Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales." ed. by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh (review)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the concept of "fun" postdates the life of Geoffrey Chaucer. But he persistently uses variants of "play" and other related terms in his writing, and he famously establishes "earnest" versus "game" as a central paradigm for the understanding of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer, it seems, took great joy in telling his stories, and many readers have delighted in his writing because it is humorous and indeed fun. The same cannot always be said of Chaucerian scholarship, which is sometimes so very "earnest" that it can seem dry and lifeless.

To the contrary, one of the greatest virtues of Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" is that it is an unusually enjoyable collection to read. It is clear from the outset that this volume promises to be a little different than the norm, with a foreword written by Terry Jones, the Monty Python veteran and literary scholar, whose first words are "What fun!" A reader might lament the fact that Jones's enthusiastic foreword is only one page long, but many will agree with his view that this "immensely varied collection of essays" is both entertaining and valuable for its "illuminating" critical discourse (xi).

Chaucer on Screen is a much-needed study that offers the first comprehensive treatment of Chaucer on film. It is edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, with essays written by a number of well-regarded Chaucerians. As the editors explain in their introduction, the book aims to investigate "the various translations of Chaucer and his literature to film and television, pointing in particular to the disparate expectations of scholars in the academy and of consumers of visual culture" (1–2). Overall, the volume provides a thought-provoking "intervention into traditional attitudes toward Chaucer and his cinematic and televisual adaptations" (6). Yet, as is true with most any large collection of essays, certain arguments are more successful than others, and there are some gaps and issues that may leave a reader somewhat unsatisfied.

Chaucer on Screen is divided into five parts, with the first titled "Theorizing Absence." This section contains four short papers that aim to answer the long-held question of why Chaucer is so scarce on film. The contributors variously theorize the relative lack of cinematic representations of Chaucer's verse, providing suggestive answers to how and why "Chaucer's language and narrative positioning obstruct modern readings" (12) of the poet on film. Literary theorists in particular may find Part 1 to be the most intriguing section of the book, and especially the accounts by Larry Scanlon and Kathleen Forni. These critics, respectively, argue that Chaucer's writing is complexly postmodern (particularly in terms of its treatment of the "real"), a fact that makes it less accessible than the work of an author of straightforward linear narratives such as Jane Austen; meanwhile, Chaucer is shown to have a significant image problem, whereby he is viewed as both "too high and too low," not thoroughly recognizable to an American audience, and is not really considered to be "a profitable commercial property" (56). Though it is sensible for English-speaking critics to compare Chaucer with William Shakespeare, a reader might wonder whether this section really needed two separate essays that consider why Shakespeare has, comparatively speaking, been so widely present on film while Chaucer has been given scant attention. Instead, a more appropriate point of comparison for one of these chapters might have been with Dante, who has been adapted and referred to in mainstream movies more often than his fellow medieval author Chaucer.

Part 2 ("Lost and Found") explores Chaucer's remote place in the early history of Hollywood. Whereas the first section is largely speculative and theoretical, in a sign of the diversity of the volume, Part 2...