Biblical Analogy and Secondary Allegory in Chaucer's the Knight's Tale

For a number of years, at least two major strains of interpretation of The Knight's Tale have had this much in common, that they have viewed the tale as capturing a world fully pagan. Their analyses with respect to this reading have led to two broad conclusions: either that Chaucer's intention in the tale is to condemn paganism by showing its deficiencies (implicit in Theseus's closing speech), or, apart from any condemnatory purpose, that he wishes to present for philosophical consideration an alternative ethical system to the dominant Christian ethos. (1) There is good sense in both of these readings: the setting of the tale is ancient Athens, a world, as Brenda Deen Schildgen has said, where Christians "were nowhere to be found" (12); moreover, both Egeus's and Theseus's philosophies stated near the conclusion, though not entirely antithetical to Christian thinking, present identifiable antique views of life, offered by the characters formulating them, as prescriptions for proper living. Scholars of the former school of thought who see the tale as a critique of these philosophies generally have contended that Chaucer suggests a Christian solution by implication only, chiefly by pointing outside the tale itself to more overtly Christian tales--even to the last of The Canterbury Tales, The Parson's Tale (Brooks and Fowler 142). What I argue in this essay is that readers of the tale have rather surprisingly overlooked a series of imbedded biblical allegories--perhaps analogies would be the better word--that constitute an implied internal critique of the pre-Christian world Chaucer constructs in the poem. The Athenians and Thebans in the poem obviously are ignorant of these analogies, but the Christian audience and certainly Chaucer himself are not. These analogies serve as a reminder even within the antique environment of the tale of the greater, truer world toward which the larger pilgrimage of The Canterbury Tales itself points. My goal is to highlight the analogies and establish as I go their importance to what I call the allegory of love, compared to the more prominent, though not necessarily the more important, allegory of the poem, namely, the allegory of rule or order. The first of these biblical analogies appears in the prima pars in the famous "Maying" scene where first Palamon and then Arcite see Emelye for the first time. Of Palamon's initial "A!" we learn: And so bifel, by aventure or cas, That thurgh a wyndow, thikke of many a barre Of iren greet and square as any sparre, He cast his eye upon Emelya, And therwithal he bleynte and cride, "A!" As though he stongen were unto the herte. (KT 1074-1079) (2) Soon after, Arcite also sees Emelye, and the great and thoroughly silly debate over who saw what and who saw first begins. Yet the silliness is complicated by Chaucer's first biblical analogy, here a clear correspondence to the David and Bathsheba episode in 2 Sam. 11:2, translated by Wycliffe as follows: While these thingis weren doon, it befelde, that Dauid roos in a dai fro his bed after mydday, and walkide in the soler of the kyngis hows; and he siy a womman waischynge hir silf euen ayens on hir soler; sotheli the womman was ful fair. (3) The similarity of the passages is obvious enough. David and the Theban cousins look down from on high at a woman below them whose beauty fully captivates them and yet who is completely ignorant of their gaze. The event in both cases is entirely fortuitous. Admittedly, differences exist in time of day and the activities of the women. Still, the similarities are remarkable, and it is hard to believe that a man as fully conversant with the Bible as Chaucer would have missed the analogy. The incident in the poem may seem to support D. W. Robertson's assertion of the allegory of order over concupiscence, specifically, of Athenian proper rule over Theban concupiscence (265-66). …