There is no double entendre in the characters of Chaucer:
they are either quite serious or quite comic. In Shakespeare the
ludicrous and ironical are constantly blended with the stately and
the impassioned. We see Chaucer's characters as they saw themselves,
not as they appeared to others or might have appeared to the poet.
He is as deeply implicated in the affairs of his personages as they
could be themselves. He had to go a long journey with each of them,
and became a kind of necessary confidant. There is little relief, or
light and shade in his pictures. The conscious smile is not seen
lurking under the brow of grief or impatience. Everything with him
is intense and continuous--a working out of what went before.--
Shakespeare never committed himself to his characters. He trifled,
laughed, or wept with them as he chose. He has no prejudices for or
against them; and it seems a matter of perfect indifference whether
he shall be in jest or earnest. According to him, 'the web of our
lives is of a mingled yam, good and ill together'. His genius was
dramatic, as Chaucer's was historical. He saw both sides of a
question, the different views taken of it according to the different
interests of the parties concerned, and he was at once an actor and
spectator in the scene. If anything, he is too various and flexible;
too full of transitions, of glancing lights, of salient points.
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