Geoffrey Chaucer

In the ninth century, King Alfred the Great, in the very midst of a desperate war to save his kingdom from invasion, judged this book important enough to have rendered into the English of his own day.

Five hundred years after him, Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English poetry, translated it once more into the English of his time, and its meditations on fortune and fate and providence run like a watermark through all his greatest verse.

and two centuries after Chaucer, Queen Elizabeth I, at the height of her power, sat down and translated the whole thing yet again for her own private consolation, reportedly finishing it in a matter of days.

The meaning of that is worth weighing.

across 700 years in a single country, a warrior king, a great poet and a reigning queen, each felt the pull of this one book strongly enough to carry it over into their own language, with their own hands.

Love is indeed blind, and in its fashion, love is also very enabling, isn't it? The origins of this proverb are considered to be quite ancient, and the belief is that it has been folk wisdom from forever.

Some origins place it with Plato, and then Chaucer was probably the first writer to use it in a formally written format, and Shakespeare actually used many variations of it throughout his writing.

So it's been there, and I think ever since two people could have loved each other, we knew love was blind.

Well, I don't need explained it, 'cause every single one of us has lived it.

Then they gave Carrains a horse, and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the downs of Surrey, and onward toward the region where Carrains and his ancestors were born.

It was very strange, but as the riders went on, they seemed to gallop back through time, for whenever they passed through a village in the twilight, they saw only such houses and villages as Chaucer or men before him might have seen.

and sometimes they saw knights on horseback, with small companies of retainers.

When it grew dark, they travelled more swiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in the air.

The hearth, where you burn wood of aromatic quality on silver dogs, tiled round about with Bible pictures, the seats deep and easy, a single Titian in a gold frame, a white bust or so upon a bracket, a rack for the journals of the week, a table for the books of the year, and close in a corner the three shelves full of eternal books that never weary.

Shakespeare, Molière, Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, De Musset's comedies, the one volume open at Carmacene and the other at Fantasio, the Arabian Nights and kindred stories in Weber's solemn volumes, Borrow's Bible and Spain, the Pilgrim's Progress, Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, Monte Cristo and the Vicomte de Brageline, immortal Boswell, soul among biographers, Chaucer, Herrick, and the State Trials.

The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of varnished wood, and at the bedhead, in case of insomnia, one shelf of books of a particular and dippable order, such as Pepys, the Paston Letters, Birch Letters from the Highlands, or the Newgate Calendar.

End of The Ideal House by Robert Louis Stevenson Read by Paul Fleischmann

Jarvis sounding more familiar to me than he had previously, because as we're recording this, we just recently watched A Knight's Tale.

And I was like, oh, yeah, OK, like I knew his voice, but it's Chaucer.

Well, I think I mean, I had seen A Knight's Tale before and I think I've seen him in other things.

But my biggest familiarity with Paul Bettany is The Da Vinci Code.

Masochistic, like, for God.

Yeah.

So it's just, it's a much different performance than Chaucer and Jarvis.

So...

I see why you're not going to describe them.

But I will say that I made those thinking of the long tradition of like Chaucer and the Miller's Tale, you know, and Kurt Vonnegut's illustrations, hand-drawn illustrations within his novel Breakfast of Champions.

And so there was a whole lineage and history of jokes and satires that sort of end with a certain body part.

And so I thought that I was pretty seamlessly entering into that tradition of satire.

And I just paint it and put it all together on the wall.

And it was the first time I'd mixed flesh tones and tried to match, you know, uh, I mean, just the history of figure painting as well.

And so for those, I went into it really thinking of, again, like I mentioned Chaucer, The Miller's Tale, like some of the great satirical, just devastatingly, almost diabolically funny literary stories.

And if you haven't read, I'll ask you both, because I know you both are very much involved in writing.

Yeah, okay.

So Chaucer.

Yes.

The Canterbury Tales.

We'd begin with England.

We'll drive down the Roman roads where Caesar's legions marched, and follow Chaucer's steps to Canterbury.

I'll show you the Isle of Avalon, where King Arthur died and the Holy Grail is buried.

Places with lovely names.

We started out with kind of basic verbs.

If you go back to Old English, Chaucer, some of that's hard to read, but it's very verb-centric, but the verbs are pretty basic.

What came about, like if we go to Shakespeare... was more inventiveness in verbs.

So he would say, he wrote, for example, in Othello, to lip a wanton on a secure couch.