The Knight: The First Mover in Chaucer’s Human Comedy
- The KnightThe First Mover in Chaucer’s Human Comedy
Assistant Professor of English, University of Rhode Island
notes
1. See the commentary on the Knight’s Tale in E. T. Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York, 1958), 901, Recent critical views ate represented preeminently by Mr. Donaldson, C. Muscatine (“Form, Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale,’” PMLA LXV [1950], 911–29), and W. Frost (“An Interpretation of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” RES, XXV [1949], 289–304). Though I dispute what I believe to be a central point of their interpretations, my own analysis is of course greatly indebted to these and other writers on the Tale.
2. Dale Underwood, “The First of The Canterbury Tales,” ELH, XXVI (1959), 455. Paull F. Baum’s Chaucer: A Critical Appreciation (Durham, North Carolina, 1958), 84–104, with its valuable emphasis on the comic elements and the mixture of styles in the Knight’s Tale, anticipates some of my argument in this paper. But in the end Baum regards these features as more or less serious blemishes (90, 95, 96, 101). In what follows I shall try to show that they serve, rather, as an index of the narrator’s outlook.
3. See Underwood, passim. Underwood here goes back to the view most fully stated by Muscatine.
4. Underwood, 406.
5. Note, e.g., his recurrent use of occupatio; see note to line 884, F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 670–1. All Chaucer citations are taken from this edition.
6. Lines 1521–4. See Donaldson’s excellent paraphrase (905): “One is constantly keeping appointments one never made.”
7. The Knight’s later conduct does not exactly suggest a virginal modesty (cf., e.g., C 960 ff.; B2 3957 ff.).
8. An interesting point is the relation of the Knight (and his Tale) to contemporary historical realities; namely, the notorious decay of chivalry in the fourteenth century, its degeneration into a military instrument of power politics. An article by H. J. Webb (“A Reinterpretation of Chaucer’s Theseus,” RES, XXIII [1947], 289–96), is very suggestive in this respect. Cf. J. Huizinga, “The Political and Military Significance of Chivalric Ideas in the Late Middle Ages,” Men and Ideas (New York, 1959), 196–206.
9. For the Homeric prototype, see C. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), chap. X, “Fate, Time, and the Gods,” esp. 221–34. I am not suggesting that Chaucer had any direct knowledge of Greek literature, but Homer’s practice in this as in other respects influenced the later Roman epic with which Chaucer was undoubtedly acquainted.
10. For the suggestion that already in the Thebaid the gods perform such a double function, see Willy Schetter, Untersuchungen zur Epischen Kunst des Statius (Wiesbaden, 1960), 5–29.
11. Here and in the following two quotations I have italicized the terms reflecting the gods’ will-psychology.
12. Underwood, 465–6.
13. Compare Nature’s speech at the end of the Mutability Cantos.
14. Lines 2538–9; see also 2561–4. Even wartime tournaments between knights of opposing armies, Webb points out (“A Reinterpretation of Chaucer’s Theseus,” 295), were seldom allowed to result in death. He concludes that there was nothing unusual in Theseus’ decision, “unless it were a strange mildness in an otherwise rather harsh character,” and also suggests that it was prompted by desire to curry favour with the crowd.
15. Webb’s main contention is that the Tale shows us a Theseus who even at his most chivalrous displayed the ignoble traits that in later life led to his damnation (289). He cites four acts of Theseus in support of his contention, such as the injustice he commits in freeing Arcite and keeping Palamon imprisoned, commenting that “from the standpoint of medieval ethics (particularly as applied to rulers) he was something less than ‘noble’” in doing so (294). For mediaeval concern with the noble rider, see L. K. Born, “The Perfect Prince: A Study in Thirteenth-and Fourteenth-Century Ideals,” Speculum, III (1928), 470–504.
16. Except that the consequences of his willing may altogether...
