Lo Canterbury!

I’m Canterbury Laureate till the end of this year and have just received Arts Council funding to rework Chaucer’s Tales (working title Roving Mic). The original text uses setting on several levels. First you have the gathering of pilgrims at the Tabard Inn on Southwark High Street. They’re setting off for Canterbury on horseback – the word ‘canter’ is short for Canterbury trot, the supposed pace at which pilgrims rode to Canterbury. Each pilgrim must tell two tales on the way there and two on the way back; and whoever tells the best tale will get a free meal paid for by all the other pilgrims. It’s the first UK poetry slam. The dramatic tension is strong and between tales we get a clear sense of time and place e.g.

Sey forth they tale, and tarie nat the tyme;
Lo Depeford! And it is half-wey pryme.
Lo Grenewych, ther many a shrewe is inne!
It were al tyme thy tale to bigynne.

Then, there’s the settings within the tales themselves e.g. The Miller’s Tale is set in Oxford, and the Reeve’s, a retaliation, is set just outside Cambridge. The BBC filmed six tales in six different locations on the London-Canterbury route. I’m all set to follow in their footsteps.

So how will location impact on my work? As a reader, I detest long descriptions of places. I claim to have read Hardy’s Return of the Native but in fact, skimmed the entire first chapter, the description of Egdon Heath. Sacrilege! Egdon Heath’s one of the main protagonists of the novel. The Victorians needed those descriptions in the absence of the BBC to do all the hard work for them.  But I’m a lazy, good-for-nothing poet who finds it difficult to make that imaginative leap from long physical description to visual image. One strong metaphor will do quite nicely, thank you. And that’s what I hope to achieve with my adaptations, a strong sense of place through one strong metaphor…