Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is his longest finished poem and dates from around the mid-1380s. It is a rich and audacious work about love which largely eludes historicising inquiry. Its audacity lies most conspicuously in the vertigo of its unpredictable movements between grandeur and wit, between solemnity and conspiratorial mockery. One moment the narrative rides high in epic rhetoric as (for example) Troilus, awestruck at the prospect of a momentous meeting with Crisedye, invokes a raft of classical gods to assist him in his hour of ‘nede’ (III. 712–35). The next, we are treated to comic deflation; Troilus's friend Pandarus hurries him impatiently toward Criseyde's room, with ‘Artow agast so that she wol the bite?’ (III. 737). Readers find themselves caught up in a creative interplay between idealising and pragmatic tonalities which is peculiarly characteristic of the poem. The soaring idealisation seems sometimes coloured with hints of mischievous parody; the humorous pragmatism, on the other hand, can look quite hollow in its insensitivity to those profounder impulses which drive so much of the poem's exploration of love. In this shimmering configuration of antithetical qualities, Troilus and Criseyde recalls Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls , composed in the same seven-line ‘Rhyme Royal’ stanza. The Parliament is a short ambitious poem exploring the ‘miraculous’ power ... log in or subscribe to read full text