In new interpretations of a number of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Marie Borroff finds mutually corroborating signs of reformist sympathies on the poet's part. She adds an original comprehensive theory to the array of past speculations about the identity of the Green Knight, and shows how, in Pearl, variations in genre and style play against the single line of the dramatic action to give the poem its unique intricacy and power. Her interest in sound symbolism comes to the fore in her analyses of Chaucer's characteristically English way of rhyming and the function of clusters of key-words linked by sound in Beowulf and Sir Gawain. She also reveals a series of double meanings in one of Hamlet's last speeches.
