Dialogue

The word 'dialogue' is first attested in Middle English in the early thirteenth century, when it appears to have been restricted to literary works in the form of an exchange between two or more persons; it seems to have acquired its more modern sense of ‘conversation’ only from the beginning of the fifteenth century, at the very moment when Chaucer’s output was complete. This essay therefore focuses on the earlier attested sense and considers Chaucer’s poetry in relation to the literary dialogue, demonstrating that while he is not generally regarded as a producer of such texts, an examination of his works quickly reveals the extent to which he has absorbed both the form and its characteristic concerns into his own writings.