Canterbury Tales

This Norton Critical Edition includes the most admired of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Publishers Weekly

Like Charles Lamb's edition of Shakespeare, Hastings's loose prose translation of seven of Chaucer's tales is more faithful to the work's plot than to the poet's language. This is not a prudish retelling (even the bawdy Miller's tale is included here) but the vigor of Chaucer's text is considerably tamed. In the original, the pilgrims possess unique voices, but here the tone is uniformly bookish. The colloquial speech of the storyteller is replaced by formal prose; for example, while Cohen (see review above) directly translates Chaucer's ``domb as a stoon'' as ``silent as stones,'' Hastings writes ``in solemn silence.'' Cartwright's startling paintings skillfully suggest the stylized flatness of a medieval canvas, but often without the accompanying richness of detail. Like Punch and Judy puppets, the faces and voices of these pilgrims are generally representative but lack the life and charm of the original text. Ages 10-up. (Oct.)

V. A. Kolve is UCLA Foundation Professor of English, Emeritus. A Rhodes Scholar, he is the author of Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, winner of the James Russell Lowell Award and British Council Prize, The Play Called Corpus Christi, and the forthcoming Christ as Gardener and Pilgrim: A Study in Medieval Iconography.

Glending Olson is Professor Emeritus of English, Cleveland State University. He is the author of Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages.