The thing that most people know about The Canterbury Tales is that it’s full of good old-fashioned filth. The storytellers may be on a religious pilgrimage, but they’re just as interested in matters earthy as they are celestial things. For every religious reference, there’s a bum joke; scatology always follows eschatology.
The Knight’s Tale is a case in point. It is a story full of high-minded sacrifice, courtly love, complex delineations of rank and honour, and examples of chivalry in action. It’s set in an Athens ruled over by the legendary Theseus, but the account of Palamon and Arcite and their rivalry for the love of the “fair” Emily doesn’t feel particularly classical. If you wanted an archetypal story from the days of olde when knights were bolde, this would be it.
There’s a distinctly Christian edge to the story’s theology, with the Knight tackling some of the most pressing questions in medieval thinking. At one point, Palamon sits hopeless in jail and riffs on Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy. He questions whether divine foresight precludes free will:
What governaunce is in this prescience
That giltelees tormenteth innocence?
What kind of rule is this divine foresight when it torments guiltless innocents? Why would a just God torment the innocent? A weighty question.
Even the more ethereal material is worth taking seriously. It is, after all, beautiful. The plot of the Knight’s Tale may have been an influence on Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsman, but its poetry feels closer to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It isn’t only that Theseus and Hippolyta and a wood near Athens feature in both works, but that they both share a joy in the beauty of nature. Just as Shakespeare delights in that bank where the wild thyme grows, so Chaucer treats us to lines such as:
And firy Phebus riseth up so brighte,
That al the orient laugheth of the lighte,
And with his stremes drieth in the greves
The silver dropes hanginge on the leves …
“Firy Phebus” is the sun, and his streams of light are drying up the silver drops of dew hanging on the leaves in the groves – but you don’t really need to know the meaning to feel that this is a luminous scene. Most of the rest of the story is similarly bright, glowing and hyperreal. The kind of stuff that most high-minded poets have aimed for since the beginning of time.
But thankfully Chaucer is not most poets. Even at his most flowery, he can’t resist getting in the jokes. There’s a glorious scene when Palamon and Arcite first see Emily in a garden (symbolically enough), while trapped together in their prison tower. (I’m not ruling out symbolism there, either). To expound at length would probably spoil the joke, but I laughed out loud at the description of the men being pierced by Cupid’s arrows and immediately arguing over who saw Emily first – gloriously oblivious to their being in prison, and her having no idea who they are.
The conclusion of the story feels conventional – Palamon and Emily are left in marital bliss and the Knight piously calls for God’s blessing on the company – and everyone agrees that it’s all been very noble. But this elevated atmosphere is soon brought crashing down by the Miller, who drunkenly interrupts the proceedings with a far more sordid story about married life. Palamon and Arcite’s love for Emily is now thrown into satirical relief by Nicholas and Absolon, two love rivals determined to cuckold a daft old carpenter with his more than willing wife, Alison. This time around, chaste longing is replaced by Alison and Nicholas in bed “in bisnesse of mirthe and of solas” (you can guess the meaning) and a farcical account of bums being kissed, farting and red hot pokers.
Just for good measure, Chaucer then drops in the Reeve’s tale. The Reeve – a carpenter – didn’t like the way his profession was portrayed in the Miller’s Tale, so he portrays a miller who sleeps in a room with a young man and his wife – as well as a father with his daughter. We’re a long way down from the Knight’s lofty tale.
This heady mix of high and low is often described as uniquely “English”, and Chaucer is credited as being the first to tap into it. That isn’t quite right. Catullus, the very poet Chaucer referenced in the opening of his poem, ran a similarly entertaining line in stately epic, shocking prurience, and a heady mixture of the two. Meanwhile, the original source of the Knight’s Tale was Boccaccio, an Italian poet who mixed high art and nether regions with the best of them. But the important point is that Chaucer was brilliant at both – a master of the ridiculous and the sublime.
