By Candace Barrington

March 30, 2022

This story is not global. And for that matter, it’s not very Chaucerian. And yet, it’s a good story about the ways Chaucer’s name and his Wife of Bath were used to promote cultural projects that had almost nothing to do with either Chaucer or his Tales.

In 2016, I published an essay in Chaucer on Screen, a collection edited by Tison Pugh and Kathleen Kelly. Titled “Lost Chaucer: Natalie Wood’s ‘The Deadly Riddle’ and the Golden Age of American Television,” the essay describes my search for a television episode cryptically referenced in a Natalie Wood biography as a “now-lost” 1955 film, The Wife of Bath, starring Ms Wood. My essay documents the few ephemera and paratexts I could locate, and it records my efforts to imaginatively recreate the film’s contents.

In December 2021, I received a surprise email from Jeff Joseph, a semi-retired motion picture archivist. Lately he has been restoring old television material, and he had recently completed work on “The Deadly Riddle.” The restored episode can now be watched online: https://youtu.be/iH6Yd0qlD3w .

When I shared the link with Gil Gigliotti, my colleague who initially alerted me to the toss-off line in Wood’s biography, I forewarned him that “the newspaper promos and ads were all so wrong.” He reminded me that ads aren’t supposed to be summaries, though noting that he did “find the ad with the hag picture effective (if way misleading). The voiceover ad needs a ‘spoiler alert’!”

So if you have time to spare and want to see how Chaucer was mangled in the 1950s, check out “The Deadly Riddle.”