Anger and Community in the Knight's Tale (2008)

As Chaucer's Wife of Bath comes to the end of her life story and prepares to tell her tale, the Friar interrupts her, commenting on the considerable length of her prologue: is a long preamble of a (831). (1) The Friar laughs as he says this and it is not clear that the Wife is bothered in any way; but before she can respond, the Summoner accuses the Friar of interfering and of taking the fun out of the tale-telling game (Thou lettest our disport [839]). The Friar then promises to tell a tale (or two) about summoners which will make the whole company laugh. Cursing the Friar, the Summoner in turn vows two (or three) tales which will wound the Friar (make thyn herte for to morne [848]). Before either the Friar or the Summoner can begin a tale, however, the Host intervenes. He allows the Wife to continue and momentarily restores order, though the conflict between the Friar and Summoner surfaces again later in their respective tales. This angry quarrel between the Friar and Summoner exposes the tensions and anxieties inherent in medieval social relations, though Chaucer's characterization of the two men as vengeful storytellers directs our attention largely to the private, or personal, dimension of the Friar's and Summoner's mutual anger. Thanks to the Host's management of the interruption at the end of the Wife's prologue, the Friar's and Summoner's hatred of one another has relatively little impact on the pilgrim fellowship or on the tale-telling game itself. In the Knight's Tale, by contrast, Chaucer provides a perspective on the consequences of an individual's anger for the community at large. This essay examines the course of Theseus' various angers in order to explore Chaucer's interest in the way in which human anger contributes to both the order and disorder of human fellowships. I argue that the tale, read as a tale of anger rather than (as is often the case) a tale of pity, reveals Chaucer's preoccupation with the problem of anger and his ambivalent evaluation of its dual nature, at once a necessary and a destructive force in human affairs. In contrast to scholastic writings on anger, Chaucer's tale imagines an anger both less easy to control and more desirable to encourage than scholastic thinkers tend to suggest. Because anger is not traditionally regarded as a Chaucerian topic or as an organizing principle for the Canterbury project as whole, critical attention has focused largely on either the negative consequences of anger or on the virtue of patience exhibited in the tales. Indeed, if we add Griselda and Custance to the list of patient and merciful figures featuring Emelye, Prudence, and Mary, we have the core of what Jill Mann persuasively argues is the ethical ideal of pietas at the heart of Chaucer's work: [T]he Canterbury Tales, for all its rich variety of mode and genre, contains not a single example of the story-type that embodies its ideals in the central figure of a male hero. Instead, the tales that mediate serious ideals are focused on a series of women: Constance, Griselda, Prudence, Cecilia. The male hero enters only in the burlesque form of Sir Thopas, to be unceremoniously bundled out of the way in favour of the tale that celebrates the idealized wisdom of a woman, Chaucer's tale of Melibee. (Feminizing Chaucer 3) One might argue that Theseus, outside the feminine virtues he exhibits, represents a masculine political ideal in the Knight's Tale, and my discussion of the tale will suggest that there is a positive as well as negative dimension to his anger. But I am less interested in the debate occasioned by Mann's work regarding Chaucer's attitude toward gender, than in the implication our reading of Chaucer's female characters has for our understanding of his attitude toward anger. (2) For all his reservations about the way in which people like the Friar justify their actions by aligning themselves with God's divine anger, Chaucer also recognized anger as a necessary and inevitable principle. …