From Chaucer's Pardoner to Shakespeare's Iago

Download or read book From Chaucer's Pardoner to Shakespeare's Iago written by Maik Goth and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages the American critic Harold Bloom claims that Shakespeare drew on Chaucer's Pardoner when creating the villain Iago for his Othello. This book turns Bloom's observation of influences within the canon of Western literature into a more complex intermedial analysis of dramatic and literary traditions at the waning of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance. The discussion of verbal and non-verbal codes in Chaucer's presentation of the Pardoner and Shakespeare's depiction of Iago sheds light on the various strands of the Vice's development, and shows that Chaucer's pilgrim, who descends obliquely from the stage Vices, stands at the very beginning of the Vice tradition, while Iago is a late development of him, who adapts his role to new dramatic challenges.