The most striking difference between these Tales is one of mood . The Knight depicts a cheerless society--tears, wailing and death open the account, and are the high point of the close--held in the pervasive grip both of a whimful, strutting autocrat and of a cosmic order whose influence is negative verging on maleficent . The Miller's response to the Knight's measured stately progress, to his tone of high seriousness and the pervasive gloom, is a fast-moving ribald tale of low life, with lightness and frivolity the keynote throughout . Low life it may be, but this is not just any old tale : it is a conscious reworking of the Knight's ingredients . The Miller grinds away the seriousness, the introspection, the philosophical underlay of the Knight's tale, and concentrates on its kernel : artifice .
By artifice is not meant simply Theseus's breathtaking contrivance of the three shrines . It is more what the Knight depicts as underlying the chivalric trappings, the chivalric codes that Theseus, Palamon and Arcite seem to espouse and embody . These are like the Emperor's new clothes, so that something of the internal dynamics of character is exposed .
Take the treatment of Theseus . Out of the many exploits of the original Theseus, the Knight selects two . Theseus bears an emblem of the Minotaur on his standard . This immediately evokes his abandonment of his lover and help-meet in the exploit, Ariadne . He is just returning from the destruction of the regne of Femenye, with Hippolyta the prize in tow . And yet, the true knight, he is immediately off to defend the weeping women's cause . His chivalric posturing is shot through with hypocrisy . He goes off to undo the tyranny of Creon (which in non-chivalry-speak means a taas of bodyes dede ), then tyrannically imposes perpetual imprisonment on Palamon and Arcite, against the code's right of ransom . He inverts the chivalric procedure of pitting champion against champion in a war, to minimise loss, by enlarging the dispute between Palamon and Arcite into an organised melee of hundreds, champions and all . He dons and doffs chivalry when it suits . By the time the Knight tells of Arcite's death, one is wondering whether Theseus's grief is simply affectation, or, if it is genuine, is it solely because Arcite was a fellow-devotee of Mars ? With the concluding marriage of state, the Knight overtly declares what he has been quietly building towards : Theseus wraps the marriage up in the cheyne of love and serves it on a platter duly inlaid with his vision of how the Body Politic (i.e. himself) is as to the Divine Order . He prescribes making vertu of necessitee . Necessity being part of the Master Plan, this leaves him the vertu . All, from broken heart through standard, shrines and tournament to vertu, is artifice, and Theseus is not a verray, parfit gentil knyght .
The suitors, Palamon and Arcite, receive more favourable treatment, though throughout their portrayals the slant is accumulatively for Palamon and against Arcite . In the prison dispute over who saw Emelye first, Arcite comes over as a petty quibbler, with little notion of honour . Set at liberty, Arcite contrives simply to be in hir presence, whereas Palamon at liberty is set at once to wage war on Theseus to win Emelye . Then we have Thise seven yeer hath seten Palamoun (1452)--the sense that the debt owed to society is lapsed ; Palamon is immured Perpetuelly, noght oonly for a yer (1458) . A freend from Thebes helps him break prison, not, the implication goes, his liberated felawe . To defy Theseus and to be near Emelye, Arcite dons the subterfuge of 'Philostrate' (Greek 'philo',lover of ; Greek 'strategema', artifice, manoeuvre) ; and Ful prively two harneys hath he dight (1630) to equip the suitors for their duel .
But there is no outright black and white . If one looks at Palamon's initial outcry in the grove--false traytour...has byjaped heere duc Theseus, falsely changed thy name (1575ff.)--one has the sense that Arcite is provoked by Palamon into defying their oath and bond . Again, when the royal party arrives at the grove, and Palamon leaps to confession, all honesty, directness, respect, humility and grace, he prefaces the briefest of mentions of his misdeeds with a catalogue--This is...this is...--of Arcite's errors . It is childish, petty, vindictive, and this in Palamon's first close encounter with Emelye .
The Knight's three candidates to be the flowers of chivalry variously fall short of the code that the Knight himself embodies . Save for the odd moments--the respectful exchanges prior to the duel in the grove ; Arcite's generous recommendation of Palamon at the death--their hearts do not seem to be in it . And this is to be ascribed to a tendency to deviousness, variously displayed, with its culmination in the pseudonymous Philostrate and in the shrines : in artifice . It is for this reason that the Knight projects them back in time into a pagan ambience : these are not worthy representatives of Christian knight errantry .
The Miller purloins the Knight's story-telling artifice and his internally revealed artifice-in-character, moves over into a Christian ambience, and redistributes the 'booty' . The format is the same : two young men, suitors to the same young woman, with an older man in whose domain the action is played out . But this is no one to one transference, for the Miller's characters, Nicholas included, are simplicity itself : for Thesean opaque, now read translucent . All who are in the prisoune of Theseus are set at liberty here in a medieval English country village . John the carpenter, providing the setting, is a Theseus manque, specifically lacking enough wit to be devious . He is at liberty, but due to his 'senex amans' situation he is trammelled with jealousy, and bound to catering to Alison's expensive taste in clothes, to keep her favour : his despense is Theseus's despense reworked . Alison's counterpart, Emelye, is literally a prisoner to start with, and is thereafter a prisoner to princely duty and the dukes's whim . The Knight consistently draws complex character, and Emelye is true to pattern . What are we to make of her offer to Diana--And whil I lyve, a mayde I wol thee serve (2330)--in the context of the contest ? Is it not so much as to wish both suitors dead ? Given this, what of her grief at Arcite's death ? Is this affectation, or does it signify a genuine attraction towards the young devotee of Mars who had spent many a month in servant's guise just to be near her ? She may simply have discerned a raw masculinity, for this is the man who earlier planned to seduce her, forcefully if need be . Certainly the need for Emelye to be won over to the charms of Palamon by Theseus implies her partiality, yet this could simply be the virginal stance reiterated . From the constrained and virginal Emelye we move over to the unrestrained and definitely lecherous Alison . Emelye al in grene fades before Alison in full bloom, all in silk . She is similarly, but here not seriously, a 'prisoner', hedged around by the jealousy of old John . In this context, Nicholas slots smoothly into the Arcite projection of virile, forceful male, though here there is no ambiguity about his candidacy, nor in Alison's acceptance of him .
With the Miller's parallel pair of suitors, aspects of the original pair are shared between them . For Palamon up with the lark, stepping gaily towards the Temple of Venus, read Absalon up before cock crow stepping gaily out to do his troubadour beneath Alison's window . For Palamon in the tower, in love, his loved one nearby but out of reach, read Nicholas in John's home, in lust, his lusted one to hand spatially and literally . As said above, for the virile Arcite, read the womanising Nicholas . For the pessimistic Arcite at liberty, who takes on the subterfuge of 'Philostrate', read the jolly Absalon, happy as the day and night are long, and as long as there are tappesteries to carouse through and young ladies to censer and cast wanful looks upon . He is so love-lorn with Alison that it takes him all night to get round to wooing her . He is only devious in his fancy--the cat and the mouse--and is as harmless as Arcite is dangerous .
If there is any sense of constraint on the Miller's pair of suitors, it shows in their voluntary but excessive commitment to a self-defining disposition . With Absalon, it is a total and virtually unthinking commitment to the role of carefree local troubadour, whose eccentric behaviour is benignly tolerated by all--specifically by the representative Gervaise, and, even more relevantly, by the 'hurt party' behind the window, old John . This comprehensive acceptance, allied to his excessive unthinking commitment, makes him ripe for the jest played by the 'thinking' players at the window, Alison and Nicholas .
With Nicholas, it is his delight in his intellectual superiority over the local yokels . It does not take much wit to 'beard' Absalon a second time at the window . Nor does it take much to outwit the witless John . On both occasions Nicholas over-elaborates, with an excessive display of his intellectual superiority . In him the Miller relocates all the individual deviousness and artifice from the Knight's tale, for Nicholas is the only one with wit enough to sustain it . He is a comprehensive Philostrate, a lover of stratagems . Yet for all that he is translucent, simplicity itself, because he is consistently the superior wit : no divagations, no internal complexity, because there is here no high seriousness, no moral code against which he can be measured .
The central product of Nicholas's artifice is the concoction of the Second Flood and the paraphernalia to be rigged up in the barn . This again is the Miller's reworking of the Knight's materiel . As was said, the Knight distances his faulty examples of knight errantry back into pagan time, but then he scatters the effect of antiqueness by endowing Theseus's society with a strong belief in an astrological cosmic order, making his tale relevant to his contemporaries . Granted, a few lines are given over to the Olympian gods as a group, redolent of the old days of lolling about drinking ambrosia, and making the occasional direct intervention in human affairs . But now in Theseus's world those carefree days are over, the gods are located in their respective spheres in the material heavens, and, most importantly, they are locked into, and locked in by, the comprehensive astrological perception . Now direct intervention in human affairs by the timeless gods is permissible only at the right hour of the right day of... The gods of a Homeric dimension are reduced now to Thesean dimensions . Move over into the medieval, Christian ambience, where belief in astrology is rife, and then look back through Christian eyes to the Biblical Flood, which, post-creation, was the first comprehensive direct intervention by God in human affairs . What the Miller then does is take the Knight's sequence of free to now human-controlled Olympian gods and their interventions, posit such a transfer of powers from biblical God to human, so that his controller of 'world events', Nicholas, can like Theseus fashion a second era of divine intervention--on cue and on demand--into a second 'divinely' ordained Flood, fixed to a certain day and time.
Astrology is intrinsic to religious system in the Athenian society portrayed . It is extrinsic to life down Osney way, save as an artifact with which to beguile the gullible John . The latter point may be retroactively illuminating, for in Athens Theseus is supreme autocrat and artificer . He spends a year and a lot of money constructing temples for three divinities, to whom the three 'lovers' are conveniently inclined, come the day and hour . The shrines are Theseus's version of panem et circenses . He does nor control the gods, but he has established among the populace a rigorous application to, and belief in, astrology and its time-charts . With the shrines he devises a fabulous earthly rendition of the gods on high, and his shrines are the sole channels through which the gods speak and intercede . Meantime the gods on high manifest themselves to their worshippers, they quarrel, they exist objectively, but compared with Theseus's fabulous and working constructs (their working visibly confirms and conveys their interventions), the Olympians appear minimally, and the field of belief is Theseus's, by their default . The Knight is overtly non-commital on the validity of the Olympian gods : he comments by accumulation, letting the scenario where devotee and divinity converge speak for itself . In lines 1355ff., we find Arcite a physical and emotional wreck : this the Knight's structural preamble to'Him thoughte how that the winged god Mercurie/Bifor hym stood and bad hym to be murie' . If we look at the sequence of visits of the devotees to their respective shrines, in the first place the devotees rise and go on cue, and one notes a definite spacing and interval between each visit . In each case, the devotees are in a highly emotional state : they are susceptible to a little planetary (i.e. Thesean) influence--a rattle here, a slammed door there, a whisper of Victory in the wind and in the wings .
Carpenter John's gullibleness is of this sort of order . His beliefs are Christianity as revealed in the Mystery Plays : he knows about Christ and the Harrowing of Hell . He knows about Noah's shrewish wife, so he is acquainted with the details of the Flood . His Christianity is underlaid with a belief in elves and sprites, and devils lurking in corners . These he can feel, sense and complacently believe . Nicholas's intimations of his communication with God come after John has been built up into a highly emotional state by the faked catatonic trance . From shrines as contrived channel to the gods, the Miller has Nicholas make himself the channel to God : hende Nicholas is superior to to John, certainly, but here the Miller makes him a superior artificer than the controller of gods and men, Theseus . His revelations shake John to the core . Nicholas has God at his ear, and John by the ear . The lodger now controls the man of the house, and controls God, his own contrivance .
As homely autocrat, Nicholas indulges his excessive delight in superior intellect by ordering preparations for the coming Flood : a Stellatum of three fixed stars, or perhaps as three of the planetary spheres, the counterparts of the three in the Knight's tale . There the music of the spheres was creaking noises and slamming doors . Here it is translated into the more harmonic echoes of clom...clom...clom . The wind of Victory becomes a blast of wind in Absalom's face . Nor is the oath forgotten : as Palamon and Arcite had taken an oath, which both break, so, for good measure, John and Nicholas swear an oath of secrecy about the divine revelation, which both break, and they swear an oath of silence on the dreaded night . The hot coulter makes Nicholas break another form of wind : his shrieks set the spheres in discord, and John's come plummeting to earth .
The coulter brand is the Miller's version of Nemesis for Nicholas's pride in his intellectual superiority and his indulgence of it : he is reduced to the level of a beast to be branded . John's is a physical, his an intellectual, fall from on high . And Absalon's intervention is the untoward happening that stops the stratagem short, renders the contrivance pointless . A similar intervention with similar effect intrudes on Theseus's artifice . He has contrived matters so that his fellow-devotee of Mars, Arcite, wins the contest . Then, on Saturn's orders, up pops Pluto from Hades, to cause Arcite's death and defeat Theseus's stratagem . Just as Absalon's intervention places Nicholas lower in the heavenly hierarchy, so Pluto's intervention places Theseus, and the fatalistic, cheerless world he fashions and nurtures, lower in the cosmic hierarchy . This contention can be borne out by two instances in the text alluding to Theseus's legendary exploits . Firstly, Theseus's defeat of the Minotaur : if he was successful in Crete, Theseus was to change his black sails to white to relay his success to his waiting father, Aegeus . He failed to do so, and Aegeus, thinking his son dead, committed suicide . Yet there in the text Aegeus is 'alive', and uttering commonplaces about 'Death conquers all' . Secondly, an exploit of Theseus after the defeat of Creon and Thebes was his descent with Pirithous into Hades to carry off Persephone, which attempt was forestalled by Pluto, and Pirithous trapped there . Up there in Thesean Athens is Pirithous, is the dead Aegeus 'alive' and talking about death, is Theseus, who need not descend to confront Pluto, for Pluto ascends to confront and confound Theseus . This is Pluto simply moving within his domain : Theseus's cheerless world is a kind of underworld, a Hades. This is the brand of Pluto, and of the Knight .
One final correlation : The Knight's Tale begins on the destruction of the regne of Femenye, the land of female supremacy, where the arms and legs of infant boys were broken to incapacitate them for war or travel . From this pagan past we move in The Miller's Tale to Osney present : 'os', French for 'bone' ; 'ne', French for 'born/born from' . We have moved into a world of Biblical dispensation, and the person born from the bone is Eve . Down Osney way, Alison is the only main character to emerge unscathed from Nicholas's grand artifice, while husband has a double fracture in the arm . Is this not the Miller's version of Femenye restored, with Alison the female supreme ?
