Four Eighteenth-Century Modernizations of The Shipman's Tale as Audiovisual Performance

Abstract

It would not have surprised Geoffrey Chaucer to learn that in 1700, after three centuries of language change, John Dryden would publish several Canterbury tales that he had modernized translated, that is, within the same language. During the subsequent century Alexander Pope, and other writers both known and anonymous, produced thirty-four modernized Canterbury tales, plus tale links and adaptations of each other's Chauceriana.2 Like Dryden, they sought the middle ground of 'paraphrase' rather than word-for-word translation ('metaphrase') or loose imitation, such that each modernizer conveys his own sense of the Middle English poetry in forms meant to appeal to contemporary readers. During the eighteenth century two writers modernized the Wife of Bath's Prologue ', three the Miller's Tale, three the Reeve's, and four the Shipman's; other tales were modernized once apiece or not at all. Translators converged, that is to say, upon Chaucer's bawdy -