THE citizens of Chaucer's Knight's Tale -- divine, semi -- divine, human -- occupy a curious universe.(FN1) It is a place where the principle of contradiction does not hold: Thebes is demolished by line 900 but is somehow reconstituted by line 1283; the grove is razed to make room for the amphitheater and razed again to provide place and material for Arcite's funeral. In this cosmos, the writ of the high god Jupiter does not run -- at least not. in the fundamental matter of resolving the strife in heaven between Venus and Mars. Both city and grove are crucial sites in the Tale's action, and their moving in and out of existence establishes the Tale's elastic ontology, while the displacing of Jupiter by Saturn unsettles the Tale's, presumed theological hierarchy. The inhabitants of this universe find nothing remarkable in such physical, or metaphysical, eccentricities, for such are the conditions of their being. They are simply unaware of the heavenly friction. The audience, both Chaucer's contemporaries and ourselves, thus discover a situation in which the characters with whom we might identify are as ignorant of the fabric of the universe they inhabit as they are blind to the labyrinthine ways of the gods who, they suppose, rule it. This is, arguably, the impression that Chaucer wanted to achieve, since he changed his primary source -- Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Teseida delle nozze di Emilia -- to create his characters' invincible ignorance. I look first at Thebes, then the grove, finally at Theseus's First Mover lecture and the circumstances surrounding it.
    Thebes is destroyed in the Tale's opening movements. Theseus, under the banner of Mars, with his personal pennon showing the Mynotaur,(FN2) moves against the city and Creon in the matter of the unburied Argive dead. After dispatching the tyrant, Theseus "rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter" (1(A) 990). Subsequently, "in that feeld he took al nyght his reste, / And dide with al the countree as hym leste" (1(A) 1003-4). I understand these lines to mean that Theseus razed the city totally and dispersed that portion of the population that remained alive.(FN3)
    Palamon and Arcite acknowledge that their city and kinsmen have been annihilated. Palamon is clear on the subject in his long monologue occasioned by the freeing of Arcite, when he attributes the destruction of their line to the fury of Saturn and Juno:

"But I moot been in prisoun thurgh Saturne,
And eek thurgh Juno, jalous and eek wood,
That hath destroyed wel ny al the blood
Of Thebes with his waste walles wyde;"
                             (1(A) 1328-31)

    Arcite agrees with Palamon's assessment. In his initial grove ruminations, he laments the eradication of city and royal line because of Juno's anger:

"How longe, Juno, thurgh thy crueltee,
Woltow werreyen Thebes the citee?
Allas, ybroght is to confusion
The blood roial of Cadme and Amphioun
...
Allas, thou felle Mars! Allas Juno!
Thus hath youre ire oure lynage al fordo,
Save oonly me and wrecched Palamoun." (1(A)
                  1543-46; 1559-61)

    Thebes has been destroyed, then, and Palamoun and Arcite are the last of the line of Cadmus. But not quite, or not all the time.
    Earlier in his monologue, Palamoun voices his fears of what the liberated Arcite might do:

"Thow walkest now in Thebes at thy large,
...
Thou mayst, syn thou hast wisdom and manhede,
Assemblen alle the folk of oure kynrede,
And make a werre so sharp on this citee
That by som aventure or some tretee
Thow mayst have hire to lady and to wyf."
                             (1(A) 1283; 1285-89)

    Thus, in a speech that asserts Thebes' ruin, we have a projection of Arcite walking about in precisely that ruined city. Certainly, by line 1355, Thebes has been well and truly reconstructed, since Arcite, returning thence from Athens, remains "... a yeer or two" (1(A) 1381). It is from this Thebes that he, disguised as Philostrate and a servant to Theseus in Athens, draws an income to supplement the "gold" given him by the Duke: "And eek men broghte hym out of his contree, / From yeer to yeer, ful pryvely his rente" (1(A) 1442-43). It is to Thebes that the escaped Palamon intends, to rally his friends and do to Theseus what he feared Arcite would do:

... in that grove he wolde hym hyde al day,
And in the nyght thanne wolde he take his way
To Thebes-ward, his freendes for to preye
On Theseus to helpe him to werreye;
And shortly, outher he wolde lese his lif
Or wynnen Emelye unto hys wyf.
                             (1(A) 1481-86)

    Theseus, too, acknowledges a reconstituted Thebes. Coming upon the cousins dueling in the grove, the Duke remarks on their love-folly in remaining in his territory, at risk, when they could be living safely and well in the city he destroyed some 900 lines before:

"Lo heere this Arcite and this Palamoun,
That quitly weren out of my prisoun,
And myghte han lyved in Thebes roially."
                          (1(A) 1791-93)

    It is to Thebes that Palamon and Arcite take themselves to wait out the year and prepare for the tournament:

And thus with good hope and with herte blithe
They taken hir leve, and homward gonne they ride
To Thebes with his olde walles wyde.
                                     (1(A) 1878-80)

    Finally, in the Tale's closing movement, it is with this Thebes, whose walls have transmogrified from "waste walles wyde" (1(A) 1331) to "olde walles wyde" (1(A) 1880), that Theseus wishes an alliance to secure that city's obedience; this he attempts to procure with Palamon's marriage to Emelye. Such, then, is the situation of Thebes: the destroyed city rises, phoenix-like, from its annihilation, without the benefit of any agency, divine or human. One minute it is not there, the next it is.
    When we turn to Chaucer's primary source for The Knight's Tale, the enigma posed by this shifting Thebes is emphasized. There is no such movement out of and into existence in Boccaccio: once destroyed, Thebes remains so.(FN4) In Teseida, book 2, stanza 81, the city is fired by the Argive widows; it was depopulated earlier when the residents, following the retreating army, dispersed in stanzas 70 and 71 (see also book 4:81; and book 11:73-74).(FN5) Arcita, disguised as Pentheus, visits the site of wasted Thebes during his wanderings after release from prison. Stanzas 2-3 and 12-17, in book 4, detail his dirge over the ruins where "Everything was destroyed by the Greeks' fire" (16). After an embittered complaint to Juno for her hatred of all things Theban, and lamenting that he and Palamone are the last of the Theban royal line (4),(FN6) Arcita moves on to Corinth, thence to Maecena and Aegina, finally again to Athens. He does not stay in Thebes because he finds nothing, and no one, there.
    Criticism on the Theban problem is thin. Derek Pearsall remarks that Chaucer rebuilds the city "miraculously... as a symbolic place of exile and despair";(FN7) H. Marshall Leicester finds that Chaucer's decision not to destroy Thebes makes "it easier for the narrator to keep [Thebes] hovering in the background... in a more sinister way."(FN8) Most commentators, like the characters within the artistic frame, accept the regenerated Thebes as a given and focus on the conflict between this Thebes, identified with fraternal and patricidal violence and incest, and Athens, associated with order and rationality. They see the agon resolved in the victory of the latter and its leader, who, occasionally, is seen to represent, and who attempts to implement, the ordering capacity of Jupiter.(FN9) But the curious ontological status of Thebes militates against an optimistic reading of the Tale. If Thebes can reconstitute itself, there can be no certainty, for the characters within the artistic frame, or for the audience, that the city and what it represents will ever really be controlled or defeated. Lee Paterson, investigating the sources of "Anelida and Arcite," has some observations that are appropriate to the Theban problem here: "Thebanness is a... doubling of the self that issues in a replicating history that preempts a linear developmental progress. Theban history... has neither origin nor end but only a single, infinitely repeatable moment."(FN10) Thebes the self-regenerating opens the possibility of an infinite progression of destruction and self-propagation, a truly fateful vision, and a central fact of The Knight's Tale.
    The Athenian grove has a capacity similar to that of Thebes: both have the power of self-regeneration. The grove is twice cut down at Theseus's command.(FN11) As in the matter of Thebes, Chaucer manipulates Boccaccio again to construct its repeated razing. The site is important in the Tale's geography: it is the scene of the first meeting and private battle between Arcite/Philostrate and the newly escaped Palamon, the place where Theseus and his retinue discover the cousins fighting, and where Theseus sets out the rules for the subsequent tournament. It is in the grove that Theseus builds his amphitheater -- "The lystes shal I maken in this place" (1(A) 1862), a feat of engineering that, arguably, entails the grove's destruction -- and most of pars tercia is devoted to a description of this structure, its prodigious size -- "The circuit a myle was aboute" (1(A) 1887) -- its temples, and the appropriate ceremonies performed in each by Palamon, Arcite, and Emelye. This grove is spoiled a second time to provide a place for Arcite's obsequies and wood for his pyre.
    Chaucer does not describe his grove in detail. We know it is in the vicinity of Athens, since Palamon, upon his escape, intends to hide there during the day and travel to Thebes at night (1(A)1478-84). Arcite makes his way thither to sing of his love and "To maken hym a gerland of the greves, / Were it of wodebynde or hawethorn leves" (1(A)1507-8). It is large enough for hunting, holds at least one hart that Theseus pursues, and has a clearing and a brook (1(A)1673-95). Theseus thinks the grove "swoote and grene" (1(A) 2860), as the narrator tells us in the process of relating his ruminations over the location of Arcite's tomb.
    Boccaccio has a fuller picture of his grove. Arcita/Pentheus wanders in a "boschette" that appears almost Edenesque, there to sing of his love and catch a nap:
    ... Now, in order to conceal well his love's desire and give an outlet to his sighs that afflicted his soul with anguish, he would, at times, go to sleep in a little bower, (book 4:63)
    And he used to do this in the warm weather, because the place was cool... (64)
    It was attractive, leafy with young trees and new greenery. It was cheerful with the birds' songs and clear, cool waters in abundance which formed over the grass cold rivulets contrasting the great heat. Rabbits, hares, deer, roes could be chased there with hounds and snares. (65)
    Barring the intervention of men with their hounds and snares, this grove is a natural garden in harmony with itself. Neither grove nor inhabitants appears to threaten anyone or anything in Teseida -- or Tale. Both are innocuous, innocent, benign -- and small.
    Boccaccio favors the term "bosc(h)ette" -- "thicket, grove" -- a derivation of "bosc(h)o" -- "wood, forest" -- with the diminutive suffix "-ette/o" when referring to what becomes Chaucer's grove.(FN12) The MED gives "gre(o)ve" a column of definition (s.v.), ranging from "(a) a thicket, copse, bush... undergrowth..." through "(b) a grove, woods," to "(c) a branch, spray." The MED devotes fourteen columns to "woods," a possible sense of "greve." Two entries are of interest: "b 1. A living tree; coll. & pl. live trees... 2.(a) A group of living trees, a grove, copse, woods, forest, woodland...." We see that both wood and grove are defined, occasionally, in terms of each other. They are distinguished from "forest," which suggests an altogether more extensive environment. The MED, in just over two columns (s.v.), offers: "1.(a) a large tract of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited woodland; a wilderness...." A grove, then, is smaller than a forest, usually smaller than a wood. The progression from grove through wood to forest moves in ascending order of extent, magnitude, and, depending on context, potential threat, real or symbolic.(FN13)
    Neither Boccaccio's nor Chaucer's grove in its particular setting has the negative valence of the Wilderness of Wirral through which Gawain passes on his journey to Hautdesert; nor Dante's "selva oscura" of the Inferno's opening lines; nor the haunted landscape of Grendel's mere. Both groves may be, as Kolve remarks, places "inhabited by animals only, where (like Palamon) an escaped prisoner can hide... or where (like Arcite) a person exiled from the country can... lament his fate, far from human ears." But their relative isolation from Athens and the Duke's society makes neither "symbolically appropriate" to the chaotic "passions" that drive the cousins to seek each other's death. Nor do these groves partake of the qualities Kolve extrapolates from Bar-tholomaeus Anglicanus's discussion of woods and forests: "places... potentially perilous, beyond law, antithetical to human values."(FN14) There are, to be sure, violent acts performed in Chaucer's grove (but not Boccaccio's), one of the most brutal being its destruction. But this grove is neither violent in se, nor does it self-destruct. The ferocity is imported; it is not a natural growth.
    As mentioned above, the grove that is demolished to provide space for the amphitheater is cut down again to provide material and space for Arcite's funeral. This double destruction of the same thing replicates the movement of Thebes out of and into existence. There are no similar ontological complications in Boccaccio. In Teseida, an ancient forest ("selva") some distance from the "boschette" is razed to provide material for the pyre in the grove (book 11:14-25). Chaucer transfers the description of this forest's destruction to the obliteration of his grove,(FN15) and here, in the second destruction, we find a well articulated, though inverse, place purging. My touchstone for place purging in early English literature is Beowulf's activity in and around Grendel's and his mother's lair. Once the hero has killed the dam and decapitated her dead son, the waters surrounding their home are clear and calm, no monsters are to be found, and brightness replaces murkiness.(FN16) In the Tale, however, the cutting down of the trees is a calamity to the grove, the earth from which it grows, and its inhabitants. Here, even the sun's light, piercing the ground previously shaded by the trees, is a violent manifestation:

But how the fyr was maked upon highte,
...
Ne hou the goddes ronnen up and doun,
Disherited of hire habitacioun,
In which they woneden in reste and pees,
Nymphes, fawnes and amadrides;
Ne hou the beestes and the briddes alle
Fledden for fere, whan the wode was falle;
Ne how the ground agast was of the light,
That was nat wont to seen the sonne bright;
                     (1(A) 2919; 2925-32)

    Kolve remarks that Theseus imposes order here "by means of an appalling disorder."(FN17) But the violence and destruction are of such magnitude that the putative order gained is out of all balance with the means used to secure it. Then again, the uprooted denizens and the grove itself -- if it could -- would probably deny the term "order" to what Theseus imposes on them.
    With Arcite's funeral accomplished, Theseus proposes to ally Athens with certain other states to secure his control over them. The only state named in this project is Thebes, and the text's wording is curious:

Thanne semed me ther was a parlement
At Atthenes, upon certein pointz and caas;
Among the whiche pointz yspoken was,
To have with certein contrées alliaunce,
And have fully of Thebans obeisaunce.
                             (1(A)2970-74)

    Line 2974 leaves much unsaid. Why must Athens have a formal alliance with Thebes? Does the line suggest that Thebes and Thebans, since their curious recreation, have been less than accommodating, less than obedient, to Athens and Theseus? Has Thebes been threatening Athens in some fashion unspecified, but glanced at, in the text? The text provides no details, but a Thebes that can resurrect itself after being destroyed is, as noted above, an ominous entity. Perhaps something of Thebes' menacing potential is caught, again, in these five lines.(FN18)
    Theseus's solution to his Theban problem is the marriage of Palamon and Emelye. These nuptials have been well received. Woods sees the marriage and Theseus's "Prime Mover" speech that precedes it as unqualifiedly positive; they are "... modes of healing, one for the spirit [Theseus's speech], one for the body [the marriage]."(FN19) Nicholson finds the union "a thoroughly satisfactory... solution to the political problem.... [T]he marriage will both satisfy the logic of passion and promote an alliance with Thebes."(FN20) Theseus's words leading up to the announcement of the marriage have an optimistic thrust:

"What may I conclude of this longe serye,
But after wo I rede us to be merye
And thanken Juppiter of al his grace?
And er that we departen from this place
I rede that we make of sorowes two
O parfit joye, lastynge everemo."
                             (1(A) 3067-72)

    But the burden of Theseus's "Firste Moevere" lecture has been, in part, that the world he and his subjects inhabit is in constant, though from his point of view orderly and programmed, change, that there is nothing permanent in that world except change, and that all things therein, including himself, his listeners, and Arcite in particular, must die. In such a context, it is curious that Chaucer has Theseus attempt to establish anything, much less the wedding of two mortals, that will last "everemo"; by this rhetorical flourish, Theseus enters a contradiction to the philosophical burden of his preceding speech. It is, more importantly, unset-tling from the audience's perspective for Theseus to attribute to Jupiter authority and governance over the universe of the Tale, specifically over the circumstances of Arcite's death.
    Theseus equates "The Firste Moevere" (1(A) 2987), "That same Prince and that Moevere" (1(A) 2994) and "That thilke Moevere stable... and eterne" (1(A) 3004) with Jupiter: "What maketh this but Juppiter, the kyng" (1(A) 3035). The Duke, in his ordering, ritual, and ceremonial functions, has been likened to Jupiter's representative "on earth" (see footnote 4). This is how Theseus sees himself and how the narrator wishes us to see him(FN21) -- "Due Theseus was at a wyndow set, / Arrayed right as he were a god in trone" (1(A)2528-29) -- perhaps how the author wishes us to see Theseus wishing to see himself. But it is an eccentricity of the Tale's theology that Jupiter is not the disposer of the battle in the amphitheater. Saturn, a god whose malevolence exceeds that depicted on the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana, adjudicates the solution.(FN22)
    The text states that Jupiter applied himself assiduously to the resolution of the problem of Mars and Venus promising mutually exclusive success to their devotees:

And right anon swich strif ther is bigonne
For thilke grauntyng, in the hevene above,
Bitwixe Venus, the godesse of love,
And Mars, the stierne god armypotente,
That Juppiter was bisy it to stente,
Til that the pale Saturnus the colde,
That knew so manye of aventures olde,
Foond in his olde experience an art
That he ful soone hath plesed every part.
                                 (1(A)2438-46)

    The terms that call for attention here are "bisy" and "stente." The MED defines the verb "stinten" in almost seven columns. Under 4(b) the edi-tors place the "stente" of line 1(A) 2442: "4(b) to abate (war, strife, etc.), end (dissension, opposition)." The context of its appearance, however, moves the term in the direction of "(c)" as well: "to put an end to (pleasure, distress, grief, sin, etc.)." The MED, in three columns, offers "bisi" in its various spellings as: "1. of persons: engaged or involved in an activity, occupied; fully occupied...; preoccupied." Jupiter was, it seems, indeed that. He was also "2. diligent, assiduous... industrious," as well as "3. intent (upon sth.), desirous, eager." When, for all that he was "4. solicitous, attentive" in the matter, he was yet unsuccessful in its resolution, he might have become "4... anxious, fearful, worried." It is under this heading "4" that the MED places "bisy" of line 1(A)2472. I find that "bisy" here has a semantic range that includes solicitous and concerned activity over a protracted period of time, by one -- in this instance the high god -- who, realizing that he cannot solve the problem -- "stint" the strife -- becomes worried and fearful. Jupiter simply cannot do what he wants to do.
    It is wide of the mark, then, to argue that Jupiter stands above Saturn in the "hierarchical chain" of the Tale's "shapers" and "movers" or that Jupiter can "convert to good" Saturn's influence.(FN23) This may be so in other circumstances but not in the Knight's Tale. Indeed, Chaucer has compelled the intervention of Saturn by another change in his Boccaccio source. In the latter, although Mars and Venus promise contradictory success to their devotees, they come to a solution themselves, without the "bisiness" of other Olympians. Chaucer's manipulation underlines the problematic character of his gods, the serious nature of the division in heaven, and the ominous inability of the high god to resolve it.(FN24)
    The earthly strife and disorder that Theseus attempts to contain is thus seen as a heavenly infection as well. Both levels of fractiousness contrast with the condition of the denizens of the grove who cohabited "... in reste and pees" until its second destruction. These "Nymphes, fawnes and amadrides" are creatures of a different order than Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. They are the gods, or half-gods, of place and thing, the spirits of trees, rocks, streams, of nature writ small,(FN25) and they are unknown in the Tale until their terrible removal. They evoke a condition of being and a time, radically other than that conjured up by the Olympians. This mythic "long-ago" is caught in Chaucer's poem "The Former Age,"(FN26) a piece extolling the lost glories of "the Golden Time," based loosely on Boethius's Consolation, book 2, metrum 5 through the first seven of eight stanzas. Stanza eight contains a portrait of Jupiter drawn from The Romance of the Rose; by extension, it implicates all the Olympians:

Yit was not Jupiter the likerous,
That first was fader of delicacye,
Come in this world...
                  (lines 56-58)

    Before the Olympians, then, humans lived a life approximating that of the grove's inhabitants, the "rest and pees" of line 1(A)2927 given more detail in the short poem. Particular to my purpose, there were no "tyraunts" (line 33); no walled citadels -- "Slepten the blissed folk withoute walles" (line 43); no wars, for there was nothing worth fighting over -- "No trompes for the werres folk ne knewe" (line 23). "The Former Age" advances a fantasy of existence before the Olympians and necessarily before Thebes, Athens, and Theseus. In that mythic moment, all things were good -- at least better than now. When Chaucer offers a vision of his own times, in, say, "Lak of Stedfastness,"(FN27) the "Golden Age," though evoked -- "Somtyme the world was so stedfast and stable" (line 1) -- has been replaced by a mean world described in a catalogue of duplicities and dissensions. In terms of the mythic vocabulary I am here deploying, the Olympians have arrived, as have Thebes, Athens, Theseus, et al., and primal goodness and innocence are lost.
    The Knight's Tale does not attempt to recoup this loss. Its internal dynamic, however, seen primarily in the actions of Theseus, is a quest for order and permanence. But what happens to the city and the grove, and the characters associated with them, indicates that they exist in a universe that is unstable fundamentally. It is a universe, as argued above, that does not recognize the principle of contradiction: things destroyed do not remain so. When the city and grove recreate themselves, the characters within the artistic frame register neither surprise nor dismay: this is how and where they live; such is their reality. Its putative presiding deity, Jupiter, cannot rule in a matter crucial to this universe's functioning. None of the Tale's characters knows of the high god's signal failure. Theseus asserts Jupiter's omnipotence and conducts himself as the god's deputy on earth. The audience recognizes that the characters within the artistic frame, having misconstrued the nature of their universe, cannot take steps to control it or ameliorate their position within it. Such ignorance, embodied in Theseus's myopia, is invincible, and thus hopeless.
ADDED MATERIAL
    The University of Manitoba

FOOTNOTES
1 All references to the works of Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987), and will be cited in the text by line number.
2 I find something ominous in the combination of Theseus's "baner" and "penoun," Mars and the Mynotaur. An iconic Mars is almost expected: Theseus has done the god's work, having conquered Scythia and the Amazons, and is marching triumphantly home to Athens when he is accosted by the Argive women. (We have seen Theseus under Mars' banner in an earlier redaction of this scene, lines 30-31 of "Anelida and Arcite," where the Mynotaur is absent.) A "baner" is the distinctive ensignia "1.(a)... of a lord or country" (The Middle English Dictionary, ed. H. Kurath et al. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1952-2001), s.v.; hereafter MED). A "penoun" is more personal, denoting "(a)... distinguishing markings for identification" of the one to whom it belongs (MED, s.v.). "Banner" is generic: "Mars" equals "war"; "penoun" implies specificity: "Mynotaur" on the pennon modifies "Mars" on the banner to suggest that Theseus makes "war" in the manner of the "Mynotaur." D. Vance Smith shares my unease with these images, noting that "Theseus... unveils his particularly ambiguous [italics mine] banner with the sign of the Minotaur..." ("Plague, Panic Space, and the Tragic Medieval Household," The South Atlantic Quarterly 98 [1999]: 398).
3 On this head, see H. R. Nicholson, "Theseus's 'Ordinaunce': Justice and Ceremony in the Knight's Tale," Chaucer Review 22 (1988): 192-213, but particularly 197: "... the city itself is taken by assault after the battle... an operation which by the current laws of war justified the slaughter of all the able-bodied in the city, as well as its total spoliation."
4 In Boccaccio's source, the Thebaid by Publius Papinius Statius, Thebes maintains a precarious existence. At the end of book 12, though the city has been mauled by Argives and Athenians, what is left of it and its citizenry establish a degree of amity with Theseus and his army. See Thebaid, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackelton Bailey, Loeb Series, vols. 207 and 498 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Nicholson remarks: "The Thebaid becomes in its last phase a 'Thesiad' which sees its hero put to rights a society that has worn itself out in opposition to the gods... Theseus clearly acts for Jupiter" ("Theseus's 'Ordinaunce,'" 194).
5 I draw my citation from Giovanni Boccaccio, Theseid of the Nuptials of Emilia (Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia), ed. and trans. Vincenzo Traversa (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). All references will be cited in the text by book and stanza.
6 Palamone and Arcita often note this circumstance. See, e.g., book 4:81; book 5: 55-59, where Arcita remarks to Palamone just before they fight: "Now it remains for us, who are the last of the Theban race, to kill each other"; also book 10:21, 39, and 49; and book 12:24.
7 Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: G. Allen Unwin, 1985), 131.
8 Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in The Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 251.
9 Peter M. Clogan ("The Imagery of the City of Thebes in 'The Knight's Tale,'" in Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh Kennan [New York: AMS Press, 1992], 169-81) connects Thebes to Augustine's "civitas terrena" and argues that some of Chaucer's audience would perceive the city to be a figuration of Babylon, the strife between kinsmen regressing from Palamon and Arcite through Eteocles and Polynices to the original fratricide, Cain. Athens and its ruler Duke Theseus have just the opposite significations. William F. Woods ("Chivalary and Nature in The Knight's Tale," Philological Quarterly 66 [1987]) equates Jupiter and Theseus: "Both show a rational, practical tendency in their governance, a pragmatic if benevolent worldliness" (288). See also Nicholson, who finds Theseus "God's agent" in the matter of Creon in both Thebaid and Knight's Tale ("Theseus's 'Ordinaunce,'" 194, 196). Nicholson remarks that Theseus's age, mid-way between the youth of Palamoun and Arcite and the advanced state of Egeus, gives him "an authority which partly justifies the parallel we discover with Jupiter among the gods" (207).
10 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 77.
11 "Grove" is not a common term in the Chaucer corpus. There are, according to J. S. P. Tatlock and A. Kennedy (A Concordance to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and to the Romaunt of the Rose, [Concord, New Hampshire: The Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1927]), twelve instances, nine of which occur in our Tale: lines 1(A)1478, 1481, 1505, 1514, 1602, 1635, 1688, 2860, and 2898; two occur in the Nun's Priest's Tale: lines 4406 and 4568; one in the Pardoner's Tale: line 762. "Greve(s)" as a variant of "grove" occurs in the Knight's Tale: lines 1495 and 1641; and the Nun's Priest's Tale: line 4013; but as "grove" in The Riverside Chaucer; the Book of the Duchess: line 417; and the Romaunt of the Rose: line 3019. Few critics have addressed the difficulty of the twice destroyed grove. Pearsall remarks that "Chaucer... having made this striking innovation [establishing the lists in the "very grove where the lovers were found fighting"] seems unfortunately to have forgotten about it when he follows Boccaccio later in having Theseus assign Arcite's funeral to be held in the same grove" (Canterbury Tales, 131). Kolve, in Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: the First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), remarks that Chaucer "did not work out with perfect consistency on the literal level of his poem" the grove problem (130). Kolve further notes: "Since Chaucer did not resolve the contradiction implicit in the location of these two large actions [the ampitheatre/battle and the funeral rites/pyre in the same grove] we cannot resolve it either..." (131).
12 The manuscript that Traversa employs as the basis for his edition uses the term "bosc(h)etto" twelve times to refer to the "grove," "bosc(h)o" seven, "silvani" once.
13 Walter Skeat derives "forest" from Old and Middle French forest, "a wood, an open space of ground over which rights of the chase were reserved. Medieval writers oppose the forest is or open woods to the walled-in wood or parcus (park)" (An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910], 222a). Skeat connects "forest" with "foreign," which he derives from Old French "forain... strange, alien" (221b). The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (ed. C. T. Onions, with G. S. W. Friedrichsen and R. W. Burchfield [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966]), follows Skeat in the "forest-foreign" equation (370b), glossing the latter as "out of doors... pert [aining] to another, alien; pert[aining] to another region, not in one's own land" (370a). A forest is large, other, perhaps alien. It is not a grove.
14 Kolve, Imagery, 108 and 110. The remark that the grove is inhabited solely by animals is not quite accurate. It misses the "Nymphes, fawnes and amadrides."
15 The description of the spoliation of "selve vechia" in Boccaccio is straight narrative. In Chaucer, the grove's destruction is part of an elaborate occupatio, a slippery trope that denies giving information in the act of providing that which is denied. The trope thus recapitulates on the rhetorical level the shifting ontologies of the Tale's wider universe. Not recognizing the principle of contradiction, the trope does and does not provide the same thing at the same time.
16 I am thinking of Hrothgar's description of the mere and its surroundings, lines 1345-79, and Beowulf's activity in and about it, lines 1399-1622, in Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Fr. Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Boston: D. C. Health & Co., 1950).
17 Kolve, Imagery, 131. Woods remarks that "the cutting of the trees and the dishabitation of the wood gods... imply the completion of things, the end of a cycle" ("Chivalry and Nature," 297).
18 Winthrop Weatherbee traces the capability of Thebes to impose itself on Athens in the Tale to Boccaccio, who, in the Teseida, "... demonstrat[es] with carefully controlled irony the insidiously self-renewing power of Theban violence..." and notes further that, in Boccaccio as in Chaucer, "... the patterns of Theban violence recreat[e] themselves inexorably in Athenian life..." ("Romance and Epic in Chaucer's Knight's Tale," Exemplaria 2 [1990]: 313, 315).
19 Woods, "Chivalry and Nature," 293. Woods notes later that "Theseus' elegy... lays Arcite's ghost by rationalizing his death and offering what amounts to an apologia for the living" (298).
20 Nicholson, "Theseus's 'Ordinaunce,'" 199.
21 Weatherbee notes the Knight-narrator's identification with his hero Theseus ("Romance and Epic," 305-6). On the relationship of the narrative voice to the narration it generates and with which it interacts, see, as well, Leicester, Disenchanted Self, particularly part 3, "The Institution of the Subject," chapters 9-14, pp. 221-382.
22 Brooke Bergan, "Surface and Secret in the Knight's Tale" (Chaucer Review 26 [1991-92]), has caught Saturn's character nicely: "There is no logic behind Saturn's malevolence, nor can it be appeased, for the gods in the Knight's Tale do not transcend human frailty as they do in The Book of Theseus" (9). Chaucer's original audience might have noted that a glance from this god brings the plague: "My lookyng is the fader of pestilence" (1(A) 2469).
23 Kolve, Imagery, 126.
24 Weatherbee apprehends the profound implications of Chaucer's change: it introduces Saturn, "the eldest of the gods," who "provides a grim account of a universe over which he claims absolute power (italics mine)" ("Romance and Epic," 325-26).
25 Chaucer recognizes the difference between the Olympian pantheon and these other "gods." In, e.g., Troilus 4, lines 1541-45, Criseyde swears on a catalogue of deities that she will be true to Troilus: "And this on every god celestial I swere it yow, and ek on ech goddesse, On every nymphe and deite infernal, On satiry and fawny more and lesse, That halve goddes ben of wildernesse;"
26 The poem survives in two manuscripts: Cambridge University Library Hh. 4. 12, ff. 43v-44r, dated in the 15th century generally, and CUL Ii. 3. 21, ff. 52v-53r, dated to the late 14th century (from A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, vol. 3 [1856-67; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 292-95, 424-25). The first ms. is an anthology of poetry by different authors: e.g., anonymous pieces, a "Liber Catonis," some poems by Lydgate, Chaucer's "Former Age" and "Parliament of Fowls"; it is of no particular interest to me here. The second ms. contains a Latin text of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae followed by Chaucer's translation, in alternating order: viz., a section of Latin followed by the appropriate section of English, each in different scripts but in the same hand and ink. After the Latin-English version of metrum 5, book 2, we have the following: "Chawc[er] vp on the fyfte met[rum] of the second book" (what becomes known as "The Former Age"), the title in the same hand and ink as the English text, of which the poem thus becomes a part. The title is enclosed by a red ink oval with inward hatching. We are confronted by Chaucer translating -- thus glossing -- Boethius, followed by Chaucer's poetic comment -- another glossing -- on his own translation. For a discussion of "The Former Age," see James M. Dean, The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America Press, 1997), 271-76. Dean remarks that, in the final stanza, Chaucer introduces two tyrants well known in medieval histories of primitive times: "Jupiter, whom Chaucer characterizes as the patriarch of lustful sexuality, and Nimrod, whose lust was for governance, power, and prideful self- assertion..." (276). See also Geoffrey Chaucer, The Minor Poems: Part One, ed. George Pace and Alfred David, vol. 5 of A Variorum Edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981).
27 "Lak of Stedfastness" is the only other of the five "Boethian" poems -- "Truth," "Gentilesse," and "Fortune" -- to use the "Golden Age" to measure and judge contemporary circumstances.