Troilus and Criseyde
‘How that Crisseyde Troylus forsok’ is told in Troilus and Criseyde, a work of marked
symmetry. It opens:
The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen
That was the king Priamus sone of Troye,
In lovynge, how his aventures fellen
From wo to wele, and after out of joie,
My purpos is, ere that I parte fro ye.
The poem, set in Troy in the tenth year of the siege, is in 8239 lines and five books.
In Book I, Prince Troilus falls in love with Criseyde, the widowed daughter of the
seer Calcas who has defected to the Greeks. In II Pandarus brings together his neice
Criseyde and the prostrate Troilus. In III their love is consummated with joie at
Pandarus’s house. In IV the Trojans agree to swap Criseyde for the captured Antenor.
In V Criseyde ‘allone, among the Grekis stronge’ accepts the protection of Diomede.
Troilus trusts her to return, and when her infidelity is proved, is killed. The sorrow
is double: the tragedye has four books of sorrow, one of joy. In its ‘rhyme royal’ (a
stanza rhyming ababbcc),Troie often rhymes with joie, and Criseyde with deyde.The
end is foreknown: interest lies in its detailed unfolding.
This story had been developed in Boccaccio’s Filostrato from the ‘Troy books’
elaborated in the Middle Ages out of Homer, Virgil and Statius. Chaucer’s version is
the supreme English example of a doomed story of courtly love. The literary dignity
of its opening, quoted above, relaxes with ere that I parte fro ye, an ‘oral’ gesture to
the audience. Chaucer seems innocent and slightly foolish, and the teller’s quick
sympathy towards the lovers complicates interpretation. When their love is consum-
mated, he exclaims:
O blisful nyght, of hem so longe isought, them
How blithe unto hem bothe two thow weere!
Why nad I swich oon with my soule ybought, had I not such a one
Ye, or the leeste joie that was theere? Ye s
His willingness to sell his soul for a kiss comes back into the mind when at the end
we read this appeal:
O yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she,
In which that love up groweth with youre age,
Repeyreth hom fro worldly vanite, home
And of youre herte up casteth the visage
To thilke God that after his ymage that same
Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a faire consider fair
This wor ld,that passeth soone as floures faire. flowers
The young are next told to trust Jesus, who nyl falsen no wight (‘will not betray
anyone’) – unlike human lovers. After the teller’s sympathy, it is a surprise to be told
that the lovers’ joys were unreal.
The surprise has been prepared. Each book opens with a lofty invocation in the
manner of Dante, and the action is punctuated by comments from a work which
Chaucer had translated, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue which, for
the Middle Ages, came to sum up the moral philosophy of antiquity. Boethius
speaks for a puzzled, suffering humanity, but eventually accepts Lady Philosophy’s60 2 · MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: 1066–1500