Chaucer

If you have been paying any attention to The Toast's content this past year, you'll know already that Mallory Ortberg has been killing it with her medieval-themed spoofs and humorous material. One of her recent successes was The Wife of Bath's Prologue. So I handed this piece to this semester's Chaucer students and told them they'd get extra credit for spoofing a different Tale, a la The Toast.

My department is a great place to work. For example, yesterday I got to play a dragon for a colleague. Simon Gatrell is teaching a course on Harry Potter, and he needed faculty "dragons" to guard dragon eggs (a scene you might remember from The Goblet of Fire). Students could win the eggs from us "dragons" if they answered our questions correctly and petitioned us with sufficient aplomb and abasement.

Chaucer has inspired a myriad of retellings, remixes, mashups, and other literary responses, and one of the most recent -- and most sophisticated -- homages is Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales (2014). Agbabi's poetry collection reimagines Chaucer's pilgrims in twenty-first century England and retells all his tales, via the diverse idioms of contemporary Brits and in equally diverse poetic styles.

You probably know the Tabard Inn as the Southwark drinking establishment from whence Chaucer's pilgrims started their imaginary pilgrimage. The Tabard was a real place -- just off London Bridge on the south bank of the Thames, on the route from London to Kent and Canterbury, and it persisted (in one form or another) until the mid-19th century. And you probably know Southwark as the London suburb, on the south bank across the Thames from the City of London proper, that was home to Elizabethan London's riff-raff: prostitutes, bear-baiting, and commercial theatre.

What if Lewis Carroll had lived in Chaucer's London? What if his Alice had been an "Alys"? What if he had written in verse instead of prose, if his Alys had known what a fourteenth-century girl would have known, and his dream-vision (for so it is, really) had been populated by medieval rather than Victorian references? Well, it might have looked something like The Aventures of Alys in Wondyr Lond, a new translation of Carroll's story into Middle English.

In the spring of 2010, a group of my Chaucer students convinced me that they could make a film of Chaucer's "Legend of Dido" from his Legends of Good Women that would be an interpretively sophisticated engagement with Chaucer's poetry, his encounter with his classical sources, and his narrative techniques.

A recent article in History Today remarks upon a somewhat unexpected fashion trend: Parisian designers creating collections inspired by medieval texts, images, and writers -- as well as medieval clothing styles themselves. As Benjamin Wild writes of Vivienne Westwood,

On your arm, even.

See the original Tumblr image at

http://tattoolit.com/post/57158513780/pre-color

Yes, folks, he actually does, right here at houseoffame.blogspot.com

He doesn't post frequently any more, but the old posts are definitely worth re-reading. I personally recommend his take on sparklie vampyres and the Cipher of Leonardo. Plus a lot of Ricardian England in-jokes that you must be a die-hard Chaucerian to get.

A comedy sketch performed by the British actor and comedian Bill Bailey. In Middle English, no less! Bonus points if you can identify the literary allusions (Chaucer and otherwise) in the sketch.

This is a legacy post from my old website.