The Knight's Tale and the Teseida Again

Abstract

The Knight's Tale is a masterpiece, and one of the surest evidences of its greatness lies in the fact that it has prompted study and criticism from a great many different points of view. If a work of literature is truly great, it can receive no definitive critical treatment. It will prove perennially fascinating to successive generations of readers and out of its abundant riches will stimulate redoubled labours among scholars to elucidate the conditions of its genesis and fresh interpretative insights suited to the taste and understanding of its critics. Scholars may try to adjust the reading of the work to what they can agree upon as the conditions of the milieu that brought it forth and what they thus infer to be the intention of the author, historically determined. But for those who delight in literature, there will remain a certain “liberty of interpreting,” unconfined by the fiats of the learned, that is of the essence of the literary experience.