Notes

• 1.1-7 Sentence structure is more flexible in Chaucer than in present day English. Lines 1-5 are a periodic sentence; the subject is purpose; the verb is is. The sentence translates, "My purpose is to tell the double sorrow of Troilus, who was King Priam of Troy's son . . ." In particular, a predicative (lines 1-4 here) or direct object (see line 1.15) often precedes the verb.
  
  Each of the first four books, but not Book Five, begins with an epic invocation, familiar to late medieval readers from heroic works, especially Virgil's Aeneid.

• 1.3 aventurës. The diaresis (ë) marks a pronounced but unstressed e (ǝ) that would not be pronounced in present day English. The word is stressed as in French: avenTURE. On the treatment of final -e at the end of the line, see the introductory section on meter.

• 1.6 An ominous invocation: Tisiphone, Megaera, and Alecto are the Furies (Erinyes), ravagers of guilty souls in Virgil. By contrast, in Part One of Il Filostrato, Chaucer's principal source for the story, Boccaccio rejects the more usual invocations of Jove, Apollo, and the Muses and addresses the poem instead to his beloved: "Thou, lady, art the clear and beautiful light / under whose guidance I live in this world of shadows." Chaucer's address to lovers in lines 21-30 just below loosely follows Filostrato Part One, stanzas 5 and 6.

• 1.8 All manuscripts except H3 (Harleian 1239) have the for the second person pronoun throughout the poem. Without endless glossing, this spelling would slow the reading process for a beginning student of Chaucer. This edition substitutes the modern spelling thee  throughout.

• 1.15 The servants of the god of love are lovers, and the narrator presumably serves them by writing their story. But is the god of love purely the classical figure of Cupid, or is romantic love also a shadow of spiritual love? (See the note on 1.32.) A related issue: within the world of this poem, can romantic love lead to spiritual love through a process of sublimation, or are the two antithetical?
  
  In this sentence the direct object precedes the verb; the line means, "For I, that serve the god of love's servants." Middle English normally marked possessive nouns with -s; there was no apostrophe. This edition follows Middle English practice for possessives; there are signs that the possessive apostrophe is disappearing from present day English as well, and possessive constructions will be clear from context. However, this edition does use other modern punctuation for the sake of clarity. In the manuscripts, there is no phrase or sentence punctuation, and there are no quotation marks. Here, as in all other modern editions, periods, commas, semicolons, colons, and quotation marks are used as in present day American English.

• 1.21 Lines 1.20-30 closely follow Filostrato 1.5-6 (Part One, stanzas 5-6). Chaucer's plot loosely follows Boccaccio's throughout; see the Introduction. Passages with close verbal correspondence to the Filostrato, or significant departures from Boccaccio's poem, will be identified in notes.

• 1.32 Characters' references to deity are to the classical pantheon, while the narrator's references are presumably Christian. Modern editors usually capitalize the latter; in the manuscripts both are lower case. At times, however, characters speak merely of "god," suggesting a Christian consciousness. Such references imply that even a pagan mind focused on pagan gods may sometimes see in them a shadow of the Christian God. Modern editors tend to capitalize these references, but it seems more appropriate and more useful to leave them ambiguous, so I have followed the manuscripts in this regard.

• 1.91 Corpus Christi is short one syllable after the sixth position caesura. Chaucer is quite strict as to syllable count: of 175 lines in Book One in which there is no final -e or other variable vowel phenomenon, only four have more or fewer than ten syllables. Except for several headless lines (with a missing first syllable, for example, "Twenty wynter that his lady wiste," 1.811), nine syllable lines are particularly rare in Chaucer. Line 1.91 is "broken-backed," like the so-called Lydgate line, except that there the caesura is typically at position four. Other principal manuscripts have "Ben worthy for to brennen fel and bones."

• 1.98 The observation is repeated in 5.728. Compare Constance, in the Man of Law's Tale, (CT II, 656): "She hath no wight to whom to make hire mone." The tale is a secular saint's life; Constance is repeatedly cast among hostile strangers in foreign lands, and her one confidante is gratuitously murdered as if to underscore her plight.

• 1.133 Lines 1.57-217 follow Filostrato 1.7-25 almost stanza for stanza. One significant difference: in Filo. 1.15, Boccaccio says that Criseida lived modestly and had no need to concern herself with a son or daughter, because she had never been able to have children.

• 1.138 Two-syllable words imported from French are in effect a kind of metrical wild card: fortune can be stressed either forTUNE as in French (in this line) or FORtune as in English (for example, 1.837), depending on its alignment against the metrical pattern. (See the discussion of meter in the Introduction.) Chaucer's poetic vocabulary is about 8,000 words, of which 4,000 are French loan words; about half of these appear in written English first in Chaucer's works. Chaucer's friend Gower wrote long narrative poems in English, in French, and in Latin, just in case. Chaucer's revolutionary choice was to throw in his lot with English, but his lexicon is half French, and he learned his versification (with end rhyme and syllable count) from French.  (See the discussion of meter in the introductory materials.)

• 1.140 Fortune is often personified as a female figure controlling a large wheel to which one or more men are fastened (so that the American TV game show is a telling modern derivative). As she capriciously spins the wheel, the captive goes from right side up to upside down, from welle to wo, from joye to sorwe.

• 1.146 Homer, Dares, Dictys: known in Chaucer's time as chroniclers of the Greek-Trojan war.

• 1.171 Following a conjecture by Lowes, modern editors suggest an allusion to Anne of Bohemia, who had been married to the young Richard II in 1382. Direct allusions to current events are very rare in Chaucer, and this one may also be an easy reach for a rhyme. The most often cited allusion, in The Nun's Priest's Tale, to "Jack Straw and his meynee," also concerns the young Richard, who put the peasants of Wat Tyler's revolt off their guard in 1381 by speaking to them in English instead of French.

• 1.194 Chaucer's Troilus has only second-hand knowledge of love's folly ("I have herd told," 1.196); he displays an outsider's scorn (1.203). Boccaccio's Troilo is once burned, twice shy (Filostrato, 1.23-24).

• 1.198 Corpus Christi (Cp), Campsall (Cl), and Harleian 2280 (H1) manuscripts share this reading; the other principal manuscripts and all modern editions have "lewed observaunces." Modern editions are all based on Cp or (in the case of Fisher) Cl; they emend the line for the sake of the meter. Here and in a few other places, I adopt a complex or problematic Cp reading in order to call attention to the manuscript and to the metrical system. This Cp reading is atypical of Chaucer. It scans as a headless pentameter (that is, with a vacant first syllable), but only if loveres is stressed on the second syllable, which is against Chaucer's practice. It also scans as a Lydgate line (that is, with a vacant fourth syllable), but this too is unlikely, though possible, in Chaucer's system of pentameter. So if the line sounds off rhythm, the reader's ear is good. The Cp line may be a scribal error or a metrical lapse on Chaucer's part.

• 1.234 to serven love: Cp and three minor manuscripts have this reading; the other major manuscripts and all other modern editions have "to scornen love." The rest of the stanza is ambiguous; it can be made to support either reading. Scornen has the majority of manuscripts (and possibly the ending of the poem) on its side, but an edition based on Corpus that insists on that reading may oversimplify an important issue in the poem, the spiritual efficacy of romantic love. See also the notes on lines 1.15 and 1.32 above.

• 1.267 Lines 1.267-329 follow Filo. 1.26-32 almost stanza for stanza.

• 1.365-67 In other words, he used his imagination, a process that works by projecting a remembered image on the screen of the mind's eye, where it can be contemplated. The imagination is contrasted to the fancy, which is suspect because it manufactures images with no real source. Imagination serves reason; fancy serves delusion. Here Troilus models a lover's psychology as if reading from a user's guide. In Boccaccio's poem, Troilo is more rhapsodic in his sentiments but also more tactical in his thinking.

• 1.394 Lollius: the fictitious source Chaucer's narrator claims for his story. Root and others repeat an earlier suggestion that Chaucer got the name by misreading a reference to Maximus Lollius in Horace's second epistle, concluding that an unknown Lollius was the greatest writer on the Trojan War. Windeatt suggests a nearer source for the idea in John of Salisbury. Whether or not Chaucer believed there was a Lollius, it seems likely that Lollius-as-primary-source is a parodic device, especially since the real source here is Bocccaccio. The name Lollius suggests loll, to droop or hang lazily about (and, more tenuously, Lollard, a member of the proto-Puritan movement current in the late fourteenth century). What we make of the name may be of some consequence in a poem where one theme is the tension between ancient and modern views, philosophies, and religions.

• 1.400-20 Troilus' song: Chaucer's translation of Petrarch's Sonnet 88, not in the Filostrato.

• 1.416 A familiar image of powerlessness in lyric and romance, and another point of contact with the Man of Law's Tale (see note to 1.98). Twice during her exile, Constance is put to sea by her persecutors in a rudderless boat.

• 1.425 This follows Filo. 1.38 and also parallels Palamon's idealization of Emilye in the Knight's Tale (CT 1.1101). (Palamon's friend and rival Arcite replies that therefore he has first claim on Emilye as a woman.) Lines 1.421-546 follow Filo. 1.38-57 almost stanza for stanza.

• 1.548 Chaucer's Pandarus is Criseyde's uncle; his age is indeterminate, but he is older than either lover. Boccaccio's Pandaro is a young, high born, energetic Trojan (Filo. 2.1), Troilo's friend and Criseida's cousin (Filo. 2.20).

• 1.568-631 This section follows Filo. 2.2-10 almost stanza for stanza.

• 1.654 The fifth letter in Ovid's Heroides is from the fountain nymph Oenone to the shepherd Paris, who deserted her and stole Helen from Menelaus, precipitating the war between Greece and Troy. The letter laments her undeserved and incurable suffering and warns Paris of the folly of his act. Ovid and Virgil were the principal sources of classical references for the fourteenth century. Direct knowledge of Greek authors was still mainly limited to some of Aristotle, in Boethius' translation, and Plato's Timaeus.

• 1.659-65 In Metamorphoses, Book I, Ovid tells of Apollo, who, though he discovered medicine, could not cure himself of love for the nymph Daphne. (His love for Admetus' daughter is a different episode, mentioned in Boccaccio's Teseida, Chaucer's source for the Knight's Tale.)

• 1.672 In Filo. 2.11, Pandaro says he suffers now because he did not love secretly. Chaucer 's poem is consistently more ambiguous, and Pandarus more coy, about his history and interests as a lover.

• 1.699 Niobe, daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion, king of Thebes, turned to marble while mourning her slain sons and daughters.

• 1.837-61 Troilus here parallels the complaint of Boethius at the beginning of the Consolation of Philosophy (Book One, meter 1, but this complaint is the burden of Book One of the Consolation and is conventional in the period). Pandarus replies (1.841-54) with the gist of Dame Philosophy's response to the complaint (Consolation, Book Two, prose 1), but in the following stanza, he puts the response to his own uses. Dame Philosophy's point is that no one can master fortune: Boethius must wean himself from a reliance on it, must let go of its trappings. Pandarus' point is that Troilus can master fortune with Pandarus' help.

• 1.859 Cerberus, the three-headed dog god, guard of the gate to the underworld.  The line is missing from Cp and supplied here from Cl.

• 1.860-61 The lines follow Filo. 2.16.

• 1.868 This attitude, not in Filo., is a key to the difference between Chaucer's Pandarus and Boccaccio's Pandaro. The following lines, 1.869-89, parallel Filo. 2.20-22.

• 1.890-96 The stanza is missing from principal manuscripts; I adopt Root's reading, which follows H2 (Harleian ms. 3943).

• 1.897-900 In Filo. 2.23, Pandaro cautions Troilo that Criseida has one troublesome quality: she is more virtuous than other women, and her virtue will be an annoyance to the courtship. Chaucer's character is more excitable; he delights in constructing an intrigue. Boccaccio's Pandaro is more practical.

• 1.983 In Filo. 2.27, Pandaro puts it more strongly: every woman lives amorously, and only the fear of shame restrains her.

• 1.1009-64 The passage follows Filo. 2.29-34.

• 1.1065-71 The image is from Geoffrey of Vinsauf's twelfth century Poetria Nova, where it is a metaphor for the rhetorical process, which is also the poetic process. Geoffrey's book adapts Cicero's treatise on political and judicial oratory, Ad Herennium, to the uses of written narrative. He condenses the classical treatments of structure and technique and emphasizes two rhetorical strategies: amplification, which, fittingly, he treats at length; and abbreviation, which, again fittingly, he streamlines. As a result, to a modern eye his discussion may appear to put the higher value on amplification. Medieval narrative often gives the same appearance: one idea or scene is developed at disproportionate length; the expansion seems oblique to the point at issue; and the transition back to the outline of the narrative seems abrupt or nonexistent. This approach led nineteenth and early twentieth century commentators to denigrate medieval style as episodic and digressive.

• 1.1072-85 Troilus' behavior is a catalogue of the ennobling effects of love. As in his absorption of Criseyde's image (see note, 1.365-67), the poem describes him as following a template.