Troilus and Criseyde is a poem of 8239 lines and roughly 60,000 words, about the length of a modern novella. The poem is written in the seven line lyric stanza called rime royal (see the introductory section on language and meter). Troilus and Criseyde is more than three times as long as the Knight's Tale, the longest of the Canterbury Tales, and almost half as long as the combined length of the poetic tales of Canterbury, and it is the only major work that Chaucer completed. The poem was written in the 1380s; it exists in sixteen surviving manuscripts, none earlier than about 1415 (fifteen years after the poet's death), a few small manuscript fragments, and three late fifteenth and early sixteenth century print editions that modern editors have often given equal standing with the manuscripts.
Chaucer's poem is a retelling of the story of Troilo and Criseida, told by Boccaccio in Il Filostrato in the late 1330s. Boccaccio's source was the story of Briseida, recorded in the twelfth century French Roman de Troie of Benoit de Sainte-Maure, and in a thirteenth century Latin prose translation by Guido delle Colonne; Chaucer's poem also consults Benoit directly at times. Benoit's narrative in turn derives from early medieval Latin accounts of the Trojan War by Dictys and Dares. In the versions before Boccaccio, the story is one episode in a much larger chronicle. The full-length plot and the development of the principal characters are Boccaccio's, and the particular complexities of Troilus and Criseyde, and of their friend Pandarus, are Chaucer's.
It is usual for fourteenth century authors to credit their ancient sources but not their modern ones (except that Dante is generally treated with the reverence due a classical authority). Boccaccio's poem never mentions its sources, and Chaucer's never mentions Boccaccio, Guido, or Benoit, although, Chaucer, or rather his narrator, does mention Dares, Dictys, and also Homer, none of whom was a direct source for the poem. But the Filostrato would have been familiar to many readers of Troilus and Criseyde, and it makes more sense to see the two poems as being in dialogue with one another than to imagine Chaucer crouching in the shadow of the ancients or lacking respect for his contemporaries. His age lacked copyright law, but that is a different matter. The explanatory notes linked to the text of this edition will follow the relationship between Chaucer's poem and Boccaccio's in some detail.
In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer even seems to poke fun at the shadow of the ancients. His narrator is a clerkly, bookish figure constantly laboring over his auctours--the model of the medieval classicist--and yet strangely involved in the love story he has found there. And for good measure, Chaucer throws in a fictional auctour, Lollius, named by the narrator as his primary source for the poem. It has been thought that Lollius may have come from Chaucer's misreading of a passage in Horace; it seems more reasonable now to see him as a parodic device. This narrative persona is a specialty of Chaucer's, and it gives the poem a hall-of-mirrors elusiveness that has always defeated attempts to find unequivocal statements in it.
The Story
From Chaucer's viewpoint, Troilus and Criseyde is a historical romance of the ancient world, set in Troy at the time of the war with Greece. The setting is significant: legend and medieval chroniclers attributed the name Britain to the founding of the nation by Brutus of Troy, descendant of Aeneas, the founder of Italy. The war with Greece is the basic condition of life in the city and the backdrop of the action, but Chaucer's narrator tells us that his is a love story; we must go elsewhere to hear about the war.
On the surface, the story is simple: boy meets girl; boy gets girl with a friend's help; boy and girl meet secretly until the war separates them; boy loses girl and tragically dies. (The male sympathy is explicit: the story is "The double sorwe of Troilus.") Troilus is the king's son and a war hero, second in renown only to his brother Hector. Criseyde is a young widow, childless and with her own palace and retainers. Pandarus is her uncle, his mentor, and their go-between. And yet the emotional climate for the lovers is their powerlessness to control their own lives, and the drama springs from the ways in which they deal with their powerlessness.
The crisis in the plot is Criseyde's forced departure in Book Four, in return for the captured Trojan warrior Antenor. The exchange is begged by her father, Calchas, a Trojan defector living in the Greek camp, and is approved by Troilus' father Priam, king of Troy. The king accepts the offer for reasons of state, apparently ignorant of Troilus' affair with Criseyde, but in the laments of the two lovers, Priam's act is described as a father's, not a ruler's. To a present-day reader, the two lovers may seem at times to fall into the emotional register of young adult fiction, and the comparison may not be entirely unfair.
Medieval literature is full of characters subjected to the will of others, fathers in particular, but the story of Troilus and Criseyde is unusual in several ways. The powerlessness afflicts both lovers: there is no riding to the rescue, no combat, no ransom, no flight, no stealing away in the dead of night, no entering the enemy camp in disguise; the lovers consider and reject all these standard romance options. Nor is either lover visibly, physically oppressed, abused, or imprisoned; the damage is inward, and only the lovers themselves even recognize the need to be rescued.
In these ways, Troilus and Criseyde superficially resembles its main source, Boccaccio's Filostrato. Chaucer's poem is forty per cent longer than Boccaccio's, and part of the added length is Chaucer's expansion of scenes in the Filostrato. But there are important departures from Boccaccio as well, and important changes of emphasis. In each case--and this sums up the relationship--an act or theme or trait is sketched or hinted at in Boccaccio, and Chaucer extends it, explores its implications, and in the process changes a lover's complaint into a study of personal identity and responsibility.
The explanatory notes on the text develop the comparison in detail, but two examples, from the parting of the lovers, will illustrate the change. The trade of Criseyde for Antenor is made in a field outside the city, and in both poems, Diomede conducts Criseyde from there to the Greek camp, but Chaucer invents a telling detail: Diomede sees Troilus' anxiety and pointedly takes the reins of Criseyde's horse, leading her physically away and leaving Troilus to watch helplessly. After the exchange, Boccaccio follows Benoit in giving a physical description of Diomede, but he leaves out the parallel descriptions of Troilus and Criseyde in Benoit's account. Chaucer restores these two sketches, so that Criseyde is physically bookended by the two men, and the men are described in contrasting terms: in Boccaccio, Diomed is simply a love rival; in Chaucer, he is more nearly the physical quality of masculinity. Throughout the poem, in one way or another, Criseyde is the meeting point of opposing forces: Troy and Greece, Calchas and Troilus, Troilus and Diomede, Pandarus and the right to privacy.
Chaucer's clearest extension of Boccaccio is in the role of the go-between. In the Filostrato, Pandaro is Troilo's young friend and Criseida's cousin; he sympathizes with the lovers' suffering, and he helps his friend, but he knows when to melt into the background. In most ways he resembles the typical romance intermediary. But Boccaccio's Pandaro is atypical in one way that gives Chaucer a hint for his own character: he worries that he has become not merely a go-between but a procurer. Chaucer takes this hint and pushes the character to his psychological extreme. In the Filostrato, Pandaro takes Troilo's first love letter to Criseida, who hides it in her bosom to read later. In the parallel passage in Chaucer's poem, Pandarus thrusts the letter into her bosom. In the Filostrato, the pivotal consummation scene takes place at Criseida's house; Pandaro accompanies Troilo to the door and then leaves. In Troilus and Criseyde, the scene takes place at Pandarus' house, in his bed-closet, and he stage-manages it completely. Even when he finally retires to the outer chamber, his presence hovers over the consummation scene and over the lovers. And when he visits Criseyde afterward to joke with her about the affair, he ends the conversation with a symbolic gesture of physical and psychological possession.
As these incidents accumulate, almost everything that happens to Criseyde seems to be an intrusion--on her independence, her safety, her mind. In this way, the modern concept of privacy as personal space rather than merely right to domicile seems to come into focus in Chaucer's poem. Troilus increasingly becomes complicit in these intrusions through his submission to and encouragement of Pandarus' schemes, first in his desire for her and later in his desperation at her loss. It is after their separation that the poem most resembles a teen romance, and it is here, in Books Four and Five, that both lovers blame their fate on their fathers.
Despite his complicity in these intrusions, Troilus also feels powerless--in Pandarus' hands, in Criseyde's, in his father's kingdom, in Diomede's presence. But his powerlessness sometimes seems to expose rather than to excuse him. Both lovers are ambivalent about Pandarus' schemes, but Troilus' qualms are ethical, and he manages to overcome them in order to get what he wants. Criseyde's are practical--she sees the danger she is in--and she submits partly because she sees the equal danger of refusing.
The combination of power and powerlessness in Troilus has contributed to a long-running thread of critical discussion of Chaucer's treatment of gender and sexuality. The terms of discussion have changed with the generations, but the underlying issues have been the same. Troilus in love either conforms to or lapses from or redefines or destabilizes romance masculinity; Pandarus' relationships with Troilus and with Criseyde, and the relationship between Troilus and Criseyde themselves, are in some way emotionally and sexually ambiguous. Twentieth century scholarship sometimes tried to discuss these questions in terms of sexual pathology. Now it seems more useful to ask if Chaucer's version of the story queers Boccaccio's, destabilizes gender identity and sexual categories.
Neither Troilus nor Criseyde ever seems really at ease in romance, and the poem in general seems ill-suited to the genre at times--or uncomfortably wedged into it. The affair isn't really adulterous, because neither is married. As his beloved, she might be expected to outrank him socially, but he outranks her. The affair is secret because the lovers fear discovery, but why?--except that the conventions of the form call for secrecy. One possibility is that secrecy adds constraint to the relationship, and Chaucer's object is to watch his characters respond to constraint.
The poem also ignores some of the conventions of romance characterization. Troilus is too philosophical and too indecisive for a normal romance hero, and much more so than Boccaccio's Troilo; and Chaucer adds to his discomfort by making him sexually naive. Boccaccio's Troilo is once burned, twice shy; Chaucer's Troilus is just inexperienced. The intrigue of his secret affair should be a stimulant for him, but it is mainly a source of anxiety. He offers to elope, despite his importance to the war effort, but Criseyde talks him out of it. Pandarus and Criseyde both urge him to be manly, but his youthful innocence is what defines him and attracts them. Criseyde calls it trouthe, meaning integrity, a kind of moral gyroscope, but the poem suggests that Troilus may not be its moral center, if it even has one. His desperation leads him to complicities, betrayals, and tactical errors. Only at the very end of the poem is he able to transcend his floundering, in a god-from-the-machine ending, taken from a different poem by Boccaccio, that has been a source of puzzlement and debate for generations of readers.
For Criseyde, the obvious source of discomfort is her precarious standing in Troy after her father's defection; her character depends heavily on her responses to the demands of the other characters. But she is also less comfortable than Boccaccio's Criseida with the intrigue of a love affair. In Boccaccio, Criseyde complains to herself that Troilo will not dare to keep her by force. Chaucer omits this; in his poem, Pandarus urges the remedy on Troilus, and he rejects it out of fear of her reaction. For most of the poem, the only character who does seem at home in romance, or able to turn it to his own ends, is Pandarus: he takes over the poem, and the role of go-between, in a way that raises serious questions about the ethics of human intervention, not only in love relationships but relationships in general. In the end, however, confronted with the debris of his schemes, even Pandarus throws up his hands in defeat.
For the reader, there is yet another kind of pressure on the lovers, and especially on Criseyde. The narrative voice has her under constant surveillance, scrutinizing her words and actions and digging for motives. Much has been written about Chaucer's narrator, particularly during the mid-twentieth century, when narrative function was a staple critical concern. Boccaccio's poem follows from the principles of the dolce stil nuovo, with its emphasis on lyric sincerity; it advertises itself as the poet's personal appeal to his beloved. Chaucer's narrator advertises himself as an outsider to love's circle; his story comes from books. He puts in focus the process of storytelling and its uncertainties, sometimes adding apparently gratuitous uncertainties at will: where Boccaccio says that Criseida was unable to have children, Chaucer's narrator raises the question only to say that his auctour has no information on the subject.
The narrator's dissatisfaction with his source materials becomes an important part of the narrative we receive, and its main effect is to mystify Criseyde's character. Early in the poem, the narrator champions her against her reputation, which he carefully reports to us; then he continues to champion her against her actions, which he consistently complicates and ambiguates, and against his own growing doubts about her. In the end, he searches his source for answers and at last, wistfully and regretfully, abandons her to the uncertainties of her character and fate. Throughout this process, her attractions for him seem to be her elusiveness and her vulnerability, and it has been observed that Chaucer's narrator is only the first in a long series of male readers to develop crushes on Criseyde because of these qualities.
Until the very end, everything in the poem resists certainty. Then suddenly everything is resolved, as Troilus looks down at the earth and laughs at the vanity of human effort and emotion. But even the tone of his laughter is ambiguous, and the closing scene seems to leave us with three possibilities. Does it offer a desperate closure that still leaves all questions unanswered? Does it parody such a desperate closure, forcing us to deal with the unanswered questions? Or does it desert the world of human entanglements entirely after spending 8,000 lines exposing it as a fraud?