambivalent and one highly flawed, are inseparable. 9 No possibility of later redemption remains open to Theseus, because the Theseus of the Legend appears to have lived after as well as before the Theseus of The Knight’s Tale...

... or the other. He is an admirable guide to this first tale of the pilgrimage, and he has many followers. For instance, Robert Jordan acknowledges a debt to Muscatine and says: “To ob- serve that Theseus’ oration culminates the thematic development of the tale and translates nobility of life...

...Stewart Justman Copyright © 1978 by Duke University Press 1978 “AUCTORITEE” AND THE KNIGHT’S TALE By STEWARTJUSTMAN In 1967 Robert Jordan wrote, “To observe that Theseus’ oration culminates the thematic development of the [Knight’s...

... in John Vyvyan, Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty (London: Chatto 8c Windus, 1961), pp. 77-91. and, briefly, in Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (London: Routledge 8c Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 207-9, and Howard Nemerov, "The Marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta," KR, 18...

... the contrasting leads of Theseus and Hippolyta in their responses to the lovers’ story of the night. From the standpoint of cool reason, Theseus dismisses the lovers’ story as an amusing and rather charming instance of how strong imagination plays tricks with reality. Thus Pepys dismisses the product...

.... Such, then, is the permissive nature of the conflict between Boethius and Lady Philosophy in the realm of philo- sophical discussion; between Palamon and Arcite on the one hand, and Theseus on the other, in the hierarchical order of society; and between worldly and heavenly love in Troilus and Criseyde...

... bears down heavily on “incongruities” and logical inconsistencies, and manages to find a great many more than I would have thought of, including a fair number about which I think he is wrong. For example, he uses as a test case Palamon’s line to Theseus: “I am thilke woful Palamoun...

... 257 In any event, the sphinxes are as close parallels to Keats’s Saturn as is the statue of Theseus (an Elgin marble), which Stephen Larra- bee judged to have been the poet’s inspiration.12 The Elgin Theseus maintains a semireclining position, leaning far backward-quite different from...

..., that in the midst of hard- ships he did not droop or fail Again, apropos of Sidney’s con- duct when, shortly after the death of his father and of his mother, rumor reached him that his sister Mary was fatally ill (fol. 19.) : “Quis Socrates, Democritus, Theseus, imo Hercules (quem duri celebrant...

... 45 1 ter. Comparison of the play to the poem has in the past been largely confined to pointing out the similarities in the relations of Theseus to the lovers. Donaldson delves deeper to deal with the general theme of the irresponsibility of romantic love, which he finds comical in both...

... and the additional virtue of being interpretable on at least two levels of meaning. Hungerford does real service in showing for the first time the incidence of the Theseus and Ariadne legend in Endymion, and in showing how Shelley reworked the Venus-Adonis story in Adonais. In general I think...

... with his conclusion that their play “dramatises the tragic potentialities of Theseus’s court” (p. 198), in part because he centers his comparison less on social homologies between the two plays than on the dramatic symbol of monstrous union-between Titania and Oberon in the one play and be- tween...

... is more often than not both Daedalus and Theseus-and we can learn a lot from both of him. ROBERTF. GLECKNER Duke University Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody. By DABNEYSTUART. Baton Rouge and Lon- don: Louisiana State University Press...

... devotees, the Bacchantes. Sometimes their appearance is principally to promote their own interests: Athena defends Apollo’s actions in the Ion; in The Suppliants she demands compensation from the Argives for Theseus’s recovering the bod- ies, a recompense which Theseus had himself forgone; Thetis...

... of busines+the Brookian acrobatics and pregnant pauses, Puck on stilts, actors doubling as Theseus/Oberon and Hip- polytall’itania-legitimate realizations of Shakespeare’s text? Or does tlie sheer self-conficlent thrust of this production, aided by the s~perb clarity...

... to tease out every nuance of a word’s meaning or a verse’s syntax end up flattened. Bate writes insightfully about the force of the imagination, his key evidence being Theseus’s speech about “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.1–17). But there is little of John...

.... Keturning to the Study from, say, Peter Brook’s brilliant but problematic rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he wonders: Are all those witty pieces of busines+the Brookian acrobatics and pregnant pauses, Puck on stilts, actors doubling as Theseus/Oberon and Hip...

.... Tolkien Roger Sale Mr. Sale achieves some searching criticism of three very different writers one the poet of sexuality, one Q Theseus-minded critic, and one an erudite romancer whose books have be- come a cult for the young...

... and Theseus-and we can learn a lot from both of him. ROBERTF. GLECKNER Duke University Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody. By DABNEYSTUART. Baton Rouge and Lon- don: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. xiv + 191 pp. $1 1.95...

... to understand that Theseus’s amphitheater was huge, nor do we need an illumination from the Queen Mary Psalter to show us that a reeve supervised workers in a field, an aspect of the Reeve’s occupation that receives not the slightest attention in Chau- cer’s depiction. Such illustrations are redundant...