Chaucer’s Mutability in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos

Abstract

Recent scholarship has increasingly focused attention on Spenser's continuity with Chaucer. This essay focuses attention on an important discontinuity between Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos and Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls as a corrective to potential exaggeration of Spenser's resemblance to Chaucer. The specific differences between Spenser's and Chaucer's poems draw attention to the significant ways in which Spenser is removed from Chaucer in time and thought, especially in terms of the way in which each poet understands and portrays the sources of disharmony and suffering in the world.