- Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales ed. by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh
Among the countless collections of essays on Chaucer, Chaucer on Screen is as brilliant and entertaining as any I have had the pleasure of reading. Each of its contributors is an accomplished medievalist, but what is most remarkable about these seventeen essays is their authors' mastery of contemporary cultural theory and their equally deep knowledge of the history, technologies, and critical appraisals of film and television. The volume's ambition is to 'foreground Chaucer's importance' in alignment with, but also over and against, 'medievalism'—which the editors define as a 'specialized genre of adaptation' where 'the vast store of medieval culture' has 'always already been appropriated, borrowed, stolen, reproduced, remade, rethought, and repurposed' (p. 2). In numerous ways, the essays in this collection are designed to revise our appreciation of recent representations of Chaucer's works as they 'float' within a modern synchronous 'sociolect' rather than participating in a diachronic contestation between the latter-day artifact and a more privileged original.
Part I, 'Theorizing Absence,' addresses a crucial issue relating to popular dissemination of Chaucer, namely, the relative lack of cinematic and televisual representations of the Canterbury Tales. In 'Naked Yet Invisible: Filming Chaucer's Narrator,' Elizabeth Scala brilliantly illustrates how, in contrast to Shakespeare (a playwright who 'inhabits his works and his characters' [p. 20]), Chaucer's more 'oblique and self-conscious relation to his own writing helps to explain its limited appearance on screen' (p. 21). In '"The Play's the Thing": The Cinematic Fortunes of Chaucer and Shakespeare,' Susan Aronstein and Peter Parolin persuasively argue that, whereas Shakespeare's plays provide 'seemingly endless potential for adaptation' because the 'archive is open, ongoing, porous, and heterogeneous' (p. 39), Chaucer's relegation to the confines of the modern schoolroom helps account for his perceived unmarketability. Larry Scanlon, in 'Chaucer, Film and the Desert of the Real; Or, Why Geoffrey Chaucer Will Never Be Jane Austen,' offers another explanation of Chaucer's minimally successful translation into film and TV; even though Jane Austen's masteries of authorial irony and of free, indirect discourse cannot be dramatized, the 'misrecognized' realism of her novels adapts to the screen [End Page 85] rather successfully; in Chaucer's works, by contrast, the 'interference' between 'the text of the narrator and the text of a character' (p. 51) is a literary accomplishment that no dramatic rendering can re-capture. In another excellent inquiry, Kathleen Forni explains in 'Profit, Politics, and Prurience; Or, Why Chaucer is Bad Box Office' that screen adaptations of the Canterbury Tales are almost exclusively an 'Anglo phenomenon' because, more than Shakespeare, Chaucer is seen in the United States as 'a signifier for British cultural superiority' (p. 67).
Part II, 'Lost and Found,' features two fascinating essays addressing the negligible presence of Chaucer's texts in early Hollywood and TV history. In a well-researched exploration of Hollywood archives, Lynn Arner in 'Chaucer and the Moving Image in Pre-World War II America' details four 'historical and cultural reasons' that Chaucer played second fiddle to Robin Hood and King Arthur: these four are 'American cinematic nationalism' (p. 75), his tales' failure 'to offer the promise of futurity' (p. 76), Chaucer's negative associations with the past, and his lack of 'cross-class appeal' (p. 79). In an equally brilliant study, Candace Barrington, in 'Lost Chaucer: Natalie Wood's "The Deadly Riddle" and the Golden Age of American Television,' investigates the almost complete disappearance of The Deadly Riddle, a film loosely based on the Wife of Bath.
Part III, 'Presence,' comprises four arresting essays focused on cinematic representations of 'perverse Chaucer.' Tison Pugh, in 'Chaucerian History and Cinematic Perversions in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale,' contends that 'perversity' in Powell's and Pressburger's unique film is aligned both with Chaucer and with the technologies of cinema itself. In 'Idols of the Marketplace: Chaucer...