“THE BESTE GAME OF ALLE”: PLAYING CHESS WITH FORTUNE ...

Gerry Wolfson-Grande 13
images of formations of chess pieces, with rooks (prisons), bishops (temples), and knights
(tournaments), along with the inherent symmetry of the game and the concept of ordered battles
between pieces.
Muscatine considers Chaucer’s attitude towards disorder perhaps as being even more
significant than his treatment of order, although, again, it could be said that it is the resolution
toward order which enhances that significance. He describes the “subsurface insistence on
disorder,” including Saturn’s speeches, to be “the poem’s crowning complexity, its most
compelling claim to maturity.” 79 In that sense, as noted above, Muscatine’s conclusion that
Theseus, as interpreter and problem-solver, is a vital representation of order, is reasonable. 80
Others are not willing to go quite that far, preferring to cast Saturn in the role of chief
agent of chaos, who may or may not be acting in accord with Fortune, or who may be acting
entirely independently of any other influences. According to Robert Emmett Finnegan, Chaucer
chose to add Saturn to the cast of characters borrowed from Boccaccio in order to emphasize
“the problematic character of his gods, the serious nature of the division in heaven, and the
ominous inability of the high god to resolve it.” 81 Blake views Saturn as an outsider, a type of
universal outlaw, who creates “arbitrary and willful” solutions to problems with little or no
concern for the ramifications of his actions. 82 Interestingly, she also comments that here one sees
that “order may be created out of nothing, for no all-encompassing rational purpose, but out of
gratuitous impulses of will.” 83 Considering that Saturn even admits that his primary motive for
involving himself is to achieve peace between the squabbling Mars and Venus, 84 rather than any
significant demonstration of his power, Blake may have a valid point. This does, however, then
beg the question as to whether the influence of disorder, possibly operating at Fortune’s
command, can actually create the opposite condition, in which case perhaps Theseus may