The Knight's Tale

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Main Points

Theseus meets the widows of the Theban war who remind him of Fortune's false wheel and thus fill him with pity. Theseus is then at the summit of Fortune's wheel. We are given the detail that Mars is the symbol he bears on his banner.

Palamon and Arcite are taken prisoners.

They see Emily in the garden next to the prison tower. They quarrel over the right to love her. Arcite claims that Palamon feels a religious affection whereas he (Arcite) loves her "for paramour," reminding us of the difficulties inherent in reconciling sexual love with Christian love, as the ideal of courtly love attempted to do. In any case, social bonds and obligations, such as oaths of loyalty, collapse in the presence of the wild, untamable sentiment of love.

Theseus's friend Perotheus prevails on Theseus to release Arcite from prison. At this point both are unhappy, Arcite because he is banished from the sight of Emily and Palamon because he thinks that now Arcite, who is free, has greater liberty to conquer Emily's love. Arcite's complaint, full of Boethian precepts about the ultimate beneficence of Fortune and man's propensity to seek happiness through mistaken goals, is quite ironic in terms of what will later happen to him. Likewise, Palamon also echoes the problems addressed by Boethius when he rebels against the presence of evil in the world, attributing his misfortune to the nature of the gods, unsympathetic to man.

Arcite receives a dream from Mercury telling him to return to Athens. Mercury, the god of poetry, recalls the founding of Thebes. Arcite has been so changed by love sickness that he is unrecognizable, so he has no fear of returning to Athens where he is employed as a chamberlain, under the name of Philostrate. One night, Arcite goes to a grove to do observance to May.

In the meantime, Palamon escapes from prison and hides in the same grove with the intention of going the next day to seek help amongst his friends in Thebes. Palamon sees Arcite, and, more importantly, hears Arcite confess to his real identity. Arcite recalls the story of the foundation of Thebes by Amphion, the harpist, who raised the city with the harmony of his sweet song. Mercury, god of eloquence and rhetoric, brought him the harp. As Lydgate explains in The Siege of Thebes, the harmony created by Amphion was his "crafty speche": thus the creative function of the king, who can harmonize diverse elements of society and cause cities to be built, is aligned with that of poets who "feyne in her writyng" worlds and fictions that are "passyng rich and royal of entaille".

From Lydgate's The Siege of Thebes
And his song/ this auctour can yow teche,
Was no thyng / but the crafty speche
Of this kyng / ycalled Amphioun
And thus the wallis made of lym and stoon,
Were Reysed first be syngying of this kyng
Lich as Poetys feyne in her writyng
Passyng Rich and Royal of entaille.

(In The Siege of Thebes, John Lydgate imagines that he joins the Canterbury pilgrims at Canterbury, and he tells the story of the siege of Thebes which precedes the opening to The Knight's Tale.)

Note the Knight's apostrophe to love, ll. 1623-7, which calls attention to the conflict between romantic love and religious love. Romantic love is cupidity, not charity.

Theseus, out hunting, happens to come upon Palamon and Arcite in the woods. Although both have betrayed him, he forgives them because he realizes that a man "wol helpe hymself in love, if that he kan." Love is a wild emotion that is not constrained by laws and customs.

Theseus ordains a trial by combat, to be held within fifty weeks, to resolve the conflict between Palamon and Arcite. He chooses to make the lists on the same place where he found Palamon and Arcite fighting in the grove. An unceremonious and unregulated fight in the woods will be replaced with a highly ceremonious and ordered event.

The lists is the poem's third walled-in edifice. The walls of the prison and the garden suggest man's lack of freedom in a world controlled by fate and chance, that is a world dominated by temporal values like power, success, and love rather than a desire for the supreme good. Entry into the arena, which can be seen as the arena of the human experience of the various catastrophes to which Fortune subjects men, is through the twin gates of love and war. The temple to Diana is not a means of access to the arena, but merely a niche in the wall. The decorations of all three altars emphasize the worst aspects of love, war, and jealousy. The altar of Venus suggests the similarity between Venus and Fortune while Mar's Temple sounds like a description of the sin of Ire. Mars's temple is connected with cold, a traditional attribute of hell. Felony, ire, dread, treason, strife, suicide, mischance, madness, murder, tyranny are the companions of Mars. Even Diana's temple evokes episodes of jealousy and revenge. Although the protagonists of the tale appeal to the gods to realize their desires for success and victory, what the gods actually bring within this huge symbol of civilized order are the most troubling questions of earthly life.

The knight deliberately recalls, in ll. 2105 and following, that activities such as tournaments are popular sports even at the present, not just in the pagan past. In fact, there were jousts at Smithfield in 1388, the lists for which were Chaucer's responsibility. Here's the way the Brut of England recorded those events.

"In this aforesaid parliament, and in the twelfth year of King Richard's reign, he let cry and ordain general jousts, that is called a tournament, of lords, knights, and squires. And these jousts and tournaments were held at London in Smithfield, for all manner of strangers, of whatever land and country they were from, and thither they were right welcome; and to them and to all others was held open household and great feasts; and also great gifts were given to all manner of strangers. And they of the king's side were all of one suit: their coats, their armour, shields, and their horses and trappings--all was white harts, with crowns about their necks and chains of gold hanging thereupon, and the crown hanging low before the hart's body; the which hart was the king's livery that he gave to lords and ladies, knights and squires, to know his household from other people. And at this first coming to their jousts, 24 ladies led these 24 lords of the Garter with chains of gold, and all in the same suit of harts as was before said, from the Tower, on horseback through the city of London into Smithfield where the jousts were to be held. And this feast and jousts were held general, and to all those who wished to come, of whatever land or nation that ever they came from, and this was held during 24 days, at the king's own cost, and these 24 lords to answer to all manner of people that would come thither. And thither came the Earl of St. Poule of France, and many other worthy knights with him from diverse parts, full well arrayed. And out of Holland and Heinalt came the Lord Ostrenaunde, that was the Duke of Holland's son and many other worthy knights with him, both from Holland and Heinalt, full well arrayed. And when these feasts and jousts were done and ended, the King thanked these strangers and gave them many great gifts, and then they took their leave of the king and of other lords and ladies and went home again to their own countries, with great love and much thanks."
The Brut, or the Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie (London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner and Co., Ltd, 1908) E.E.T.S., vol 2, p. 343, translation mine.

Arcite prays to Mars, Palamon to Venus, and Emily to Diana. Emily's prayer to Diana is one of the very few times we actually see Emily expressing a desire. Her wish for chastity seems to go beyond convention. She wants no part of any aspect of love. She does not merely reject courtship; she rejects marriage and even motherhood.

When Emily finishes her prayer, one coal dies out, then starts up again, while another blazes brightly, then extinguishes itself and begins to bleed. The description of the twig that speaks and bleeds is taken from Dante, Inf. XIII, ll. 31-41, and Dante in his turn borrowed the device from the tale of Polydore in Book III of the Aeneidwhere Polydore's treacherous murder for gold is revealed to Aeneas by the bleeding and speaking vegetation of the land of Thrace. In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil find that the circle of suicides is a horrible forest of contorted and deformed trees (the human nature degraded to the level of a plant, but without the beauty of vegetation). When Dante breaks off a piece of a branch, it begins to speak, reproaching Dante for his cruelty, and blood and words both begin to pour from the twig. It's Pier della Vigna, who had been secretary to Frederic II and who had committed suicide over despair at the calumnies spread against him. In the Knight's Tale, the bleeding twig clearly represents Arcite, and suggests the terrible crimes of murder and self-murder.

The debate between Mars and Venus, solved by Saturn under the direction of Jupiter, establishes a type of hierarchy analagous to that of Divine Providence over Fate as described by Boethius and Dante: Jupiter employs Saturn to resolve the conflict between Mars and Venus just as Divine Providence uses Fate for purposes that are beyond human understanding. L. 2529: The description of Theseus, "as he were a god in trone," underscores the fact that Theseus falls short of being a god. His attempts at order and control ultimately fail.

The fight between Palamon and Arcite recalls their earlier fight in the grove. Both are compared to wild animals.

The Knight's remarks, in 2809, ff., sound curiously agnostic for a Christian knight. It's possible that he's referring to the problem of the possibility of salvation for a pagan who has never been baptized and thus refuses to comment on whether Arcite was saved or not, but the knight's suggestion that he cannot believe in something that he himself has not seen or experienced suggests a more general problem.

Egeus's description of the world as a "thurghfare ful of wo" and of human life as "pilgrymes, passynge to and fro" is perhaps the only possible solution to the problems of injustice in the world that a pagan culture is able to give. Not just love and war, but human life itself is an imprisonment, from which the only release is through death. Thus it is fitting that the fight in the grove, the tournament, and Arcite's grave are all located on the same spot.

Theseus's "First Mover" speech, a circular structure like the arena itself, attempts to give an appropriate solution to all the questions the tale has raised. Theseus's first response to the discord between Palamon and Arcite was to resort to human reason and ingenuity. In place of a murderous combat in a forest, Theseus opposed the tournament that would ritualize and civilize and make a game of love and death. He attempts to control evil by restraining and governing natural impulses by the limits of civilization, just as Jupiter had done among the gods. However, natural reason and goodness are not enough to eliminate unhappiness from man's life. Theseus's speech is both an attempt to account for the presence of evil in the world and to incorporate that evil into a scheme that is ultimately purposeful. An issue that was of some concern to medieval Christians was the possibility of salvation for 'noble pagans.' Can man's reason alone lead him to deduce the existence of God? Theseus goes so far as to deduce the existence of an eternal and beneficent supreme architect, and also an eternal realm in opposition to a realm of constant change. He concludes that nothing happens without a cause, and that the cause is determined by Jupiter. He also concludes that the First Mover has harmonized all the discordant elements of the universe by establishing certain necessary limits or "boundes, that they may nat flee," such as the natural term of life that can be shortened but not lengthened. However, Theseus does not arrive at Lady Philosophy's Stoic doctrine of personal victory through concentration on the supreme good, and far less does he intuit the possibility of grace and redemption. Rather, his is a philosophy of acceptance and resignation. Since it does no good to complain, we may as well accept the fact that human life is made up both of joy and woe, knowing that the cyclical transmutation from joy to unhappiness derives ultimately from a divine order, not the random chance of Lady Fortune's wheel. Thus the marriage with which the poem ends, the harmonious weaving together of the previous causes of unhappiness, is not a triumph of man's reason over earthly unhappiness, but a recognition of the limits of man's reason.
Thomas Aquinas discusses the possibility that some people, even though they have not been baptized, can attain salvation by virtue of baptism of desire (a person who desires baptism but is prevented from receiving it) and baptism of blood (death by martyrdom). From the Summa Theologica, III, 68, 2: Whether a man can be saved without Baptism?

Objection 1. It seems that no man can be saved without Baptism. For our Lord said (John 3:5): "Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." But those alone are saved who enter God's kingdom. Therefore none can be saved without Baptism, by which a man is born again of water and the Holy Ghost.
Objection 2. Further, in the book De Eccl. Dogm. xli, it is written: "We believe that no catechumen, though he die in his good works, will have eternal life, except he suffer martyrdom, which contains all the sacramental virtue of Baptism." But if it were possible for anyone to be saved without Baptism, this would be the case specially with catechumens who are credited with good works, for they seem to have the "faith that worketh by charity" (Gal. 5:6). Therefore it seems that none can be saved without Baptism.
Objection 3. Further, as stated above (1; 65, 4), the sacrament of Baptism is necessary for salvation. Now that is necessary "without which something cannot be" (Metaph. v). Therefore it seems that none can obtain salvation without Baptism.
On the contrary,Augustine says (Super Levit. lxxxiv) that "some have received the invisible sanctification without visible sacraments, and to their profit; but though it is possible to have the visible sanctification, consisting in a visible sacrament, without the invisible sanctification, it will be to no profit." Since, therefore, the sacrament of Baptism pertains to the visible sanctification, it seems that a man can obtain salvation without the sacrament of Baptism, by means of the invisible sanctification.
I answer that, The sacrament or Baptism may be wanting to someone in two ways. First, both in reality and in desire; as is the case with those who neither are baptized, nor wished to be baptized: which clearly indicates contempt of the sacrament, in regard to those who have the use of the free-will. Consequently those to whom Baptism is wanting thus, cannot obtain salvation: since neither sacramentally nor mentally are they incorporated in Christ, through Whom alone can salvation be obtained.
Secondly, the sacrament of Baptism may be wanting to anyone in reality but not in desire: for instance, when a man wishes to be baptized, but by some ill-chance he is forestalled by death before receiving Baptism. And such a man can obtain salvation without being actually baptized, on account of his desire for Baptism, which desire is the outcome of "faith that worketh by charity," whereby God, Whose power is not tied to visible sacraments, sanctifies man inwardly. Hence Ambrose says of Valentinian, who died while yet a catechumen: "I lost him whom I was to regenerate: but he did not lose the grace he prayed for."
Reply to Objection 1. As it is written (1 Kgs. 16:7), "man seeth those things that appear, but the Lord beholdeth the heart." Now a man who desires to be "born again of water and the Holy Ghost" by Baptism, is regenerated in heart though not in body. thus the Apostle says (Rm. 2:29) that "the circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not of men but of God."
Reply to Objection 2. No man obtains eternal life unless he be free from all guilt and debt of punishment. Now this plenary absolution is given when a man receives Baptism, or suffers martyrdom: for which reason is it stated that martyrdom "contains all the sacramental virtue of Baptism," i.e. as to the full deliverance from guilt and punishment. Suppose, therefore, a catechumen to have the desire for Baptism (else he could not be said to die in his good works, which cannot be without "faith that worketh by charity"), such a one, were he to die, would not forthwith come to eternal life, but would suffer punishment for his past sins, "but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire" as is stated 1 Cor. 3:15.
Reply to Objection 3. The sacrament of Baptism is said to be necessary for salvation in so far as man cannot be saved without, at least, Baptism of desire; "which, with God, counts for the deed" (Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. 57).
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