The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey ChaucerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I couldn’t hack the original Middle English and settled for the Coghill translation – which is very readable and has sparse but occasionally entertaining endnotes. The big innovation here is the potential for irony inherent in contrasting the description of the teller of the tale with the tale itself, and how some tales comment on and undercut the tales around them. The showstoppers are the first one-two of the Knight’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale, and then the extended character work of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath’s account of their lives. I also liked the Summoner’s Tale which, like the Miller’s, climaxes in a fart joke, and the Merchant’s exploration of jealousy and cuckoldry that ends in ridiculous sexual antics up in a tree. The more pious tales are less interesting – the testing of a wife’s faithfulness in the Clerk’s Tale is sadistic, the Monk rattling off examples of hubris is monotonous, and the Prioress’s tale of a child killed by Jews is depressing. Chaucer is at his best when questioning the sexual politics of his day, and at his worst when fretting about the sinfulness of his stories and the status of his soul.
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