Telling Tales

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote….

Chaucer is, sadly, out of the school curriculum in Ireland. The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales used to open the veteran poetry collection Soundings, and was a doorway for teachers to open up at least some of the tales themselves, but those days are gone. I’ve kept it going a little through a module in our Transition Year programme, partly in memory of our late friend Terry Dolan (Professor T.P. Dolan, once Professor of Old and Middle English at UCD). Here is what I wrote following his funeral in 2019.

In 2014 the English poet Patience Agbabi produced Telling Tales, a bravura performance which brought Chaucer’s stories into our century. It fizzes with invention, opening with Harry ‘Bells’ Bailey’s ‘Prologue - Grime Mix’ on a Routemaster bus from the Tabard to Canterbury Cathedral, 

I won’t stop all the clocks with a stopwatch / when the tales overrun, run offensive, / or run clean out of steam, they’re offensive.

After this we get a masterclass in poetic form and tone, including  a sonnet corona (the Man of Law), mock-Sharon Olds (The Clerk), and ‘100 Chars’ (The Monk). Agbabi is truly in the Chaucerian spirit of presenting ‘sondry folk’ in all their demotic glory: a good example is ‘The Kiss’, telling the famously filthy Miller’s story in single-rhyme quatrains. The more you know about poetic history the more you will enjoy Agbabi’s versions, but she wears her learning lightly in this conversation between 14th century England and the multi-cultural present (I think of the vibrant generosity of Bernardine Evaristo’s Man Booker-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other).

The Prologue itself has been re-located to the end of the book, in often hilarious 50-word Author Biographies (the Nigerian Wife of Bath: ‘My fifth husband is toyboy, live and kicking’. She’s 29).

In Dryden’s famous statement, truly ‘here is God’ plenty.’

END

On Chaucer: here is a conversation I had with Terry Dolan in his kitchen in (appropriately) April 2009. Also, check out Patience Agbabi herself on this enjoyable On the Road with Penguin Classics podcast with Henry Eliot, as they travel from London to Kent, including a from-memory rendition of the Bailey Grime Mix.