6 - Conclusion: Other Facets of Chaucer's Fabric and Costume Rhetoric

Summary

Chaucer's “masterpiece of reality … [his] verisimilitude of artificiality,” achieved in his Tale of Sir Thopas, marks the pinnacle of his costume rhetoric deployed to comic effect and even to the point of “overkill.” Thopas, with its two complete costumes for its inept knight, outdoes even the Miller's Tale's fulsome portrait of Alison, an elderly artisan's wanton young wife, and her overreaching embroidery; and it more than outshines the Reeve's Tale's description of colorful peasant Sunday dress and excessive armaments.

In tracing Chaucer's overall pattern of usage, the General Prologue (GP) to the Canterbury Tales proves his mastery of literary sartorial depiction within character portraits, but this penetrating portrait technique is never brought into play when Chaucer introduces the major characters in his romances, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. In the Knight's Tale, contrary to audience expectations, two minor personages in the plot, Lygurge and Emetreus, benefit from Chaucer's genius in sartorial characterization in descriptio, although the intent of their portraits is apparently not to characterize or to highlight their later actions, but rather to illuminate the spectacle of the tournament as a whole, as it illustrates Theseus's magnificence. Conversely, the major characters in this tale, Theseus, Emelye, and Palamon, at best receive only brief general costumes; Arcite is graced with lavish funerary dress that is somewhat more detailed but, again, this array primarily reflects Chaucer's portrayal of Theseus's magnificence manifest in the spectacle of a royal funeral.