The Knight’s Tale
The first of the Canterbury Tales is also among the longest and most leisurely. As befits a member of the conservative English gentry, it is set, more or less, in the ancient Greece of Theseus, although the characters are all essentially medieval.
Interestingly, there is good reason to think that Chaucer wrote the tale before starting the Canterbury Tales in general; he refers to it in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women.51
The tale — which eventually became the basis for The Two Noble Kinsmen52 — is elaborate, but the plot comes down to this: Arcite and Palamon are cousins and blood brothers who have vowed always to love and support each other. When their city of Thebes is overthrown they are captured by Theseus, who imprisons them. While in prison, they both see Emelye, Theseus’s sister-in-law. Both eventually manage to gain their freedom — and both try to pay court to Emelye. And to fight over her.
At this point, Theseus intervenes. He orders them to come back in a year with a hundred men each and battle over Emelye — the winner, obviously, gets her. Much is made of their preparations, and the noble warriors they gather, but the point is the fight. Although it is a real contest, the tournament rules are such that men need not die; if someone is seriously wounded, he is removed from the combat — an important point, because it means that Palamon or Arcite could lose the battle and yet live.
Before the fight, each of the primary characters prays. Arcite prays to Mars for victory in the combat;53 Palamon prays to Venus that he will win Emelye; Emelye prays to Diana to remain free of either but, if she must be wed, to wed the one who truly loves her.
Both Arcite and Palamon fight well and are wounded. After much gore, Palamon suffers the first serious wound; he survives but loses the battle. But Arcite, although the victor in the battle, falls from his horse and is mortally wounded. He has won, but he cannot claim his prize. At the end, he makes peace with Palamon, telling Emelye to marry him and be happy; he will be a good husband.
So all prayers are answered: Arcite was victorious in battle, Palamon wins Emelye, and Emelye wins a good husband. But the fellowship of Arcite and Palamon, which seemed the point of the story at the start, has ended.
The Knight’s Tale is most likely loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Teseida delle nozze d’Emelia,54 but Chaucer has been unusually free with the source; only about a third of the lines correspond to Boccaccio.55 What is interesting is that, although Chaucer has dramatically shortened the tale, the Knight’s Tale is not simply an abridgment. Although much has been cut, much has been added as well — so much that Chaucer is considered to have transformed an epic into a romance.56 “The crowning modification... is the equalization of Palamon and Arcite.”57 In Boccaccio, Arcita is the hero and Palamone “is a secondary figure, necessary to the plot because he brings about the death of Arcita.”58 Chaucer will have none of that. Although neither Palamon nor Arcite is really characterized, they are given almost exactly equal attention — and equal distinction. ”Palamon and Arcite are differentiated in individual scenes, but neither stands out especially from the generality of brave, lovestruck young men.”59 “It seems that Chaucer has deliberately levelled the two, so that the outcome of the story will appear not nobly tragic but bleakly capricious.”60 I would say rather that the changes are such as to make the story require a resolution but not care which way it is resolved — we don’t care who wins. The story is about both lovers, and about their relationship. Chaucer’s reference to it in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women speaks of it as “the love of Palamon and Arcite”61 — in other words, of the relationship they had and allowed to fail. As Charles Muscatine wrote, “the Knight’s Tale is essentially neither a story, nor a static picture, but a poetic pageant, and that all its materials are organized and contributory to a complex design expressing the nature of the noble life.”62
Possibly Chaucer was trying, in the Knight’s Tale, to create something new; the result has been called the “philosophical romance.”63 But if it is to be a study in philosophy, it must partake of philosophical ideas. These ideas largely derive from The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius,64 but there is more to it. Boethius supplied the philosophy of the ending, but it is Chaucer who supplied the conflict of loyalties.
“Though Boethius was a Christian.... he makes no specific references to Christianity and by avoiding the issue of the life to come places the emphasis of his thought on this world and man’s deportment in it — precisely what Chaucer does in the Knight’s Tale. It is this emphasis that makes Boethius’s book and Chaucer’s tale so strongly stoic: with no promise of reward or punishment man must adjust himself to life on earth as if there were no other.”65 But is this not exactly what Griselda did also? She obeyed Walter not in hope of reward but because it was her trouthe.
To Boccaccio, the earlier friendship of the Palamon and Arcite hardly matters. To Chaucer, the friendship of the two men — and its breakdown — is the key to the whole tale.
Palamon and Arcite begin the story as close friends. They have a bond, and that bond brings rules — to put it in Chaucerian terms, they have trouthe to each other. By making them equally significant characters, Chaucer makes the trouthe equal, and makes it binding both ways. “This conflict is a twofold one: there is the love conflict, but there is also the conflict of loyalty between the two young men; a loyalty of kinship since they were cousins, and a loyalty of friendship as sworn brothers, and also each was ‘ybounden as a knyght’ to the other.”66
The first part of the poem shows love — perhaps the “courtly love” that was such a hot topic in the Middle Ages, although Chaucer’s attention to “courtly love” has almost certainly been overstated67 — overthrowing the two blood brothers’ pledges to one another. The ending shows that the pledges are stronger than the love. To put it another way, the contest over Emelye violates Palamon’s and Arcite’s trouthe. The whole point of the plot is to restore it.
Admittedly one of the combatants lives and one dies. On the other hand, one is victorious and one is defeated — and, for a knight, reputation is often held to be worth more than life. So who wins the greater prize? It is not clear. What is clear is that both suffer for breaking trouthe.
Arcite’s last words are of love, and yet not really of love, and they include perhaps the most famous in all the Knight’s Tale:
What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave
Allone, withouten any compaignye.68
Even in death, Arcite will be Emelye’s servant:
To yow, my lady, that I love moost,
But I bequethe the servyce of my goost
To yow aboven every creature....69
And when he lists the virtues he wishes still to hold, trouthe leads the list:
And Juppiter so wys my soule gye...
That is to seyen, trouthe, honour, knyghtehede,
Wysdom, humblesse, estaat, and heigh kyndrede,
Fredom, and al that longeth to that art....70
Meanwhile, Palamon and Emelye form a true bond of trouthe:
For now is Palamon in alle wele,
Lyvynge in blisse, in richesse, and in heele,
And Emelye hym loveth so tendrely,
And he hire serveth so gentilly,
That never was there no word hem bitwene
Of jalousie or any oother teene.71
It is a happy, hopeful, and troutheful ending. It is arguable that it even creates a second and better trouthe relationship, for Theseus uses the marriage of Emelye and Palamon to build unity in his realm.72
The intricacy of all this is noteworthy. Admittedly Chaucer did not invent this, since it was in his source, but his modifications make it more dramatic. There are many ways the tale could have ended. Palamon could have killed Arcite, or vice versa, or they could have killed each other. Emelye could have fled the city, or married someone else. All of these are resolutions, but they are not solutions. A true solution was required to satisfy trouthe, and that is what we have. This is important because some of our other romances (notably the Franklin’s Tale) also require complicated solutions to work. Trouthe is hard — but it’s worth it.
It is true that the Knight’s Tale is followed by the elaborate obscenity that is the Miller’s Tale, and the Miller’s Tale subtly takes up and distorts the themes of the Knight’s Tale,73 so that it might seem that Chaucer is parodying or even denying the validity of his first tale. But this need not follow. The Knight’s Tale shows the way an Eternal Triangle works in a world guided by trouthe; the Miller’s Tale shows the world without trouthe — and then the Reeve’s Tale shows things going even more downhill.74 The Miller parodies the world of the Knight, and shows that not everyone is as virtuous as those in the Knight’s world — but that is, in a way, the point: Virtue, particularly this virtue, makes things better. The Miller’s Tale’s “vulgar and lusty view of ‘love’ and ‘justice’ make the Knight’s views in retrospect less incredibly idealized, less impossibly sentimentalized.”75
Love did not triumph, but trouthe did, because Palamon and Arcite’s betrayal of their blood brotherhood cost one of them his life.
Woodcut of the Knight, from Richard Pynson’s 1490 edition of The Canterbury Tales.