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

Gerry Wolfson-Grande 3
typical wager, for he is playing with the life of his lady. 10 It is also a pointless bet; at a crucial
point in the game, Fortune captures the Black Knight’s fers, or queen, representing his lady, and
polishes him off with an errant pawn one move later. 11 Within a few moves, Fortune displays just
how quickly her wheel can fling a hapless mortal from its top to the ground. Taylor points out
that the Black Knight’s ignorance of Fortune’s dual nature allowed him to delude himself as to
“what to expect at the height of his happiness.” 12 But the Knight’s resentment of Fortune’s whim
is temporary; he eventually does acknowledge, however ruefully, that he “wolde have drawe the
same draughte” regardless of any opportunity for foreknowledge of Fortune’s capricious
nature. 13 His grief, then, is for the actual physical loss of his love rather than constituting an
embittered outcry towards his opponent, whose influence over the lives of men he understands
and accepts even while wishing she had treated him differently.
The concept of Fortune as an impartial and arbitrary entity was a continuing focus during
the Middle Ages. Howard Patch delineates three primary viewpoints: the romantic, “content to
leave things to chance, with or without personification”; the rationalist, who, in the Aristotlean-
Aquinian tradition, denied Fortune’s existence; and those in the middle, who “held to a belief in
chance subordinate to reason, a kind of personification of Aristotle’s causa per accidents.” 14 He
notes that, in a contest between the philosopher and the poet to further define the third category,
the poet would succeed in refuting the “hardheaded philosopher” by “replying that even the
philosopher must admit the existence of apparent chance.” 15 Patch also contends that Fortune’s
increased literary visibility during a time when poets freely borrowed from their predecessors
and each other, as well as the highly unstable political and social environment, increasing a sense
that “circumstances really turn on the wheel of the fickle goddess,” also contributed to bringing
Fortune’s role, now super-sized, back into the popular spotlight. 16