A Curious Condition of Being: The City and the Grove in Chaucer's Knight's Tale

The citizens of Chaucer's Knight's Tale—divine, semi-divine, human—occupy a curious universe. ¹ It is a place where the principle of contradiction does not hold: Thebes is demolished by line 900 but is somehow reconstituted by line 1283; the grove is razed to make room for the amphitheater and razed again to provide place and material for Arcite's funeral. In this cosmos, the writ of the high god Jupiter does not run—at least not in the fundamental matter of resolving the strife in heaven between Venus and Mars. Both city and grove are crucial sites in the Tale's action, and their moving in and out of existence establishes the Tale's elastic ontology, while the displacing of Jupiter by Saturn unsettles the Tale's presumed theological hierarchy. The inhabitants of this universe find nothing remarkable in such physical, or metaphysical, eccentricities, for such are the conditions of their being. They are simply unaware of the heavenly friction. The audience, both Chaucer's contemporaries and ourselves, thus discover a situation in which the characters with whom we might identify are as ignorant of the fabric of the universe they inhabit as they are blind to the labyrinthine ways of the gods who, they suppose, rule it. This is, arguably, the impression that Chaucer wanted to achieve, since he changed his primary source—Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Teseida delle nozze di Emilia—to create his characters' invincible ignorance. I look first at Thebes, then the grove, finally at Theseus's first Mover lecture and the circumstances surrounding it.

Thebes is destroyed in the Tale's opening movements. Theseus, under the banner of Mars, with his personal pennon showing the Mynotaur, ² moves against the city and Creon in the matter of the unburied Argive dead. After dispatching the tyrant, Theseus "rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter" (1(A) 990). Subsequently, "in that feeld he took al nyght his reste, / And dide with al the countree as hym leste" (1(A) 1003–4). I understand these lines to mean that Theseus razed the city totally and dispersed that portion of the population that remained alive. ³

Palamon and Arcite acknowledge that their city and kinsmen have been annihilated. Palamon is clear on the subject in his long monologue occasioned by the freeing of Arcite, when he attributes the destruction of their line to the fury of Saturn and juno:

"But I moot been in prisoun thurgh Saturne,And eek thurgh Juno, jalous and eek wood,That hath destroyed wel ny al the bloodOf Thebes with his waste walles wyde;"

(1(A) 1328–31)

Arcite agrees with Palamon's assessment. In his initial grove ruminations, he laments the eradication of city and royal line because of Juno's anger:

"How longe, Juno, thurgh thy crueltee,Woltow werreyen Thebes the citee?Allas, ybroght is to confusion The blood roial of Cadme and Amphioun.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .Allas, thou felle Mars! Allas Juno!Thus hath youre ire oure lynage al fordo,Save oonly me and wrecched Palamoun."

(1(A) 1543–46; 1559–61)

Thebes has been destroyed, then, and Palamoun and Arcite are the last of the line of Cadmus. But not quite, or not all the time.

Earlier in his monologue, Palamoun voices his fears of what the liberated Arcite might do:

"Thow walkest now in Thebes at thy large,.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .Thou mayst, syn thou hast wisdom and manhede,Assemblen alle the folk of oure kynrede,And make a werre so sharp on this citeeThat by som aventure or some treteeThow mayst have hire to lady and to wyf."

(1(A) 1283; 1285–89)

Thus, in a speech that asserts Thebes' ruin, we have a projection of Arcite walking about in precisely that ruined city. Certainly, by line 1355, Thebes has been well and truly reconstructed, since Arcite, returning thence from Athens, remains "… a yeer or two" (1(A) 1381). It is from this Thebes that he, disguised as Philostrate and a servant to Theseus in Athens, draws an income to supplement...