Chanticleer and the Fox it clear that its inspiration was Edmond Rostand's drama "Chantecler" about a cock that believed the sun would not rise unless it crowed first. Several other works claim to be inspired by Chaucer's tale but, like Rostand's play and the 1990 cartoon feature film Rock-a-Doodle based on it, have little connection with the original Renart Cycle version beyond using the name Chanticleer, or variants of it. Chanticleer and the Fox Chanticleer and the Fox is a fable that dates from the Middle Ages. Though it can be compared to Aesop's fable of The Fox and the Crow, it is of
The Cock and the Jewel in which a man inherits a valuable manuscript but prefers to have cash in hand for it. According to his reading of the fable, what the man and the cock lack is aesthetic judgement rather than wisdom. Some later interpretations are equally materialistic. Thomas Bewick applies the fable to the choice of sexual partner in his "Select Fables of Aesop" (1784), while the Canadian author Robertson Davies converts it to a playlet satirising devotees of the "Readers Digest" in his "A Masque of Aesop" (1955). Such a short fable suggested little latitude for invention to most book illustrators, apart from