‘Think of All the Differences!’: Mixed Marriages in Transcultural Adaptations of Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’

Abstract

At a historical moment in which we attempt to come to grips with the legacy of racial inequality, this essay considers two twenty-first-century adaptations of Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’, which respond to the xenophobic and imperialist ideology of the original by representing its noble white heroine as a black asylum seeker, and replacing the dynastic genealogy of Chaucer’s tale with a celebration of an inter-racial marriage that defies cultural norms. Chaucer’s text might not seem promising for modern adaptation: its passive heroine embodies the abstract principle of constancy, and the action of the tale serves an ideological purpose that seems, to modern eyes, to be profoundly and unpleasantly imperialist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic. And yet, the 2003 BBC adaptation made the work remarkably legible for a twenty-first-century audience, by highlighting, rather than suppressing, the tale’s concerns with issues of family, race, and religion, and by imagining its central heroine as a Nigerian Christian, fleeing religious persecution. These concerns with migration and racial and religious intolerance are developed brilliantly in Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, a poetic revision of Chaucer’s work as filtered through the lens of the television adaptation. In these texts, mixed marriages become a powerful tool with which to challenge the racist legacy of the past and to interrogate the relationship of the adaptation to its canonical forebears.