From an American playwright who “is in a class by himself,” two acclaimed plays linked by a character who comes of age in the sixties. (The New York Times) In John Guare’s classic play The House of Blue Leaves, winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play, the Pope is visiting New York, and eighteen-year-old Ronnie goes AWOL from the army to come home to New York and blow up the Pope as he passes his house. In his new play, Chaucer in Rome, it is the year 2000, and Ron and his wife come to Rome to search for their son. With his inimitable wit and understanding, Guare has written two scathingly funny satires on the warping hunger for fame, and the betrayal involved in creating art. Praise for The House of Blue Leaves: “Splendid . . . a joyful affirmation of life and of John Guare’s artistry.” —The New York Times “A woozy, fragile, hilarious heartbreaker . . . the writing is lush with sad, ironic wisdom about fame, love, and deluded values.” —USA Today Praise for Chaucer in Rome: “Guare makes us become voyeurs even as we scorn voyeurism—thus offering a titillating, troubling commentary on life.” —USA Today “Guare’s most disciplined, merciless yet lovable work since Six Degrees of Separation and maybe his best yet.” —New York Newsday

THE STORY: In the Holy Year of 2000 in Rome, Matt has learned that his painting has given him a curable form of cancer. In return for survival, he must abandon paint for a new artistic medium. Ultimately he chooses to dress in religious garb, video

An exploration of the influence of Italy and Italians on Chaucer’s life and writing. Geoffrey Chaucer might be considered the quintessential English writer, but he drew much of his inspiration and material from Italy. In fact, without the tremendous influence of Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio (among others), the author of The Canterbury Tales might never have assumed his place as the “father” of English literature. Nevertheless, Richard Owen’s Chaucer’s Italy begins in London, where the poet dealt with Italian merchants in his roles as court diplomat and customs official. Next Owen takes us, via Chaucer’s capture at the siege of Rheims, to his involvement in arranging the marriage of King Edward III’s son Lionel in Milan and his missions to Genoa and Florence. By scrutinizing his encounters with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the mercenary knight John Hawkwood—and with vividly evocative descriptions of the Arezzo, Padua, Florence, Certaldo, and Milan that Chaucer would have encountered—Owen reveals the deep influence of Italy’s people and towns on Chaucer’s poems and stories. Much writing on Chaucer depicts a misleadingly parochial figure, but as Owen’s enlightening short study of Chaucer’s Italian years makes clear, the poet’s life was internationally eventful. The consequences have made the English canon what it is today.

Provides a rich and varied reference resource, illuminating the different contexts for Chaucer and his work.

Pier Pasolini's "trilogy of life" is a series of film adaptations of major texts of the past: The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and One Thousand and One Nights. The movies demonstrate a film author's acute aesthetic sensibility through a highly original cinematic rendering of the sources. The first two films, closely examined in this book, offer a personal, purposefully stylized vision of the Middle Ages, as though Pasolini were dreaming Boccaccio's and Chaucer's texts through the filter of his "heretic" consciousness. The unusual poetic visualization of the source works, which could be described as irreverent cinematic homage, has the potential to renew the traditional reading of such literature. This book shows how cinema becomes an alternative form of storytelling. It first studies the two films in detail, putting them in perspective within the trilogy. Next it interprets them, recounting misinterpretations and expounding upon Pasolini's ideological perception, and defends the oft-criticized adaptations. Finally, it discusses how the films represent innovation over strict adaptation. Appendices offer charts with information on the narrative structures of the films and the correspondences between them.