The Knight's Tale
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The Knight's Tale is the first tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
The Knight's tale is about two knights, Arcite and Palamon, who are imprisoned by Theseus, duke of Athens. In prison they see and fall in love with the sister of Hippolyta, Emily (Emelye). They variously get out of prison and end up in a tournament over Emily arranged by Theseus. Arcite wins, but dies before he can claim Emily as his prize and so Palamon marries her. It introduces many typical aspects of knighthood such as courtly love and ethical dilemmas, etc. The story is in the form of poetry.
Teseida delle nozze di Emilia by Giovanni Boccaccio is the source of the tale. The Knight's Tale, though, is a very loose translation, shortening Boccaccio's 9000 line epic to a little over 2000 lines. Although some of the plot is lost, an undercurrent of philosophy is added by Chaucer, mainly inspired by the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius which Chaucer had also translated.
John Dryden translated this story to a more modernized language style of his day. The book is entitled "Palamon and Arcite" and is longer than the original text due to Dryden's poetic touches.
The Knight and his tale both embody the ideas of chivalry, but Chaucer's Knight, a book by Terry Jones, portrays the knight as a mercenary and far from a gallant, ethical, gentle character (although this theory has been widely disputed by the academic community). The following tale, by the Miller, is a direct antithesis to the Knight's with none of the nobility or heritage of classical mythology, but is instead rollicking, bawdy, comedic and designed to annoy the Knight.
The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play co-written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, is based on the tale.
The 2001 movie A Knight's Tale, starring Heath Ledger, takes its name from this story, and a fictionalized Chaucer himself appears in it as a character. At the end of the film, a small joke is made about this poem where the fictionalized Chaucer claims he will put this particular tale into writing which references "The Knight's Tale".
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| Preceded by: General Prologue |
The Canterbury Tales | Succeeded by: The Miller's Prologue and Tale |
