IT'S HARD FOR me to write about Zadie Smith without immediately deliquescing into fanboy gush, so I'm not even going to try to maintain some sort of judicious objectivity here. This is brilliant. Writing a play around a 21st century version of the Wife of Bath, in which the Wife is a Londoner of Caribbean origin, is already a great idea. That the play goes so far as to be faithful line by line to Chaucer's original makes it all the more amazing. Then add in that Smith wrote the update in (loosely) rhyming iambic pentameter couplets, just like Chaucer's original, which takes us to even higher levels of astonishment. Then, at the end, when Smith throws in a Chaucerian "Retraction" taking her own (first four only) novels to task, what alternative do we have to sheer awe?
Plenty of folks will be happy to take cheap shots at this. Ignore them. To repeat: this is brilliant.
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