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Updated: June 27, 2025
He did not know that it was Arcite who sang, but he knew that the horse must belong to a knight of the court, and he crouched down to the ground lest he should be seen and taken back to prison. Soon Arcite's joyous mood passed away, and he grew sorrowful. He sighed and threw himself down not far from the spot where Palamon lay. "Alas, alas!" said Arcite, "for the royal blood of Thebes!
"She did, but never me: she could not love me; she would not love, she hated, more, she scorned me; and in so a poor and base a way abused me for all my services, for all my bounties, so bold neglects flung on me." One more passage strikes my eye from B. and F.'s "Palamon and Arcite."
Let the reader weigh them both, and if he thinks me partial to Chaucer, it is in him to right Boccace. I prefer in our countryman, far above all his other stories, the noble poem of Palamon and Arcite, which is of the Epic kind, and perhaps not much inferior to the Ilias or the Aeneis.
These three scenes, as no such reader will need to be told or reminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter after the release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits, as we may in a double sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighing against each other in solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from her own kinsfolk a full and laboured description of their leading champions on either side.
At first Theseus was too angry to listen to them, but soon he thought that he would have done as the princes had done, if he had been in their place, so he said, "Arcite and Palamon, ye could both have lived in peace and safety in Thebes, yet love has brought you here to Athens into my power, who am your deadly foe.
Meanwhile, by the help of a friend, Palamon, who had drugged his jailer with spiced wine, made his escape, and, as morning began to dawn, he hid himself in a grove. That very morning Arcite had ridden from Athens to gather some green branches to do honour to the month of May, and entered the grove in which Palamon was concealed.
There is, in this charming scene, an evident resemblance to the early part of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, where Palamon and Arcite fall in love with Emilia, whom they see walking in the garden of their prison. Perhaps the similarity of the actual fact to the incident which he had read in Chaucer may have induced James to dwell on it in his poem.
When they draw lots for the first story the chance falls to the Knight, who tells one of the best of the Canterbury Tales, the chivalric story of "Palamon and Arcite." Then the tales follow rapidly, each with its prologue and epilogue, telling how the story came about, and its effects on the merry company.
As for Palamon, all his old love for Arcite came back, and he wept for him as bitterly as he had bewailed his own sorrow in the dungeon. When all the Greeks had ceased to mourn for Arcite, Palamon still grieved for the death of his friend, and for the strife that had been between them. After two years Theseus sent one day for Palamon and Emelia.
As he roamed he sang "O May, of every month the queen, With thy sweet flowers and forests green, Right welcome be thou, fair fresh May." The grove was the one in which Palamon lay beside a pool of water. When he heard the song of Arcite, cold fear took hold on him.
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