Chaucer's Book of Love: Troilus and Criseyde (an introduction)
The Chaucer Reading Challenge continues
Most readers never get the chance to try Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, not even most English majors, unless they take a designated Chaucer course. This is understandable, considering the poem’s length and difficulty for the general reader, and it is not as divideable into convenient chunks for reading as The Canterbury Tales. The poem deserves a wider readership, however. It is his one polished and complete long poetic narrative, and there is evidence that Chaucer himself considered it his masterpiece, rather than the messily unfinished Tales.
Some of that evidence comes from the end of the poem itself, so we will leave that for a later installment, but there is some external evidence in the form of a short, comic poem that Chaucer addresses to his scribe, Adam:
Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
Boece or Troilus for to writen newe,
Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,
But after my making thou write more trewe;
So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thurgh thy negligence and rape.
This little poem is in the same seven-line form as the stanzas in T&C (more on this later), as Chaucer admonishes the poor scribe for all of his mistakes in copying out these works and curses him with a skin disease on his scalp if he does not amend his ways. The poet refers to two important texts here: his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy—the key philosophical text for Chaucer—and Troilus and Criseyde.
This is, of course, meant to be funny, but it also conveys an essential anxiety that the correct form of his great poem should outlive him—a real concern in the days before the printing press, when each scribal copy would contain errors, which would be compounded with each generation of copying.
Indeed, Chaucer’s great poem is a case study in textual transmission, both in terms of scribal transcription and of source study. Chaucer’s most essential source goes unnamed in the text: Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, and the narrator names instead a source that apparently does not exist—someone called “Lollius.” Our poet seems to have been one of the first readers of Boccaccio in England, which explains why he doesn’t invoke the name: he probably acquired manuscripts during one or more of his Italian trips, where he became enamored with the three great Italian trecento poets: Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch. While he names Dante and Petrarch in his poetry, he never refers to Boccaccio by name.
So, who is Lollius? It is ultimately impossible to know whether this is a Chaucerian fiction or a Chaucerian misunderstanding. It is possible that he thought that Boccaccio was called Lollius? It’s not likely, though it is more credible that Chaucer thought that there was a lost Latin source named Lollius, and he may have thought that this was one of Boccaccio’s sources. He refers to Lollius’s text as being in Latin, and while it is (barely) possible that he mistook Boccaccio for Lollius, it is not possible that he mistook Boccaccio’s Italian for Latin.
One bit of evidence that suggests that Chaucer thought Lollius was real is that he gives him a shout-out in The House of Fame among other famous (real) poets, and it seems unlikely that he would slip in a fictional figure here. Whether or not he thought Lollius was real, however, it is reasonably clear that in T&C he uses him as a convenient fictional hook upon which to hang the authority of his text and the ancient quality of his story.
Why does he feel this need? Originality was not an especially valued quality for a medieval text; indeed, auctoritas, or reputable written authority, based on ancient and respected precedent, was much more important. In this case, not only was Chaucer making use of a relatively unknown text (at least in England), but he was altering it to the point to make it practically unrecognizable—to make it, in fact, utterly original.
Indeed, T&C has no precedent in English (or, for that matter, in any other language), and, despite its influence, there is no later poem that is much like it either. That’s a big claim, and it will take time to develop over the course of our reading of the poem, but perhaps a good place to start is the beginning. We will get into Chaucer’s other sources and what he does with them as we come to them in our reading.
Here is how we open the beginning of Book I:
The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen,
That was the king Priamus sone of Troye,
In loving how his aventures fellen
Fro wo to wele, and after out of joye,
My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye.
Tesiphone, thou help me for t’endite
Thise woful vers that weepen as I write. (Lines 1-7)
There is so much going on in these seven lines—which is typical of this stanza form, subsequently known as “Rhyme Royal,” which Chaucer invented. It is, essentially, an eight-line stanza compressed into seven lines, with a quatrain and two couplets, except that the fourth (middle) line pivots, serving both as the final line of the quatrain and first line of the couplets. The result is that each stanza in this long poem works as an elegant “mini-poem,” to be admired and puzzled over.
In this particular example, the opening quatrain conflates the (pseudo)historical calamity of the Trojan war with the sorrow of a prominant son of Troy, whose name clearly associates him with his doomed city. But in the couplets, the narrator’s first-person pronoun asserts itself as he calls upon divine help for assistance. This is standard practice for the opening of an epic (see, for example, the Iliad or the Aeneid), but what is unusual here is that our narrator does not call upon one of the nine traditional classical muses (at least not yet), but rather upon Tisiphone, one of the Furies—who were classical spirits of vengeance and torment. Our poet is asking for help from an agent of suffering.
Like the opening of Romeo and Juliet, this stanza tells us from the start that this story will not end well. Troilus’s fate is set before we even meet him, and as in Shakespeare’s play, the course of the narrative is drenched in dramatic irony, since even during the moments of erotic bliss that we reach in Book III, we know what is coming. (Incidentally, the fact that we reach this state of bliss in the third book is, I think, a sign of Dante’s influence on Chaucer, which the poem signals at specific structural moments; again, more on this in a later post.)
This opening is startlingly different from Chaucer’s source; in fact, it is sort of the opposite. Boccaccio’s narrator presents himself as an ardent lover who is using his text to attract the attention of his beloved. Chaucer’s narrator, on the other hand, claims to have nothing to do with love: “For I, that God of Loves servants serve, / Ne dar to Love for myn unliklinesse / Prayen for speed” (lines 15-17).
So, the narrator is the “servant of the servants of Love,” which seems to place him in the humblest of positions. He is not worthy to serve Love, but only Love’s servants—i.e. lovers. However, this is also a sly assertion of authority, since this self-presentation echoes the purported role of the Pope as the “servant of the servants of God.” Chaucer, in this poem, is a kind of “pope of love.”
And this may be a hint of why Chaucer decides to set his self-designated masterpiece in the context of pagan antiquity. Such a context allows him to explore the potential and transformative power of love while free of complicating theological problems. It allows him to consider the ethics of love, and even the metaphysics of love: what is it? What does it do to us? Can it transform us spiritually? Why is love so central to our experience of being in the world?
These are big questions for a little love story, but Chaucer takes them all on, and so will we. In our next installment, we will return to The Canterbury Tales before returning to T&C. This is by design, because I would like us to consider the figure of Criseyde alongside Chaucer’s most formidable female creation: The Wife of Bath.
Thanks for reading, from my fancy, ancient internet typewriter to yours.
