‘They met in a pub. Got very very merry. They started telling tales. Lechery, treachery, that sort of thing. Free nosh for the best story.’ Thus the cover of the Radio Times for 16 October 1969, advertising a new television production of the Canterbury Tales that started transmission the following week. The adapters, Martin Starkie and Nevill Coghill, had recently provided framework and text (based on Coghill's well-known translation, 1951) for a highly successful musical of the Tales that ran for several years in London's West End and that today still frequently tours in Britain and the USA. Vying with this in its share of the popular Chaucer market is the Phil Woods/Michael Bogdanov adaptation of the Tales, again a familiar item in the modern theatre repertoire and, in the words of the Time Out review of the first production, an ‘ebullient romp … dull it ain't’ (19 January 1979). The idea of Chaucer as adult pantomime and of the Tales as a kind of pubouting also underlay the BBC Radio 4 transmission of several (again much adapted) tales in March–April 1991, stories accompanied by plentiful guffawing, thigh-slapping and aleslurping on the part of their narrators.

Perhaps with no other author is the gulf between the popular and academic reception so marked. While Chaucer carouses his way through theatres and the media in this country and abroad, Chaucer scholars continue their earnest proliferation of books and articles that also have a world-wide audience, notably in Europe, the USA, and the Far East. Far from a simple, merry Chaucer infused with a dose of late-1960s liberationism that stage and screen purvey, the academic Chaucer industry has evolved a formidably complex, contradictory, and unfinalized author of whom, as A. C. Spearing remarked in his short study of Troilus and Criseyde, ‘almost no interpretative statement can be made … that does not require correction by its opposite’. Chaucer scholars themselves have occasionally been known to worry about the academic appropriation of Chaucer, and about the fact that an educated but non-professional readership for his work that might fill the gap between the popular and academic reception seems to be relatively lacking.