The unrecounted storm

Emily in the garden

[Image source: https://chaucereditions.wordpress.com/1910s/1912-emily-underdown-the-gateway-to-chaucer/ ]


And how asseged was Ypolita,
The faire, hardy queene of Scithia;
And of the feste that was at hir weddynge,
And of the tempest at hir hoom-comynge;

(The Knight's Tale, 23-26)

This is from Chaucer's (or rather, the Knight's) brief summary of a whole lot of material that he intends to pass by in order to focus on the story of Palamon and Arcite.

Dryden, paraphrasing Chaucer, has this:

The Town besieg'd, and how much Blood it cost
The Female Army, and th' Athenian Host ;
The Spousals of Hippolyta the Queen ;
What Tilts and Tourneys at the Feast were seen ;
The Storm at their Return, the Ladies Fear :

(Palamon and Arcite, I. 19-23)

Chaucer's source for the story was Boccaccio's Teseida. He reduced it mightily: The Knight's Tale is 2250 lines: the Teseida is 9896 lines, coincidentally (?) the same number as Virgil's Aeneid. But while Boccaccio recounts Theseus' Scythian adventure at some length, there is no tempest in the Teseida. It was Chaucer's own idea.

Why he included it we can only speculate. Probably there was no big significance, it just seemed like the right sort of story-element for a romance. Storms occurred e.g. in Arthurian romances, or in other Boccaccio stories, such as Cymon and Iphigenia; and of course in the most popular part of Virgil's epic, the story of Dido.

"At hir hoom-comynge" might seem to imply that the storm was raging at the very moment the newlyweds entered Athens, but we soon discover that they haven't quite arrived there yet. Maybe Chaucer envisioned a storm at sea towards the end of their return voyage from Scythia.

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Dryden embellishes Chaucer's unrecounted storm with "the Ladies Fear". That additional detail might seem rather ill-chosen in this instance:  would this "hardy" warrior-queen and her sister be so stereotypically fearful? But Dryden is rightly registering a certain paradox. The Hippolyta we meet in The Knight's Tale is, whatever her warrior-queen past, now an impeccably royal consort; when she influences her husband it's not by challenging his authority but by the sweetly irresistible plea of feminine sensibility. As for the Emily who comes to do May's observance in the palace garden, there's nothing at all Amazon-like about her. Boccaccio had begun this transformation himself. Initially he presents her as having only a single breast, like all Amazon warrior-maidens, but as the Teseida proceeds he makes her into a portrait of his own real-life love and sheds all such martial details. In Chaucer's tale, Emily and Hippolyta are fair damsels in the mode of medieval romance.

So far as we know Boccaccio made up the central story (though a few details, mainly about Arcite, might derive from a Byzantine source). In his story, Emily's desire to remain a virgin is connected with her being an Amazon. Chaucer doesn't mention this, so it comes across as an attractive girlish freak, evidence of Emily's chaste-mindedness (and, most importantly, malleable to male authority when the time comes).

I don't want to be heavy-handed about what is, after all, a romance and a made-up one at that, but still, it's hard not to notice that The Knight's Tale begins with a man (Theseus) winning his bride (Hippolyta) by attacking her, and ends with a woman (Emily) being forced against her will to marry, following another violent contest -- though in this case the physical violence is at any rate between the men and not directed towards her. Chaucer himself isn't oblivious to the tensions within his tale, but later authors seem to amplify them.

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Dryden brings out those tensions at once.

In Scythia with the Warriour Queen he strove,
Whom first by Force he conquer'd, then by Love ;

(Palamon and Arcite, I.7-8)

In 1700 it was hardly possible to use "Force" in the context of "Love" without making the reader think momentarily about rape.

As we saw earlier, his summary of the war with the Amazons involves the "Blood" of both sexes. Dryden isn't bothered about being tactful.

And he assigns quite new motives for Emily wanting to remain a virgin:

Like Death, thou know'st, I loath the Nuptial State,   }
And Man, the Tyrant of our Sex, I hate,                    }
A lowly Servant, but a lofty Mate.                            }
Where Love is Duty on the Female Side,
On theirs mere sensual Gust, and sought with surly Pride.

(Palamon and Arcite, III. 227-31)

Dryden was not intending feminist revisionism, he simply lived in a different age. Moving from Chaucer's tale to Dryden's is like moving from "chivalry" to (that related word) "cavalier". One could be staunchly a cavalier, but it could no longer be idealized in quite the same way as the earlier term. No longer shielded by religion, the modern exemplar of arms and gallantry and sexual conquest was now in the public domain, a topic of secular debate in which women's voices, too, were starting to be heard.

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Theseus and Hippolyta, the model royal couple who tranquilly preside over A Midsummer Night's Dream (and later The Two Noble Kinsmen) were in effect the invention of Boccaccio and Chaucer. (We know of two lost Elizabethan plays about Palamon and Arcite, so it might have been one of those that was Shakespeare's direct source.) The ancient classical stories about Theseus and his Amazon dalliance (sometimes Hippolyta, sometimes Antiope) are far less tranquil: in some of them, Theseus kills his Amazon girl-friend, in others she tries to kill him. (After all, these myths had to fit in with the more famous story in which Theseus is married to Phaedra.) Shakespeare did have an inkling of this wilder substrate: he knew (from Plutarch) about Theseus' rape of Perigune.

Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night
From Perigouna, whom he ravishèd ...

(A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.1.80-81)

And this sunniest of his comedies contains a few other shafts of this darker light. It's there from the start.

Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword
And won thy love doing thee injuries ...

(A Midsummer Night's Dream, I.1.17-18)

The tournament

[Image source: https://chaucereditions.wordpress.com/1910s/1912-emily-underdown-the-gateway-to-chaucer/ ]

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The Knight's Tale goes back a long way with me... I encountered it, as a child, in a marvellously illustrated re-telling. Some of those illustrations are still vividly present to me: the rivals quarrelling in the tower while Emily wanders in the garden below; the bloody fight in the grove; the stricken Arcite lividly swaying on his horse. I'm disappointed that I couldn't find those images online: the ones here (from the useful chaucereditions site), come from a 1912 Gateway to Chaucer by Emily Underdown, "With Sixteen Coloured Plates and Numerous Marginal Illustrations after Drawings by Anne Anderson".

If I'm honest I don't think I've ever cared quite so much for the tale since. That child's version stuck to the story and its scenes of action, needing no further commentary. Chaucer begins like that, and no-one tells a story better. But he slows right down for the description of the temples, the young people's prayers, the gods' debate, Arcite's funeral rites, Theseus' philosophical musings...  Here were the great passages admired by my university teachers, the meditations on violence, fortune and misfortune, the vanity of this life and the mystery of death. A childish part of me still feels there's a heavy price to pay.