This adaptation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales explores the bawdy humor of The Miller's Tale, The Merchant's Tale, The Nun's Priest's Tale, and The Wife of Bath's Prologue. Prochaska infuses The Franklin's Tale with a hefty dose of comedy as the characters navigate their way through a rocky coastline and an awkward love triangle.
Faithful to the original, this text is accessible to a young twenty-first century audience for whom it may be an introduction to Chaucer's wise and gentle satire on love, marriage, and sex.
"CANTERBURY TALES is not centered on sex but [it] does not shy from the pilgrims' raunchiness, and...it was taken directly from Chaucer's original stories of an odd-lot of women and men headed for England's famous cathedral... Adapter Reiner Prochaska has pulled off a marvelous script, translated into modern English; he begins with Geoffrey Chaucer's strange language that was spoken in his time, long before the age of Shakespeare, when England still paid homage to Rome and the pope. No religious overtones, let me reassure readers, creep into the tales of fellow travelers who are much more concerned with life's harrows and 'country matters' than God's or the Vatican's doings. In that era, they could not count on sticking around a long time and that made every day precious. And that's what Chaucer captured and playwright Prochaska affirms." Roy Meachum, The Tentacle