Geoffrey Chaucer's ‘The Knight's Tale’ and William Shakespeare's The Tempest Read Through A Gendered Lens

Abstract

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, gender functions as the central structure through which power is constructed and sustained. Chaucer’s romance opens with Theseus returns as ‘lord and governour of Atthenes’ having ‘conquered al the regne of Femenye’, a formulation that immediately frames femininity as territory to be subdued. Emilye’s desire ‘to ben a mayden al my lyf’ is overridden by divine and civic decree, revealing a chivalric order in which female agency is subordinated to masculine rivalry and statecraft. Drawing from Patricia Ingham’s concept of ‘creative masculinity,’ this essay argues that Chaucer presents patriarchal authority as a performance that transforms female silence into social stability. In The Tempest, patriarchal control is relocated from battlefield to island but remains equally dependent upon feminine containment. Prospero’s command to Miranda – ‘Obey, and be attentive’ – distils the play’s gendered hierarchy, reducing daughterhood to disciplined compliance. Meanwhile, the absent Sycorax is identified by Tania Duarte as a necessary foil, her character both demonised and erased to legitimise Prospero’s authority. Read together, these texts expose a shared paradox: patriarchy requires the silencing of the feminine in order to imagine itself whole. While Chaucer ultimately affirms masculine order within providential rhetoric, Shakespeare reveals its fragility, presenting authority as performance rather than inevitability.