Rewriting Perfect Friendship in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Lydgate's Fabula Duorum Mercatorum

Abstract

Looking back at Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale from a twenty-first century vantage point, one can easily see a classic "love triangle"—two men fighting over a woman. In fact, Palamon and Arcite's tragic rivalry for the hand of Emelye offers a particularly good medieval instance of what René Girard has called "triangular desire," that is, desire mediated through a third party, often a rival. 1 A strikingly similar scenario appears in a lesser-known text, the Fabula duorum mercatorum, by Chaucer's most distinguished 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 I wish to argue that the love conflicts in these two poems are unusual because of Chaucer's and Lydgate's engagement with a popular type of medieval English romance and exemplum in which one almost never finds a woman successfully coming between men. I refer to the tradition of stories that idealized male friendship and brotherhood. 2 This thoroughgoing glorification of same-sex bonds is crucial to our interpretation 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 relegating relationships with women to a place of secondary importance.

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