Welcome to Professor Turner.

Thank you so much, Jane. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you all for coming, those in person who've come in your lunchtime, and of course, thank you also to those who are online or watching it afterwards. So I'm going to talk today about ordinary women in English literature and trace a kind of through line from the 14th century when I think the voice of ordinary women first emerges in English literature right through to the 21st century, to text written just a few years ago, using the Wife of Bath as the focus. So from Chaucer's Wife of Bath to Zadie Smith's Wife of Wilsden, who is who is a translation of The Wife of Bath. So I'm going to begin with a little excerpt from Zadie Smith's play. So this is The Wife of Wilsden, which premiered at the Kiln Theatre in 2021. Some of you may have gone to see it. I went to see it there. And this is Claire Perkins in the role of The Wife of Wilsden. And this there's been a kind of prologue for this, but then this is how she begins her story.

Let me tell you, Sammy. I don't need no permissions or college degrees to speak on how marriage is stress. I've been married five damn times since I was 19 from my eye demony. And I survived.

Okay, so that's how she opens. And those are the words that she just spoke, which I'll just read out as well, but I'm not going to uh attempt to speak in dialect, I'll just speak in my own accent. Let me tell you something. I do not need any permission or college degrees to speak on how marriage is stress. I've been married five damn times since I was 19, from me I de me, but I survived. So that's a very close translation of the opening of Chaucer's 14th century Wife of Birth prologue. So I've given this to you here in the Middle English. I'm not going to give you much Middle English, but here's a little bit. So Chaucer was the first person to write in an early form of iambic pentameter. So that's the ten-syllable, five stress poetic line that became the fundamental building block of English poetry. Zadie Smith also writes her whole play in Iambic Pentameter. And you can see that, I mean, the word that Claire Perkins stressed was stress. Okay, so in that line, line three here, to speak on how marriage is stress. Now that is a stressed syllable in the line. And that's part of the joke of these lines, that these lines say, this is a woman who's saying, I haven't got any authority, I haven't got any education, I'm just telling you about my lived experience. But that's obviously not true. The wife of Bath is in fact calling on all kinds of literary sources, particularly the Church Fathers, but also lots of contemporary literature in her um in her prologue. Zadie Smith's wife of Willisden is translating Chaucer, speaking in iambic pentameter, following those forms. So you can see there's a kind of tension there that has been maintained through the very use of Chaucer. So there's lots of things kind of going on there where you can see how this idea of the authentic voice is a literary, is a literary conceit, the idea of is this really an ordinary voice or not? It seems to be, but it may not be. So before I talk more about what happens across time to Chaucer, I want to contextualize this a bit by talking about how the idea of the ordinary woman's voice emerged in the 14th century. So I want to tell you a bit, first of all, about medieval women. What kind of world was Chaucer writing in? What was this world in which he kind of invented this ordinary woman's voice as a literary voice? So, of course, there were lots of women in literature before Chaucer was writing, but they tended to fall into particular types. So you've got queens, you know, people like Guinevere, you've got princesses, marriageable, aristocratic women, damsels in distress who get rescued, you know, you've got those kinds of figures. You also have nuns and saints sometimes. Um, and then you also have prostitutes, um, witches, old hags, um, kind of mysterious, magical, you know, fairy women who can um seduce men. You have boards, so pimp figures who are so who are often former prostitutes. Those are the the kinds of women that we see across literature. There isn't much space for the kind of women that most people knew in everyday life, the kind of women that would be in most people's families and friends and who they would know in the street. In contrast, you know, there's of course a huge range of women in society at the time. So if we're thinking about, you know, Chaucer, for example, his mother was a property owner, his wife always earned her own salary and you know, received money in her own right. Um, he knew women who traded on their own in London separately from their husbands. Women had a a huge range of roles in society. You know, of course they did. Um, aristocratic women would run would run property and businesses in in all kinds of ways. And some of these women did you know outrageous things that were you know often not very admirable, but quite interesting. So there's an example of a a duchess in the 15th century, for example, who quite like the wife of Bath. You know, she was this one, this real duchess in the 15th century, was married four times. Her fourth husband, she married when she was 65, and he was a teenager. Now, you know, I don't think that is good behavior in any way. I think it's appalling. But I think it's quite interesting that women were doing things like that. And we also sometimes in the historical record find examples of women who were parchment makers or blacksmiths or owned ships. You know, once you go into the the archives, you just find so many fascinating, real medieval women. Um, and you know, their experiences aren't always reflected in in literature of the time. But some people have, in fact, called 14th and 15th century Northwestern Europe and particularly the London area in England, they've called it a golden age for women, um, which many people find very surprising. And I think we can go too far with this golden age idea, in that I don't think any of the women here would have liked to be a woman in that time. Um, and I certainly think, you know, an era when, of course, I mean, of course, most men didn't have the vote either, but when women didn't have the vote, there were no epidurals, there were all kinds of ways in which this was not a golden age. But the reason people say it was a golden age is that it was much better then than it was in some ways later than it had been before, and than it was in many other places in the world. So this is partly a post-plague development that after the plague, essentially we see an economic boom and a lot of social mobility. So the plague hits in 1348 and of course has an appalling toll on the population. Maybe a third, maybe a half of the population died. As a result, after the plague, people had met those who survived, while they were psychologically scarred, they had inherited often from the people who had died. But also there was the same amount of land that needed to be farmed, and there were half the number of people to do it, maybe two-thirds. So wages went up. The government tried to stop that, but wages did go up, and people were able to travel. If they weren't getting what they wanted, they might move to cities, get better jobs. And that affected women as well as well as men. So we do see people taking on more opportunities. This was also an era in which, again, in comparison to other places, women's inheritance rights in northwestern Europe. So if we're thinking about kind of England and the Netherlands, those kinds of areas, women's inheritance rights were really okay. You know, they would inherit a third of their husband's wealth, um, a half in London, they um they could own property in their own right, they could trade as a fam soul, as a woman on their own. They didn't have to trade with their husband or covered by their husband. So there were various ways in which women did have some economic autonomy. And when we compare this with other places, so say Italy at the time was importing a lot of enslaved young girls from the east, from Crimea, um, that wasn't happening in England. Um, and we also see in in southern Europe often women, when they were widowed, they they were they couldn't take any dower back, they couldn't take any money that had been accrued during the marriage. And if they took their dowry back, they lost control of their children if they went back to their their own natal home. So there were lots of ways in which things were better, much better here for women than they were elsewhere. So in particular, this was because many women worked, and that, you know, most women had a job of some kind for part of their lives. Um, they were not just staying at home doing the domestic work of the household, and that's partly because there was a tradition, much more of a tradition, of you know, paying for the domestic work of the household. You know, we don't, most of us today, you know, don't aspire to be maids or aspire for that for our daughters. But actually, working in domestic work was a way for girls to get away from the control of their parents, to earn their own money, to have some independence, and then to be able to choose their own marriage partner because they did have more economic independence. So, this is in real contrast again to countries where enslaved people did the domestic work of the household, or in a country such as China at this time in the 14th century, where the domestic work of the household would be done by the women of the household. You also see a lot of women in working in the clothing trade as well as in um the food and victualing trade, brewing beer in particular, that was something that was done by by women. We also see women in you know various kind of more uh more unusual jobs, as I as I mentioned before, you occasionally see you know a female scribe or something like that. But mainly you see them in these areas, so domestic work, the the clothing trade, the food trade. And the fact that we have a lot of working women also contributed to something called the European marriage pattern, where which is a mainly northern European phenomenon, which very broadly speaking, women married later than they did elsewhere. They there they they then formed a separate household rather than living, so neo-locality rather than living with the parents of one um of one partner. They formed a new household because they were marrying later, they both brought money to the to the marriage, and they had fewer children whom they could invest more time and money in because they were marrying later and having and having fewer of them. So that kind of pattern was a really important part of why it was not really so bad to be a um to be a woman in the 14th century in England or in the Netherlands, again, compared to other places and compared to later, in fact. So later, when the economy got weaker in this country, we start to see fewer female apprentices, for example, fewer women going into guilds and being accepted. You know, at this time there's an economic boom, there are jobs for many people. It's quite interesting to compare it to something like the First World War, you know, where you get lots of women doing jobs and then after that a lot of kind of anxiety and retrenchment against that to a certain to a certain extent. So we also start to see more women writers at this time, so the late 14th century. So this is where, so of course, across time, there've always been some women writers. But when we're looking in earlier centuries in England, we sometimes see them, but they're mainly writing in in Latin, or their work is lost, or they are anonymous, you know, as Virginia Wilf talks about the fact that many of the anonymous texts, anonymous was often a woman, probably. But in the late 14th century, this is the first time when we have named female authors writing in English. So Julian of Norwich, um, and then Marjorie Kemp, who dictated her her work, but very much formed her own work. And in France, we have Christine de Pizan, who um wrote the book of the City of Ladies, uh, you know, a book in which she she bemoans the fact that women have not written books. So we start to see more women writers emerging. And you know, there was a there was a reasonable amount of female literacy, but it wasn't as high as male literacy, of course. And while educated women might be likely to know English and French at this time, all educated men at this time knew English, French, and Latin. But very few women had the opportunity to learn Latin because that was taught in grammar schools, and women didn't go to schools, they got their education in in the household if they were getting education. So very few women knew Latin. But we are starting to get women writers at this time, and it's in this um kind of background that Chaucer writes his wife of Bath character. So I'm sure some of you know all about this, but very quick recap Jeffrey Chaucer writes the Canterbury Tales in the last couple of decades of the 14th century. A group of people gather in the Tabardin in Southwark to go on pilgrimage. They gather there randomly, but they make a kind of company together, and then they decide to tell stories on the way. And that's what the Canterbury Tales is. So this group is almost all male, very mixed social class, but all almost all male. And there are three women. Two of the women are nuns, the prioress and the imaginatively named second nun. Um, and then there is the wife of Bath. So the wife of Bath is the only secular female on the pilgrimage, as in the only non-nun woman on the pilgrimage. And she is described, you know, very vividly in the general prologue, um, with her five husbands, with her enormous hat, with her you know, exuberant personality. And Chaucer then shows a much greater interest in her than in any of his other characters. She pops up in various other Canterbury Tales as well as her own. She also pops up in a short poem that he wrote outside of the Canterbury Tales, and he doesn't do that with any of the other Canterbury pilgrims. So he treats her differently. He also gives her much more time to talk about her own life. So the Canterbury Tales, each, almost all, they have a prologue before their tale. And mostly the prologues are quite short. They don't really, there might be some bickering between pilgrims or a little introduction. There are three that are known as the confessional prologues, in which we hear more about the sins, the lives of the person speaking. But the other two confessional prologues are kind of two, three hundred lines. The wife of Barthes is over 800 lines. So it's a completely different kind of thing. And really, this is where Chaucer develops the whole concept of literary character. He gives her much more of a memory, of a personality, hopes for the future, discussions of what she's done. We get much more of a sense of her interiority and a much greater sense of the illusion of this is someone who has a life beyond the page. You know, this is someone who really seems to speak to people. She's based very closely on lots of literary sources, but Chaucer puts in lots of other things which makes her seem, seem real to many readers, you know, right across time. You know, many people will say that this is their favourite character. So I've written on the PowerPoint there, Lavier to the Wife of Bath. The picture, by the way, is from a manuscript from around the time of Chaucer's death, so one of the early manuscripts, so around 1400, um, of the The Wife of Bath, um, very memorably there with her whip on her horse. So the Wife of Bath based on, is based on lots of different figures who tended to be very anti-feminist, very misogynist figures from past literature. So Lavier is the old woman figure in a very famous medieval text called The Romance of the Rose, La Roman de la Rose, a French text written in the 12th and 13th centuries by by two authors. Um one wrote some and then the other one finished it off. And in that poem, so the the old woman figure, the VA figure, she is uh a kind of cynical old prostitute. So she has been um she's been a prostitute, she's now aboard who is uh kind of procuring young women for men and is advising young women on how to how to get money for their sexual favours from men. She is, I mean, she she's uh she has her funny elements, but she is she's very cynical about life and the world. And she's also the fact that she is from a background in prostitution is really important because in contrast to that, Chaucer's wife of Bath is essentially respectable. I mean, she's a bit she's she's over the top, but she's a married woman. You know, she is not, it's very, very different, both in social terms and economically, from being a prostitute or a board. She's been married many times and she has made money from that as well as from her own job in the cloth trade. So Chaucer takes a kind of a type character, the old prostitute, and turns her into a much more recognizable, real kind of figure in his own society. That's not to say that she is, of course, actually like a real woman, no literary characters are, and she is very over the top in all kinds of ways, she's quoting texts, but she is more familiar than Queen Guinevere in a text, more familiar than Lavier in a text. She is someone who kind of speaks to people then and now, and we're told lots and lots of things about her. So she is someone, as they say, who had a job working in the cloth trade and also inherited from her husbands. She tells us in her prologue about her travels, you know. So she's she goes traveling, she sees her friends, she goes out and she has too much to drink with them, um, she flirts, she enjoys sex, she talks about that a lot. Um so, in many ways, although she's excessive, she is, you know, to use a terrible word, she is relatable for many people. Um, and I think it's really worth remembering that in many countries then, and in some countries now, the idea of a woman who could talk about sexual pleasure, have a job, go out of the house on her own, see her friends, enjoy herself, go on holiday, that's not imaginable in some countries today. And it wasn't imaginable in many countries in Chaucer's time, but it was completely imaginable and relatively normal at that moment. So the wife of Bath, she has her prologue and then her tale. So her prologue is the story of herself, um, and then her tale is the story of uh a woman who is raped, um, and what happens to the rapist when women take over his punishment, and it ends up with scenes of transformation and education. In the prologue, this is where the wife of Bath kind of explicitly talks about the problems of the canon, of the texts which are around at that time. And she calls this the Book of Wicked Wives. So she tells us about the fact that her husband spent all his time, this is her fifth husband, spent all his time reading his book of wicked wives. And um, so I've put this in a modern translation. He had a book that he loved to read, that he read night and morning for his own delight. And night and morning, it was his custom, whenever he had leisure and freedom from any other worldly occupation, to read in it concerning wicked women, but to the point where I got beaten up, as I was telling you, just for a book. So she tells us about these this book of wicked wives, which is a whole collection of books that say terrible things about women. All bound up together. And there are real manuscripts that have survived that do that, where there's lots and lots of misogynist texts all packaged up together, you know, in one volume. So it's like a kind of if you like this, you might also lead like this one. You know, here's some more terrible things. And there's stories about women such as Pacify, who had sex with a bull and gave birth to the Minom Tor. Not relatable, you know, not a real woman. Um, but he reads these books and says, look, this is what you're like, and this becomes the occasion for violence. But the Wife of Bath is also, as well as talking about the horrors of that, of listening to someone night after night talking about how awful women are. She also talks about the fact that there are not women, there are not books by women, or very few at the time. And to talk about that, she uses this idea of this fable about the lion, and she asks, Who painted the lion? Tell me who. And that's a reference to one of Aesop's fables, which everyone in the Middle Ages knew very well. These were kind of fundamental, um, fundamental texts. And this is a story in which there are there's a man and a lion walking along, and they see a work of art in which the man is triumphing over the lion. And the man, the real man, turns to the lion and says, Look, you know, humans are so much better than lions. And the lion says, Yeah, well, who painted that? It was a human. If lions had painted it, then they would have shown the lion eating the man. And of course, the point of that story is that perspective is everything. You always have to think about who is producing this work of art, who's writing it, what's their agenda, who painted it. Um, and no one before Chaucer via the wife of Bath, no one had applied that to sex and gender, to the relationship between men and women. So the wife of Bath is saying, well, all these terrible things are said about women because all the texts have been written by men. And then she goes on to say, if women had written stories as men have in their oratories, they would have said of men more wickedness than all the Mark of Adam can redress. So she's saying we need to balance this out. You know, we need to have texts written by women as well as texts written by men because the bias of what we've got at the moment is so extreme. So I'm gonna move on just to talk a bit about what happens to this character across time. So hopefully I've got across the sense of how powerful this voice is and how radical what she was saying was. Again, remembering this is the late 14th century when Chaucer writes this character. And the Wife of Bath went on to have a really extraordinary afterlife across time, because we don't immediately get lots of other figures like her, we get lots of anxiety about her. And what happens is that you get on on the one hand, lots of readers and writers responding are fascinated by her, but they're also often motivated by a desire to kind of crush her and tame her voice. So before I move on to talk about Zadie Smith, I'm going to give you a few examples of what happens, you know, between Chaucer and Zadie Smith, some of what happens across time, because in every single period from the 14th century to today, the wife of Bath's voice speaks really strongly in the literature of the time. So I'll just give you a few examples. So early on, very early on, this is an image of a manuscript of the Canterbury Tales. And what happens in some manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, so they are handwritten by a medieval scribe, and they put lots and lots of notes next to the Wife of Bath, many more than they do across any other Canterbury Tale. So you can see here this page of the Wife of Bath's prologue, these extensive notes that are written down the side. And it tends to be the scribes giving you a counter voice, so saying, Don't read her, read me. You know, she's saying these things, but this is what I think. So they'll so this that long note there is an example in which the scribe is quoting lots and lots of bits of the Bible about how terrible women are, and in fact, is actively misquoting them. They often do it in Latin, the more authoritative language, against the Wife of Bath's English as well. But at this very early point, we see a kind of anxiety about her voice and a desire to contain it. My next example is this ballad, The Wanton Wife of Bath, which was a wildly popular ballad in the 16th and 17th century. And I mean, one thing that I like, and there's lots of copies have survived of this, um, there's an English version, then there was a Scottish version. One of the things I really like about this is as you can see, the people printing, so we're now in the age of print, the people printing the ballad didn't have many options for printing woman figure, they just had Elizabeth I. So that's how the wife of Bath looks in this in this ballad. Um, here's woman. Um so, but this ballad, so we've got evidence of that the that when it was circulated, there were two different times in which the printers were put in prison and the ballad was burnt because people found her challenge to authority in this in this text. So so anxiety-producing. And it's a it's a great story. It's the story of what happens when the wife of Bath dies and tries to get into heaven. It's very, very funny. Um so it's a kind of a sequel text. So another thing that we see a lot, and this is censorship. So this is Alexander Pope's early 18th century translation version of the Wife of Bath's prologue. And what he did was he took out all the bits that are about sex and the body and female sexual desire. So as a result, there's not much left. Um, the prologue is about half the length of the original, but we often see that kind of censorship of the Wife of Bath. And around the same time, you know, Dryden says when he's writing his fables that he really, really wants to put in the Wife of Bath's prologue, but he doesn't dare because it's too licentious. And he's and and he but he keeps writing about in this prologue about the fact that he really wants to, but he won't, but he knows people would really like it, but it's too problematic, so he doesn't actually put it in. And there's also plays in the 18th century of the Wife of Bath, which kind of crush her in all kinds of ways. Um, there's yeah, there's a lot of disturbing stuff, but I have to move forward across time. So this is we're now in the 20th century, and this is a lovely novel published in the 70s by someone called Vera Chapman, who was also known as Bella Donna Took. She was a founder member of the Tolkien Society, um, and she wrote lots of novels. And this novel, The Wife of Bath, is uh a kind of her imagination of the Wife of Bath's life. Now, what I find interesting about this is that Vera Chapman really liked the Wife of Bath. She clearly wanted to write a sympathetic version. You know, she's not trying to crush her or censor her, but she is trying to make her likable. And so she does things like make her into a loving mother, which the Wife of Bath is not a loving mother or a loving person. You know, she's just you know she's just not like that. So she gives her children because that's what women are supposed to be. They're supposed to be loving towards their children and kind of nurturers, and she's not a nurturer, you know, she's a problematic figure. That's her that's a great thing about her, that she's she's difficult. Um, and the and and so Vera Chapman gives her gives her these children that she loves and is devoted to. She keeps putting her in scenes where she gets rescued by men, so she keeps putting her into damsel and distress scenes. So there's all these ways in which she makes her life much more like a kind of Hollywood movie. You know, she and you can see that this is her attempt to to rehabilitate her. And she she's not trying to be misogynist, but it clearly is a kind of a really problematic kind of reflection on how women are allowed to be in in novels and in and in the media. And also in the 1970s, this is Laura Betty acting the wife of Bath in Pier Paolo Pasolini's film The Canterbury Tales, which I'm sure some of you will remember and and saw, as have seen. Terrible film. Um absolutely hate it. Um, but it's, I mean, yeah, Pasolini, I think, deeply problematic in all kinds of ways. So he, in his film, he makes the wife of Bath a really monstrous figure. So in his film, you know, having sex with her literally kills her fourth husband. And like he actually dies because of it. And, you know, that her fifth husband isn't at all interested in her, and he makes her this kind of figure of deathly older female sexuality. So he kind of takes away all the interesting things that Chaucer had put in and puts her back to being the kind of previous stereotypes that Chaucer had been making more interesting. But you know, that's the that's the 70s for you. It was a difficult time, I think. Um, so in the 21st century, there's been lots, I mean, an incredible number of new wives of Bath. Um, so just to give you a couple of examples, Patience Agbagby, brilliant Nigerian British poet, who wrote her version of The Wife of Bath, The Wife of Baffer, and then went on to translate all of the Canterbury tales, all in different poetic forms. You know, she is a brilliant poet, but it began with The Wife of Bath. Carolyn Bergvoll, who's a Scandinavian poet, um, who wrote a book called Alison Sings, which is a whole kind of poetic, um, some of its poetry, some of its poetic prose, all about the wife of Bath, whose name is Alison. Um, and then this is a poster from Brazil, a Brazilian play about the The Wife of Bath, with a very famous um actress playing the main part, the Moler de Bath. So these are just a few examples. There's many more. You know, The Wife of Bath is everywhere. And perhaps most famously in the 21st century, Sadie Smith, one of our best novelists, essayists, wrote The Wife of Wilsden in in 2021. So this is Sadie Smith's um only play, and for that play, she chose to do a quite, I mean, in some ways, quite literal, detailed translation of both the prologue and the tale. She brought in lots of 21st century references, but it is but it's very close to Chaucer's text in all kinds of ways. Um I mean, she said that you know, someone asked her after she after it had been performed if she had added all the kind of um all the more raunchy bits, and she was like, no, I had to tone them down, you know. So when she wrote about what you know her process of working on Chaucer for the 21st century, this is what she said. When I sat down to write The Wife of Wilsden, I had no idea it would end up being one of the more delightful writing experiences of my life. I think when we talk about creativity, not enough is said about the interesting role that limits, rules, and restrictions can play. In this case, the rules of the game were almost absurdly constricting. A medieval text concerning sexual politics that would seem as distant as the moon, constructed in rhyming couplets from lines of ten syllables each. Yet from the moment Alison opens her mouth, experience, though noon auctorite were in this world, were licked enough to me to spake of woe that is in mariage, I knew that she was speaking to me and that she was a Kilburn girl at heart. It's really lovely, isn't it? And I think that what she's saying there about limits is a really important point about creativity more generally. You know, that when you when people are starting to write poetry, actually the the constraints of the sonnet form enable creativity rather than constricting them in all kinds of ways. And obviously that's what she she saw here. But that sense that it was that Alison's voice really spoke to her and that she seemed really contemporary to her is crucial, I think. So I'm going to say a little bit about the continuities between Chaucer's and Smith's text, and then a bit about the the changes. So the continuities, I mean, perhaps, I mean, very depressingly, really, some of the major plot points were things that still you know spoke to Smith and to culture today. So in Alison's prologue and tale, she talks about domestic violence and rape. And of course, these are issues that have not gone away, have not in any way been solved. So this is you know Smith's version, I'm not the strongest, but there and then I pulled back my fist and clocked him proper hard on his cheek. He fell, came a cropper into the fireplace, arse overtit, then rose up, raging like a pit bull. Then he chose to get up and strike me upside my head, I hit the floor and lie down, like me dead. So the scene of domestic violence uh you know hardly hardly needs. I mean, she's translated, it doesn't need any adaptation in that this is a completely imaginable scene. Um the same with the the story of rape from the tale. He saw a beautiful young Aachen girl early one morning just walking by, a virgin with no interest in this guy, but he wouldn't stop. He thought his strength gave him the right. So again, um the fact that these issues were the central points of the Wife of Bart's prologue and tale. She keeps circling back to them, she talks about them, the tale, the prologue keeps returning to it, the tale is all about how do you most appropriately educate and punish a rapist. That these are these are not things that we have in any way solved, and that is, of course, sobering. She also uh does things like um transposes the book of wicked wives, which I mentioned before, which in um in Alison's version is books by you know people such as Jerome, so Church Fathers. Now, this is this is what Zadie Smith does with the Book of Wicked Wives. The husband says, it's made of some books I put together, 12 rules of life, myth of male power, the game, something called the woman racket. And then Alvita, who is the wife of Wilsden, says some mental crap he got off the internet. Now, these are of course real books that some of you may know. I I think I particularly like the reference to the internet because I always think of the um the Book of Wicked Wives as being similar to an algorithm, you know, that the Book of Wicked Wives packages together all these similar misogynist texts. And as we all know, if you're on the internet, once you read one kind of thing, you will be fed more things like that. So whatever your politics are or your views, you know, you will keep being you will keep being shown more and more things like that. And that of course backs up all of our own political prejudices. If you do go to the internet as a racist or a misogynist, or you know, those views will be backed up over and over again. And that kind of brief reference to the internet, I think, speaks to, you know, reminds, reminds us of that fact that the in a in a very analogue form, that's what we see in the in the book of Wicked Wives, but it's very familiar to us today. But there are also some really interesting changes, I think, in what Smith does when she's thinking about um Um the Ordinary Woman and the Wife of Birth. So this is the the beginning of the tale. So when we've moved from the prologue, Alison's own story, to the story that she tells, the story of the rapist, which is set in Arthurian Britain in Chaucer's version. So these are the stage directions. First child walks across the stage like a scene changer in a medieval revel, holding an enormous sign which reads The Wife of Wilson's Tale. Second child walks in the opposite direction with an equally large sign, transferred from Arthurian Camelot to Maroon Town, Jamaica. First child walks by once more with the sign featuring Queen Nanny, famed rebel slave and leader of peoples. So one important change is a change of genre that this is now a play. And you know, in the 14th century, there was a lot of drama, but the plays were in the streets and they were mainly religious drama, um, the mystery plays, um, morality plays, those kinds of things. And before the kind of era of the theatre. And the play, of course, has different affordances to a tale-telling collection, although Chaucer's text would have been read out loud and performed. So it's not as different as it might seem to us today. But it is still, of course, very different, you know, in this sense of the scene changing, the costumes, the different characters voicing what's going on, and the fact that the prologue and tale is all on stage, so you have the same actors going across the two parts. Those things are very different. But also the transference to Jamaica, that is a crucial difference in terms of thinking about, I suppose, our literary culture. You know, and Smith said she just couldn't imagine Alvita telling this Arthurian story, and the fact that she transfers it to Jamaica and that she also brings in various asp various aspects of Jamaican dialect in the in the play. I think this is really interesting. It's a great example of when when people ask me about decolonizing the curriculum, for example, and of course I work in a university, people ask ask us about that. And I always kind of talk about the fact that for me that's always about bringing more things in, not pushing things out. And I think this is a great example of this, that Smith is using, you know, one of the kind of fundamental dead white men of English literature and the brilliant Trosser, but she's also bringing in contemporary Jamaican dialect into her text. You know, you need you need all those things. Um, and so that idea of the the that when we take a text from the past, we don't just um kind of keep it the same but dress it up in modern language. We also actually try to put it into a new the a new world. I mean, T. S. Eliot said that you know immature poets imitate, mature poets steal, something like that. And I think that you know that that idea of stealing and making it new is is important. So she also changes a little bit about the ending. So at the end, in Chaucer's version, this old, old, loathly lady, this ugly old woman, transforms into becoming a beautiful young woman. Um, obvious problems with that. But um, what happens in Smith's version? We see the old wife tying a silk scarf around his eyes, a blindfold, and then changes place with Alvita, the wife of wisdom, who takes it from here. Alvita pulls off the blindfold to reveal her fabulous, thick middle-aged beauteousness. And Darren looks delighted, although some of Alvita's descriptions of what happens next seem almost like magical commands that impel him to act as she says he did. But the crucial difference there is that Smith is saying you don't have to be young to be attractive, that she is, you know, trying to celebrate a kind of a middle-aged beauteousness, and she is bringing the actual wife of Bathfigure, the wife of Wilson, directly into the story. Again, something that's much more possible on the stage than it would be in the story as it's told. So some of those things, I suppose, speak more to sexual politics today, you know, the idea of taking that idea of the ordinary woman a bit into a bit further, where she is able to do less complete wish fulfilment at the male wish fulfilment at the end, and instead, I suppose, moves more towards a kind of female wish fulfilment with that the magical commands. Um, and indeed, there are, of course, differences in terms of thinking about women readers and writers today. And the most obvious is that Chaucer, of course, was a male writer writing a female voice. The wife of Bath is not a real woman. She was imagined and voiced by a man, and that today there are obviously many more opportunities for women, such as Zadie Smith, to tell their stories, to write their own um texts. Though of you know there are many ways in which we, of course, have much further to go. I don't think everything is fine now. But we have made, we have made progress. It is easier to be a woman writer today or reader today than it was in the 14th century. I want to finish by just thinking about the context of this of this ordinary woman. That when Chaucer wrote this, this is of course Smith's version, when Chaucer imagined the ordinary woman, he was doing that in the in the broader context of the Canterbury Tales. The whole point of the Canterbury Tales is that we shouldn't just listen to the voices of the important, the hegemonic voices in society. That this is a mixed social group, they should all get the chance to tell their own story. There's one famous line in which Chaucer writes, you know, diverse folk diversely, they said. Talk to different people, you'll get different perspectives. It seems like an obvious point. But it was something that was entirely new in Chaucer's time. You know that the tale collection, which was an important source for him, was Piccadillos de Cameron, in which all the tale tellers were of the same high social class. So this idea of opening up the voice of an ordinary woman was part of a project to open up the voices of ordinary people more generally. And when we do that, what we see is that every ordinary person is also extraordinary in what they have to say. Thank you so much.