Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T09:11:05.029Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - The consolation of Stoic virtue: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the tradition of the roman antique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2009

Barbara Nolan
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Get access

Summary

When we turn to Chaucer's Knight's Tale, we might expect that it, like Troilus and Criseyde, would be styled a “book,” particularly since, like Troilus, it is a translation of one of Boccaccio's opere. We do not know exactly when Chaucer composed the Knight's Tale, nor what manuscript of the Teseida he used as the basis for his translation. Yet the Knight's Tale is decidedly not like Troilus, nor is it like the Teseida, either in its tone or in its teaching. It is not a “book” in the poet's description of it, but a “tale,” part of the larger “Book of the Tales of Caunterbury.” It is, to be sure, one of the most formally structured of the tales, carefully divided into scholastic partes, and it participates in the tradition of the roman antique? But by comparison with Troilus it is considerably less complex and, as I argue here, less comforting and less resolved in its conclusion.

Chaucer may have made an earlier version of the young Thebans' love story, closer in conception and metrical form to the Teseida. In the Legend of Good Women (c. 1384–86?), he claims to have written a “book” detailing “al the love of Palamon and Arcite/ Of Thebes” (F 420), and this work may not be the Knight's Tale as we now have it. His Anelida and Arcite (c. 1375–79) shows that he had tried at one point to imitate Boccaccio's compositional practices in the Teseida, rather than using its amorous story line.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×