Troilus and Criseyde has been compared to an epic poem (the resemblance is slight, but the form is evoked by epic invocations at the beginning of books One through Four), a five act renaissance tragedy, and a modern psychological novel, among other things. The range is suggestive: readers have struggled to contain the poem within medieval or even modern categories. Historically, though, it belongs to romance, and specifically to the Matter of Rome (also called the Matter of Alexander). These are the stories, including those of Troy and Thebes, inherited from Greece and Rome and found in late classical and early medieval Latin narratives. Etymologically, romance means a story translated from Latin (Roman) into the vernacular.
Medieval romance also includes the territory of native English narratives with Saxon roots, and the Old French narratives of Charlemagne and Roland, but most familiar now are the cycles of Arthur and of Tristan and Isolt, the so-called Matter of Britain, developed from Celtic tales. All these traditions emerge from stories of war. In the twelfth century French versions of the British cycles--the poems of Chrestien de Troyes and Marie de France--war often gives way to other forms of physical conflict (the tournament, feats of knight errantry), and physical conflict and romantic love begin to be of more or less equal and sometimes conflicting importance. The concept of chivalry, civilized knightly behavior, emerges as both a Christian moral code of knightly conduct and, at the same time, a class-based tactical manual and code of etiquette for love affairs at court. The concept of chivalry, together with its illustrations and codifications, is framed from an aristocratic, male, and heterosexual point of view. The tradition is aware of the rights of women, or more precisely the obligations of men--essentially, the protection of the weak--but individual narratives, including those of Chrestien and Marie, often resist or question these tendencies.
In the late thirteenth century, a few French poems, notably the anonymous Chastelaine de Vergy, take the romance indoors away from the forests and the lists. There is still a knight, but the setting is contemporary, the plot is psychological, and the themes of the poem often emerge from the concerns of the lady. This tendency toward contemporary settings and issues is strengthened in the mid-fourteenth century by the narratives of Guillaume de Machaut, one of whose poems begins with the narrator venturing timidly outdoors in the spring after a winter of the plague. Machaut's bookish, ironic, self-deprecating narrative persona is the likely parent of Chaucer's narrator.
Chaucer's English contemporaries, notably the Gawain poet and the authors of the stanzaic and alliterative versions of the Morte Arthur, still drew from the Matter of Britain. Chaucer's only Arthurian story is the cryptic tale told by the Wife of Bath, which begins with the trial and sentencing of a knight for the crime of rape. His only story from the Tristan cycle is the Tale of Sir Thopas, a burlesque of the thirteenth century English narrative Sir Tristrem. Only in Chaucer's first narrative poem, The Book of the Duchess (whose situation and concerns resemble Machaut's Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne) is chivalry taken seriously as a civilizing force.
The story of Troilus and Criseyde belongs to the Matter of Rome, but it also belongs to the late medieval movement indoors, away from physical conflict and action adventure plots. The etiquette and tactics of love are still a presence, and the love story operates possibly within and possibly against the spirit of what modern scholars have called courtly love. The term (l'amour courtois) dates from the nineteenth century; medieval French writers called it fin' amor, refined love.
Modern discussions of courtly love generally begin with Andreas Capellanus, chaplain to the Court of Marie de Champagne in the late twelfth century, whose treatise de Arte Honesti Amandi (of the art of honest love) is translated "the art of courtly love." Most of the treatise is a set of dialogues between men and women, according to the permutations of social rank (man of lesser nobility addresses woman of higher nobility, etc.). Unfortunately, the book has provided a convenient template for analysis, and it has sometimes been accorded more authority than the narratives themselves and led to doubtful conclusions about medieval society.
The dimensions of love in medieval romance come from two conflicting traditions: the cynicism of Old French and Provençal lyric, which also influenced Andreas; and the idealism for which the Italian lyric poets of the dolce stil nuovo provided a vehicle. Dante's Vita Nuova is the manifesto for this tradition. For both traditions, the assumptions and viewpoints are male and heterosexual--the lover is male, the beloved female--as is the case with any medieval secular tradition. In the first, the beloved is an adversary; love is a physical force, a sickness, a wound; its motive is physical, its object is consummation. In the second, love is a spiritual force; its object is sublimation of desire. The same impulse later produces the neoplatonism of the renaissance, drawn from Diotima's ladder of love in Plato's Symposium. The beloved is idealized and even idolized, and the lover's emotion becomes a path to salvation. Dante describes this process in the Vita Nuova and develops it further in the Commedia.
Both impulses coexist uneasily in medieval lyric and narrative poetry. Troilus' goal is to adore and possess Criseyde, and his desperation is due in part to the absolutism and conflict of the two goals. The same conflict is what makes Criseyde's position impossible.
Conventions of romantic love are of several kinds. The symptoms of the lover are familiar to us in everything from the renaissance sonnet to modern rock and roll and country music: he (or sometimes she) freezes and burns, turns pale, weakens, languishes, and pines. Secrecy is often necessary because the love is forbidden, and the intrigue it requires is an emotional and physical stimulant. The etiquette of love--which, as in Andreas, is an etiquette of rank--dictates the dialogue between lovers and the logistics of their relationship. The convention of amor lonh--absence makes the heart grow fonder--provides a test for the depth of the emotion. The civilizing effects of love produce noticeable changes in the lover: he grows kind, gentle, generous, and reverent. The Filostrato exhibits most of these conventions, and Troilus and Criseyde exhibits and examines most of them.
Courtly love, then, is one central--and ambiguous--presence in the poem. The other is Boethius, the fifth century writer whose Consolation of Philosophy was the most influential work of popular philosophy in the middle ages. Anyone who was literate read it; Chaucer translated it from Latin to English; princes held for ransom carried it with them. Boethius was himself a prisoner, charged with heresy and eventually executed. While in prison he wrote the Consolation, a Socratic dialogue in which he is confronted, lamenting in his cell, by Dame Philosophy, who leads him through a process of introspection that delivers him from despair.
Dame Philosophy explains to Boethius the difference between the web of fate and the vision of providence. That difference, and the key to existence, is the recognition of his own free will. Boethius' complaint is that his fate is unjust; he asks why, in God's world, evil is allowed to exist, why bad things happen to good people. Dame Philosophy leads him to an Augustinian view of good as absolute and divine and evil as privative--in effect, a mothhole in the fabric of creation--rather than an active force.
Boethius' problem is forgetfulness; he must recover his true nature. All men by nature desire the good, but some are led astray by error: they mistake material goods for the good. Fortune is dependable because change is her nature, and Boethius' reversal of fortune should teach him to shift his gaze upward, to wean him from the material world. The good we truly desire is divinity, and while we cannot achieve divinity, we can approach it by participation. The nature of this participation is obedience to the divine will, but obedience does not really mean submission; it means letting go of the diseased will, the ego, going with the flow of the universe. The key is that this is a contemplative process, not an active one. It frees the will and releases one from the frustration of questions that cannot be answered because they are questions about mirages.
But how can the will be free if it is governed by the divine will and known from the framing of the world? This question too comes from an imperfect understanding. Divine providence is a matter of seeing not ahead in time but forward in space (pro-videre). To the divine view, all history is laid out like a map; Lady Philosophy compares God to a spectator at a chariot race. (Perhaps a better comparison for us is the composition of a painting or tapestry in which historical events are arranged not in a chronological line but thematically, spatially.) At this point, Lady Philosophy breaks off the lesson, urging Boethius not to pry farther than his mortal intelligence can go, but to depend on free will, faith, and humble prayer.
For Troilus and for Criseyde, for different reasons, the deepest questions are not romantic or moral or strategic but philosophical. By what right do they exist? Were they dealt a bad hand at random or by design? Are they free to act or trapped in a web of fate? Is romantic love a social necessity, the road to divinity, the ultimate reality, or the greatest illusion?
Boethian elements and paraphrases appear throughout Troilus and Criseyde and are one important way in which Chaucer's poem embellishes or redirects Boccaccio's. The explanatory notes track this comparison. In Book Four in particular, Troilus has a long soliloquy for which there is no source in the Filostrato, and this speech is often cited as a locus of Boethian influence. It may be more accurate to speak of a Boethian dramatic presence. Troilus acts out the desperate logic of Boethius' inquiry, but the effort leads him nowhere. There is no Lady Philosophy to guide him--certainly not Pandarus, who can only urge Troilus to enmesh himself more deeply in the web of fate. The soliloquy is dramatically effective because it is philosophically a stalemate.
At the same time, the ending of the poem offers a moment of illumination for Troilus which short circuits the Boethian process and seems to lead his spirit to the same vision that Lady Philosophy guides Boethius to see. Even here, though, the resolution is not precisely Boethian: Troilus is dead, and the Consolation is a guide for the living.