This fast-moving Modern English version of Chaucer's greatest tragic romance highlights the poem's rapid shifts in register and diction as well as its subtle and elusive characterizations, while preserving the enchanting rhyme-royal stanza of the Middle English original. Christine Chism's Introduction illuminates the work's historical context, poetic devices, first audiences, sources, and non-traditional re-conception of a traditional female protagonist "whose faults," as Criseyde says, "are rolled on every tongue."