ABSTRACT
In this Nun's Priest's Tale the reader's boredom overwhelms and muffles almost completely the potential for dramatization in Chaucer's text. Conveyed by overregularized meter, with vowels stretched to exaggerate strong stresses, ennui opens the Tale and recurs throughout for narrator and characters alike. For example, Pertelote's first exclamation is recited with exaggerated pitch shifts exactly like those of the narrator introducing it, at NPT 2888-91, and nothing differentiates between Chaunticleer's bored "solas" and the narrator's bored "cas" at NPT 3203-4.
