Using Giles of Rome's De Regimine Principum as a convenient touchtone, Stephen Rigby constructs a period eye, establishing through Giles and others--indeed his bibliography is large--a medieval horizon of political thought upon which to place The Knight's Tale, the better to assess Chaucer's portrait of Theseus. Does Chaucer construct him as an ideal ruler or as a tyrant? Does Theseus in effect embody Giles' ideas of prudence? In De Regimine Giles sets out the moral qualities a ruler should enact: virtue, reason, prudence and justice, which one can expand via Aristotle into liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, proper ambition, gentleness, friendliness, truthfulness, and even proper amusement (Theseus enjoys the hunt). While fairly canvassing the large body of literary scholarship, and going against the grain of many analyses that find Theseus wanting, Rigby locates places in the tale where Theseus exhibits all of those qualities noted above in adequate or more than adequate ways. The argument moves along three headings: the good rule of the self (ethics); economies and politics or the good rule of others; and the first mover or appropriate wisdom about the order of the cosmos. Contrary to the reading experience of most Chaucerians today, Rigby's thesis, bolstered widely and in detail by relevant medieval commentaries, is that Theseus is indeed Chaucer's image of an ideal ruler however set in a pagan past.
That thesis is not wrong, with Rigby scoring some politically inflected insights. Yet he adds little other than comprehensiveness to J. D. Burnley's view that Theseus is an antitype of the tyrant, while directly arguing against the many who see strands of tyranny in Theseus and his state. Nice details abound, such as the meaning of Theseus' battle pennants (openly indicating the kind of war he will wage against Thebes), that Emily's wishes are as extreme as Arcite's (she has no ascetic motives), and that Saturn has a good side (association with the wisdom of long experience, hence linked to Egeus). But minor glitches aside--Cressida is Shakespeare's character not Chaucer's, and Arcite and Palamon do not fight ankle deep in blood--Rigby's fidelity to his thesis too often slights the dramatic shifts in the narrative, Theseus' periodic willfulness, and the intercessory role of noble widows, wives and ladies.
Repeatedly, Theseus' first impulse is not prudential--something clear from the beginning. Regarding his character, many have noted his willfulness and that, as Esther Quinn has recently generalized, Chaucer establishes a pattern of positive and negative 'signals' running in their variations throughout the narrative, while in the end representing Theseus as a capable ruler. [1] But even then one can wonder whether or not he disappears into the ideal. Might his acquired wisdom fall short?
Skipping much of interest, one might review a few important moments: Theseus's initial response to the grieving widows, to the blood- stained Arcite and Palamon, and to his own invocation of the first mover. While Rigby notes that Theseus does learn, mainly by internalizing female perspectives, more attention to dramatic perspective would have been salutary. Indeed, Rigby might better have arranged his impressive resources to show just how and in what ways Theseus emerges as a good ruler, being so in potential. The widows complain early in the poem, only to provoke Theseus. Why are they so envious of his honor? Or who has injured them? And, obtusely, why are they clothed in black? Slow on the uptake he changes soon enough after listening to their pleas, which arouse his "pitee." That same "pitee" seems absent, however, when he imprisons Arcite and Palamon perpetually, only later to have Duke Perotheous, someone whose soul is his own, persuade him to release Arcite. When he much later confronts Arcite and Palamon in the countryside, learning who they are and why they fight, he is at first roused to anger until swayed by the 'compassioun' to which the tears of accompanying ladies move him. Yet he will still decree a tournament countenancing death for one of the knights, a decree he later withdraws (although not beseeched to do so). Rigby rightly notes some of this but not in full, dramatic context. The dramatic line then seems to be one of maturation. By poem's end, Theseus has matured, hence the first mover speech--an ornament of that maturity and, according to Rigby, a counsel of hope in the face of a possibly paralyzing sorrow (although mourning has already ended among the Greeks). Yet, one might wonder. Theseus gets to the notion that all things have their own durations before he descends to men and women who go from youth to old age to death-- forgetting that there is eternal succession (although not eternity for individual creatures). Why strive against Jupiter's desire, then, that all things move to their 'propre welle'? Let us make a virtue of necessity, he concludes, somewhat hastily. A more Boethian insight would think that the love that knits all things together should govern our hearts as well in a knot of holy matrimony (Boece, II. met. 8). Contrary to Rigby, Chaucer does not technically "provide a mirror for contemporary princes in the guise of an allegorical narrative" (227). Rather, he develops a drama of impulsiveness, chastened repeatedly given the persuasive feelings of (mainly) womanly intercessors. Nevertheless, as Rigby points out, the marriage at poem's end does matter (in Theseus's clumsy way)--feminist complaints about Emily's lack of agency aside. Theseus would have her womanly 'pitee' 'rewe' upon Palamon, a short step away from having love knit up two hearts, thus also but not primarily tying neighboring peoples together (a point pushed too hard).
While Rigby's focus on The Knight's Tale generates more than enough applied discussion of medieval political philosophy, one misses some account of The Tale of Melibee, Chaucer's most prolonged meditation on the right behavior of aggrieved princes. Still, one can be grateful to Stephen Rigby for bringing political philosophy home to the Canterbury gathering's lead-off tale, in the expectation that he might someday apply that range of interests to a reading of interactions between Melibeus and Prudence. Indebted to Albertanus through Renaud de Louens, Chaucer's Meilbee ends with a Christian rather than pagan perspective, the greater prudence of mercy for one's reconciled enemies in hope of God's mercy for oneself.
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Notes:
1. Esther Casier Quinn, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Poetics of Disguise (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 2008), p. 98.