Towards a poetics of sexuality in retellings of Chaucer and Shakespeare for "young readers," 1806–2020

Thesis

This thesis examines how sexual content in the work of the English authors Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare has been adapted for “young” Anglophone readers in prose retellings since 1806. The tools of selection, omission, conversion, and ambiguation enable the children’s adaptation to satisfy its paradoxical mandate: to transmit an ‘authentic’ version of the source-author and his text(s) while protecting, entertaining, instructing, and preparing a reader considered vulnerable to the sexual content abounding in both authors’ works. Rather than dismissing these adaptational techniques under the vague term “sanitisation,” however, I propose that they constitute a poetics, one that not only shows remarkable consistency across two centuries but is more complex than previously acknowledged. Its techniques of avoidance, equivalence, and deferral index changing ideas about the nature of the child reader as well as opening new lines of enquiry into the source-authors, their respective texts, and cultural constructions of the “dangerous,” “coarse,” and “pure.”

This study expands scholarly work on children’s canonical adaptation in four interconnected ways. It addresses both Chaucer and Shakespeare, two paternal and bawdy English writers whose children’s adaptation traditions are significantly parallel but have not yet been studied in complement. It focuses on transcodings of sexuality, and, in particular, on corpus-wide patterns in the handling of heteropenetrative intercourse, virginity, and rape. This corpus includes adaptations from a wider time period than have previous studies and organises its readings not by adaptor or collection but by source-text and by sexual theme, allowing for close readings of the same granular textual moment across two centuries. Those readings, in turn, contribute to a richer theory of the children’s adaptation as a liminal, paradoxical site for textual negotiations of age, “Englishness,” feminist revision, and literary sexuality legible in Chaucer and Shakespeare’s interwoven afterlives.

Authors: Fleming, LHB

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-dqo9yxeka
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Shakespeare; retellings; children's literature; Chaucer; poetics; medievalism; sexuality; children's adaptation
• Subjects: English; Chaucer; Retellings; Adaptation; Shakespeare; Sexual poetics; Children's literature