A BIT OVER 350 lines into the Knight's Tale, Arcite has been released from captivity “in angwissh and in wo” (1.1030) and sent home to Thebes. Disconsolate that he can no longer see his beloved Emelye, Arcite bemoans his confinement in what he calls a “prisoun worse than biforn,” envies the “victorie” enjoyed by Palamon, who may continue to live “[f]ul blisfully” in a cell Arcite likens to “paradys,” and turns philosophical (1.1224, 1235–37). It is, he says, a sad aspect of human nature that in the search for happiness people habitually go astray:

For a drunken man, the path to his house is slider. The word slider is unusual in Chaucer, its only other instance coming in the Legend of Good Women, where it describes the slipperiness of a ship's deck when an enemy has strewn it with peas to render it hazardous in the confusion of battle. Variants (slyde, slit, slydyng/e) appear more frequently—in the Clerk's Tale, Franklin's Tale, and Canon's Yeoman's Tale in the Canterbury Tales, and also in Boece, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseyde— and often, as with Arcite's complaint, in meaningful and potentially hazardous situations. In this chapter, I explore Chaucer's use of the word slideras it is reflected in the haphazard movement of events and reflective philosophical attitude that undergird the Knight's Tale, and then, more briefly, in how the variants point to similar perspectives in the Clerk’s, Franklin’s, and Canon's Yeoman's Tales.