Reinventing Chaucer: Helgeland's A Knight's Tale

Abstract

We walk in garden of his turbulence! (A Knight's Tale) For those Chaucerians who anticipated Brian Helgeland's A Knight's Tale as a faithful screen version of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, film must surely disappoint. Although a knight does indeed joust to win a lady, there is lit- tle connection—apart from title—between this delightfully anachro- nistic fairy tale and Chaucer's sobering meditation on inadequacies of human and divine justice. One of Chaucer's favorite premises—that gen- tilesse is determined by vertuous lyvyng rather than heigh parage— does appear to be a thematic touchstone insofar as eponymous peasant knight believes in fair play and mercy and therefore finally vanquishes cynical, cheating aristocrat. But simple dichotomy between secular good (represented by a young, blond, ambitious underdog) and evil (the older, experienced enemy of democracy dressed in black) so dear to mod- ern film audiences is quite alien to Chaucer's sensibility, at least in his Knight's Tale, in which point is that neither Palamon nor Arcite is more deserving of earthly happiness represented by Emily. Any comparison seems specious, however, since although film is ostensibly inspired by Chaucer, Helgeland's version can only be described, in film parlance, as a very loose adaptation of first Canterbury tale (notwithstanding Geoff Chaucer's declaration at end of film that he write some of this story down). A Knight's Tale potentially represents a form of literary symbiosis, that is, when meaning in an original text is affected by its invocation, adap- tation or continuation in a later text. As David Cowart explains, symbio- sis occurs when later text invites or provokes an artistic or epistemic dialogue with original, renewing and transforming its precursor. 1 Below I will suggest that while Helgeland's cavalier appropriation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale does make a statement about what Cowart calls the modern temper as contrasted to spirit of age that produced