Abstract
Chaucer's poetry is generally felt to be distinguished by “an irony so quiet, so delicate, that many readers never notice it is there at all or mistake it for naïveté.”1 Granting, of course, the danger that “naïveté” may in turn be mistaken for irony, we may still suspect, with G. K. Chesterton, that Chaucer “made a good many more jokes than his critics have ever seen.”2 Whatever disputes continue about certain passages, no one is likely to deny today that the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is rich in subtle and satiric ambiguities. A more debatable and more neglected question, and one which I wish to pose here, is: How early did the ironic spirit manifest itself in Chaucer's works?
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