Reading Chaucer Aloud

Catalog description

Geoffrey Chaucer is routinely listed among the two or three most influential poets and storytellers ever to have written the English language. Most modern readers, however, have never read his work. The dialect in which he wrote is considered too difficult to comprehend, the time period in which he lived too distant. He has become a subject for specialists alone, a writer we read because we feel we must, never just for fun. This is a terrible shame. Few realize that with only a handful of simple tools and a bit of honest practice, even novices can quickly unlock the door to Chaucer’s literary world. Within that world, they find a surprisingly accessible artistic voice – elegantly simple, charmingly self-deprecating, and bitingly, laugh-out-loud, funny. In this three-week intensive course, we will quite literally give new life to this voice: we will spend each class reading Chaucer aloud together, to each other, in a round. Much like a dramatic table read, we’ll recreate the rhythms of his verse, we’ll feel the pulse of his dramatic timing, and we’ll hear the charming cleverness of his wordplay. We’ll learn how Chaucer spoke to his own fourteenth century world. And we’ll think carefully about how he speaks even still to our own. Actors, poets, and spoken word enthusiasts might find particular utility in the course’s intensive immersion. Previous enthusiasm for the Middle Ages will be helpful, but not necessarily required. The only true prerequisites for the course are an interest in literary art and a willingness to try something new.