A Knight's Tale- Chaucer's Lost Story?

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales have had no small showing in modern media, especially popular in mini-series form.  Chaucer probably started writing The Canterbury Tales in 1386, smack-dab in the middle of England’s High Middle Ages.  Because of Chaucer’s evident literary skill, and the extensiveness of his work at a time generally regarded as having less of a showing for great literature, Chaucer’s works have remained canonical for almost 650 years.  Despite its greatness, however, Chaucer’s Canterbury collection was never fully finished.  Only 22 of the original 120 planned stories were completed.  Nonetheless, Chaucer’s influence can be seen throughout modern pop-culture, though the poet himself is rarely shown. 

Geoffrey Chaucer

Paul Bettany playing Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale, alongside Heath Ledger, is probably one of my favorite movie characters of all time (who doesn’t love a rogue Paul Bettany?).  However, I wouldn’t put too much credit into the legitimacy of the pieces of Chaucer’s personal life depicted in the movie.  Though he does write about gambling in The Canterbury Tales, there is no proof that Chaucer was a gambler.  Nonetheless, Paul Bettany’s characterization of Chaucer definitely brings both a nice dose of comic relief as well as acknowledgement of the era’s most popular literature.  It may also help that Paul Bettany is vastly more attractive than the real Geoffrey Chaucer… just saying.

Here’s a clip from A Knight’s Tale showing Chaucer’s entrance into the movie:

The significance of The Canterbury Tales ties in here too, I promise.  I’m not writing a whole post on Paul Bettany.  Certain elements in A Knight’s Tale are highly reflective of Chaucer’s works.  Just look at the movie’s title- it looks as though it could have come straight out of The Canterbury Tales.  Who knows, maybe someone found a lost Canterbury Tales story and turned it into a movie.  Probably not, but it is a fun idea to kick around.

In addition, the characters in A Knight’s Tale are, like those in The Canterbury Tales, on a sort of pilgrimage.  William, Wat, Roland, and Kate are on their own pilgrimages back to London, a home they had left behind.  Although they aren’t on a spiritual pilgrimage, the theme does match rather nicely.  More importantly, Chaucer, acting as William’s herald in the jousting competitions, seems to indirectly narrate much of the story, as if that Chaucer were drawing inspiration from the movie to place in his Canterbury Tales.

The most evident reflection of The Canterbury Tales in A Knight’s Tale is the exchanging of stories between the pilgrims.  After all, that was the whole story line of The Canterbury Tales, a group of pilgrims introducing themselves through stories.  We see this most strongly in A Knight’s Tale when the four pilgrims exchange the stories of their pasts in order to aid William in composing a letter to his love interest, Jocelyn.  Chaucer sits quietly in the corner scribbling their contributions into letter form, almost as if writing The Canterbury Tales.

Here’s the clip of the letter being written:

Now, I’ll end with a little irony.  A knight did actually appear in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  His story was even recorded as “The Knight’s Tale,” (sound awfully familiar, doesn’t it?).  But the ironic part is that this character was the least ideal of all of Chaucer’s character.  Although the knight was a good man, he represented what Chaucer saw as a dying age of chivalry, a man living in the past.  Yet, in A Knight’s Tale, the knights are still celebrated and honored.  So maybe Chaucer didn’t write the movie’s plot after all…

Happy Reading!

Chaucer, Geoffrey.  The Canterbury Tales.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  Ed. Stephen Greenblatt.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.  29-100.  Print.