Susan Crane's “Alison's Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath's Tale” (102 [1987]: 20–28), though superior to many of the articles it cites, finally demonstrates not so much the Wife's “incapacity” as the inadequacy of an approach that Crane shares with many critics of the Wife of Bath. The approach is characterized by a failure to distinguish sufficiently between the prologue and the tale and by the related assumption (despite words to the contrary) that Alison is a real person, not a fictitious character.