i think if geoffrey chaucer were zapped into the current day then once he learned the language and grasped the social situation he would leverage his position as Actually Geoffrey Chaucer to get the cushiest most luxurious publishing contract imaginable. and then within six months tops he would be writing omegaverse
if william shakespeare were zapped into the current day he would become the focal figure of a hit subscription-based webseries that makes live action adaptations of popular fanfics. after narrowly matrix-dodging several major copyright lawsuits through sheer power of “i’m shakespeare,” he would subsequently learn to navigate the legal ins and outs of transformative work and parody with the steely precision of an exacto knife
i also think their works would be very progressive in a dr who kind of way, not because those are their innate beliefs, but because the second they work out that people can and will refuse to purchase their works for containing such and such bigotry, those writers will get very With The Program, very very quickly. but of course when they learn that the french are still fair game they’ll grab onto it with both hands and run it into the ground
