7. Performance and new Chaucers

Creative responses to Chaucer, across the world, have never been more varied and vibrant. This repairs some shortcomings of earlier centuries, where imitators have generally reworked entrenched ideas of a fatherly, and occasionally misbehaving, Chaucer, although an exception must be made for Shakespeare, who was a brilliant early reader of Chaucer. ‘Performance and new Chaucers’ considers the globalization of Chaucer and looks at how his work has influenced the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Lavinia Greenlaw. Marilyn Nelson, and Caroline Bergvall. The extraordinary growth of translations worldwide since 2000 suggests new esteem for Chaucer as the poet of an unfinished Englishness ripe for translation, adaptation, and local variation.