A Curious Condition of Being: The City and the Grove in Chaucer's Knight's Tale

Abstract

THE citizens of Chaucer's Knight's Tale?divine, semi-divine, human?occupy a curious universe.1 It is a place where the prin ciple of contradiction does not hold: Thebes is demolished by line 900 but is somehow reconstituted by line 1283; the grove is razed to make room for the amphitheater and razed again to provide place and material for Arcite's funeral. In this cosmos, the writ of the high god Jupiter does not run?at least not in the fundamental matter of resolving the strife in heaven between Venus and Mars. Both city and grove are crucial sites in the Tale's action, and their moving in and out of existence establishes the Tale's elastic ontology, while the displacing of Jupiter by Saturn unsettles the Tale's presumed theological hierarchy. The inhabitants of this universe find nothing remarkable in such physi cal, or metaphysical, eccentricities, for such are the conditions of their being. They are simply unaware of the heavenly friction. The audience, both Chaucer's contemporaries and ourselves, thus discover a situation in which the characters with whom we might identify are as ignorant of the fabric of the universe they inhabit as they are blind to the laby rinthine ways of the gods who, they suppose, rule it. This is, arguably, the impression that Chaucer wanted to achieve, since he changed his primary source?Giovanni Boccaccio's II Teseida delle nozze di Emilia?to create his characters' invincible ignorance. I look first at Thebes, then the grove, finally at Theseus's First Mover lecture and the circumstances surrounding it.