Chaucer, The Knight's Tale

Question 1

Knight’s Tale: nature

Answer 1

• Astrology ~l.2987
• Fate & empiricism n21
• Transmutation ~l.2838
• Nature forgets n22
• “Fair cheyne of love” in Theseus’s speech, ~l.2987

Question 2

Knight’s Tale: history, memory

Answer 2

Could Palamon be channeling the new Christianity, post 12th c. Renaissance, while Arcite channels earlier Old Testament Christianity?

Question 3

Knight’s Tale: morality, identity

Answer 3

“Thyn is affeccioun of hoolynesse, / And myn is love as to a creature” ~l. 1159

Question 4

Knight’s Tale: genre

Answer 4

• Chivalric romance—quests for love
• Chaucer had thrown out a lot of the epic machinery that was in the Boccaccio version, Teseida, but there’s still epic stuff.
• Some elements of realism: contemporary courtly practices, many of them introduced. (See Stuart Robinson’s “Elements of Realism in the Knight’s Tale”)
• Counterbalanced by the distance of a pagan setting/characters.
• Lots of debate about what Arcite and Palamon stand in for, what they mean.

Question 5

Knight’s Tale: history of the tale

Answer 5

• Adapted from Boccaccio—and Chaucer had already made a tale about Palamon and Arcite before using it for CT.

Question 6

Knight’s Tale: Ideology (Christianity, revolution, old/new, status quo)

Answer 6

Could Palamon be channeling the new Christianity, post 12th c. Renaissance, while Arcite channels earlier Old Testament Christianity?
o The knight’s story is built around establishing a hierarchy, which is most explicitly laid out in Theseus’s speech at the end about the fair cheyne of love, a reference to the idea of a GREAT CHAIN OF BEING (LOVEJOY), something very prevalent in ARISTOTLE and especially in SCHOLASTIC interpretations of Aristotelian thought. So the tale supports this heirarchy, but there’s IRONY: it doesn’t acknowledge the way that this order was already founded on a kind of spiritual/devotional revolution (even ecclesiastical since it is followed by the 4th Lateran Council in 1215). So my interpretation is that ARCITE & PALAMON in some sense might be read as two historical views on Christianity–ostensibly a mainstream, status quo Christianity is reinforced by the end of the tale, but from the perspective of an older Christian perspective, the victory of Palamon is subversive.
- Thus the tale ends on this speech about order and is supposed to be followed by the monk(???) who would be an appropriate next step in a social order started by the knight–but the Miller’s interruption subverts this–what I’m saying is that the Miller’s interruption SEEMS OUT OF THE BLUE but it’s actually prefigured in the irony buried within the Knight’s Tale. This explains why the Miller’s story starts with a discussion of an astrologer who oversteps his bounds–the ordered Aristotelian spheres set up by Theseus are about to be broken by Nicholas.

Question 7

Knight’s Tale: art, artifice, meta-commentary on genre

Answer 7

o Discuss the ideology talking point first. Then explore how a change is also enacted by the generic evolution of the tale itself as it goes from Boccaccio’s Teseida to Chaucer’s tale—much of the epic machinery is stripped out. If the Knight’s Tale ends by insisting on order and the “Cheyne of love,” it does so in a rather ironic way. The epic is fairly insistent on the need for the warrior hero above and beyond the love hero—Cf Aeneid, in which the son of Venus must escape the feminine world of Dido and Carthage; ends with his uncharacteristic furor in slaying Turnus.

Question 8

Knight’s Tale: time of setting

Answer 8

The anachronisms of the story allow it to incorporate a broad range of historical material. See historical details elsewhere

Question 9

Knight’s Tale: do Palamon and Arcite need to stand in for something?

Answer 9

Yes. There are plenty of writings around this time that include the kind of totally circumstantial detail many now call “novelistic”–details that may have significance to the mimetic reality of the story but aren’t meant to convey some kind of cosmic, allegorical meaning (Sir THOPAS, JULIAN of Norwich, others) but the romance is naturally connected to the allegorical mode–it’s conducive to it. Think about Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso for an example of how these kinds of topoi beg for allegorical reading–we could get something of an idea of what Arcite is like even if all his actions and words were whited out of the manuscript and we were just looking at Palamon–their differences are always telling–the details about them are representative of their ultimate fate in the tale–they are singular and therefore invite us to align them with singular ideas or ideals.