Some Eighteenth-Century Wives of Bath

Of all Chaucer’s personages, the Wife of Bath was the most celebrated in the eighteenth century. The words of her Prologue and Tale—or reports or imitations of her words—appear in a wide variety of forms: plays, translations, imitations, dictionaries, anthologies, poetic commonplace books, and in the footnotes to editions of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and occasionally Horace and Juvenal. Presentations of the Wife vary from Blake’s monster to the figure who talks her way into heaven itself in the much-reprinted ballad The Wanton Wife of Bath. This chapter discusses the depictions of the Wife in John Gay’s The Wife of Bath (1713), in versions of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, by Pope and by Andrew Jackson, and in retellings of The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Richard Brathwaite, Dryden, George Ellis, and Voltaire.