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SOURCE: “The Fantasies of ‘Mad Rabelais’: Exploiting the Unreal,” in Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England, Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 146-95.
In the excerpt below, Prescott traces the influence of Rabelais's ideas about fantasy toRenaissance writers and artists.
In a culture that is ambivalent about the mental powers that can set lovers' eyes rolling or lead a nervous nocturnal traveler to suppose a bush a bear, Rabelais's fantasy seemed variously repellent or engaging. Either way, it was rhetorically useful. Michael Drayton jokingly calls Rabelais himself mad. Nimphidia, The Court of Fayrie (1627), a mock epic about the tiny fairy knight Pigwiggen, names earlier triflers:
Olde Chaucer doth of Topas tell Mad Rablais of Pantagruell, A latter third of Dowsabell, With such poore trifles playing.(1)
Drayton plays deftly with perspective: Sir Topas encounters the giant Olyphant, and the maker of tiny pigwiggen remembers Pantagruel. And because his speedy tetrameters describe small...
This section contains 14,595 words (approx. 49 pages at 300 words per page) |
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