A Knight's Tale" Author(S): Hannah Wilkes Source: Studies in Popular Culture, Vol

Popular Culture Association in the South Chaucer Comes to Hollywood: Changing Stars and Staying Authentic in "A Knight's Tale" Author(s): Hannah Wilkes Source: Studies in Popular Culture, Vol. 35, No. 1 (FALL 2012), pp. 91-107 Published by: Popular Culture Association in the South Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23416367 Accessed: 10-02-2018 22:39 UTC 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]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Popular Culture Association in the South is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in Popular Culture This content downloaded from 128.223.223.130 on Sat, 10 Feb 2018 22:39:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Hannah Wilkes Chaucer Comes to Hollywood: Changing Stars and Staying Authentic in A Knight's Tale1 Somme wikke aspect or disposicioun Of Saturne, by som constellacioun, Hath yeven us this . [Some wicked aspect or disposition Of Saturn, by some constellation, Has given us this . ] —Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knight's Tale, 1087-10892 "Aman can change his stars." —William Thatcher, A Knight 's Tale Having defeated his arch-nemesis at last, William Thatcher embraces his lover Jocelyn, seemingly for hours, as the sun sets and the stars come out; the camera pans upward until the audience sees only stars. This final shot of Brian Helgeland's 2001 film A Knight's Tale is not a mere romantic convention; it is a final reminder of the film's theme: that it is possible to change one's stars. William has always dreamed of being a knight, so when his master dies, he adopts the persona of Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein. Soon, William hires Geoffrey Chaucer3 to write him false patents of nobility and act as his herald. Eventually William's humble background is discovered; he is arrested but then pardoned and knighted by Edward, the Black Prince. Modern rock music and slang help tell the story and complicate the film's 1370 setting; anachronisms aid rather than weaken the translation of parallel themes. A Knight's Tale is loosely inspired by Chaucer's The Knight's Tale. In the "Stories of the People" featurette on the DVD, Helgeland explains his inspiration: I read a biography of Chaucer, and there's a six-month period where they just don't know what he was doing, so part of the conceit was that this movie happens during the six months that he was missing... The first tale in The Canterbury Tales is called The Knight's Tale, and, hopefully, the idea is that he's writing about William in some way. 91 This content downloaded from 128.223.223.130 on Sat, 10 Feb 2018 22:39:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Hannah Wilkes As Chaucer scholars know, The Knight's Tale is based on Boccaccio's Teseida Delle Nozzi di Emilia, not an undocumented six-month adventure. But as Candace Barrington observes, Helgeland is not producing a film for Chaucer scholars but for the general public; he expects audiences' Chaucer-specific knowledge to include only that someone named Geoffrey Chaucer wrote important literature (2). Chaucer's The Knight's Tale is the story of two cousins, Palamon and Arcite, who fall in love with a woman named Emelye while they are imprisoned. When their love becomes known, they are ordered to fight to the death, with the victor winning Emelye's hand. Arcite initially wins the battle, but Saturn has him injured immediately thereafter, making Palamon the victor. Clearly, Helgeland did not adopt the full plot of Chaucer's tale. Nonetheless, as I will show, there are many parallels between the two Knight's Tales. In considering this adaptation, I draw heavily from two major ideas Kathleen Murray proposes in her article "To Have and Have Not: An Adaptive System." She questions the critical assumption that adaptation is specific to narrative. In analyzing an adaptation that strongly deviates from the source text's narrative, I, too, will challenge this assumption. Murray notes that "[t]here is no satisfying general theory about adaptation" but suggests the relevance of adaptation's scientific meaning, which emphasizes transformation. By considering adaptation in this sense, we see that "[t]he original text is transformed by the film version. It cannot be read in quite the same way again" (93). This transformation may violate what is essentially an unwritten contract between adaptors and their audiences. As Colin McCabe notes, "The cinema . claims that the source material is being faithfully translated into a new medium" (5). A Knight's Tale "faithfully translates" numerous aspects of the source text, though not Palamon and Arcite's quest for Emelye. Helgeland's text is unique because of the way he adapts these other elements. As Nickolas Haydock concedes, "the anachronistic, agglutinative representation of the past in Helgeland's A Knight's Tale may be closer to the poetics of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale than we would comfortably admit" (6). Helgeland makes the medievalism more accessible to a modern audience by translating it into modern features. These modern features have made scholars rather fretful. David Matthews' description of the film as "largely amiable" (199) is perhaps the closest thing to praise medievalists have offered, though Kathleen Forni's characterization of it as a "delightfully anachronistic fairy tale" (253) gives the same sense of back-handed compliment. 92 Studies in Popular Culture 35.1 Fall 2012 This content downloaded from 128.223.223.130 on Sat, 10 Feb 2018 22:39:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Chaucer Comes to Hollywood: A Knight's Tale Forni later asserts that "the film . fails as a constructive form of literary symbiosis" and "fails to engage Chaucer's tale on any thematic or aesthetic level" (255), two failures I intend to show do not exist at all. Matthews calls A Knight's Tale "a modern film taking a distinctly disrespectful attitude" (121). Barrington seems to sense disrespect not just to the Middle Ages but to Chaucer himself, saying, "The resulting popular Chaucer bears little resemblance to the academic Chaucer; in fact, encountering popular Chaucer can be very disorienting for those scholars and teachers who strive to approximate 'authentic readings'" (3-4). The scholarly concern seems to be that audiences will come away from A Knight 's Tale believing it to be The Knight s Tale, including an authentic picture of Geoffrey Chaucer, poet-slash degenerate gambler.4 Further anxieties arise in the criticism that A Knight's Tale presents a Geoffrey Chaucer who is a product of modern America, not medieval England. Louise D'Arcens summarizes the overall critical view of the film as "unanimous criticism of A Knight's Tale's avowedly modern, capitalist, and meritocratic ideology" (91). Haydock, Forni, and Helen Dell all suggest that the "capitalist master narrative" makes the film both very much modern and very much American. Other scholars see definite Americanism—incorrectly, I believe—in other features of the film. Züleyha Çetiner-Ôktem argues that William, Wat, and Roland's first interaction with Chaucer illustrates Americans' relationship to medieval England. The three men have never heard of Chaucer or his poetry; likewise, Chaucer "does not hold a lot of significance for Americans outside the academia [sic]. Obviously, Chaucer is not a part of American culture" (50). This last sentence overstates the point a bit; as I have said, most Americans outside the academy know who Chaucer is and that English teachers consider his poetry to be capital-L Literature.5 His appearances in popular culture are not ubiquitous, but neither are they nonexistent. In Barrington's interpretation, A Knight 's Tale "uses [Chaucer] to validate a distinctly American ethos : risk-taking for personal gain" ( 143) and that "as a good American hero William overcomes the odds, wins the championships, and gets the girl" (143). Yet these are not features specific to American narratives; both appear in Chaucer's tale. Arcite and Palamon risk death as they overcome their own odds (they are, after all, imprisoned) in an attempt to win the joust and win Emelye. As Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray note, "Medieval film is certainly anachronistic, but we should not dismiss it for being so" (9). Instead, we should examine the anachronisms. Louise D'Arcens 93 This content downloaded from 128.223.223.130 on Sat, 10 Feb 2018 22:39:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Hannah Wilkes observes that the film "both provokes and dramatizes anxieties about the relationship between the medieval and medievalism, literature and film" (81) and "has failed (however deliberately) to capture the historical past" (91). She suggests that most medievalists have not done what the film "cheekily" invites us to: resist our urge as medieval scholars to view the film as "a degraded iteration of Chaucer's tale or more generally of medieval romance." Yet if we do resist this urge, we recognize the fallacy of "the implicit privileging of the medieval over the medievalist text" and recognize that medievalisms have their own value (81). These two recognitions are crucial for medievalist scholarship and for my argument. I go a step farther than D'Arcens and suggest that, not only should we treat the medievalist text as equally important as the medieval text, we should also acknowledge that the medievalist text might teach us something about the medieval text.

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