In the following essay, Woolf comments on Chaucer's satire in the "General Prologue."
Many people nowadays acquire an early and excessive familiarity with the "General Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales, which later blunts their sharpness of perception. Since the "Prologue" is read at school, necessarily out of its literaryhistorical context, its methods of satire seem to have an inevitability and rightness which preclude either surprise or analysis. This natural tendency to remain uncritically appreciative of the "Prologue" has been partly confirmed by various works of criticism, which, though admirable in many ways, effusively reiterate that "here is God's plenty": they thus awaken an enthusiastic response to the vitality and variety of the characterisation in the "Prologue," at the cost of making.....
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