The "General Prologue" provides us with no evidence as to the character of the Nun's Priest. Only in the prologue to his story do we finally get a glimpse of who he might be, albeit in a rather obtuse way. As Harry Bailey rather disparagingly remarks: "Tell us you can do what we can in a clearing./Be cheerful, even if you ride on a jade" (p. 235, ll2811-2812). I say this with caution because much criticism has surrounded the supposed character of the priest-nun, her role in the tale, and her relationship to the Canterbury Tales as a whole. An example, in my opinion, of an unsatisfactory reading is illustrated by Arthur Broes' 1963 article "Chaucer's Disgruntled Cleric: The Nun's Priest's Tale." Broes argues that the priest-nun is a “learned clergyman” (Broes 162) who attacks his ecclesiastical superiors, notably the prioress, for their alleged spiritual failures. Although one can clearly find allusions to the Prioress (line 2835 would be a most poignant example, "No piece of deyntee passed through her throat") in the tale, I nevertheless think that Broes's reading is very one-sided. Indeed, Derek Pearsall would seem to agree. Pearsall's 1984 Variorum is an invaluable source of information on the tale's sources and analogues, as well as a fairly comprehensive summary of critical approaches to the tale. Concerning the character of the priest-nun and the question of a so-called "dramatic" reading of the text, Pearsall notes that there are two main critical camps: those who argue that the character of the priest-nun can be established from evidence textual, thus affecting any reading. of the tale, while others, represented perhaps by Robert Kilburn Root, hold the following position: "Neither in the General Prologue nor in the links which... in the middle of the article... did speak of the concept of confinement , or entombment, in history and in literary texts. This act, whether created consciously or not, involves a feeling of need for reflection, an island of contemplation, but simultaneously this confinement threatens the inevitable need for progress. In both “The Knight's Tale” and “The Priest-Nun's Tale,” we are confronted with island worlds whose workings are a mystery, and in fact, even though we can witness their workings, we remain strangers to the cultural codes buried within the enclosure. Chaucer seems to be aware of this. The Knight takes us forward, but always looks back. The nuns' priest reminds us that we must always look forward, beyond our confines. In the final analysis, Chaucer left us a story, to borrow Stephen Greenblatt's term, of "resonance and wonder" that reverberates across space and time..