Guide to Week 3:
Read the second two parts of "Knight's Tale" and try to figure out how you might describe the overall structure of this tale's four major "movements." What happens to the characters in each, and how does the generic "mood" change? The classical gods (Venus, Diana, and Saturn) are an unusual set of characters to encounter in a medieval work, though Renaissance art uses them freely. How does the classical pantheon coexist with the Christian frame narrative of a pilgrimage to a Christian saint's tomb to give thanks for divine assistance? Other notable additions Chaucer makes to Bocaccio's Il Teseide occur in Part Four when he draws upon Boethius and other philosophical writings to provide Egeus and Theseus with a philosophical rationale for what has happened to Arcite. Chaucer also makes a dramatic series of changes, mostly by omission, in the way Arcite's fate is handled by Boccaccio's narrative. How does this change the world-view of the Italian tale, and what might that mean about the expectations of Chaucer's English audience? Especially, what do you think of the tale's "closure"? Does it matter whether we assign authorship of the tale to Chaucer-the-poet or to his persona, the pilgrim Knight?