| Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is one of those medieval “wicked women.” Turns out, they’re still around. Zadie Smith has written a contemporary version of Chaucer to point this out and to revel in it. The show needs a Tale to follow Chaucer’s template and conceit, but it’s the Prologue that really swings. Luckily, it’s two thirds of the show. Smith’s wife, after Chaucer, has been one five times and she has a lot to say about her husbands. And all in a wry, unobtrusive meter that’s pretty impressive. And funny. But once she has to give her actual Tale, the show falls down, not because it isn’t well presented—the direction is imaginative throughout—but because everything the Tale is meant to illustrate has already been made clear in the Prologue. So it’s more—less really—of the same; the wife’s life, as she details it in her Prologue, is a better lambast of patriarchy than her Tale. Smith adheres to Chaucer when perhaps she should have taken what she could use and then, yes, divorced him. |
