Epic

It seems likely that the issue of impersonation has given readers more trouble in the Knight's Tale than in the tales of the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath at least in part because, unlike those two pilgrims, the Knight has no declared interest in self-presentation. At the end of the General Prologue he agrees in a bare three lines to tell the first tale (I, 853–55) and commences at once on the narrative: "Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,/Ther was a duc . . ." (859–60). Since his announced aim is only to tell a story, and he is not his own subject as the Wife and Pardoner are theirs, it is not surprising that his voice is relatively recessive and self-effacing, directing us more toward the narrative than the narrator, even when, as he does at the end of Part I, he steps back

to address the audience directly: "Yow loveres axe I now this questioun:/Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun?" (1347–48). Even those critics who have been willing to consider the role of the Knight in the Knight's Tale have tended to follow its narrator's lead and minimize his agency, his active working on and with the story. They are inclined to categorize the traces of him they find not as conscious self-presentations but as self-revelations, frequently of the unconscious or self-betraying kind. We have heard—when the issue of the story's narrator has been raised at all—of a naive and idealistic Knight who does not see how his own story questions his beliefs, a romantic Knight caught by reality but aspiring to the ideal, a Knight in bad faith whose successes have led him to dodge the darker implications of his world. I do not know of an interpretation that consistently gives the Knight credit for understanding and facing his own tale, for being fully capable of seeing in it what we see.^[1]

Yet a voice-oriented reading of the tale brings out a narrator who is the consistent agent of the full range of the poem's effects: its humor and pathos as well as its splendor; its horror and grim realism as well as its shining idealism; its insistence on chaos, madness, and the brute misery of the human condition as well as its praise of order and the noble life. Such a reading restores to the Knight two areas of concern that are ordinarily seen primarily as background, as matters of conscious concern, if at all, to Chaucer as maker of the poem rather than to the Knight as teller of the tale, and in so doing restores to him his disenchantment as well. The two areas I have in mind are the relation of the tale to the historical state of knighthood in the fourteenth century and the relation of the tale to its literary sources. In the first instance, I will be concerned to show that the tale functions as both a

[1] Let me at once single out Neuse, "The Knight," as an honorable, if ultimately only partial, exception to this generalization. Neuse's article remains for me the best single discussion of the tale and the nearest precursor of my own approach to it. For examples (by no means exhaustive) of the versions of the Knight listed in the text, see the following: (1) Naive and idealistic: Howard, Idea, who, despite his penetrating remarks on what he calls the obsolescence of knightly ideals in the fourteenth century (94–97, 113), does not allow the Knight himself access to the ironic vision that reveals it (esp. 227–37); Salter, "Introduction," in Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale, 7–36; Spearing, "Introduction," in Selected Tales from Chaucer: The Knight's Tale, 48–50; Thurston, Artistic Ambivalence, esp. 68. (2) Realistic but aspiring: Foster, "Humor in the Knight's Tale. " (3) Bad faith or worse: Ebner, "Chaucer's Precarious Knight"; Helterman, "Dehumanizing Metamorphoses"; T. Jones, Chaucer's Knight, passim.

representation of and a response to the well-attested decline of chivalry in the period: the mercenary greed, the constant treachery and switching of sides, the brutal and unnecessary violence visited on the defenseless, and the continual subordination of chivalric ideals to political necessities that fill the pages of Froissart and Terry Jones, to search no further afield. Whatever may be said against Jones, he can tell us what the Knight has seen because he provides a set of glosses on what is more obliquely, but no less insistently, represented in the tale itself. If we can see these things, and if, despite William Brandt, Froissart could see them, it should come as no surprise that the Knight sees them too and that, again like the Wife and the Pardoner, he has attitudes toward the social conditions that constitute his estate.^[2] Like Froissart, the Knight is aware that if chivalry is to be sustained as a viable ideal, it must come to terms as best it can with those human weaknesses of the strong that make them so dangerous and with the demands of practical politics. Ultimately I will argue that the tale itself is such an act of coming to terms with historical and social reality, an instance of the doing of knighthood. Both the Knight's maintenance of chivalry and his disenchanted criticism of it are the story he tells.

In fact, the track of the Knight's historical disenchantment with chivalry as an institution is most clearly registered, at least at first, in his dissatisfaction with its most cherished fantasies, which are also his own. From the beginning he places the tale in relation to its "sources" in the larger sense of the generic discourses of epic and romance that

[2] In the case of Froissart this is not the place to make the argument. The reader is directed, however, to the tale of the ill-fated Franco-Burgundian and Hungarian expedition against the sultan Bajazet that occupies much of the latter portion of Book IV of the Chronicles, especially to the extraordinary chapter 89 of that book and above all to the Count de Nevers's report of the Turks' opinion of the schism in chapter 91: "The sultan thought our faith erroneous, and corrupted by those that ought to have kept its purity; and the Turks laughed and made their jokes at it. . . . I believe they are perfectly well acquainted . . . with our schisms in the church, and how the Christians are at variance with one another, respecting the two popes of France and Italy; and the Saracens are wonderfully surprised how the kings of the different countries suffer it" (654). Such outspoken assessments are not rare in Book IV. Brandt's Shape of Medieval History has been an influential exponent of the historical structuralist position that "most aristocratic writers [of chronicles] assume aristocratic stances even while they write about them; they do not notice things that do not cohere within those stances" (81). Though he specifically exempts the socially marginal Froissart from the extreme form of this class-conditioned perception, he does not recognize the actual critical and analytical thrust of the Chronicles. I do not wish at this point to enter into the controversy over Terry Jones's book. For a sensible recent contribution, see Brown and Branch, Review of Terry Jones, Chaucer's Knight.

supply much of its ideological justification in mystified forms. It is important to see that the details of the tale operate in the context of these larger discursive fields, that they are "stylized" in Sontag's sense of the word. Here we can turn immediately to the text, which provides a clear, if complex, characterization of the speaker's attitude toward his sources at its outset:

Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour
That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne;
What with his wysdom and his chivalrie,
He conquered al the regne of Femenye,
That whilom was ycleped Scithia,
And weddede the queene Ypolita,
And broghte hire hoom with hym in his contree
With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee,
And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.
And thus with victorie and with melodye
Lete I this noble duc to Atthenes ryde,
And al his hoost in armes hym bisyde.

And certes, if it nere to long to heere,
I wolde have toold yow fully the manere
How wonnen was the regne of Femenye
By Theseus and by his chivalrye;
And of the grete bataille for the nones
Bitwixen Atthenes and Amazones;
And how asseged was Ypolita,
The faire, hardy queene of Scithia;
And of the feste that was at hir weddynge,
And of the tempest at hir hoom-comynge;
But al that thyng I moot as now forbere.
I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere,
And wayke been the oxen in my plough.
The remenant of the tale is long ynough.
I wol nat letten eek noon of this route;
Lat every felawe telle his tale aboute,
And lat se now who shal the soper wynne;
And there I lefte, I wol ayeyn bigynne.
          (859–892)

This opening passage enacts a motion, which the tale itself will recapitulate, from the there and then ("whilom") of fable, the ideal and

heroic past, to the colloquial immediacy of here and now on the pilgrimage. The Knight is isolating his particular tale from the vast storehouse of "olde stories" in which it is embedded, bringing it forward for his present audience. His initial act thus calls attention to itself as a selection from sources and in particular an act of compression in the fiction that is analogous to Chaucer's act of selecting, editing, and compressing Boccaccio and Statius (the latter is a source the Knight acknowledges himself [2294]) outside the fiction.^[3]

This selective operation on what we can identify in a broad sense as a prior text^[4] identifies the Knight's telling as an act of rereading the generic discourse of chivalry something like the Wife of Bath's recounting of her autobiography and even more like the Pardoner's handling of his exemplum. Of course any retelling of a story the teller does not make up is like this, but what makes the more active editorial image apposite in the Canterbury Tales generally and in the Knight's Tale in particular is the way the text features a set of attitudes toward the source as such. At the simplest level the Knight is aware, and says so, that the story in its original form (something like "The Deeds of Theseus," perhaps) is not suitable to the present occasion: at the very least it is too long. But the text also registers the attraction that storied world has for him, and nowhere more than when he begins to disengage himself from it. The number of things he announces that he will not tell us (growing more and more concrete and detailed up to the tempest, when he breaks off) and the way the voice lingers over the repeated rhymes, femenye/chivalrye, Ypolita/Scithia, all betray a reluctance to let go of what "I wolde have toold yow," the clear and noble representation of his own tradition enshrined in the old books. This attraction is in tension with, and finally controlled by, the Knight's awareness of the need to discipline his imagination, to accede to the

[3] Compare the discussion of Janekyn's book and the sources of the Wife of Bath's Prologue above, chapter 5. There is a convenient summary of Chaucer's use of the Teseida in Riverside Chaucer, 827, and a helpful account of the general tenor of his changes in Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 117–21.

[4] "The Knight's learning comes not, as a clerk's learning would have, from books, but from a body of lore some of which was preserved in books but most of which was probably passed on orally. It is useful when we think of medieval oral traditions to suppose that there were separate traditions for separate groups—a 'folklore' of the people, a 'knightlore' of the aristocracy, a 'clerklore' among churchmen." Howard, Idea, 228. It is worth remembering, however, how often the Knight refers to his sources as "olde bookes" and the like. It seems clear that at least in the case of this story the speaker thinks of it as a predominantly literary thing, though generic rather than specific.

claims (perhaps the impatience) of others, and to make something of his story that recognizes the demands of the situation in which he speaks. The motion from past to present and literature to life is also a motion from nostalgia to social responsibility. But the speech is structured in such a way as to bring out the effort as well as the control, the sense that there is something to be controlled. It is important to keep this double attitude or ambivalence firmly in view since it is one of the great stylistic facts of the poem and ultimately a key to its meaning.

The Knight's Tale is a romance grafted onto an epic, the story of the loves of the young Theban knights Palamon and Arcite for the Amazon Emelye, sister-in-law of Theseus, in the aftermath of Theseus's conquest of Amazonia, "the regne of femenye," and in the wake of his equally epic destruction of Thebes itself. The poem presents itself as a continuation of the last book of the Thebaid of Statius. This structural fact, which has been variously noted by critics,^[5] is itself the index of a particular way of proceeding on the part of the narrator: he tells a story (a love story) that is easiest to identify as a romance, but he begins with a set of epic themes in an epic world, and here already the ambivalence that concerns me is manifest.

In the foreground of the narration of the conquest of Thebes that opens the story proper is the heroic image of Theseus, "In al his wele and in his mooste pride" (895), hastening off to right the wrongs of the Theban women before he has even brought his bride home to Athens and slaying the villain Creon (the apparent source of the evil) "manly as a knyght/In pleyn bataille" (987–88). This heroic image is fostered by the often-noted stylization of this world, a kind of epic formality of language and clarified largeness of gesture whereby distressed ladies faint ceremonially before speaking their formal complaints of Fortune's false wheel.^[6] The generic intent of this stylization, its epic vouloir dire, is to abstract and idealize the action so as to celebrate the

[5] The most useful discussion of the relations of the tale to epic remains Haller, "Epic Tradition." There are good brief treatments of the issue as well in Cooper, Structure of the Canterbury Tales, 91–93, and Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 117–11. Important new ground is broken, especially with regard to the different treatments of Statius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer in relation to one another, in Hanning, "'Noble Designs and Chaos.'"

[6] The best discussion of this kind of epic style, including the staccato parataxis typical of the opening of the Knight's Tale, is Auerbach, Mimesis. The first five chapters are relevant, but see especially the account of Tacitus and late classical historiography, 29–35, and chapter 5, "Roland Against Ganelon," 83–107. Compare Brandt's account ofwhat he calls the aristocratic style in medieval chronicles, Shape of Medieval History, 81–105. In both cases first-rate structural and stylistic description is to a degree vitiated by failures of interpretation.

clarity and decisiveness of the heroic individual and his deeds, untrammeled by more realistic considerations. Indeed the text concentrates so firmly on Theseus and his might that the image of the hero tends to overpower the larger forces in whose name he putatively acts. The Argive women may be waiting in the temple of clementia for redress of grievances they ascribe to Fortune, but it is Theseus they have been awaiting for two weeks (928–29), and it is to him as the "Lord, to whom Fortune hath yiven/Victorie" (915–16) that they appeal—not just anyone's clemency will do. When the ladies have dramatized their low position on Fortune's wheel with a symbolic (and simultaneous) fall (948–511), it is Theseus alone who raises them:

Whan he saugh hem so pitous and so maat,
That whilom weren of so greet estaat;
And in his armes he hem alle up hente,
And in his armes he hem alle up hente,
And hem conforteth in ful good entente.
          (955–58)

Realistic description (all of them?) is subordinated to the symbolism of the single sweeping gesture of lifting up as an image for the redress of what the second line construes as a sad case, the casus feminarum illustrium. The language presents Theseus as dominating and controlling the motion of the wheel, as if he had replaced Fortune. Similarly, when the hero rides to Thebes:

The rede statue of Mars, with spere and targe,
So shyneth in his white baner large
That alle the feeldes glyteren up and doun;
And by his baner born is his penoun
Of gold ful riche, in which ther was ybete
The Mynotaur, which that he wan in Crete.
Thus rit this duc, thus rit this conquerour . . .
          (975–81)

That banner does not announce "Mars is coming" but "Theseus is coming." The image of the god is part of the splendor of the hero's display, almost like the trophy of his earlier deeds, the Minotaur, that

accompanies it: the hero is more real than the god. The Knight's concentration on Theseus and his glory thus stresses the primacy of the duke's heroic will. He is initially presented not so much as the embodiment of larger forces of order that much criticism has seen in him later in the tale but rather as an independent generator of action, the lord of Fortune and more effective than the gods, who makes order in the interest of his own heroic reputation: he swears "Upon the tiraunt Creon him to wreke/That al the peple of Grece sholde speke/How Creon was of Theseus yserved" (961–63).

Though the general attitude in the tale toward the deeds of Theseus seems clearly positive, those deeds also have darker implications. The conspicuously brusque epic style of the description has its traditional effect of concentrating attention on the celebration of the hero, but it also sometimes works to bring the darker implications forward in a way that smokes the edges of the bright image of the hero's glory. Thus the description of Theseus's first sight of the mourning women:

"What folk ben ye, that at myn homcomynge
Perturben so my feste with criynge?"
Quod Theseus. "Have ye so greet envye
Of myn honour, that thus compleyne and crye?
Or who hath yow mysboden or offended?
And telleth me if it may been amended,
And why that ye been clothed thus in blak."
          (905–11)

Awareness of potential envious enemies comes first here, almost as a reflex. It is followed by awareness of an alternative—the presence of a wrong, instantly conceived by Theseus as "to be righted—by me"; only then, apparently, does the visual detail of the black garments register. It is as if Theseus's actual visual perception were preprogrammed to give priority to the details of sensory data most relevant to his heroic being.^[7] This is the first instance in the poem of an attention to the processes of visual perception that will issue later in an extended treatment of the masculine gaze. For the moment, however, it is enough to note how the presentation catches the element of heroic self-regard in epic seeing, the jealous and contentious care for one's own reputation that are characteristic of this ethos. Similarly, if the

[7] See Van, "Theseus and the 'Right Way,'" 86–87.

single combat with Creon presents the good side of the heroic capability for violence, the effects of that violence on Thebes—"And rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter" (990)—seem less easily justified.^[8]

The Knight completes his narration of Theseus's noble deed with a brief account of the burning of the desecrated Argive corpses, leaving the sacrilege atoned and the "noble conquerour" resting in possession of "al the contree as hym leste" (1004). He follows immediately, however, with a more realistic image of the "pilours" ransacking and stripping in "the taas of bodyes dede" (1005). This more disenchanted description lets something harsher, and closer to the concrete experience of war, invade the stylized world of the tale. It sounds a theme that will later be embodied in the Temple of Mars and Arcite's broken body and does so in a style that departs noticeably from the rhetorical level of what precedes it. Not that this sort of treatment of defeated armies is unusual or even necessarily reprehensible in Chaucer's time; it is neither, as M. J. Keen's discussion of sieges in The Laws of War in the Later Middle Ages (119–33) makes clear.^[9] Rather, it is a question first of literary decorum. This concentration on details of war that are at once violent and mundane sorts a little uncomfortably with the less concrete and more elevated image of combat that precedes it, and it introduces a specific and "modern" note that contrasts with the relatively timeless epic world. The passage qualifies, and perhaps questions slightly, the smoothness of the celebratory epic surface in a way that can be brought back to Theseus as well. Its echo of the Argive widow's account of what Creon did—"Hath alle the bodyes on an heep ydrawe" (944)—makes it easier for us to reflect that in disposing of one heap of corpses, Theseus has created another.

Such touches suggest that the Knight is not entirely uncritical of the epic ideal as he finds it embodied in his "olde stories." There is something disturbing about the purity of Theseus's epic self-assertion, even

[8] Questions about this act of Theseus have often been raised in the literature: by Van, "Theseus and the 'Right Way'"; by Webb, the first modern assassin of the duke's character, "Reinterpretation of Chaucer's Theseus," 290–91, with citations of fourteenth-century protests against pillaging; by Underwood, "First of The Canterbury Tales, " in Owen, Discussions of the Canterbury Tales, 39; and by James Smith, "Chaucer, Boethius," who blames the Knight for Theseus's vacillating character.

[9] But see the documents cited in Webb, "Reinterpretation of Chaucer's Theseus," passim.

in a good cause, because it seems too heedless of consequences, especially social and political ones, and the style of the description tends to bring this out. If the heroic individual is given the powers of Fortune and the gods, he is also identified as the source of the bad effects of those powers as well as the good. The role of style in promoting this effect is especially clear in the passage that concludes the first, epic phase of the tale and introduces the protagonists of what is to follow:

Nat fully quyke, ne fully dede they were,
But by hir cote-armures and by hir gere
The heraudes knewe hem best in special
As they that weren of the blood roial
Of Thebes, and of sustren two yborn.
Out of the taas the pilours han hem torn,
And han hem caried softe unto the tente
Of Theseus; and he ful soone hem sente
To Atthenes, to dwellen in prisoun
Perpetuelly—he nolde no raunsoun.
And whan this worthy duc hath thus ydon,
He took his hoost, and hoom he rit anon
With laurer crowned as a conquerour;
And ther he lyveth in joye and in honour
Terme of his lyf; what nedeth wordes mo?
And in a tour, in angwissh and in wo,
This Palamon and his felawe Arcite
For everemoore, ther may no gold hem quite.
        (1015–32)

Though not much is made immediately of what Theseus has done to Thebes, the lineage of Palamon and Arcite keeps their public and political identity marginally alive in the passage and supplies a tacit reason for Theseus's actions. But although it is likely that he imprisons the Theban princes because they are members of a family that might otherwise cause him trouble, the fact that we are not told why he does it deflects attention from Theseus's concern for order or even realpolitik and stresses once again the arbitrariness of his power and his individual will.^[10] The last lines, with their hieratic, wheel-of-Fortune contrast of the magnificence of the conqueror and the wretchedness of

[10] Kolve has written well on the initial harshness of the image of Theseus, Imagery of Narrative, 98–102.

the vanquished, contribute to this effect by presenting the situation as if it were concluded and without further consequences, "perpetuelly," "for evermoore." As we shall see, Palamon and Arcite's political identity continues to dog the tale to its end, though they themselves do all they can to suppress and evade it. But even on first reading we cannot but be aware that the story has barely begun, and this recognition enforces a generic awareness of literary probabilities: conventional expectations about a story of this sort include the expectation that complications will soon follow, as of course they do. The Knight's voicing here, therefore, represents not his own assessment of the situation but the rhetorical miming of an epic style that subordinates questions of the consequences of heroic action to the memorializing of the hero's res gestae.

This sort of controlled but continual exaggeration of the hieratic stiffness of an antique, epic style, which I have been tracing throughout the opening of the poem, bespeaks the presence of a narrator for whom it is the embodiment of an antique, inadequate vision, one that will ultimately need to be brought up to date so as to render the heroic individual more responsive, and responsible, to the requirements of order and the noble life. This is the last time in the poem that we will see Theseus so abstractly and absolutely. From now on he will constantly be dealing with the consequences of this briefly frozen moment, exposed to increasingly realistic and modern pressures that will finally transform him, bringing him forward from the idealized past into the Knight's real world.