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Medieval and Modern in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
While recent scholarly attention to the medieval aspects of Troilus and Criseyde has overshadowed the older custom of critics to associate it with modern fiction, its kinship with such later literature is authentic. The poem’s plentiful medieval materials—for which Chaucer draws extensively on Dante, Machaut, and Boethius—invite interpretation of it in terms of traditional modes: the epic, the romance, and the philosophical demonstration. Chaucer, however, completely undercuts the usual effects of these modes with irony, at the same time employing the elements and techniques of realism. The irony cooperates with the realism to make a work that finally is like modern fiction in identifying the essentially human through the particularity of its presentation.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977
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Notes
1 Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1915), p. 109. The earliest statement that Troilus is a novel which Caroline Spurgeon lists is that by Thomas Campbell in Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of 1830; he styles the work “an ancient novel in verse”—Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900 (1925; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1960), n, Pt. II, 177. Closer to Kittredge's time, W. P. Ker says in 1895 that Troilus “is the first great modern book in that kind where the most characteristic modern triumphs in the literary art have been won; in the kind to which belong the great books of Cervantes, of Fielding, and of their later pupils. ... It is a tragic novel” (quoted in Spurgeon, ii, Pt. II, 149).
2 Lewis, “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 17 (1932), 56.
3 Not all scholars in recent times have neglected the “modern” aspects of Troilus. The perennial assertions and assumptions that Troilus is realistic, and my argument in this paper, are supported by some careful analyses of the story's psychological verisimilitude made in the last few years; notably, Donald R. Howard, “Experience, Language, and Consciousness: Troilus and Criseyde, II, 596–931,” in Medieval Literature and Folklore Studies: Essays in Honor of Francis Lee Vlley, ed. Jerome Mandel and Bruce A. Rosenberg (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 173–92; also The Three Temptations (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), esp. pp. 120–33; and Elizabeth R. Hatcher, “Chaucer and the Psychology of Fear: Troilus in Book v,” ELH, 40 (1973), 307–24.
4 Quotations of Chaucer's works herein are from F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1957). Line numbers are noted in parentheses in the text.
5 The imagery prompts some readers to postulate that Troilus' story genuinely involves a movement around Fortune's wheel. Thus, Helen Storm Corsa, Chaucer: Poet of Mirth and Morality (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1964), p. 42, states flatly, “The poem in its five books is not only an exemplum of the moving wheel of Fortune, it is the wheel itself.”
6 Dante calls his work a “comedy,” but uses throughout the style of heroic narrative. As Robert S. Haller, Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1973), p. xxxvi, states, “Dante was quite aware, as is every reader, that the real classical precedent for his work is the epic, not the comedy.”
7 T&C i.l, 6–9; ii.1–4; iii.5, 39–42, 45, 1807–10; IV.22–24; v.1863–65, and probably 1807–27; HF 81–82, 520–28, 1091–1109; PF 127–75; A A 211, 350. Other significant structural points at which Chaucer recalls Dante are in HF in the eagle's appearance at the end of Book I and the opening of Book ii (11. 499–508, 529–44), in the Legend of Good Women at the beginning of the legends of Dido and of Hypsipyle (11. 924–26, 1371–72), in the prologues of the Prioress (B 1664–70) and the Second Nun (G 36–56), and in the invocation of AA (11. 8–20).
8 See John L. Lowes, “Chaucer and Dante,” Modern Philology, 14 (1917), 718–20; and Robinson's note on T&C i.l tf. Howard Schless, “Chaucer and Dante,” in Dorothy Bethurum, ed., Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 147–49, points out weaknesses in Lowes's argument. The connection between Chaucer's and Dante's presentations of the Furies nevertheless seems to me firm.
9 In my essay “Guillaume de Machaut and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,” Medium ALvum, 45 (1976), 277–93, I document the extensive basic influence of Ma-chaut's works on T&C, including a number of specific borrowings referred to below in this essay. Kittredge has dealt with some of this influence in two notes: “Antigone's Song of Love,” Modern Language Notes, 25 (1910), 158; and “Chaucer's Troilus and Guillaume de Machaut,” Modern Language Notes, 30 (1915), 69. For a more general treatment of Machaut's pervasive contributions to Chaucer's oeuvre, see my essay, “Chaucer and French Poetry,” in D. S. Brewer, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Bell, 1974), esp. pp. 118–30.
10 Ernest Hoepffner, ed., Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, n (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1911).
11 As a result of the extensive parallels between the respective books of the Consolation and Troilus that he notes, John P. McCall, “Five-Book Structure in Chaucer's ‘Troilus,’ ” Modern Language Quarterly, 23 (1962), 297–308, is led to conclude that “while Boe-thius’ work is a comoedia and Chaucer's a tragedy, both embody the same ultimate vision of man's human and divine relationship to eternal Truth” (p. 308). Corsa, p. 41, claims that Troilus “is the poetical-dramatic illustration of what the Consolation is all about.”
12 The Consolation of Pliilosophy, trans. Richard H. Green (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), p. 105. This translation of the passage is about as straightforward as one could make the Latin: “Aiunt enim non ideo quid esse euenturum, quoniam id prouidentia futurum esse prospexerit, sed e contrario potius, quoniam quid futurum est, id diuinam prouidentiam latere non posse eoque modo necessarium hoc in contrarium relabi partem, neque enim necesse esse contingere quae proui-dentur, sed necesse esse quae futura sunt prouideri—quasi uero quae cuius rei causa sit praescientiane futuro-rum necessitatis an futurorum nécessitas prouidentiae laboretur” (Boethius, ed. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962, p. 374).
13 In the lines of PL quoted, by use of baroque syntax and repetition Milton similarly represents the confusion of the Satanic angels.
14 In discussing poetic techniques in the Consolation, Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 77, notes cogently that there is “a tension between the effect of the metra and that of the prosae, in which Philosophy's case for providence moves steadily forward, and this tension becomes increasingly important in the later books of the dialogue.” In the Book v proses, I would add, there is also tension between the syntax and the sense.
15 Howard R. Patch, “Troilus on Predestination,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 17 (1918), 405, makes much the same point: “The speech is not intended as a sample of dialectic fireworks but as an outburst of human emotion.”
16 Alan Gaylord, “Uncle Pandarus as Lady Philosophy,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, 46 (1961), 571–95, explores Pandarus' Boethian role, though he does not deal with the complication that Machaut's influence presents.
17 Medieval English Lyrics, ed. R. T. Davies (Evans-ton: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), p. 107.
18 For Mischance as Fortune, see discussions of For-tuna Mala, Meseur, and Maleure, in Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1927), passim. In a clear reference to Fortune, the Queen in Shakespeare's Richard II speaks of “Nimble Mischance, that art so light of foot” (iii.iv.92).
19 William K. Wimsatt, “The Concrete Universal,” in The Verbal Icon (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 69–83, has notably applied this term to literature. He shows the concept expressed to be an ideal posited for literature in all ages, and I think the term especially apt for expressing the notion of “type” as it may be manifested in realistic depiction of particular entities and events. For “type” and its importance for the “theory and practice of realism,” see René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 240–42.
20 Northrop Frye remarks intriguingly on the relationship of irony to realism, and to the related concept “naturalism” in Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), esp. pp. 42, 49. He states (p. 42) that irony “begins in realism and dispassionate observation,” meaning (if I understand him) that accurate neutral description often implies a negative judgment, so that an ironic disparity is created between description and implication. Thus, through putting forward, then undermining, the pretensions of the conventional modes, Chaucer dramatizes and makes explicit the irony that may be already implicit in the realistic report of the action.
21 See n. 3.
22 The nearest analogue to Pandarus' entrance into Criseyde's home is found in Machaut's Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne, ed. Hoepffner, Œuvres, I (1908), 11. 1452–1501, at the point when the main characters are introduced into the king's presence and find a clerk reading the story of Troy to a court audience. The elaborate description of the entrance and welcoming clearly is designed to demonstrate the exemplary behavior characteristic of the king's court.