Inthe American critic Harold Bloom claims that Shakespeare drew on Chaucer’s Pardonerwhen creating the villain Iago for his . This book turns Bloom’s observation of influences within the canon of Western literature into a more complex intermedial analysis of dramatic and literary traditions at the waning of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance. The discussion of verbal and non-verbal codes in Chaucer’s presentation of the Pardoner and Shakespeare’s depiction ofIago sheds light on the various strands of the Vice’s development, and shows that Chaucer’s pilgrim, who descends obliquely from the stage Vices, stands at the very beginning of the Vice tradition, whileIago is a late development of him, who adapts his role to new dramatic challenges.weiterlesen