In Part 2 of our discussion on The Canterbury Tales, translator and editor Sheila Fisher uncovers her favorite line(s) in the text, tells us how she approaches teaching the Tales, gives us a cross-centuries Chaucer playlist, and reflects on the text's relevance to readers today.
Sheila Fisher is Professor of English at Trinity College (Hartford). She is the author of Chaucer’s Poetic Alchemy: A Study of Value and Its Transformation in The Canterbury Tales, and the editor (with Janet E. Halley) of Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, as well as essays on the Gawain-poet, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe.
To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Canterbury Tales, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/NLCanterbury.
Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.
Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by The Canterbury Tales: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4w2Lu5kGenjNFtqCQT8djv?si=0b2bd16d939f471a.
Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.
Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/thecanterburytales/part2/transcript.
In Part 2 of our discussion on The Canterbury Tales, translator and editor Sheila Fisher uncovers her favorite line(s) in the text, tells us how she approaches teaching the Tales, gives us a cross-centuries Chaucer playlist, and reflects on the text's relevance to readers today.
Sheila Fisher is Professor of English at Trinity College (Hartford). She is the author of Chaucer’s Poetic Alchemy: A Study of Value and Its Transformation in The Canterbury Tales, and the editor (with Janet E. Halley) of Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, as well as essays on the Gawain-poet, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe.
To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Canterbury Tales, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/NLCanterbury.
Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.
Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by The Canterbury Tales: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4w2Lu5kGenjNFtqCQT8djv?si=0b2bd16d939f471a.
Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.
Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/thecanterburytales/part2/transcript.
[Music]
[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as we interview its editor, Sheila Fisher. In part one we discussed Chaucer and his world, the idea of courtly love, and we talked about the iconic Wife of Bath. In this second episode we learn about Sheila's lifetime reading Chaucer, common challenges to understanding The Canterbury Tales, Sheila's Chaucer playlist, this work's contemporary relevance, and much more. Sheila fisher is professor of English at Trinity College. She is the author of Chaucer’s Poetic Alchemy: A Study of Value and its Transformation in The Canterbury Tales. She also co-edited Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writing: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism. Sheila Fisher welcome back to the Norton Library podcast.
[Sheila:] Thank you Mark; it's really great to be back.
[Mark:] Good to see you again. So, I want to continue our discussion of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and maybe we can start: do you remember where you first encountered this work?
[Sheila:] Well, I first encountered it as part of a - in translation - as part of a junior year in high school English class. You know it was like, we read the general prologue and maybe a couple of tales. But my first real encounter with it was forty years ago this fall, in Vernon Harward’s Chaucer class at Smith College, and it basically changed my life. I was looking for a major and I was trying to decide between art history and maybe French or Classics or English, and I really wanted to do English but that looked like it'd be too easy. And then I hit Chaucer, and I always loved translating. I mean I loved reading in French; I loved translating Latin. And I hit the Middle English and I thought oh wow, this gets to be - I can be an English major and I can translate and it's old and I love old things. So I thought, hey wow this may be the matchmaker here. And then we got to the Miller’s tale, and we had just come off you know the kind of beautiful, monumental tragic courtly love story of the Knight’s tale that was like everything you imagine the Middle Ages to be: you know? Knights, ladies, tournaments, and we slam right into that world of the Miller’s tale where, you know, you got the old husband, the young wife, the handsome boarder, and you know what's going to happen. And, you know, people are sticking their butts out the window and farting at each other. I'm thinking like what universe is this stuff coming out of? I mean it just blew my sense of the Middle Ages right out of the water. And even more importantly, I'm thinking, how do you have a literary work where there are these two radically different pieces back to back and as I was, you know, reading through the Canterbury Tales that semester I thought -and there are ways in which Chaucer, many times, just lets those contradictions sit with each other in a kind of equipoise and makes us ask: what do you do with these contradictions? What do you do with this collision? And I think probably as a nineteen-year-old not that, you know, you don't have this as – oh, it was fifty years ago I encountered this! This is really something! It it's not as if like fifty years later you don't have contradictions in yourself, but I think it's a nineteen-year-old who’s trying to figure out some things about my own life, where I wanted it to go, my own personality in my second year in college, I thought this was really interesting, you know, sometimes you can just let the contradictions stand without having to figure them out.
[Mark:] And then thinking back to your junior year in high school experience, maybe I will speak on behalf of juniors in high school everywhere who didn't go on to become experts in this field: did you experience frustration or anxiety at reading Chaucer’s works as a junior in high school or were you fascinated by this sort of different language and different world?
[Sheila:] I was, I think, charmed might be the word. I think at that point, as a high school English major, I was just much more involved with novels, you know, like Victorian novels. And our high school English teacher, who was brilliant, had us write a general prologue to what would be perhaps our Canterbury Tales, but using contemporary characters. So my parents were antique dealers and would often go to auctions, and I went to an auction with them and just sat and watched the people at the auction and made them my Canterbury pilgrims. So I, you know, I don't remember how my other students in my class reacted to him, but I never thought at that point that he would be one of the major influences on my life. But I thought he was charming.
[Mark:] In your experience teaching this work and talking about it with people, what do you think is the most common misreading of The Canterbury Tales?
[Sheila:] In my introduction to the Norton Library Canterbury Tales, I talk about the ways in which his characters are so vivid that if you went back to London, you might be able to see them. Having said that, I think one of the most common misconceptions maybe people like me contribute to it is that the general prologue pilgrims and thus the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales are demographically representative of fourteenth-century society. Let's face it, there are three women on the pilgrimage. And even if women didn't go on pilgrimages as often as men, for probably obvious reasons, there would have been more than three women on a pilgrimage of twenty-nine people. There are relatively few aristocrats. There's the knight and the squire. And his yeoman, who is not an aristocrat, is riding with their little group. So, it's not demographically representative there. There may be more corrupt clergy people than one would expect. I mean, the parson is, obviously, almost overly idealized, but Chaucer is playing not so much into demographic representations as he's playing into what was a very active anti-clerical satirical position. And a lot of that derived from the corruption of the church. So, I think that if you go into The Canterbury Tales well you're going be - Chaucer’s artistry is to take us in and make us think we're right in medieval England, but it's not that demographically representative.
[Mark:] When you present this book to readers who might not be as well-versed in the period and in the language, what are the challenges that new readers generally face with The Canterbury Tales?
[Sheila:] It's old and so it's a different world. And it depends on the individual student’s patience or the individual reader’s patience. I mean, some people love being immersed in a different world and some people just feel totally disoriented and unpleased with the experience. There's also the fact that it's poetry. I mean, with the exception of the few of the tales that are deliberately written in prose, this is narrative poetry, primarily iambic pentameter couplets but also another verse form Chaucer invented, the rhyme royal stanza, which is more complicated, that you get in the clerk's tale and the prioress's tale. And people generally don't pick up narrative poetry to read on the beach. So there's impatience with that. There's also the fact that there are aesthetic choices that medieval literature is very comfortable with that we might not be comfortable with. So, for example, in the knight’s tale when they're building Arcita’s funeral pyre, they list every last kind of wood that goes into the funeral pyre, what the uses of that wood, when it's not being part of a funeral pyre. In certain ways it's very touching. It's got this kind of encyclopedic sense of range that the medieval imagination liked. And that's a point where, you know, modern readers can have their eyes glaze over. So, I think that those are the challenges, and those are the challenges that you need to overcome.
[Mark:] Sheila in the entire Canterbury Tales, do you have a favorite line?
[Sheila:] Can I have two?
[Mark:] Why not?
[Sheila:] Okay with the first one, we're going to have to go back to the Middle English because there's always something lost in translation. But in the Miller's portrait, he's described as a kind of hulking brute sort of guy. A lot of animal imagery. He's got a wart on his nose. He's got hairs growing out of it. You get the picture. But Chaucer has a line that is so brilliant in its use of sound to create an image of the Miller. So, Chaucer writes, “He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre.” I mean, the sound there is perfect, and so I translated it “he was short necked and broad, a thick-thewed thug.” And I thought “thick-thewed thug” was kind of fun. The other one goes in a very different direction and comes from the Wife of Bath in one of her introspective moments. She's thinking about what the aging process is and how it can, you know, not be easy. But she says, but in any case, “I have had my world as in my tyme.” “I have had my world right in my time.” And the kind of claiming of this female voice, for we know that aging is not for the timid, but I've had my world in my time is just a kind of really you know - it's simple, but it's just very powerful.
[Mark:] So, in what context does she say that? In some sort of a meditative summary of her life?
[Sheila:] Yes she's thinking about aging, and she's thinking about how age poisons everything. And she's lost her beauty, she's lost her sexiness, but still she says it tickles her around the root of her heart that “I have had my world as in my tyme.”
[Mark:] Poignant, that's a very poignant moment. So, a related question to a couple of these: how do you teach this work? What methods have you found to be particularly effective?
[Sheila:] Well I like to do with my students - and this is if I'm teaching it in the Middle English in my upper level courses, and if I am teaching it in translation in my introductory and intermediate courses - is I like to do a deep immersion. I mean, I just give them background. We'll start out with contextualization, but I never have like lectures for the first two classes. And what I like to do is have them kind of dive in and see how far they can get towards the deep end. And what I also try to do since they're afraid of the work – it can be very intimidating. They don't know the world this comes from, and I make it clear that you don't have to even know what the Middle Ages are to do well in the course. What I then have them do is think about asking the same questions of The Canterbury Tales as a work of literature that they would ask of more contemporary works of literature. And let's face it, you know, we're the children of the novel. I don't know how many student papers I've read about poems, plays, whatever where they say “and in this novel.”
[Mark:] I almost said it myself, yes.
[Sheila:] We do that, and so I always say this is narrative literature. It just happens to be written in poetry; that's what they did then. I mean, with some exceptions. So, treat it as literature, and if you think that this is confusion or there's a passage that's confusing, it may very well be that it is. Because Chaucer is a master of ambiguity and elusiveness and as you had pointed out, I think in our first episode, there are all these layerings. There are stories within stories, and that creates a greater field for ambiguity and elusiveness right there.
[Mark:] So students have to be comfortable with that level of ambiguity, interesting.
[Sheila:] And also mine it the way they would mine ambiguity in a contemporary novel.
[Mark:] Sheila, anybody who knows anything about the Norton Library podcast knows that we are shameless in our quest for headline making moments. So, we are wondering if you have something controversial to say about The Canterbury Tales or a hot take that you could introduce to this interview.
[Sheila:] I'm not sure how controversial this is, but it may depose one of the myths about Chaucer, and I'm not the first to depose this myth. Stephanie Trigg and Thomas Pendergast have just come out with a great short book called 30 Great Myths about Chaucer, and this is the first one. Their first great myth is that Chaucer is the father of English literature. And my take on that is that Chaucer is the father of English poetry, which amounts to the same thing. There are ways in which Chaucer did first what nobody had done before him. There's absolutely no arguing that. I mean, you could, but I don't think you can. But there was a whole tradition of poetry in the fourteenth century, let alone in Old English poetry, that was really amazingly beautiful and sophisticated work. I mean, Beowulf for starters is a major work of English poetry, and the fact that we don't know who wrote it doesn't mean that it's fatherless, or motherless, but probably fatherless. There's a beautiful tradition of elegiacal English poems that are complex and insightful and really psychologically rich. Let alone the works of the Gawain poet in the fourteenth century, whose name we don't know, or William Langland. So, to set up Chaucer as the father of English poetry becomes problematic. I mean as Trigg and Pendergast point out in their book, we kind of have to ask ourselves why we want it. I mean, where's a good end for us to make that investment. Because if we can look to the beginning of a canonical English literary tradition, then does that give us some sense of security as we scroll through, over the centuries as literature progresses.
[Mark:] Over the last six-hundred-plus years, how has The Canterbury Tales been repurposed or represented in other art forms, other media, for contemporary audiences? Have there been adaptations that you would either recommend or not recommend?
[Sheila:] You know, I think as I say in my introduction, one of the things that got me going on translating The Canterbury Tales was wondering. There were all of these, like around 2000 or a little bit later, these wonderful movies about classic British stuff, I mean Shakespeare all over the place, Austin all over the place, and I'm thinking, “why aren't there good adaptations of Chaucer?” I mean, there's the 1972 Pasolini movie, which, I hope I'm not stepping on any toes, I was not crazy about. I showed it in class once, and they had a black and white tablecloth that went from one tale to another to another, and so we spent more time finding the tablecloth, and I thought it was sensationalistic and cheesy. But that's just me. There was a musical I saw in college that was very, very silly and fun, but I don't think it had any longevity to it. And then the BBC did, and it was fun, and I haven't gone back to revisit it, but it was a miniseries in 2003 that took a handful of tales and updated them to modern British settings. And then there's that famous movie A Knight’s Tale that has nothing to do with The Canterbury Tales.
[Mark:] I see. Do you think the tales lend themselves to cinematic adaptation?
[Sheila:] I don't know about cinematic adaptation, but dramatic adaptation because the two most interesting adapters of Chaucer who are working now, and they're still working, is Patience Agbabi - I hope I'm not mispronouncing her name - a British poet and performer, and she has taken The Canterbury Tales and repurposed them into a book called Telling Tales that she also performs, or she'll perform with an ensemble. In fact if you go on YouTube there's one that she calls a contemporary remix of Chaucer. So she has more traditional rhythms, she has rap rhythms. The Wife of Bath, for example, is a woman who sells clothing in Nigeria. And I saw in 2014, at a conference in Iceland, I saw a performance of one of these tales, and it was just really, really interesting. The other most recent one Is Zadie Smith has done The Wife of Willesden, and if it ever comes near you, just go see it. It's really, really good.
[Mark:] A play?
[Sheila:] Yes, and it's set in a pub in Willesden. It doesn't go traveling, but it's set in a pub in Willesden, which is a suburb of London, where Smith herself grew up. And much of it is in rhyming iambic pentamer couplet. It does really interesting things with race. It's kind of a racially blind cast production. The Wife of Bath is Jamaican, if I'm not mistaken. And it just really brings it very, very vividly into the present and keeps so much of the flavor of the original that it's really - it's a really impressive production.
[Mark:] How about music? Are there songs that you would put on a Canterbury Tales playlist?
[Sheila:] Of course you could put anything that was medieval. You know, medieval religious music; there was medieval secular music; there was music that was the background for medieval dances. And so you could just go to that whole, you know, playlist of medieval secular music. But if you ask somebody like me a question like that it just erases from my head every bit of music I ever heard in my life. I don't know. So I asked my daughter who has exactly the opposite, so we had a really good texting exchange last weekend. And so if you wanted a playlist that would take on the idea of pilgrimage itself, you could either do Talking Heads we're on the “Road to Nowhere” or you could do The Beatles “The Long and Winding Road.” You could have “Scarborough Fair” as kind of background music to anything. The Wife of Bath could be “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” or it could be The Beatles “Can't Buy Me Love.” You could have for the nun’s priest tale, which is taking all kinds of jabs at the prioress, who thinks she's so so so pretty - you could have something like “You're So Vain,” because of course the prioress thinks everything's about her. And then maybe in a sweeter vein, for the knight’s tale, you could have that wonderful you know old American Standard, “When I Fall In Love.”
[Mark:] That is fantastic, Sheila. Those are great selections. To take us back for one second to medieval music, or what would have passed for contemporary music in Chaucer’s time. What would that have been like? What would have been the instrumentation? Who would have played that music?
[Sheila:] Right, well you could have court performers who were very well trained, and you would have instruments, some are just like nothing that we have today, but some are the precursors for our modern instruments. Like the gittern is like a guitar. Or you a loot and there were harps, or little hand harps or little dulcimers. And you could have people do ensemble singing or you could have people do solo singing. In the miller's tale Absolon, the wannabe courtly lover who is basically a barber and a church secretary, plays the guitar in taverns. So, he would play the guitar and he would sing and he would entertain, and he serenades Allison, the woman he wants to love him and who doesn't, outside her bedroom window. There were wandering minstrels who would have a very portable instrument and take it along with them.
[Mark:] Your edition of The Canterbury Tales, Sheila, has a really helpful glossary and also generous notes in the back, and of all the notes there's one that I wanted to touch on with you if you wouldn't mind expanding on. So, this note is to line seventeen of the general prologue, and you refer to something that I think we did not talk about in the first episode or this episode. And that is the phrase “the holy blessed martyr.” And could you tell us a little bit about how you explain that in the notes and what that means for the entire work?
[Sheila:] The Canterbury pilgrims - this is not just being repetitious - the Canterbury pilgrims are going off to Canterbury. And they're going off to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Thomas Becket, who was murdered by the henchmen of Henry II on December 29th, 1170. Thomas Becket was a good friend of Henry II. Henry II fast-tracked him into the Archbishop of Canterbury seat because he thought that he could exert some influence over the church, because there's perennial tension between the church and the crown. Thomas, to Henry's chagrin, took his job seriously. He wasn't just a kind of put-up Bishop. Once he got there, he took it seriously. And it's reputed that Henry said to some knights who were close to them “who will rid me of this miserable priest?” That may or may not be true. And so these knights went, they murdered him viciously in the cathedral, and that then gave England what it really had not had so strongly before, which was a homegrown pilgrimage site. Jerusalem was a major pilgrimage. Rome, Santiago de Compostela - but if British pilgrims wanted someplace where they wouldn't have to cross a body of water, this was where they would go. And so it basically launched a kind of - it's not that it single-handedly launched an English pilgrimage trend, but it also made it just so much easier for people to travel. And by the time Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, the church - and this was throughout Europe - was kind of discouraging pilgrimages because they were becoming like our equivalent of tour travel or cruise travel. And people were going for all the wrong reasons.
[Mark:] That's what I really want to pick up on is - because we've used in both of these episodes - we've used the word pilgrim and pilgrimage quite frequently. The Wife of Bath has been to Jerusalem three times. When we think of pilgrim, there's a religious association to it. But is there also a secular or even a psychological aspect to pilgrimage where the external journey is symbolic of some kind of an internal journey, whether it is religious or whether it is personal development or maturation?
[Sheila:] Right. When Chaucer chose the pilgrimage as the literary motivation for The Canterbury Tales, he was basically working off centuries-old tropes of the journey as the organizing principal for literary works. I mean you think of The Odyssey; you think of The Aeneid; courtly romances where the knight goes out and he's on quest. So, Chaucer was adapting it really cannily to both a quest that is interior but also a journey that's exterior, that could be located in the vivid contemporary reality of his own time. And in making a journey, you're supposed to be going for spiritual reasons. You're supposed to be looking to ameliorate your chances of salvation, but people were also going for secular reasons. They wanted to meet other people; they wanted to get out of the house; they wanted a little bit of adventure; for all the reasons that people travel. And so on that level, certainly when one is going on a spiritual quest, there's a psychological aspect to it. But if you're going on what's supposed to be a spiritual quest for your own personal secular reasons there sure is a psychological aspect to that. And I think Chaucer was aware of the ways in which it could exist on these multiple levels.
[Mark:] Sheila, one final thing for this episode. I am also wondering about the contemporary relevance to The Canterbury Tales. In other words, as you're looking around our society today, or the world, what is going on in our time, if there's something that connects us back to The Canterbury Tales that makes the text live on.
[Sheila:] There were these larger overarching themes that I think one can find, probably for obvious reasons, that one can find in literature across the centuries. The place of the self within society; the place of the individual within a whole; systems of oppression; systems of exclusion; how to be able to read the world and its obfuscating surfaces in any kind of empowering way; or how can you become deluded yourself. All of these things. The other thing that makes Chaucer relevant is - and I hope this doesn't sound tautological - but what makes Chaucer relevant is the relevance we can find in him. So, for example, this is a rich enough text that, certainly at the beginning of second wave feminism, there was just ample room to move around for feminist readers of all kinds of inclinations. And so you can find people, feminist readers, who radically disagree about the Wife of Bath. Queer studies has found a really important place within The Canterbury Tales because of the ways in which Chaucer can question gender, but also when you get the gender fluidity in a character like the pardoner. There are ways in which critical race theory is finding its place. And so, it's relevant because it's a rich enough work to support contemporary exploration.
[Mark:] Sheila Fisher, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast to discuss Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Thanks, Sheila.
[Sheila:] Thank you so much; I really enjoyed it.
[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of The Canterbury Tales, translated and abridged by Sheila Fisher, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.