Guide to Week 2:
Our first full "tale" after the General Prologue sets us a puzzle in genre defininition. As you read the first two parts of "Knight's Tale," try to determine what genre or kind of tale this is. Boccaccio wrote its source (Teseida) as an epic, with language and form in the high style, emphasizing individuals' response to fate. In Chaucer's version, too, its nominal hero, Theseus, is a mythic figure, more at home in an epic where warfare decides the action. Here, though, Theseus has to sort out the love lives of two young knights and a young princess who belong in a romance, a genre in which the rules of love and an ethic of noble suffering decide the action. (If you have never thought about genres like epic and romance, click here to read a summary of Northrup Frye's theory of how epic, romance, tragedy and satire may relate to the way humans structure their perception of existence.) Most readers accept the narrative as it presents itself until it reaches certain points at which the choice of genre becomes crucial to what we expect to happen next. Epics typically end with deaths of major characters, and not infrequently challenge audiences to meet the epic hero's high standard of conduct. Romances typically end with marriages of major characters, or at least with erotic or political reconciliations of characters divided by the plot's serpentine turnings. The hero rarely dies in most romances, but Marie de France challenges that convention.
When you have finished KT parts 1 and 2, read Marie de France's "Eliduc." This is an example of a subgenre of the romance, called a "Breton lai," and will give you a feeling for how the world of romance works. Note that the implicit questions raised by the plot involve loyalty, especially loyalty in love, under circumstances which create multiple claims upon those loyalties. The resolution of the plot's tensions involves numerous coincidences, and although our culture may not agree with the values which are invoked by the tale, the plot follows a familiar pattern of sudden reversals until the tensions are put to rest. Can you find traces of this pattern in KT's first half? Be looking for it in Parts 3 and 4, too. What parts of KT are at odds with the romance conventions you see in "Eliduc"? Does this give us grounds for preferring one text over the other as a work of literary art? Might the differences point to a change in the readers for whom the authors wrote? Remember that Marie lived in an Anglo-Norman court about 300 years before Chaucer. Knowing a little about Henry II's reign might help. Whether you read Marie in ModE translation online or in the paper print edition, you certainly are going to experience her work differently from the readers who encountered her work in C13 parchment manuscripts, and that also might have something to do with the differences between these two narratives.
Note on the Syllabus Construction: Since the seminar takes seriously the question of "how to read like a Medieval reader," we owe ourselves a defense of the decision to split the tale into two weeks. OK, it's huge, but that's not the only reason. Internal and external evidence suggests Chaucer routinely recited these tales in public, at court or in mixed audiences of noble and bourgeois hearers. If you calculate how long it takes to read aloud the 1021 lines assigned for this week, you will find that it takes quite a while, perhaps as much time as an after-dinner audience would care to spend listening to even a very good poet. The "parts" of KT may well have been performance units, themselves. Can you detect any evidence for or against that hypothesis?