In one of the most ambitious and unfinished works of English Literature, Geoffrey Chaucer tried to incorporate and encompass all of human emotions and possible human encounters with themselves, other human beings, fate, nature and moral dilemmas in a structured format of story telling.
In Knight’s Tale of which there are four parts, the tale of love, forgiveness, competition, death and life are dealt in great detail. Theseus, the instrumental character in the Knight’s tale, in the beginning of the tale takes on Creon, ruler of Thebes to recover the mortal remains of four dead men whose wives plead with him.Then he finds two wounded thebian soldiers whom he rescues and cures but imprisons in the Athenian towers – The two soldiers are Palamon and Arcite. While in captivity, the two soldiers chance to glance upon the beautiful Emelye, sister in law of Theseus and both fall in love with her and start pining for her. On the petition of Perotheus a common friend of himself and Theseus, Arcite is fortunate to be released but banished from Athens.
Both Palamon and Arcite envy each other’s fate, as each believes that the other has the greater chance to acquire Emelye. Both the lovers suffer from lovesickness and take to desperate measures. The gaunt and unrecognizable Arcite enters Athens in disguise and enrolls as a servant in the palace, close but not close enough. Palamon, escapes from Prison. As fate would have it, Palamon, on escaping from the prison encounters Arcite singing and making garlands in the forest suffering with unrequited love.
They challenge each other to a duel.Theseus intervenes and though his original intentions are to kill both of them, he heeds to his wife and his sister in law and fixes a duel in fifty weeks time between the two with their best possible armies of 100 young men. Theseus builds a huge stadium with the statues of Mars, the God of War, Venus, the God of love and Diana, the god of Chastity. Palamon prays to Venus, Arcite to Mars and Emelye to Diana (as she wants to remain a maiden) and all three return in the hope that their prayers have been heard and shall be answered the next day.
Arcite defeats Palamon in the battle but since Venus sides with Palamon, there is an earthquake and the victorious Arcite is trampled by his horse and just before he dies he extols the virtues of Palamon and exhorts Emelye to marry him. But his death leaves everybody shattered. Both Palamon and Emelye continue in grief long after, wearing the mourners black. Theseus’ father, the oldest and the wisest of them has a talk with Theseus, Palamon and Emelye and tells them that death is a natural but life cannot stop because of it.He also reminds Arcite’s last wish that Palamon and Emelye be married.
Thus they unite and live in happiness. The Knight’s tale is a reminder of the cycle of grief and happiness and the relativity of them all. Captivity seems suddenly bearable because of love, the disappearance of the competitor suddenly becomes grief because of death (of a dear friend) and the dilemma of right and wrong haunts Theseus in many circumstances and life always provides him good advice from different quarters like his wife, his friend and his father.He has the god sense to take the good advice and there fore the story has a happy ending.
Chaucer’s attempt, though it remains incomplete, yet symbolizes the breadth of his mastery over creating and weaving stories that can encompass the entire gamut of human emotions and all possible situations of conflict and dilemma. It can only remain for us to speculate what would have been the effect of the work on English Literature had Chaucer been able to complete his grand design.
