Some twentieth-century poets found themselves in Chaucer. Yeats praised Chaucer for his masculinity and vitality. Others praised his refinement; still others, his earthy physicality. His cheerfulness did not match modernism’s seriousness, but among Chaucer’s best twentieth-century readers was Virginia Woolf. She tangled with an iconic Chaucer in her Common Reader, and she discerns Chaucer’s interest in nature (like a Romantic poet) coupled with a keen, realistic eye (like a modern novelist) that helps readers “make out a meaning for ourselves.” This liberal tendency, coupled with an admiration for realism, brought Chaucer’s iconic status into the twentieth century, where, through the wonders of cinema and YouTube, he has persisted in the modern imagination. Even as the Academy claims expertise in Chaucer’s language and tends to denigrate popular culture’s regard for the poet, a healthy cadre of lay readers continue to enjoy Chaucer’s poetry.
Perhaps not all contemporary medieval-themed enterprises that employ the icon of Geoffrey Chaucer cave as blatantly to modernization as A Knight’s Tale, but many do. A very funny Chaucer comes to life in the visitor attraction “The Canterbury Tales: Medieval Misadventures,” just minutes from Canterbury Cathedral in historic Kent (see www. canterburytales. org. uk/home. htm). In the attraction, life-sized figures move a la Disney to enact five of the Tales, not surprisingly the five most frequently anthologized: “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” and “The Pardoner’s Tale.” A sound system carries the walk-through narrative and a mostly Modern English reading of selected passages from the Tales. Multilingual audio guides can be had for a price. Still, like all things coded “medieval,” the animatronics remain in semi-darkness, a subtle coding of the earlier “Dark Ages.” Although it’s a stretch to find anything remotely sublime about the poetic icon in the tourist attraction, “The Canterbury Tales” re-certifies for twenty-first-century tourists not Chaucer’s attachment to the cathedral but the creative engine of his imagination tangling the medieval literal—the pilgrimage and its trudging steps—with the medieval virtual— tale-telling and an infinite variety of stories. Chaucer’s identity as both poet and pilgrim, his seemingly bumbling narrator persona, and his constant attempts to blur the line between reality and fiction serve as continuous features of an iconic Chaucer.
YouTube Chaucer videos are amateurish and short. On the other hand, British novelist and screenwriter Jonathan Myerson has written and directed a very slick three-part version of The Canterbury Tales (1998 and 2000) that employs Claymation and other techniques of animation. Joining twentieth-century professionalism with good old-fashioned business sense, Myerson consulted academic Chaucerians for details of his production while also signing up the BBC and HBO as distributors. Several teams of animators, using visually different styles, produced 10 tales in nine episodes (The tales of the Miller and the Reeve are combined). Myerson’s series also includes the frame story of the pilgrimage to Canterbury and a set of links between the tales, and his Chaucer looks as an iconic Chaucer should: hooded eyes, pointed beard, slight paunch. Even Alexander Pope would recognize him. Just like the portraits in the Hoccleve manuscript and everywhere else, though produced with the wonders of animated plasticene, the forked beard, slight pot belly, and hooded eyes are paired with a gentle demeanor that strongly contrasts with the wild and wooly Miller. Myerson originally provided two soundtracks for his videos: one in Middle English, the other modernized. In this, Myerson harks back to a sensibility born in the eighteenth century that, through modernization, encouraged the reading of the Tales, instead of antiquarian or purely iconic admiration.
A network television phenomenon that has kept iconic Chaucer in the public eye is a live-action series made for the BBC of six updated Canterbury Tales (2003). Sally Wainwright adapted “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and set it on and behind the stage of a soap opera; Peter Bowker’s “The Miller’s Tale” updates the funniest narrative in English with a pub, karaoke night, and false promises of fame; “The Knight’s Tale,” adapted by Tony Marchant, begins with jail and two prisoners falling in love with their teacher; Avie Luthra’s “The Sea Captain’s [Shipman’s] Tale” concerns a love triangle in an Asian community in Gravesend, Kent, outside London and on the Thames; Rochester, east of Gravesend, is the setting for the three drunken rioters of “The Pardoner’s Tale,” adapted by Tony Grounds; and Olivia Hetreed sets her adaptation of “The Man of Law’s Tale” in Chatham, just down the road from Gravesend, with an amnesiac yet pious Nigerian filling in for the Christian Constance.
The problem with adaptations like this high-budget BBC effort is the relentless normalizing of Chaucer’s social world, not to mention his language. The commercial structures of London, Gravesend, Rochester, and Chatham may arguably have their roots in the late Middle Ages, but the triumph of commercialism that controls the modern imagination could not have been envisioned in Chaucer’s time. In addition, regularization and familiarization rob The Canterbury Tales of their alterity and shortchange the audience of an opportunity to grapple with that alterity. Of course, such adaptations of
Chaucer fit the long history of his iconic status: reshaped, refolded to fit alternately others’ Protestant and Catholic, national and provincial, sublime and scurrilous agendas. Can we ever define a “real” Geoffrey Chaucer?
World History
