“CHAUCERIAN RENAISSANCE: PERICLES ENCOUNTERS THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN” FOR “THE WHOLE WORLD IS BECOME A HODGE-PODGE: GENERIC CHANGE IN CONTEXT”

The genre-blending of Troilus and Cressida, from the Prologue’s Henry V-like presentation of epic history in microcosm to the interventions of comedic romance, romantic satire, tragic romance and neoclassical tragedy, suggests that Shakespeare discovered in Chaucer a kaleidoscopic refraction of the medieval world and the English literary past. Rooted in the histories, refashioned as a touchstone of human interaction in the comedies, revisited as setting and tone in the tragedies, Shakespeare engaged his “memory” of Chaucer most directly in the tragicomedies. Inspired perhaps by Chaucerian juxtapositions of poet-narrators and their tales, Shakespeare explored the potential of generic multiplication and recombination most successfully in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, wherein narrator figures appear for narrative expediency (“Time”) or effect. In collaboration with other playwrights on “medieval” material, however—notably Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, their narrators either ubiquitous or conspicuously absent—Shakespeare’s lens on the past tends to fracture.