The Parliaments of Gods and Men in the Knight's Tale

In a plangent lament in the Knight's Tale, the Theban warrior Palamon accuses the gods of injustice upon suffering perpetual imprisonment after the fall of his city to a withering Athenian siege:

"O crueel goddes that governeThis world with byndyng of youre word eterne,And writen in the table of atthamauntYoure parlement and youre eterne graunt,What is mankynde moore unto you holdeThan is the sheep that rouketh in the folde?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      What governance is in this prescience,That giltelees tormenteth innocence?"

(I 1303–8, 1313–14)¹

Palamon's complaint is typically grouped as one of the Boethian speeches in the Knight's Tale, as it reverberates with the theme of the suffering of innocents voiced by Boethius's persona in the first book of the Consolation of Philosophy.² From a Boethian perspective, Palamon's complaint against the gods' "parlement" and "graunt"—synonymous terms for a decree or decision reached through consultation³—appears vainly directed against the sublunary realm of Fortune, to which the art of politics belongs and which is to be transcended. Yet, curiously, the Knight holds out the possibility that temporal government is part of the solution to human suffering rather than part of the problem, as his tale purports to demonstrate at its resolution (which after all is a political assembly despite the Boethian resonances of Duke Theseus's celebrated "first mover" speech).⁴ Not coincidentally, neither parlement nor the substantive form of graunt appears in Chaucer's translation of the Consolation. I point to the peculiar use of this terminology in Palamon's speech because it provides a key to understanding the derivation and function of another major speech, Saturn's counsel to Venus "in the hevene above" (I 2439), which in turn provides an eye-opening gloss on Theseus's speech at the Athenian parliament.

The rhetorical thread running through all of these passages is the deliberative episode of classical epic. Saturn's speech is an example of the "councils of the gods" topos, with which Chaucer would have been conversant through his reading of Statius' Thebaid as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Virgil's Aeneid.⁵ The first two are established sources for the Knight's Tale, while the third may have aided Chaucer in creating the conciliar exchange between Saturn and Venus.⁶ I mention these texts because all three speeches referenced above are additions Chaucer made to his main source, Boccaccio's Teseida. Chaucer's employment of the discourse of counsel provides an interface between literature and history in the work of an author who intimately knew both the fictional councils of Olympus and the real-life assemblies of Westminster. This essay seeks to explore that interface by focusing on both the rhetorical and political contexts of the discourse of counsel in the Knight's Tale.

In particular, I am interested in the use of parliamentary language in the deliberative passages of the Knight's Tale. In order to provide an historical context for several passages that maintain traces of parliamentary rhetoric, I will apply a cluster of premodern norms of English political discourse to the narrative: excessive deference, powerful patronage networks, extreme secrecy, strict exclusivity, and the belief that aristocratic rule is inherently rational and that, conversely, the opinion of the masses is inherently irrational. While the Knight's Tale makes us aware of how these norms function to control discourse within aristocratic culture, it also inevitably makes us aware of their constructedness. Rather than functioning as a metanarrative that would sacralize Theseus's secular authority, the Olympian council reveals the systematic violence and factionalism at the heart of his government. The Athenian parliament and the Olympian council turn out to operate under the same cynical set of rhetorical conditions, and the fact that they are informed by parliamentary discourse makes them a troubling critique of the real-life councils Chaucer knew firsthand as a member of Richard II's court.

David Anderson has reconstructed how Chaucer appropriated Boccaccio's Teseida not for its own sake, but to draw out those patterns in his narrative that...