1. David Herd and Anna Pincus, eds., Refugee Tales I (Great Britain: Comma Press, 2016); David Herd and Anna Pincus, eds., Refugee Tales II (Great Britain: Comma Press, 2017). The opening paragraph recounts details from “The Lawyer’s Tale” (RT1, 118); “The Unaccompanied Minor’s Tale” (RT1, 22); “The Witness’ Tale” (RT2, 44-45); “The Detainee’s Tale” (RT1, 60); “The Abandoned Person’s Tale” (RT2, 27). When released from a detention center, a person is given an allowance of £5 a day. It takes the form of a top up card, called an Azure card, that can be used only in designated outlets and on certain products. It cannot be used on public transport (“Afterword,” RT2, 119).
2. The Canterbury Tales visitor attraction is a stone’s throw from the Cathedral in St Margaret’s Street. It is an interactive tour through Chaucer’s tales. The experience of this popular attraction for an academic audience is discussed by Stephanie Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals: Scholars, Pilgrims, and Medieval Tourists,” New Medieval Literatures 7 (2005): 9-33. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer was adapted by Mike Poulton and shown originally by the RSC at the Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon (2006).
3. There is not space here to compare Refugee Tales with the huge number of twenty and twenty-first century Chaucerian responses. For comparisons, there is Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Kathleen Forni, Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2003) and The Global Chaucers Project (https://globalchaucers.wordpress.com/).
4. Linda Hutcheon notes that one of the pleasures of adaptation comes from repetition with variation, “from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise,” from A Theory of Adaptation, with Siobhan O’Flynn (London: Routledge, 2013), 4.
5. There is one exception: Constance in “The Man of Law’s Tale” turns up in a different setting in “The Migrant’s Tale” and “The Lawyer’s Tale.” I discuss these later.