SOURCE: "Chaucer The Pilgrim," in PMLA, Vol. LXIX, No. 4, September, 1954, pp. 928-36.

Donaldson is a scholar of Medieval and Old English Literature known for his translation of Beowulf for modern readers and his book, Speaking of Chaucer. In the following excerpt, Donaldson analyzes the persona of the fictional Chaucer, the narrator of the Canterbury Tales, and discusses the differences and similarities between this fictional protagonist and the poem's actual author.

Verisimilitude in a work of fiction is not without its attendant dangers, the chief of which is that the responses it stimulates in the reader may be those appropriate not so much to an imaginative production as to an historical one or to a piece of reporting. History and reporting are, of course, honorable in themselves, but if we react to a poet as though he were an historian or a reporter, we do him somewhat less than...