Abstract
Most criticism of the "Tale of Beryn" deals principally with the 'continuities' between the text and Chaucer's work. Contrary to this position, the present paper concentrates on the points at which Beryn departs from Chaucer, signalling how the later poet engages with and even challenges his predecessor in productive ways. In particular it focuses on the different attitudes to adolescence put forward by the two poets. It is found that the later writer exploits latent discrepancies in Chaucer's text to initiate a debate on youth, sensing a greater level of danger in adolescence than his forebear.
Highlights
In her 1987 study of Jaufre Rudel, Sarah Kay raises an interesting point about the medieval practice of continuing another author’s text
Drawing a parallel between this ‘intellectual activity’ and the modern ‘discipline of literary criticism’, Kay states that continuation is always at some level an interpretative procedure
Such exercises might ‘show the responses of thematic interpretation or formal analysis of a text, or of personal engagement with it [. . .] continuations might reasonably be expected to show a degree of commitment to their source text, appraise its quality or marketability, develop some aspect of its content’
Summary
In her 1987 study of Jaufre Rudel, Sarah Kay raises an interesting point about the medieval practice of continuing another author’s text. DELITE’: CHAUCER, THE TALE OF BERYN, AND THE PROBLEM OF ADOLESCENTIA One text in which these concerns are central is the Middle English Tale of Beryn. ‘The Canterbury Interlude and the Merchant’s Tale of Beryn’, in The ‘Canterbury Tales’: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed.
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