Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to this English unit, Telling Tales by Patience Agbabi.

I'm Miss Sewell, and I will be leading us through our pilgrimage towards Canterbury.

Now, this lesson explores Patience Agbabi's poem "Emily by Robert Knightley", and we will be discussing the characters of Emily, Arc, and Pal.

Please note that this lesson covers mental health and violence.

If these are sensitive topics to you, we recommend checking with a trusted adult before starting or doing this lesson with a trusted adult nearby.

If you'd like to carry on with the lesson, I'd like you to make sure you have a pen, piece of paper, and that you cleared away all distractions.

Make sure you turn off notifications on this device that you're viewing the video on.

Pause the video to make sure you're ready to start the lesson.

Perfect.

Let's get cracking.

In this lesson, we'll gain an understanding of the poem "Emily by Robert Knightley".

We're going to explore the characters of Arc, Pal, and Emily.

Firstly, we're going to have a quick catch up.

So we're just going to cover which characters we met in "The Knight's Tale" by Geoffrey Chaucer.

We met Palamon.

Now, Palamon is one out of three of our main characters from "The Knight's Tale".

He sees Emily first and compares her to a goddess.

Then we have Arcite.

Now Arcite is a second main character in "The Knight's Tale" and he sees Emily second and falls in love with her beauty.

Then we have Emily who is our third main character in "The Knight's Tale".

And she is arguably the central character to this narrative that the knight tells.

However, we never hear from Emily herself.

This is because she lives within a patriarchal society, a society within which men have more power and influence than women do.

It's up for discussion whether Emily is aware of the society that she lives in.

We have two arguments that take place next to each other.

It can be argued that Emily is fully aware of her patriarchal society, and as a result suffers because she cannot express her own opinion, and therefore she must follow the order of men.

However, the other argument is that Emily is not aware there's a patriarchal society that she lives in.

Instead, she just carries on with normal life and follows the expectations of women, and that she is not affected by not having a voice.

But the argument is up for discussion.

Secondly, we're going to just recall the plot of "The Knight's Tale".

Palamon and Arcite compete for Emily's love.

Now, how did they get there? Well, Theseus finds Palamon and Arcite as two injured princes from a battle.

He takes the two men and places them in a tower as prisoners.

And within their prison, Palamon notices Emily from outside of his barred window, and he falls instantly in love with her.

Arcite, too, falls in love with the sight of Emily out of the same window.

And the relationship between the men begins to deteriorate as they compete against each other for who should rightfully marry Emily.

As their relationship breaks down, they begin fighting physically.

Theseus becomes aware of this fighting and sets up a tournament.

The winner of the tournament will get Emily's hand in marriage.

Emily is the prize in this situation.

You either win the prize or you die.

Not great odds.

Arcite sadly fails, and he ends up dying as a result of his injuries, whereas Palamon recovers and he, after a period of mourning, ends up marrying Emily.

However, throughout this tale Emily is never asked who she wanted to marry, and if she even wanted to marry either of the men.

Within Chaucer's story, Emily does not have a voice.

We do not hear from her, even though the plot centres around the men's love for Emily.

It's interesting to point out that this love stems from beauty.

The men fall instantly in love with the way Emily looks.

And it's quite strange to think, especially as a 21st century reader, of someone just falling in love based on looks.

After all, looks fade whereas personality does not.

At the beginning of Patience Agbabi's "The Knight's Tale" renamed "Emily by Robert Knightley", there's a quotation by J.

R.

Hulbert, and it is the quotation that you can see on the screen.

And I'll read it to you.

"In Chaucer's story there are two heroes "who are practically indistinguishable from each other, "and a heroine who is merely a name." Let's just pick that apart.

So in Chaucer's story, "The Knight's Tale", there are two heroes.

Now, you've heard the word heroes, especially in films such as "The Avengers", and our heroes are Palamon and Arcite, and they are practically indistinguishable, meaning they are very similar.

Written down on paper, you wouldn't be able to tell who was who.

They're very similar from each other.

And a heroine, and our heroine is our female hero.

Now, our female hero is the one who we only know by name, and that is Emily.

We know no more of Emily than her name.

Which is quite sad because Emily is the centre of our story, the centre of our tale, and we never know anything deep about her.

We never know how she's feeling.

We never know her opinion on this situation.

We don't know whether she wants to marry Palamon or Arcite, or if she doesn't want to marry either of them.

Now we're going to explore the word heroine.

So a heroine is the main female character in a story who has great qualities and is someone the reader is expected to sympathise with.

Now, that is absolutely our female within this story, Emily.

Now that is definitely our female within "The Knight's Tale" of Emily.

So let's look at our original Emily.

Now we're getting into call Emily from our small narrative, "The Knight's Tale" from our larger narrative, "The Canterbury Tales", we're going to call that Emily mediaeval Emily, so mediaeval, meaning she's from middle ages just to make things easier.

So this Emily, mediaeval Emily, has suffered or has lived within a patriarchal society.

Now, I put suffers and lived because of that argument I was talking about earlier.

We're not 100% sure if Emily is even aware of this patriarchal society she's living in.

So if she is aware, then she would be suffering because she cannot voice her opinions and she cannot make decisions on her own.

Whereas, maybe if she's not aware of this patriarchal society, it would be that she just lived within it, and she was accepting of how she was treated by men, and she was absolutely happy to follow orders of men.

So I put suffers/lived just in case she was either/or because again, the argument's up for discussion.

It is said that Emily is a mediaeval ideal.

Now what I mean by that is that Emily is the ideal mediaeval woman.

She is beautiful, she is pure, she is extremely feminine, she's very delicate.

And now we're just recalling the plot.

So Palamon sees Emily and immediately falls in love with her.

And this mediaeval Emily sums up the essence of the romance stories, so the idea that boy meets girl and they fall in love.

And what person doesn't love a romance story? So here Emily is the ideal.

She is pure, she is beautiful, she is delicate, and Palamon compares her to Venus, the goddess of love and beauty.

And he compares her to that because she can't be human because she is so beautiful and he falls so very deeply in love with her that she cannot be of this planet.

She can not be of this earth.

She must be something more.

It is clear to see that Emily is a heroine.

Well, why? So if we remember, a heroine is the main female character of our story.

Well, absolutely, Emily is our main female character of this "The Knight's Tale".

She has great qualities.

Absolutely.

She's the mediaeval ideal woman.

She's beautiful, she is pure.

So she has great qualities.

A heroine must also be someone that we can sympathise with as a reader.

Well, we can sympathise with Emily.

If we believe that she is aware of the patriarchal society she lives in, she therefore suffers because she is not allowed to share her opinion on the man she wishes to marry.

And therefore, we feel sympathy towards her because she is trapped, she's stifled by the society that she's living in.

The men don't ask her opinion and therefore, she must just marry Palamon.

So she ticks all those three boxes, so she must be our heroine.

Now I'd like you to answer these questions just to check that you were following along.

So on your sheets of paper, can you answer these questions? Number one, who is the heroine of "The Knight's Tale"? Number two, what great qualities does the heroine have in "The Knight's Tale"? Notice that I've used the word heroine again, because I didn't want to give you the answer to question one.

And number three, how does the reader sympathise with the heroine of "The Knight's Tale"? Answer those on your sheets of paper.

You can pause the video in three, two, one.

By now you should have paused the video.

Now we're going to go through the answers to those questions.

Do not worry if you did not get the exact wording that I have.

That's okay.

Who is the heroine of "The Knight's Tale"? The heroine of "The Knight's Tale" is Emily.

Absolutely.

She ticks all three boxes.

She is the main female character, she has some great qualities, and we feel sympathy for her.

She is definitely the heroine of our tale.

What great qualities does a heroine have in "The Knight's Tale"? In "The Knight's Tale", the heroine Emily has qualities that were valued in women during mediaeval times.

She is perceived to be delicate and beautiful.

She is therefore deemed innocent and pure.

Absolutely, she has some great qualities for mediaeval times.

Number three, how does the reader sympathise with the heroine of "The Knight's Tale"? The reader feels sympathy towards the heroine of "The Knight's Tale" because she lived in a patriarchal society.

Therefore, her opinions did not matter, especially when deciding who she should marry.

Well done if you were able to answer all of those three questions in full.

We're going to move on and look at "The Knight's Tale" reinvented by Patience Agbabi as "Emily by Robert Knightley".

On your screen is an iceberg.

When we see pictures of icebergs, we normally only see what is above sea level, what is above the ocean.

So it looks like it's sat on the ocean just floating around.

However, beneath the ocean's surface lies further ice.

The iceberg goes a lot deeper than just sitting on top of the ocean.

And this, a lot of the time, reflects our own personalities.

So the top part of the iceberg is what we like to show to people, our positive, outgoing, bubbly personalities, our funny side, our happy side, the joyful side, the side where you can make friends easily, the side where you can talk openly about how you feel.

This is our positive personality, the parts that we like to show to people.

However, beneath the surface, beneath the exterior that we like to show people of our personality, lies the underparts, the sinister parts, the not-so-nice part that we don't like to show to people.

That might be forms of when we get angry, when we get frustrated.

Sometimes it's even horrible traits that we don't like to admit that we have, like jealousy or being possessive.

So an iceberg shows us what our personality is like, how we have this nice exterior that we like to show people and that we're proud of, but then sometimes we have some parts of ourselves that we don't necessarily like and that we do hide from people.

We can look at our iceberg in another way.

This is us, nice and calm and very balanced.

And on the left, we have our positive side that we like to present to society.

Psychologists call this side our ego, E-G-O.

Our ego.

You might want to think of it as the little angel that sits on your shoulder and tells you to do all the good things, encourages you to be proactive and do positive things to others.

But then we also have our sinister side.

So our bottom side of the iceberg, the part that we don't like to show people, the jealous side, the angry side.

And this side is what psychologists call the id, I-D.

The id.

Now the id is the sinister part of our personality that we hide away.

You might have heard people say, "Oh, they've let their id out a bit today." They've let out part of their personality that people don't normally see, and that's sort of like the devil sat on your other shoulder, telling you you should do all the bad things, the naughty things in your day.

The perfect example is you're a happy medium while you go into the kitchen and then you see that someone has made a cake.

And your good side tells you, so your positive side tells you, "Oh, well, that's obviously someone's cake.

"I'll leave that alone.

"You know, I shouldn't eat any of that cake.

"It's not mine, I don't know who it belongs to.

"Might be someone's birthday cake." But then our, and that's our ego.

Whereas our id is our sinister side, and we think, "Well, actually, I don't care whose cake that is.

"I want all of it." And you pick the cake up and you run away with it.

And that would be you showing your id.

Because in that moment, you don't care about other people, you don't care about whose cake it is.

You just want it for yourself.

So it's that idea that you can, you make choices with either your ego or your id.

And we have an ego and an id inside everyone's mind.

This is extremely relevant to the tale that we're going to read today.

Our balanced main character is Emily.

And within Emily's mind, her ego is Pal and her id is Arc.

Notice how they're similar spellings between the male characters of Patience Agbabi's tale and "The Knight's Tale".

So from "The Knight's Tale", Pal would be Palamon, Arc would be Arcite, and Emily stays, and Emily remains the same.

So within Emily's mind, her ego is Pal and her id is Arc.

So her positive personality is fueled by Pal and her negative side of her personality is fueled by Arc.

Just to remind you, the text we're about to read contains references to mental health and violence.

For some people, these will be sensitive topics.

If this applies to you, you may want to do the rest of this lesson with a trusted adult nearby who can support.

Now I'm going to look at the characters we're going to meet in "Emily by Robert Knightley".

This poem is the reinvention of "The Knight's Tale".

This poem was written by Patience Agbabi, and she created Robert Knightley as a fictional poet, and he wrote the poem, "Emily".

So we meet Pal.

Now Pal is the narrator of this poem, of this tale, and he is Emily's ego.

So Pal is the ego, the positive side within Emily's mind.

However, Arc, Arc is Emily's id, and he's the negative part of Emily's mind.

And we are told that once before he tried to starve his host Emily in order to gain control of her mind and get rid of Pal.

However, Emily is not aware of these personalities that occupy her mind.

Each time one of these personalities takes over, Emily blacks out, and she does not recall what has happened during the time that either Pal or Arc has had control of her mind.

We're just going to do a quick check of what you have learned so far.

So on your sheets of paper, I'd like you to write the number of the question and then you can write the letter of the answer that you believe to be correct.

In a moment, you can pause the video to answer these questions.

You will answer who is the ego, so the positive, inside Emily's mind? Number two, who is the id, so the negative, inside Emily's mind? Number three, is Emily aware of these two personalities? And number four, what happens to Emily when a different personality takes over? You can pause the video to answer those questions in three, two, one.

Excellent.

So you should have taken the time to pause the video and answer those questions on your sheets.

Let's go through the answers.

Who is the ego inside Emily's mind, so the positive part? Well, that's Pal.

So you can think the positive part of Emily's mind is Pal.

They both begin with a P.

So that was B.

Number two, who is the id inside Emily's mind? Well, that was Arc, that was C.

Number three, is Emily aware of these other personalities? B, no, she is not aware.

And number four, what happens to Emily when a different personality takes over? Well, that's B, she blacks out, she passes out, and that's why she's not aware of these personalities.

Now we're going to run through some sections of the text and understand what's happening.

Pal is our narrator, so he begins: "Arc? Dead." So now we're fully aware that Arc is dead.

"And if you're sniffing for his body, "you won't find nothing: "ransack the Big Smoke from Bow to Bank.

"Arc fell for Emily 10 feet deep." So those lines there are just explaining how even if we were to look for the body of Arc, we wouldn't find anything.

And why would we not find anything? Well, because Arc is just part of Emily's mind.

He's a personality she has within her mind.

Pal says, "Ransack the Big Smoke," the Big Smoke meaning London.

And he's saying, you can go from Bow to Bank, so parts of London, you can search that stretch of land and you will not find the body of Arc.

And why would you not find it? Because it's within Emily's mind, Arc, the personality within Emily's mind.

And then Pal says, "I'm Pal, Emily's alter.

Think ego." So there, Pal is saying that he is part of Emily's mind also and he is an alter ego, an alter personality that Emily sometimes takes.

And then he moves on: "Arc and me, we shared a cell for months, "it was a shrine to her, a temple." Where he says shared a cell, it's very similar to how they shared, Pal and Arc shared a cell, as Palamon and Arcite in "The Knight's Tale".

So there Patience Agbabi is hinting towards the previous tale.

In that small fragment detail, shared a cell, Patience Agbabi hints back to Chaucer's classic of "The Knight's Tale".

And then he says, "It was a shrine to her, a temple." So there, Pal is suggesting that Pal and Arc, too, worshipped Emily, saw Emily as a goddess, just as Palamon and Arcite saw Emily as a goddess-type figure.

Then we move on.

And Pal says, "I miss him." So missing Arc.

But he says he misses him "like a gun to the temple.

"Too close.

"Two men locked in a woman's body, "her messed up head.

"When I say we shared a cell, I'm talking brain.

"She became us." When Pal says, "I miss him, like a gun to the temple," Pal is illustrating how he really does not miss Arc in the slightest.

He is expressing how much he does not miss Arc at all.

And then he says, "Two men locked in a woman's body," and there Pal is highlighting how Pal and Arc, two male frames of mind, locked within Emily's body.

Then he explains how they shared a cell, but that cell he's talking about is brain, so he means that the men shared Emily's brain.

So they are within her mind.

And then he says, "She became us." So Emily is no longer an individual in this poem.

She became an us.

So Emily is the embodiment of not only herself, but she also has Arc and Pal living within her.

We're just going to check what we have learned so far.

So, as we did before, I'd like you to write your answers on your sheets of paper.

You can write the number of the question and then just write the letter of the answer you believe to be correct.

I'll read through the questions, and then you can pause the video.

Number one, what happened to Arc? Number two, what is the cell within the poem? Question three, is Emily aware of these other personalities? Question four, what happens to Emily when a different personality takes over? You can pause the video to answer the questions in three, two, one.

Excellent.

So by now, you should have answered those questions on your sheets of paper.

We're now going to go through the answers.

Question one, what happened to Arc? Well, Arc died.

So the correct answer is C, he died.

Question two, what is the cell? The cell is brain, and Pal explains that the men shared Emily's brain, so the answer is C.

Number three, is Emily aware of these other personalities? B, no, Emily is not aware of these personalities.

And then number four, what happens to Emily when a different personality takes over? And that is C, she blacks out or she passes out.

So she's unaware of what has happened during that time.

Pal moves on to say, "My voice, her face.

"All men want Emily, "they think they have a right.

"Arc's dead.

"He broke his parole, "an alter crazy on I'd, "ae starved us all to cancel me out for good.

"It's written off, our body." He states how all men want Emily, and they think they have a right, explaining how Emily needed to create a guard for her body in Pal, highlighting why Emily had to create Pal in order to protect her body.

Saying all men want Emily suggests that Emily is still beautiful and that she still encourages men to love her.

The fact that all men want her shows how she's still desired by men.

But then it becomes quite sinister in the idea that they think they have a right.

So again, hinting back to Palamon and Arcite in their idea that they believed that they had a claim to Emily, that Emily was their prize.

Pal hints at what happened to Arc.

Now, Arc is dead.

He broke his parole.

Parole is when a person is temporarily released from prison, but they must abide by certain rules.

If they break the rules, then they are sent back to prison.

So Arc has been released, so has been able to take over Emily's body as the main personality, and that was his parole.

However, he is an alter ego, so an alter personality that went crazy on id.

So he went crazy on the idea that he could then use all the negative aspects of Emily's personality, and he enjoyed doing terrible things as Emily.

He enjoyed doing sinister things while in control of her body.

And as a result, in order to get full power of his host, of Emily, he tried to starve all three of them inside Emily's body in order to cancel out Pal, to get rid of Pal for good, and to just have Arc and Emily within one body.

However, as a result, it then took a toll on Emily's body and it's written off her body for good.

When we end our poem, we're no longer hearing from Pal.

Instead, we have a slightly italicised, or a slightly slanted font instead.

And it says, "I must've blacked out.

"This body ain't no temple "but what's the alternative, a padded cell? "Got anything to smoke? "I'm Emily." So in this small section that is different in font, slightly slanted, and bracing, here we have the voice of Emily.

And we've never heard the voice of either mediaeval Emily or the 21st century Emily, until this point.

And here, Patience Agbabi has given us something we've not had before.

She has given Emily a voice.

And it's really significant for Emily to now have a voice.

She was really restricted by this mediaeval ideal of what women should be.

She was restricted by her time within a patriarchal society, the fact that she couldn't share her opinions and she couldn't make decisions by herself.

But now we are given a taste of what Emily's voice could be.

And she says, "I must've blacked out." Here, Emily is hinting towards the idea that she'd lost consciousness.

So she'd lost a period of time where a different consciousness must have taken over her body or a different side had taken over her body.

Well, that makes sense because we've just heard a complete narrative from Pal.

So it must've been that Pal had control of Emily's body in that moment.

And it's almost as though because Emily has now got a voice, she doesn't quite know what to do with it.

Our mediaeval Emily had no voice whatsoever, but now this Emily has a voice, and she doesn't know what to do.

And instead, as a result, she becomes quite a fractured character.

She's quite broken by this freedom.

And she doesn't, she's not quite sure on how to manage it.

And then she says right at the end of the poem, "I'm Emily." And it is so significant that previously we've just been given the name Emily in "The Canterbury Tales".

We knew nothing else about Emily, apart from what she looked like.

And this time within Patience Agbabi's poem, we have been given an insight into the inside of Emily's brain, been given an insight into her mind and how she thinks, what she feels, what her opinions are.

We've been given a slight taster of what that might be like.

And by ending the poem on "I'm Emily," now has been given a voice, she's breaking free of that patriarchal society that was previously trying to contain her opinions, trying to contain her options.

And now she's free.

So, Patience Agbabi has given Emily something that Chaucer never decided to give her, a voice and some freedom.

And instead, Patience Agbabi has trapped Arc and Pal.

We're going to sum up our 21st century Emily.

Pal and Arc are her alternate personalities.

They both live, or Arc lived, within her mind.

Pal operates her ego, so her positive side, and Arc operates her id, her negative side.

She is quite damaged and she is vulnerable as 21st century Emily.

She's damaged in the fact that she's aware that this body isn't a temple anymore.

She's quite vulnerable.

She had to invent Pal within her mind to protect her from the shadows that are around her, protect her from men that think they have a right to Emily.

But this Emily is significantly different to our mediaeval Emily because she has been given a voice, a chance to share her opinion.

And it's interesting that Patience Agbabi has allowed us entrance into Emily's mind in order to understand what she thinks and what she feels.

In a moment, you are going to pause the video to complete your task that is on the next slide.

Answer these questions in full sentences on your sheets of paper.

Number one, who is the heroine of "Emily"? "Emily" being out 21st century Patience Agbabi poem, who is the heroine of "Emily"? Number two, how does the reader sympathise with the heroine of "Emily"? And number three, explain a difference between the mediaeval Emily, so "The Canterbury Tales" Emily and the Emily who lives in the 21st century.

You should pause the video and answer those questions in three, two, one.

Excellent.

So by now you should have paused the video and answered those questions on your sheets of paper.

Now we're going to go through the answers.

Do not worry if you've written something slightly different to myself.

That's absolutely fine.

As long as you've got the key ideas down, then that's perfect.

So who is the heroine of "Emily"? Well, the hero of "Emily" is Emily.

Well done if you were able to remember that.

Number two, how does the reader sympathise with the heroine of "Emily"? The reader feels sympathy towards the heroine of "Emily" because she is afflicted, so affected by, pained by, the actions of the multiple personalities in her mind.

Her body has become damaged and she is vulnerable.

You could have also said that we feel sympathy towards Emily because now that she has a voice, she doesn't quite know what to do with it, and therefore she becomes very fragmented.

Number three, explain the difference between the mediaeval Emily and the 21st century Emily.

A difference between the mediaeval Emily and the 21st century Emily is that the 21st century Emily has been given a voice.

Whilst this is a positive, 21st century Emily is still suffering because of the male personalities inside her head.

Whereas, mediaeval Emily is portrayed as the perfect woman by mediaeval patriarchal society standards, society controlled by men.

Great work today.

Thank you for working so very hard on this lesson.

You have been brilliant.

Next lesson, we'll still be looking at "Emily by Robert Knightley", and we'll be looking at the extended metaphor, a prison within the poem.

I hope you can join me then.