Laughter in the Courts of Love: Comedy in Allegory from Chaucer to Spenser by Frances McNeely Leonard

Abstract

REVIEWS FRANCES MCNEELY LEONARD, Laughter in the Courts ofLove: Comedy in Allegory from Chaucer to Spenser. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1981. Pp. x, 192. $18.95. Frances Leonard writes spiritedly about comic scenes in poems ofthe late­ medieval "allegory of love" tradition in English. Her thesis, that comedy need not undermine the decorum of allegory and can even make it more effective, is one that few will want to contradict. For underlying the argument (and providing its impetus) is a dubious assumption that most readers feel that allegory is serious business and ought never be funny. For the average critic (it appears she has the patristic critic especially in mind) comedy and allegory "must be inimical." But is it so? The principle seems to have been formulated too much in the abstract. All readers of the Roman de la Rose, here acknowledged as seminal, know that love allegory can be comic. And religious allegories (Piers Plowman, The Castle of Perseverance) have hilarities of the letter that do not detract from but enhance spiritual meaning. It is puzzlirw why the author supposes her audience needs to be convinced otherwise. I find the main issue, which is what comedy does to or for allegory, is never quite brought to a hard, sharp focus. It is adumbrated in phrases like "Chaucer's mature efforts to make comedy and allegory serve the same end," but Leonard does not seem to face the central question of whether comedy and allegory in dynamic linkage create an effect that is somehow more than the sum of the effects that each would achieve in isolation. General statements like "The combination of comedy and allegory is designed to increase the complexity of[poets'] vision and expression" leave the reader suspended, yearningfor solider ground and a stabler foundation in theory. In regard to the nature ofcomedy, for example, Leonard enlists the aid of potent authorities (Frye, Langer, Bergson) but exploits their thought rather less than she could have; the result is that comedy is never pinned down long enough for positive identification (by her own admission comedy "is protean and will not be wrestled to the ground"). And so it is in her analysis, which often bewilders the reader with a wealth ofdefinition. Comedy is at once a form ofdrama and a narrative mode, a way ofseeing and a style ofwriting, an aspect ofauthorial tone and a category ofreader reception, something distinct from satire and yet in several cases appar177 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ently its equivalent. A reluctance to distill comedy down to its essence is accompanied by a reliance on metaphorical rather than univocal state­ ment: comedy is "a child of reality," the comic vision a "celebration of human existence," "a rapid movement of the mental eye." On the more practical level of determining simply what is funny, Leonard sometimes goes overboard: "Any event that recurs without significant variation ...provoke[s] laughter," or, "Devotion to detail for the love of detail is comic." The analysis of allegory is similarly lenient. The author rejects as too narrow C. S. Lewis'srestrictionof allegory to personification allegory whose significatio is an inner action (yet seems to adhere to it where the concept proves convenient, as in The Faene Queene), and she rules out exegetical allegory as irrelevant to the tradition of love, perhaps properly so. But what is left is a latitudinarian view that makes practically all figurative statement allegorical. If Lewis says that none of Chaucer's important poems is a true allegory, Leonard notwithstanding calls him allegorist. Comedy is duly found essential to the meaning of his comic poems, but that meaning having been defined as allegorical, there is, ipso facto, no conflict between comedy and allegory, rather (and not surprisingly) an effective conjunc­ tion. So with Chaucer's dream visions: The Book ofthe Duchess is "an allegory about human feeling and understanding" and deserves the desig­ nation because Blanche is not named directly but is spoken of in figurative terms. The author can thus raise as the main critical issue the presence of comedy in allegory (and put it satisfactorily to rest), whereas most readers will continue to see the problem as one of comic elements...