austere arguments. The five books ofTroilus follow the revolution of Fortune’s
wheel: sexual bliss is fleeting and temporary, less real than eternal truths, and
hencefals.
On the human level, the lovers’ predicament is real enough. The smitten
Troilus complains upon his bed. The lovers come together only through the
scheming of Pandarus, who has to push the swooning Troilus into Criseyde’s bed.
When Troilus tells her she must yield, she replies: ‘Ne hadde I er [Had I not
before] now, my swete herte deere, / Ben yelde, ywis [indeed], I were now
nought [not] here.’ She has ‘been yielded’: she does not yield herself. Pandarus,
her supposed protector, has indeed worked tirelessly to get her to yield, and in his
house. But uncle and niece have a knowing relationship; next morning, she calls
him a fox. Troilus too colludes in Pandarus’s lie that he, Troilus, is about to die of
jealousy – a ruse to get him into Criseyde’s room. Deceit and fidelity are part of
the secrecy of courtly love. But Troilus’s pretended jealousy turns into real jeal-
ousy, and her sincere promises are broken by events. Once they are parted,sorwe
begins to bite.
Criseyde’s characterization is ambiguous and opaque, a matter of suggestion
and interpretation, closer to Samuel Richardson and Henry James than to La
Chanson de Roland. Readers differ over the culpability of Criseyde; the narrator
excuses her as ‘tendre-herted, slydyng of corage’, terms which also fit him. But
when Criseyde gives Diomede Troilus’s love-token, the narrator says ‘Men seyn – I
not – that she yaf hym her herte’ (‘They say – I don’t know – that she gave him her
heart’). The narrator does not know, but the author invites a guess. The blind
pagan lovers are at the mercy of events: the God of Love makes Troilus fall for
Criseyde as a punishment for laughing at love. Criseyde is exchanged willy-nilly
fo r Antenor, who is to betray Troy to the Greeks. Readers are free to choose sides,
since each personage is presented from its own perspective. Romantics can iden-
tify with Troilus, or with Criseyde, or pity the pair of them, broken by circum-
stance.‘Pite renneth sone in gentil herte’ is a line that comes five times in Chaucer.
If we do not pity, the ending has no sting, and the poem fails. But the reader can
see the folly of love, and the lovers punished by their passions. After the slow revo-
lution of Fortune’s wheel, Troilus is killed in one line – ‘Despitously him slew the
fierse Achille.’ His spirit looks down from the heavens at those weeping at his
funeral, and ‘in himself he lough’. Sudden death and inaudible laughter: a Gothic
change of perspective.
The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s last work, theCanterbury Tales, is today his most popular. Its opening
‘When that April with his shoures soote’ is the first line of English verse that is widely
known. The sweet showers of April that pierce to the root the dryness of March are
areverdie, a celebration of Spring renewal. This opening, a welcome to April show-
ers and to the classical god of the West Wind, is often taken as a starting point for
‘Eng. Lit.’ (In 1922 T. S. Eliot began his lament for civilization,The Waste Land, with
‘April is the cruellest month’, reversing Chaucer’s reverdie.) It would be better to take
Chaucer’s opening line as confirming that English poetry, already seven centuries
old,had successfuly domesticated new European literary traditions.
Chaucer tells how he was joined in the Tabard Inn, Southwark, by a company of
‘sondry folk, / And pilgrims were they alle’. Spring is the pilgrimage season in
Christendom:
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