Make Love and War: The Knight’s Tale

Emily, the lady-love of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” the first of the Canterbury Tales, appears in a garden, and the poet describes her as if where were part of the garden. She is Eve in Eden.

But this is no Edenic world. The men who see her are locked out of Eden, locked, indeed, in prison. Even when they are freed, they have to storm Athens to gain Emily. In this world, there is no simple return to innocence. Eden still arouses passions and longings, but in this world the passions that Eden and Eve arouse lead to rivalry and violence and death.

Is there a solution? Theseus is the “god on earth,” a model of (ancient Greek!) chivalry and also the source of whatever order comes to exist. He takes vengeance on Creon,; he arranges for a tournament so that the rival lovers can battle for Emily in a rule-governed war rather than in a mayhem in the woodsrather than a battle in the woods; he builds the lists and temple, prepares a magnificent funeral for Arcita, joins Palamon and Emily in marriage. The order that Theseus establishes is the closest thing we can expect to Eden in this world: Marriage, rule of law and custom. To achieve even this haunted shadow of Eden, Theseus has to exercise force. Things would be much worse if he did not.

The Tale is full of the majesty, pomp, and ceremony of courtly or noble life: The sumptuous description of the tournament, the stately pace of the poem, the long speeches, all contribute to an impression of order and stability. The symmetry of the plot seems to hold a promise of stability: Apparently interchangeable knights fighting for a lady, each with 100 knights, each with one close assistant. 

The rival lovers, Arcita and Palamon seem indistinguishable, but are not. Palamon falls in love with Emily first and confides in Arcita, who immediately betrays his trust and becomes a rival. Arcita is astonishingly quick to break his vow of brotherhood. Palamon prays for Emily, not for victory, and he specifically disavows any wish for glory.

Every knight has two concerns: love and war, not love or war, but both. Yet chivalry is only possible if the two demands are kept in balance. In his passion for Emily, Arcita has lost sight of this balance. Before the tournament, Arcita prays to Mars, god of war, for victory and glory, not for love. Palamon, by contrast, prays to Venus, goddess of love. Palamon keeps love and war together, and therefore his war-making has a telos beyond war. Arcita pulls them apart: War for war’s sake.

The threat to order posed by chaos and passion raises philosophical questions about reality as a whole. Is there an ultimate order beyond the chaos that comes from the tensions and conflicts between Mars and Venus? How can one live a noble life when the external supports of that life are torn apart by passion? Is there a providence that ultimately harmonizes love and war? 

There is certainly a providence evident in the story. Chance encounters play a large part in the plot. Arcita and Palamon in Athens only because the Athenian soldiers ran across them in the rubble of Thebes. They happen to be imprisoned next to the garden, then they happen to come upon each other in the wood, and Theseus happens to be hunting that day in that very wood. Their lives and love are shaped by apparently accidental events. But this doesn’t give much assurance: How is one to live  in a world where we are constantly having to keep appointments we never made?

The “Knight’s Tale” isn’t a comforting story. Instead of simply affirming that God controls all things for good, it shows how our lives often seem to prove the opposite. when Arcita is released from prison, he laments that he was ever born. Being free is a worse prison than literal prison; prison looks like a paradise in comparison to freedom without Emily. Theseus generalizes the point when he talks about the “foul prison of this life.” The challenge is the same as Ivan Karamzov’s. Palamon in his cell asks “what governing mind is in such prescience that so torments the guiltless innocent?”

What gods exist in the story don’t bring any comfort either. The visits to the temples of the gods are the central scenes of the whole story. But what’s revealed in the temple is terrifying: The gods are simply a transcendent form of the chaos, passion, and disorder of the world. Venus is the goddess of love, but love in all its forms – including jealousy and force as well as pleasure and hope. These are not gods who give answers to questions about innocent suffering. What they reveal instead is a principle of disorder and an indiscriminate jumble of good and evil at the very heart of things. 

The closest we come to an answer is in the final “chain of love” speech from Thesus. God established an order in the world in which everything is corruptible. Everything lives, dies, and then something takes its place. Ethically, this implies a kind of Stoicism. There is no use contending with Jupiter’s power; accept the fate that comes to you with courage and resolution. There is a hint of the ancient heroic creed: Better to die in youth and vigor in the midst of battle than grow old in isolation. 

This is not, I think, Chaucer’s final vision of things. And the poetry of the Tale is so delectable that we miss the grimness of the world. But it stands as one of literature’s starkest depictions of a world where no one is quite in charge.