Troilus and Criseyde

Overview

Troilus and Criseyde is about eight thousand two hundred lines in five books, written around 1385, and it is the longest poem Chaucer finished. The stanza is rhyme royal, seven lines rhyming ababbcc, which he uses with great flexibility: it can carry a joke, a soliloquy or a love scene without changing gear.

The source is Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, written fifty years earlier, and comparing them shows what Chaucer is doing. He roughly doubles the length, and nearly all of the new material is interior. Boccaccio’s Criseida decides quickly; Chaucer’s Criseyde takes most of a book, and we are inside the deliberation. Pandarus, a minor cousin in the Italian, becomes one of the great characters in English, a fixer and a talker who is by turns funny, touching and appalling. And the narrator, who barely exists in Boccaccio, becomes a presence: a man who serves the servants of love and has never been in love himself, who apologises for his material, protests that he is only following his source, and keeps declining to judge.

The language is Middle English and it is the main obstacle. It is easier than Gawain and harder than it looks, and reading it aloud helps enormously, since a good deal of what seems strange is spelling. Barry Windeatt’s edition gives the Middle English with a facing prose crib, which is the best of both.

The story is set during the Trojan war, which everyone in the audience knew would end badly, and Chaucer tells you in the first stanza how it comes out.

What happens

Book I. Calchas, a Trojan priest, foresees the city’s fall and defects to the Greeks, leaving his daughter Criseyde, a young widow, in Troy without protection. At a festival in the temple, Troilus, a son of Priam, is amusing himself by mocking the lovers in the crowd, and sees her, and is struck. He goes home and lies down and suffers in the approved manner. His friend Pandarus, who is Criseyde’s uncle, extracts the name and undertakes to help.

Book II. Pandarus goes to work, and the book is the best social comedy in Middle English. He finds Criseyde reading a romance with her ladies, drops hints, withdraws them, plays on her fear, her curiosity and her vanity, and threatens to kill himself. She resists, considers, and the poem follows her thinking in detail: she is her own woman and at ease, she has no husband to say check to her, and this is not obviously an improvement on her position. Then she watches Troilus ride home past her window, bloodied and modest, and the poem gives her one of its famous half-lines, that it was not all so soon to do.

Book III. The centre, and the happiest thing in Chaucer. Pandarus engineers a dinner at his own house on a night when it rains so hard that Criseyde cannot go home, puts her in a small chamber, and brings Troilus in through a trapdoor. The comedy is sustained to the last possible moment, with Troilus fainting and having to be thrown into the bed by his friend, and then it stops being comedy. The night itself is written with a tenderness and a physical frankness that is entirely unlike the tradition it comes from. Troilus ends the book with a hymn to the love that binds the elements and holds the world together, taken from Boethius.

Book IV. The Trojan parliament agrees to exchange Criseyde for the captured Antenor, at her father’s request. The reversal is political and impersonal and nobody in the lovers’ world has any say in it.

Troilus, alone in a temple, delivers the long soliloquy on predestination. If God foresees an event, it must happen; if it must happen, it is not free; therefore nothing is in our power. The argument is taken almost line for line from the Consolation of Philosophy, and Chaucer’s audience would have known that Boethius goes on to answer it with the distinction between divine knowledge and necessity. Troilus does not get that far. He concludes for necessity and lies down.

Criseyde proposes a plan: she will go, and return within ten days, having talked her father round. Troilus suggests they simply run away. She refuses, on grounds of her honour and his, and the refusal is reasonable and is the decision everything turns on.

Book V. In the Greek camp she is met by Diomede, who is direct, practical and unromantic, and who points out within a day that Troy is going to fall. The ten days pass. Troilus waits on the walls and misreads every approaching figure. Letters cross; hers grow shorter and more evasive. Eventually Deiphebus takes a coat from Diomede in battle and there is a brooch on it that Criseyde had given Troilus at their parting.

Chaucer’s handling of her here is the thing to watch. He gives no scene of decision, reports her slipping rather than choosing, quotes her saying she will be written about badly, and then refuses to pile on: he says that if he could excuse her in any way, for pity, he would. Troilus goes into the field looking for Diomede, does not find him, and is killed by Achilles.

The ending. His spirit rises to the eighth sphere, looks down at this little spot of earth, and laughs at the people weeping for him and at the blind lust that cannot last. Then Chaucer turns to the reader, addresses young people in whom love is growing, and tells them to come home from worldly vanity to the God who will not betray them, dedicates the book to Gower and Strode, and closes with a prayer.

How to read it

Read it in a facing-page edition. Windeatt’s is the standard and lets you check a line without abandoning the verse.

Read the first hundred lines aloud twice. Most of the difficulty is the eye rather than the ear, and after a few hundred lines the language stops being an obstacle.

Read Boethius, at least Book V, before or alongside Book IV. Troilus’ soliloquy is a quotation, and the point is what he leaves out.

Watch the narrator. He claims to be following his source, protests when the story turns against Criseyde, asks the reader not to be angry with him, and finally abandons the whole pagan frame in the last stanzas. Whether the palinode is a betrayal of the poem or the thing it has been moving toward is the main critical question about it.

Give Criseyde her circumstances. Her father has defected, she is a widow in a besieged city, she is traded by a parliament that does not consult her, and she is delivered into an army camp. Readers from Henryson to Shakespeare made her a byword for falsehood. Chaucer, who invented most of her, declined to.

Questions it raises

• Is Criseyde false, or does the poem show a woman with no good options taking the one available?
• Chaucer says he would excuse her for pity if he could. What stops him, and does the poem agree with the tradition or with its author?
• Troilus argues himself into determinism using an argument whose answer is in the same source. Is that his failure, or a comment on what arguments do to people in distress?
• Pandarus is a friend who acts entirely out of affection and arranges everything, including the bed. What is the poem’s judgement on him?
• The ending has Troilus laugh at the grief of the living and Chaucer turn the reader to Christ. Does that repudiate the three books of love, or place them?
• Chaucer tells you the outcome in the first stanza. What does a poem gain by removing suspense?