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Knight's Tale" and Lydgate's "Fabula Duorum Mercatorum" Author(S): Robert Stretter Reviewed Work(S): Source: the Chaucer Review, Vol

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Knight's Tale Rewriting Perfect Friendship in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" and Lydgate's "Fabula Duorum Mercatorum" Author(s): Robert Stretter Reviewed work(s): Source: The Chaucer Review, Vol. 37, No. 3 (2003), pp. 234-252 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096207 . Accessed: 13/03/2013 02:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Chaucer Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:16:29 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REWRITINGPERFECT FRIENDSHIP IN CHAUCER'SKNIGHTS TALEAND LYDGATE'SFABULA DUORUM MERCATORUM byRobert Stretter Looking back at Geoffrey Chaucer's Knights Tale from a twenty-first cen one can see a classic "love men tury vantage point, easily triangle"?two over a fighting woman. In fact, Palamon and Arcite's tragic rivalry for the hand of Emelye offers a particularly good medieval instance of what Rene Girard has called "triangular desire," that is, desire mediated through a a rival.1 A in a third party, often strikingly similar scenario appears lesser known the Fabula duorum Chaucer's most distin text, mercatorum, by guished disciple, John Lydgate. The love triangle is so common a feature of literature that it is tempting to take its presence in a given text for granted. But Iwish to argue that the love conflicts in these two poems are unusual because of Chaucer's and with a Lydgate's engagement popular type of medieval English romance and exemplum in which one almost never finds a woman between men. I refer to the tra successfully coming dition of stories that idealized male friendship and brotherhood.2 This thoroughgoing glorification of same-sex bonds is crucial to our inter pretation of the gender and sexual dynamics of many medieval and early modern texts. In contrast to the tradition of fin' amor, which presents a highly codified male-female love as the supreme human relationship, these tales establish a world of intermasculine priorities, firmly relegat ing relationships with women to a place of secondary importance. Chaucer is the first English writer explicitly to set the friendship tradi tion against the ideals of fin' amor. By enlisting the ideological weight of the masculine code of sworn brotherhood in the Knights Tale, a depar ture from his source in Boccaccio's Teseida, Chaucer evokes a struggle between two competing ideals of affectivity, one a theoretically nonsex ual love between men, the other a fundamentally erotic love between the sexes. The incompatibility of these gendered ideals, and Chaucer's decision THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2003. Copyright ? 2003 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:16:29 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ROBERTSTRETTER 235 to subjugate the former to the latter in the Knight's Tale, results in an intensification of his portrayal of sexual desire as an overwhelming force in human affairs. The conflict of these traditionally separate yet equally powerful models for prioritizing human devotion provides the impetus for Chaucer's story. Moreover, the destruction of one noble bond by another heightens the troubled, often fatalistic tone of the poem. The effect of what Chaucer is doing becomes particularly clear when one compares the Knight's Tale to Lydgate's Fabula, a text on which it appears to have had a heavy influence. Pamela Farvolden, who first explored the relationship between these two texts several years ago, righdy sees Lydgate as responding to Chaucer's portrayal of the tension same-sex between and male-female affection. However, Farvolden pre sents Chaucer and Lydgate as engaged in essentially the same project; woman to cement "both poems," she asserts, "illustrate the exchange of and relations between men."3 In Farvolden's personal political view, Lydgate's Fabula establishes an explicit parallel between sworn brother hood and courdy love in order to extend and intensify the Knight's Tale's implicit message that women's role in romance is to strengthen male bonds. My position is that Chaucer and Lydgate are in fact completely at odds in their portrayals of the relationship between love and friendship. The implication of Palamon and Arcite's fragile relationship is that friendship is no match for sexual desire; Lydgate, on the other hand, reestablishes the supremacy of friendship with an almost ferocious insis tence. My goal in this essay will thus be twofold: first, to show how the conventions of the friendship tradition enable Chaucer's exploration of the power of erotic desire, and, second, to demonstrate how in the Fabula Lydgate essentially undertakes to rewrite Chaucer's fatal rivalry so that male friendship triumphs over male-female love. I. Chaucer and the Friendship Tradition Much of the best and most enduring Middle English literature?includ ing major works of the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Malory?celebrates chivalric fin'amors, a fact that can obscure the importance of the discourse of same-sex friendship in medieval England. It will be helpful therefore to some begin by reviewing of what that discourse involved. In depicting the intense bond between Palamon and Arcite, Chaucer could have drawn from two largely distinct friendship traditions: the one, classical amicitia', the other, sworn brotherhood. The highly theorized classical tra dition of ideal male friendship traces its origins at least as far back as Pythagoras, but in the Middle Ages it found itsmost influential articula tion in the writings of Aristode and especially Cicero. Aristode's vision of This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:16:29 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 236 THE CHAUCERREVIEW perfect friendship, to which he devotes two entire books of the Nicho machean Ethics, involves two men drawn together not by any hope of gain but by similitude and a love of virtue. True friends achieve such spiritual unity that their separate identities begin to collapse; as Aristotle puts it, in a phrase that may have already been proverbial, "a friend is another self." In De amicitia, Cicero places male friendship together with wisdom as the greatest gifts of the gods to mankind and urges that friendship be ranked "above all other things in human life."4Works such as Seneca's a cat Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium and Plutarch's Moralia (which contains alog of famous pairs of perfect friends) further contributed to the codi as fication of ideal male friendship, passing on such commonplaces the notion that friends share a single soul and hold all their possessions in common.5 Theseus and Pirithous, whose friendship ismentioned in the Knights Tale, were two of the most famous exemplars of this tradition.6 Chaucer could have encountered this amicitia perfecta, as Cicero calls it, in any number of places, including the Roman de laRose, where Reason ... defines at some length "Love of freendshipp / / That wole not breke for wele ne woo" (Rom 5201, 5204) ? But both Chaucer and his audience would most likely have been much more familiar with male friendship a common in the form of sworn brotherhood, feature throughout and and connected to an actual European romance, folklore, exempla, a social practice in which men swore solemn, legally binding oath of mutual support.8 Brotherhood was a favorite theme of Middle English as Sir and SirAmadace.9 romances, such Guy of Warwick, Tristrem, Athelston, But the best-known and most representative medieval brotherhood story, was the on the basis of the number of surviving manuscripts and variants, legend of Amis and Amiloun (or Amelius). MacEdward Leach writes that to "every important literature from Celtic to Hungarian and from Norse . was and worked over into Italian knew it. [T]he story again again such as miracle many different narrative forms, play, exemplum, prose tale, ballad."10 Chaucer almost certainly knew the Middle English romance Amis and Amiloun since a copy appears in the Auchinleck he seems to have read.11 Manuscript, which concerns two Briefly, the plot of Amis and Amiloun knights of Lombardy who become sworn brothers, vowing to aid each other "In wele & wo, in wrong & ri3t."12 During the course of the tale, various challenges arise Amiloun that test the strength of the bond of brotherhood, but Amis and other in never falter?they remain true to their pledge to help each in a xvrong as well as right, as when Amiloun impersonates Amis judicial a combat so that his friend may avoid perjury. The story ends with to cure supreme test in which Amis murders his own children in order live out their his brother of leprosy. Having passed this test, the knights on same and a days together, both dying the day sharing single grave. The ethos of brotherhood, as even the most cursory look at Amis and This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:16:29 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ROBERTSTRETTER 237 Amiloun makes clear, establishes a world in which a formal oath between men supersedes all other bonds and responsibilities, whether familial, matrimonial, political, or religious. The brotherhood of Amis and Amiloun gives an idea of the nature of the relationship that Emelye's presence destroys in the Knight's Tale.
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