The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer

Books

• The most well-known work of the 18th century writer Harriet Lee was called The Canterbury Tales, and consists of twelve stories, related by travellers thrown together by untoward accident. In turn, Lee's version had a profound influence on Lord Byron.
• Henry Dudeney's 1907 book The Canterbury Puzzles contains a part reputedly lost from what modern readers know as Chaucer's tales.
• Historical-mystery novelist P.C. Doherty wrote a series of novels based on The Canterbury Tales, making use of both the story frame and Chaucer's characters.
• Science-fiction writer Dan Simmons wrote his Hugo Award winning 1989 novel Hyperion based on an extra-planetary group of pilgrims.
• Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used The Canterbury Tales as a structure for his 2004 non-fiction book about evolution titled The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. His animal pilgrims are on their way to find the common ancestor, each telling a tale about evolution.
• Canadian author Angie Abdou translates The Canterbury Tales to a cross section of people, all snow-sports enthusiasts but from different social backgrounds, converging on a remote back-country ski cabin in British Columbia in the 2011 novel The Canterbury Trail.
• British poet and performer Patience Agbabi is one of fourteen authors who worked together to tell the stories and experiences of refugees, detainees, and asylum seekers in a book titled Refugee Tales. The collaborative efforts of the writers and displaced people create stories modeled after Chaucer's tale of journey in The Canterbury Tales. This project is rooted in the efforts of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, a non-partisan advocacy group for detained people.

Stage adaptations

• The Two Noble Kinsmen, by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, a retelling of "The Knight's Tale", was first performed in 1613 or 1614 and published in 1634.
• In 1961, Erik Chisholm completed his opera, The Canterbury Tales. The opera is in three acts: The Wyf of Bath's Tale, The Pardoner's Tale and The Nun's Priest's Tale.
• Nevill Coghill's modern English version formed the basis of a musical version that was first staged in 1964.
• In 2021, Zadie Smith debuted her first play, The Wife of Willesden, adapting the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale as told at a contemporary bar crawl, with the tale set in 17th century Jamaica. The work was originally performed in London[72][73] and at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2023.

Film and television

• A Canterbury Tale, a 1944 film, jointly written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is loosely based on the narrative frame of Chaucer's tales. The movie opens with a group of medieval pilgrims journeying through the Kentish countryside as a narrator speaks the opening lines of the General Prologue. The scene then makes a now-famous transition to the time of World War II. From that point on, the film follows a group of strangers, each with their own story and in need of some kind of redemption, who are making their way to Canterbury together. The film's main story takes place in an imaginary town in Kent and ends with the main characters arriving at Canterbury Cathedral, bells pealing and Chaucer's words again resounding. A Canterbury Tale is recognised as one of the Powell-Pressburger team's most poetic and artful films. It was produced as wartime propaganda, using Chaucer's poetry, referring to the famous pilgrimage, and offering photography of Kent to remind the public of what made Britain worth fighting for. In one scene, a local historian lectures an audience of British soldiers about the pilgrims of Chaucer's time and the vibrant history of England.[74]
• Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1972 film The Canterbury Tales features several of the tales, some of which cohere to the original tale and others which are embellished. "The Cook's Tale", for instance, which is incomplete in the original version, is expanded into a full story, and "The Friar's Tale" extends the scene in which the Summoner is dragged down to hell. The film includes these two tales as well as "The Miller's Tale", "The Summoner's Tale", "The Wife of Bath's Tale", and "The Merchant's Tale".[75] "The Tale of Sir Topas" was also filmed and dubbed; however, it was later removed by Pasolini, and is now considered lost.
• Alan Plater retold the stories in a series of plays for BBC2 in 1975: Trinity Tales.
• On 26 April 1986, American radio personality Garrison Keillor opened "The News from Lake Wobegon" portion of the first live TV broadcast of his A Prairie Home Companion radio show with a reading of the original Middle English text of the General Prologue. He commented, "Although those words were written more than 600 years ago, they still describe spring."
• Jonathan Myerson directed an animated version of The Canterbury Tales in three parts from 1998 to 2000. The series was nominated for an Oscar (as animated short film) in 1999 and won the BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film[76] in addition to four Primetime Emmys.[77]
• The 2001 film A Knight's Tale, starring Heath Ledger, takes its title from Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" and features Chaucer as a character.
• In 2003, the BBC again featured modern re-tellings of selected tales in their six-episode series Canterbury Tales.[78]

Music

• British Psychedelic rock band Procol Harum's 1967 hit "A Whiter Shade of Pale" is often assumed to be referencing the Canterbury Tales through the line, "as the miller told his tale." However, lyricist Keith Reid has denied this, saying he had never read Chaucer when he wrote the line.[79]
• The title of Sting's 1993 album Ten Summoner's Tales alludes to "The Summoner's Tale" and to Sting's birth name, Gordon Sumner.[80]

• The Knight
• The Squire
• Oswald The Reeve
• Robin The Miller
• Roger The Cook
• Alison The Wife of Bath
• The Franklin
• The Shipman
• The Manciple
• The Merchant
• The Clerk of Oxford
• The Sergeant of Law
• The Physician
• The Parson
• The Monk
• Madame Eglantine The Prioress
• The Second Nun
• The Nun's Priest
• Hubert The Friar
• The Summoner
• The Pardoner
• The Canon Yeoman
• Geoffrey Chaucer