Canterbury Tales

About the show

Before the first act there is a prologue in which Chaucer explains to the audience that the telling of the tales is the suggestion of Harry Bailey, innkeeper at The Tabard in Southwark, where the pilgrims gather before riding to the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Chaucer and Bailey, who is referred to as "the Host", ride with them and the latter strives to keep matters running smoothly as each pilgrim tells his or her tale and hands on the story-telling to the next. The show draws on five of the tales, opening with glimpses of Chaucer, the Host and the tellers of the tales as seen in Chaucer's General Prologue. The first tale in the show is from the bawdy fabliau The Miller's Tale, in which two young men vie to seduce the young wife of an older carpenter. One of them succeeds, but has a hot iron pressed into his buttocks by the other, and in the ensuing hullaballoo the carpenter, tricked into sleeping in a bathtub suspended from the rafters, tumbles down onto the attic floor. After an episode from The Nun's Priest's Tale – featuring the cock Chanticleer, his wife, the hen Pertelote, and the fox who hopes to eat Chanticleer – there is another tale about two young men seeking to seduce a married woman, taken from The Reeve's Tale (called The Steward's Tale in this version). The theme persists in the section drawn from The Merchant's Tale, in which the elderly Januarie is deceived by his young wife, May, and her lover, Damyan, after Januarie goes blind. His sight is suddenly restored and he sees the two in flagrante, leaving May with some explaining to do, which she just about manages. The Squire tries to raise the tone with a song in praise of chivalry, but the Wife of Bath is unimpressed. In her prologue, and throughout the show, she dismisses celibacy as something God does not call for, and her tale tells of a knight accused of rape, who is condemned to discover what women most desire. He turns to an ugly old witch who tells him that the answer is sovereignty over men. As promised, he marries her and has the sense to give her the answer she hopes for when asked if he would wish her ugly yet faithful or beautiful and fickle. He insists that the choice has to be hers; her youth and beauty are restored and they live "in perfect bliss" ever after. By contrast with Chaucer's original, which ends, unfinished, while the pilgrims are still en route to Canterbury, the show has them arriving there. In The Stage, the reviewer R. B. Marriott wrote of "a finely conceived scene at Becket's tomb: simple yet gripping, a holy moment in perfect harmony with the rest of the story, and investing the characters with an extraordinary human vividness".