Abstract
It is tempting to see games as a medium through which conflicts can be worked out within safe, bounded spaces, without permanent damage to the participants. This perception is evident in Johan Huizinga’s definition of playgrounds as spaces that are “hedged round, hallowed, within which certain special rules obtain… temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart”1 and game designer Chris Crawford’s description of games as “an artifice for providing the psychological realizations of conflict and danger while excluding their physical realizations.”2 Within Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, characters also desire to see games in these terms: Theseus’s decision to use the tournament to resolve an otherwise intractable conflict draws upon this sense of games as a safe space, as does the Wife of Bath’s insistence that no one should be offended by her words “[f]or myn entente is nat but for to pleye.”3 “The Knight’s Tale,” however, complicates this understanding by exploring the potential of games to transgress this imaginary boundary.4
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
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1950), p. 10.
Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, (Vancouver: Washington State University Vancouver,1997), accessed November 23, 2013, http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stewart/cs583/ACGD_ArtComputerGameDesign_ChrisCrawford_1982.pdf, p. 12.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), line III.192.
Jacques Ehrmann’s argument that play “cannot… be isolated as an activity without consequences.” “Homo Ludens Revisited,” Yale French Studies 41 (1969): 31-57.
Andrew Higl, Playing the Canterbury Tales: The Continuations and Additions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Examples include Gerhard Joseph, “Chaucerian ‘Game’-’Earnest’ and the ‘Argument of Herbergage’ in The Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 5.2 (1970): 83-96
Beryl Rowland, “The Play of the Miller’s Tale: A Game within a Game,” Chaucer Review 5.2 (1970): 140-46
Michael McClintock, “Games and the Players of Games: Old French Fabliaux and the Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 5.2 (1970): 112–36
Stephen Manning, “Rhetoric, Game, Morality, and Geoffrey Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 105-18.
See, for example, Gania Barlow, “A Thrifty Tale: Narrative Authority and the Competing Values of the Man of Law’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 44.4 (2010): 397-420.
Sherron Knopp, “Poetry as Conjuring Act: The Franklin’s Tale and The Tempest” Chaucer Review 38.4 (2004): 347 [337-54].
Peggy Knapp, “Aesthetic Attention and the Chaucerian Text,” Chaucer Review 39.3 (2005): 241-58.
David Lawton, “Chaucer’s Two Ways: The Pilgrimage Frame of The Canterbury Tales” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 3-40.
Jim Rhodes, Poetry Does Theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-Poet (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
Carl Lindahl, Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 10.
Earlier work on the ‘earnest’ and ‘game’ dichotomy is extensive. Particularly influential are Ernst Robert Curtius’s survey of the tradition of jest and earnest-from antiquity through the Middle Ages- in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, Pantheon, 1953), pp. 417-35
Gabriel Josipovici, “Fiction and Game in The Canterbury Tales,” Critical Quarterly 7 (1965): 185-97. More recent critics have seen the earnest-game division as less absolute
Malcolm Andrew’s essay, “Games,” in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 167-79
Laura Kendrick, “Games Medievalists Play: How to Make Earnest of Game and Still Enjoy It,” New Literary History 40 (2009): 443-61.
See, for example, Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). In Blamires’s reading, the tournament is intended to be a “public spectacle of community and fellowship” (p. 30), but “The Knight’s Tale” swiftly becomes a story of fellowship gone wrong, foreshadowing the divisions that later appear among the pilgrims.
For the history of the tournament and its customs, see David Crouch, Tournament (London: Hambledon, 2005).
A.J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1982), p. 124.
Two Noble Kinsmen, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 3.6.295-96.
Sir Perceval of Galles, ed. Mary Flowers Braswell, TEAMS: Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), ll. 113-76.
A. G. Lester, “Chaucer’s Knight and the Medieval Tournament,” Neophilologus 66 (1982): 460-61 [460-68].
Ilan Mitchell-Smith, “As Olde Stories Tellen Us’: Chivalry, Violence, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Critical Perspective in ‘The Knight’s Tale,’” in Fifteenth Century Studies: Essays in Honor of Edelgard E. DuBruck, ed. Barbara I. Gusick and Edelgard E. DuBruck (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), p. 90 [83-99].
Mark N. Taylor, “Chaucer’s Knowledge of Chess,” Chaucer Review 38.4 (2004): 299-313
Jenny Adams, “Pawn Takes Knight’s Queen: Playing with Chess in The Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer Review 34.2 (1999): 125-38.
Margaret Connolly, “Chaucer and Chess,” Chaucer Review 29.1 (1994): 40-44.
Robert A. Pratt, “The Knight’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York: The Humanities Press, 1958), pp. 100-101 [82-105]. See also Mitchell-Smith, “As Olde Stories Tellen Us,” pp. 91-92.
The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 5.6.112-15.
Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), lines 50-51.
For a detailed discussion of this tradition and the ways in which Chaucer conspicuously departs from it, see Jenny Adams, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 96-97.
This may reflect a broader cultural shift: Daniel O’Sullivan notes in “Changing the Rules in and of Medieval Chess Allegories” that chess allegories become increasingly dynamic and reflective of actual game-play, from the fourteenth century onward. In Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World, ed. Daniel O’Sullivan, Berlin and Boston, MA: DeGruyter, 2012, pp. 199-220.
Robert Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel: Love and Fortune in The Knight’s Tale,” Medievalia et Humanistica 31 (2005), pp. 60-61 [59-82]
Jill Mann, “Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight’s Tale,” in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 75-92.
David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess (New York: Doubleday, 2006), p. 59.
Some critics have, of course, argued that Arcite’s death is just. Explanations of why he has to die range from Catherine Rock’s argument that he has repeatedly violated the codes of chivalry (“Arcite as Oath-Breaker in the Knight’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 40.4 (2006): 416-32) to Edward Schweizer’s explanation that his death is the natural final stage of his love-melancholy, for which he is morally responsible (“Fate and Freedom in The Knight’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 13-46).
Margaret Felberg-Levitt, “Dialogues in Verse and Prose: The Demandes d’amour,” Le Moyen Francais 29 (1991): 35 [33-44].
Richard Firth Green, “Le Roi Qui Ne Ment and Aristocratic Courtship,” in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), p. 219 [211-25].
Leonard Michael Koff, Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 88.
Michael Olmert argues that the Parson’s Tale “is steeped in play and presents the rules for playing the game of life,” emphasizing the often improbable, paradoxical, and counterintuitive rules of Christian doctrine. In this reading, the Parson becomes a foil to the Host, and the heavenly feast, to which he bids his fellow-pilgrims, a counterpart for the earthly feast the Host promises at the end of the return journey to Southwark. “The Parson’s Ludic Formula for Winning on the Road [to Canterbury],” Chaucer Review 20.2 (1985): 159 [158-69].
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2015 Serina Patterson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Corrigan, N. (2015). The Knight’s Earnest Game in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. In: Patterson, S. (eds) Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497529_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497529_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56148-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49752-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)