Serious Play: Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto

Robert Hanning

Published by Columbia University Press 2010

Serious Play

Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto

Robert Hanning

In the series Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures

https://doi.org/10.7312/hann15210

Overview
Contents

About this book

Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto, premodern Europe's three greatest comic poets, found abundant cause for laughter in the foibles and follies of human desire. Yet they also excelled at the dangerous game of skewering the elites on whom they depended for patronage. The resulting depictions of addled lovers and rattled rulers create a unique dynamic of trenchant critique wrapped in amusing, enlightening, and disturbing fantasy, an achievement hailed as serio ludere, serious play, by Renaissance theorists.

Through an imaginative analysis of Ovid's amatory poetry, Chaucer's dream poems and excerpts from the Canterbury Tales, and Ariosto's epic Orlando Furioso, Robert W. Hanning illuminates the contrast and continuities in often hilarious, always empathetic representations of bungled desire and thwarted political authority. He also documents the response of all three poets to the "authority" of cultural predecessors and poetic convention. Each poet lived through exciting times (Augustan Rome, late-medieval London, and high-Renaissance Italy, respectively) and their outsider-insider status links them as memorable speakers of comedic truth to power. Providing fresh perspectives on Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto within their rich historical moments, Serious Play isolates the elements that make their work so appealing centuries after they lived, observed, and wrote.

Author / Editor information

Robert W. Hanning, a native of New York City, taught medieval and Renaissance literature at Columbia University for forty-five years before his retirement in 2006. He has also taught and lectured on issues of "race," ethnicity, and immigration in America. His books include The Vision of History in Early Britain, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, and The Lais of Marie de France, cotranslated with Joan M. Ferrante.

Reviews

Hanning offers lively appreciations of three major poets whose works speak comic truth to cultural power.

[Serious Play] delights and instructs.

Thoughtful, scholarly, [and] often humorous.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Preface and Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
1. Ovid’s Amatory Poetry: Rome in a Comic Mirror Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Chaucer: Dealing with the Authorities; Or, Twisting the Nose Th at Feeds You Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
3. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: Confusion Multiply Confounded; Or, Astray in the Forest of Desire Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
In Conclusion (or Inconclusion) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 312

eBook

Published: September 23, 2010
ISBN: 9780231526395