Structure and Pattern in Chaucer's Knight's Tale

Abstract

The Knight's Tale has often been cited as an example of Chaucer's use of "conventional" or formal style, in contrast to the naturalism of the General Prologue. As Charles Muscatine observes, "When Chaucer writes at either end of the scale of values, indeed, his style becomes correspondingly extreme. When he writes at the Knight's end of the scale 'Of storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse,/ And eek moralitee andhoolynesse,' he leans heavily on conventional forms." This formalism is characterized not only by the use of rhetoric and a "high style" of writing but also by the use of a classical setting and the patterns and correspondences found in such Latin epics as the Aeneid and the Thebaid. Chaucer's development of the idea of correspondence between gods and men, for example, yields an ordered, symmetrical set of characters. When this ordering of form is considered alongside the prominent presentation in Theseus' sermon of the order of Nature, it is not much of a leap of interpretation to assume that the Knight's Tale is in some way "about" order. However, when more closely examined, the poem seems to be more "about" disorder than order. Merle Fifield interprets Theseus' sermon in the following way: it counsels "the acceptance of eternal disorder as one of God's works (3057)" and it forbids."the expression of an ethical order in the narrative action of the romance." In fact, layers of disorder and order alternate. The emotional chaos and fruitless conflicts of Arcite and Palamon lead them to be compared to animals (1655-59, 2626-33), but above them is Theseus, who attempts to order the lives of his subjects rationally and whose symmetrical battle arena symbolizes his world view. Above Theseus is the disorder of Olympus, where the gods quarrel and scheme, and above them, if we may believe Theseus (2987 ff.), is the First Mover, stable and eternal.