What happens in Chapter 2 of The Canterbury Tales?
The Knight's Tale begins with Theseus, the Duke of Athens, returning victorious from his conquest of Scythia, accompanied by his new wife Hippolyta and her sister Emelye. On their way, they encounter a group of widowed noblewomen whose husbands were killed at Thebes and left unburied by the tyrant Creon. Touched by their sorrow, Theseus changes his course, heads to Thebes, defeats Creon, and ensures the dead are returned to their wives. Among the casualties, two young knights—Palamon and Arcite, who are cousins and sworn brothers—are discovered wounded and imprisoned in Athens. From their cell, the two men see Emelye walking in the garden below and immediately fall in love with her, igniting a rivalry. Eventually, Arcite is freed thanks to a friend, Perotheus, but he is banished from Athens under threat of death. Disguised, he returns and serves in Theseus's court as a page named Philostrate. Meanwhile, Palamon escapes from prison, and the two cousins accidentally meet in a grove, where they decide to duel at dawn. While Theseus is out hunting with Hippolyta and Emelye, he stumbles upon their fight and condemns them to death—until the women plead for mercy. Instead, he orders a formal tournament: the winner of a grand joust with three hundred knights in fifty weeks will marry Emelye. Each knight prays to their patron deities—Palamon to Venus, Arcite to Mars, and Emelye to Diana—and the gods' conflicting promises are only resolved by Saturn's intervention. Arcite wins the tournament but is thrown from his horse and succumbs to his injuries; ultimately, Palamon marries Emelye.
Analysis
Chaucer presents The Knight's Tale as a chivalric romance narrated by the most esteemed of the pilgrims. The tale’s structure reflects the Knight’s values of symmetry, hierarchy, and the management of chaos through ceremony. It unfolds in four parts, each centered on a key event—the siege of Thebes, the prison scene, the duel in the grove, and the tournament. These moments raise the stakes while keeping a dignified, almost ceremonial rhythm. This deliberate pacing is a stylistic choice: the Knight tells the story in an epic register, drawing inspiration from Boccaccio's Teseida, which Chaucer uses to reveal its limitations.
The key irony here is that chivalric order fails to resolve the conflict between two equally deserving and passionate rivals. Palamon and Arcite are crafted as nearly identical characters, making their rivalry seem absurd. Chaucer highlights this absurdity through their simultaneous love at first sight. The tale features three detailed descriptions of temples (Venus, Mars, and Diana), which are among the most elaborate passages in Middle English poetry. These descriptions convey images of violence and suffering that challenge any idealized notions of courtly love or martial glory.
Saturn's solution—causing Arcite's tragic accident to appease both Mars and Venus—carries a dark humor: divine forces yield not justice but a bureaucratic compromise. Theseus’s final speech on the "First Mover" tries to offer philosophical comfort, yet the stark contrast between its confident language and the arbitrary suffering that came before it serves as Chaucer's sharpest critique of the genre itself.
Key quotes from Chapter 2
“And certainly a man hath moost honour / To dyen in his excellence and flour, / Whan he is siker of his goode name.”
Theseus delivers these lines in his closing consolation speech, framing Arcite's early death as a kind of fortune rather than tragedy—a claim the tale's preceding carnage renders deeply ambiguous.
“The smylere with the knyf under the cloke.”
This image appears in the ekphrasis of Mars's temple, cataloguing the god's domain of treachery; it is one of Chaucer's most compressed and frequently quoted figures for hidden malice.
“What is this world? What asketh men to have? / Now with his love, now in his colde grave / Allone, withouten any compaignye.”
Spoken at the moment of Arcite's death, these lines collapse the entire courtly ambition of the tale into three stark rhetorical questions, marking the tale's sharpest tonal break.