Abstract
The Knight’s Tale is a series of failed narratival and philosophical closures that ends in a diminuendo of consolation. It invests its narrative momentum in a plot sequence that avoids open warfare between Athens and Thebes by sublimating Theban desire and violence into an orderly tournament whose victor can marry the Amazonian princess Emelye. Arcite wins the tournament but dies in a mysterious equestrian accident ordered by Saturn and carried out by a Fury. Set some years later, the tale’s ending satisfies everyone still alive—Palamon marries Emelye, and this Theban—Amazon union under the aegis of King Theseus secures peace for Athens—but does so without accounting for the main energy of the plot. Arcite’s catastrophic death haunts the final happiness, inassimilable to its quiet domesticity. The burden it places on the marriage between Palamon and Emelye is the Augustinian burden of consolation after a past revelatory resolution so total that its uncomprehending survivors live out their posthistory in its shadow. The tale’s full form encompasses a linear narrative of Athenian political triumphalism that presses for closure, a recursive Theban typology that systematically derails Athenian resolution, and finally an Augustinian posthistory ironically enabled by the blind recursiveness of Thebes and the self-interested machinations of pagan divinity.
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
R. James Goldstein, “Future Perfect: The Augustinian Theology of Perfection and the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007), pp. 87–140.
Important assessments of Chaucer’s refraction of ethical and philosophical questions through a classical past include John M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979);
John P. McCall, Chaucer among the Gods: The Poetics of Classical Myth (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979);
A.J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, Chaucer Studies 8 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982);
and Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
Charles Muscatine, “Form, Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale,’” PMLA 65 (1950), pp. 911–29, and Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 175–90.
Statius begins the Thebaid with “fraternas acies” (1.1), or “fraternal strife.” The concept is central to medieval readings and retellings of Theban history. Chaucer’s revisions of the Teseida heighten tension and fraternal strife where Boccaccio minimizes it; see, for example, David Anderson, “Theban Genealogy in the Knight’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 21 (1987), p. 315;
Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 32–43;
and Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the OF Roman de Thèbes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate, Studies in Medieval History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 85–111. For example, Battles, p. 103, notes “the very different outcomes of the scene in the parallel prison scenes in the Teseida and the Knight’s Tale: where Boccaccio uses the prison cell to lay the groundwork for reconciliation between the Theban cousins, Chaucer uses it to foster further conflict in the Theban style.” All citations of Statius are from Statius II and Statius III, ed. and trans. D. Shackleton Bailey, LCL 207 and 498 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 166–74, identifies this aspect of difference as key to medieval typology and explains its implications for Arcite’s death in the Teseida.
See Hayden White, “Auerbach’s Literary History: Figurai Causation and Modernist Historicism,” Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 128, for its importance within figurai reading in general.
See Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 111, on the senescence Chaucer and Gower saw in their world and how it could be resisted by institutions. The medieval diagnosis of the Christian world as senescent derives from Augustinian parallels between microcosmic and macrocosmic history. After the high maturity of the world when Christ lived in it, the world is doddering or dwindling toward its apocalyptic end in death.
James M. Dean, The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature, Medieval Academy of Books 101 (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1997), surveys the topic in Jean de Meun, Dante, and Middle English literature, and provides a catalogue of tropes. 9.
Robert W. Hanning, “‘The Struggle between Noble Designs and Chaos’: The Literary Tradition of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Literary Review 23 (1980), pp. 534–40.
H. Marshall Leicester Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 27, 221–382.
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 165–230. Each of these critics reads the tale as dramatizing the consciousness of the Knight, at least to some extent.
I hold with Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, Unwin Critical Library (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 116–17, that of all the tales this one (previously written and lightly revised) is the least likely to dramatize the consciousness of its purported speaker. Nevertheless, the points these scholars make about the troubled chivalric consciousness (or lack thereof) in general remain valid.
On the medieval reception and popularity of the Consolation among those who had political or social power at stake, see The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine E. Légiu and Stephen J. Milner, New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).
See Merle Fifield, “The Knight’s Tale: Incident, Idea, Incorporation,” Chaucer Review 3 (1968), p. 98, on Theseus learning from his failure to control the tournament. Theseus learns from Egeus also, but much expands and improves Egeus’s cursory notes toward consolation.
Peter Elbow, Oppositions in Chaucer (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), pp. 82–7. He notes that Theseus’s changes of mind always move in the direction of mercy.
The speech is Boethian at beginning and end of its philosophical portion (2987–3016, 3035–40). The intervening material, mostly from the Teseida, seems to many critics incompatible with its bracketing Boethian claims. See Pearsall, pp. 124–5, and Jill Mann, “Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale” The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd ed., ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 93–111, for two of the more judicious accounts of the speech’s self-contradictions. The speech may fail internally as argument in addition to its external failure as narrative resolution. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, p. 183, describes its movement as “logical and orderly,” but reduces the non-Boethian lines 3017–34 to a passing mention (p. 184).
See Pearsall, ibid., on the nearly impossible demands on the speech by its structural context, and Elizabeth Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 171–2, for those demands contrasted to the lower philosophical stakes in the Teseida.
For the physical details of the death as Saturnine, see Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry, pp. 169–70; and Edward C. Schweitzer, “Fate and Freedom in The Knight’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981), pp. 23–30, who enlists its obvious link with Saturn for the purposes of moral allegory, not pathos.
David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 183–5, 188–93, provides a blistering critique of Theseus. For the unanswerability of Arcite’s pain,
see also Mark Miller, Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 55 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 104;
Robert B. Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 106;
and Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Condition of Creatures: Suffering and Action in Chaucer and Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 71.
On this tale’s evasion of Boethian antimaterialism and prioritization of the eternal, see F. Anne Payne, Chaucer and Menippean Satire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), p. 223; Elbow, pp. 133–4; and Schweitzer, p. 44.
Bernard L. Jefferson, Chaucer and the Consolation of Boethius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1917), p. 71, identifies a number of Chaucerian passages addressing issues of theodicy in the tradition of Boethian inquiry but refusing to arrive at answers, leaving “the matter for clerks to decide.” Burlin, p. 80;
Joerg O. Fichte, Chaucer’s ‘Art Poetical’: A Study in Chaucerian Poetics, Studies & Texts in English 1 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 1980), p. 111; and Miller, pp. 30–1, agree that when Chaucer handles philosophical material he cares less about the ideas themselves and more about how they appear in and shape existential experience—how the abstract is made concrete and literal. Fichte, pp. 88, 111, and Anne Payne, pp. 232–58, link Chaucer’s preference for lived metaphysics with his penchant for antiteleological closure.
John Lydgate, John Lydgate: The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), gives the history of Thebes up through Eteocles and Polynices explicitly in response to the Knight’s Tale.
Patterson, p. 200, is the magisterial description of Theban narrative pattern. See also Robert S. Haller, “The Knight’s Tale and the Epic Tradition,” Chaucer Review 1 (1966), pp. 67–84; Battles; McCall, pp. 89–92; Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio, pp. 20–1, 29;
James Simpson, “Chaucer’s Presence and Absence, 1400–1550,” The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd ed., ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 259;
and Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus & Criseyde (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 111–44.
Peggy A. Knapp, Chaucerian Aesthetics, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 103, points out that the tale never actually condemns love for Emelye.
The seminal discussion of the metaphoric and metonymic poles of poetry is Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, Janua Linguarium 1 (‘s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1956), pp. 76–82.
Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Poet as Storyteller (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 37–53, identifies the poetic character of Chaucer’s work as metonymic, not metaphoric; the distinction is between mere abstract similarities and “associations, notably of contiguity” (p. 40). Typology is metonymic, positing intrinsic associations.
Boitani, “Style, Iconography and Narrative: The Lesson of the Teseida,” Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 197–8, makes a similar distinction between metonymy as internal association and metaphor as external association (the artificial relationship most often cited as the abuses of allegory). In Boitani’s account, Boccaccio is metaphorical, Chaucer metonymic.
John Lydgate followed suit by reading the Knight’s Tale as directly relevant to England’s political situation. For Lydgate’s interpretation, see Simpson on its warning against English civil war, and Paul A. Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 51, on its analogy to the 1420 peace treaty incorporating France into England by means of royal marriage.
Pace the suggestions compiled by W. A. Davenport, Chaucer: Complaint and Narrative, Chaucer Studies 14 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), pp. 106–7, 110.
Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 38, sees Arcite’s isolation from worldly concerns at the moment of death as the key to his freedom for compassion. Her discussion of interpretation within the Knight’s Tale concentrates on Arcite’s and Palamon’s self-centered and erroneous interpretations of each other’s motives; it is less concerned with the characters’ interpretation of the past.
Elizabeth Fowler, “The Afterlife of the Civil Dead: Conquest in the Knight’s Tale,” Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas C. Stillinger, Critical Essays on British Literature (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998), p. 73.
For views of the marriage as insufficient closure to the tale, see Aers, p. 194; Anne Payne, p. 255; and Leicester, pp. 375–6. Even Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London: Duckworth, 1983), who reads the ending as a Christian analogy, admits, “It is hard to reconcile the ending fully with what has gone before” (p. 105). Patterson, Chaucer, p. 209, sees all the structural repetitions as undermining the sense of progress. This misses the typological point; progress occurs by means of subtly differentiated repetition.
Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio, Medium Ævum Monographs New Series VIII (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1977), p. 48.
Elizabeth B. Edwards, “Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Work of Mourning,” Exemplaria 20 (2008), p. 381, believing that Theseus’s generalized speech is the primary consolation the tale offers, sees that consolation as depending on “the annihilation of the perspective of the singular.” Because its final event is the appropriate fulfillment of Palamon’s long-cherished desire, I am arguing that the tale ends exactly in the perspective of the singular.
Copyright information
© 2015 Chad D. Schrock
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schrock, C.D. (2015). Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: Consolations at War. In: Consolation in Medieval Narrative. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137447814_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137447814_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49761-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44781-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)