Abstract
The 2001 movie A Knight’s Tale prompted Peter Travers to invent a new exclamation: “Holy Anachronisms!”1 Yet its gleeful wallow in a medieval past that equally recalls fantasies of the 1970s and the 1370s unthinks historicist fidelities in a fashion that recognizes what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen characterizes as the “temporal interlacement” of the Middle Ages, “the impossibility of choosing alterity or continuity” as a critical model for contemporary scholars.2 By mistaking elements of the past for tactical use in the present, Brian Helgeland’s anachronistic rendering of Chaucer’s corpus challenges notions of authority staked on visible control.3 As I argue, A Knight’s Tale consolidates a version of Chaucerian authority visually calibrated to promote a fiction of identity, here a type of masculinity. Although through the construction of the protagonist William’s knighthood Chaucer’s presence in the film is ultimately diminished, the mobility that accompanies his increasing invisibility finally invests Chaucer with an “underground” appeal that reveals canonical authority’s inherent anachronism.
I got hold of a picture of Chaucer and it turns out he’s an enormously fat, bald, bearded dwarf, so…1 threw out any pretension of doing any research whatsoever and made it up.
—Paul Bettany, “Geoff” Chaucer
To me, what this movie is all about is, “You got Chaucer on my Queen.” “No, wait. You got Queen on my Chaucer.”
—Brian Helgeland
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000), pp. 1–17, at p. 5.
Régis Debray, “The Three Ages of Looking,” trans. Eric Rauth, Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 529–55, at p. 532.
Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993 )
Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 )
and Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon ( Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001 ).
Besides the valuable studies by Lerer, Forni, and Trigg, see also Julia Boffey’s and A. S. G. Edwards’s article, “ ‘Chaucer’s Chronicle,’ John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 201–218.
Brian Helgeland, A Knight’s Tale: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2001), p. 17. Unless there is a difference between the shooting script and the final cut, all further citations refer to the shooting script and are noted parenthetically in the text.
Glending Olson, “Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer,” Comparative Literature 31 (1979): 272–90 usefully traces the relationship between making and craftsmanship in medieval vernacular literature.
Brian Helgeland, “A Write Knight Takes on Hollywood—and Lives to Tell the Tale,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2001, www.latimes.com. Also see Helgeland, Shooting Script p. vii.
John Matthews Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (London, 1926) follows this approach.
Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 ), pp. 107–139.
Kathleen Forni, “Reinventing Chaucer: Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 37 (2003): 252–64, at p. 254.
Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 ), p. 27.
John Horn, “The Reviewer Who Wasn’t There; Sony resorts to some questionable marketing practices to promote new movies,” Newsweek, June 2, 2001, www.newsweek.com.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2007 Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Crocker, H.A. (2007). Chaucer’s Man Show: Anachronistic Authority in Brian Helgeland’s a Knight’s Tale. In: Ramey, L.T., Pugh, T. (eds) Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603561_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603561_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53486-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60356-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)