FORM AND STRUCTURE

Some believe the Knight's Tale is a pure romance, filled with knights and lovely ladies and battles for the sake of love. At several points it's clear Chaucer is making fun of the courtly love conventions of the French romances, with the lovesick Arcite going "up and down" in his moods. Duke Theseus, too, treats the love battle like a game, making light of love and offering the joust as a solution.

Others think the tale, which Chaucer changed greatly from Boccaccio's original, starts out as an epic before it becomes a conventional romance in its style. Another irony is that Theseus' speech at the end, would not have appeared in a conventional romance tale.

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