tales out of school

When was the last time you read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? If you’re like me, you probably haven’t reached for this medieval classic since high school or college (unless, of course, you teach English lit). Those thickets of Middle English were tough going.

In case your memory’s a bit hazy, here’s a recap: The Canterbury Tales were written by Geoffrey Chaucer, an English poet and civil servant, between 1387 and 1400. A group of 30 odd pilgrims makes its way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral; en route they tell stories to pass the time. Readers learn about the individual pilgrims of the frame story—a knight, a miller, a physician, a prioress, and many others—and hear the tale that each tells.

Translators, writers, and artists are always seeking ways to make The Canterbury Tales more accessible to contemporary readers. An unabridged modern English translation by Burton Raffel appeared in 2008. Peter Ackroyd, known for his many works on English history, produced a prose retelling in 2009. In 2011, Seymour Chwast illustrated an idiosyncratic graphic adaptation that found Chaucer’s pilgrims riding motorcycles and speaking in modern vernacular (“Hey, babe, let’s party!”).

Perhaps no character in the book has endured like the Wife of Bath. As scholar Marion Turner demonstrates in The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton University Press, Jan. 23), this liberated, bluntspoken merchant woman was a revolutionary female depiction in medieval times and continues to inspire readers today, as she recounts the chronicle of her five marriages with her frank and funny perspective on sexual and marital relations. “Over and over again, in different time periods and cultural contexts,” Turner writes, “readers see her as ‘relatable’ in certain ways, as a three-dimensional figure who is far more than the sum of her parts.”

Creators as diverse as Voltaire, Ted Hughes, and Pier Paolo Pasolini have reimagined the Wife of Bath in their work. The latest is novelist Zadie Smith. Her first play, The Wife of Willesden, opens off-Broadway at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 1 after successful runs in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Smith recasts Chaucer’s “Alyson” as “Alvita,” a Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-50s who regales the customers of a northwest London pub on open mic night.

In her introduction to the published script (Penguin Books, Feb. 14), Smith writes that “from the moment Alyson opens her mouth… I knew she was speaking to me, and that she was a Kilburn girl at heart.…For Alyson’s voice—brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic—is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playgrounds of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road, any day of the week.” This entertaining play is further proof of Turner’s thesis: The Wife of Bath really has legs.

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Angeline Boulley ’s sophomore novel is a textured, thrilling mystery grounded in an Anishinaabe community dealing with stolen ancestors and artifacts and missing women. Read the review on p. 148.

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