I have just finished reading Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde".. And I
was surprised to see in Book 5, line 1786, "Go, litel bok, ..."
Doing a google search on "go litle bok" produces no results; "goe little
booke" yields lots of sites that have the text of "The Shepheardes
Calender"; a search for "go little book" yields various pages, including
a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson entitled "Go, Little Book -- the
Ancient Phrase".
My question: is "go little book" really an "ancient phrase"? I had not
seen such a concept before I read Spenser (actually, I have been
thinking for the past 20+ years that the concept of sending a
personified book into the world on a teaching "mission" was my own
creation -- it's an organizing principle a book of short stories I will
complete before too long).
But now I see that Spenser saw "Go litle bok" in Chaucer. Is it
elsewhere too, in earlier works? Does anyone know of any critical
discussion of this device?
Kevin Farnham
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