Jonty Claypole

And there's also a tendency to say, well, you know, when England does have its renaissance with Shakespeare, it's very literary because of the Reformation.

We're not interested in visual arts.

I don't think either of those things are quite true.

I think our Renaissance actually begins back in the 1360s, you know, shortly after Dante and Giotto have started the Renaissance in Italy.

And it is completely exceptional.

You know, these are extraordinary works of art being created in different media, which are all connected in different ways with what it means to be Englishness, with building a national identity.

And I think the reason why we have Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare

our finest later Renaissance artists being writers, is partly because of the Reformation, but actually because they're just continuing the legacy set down by Chaucer and John Gower 200 years earlier.

So it is a great flowering of the arts, despite Richard being an egomaniac.

OK, Sophie, let's get into the general prologue.

I think one of the ways to look at what he's doing that is so new is to look at the book or the material he's most closely emulating, which is Boccaccio's Decameron.

And the Decameron by the Italian Boccaccio had a sort of moment, didn't it, during the pandemic?

Because...

It's a frame narrative set during a plague in Florence and a group of beautiful young people, the sort of Byron Bays, made in Florence crowd.

They move out of the city into the hillside to sit out the plague.

And they tell each other stories every day to pass the time, while meanwhile the working classes are dying in appalling agony of the plague down in the town.

And each day they have a theme to unite their tales.

And Chaucer encountered this work during his travels.

And so when he decides to do his own riff on it, this is where you see what a genius he is.

First of all, Chaucer is not interested in beautiful, privileged people having a lovely time by themselves.