What the Trumpet Solo Tells Us: A Response

Poor Brian Helgeland! Belted by Bourdieu on one side, laid out by Lacan on the other, with a dash of Derrida to finish him off. Helgeland appeared in the programme for the New Chaucer Society Congress in 2002, but cancelled; perhaps he made the right decision. Can we ever have a conversation, we medievalists, with our avatars, the popular novelists and film-makers? Is that even the point?

Of course in reality there is considerable sympathy among medievalists, including those writing here, for Helgeland's largely amiable film and even, more broadly, for its free-wheeling approach to medieval history. I, like many medievalists, hurried off to an early screening of A Knight's Tale in 2001, with the usual twin sense that operates in such cases that, as a medievalist professional, I simply had to know about such popular phenomena and that enjoying it or not was really beside the point: this was work. In screening the film subsequently for students (thereby confirming that I was always in it for the pedagogical value) I have collected some favourite moments. One of them is a buried visual joke: in a shot of fourteenth-century London, it is possible to identify a few features of the medieval city. St Paul's Cathedral is there, but there also, if you happen to be looking at the right moment in the top right hand corner, is the London Eye: a medievalized, wooden version of the famous ferris wheel, on the banks of the Thames.

Another way into the film's approach to history is more overt and occurs at the beginning. The film opens with a pre-credit prologue, setting up the need for William Thatcher to impersonate a knight who has inconveniently died mid-tournament. As we watch this, we know we're in the Middle Ages because we can tell from costumes, armour, and the jousting context. We know, without thinking about it, that a kind of translation is going on, that really the characters are speaking some sort of Olde English, which is being cinematically, magically translated for us, but at the same time without entirely ending up as modern English: 'If they find out', says one of William's companions of the proposed impersonation, 'there'll be the devil to pay', which is not quite a modern idiom. But none of this matters. 'As an audience', writes William Woods,

we are extraordinarily tolerant of inconsistencies, perhaps because our feeling for the authentic can be sustained by what seems typical, the kinds of clothes, gestures, and so forth that we expect of medieval reality. Our prior knowledge of the medieval, built up from watching films and from other sources, allows for a range of specificity in the unique image.¹

We then shift to the jousting lists, and the opening credits. And this is introduced, for a moment, by a voice that is almost instantly familiar: Freddie Mercury's tones, quickly enfolded by the extravagant sound of Queen and their song – as the essays here have noted – 'We Will Rock You'. But the scene before us remains within the medieval setting. We are allowed to imagine that the sound is non-diegetic: that is, we can hear it, but they can't. It's not in the story, so this is Queen as intercessors, somewhere between us and the diegesis. While the song unfolds, there's a lot going on: people in the stands, knights charging past, all the colour and life of the Middle Ages. The sequence comes back a couple of times to some heralds, men wearing tabards, playing long trumpets or horns. As 'We Will Rock You' arrives at Brian May's squawking guitar solo, one of these heralds is seen in medium close-up. And at the moment the solo brings the song to its abrupt end on a wail of reverb and silence falls, this herald removes the trumpet from his mouth.

In that instant, what has so far been acceptable as non-diegetic sound, and hence as not entirely anachronistic, suddenly seems to enter the diegesis. The guitar solo, we seem...