It was interesting to me that Donaldson began an essay which argued that “the device of the persona has many functions, so integrated with one another that to try to sort them out produces both oversimplification and distortion” by declaring that “Chaucer the pilgrim…is not really Chaucer the poet.” He even goes on to distinguish Chaucer the poet from Chaucer the civil servant; while perhaps too confining and guilty of the oversimplification which he himself bemoans, his insistence that we think of these three different aspects of Chaucer as different entities does serve to differentiate sharply between the author, the authorial voice, and the narrator. As Donaldson points out, these three very different parts of the storytelling process too often merge into an undifferentiated jumble in the reader’s mind. I agree with Donaldson that this harms rather than helps our understanding of the text; I’m not sure that I agree that these are the only authorial personas which one ought to consider. I think rather than one narrator voice and one poet voice, it might be useful to think of these as operating upon a scale of tones. After all, the narrator’s own character is less important than the story being told, and it is not inconceivable that Chaucer might alter his pitch so that the tone might be different for different passages.