A Double Sorrow : Troilus and Criseyde
- Submitting institution
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Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 30375708
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Faber and Faber
- ISBN
- 978-0-571-28454-2
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This experimental version of Troilus and Criseyde investigates how Chaucer’s long narrative work can be adapted for modern audiences in ways which respond to and foreground issues of translation and continuity. Greenlaw works entirely within Chaucer’s text, but draws out themes that have contemporary resonance – misogyny, war, power structures, female autonomy and commodification, social censure and codification, and the doubly closed society of a people under siege. The starting point is the practice of the ‘version’. The version is aligned with translation, but is an explicit and fundamental re-orchestration of an original text which works with rather than through the constraints of conventional translation. A Double Sorrow extends this practice to engage with Chaucer’s own source material including Sainte-Maure’s twelfth-century epic, Roman de Troie and Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. It condenses the original narrative into around 200 stanzas which have the effect of individual poems, each demanding concentrated attention. From many of the recitative passages, she distills a lyric essence and transmutes the arias into translucent moments of stasis in the narrative.
In negotiating Chaucer’s borrowings, Greenlaw considers questions of authorship, image and narrative which are key to her overall practice. She activates the space of the page so as to enact the unfixed nature of this version, using running heads and footnotes to comment on and qualify. Published in the UK and the US, A Double Sorrow is used by schools and colleges in Chaucer studies. It was presented in a dramatized version directed by James Runcie at the Southbank Centre and given four performances. It was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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