‘Wanting of hir wille’: Arendtian sovereignty and plurality in The Knight’s Tale

Abstract The Knight’s Tale presents patriarchal sovereignty in the figure of Theseus, who exercises his power through the capacities of homo faber (man the tool user and craftsman). This fashioned political realm is seductive; however, Hannah Arendt argues that the transformation of the political realm through homo faber ’s work creates an anti-politics that survives through a Stoic illusion of freedom. Arendt’s work allows us to recognize why Theseus’s use of the capacities of homo faber to master Arcite and Palamon never truly arrives at its intent since it thrives through the suppression of what Arendt denotes as the human political condition: plurality. I argue that reading Emelye’s prayer and the negotiation of Chaucer’s gods through Arendt allows us to understand how sovereignty is a weaker exercise of man’s capacities than speech and action which, following Arendt, operate within the non-sovereign reality of human life.