The Knight’s tale – lecture notes PDF

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The Knight’s tale – lecture notes 

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Themes: o Representation of women o Generic play o Issues of structure and style. o Themes of good governance o Role of religion and philosophy o Chivalry and love o Sources and contexts – romance or tragedy Sources: Separate work – came back to it in 1380s. Boccaccio’s Teseida – Italian poem – narraties career and rule of ancient Greek hero Theseus. PHILOSOPHY Boethius , Consolation of Philosophy (Latin prose and verse), c. 524 A.D. Romance story with philosophy – darkens text, ends on happier note. Romance and tragedy cause tension.

‘Palamon’s happy ending, his recovery from despair, is only possible because of Arcite’s death’ (Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: OUP, 1987), p. 64 ‘Two almost indistinguishable young men fall in love on first sight with the same woman; apart from the fact that one has a moment’s priority, their claims are exactly equal. Up to this point their life histories and their moral states are, for the purposes of the poem, identical. There can be no moral or metaphysical justice in the different fates that befall them; yet one dies wretchedly wounded, while the other lives out his life with Emily “with alle blisse”’ (Cooper, Oxford Guides, p. 76) ‘The emphasis of the Knight’s Tale is less on what happens than on why it happens, in metaphysicial, not psychological terms’ (Cooper, Oxford Guides, p. 77)

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Charles Muscatine ‘Form, Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer's Knight's Tale’, PMLA, 65:5 (1950), 911–929: o ‘the struggle between noble designs and chaos’ o a ‘poetic pageant’ in which all the materials are ‘organized and contributory to a complex design expressing the nature of noble life’ o BUT: we are offered ‘no glittering, romantic fairy-castle world. The impressive, patterned edifice of the noble life, its dignity and richness, its regard for law and decorum, are all bulwarks against the ever-threatening forces of chaos, and in constant collision with them’.

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Key related themes: o Tension between chaos and noble life and darker forces and threatening it. o Role and representation of women o Characterisation of Theseus.

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BOETHIUS: Consolation of Philosophy o Applied philosophy – conciliation and solace.

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A dialogue between a first-person narrator, the prisoner ‘Boethius’, and Lady Philosophy, concerning the concept of underserved suffering and the way in which one should react to adversity. Emphasis on the transitory nature of earthly life and wealth, need to accept fortune (good and bad) and fate/free will (arguing that God’s foreknowledge does not interfere with free will) Through the course of the entire conversation, Boethius moves towards an understanding of the workings of divine providence and so acquires a philosophical framework in which to set his own imprisonment and impending execution.

Faculty of mind and soul can comfort him – unwise to be attached to anything. Tells how God orders the world through provenance – we cannot understand this, so much accept. Bad fortune can work on good as helps to understand virtue. God’s foreknowledge doesn’t interfere with human free will.

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Wheel of Fortune o Capricious nature of fate. o Fortuna – spins wheel so people experience different periods of various fortune. o Four steps.

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Tragedy: noble person, at high point of fortune, falls to misery. o Monk’s Tale. o Tragedy – falls of great men through instability of fortune. o Interest in fall from high to low.

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Three other key concepts: o Romance: narratives about high born people, set far away or long ago; plots concerned with love and/or chivalry; and the vast majority have happy endings. o Courtly love: term coined in the 19th C to describe the portrayal of love in several medieval English and French works. Unrequited knightly lover fights in combats and tournaments to prove his devotion to his beloved who shows mercy and accepts his love. That love often described in religious terms, and often kept secret from others. (e.g. how brothers speak of Emily) o Chivalry: the virtues that a knight should embody, including bravery, honour, mercy to his enemies, loyalty to his lord, and pure love for his lady. Actual military experiences and tournaments/spectacles.

The characters’ experiences are suffused with references to Fortune, and notions of courtly love and chivalry – and the noble order with which they are associated – face the ever-present threat of tragedy and chaos.

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Symmetrical structure:

Theseus’ winning of Hippolyta

Palamon’s winning of Emily

Cappeneus’ wife on Fortune

Theseus on Providence

The widows’ laments,

The laments for Arcite,

the destruction of Thebes, the burning of the bodies

the destruction of the forests, Arcite’s funeral pyre

Palamon and Arcite found among the dead

Arcite’s death

The lover’s rivalry over Emily

Arcite’s yielding of Emily to Palamon

Arcite’s sickness

Arcite’s injury

Palamon’s escape

Palamon’s injury

The combat in the wood

The tournament

Theseus decrees the tournament Three temples

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Theseus’ rules for the tournament Three prayers

The poem begins with a wedding and funeral, and ends a funeral and a wedding. The intercession of kneeling ladies in the forest for Palamon and Arcite is a scene original to Chaucer that recalls the scene of the kneeling widows asking for mercy at the beginning of the poem. P & A = cousins: found side by side, wearing the same coat of arms, and they are later given parallel speeches Chaucer proves a god to parallel each of the main characters. Symmetry in setting. The amphitheatre where the tournament between the two lovers is to take place is a perfect mile in circuit with the three shrines, built in the grove where Palamon and Arcite first fought, and where Arcite is to be buried.

Rhetorical devices:     

Tie in with notions of chivalry and courtly love and ending. Commutatio Dubitatio Interrogatio Occupatio

Theseus’ Final speech 

Unity, order and good governance – but below surface, things aren’t quite what they see, (chaos).

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Symmetries in structure and rhetorical devices tie in with idealised notions of chivalry and courtly love running through the poem; with seemingly happy ending that forges a political alliance between Athens and Thebes; and with Theseus’ final Boethian speech – his father, Egeus, described the world as ‘a thurghfare of wo’ (2847) but Theseus urges a turn away

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from astrology and focus on fate/fortune to an emphasis on Providence, supported by human decision and action. Theseus suggests that the events of the tale have arrived at their appropriate conclusion. He depicts Providence and the world as a ‘faire cheyne of love’ (2988), ‘stable and eterne’ (3004) concluding: ‘Thanne is it wisdom, as thynketh me,/ To maken vertu of necessitiee’ (3041-2)

Elizabeth Salter: ‘The solace offered by the [end of] the poem is curiously thin and formal’; 'The Knight’s Tale, at its most remarkable, is an uneven work of ‘‘sad lucidity’’, presenting a view of a world in which there is ‘‘nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain’’, and expressing best not the great orthodoxies of medieval faith, but the stubborn truths of human experience’’ (‘Chaucer and Boccaccio: The Knight’s Tale’, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings (Oxford, 1983), pp. 141-81 (p. 181)).

1. Poem opens with Theseus conquering Amazonian women, marrying queen Hippolyta – her and Emily are goods of war – he makes decision over Emily. – Hip. Is cut from narrative. 2. Theseus’ triumphal procession back to Athens is halted by a stark vision of female grief when a group of Theban women appeal to Theseus to avenge Creon’s tyrannical refusal to bury the body of their husbands. The women here describe Theseus as one to whom ‘Fortune hath yiven Victorie, and as a conquerour to lyven’ (915-16), whereas they are ‘wrecched’ (921), ‘caytyves’ (924) subject to ‘Fortune and hire false wheel’. a. Women have allegorical role to play – show downfall of fortune 3. Creon is described as ‘fulfild of ire and iniquitee’ and the knight draws attention to his ‘despit’ and ‘tirannye’ (ll. 940-1), contrasting him to the ‘gentle duc’ Theseus and his ‘herte pitous’ (ll. 952-3). 4. But Theseus himself soon sets out to exact a terrible revenge on Creon, bearing on his armour a ‘rede statue of Mars’, the god of War, and image of the ‘Mynotaur’, which he had earlier (and beyond the time frame of this poem) conquered in Crete with the help of Ariadne. a. Symbol of violence. 5. When he comes across the not-yet-dead bodies of Palamon and Arcite, Theseus decides - in a manner unique to Chaucer’s version of the tale - to imprison the pair ‘perpetuelly’ and without ‘ransoun’ (1024). a. Unique to Chaucer – tyrannical tendencies of Theseus. 6. Unnaturally brought back to life from a Theban past Theseus is seeking to suppress, the cousins are reborn into an Athenian present they continue to disrupt; and from the Knight’s perspective, they embody an irrationality that Theseus must chasten into civilization’ (Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 200). a. Brothers challenge Theseus’ order. 7. But ‘while the form of the amphitheater and its oratories bespeaks human control, [...] , the actual descriptions of the planetary deities witness instead to their implacability’ (Patterson, p. 224). Nb. Sufferings of love emphasised in temple of Venus. a. Control of battle lies in hands of deities.

Venus – piteous images in temples. – focus on tournaments. Mars – more chilling and dark than original. – dark images – dark forces  Compare Arcite’s pyrrhic victory: ‘a grim comment upon the inability of man to deal with the secret workings of the gods’ (Salter, ‘Chaucer and Boccaccio’, p. 168).  Note also that Chaucer omits the final section of Boccaccio’s original narrative where Arcite ascended to the heavenly spheres. Saturn – o o

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‘Saturn’s malevolence is emphasized rhetorically by the fact that the horrors he controls are described not iconographically but in his own words’ (Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides, p. 78) ‘The stage is now set, darkly, for the concluding section of the poem, which will illustrate the outmanoeuvering of human courage and magnanimity by divine ingenuity' (Salter, ‘Chaucer and Boccaccio’, p. 169) - Arcite seemingly victorious, only to fall from his horse; Emily is forced into a marriage she doesn’t want.

Theseus’ speech of order and unification undermined by ending of Knight’s tale – bleak. Speech attempts to transcend suffering of poem, but suffering outweighs this desire. ‘My lookyng is the fader of pestilence’ – black death, 100 years war – perhaps Chaucer didn’t want us to see story at face value, but look at glory of warfare and violence - plea for peace....