Troilus and Criseyde

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A slave of love - Rated
Geoffrey Chaucer's fresh, but, sometimes very sentimental text tells the story of the brave knight, Troilus, a `slave of love', Criseyde, a realistic widow, and their go-between, the intriguer and opportunist, Pandarus.

For the idealist, Troilus 'Next to the foulest nettle, tick and rough, / Rises the rose in sweetness, smooth and soft.'

For the realist, Criseyde 'Am I to love and put myself in danger? / Am I to lose my darling liberty? / She who loves none has little cause for tears. / Husbands are always full of jealousy' / And men are too untrue /Or masterful, or hunting novelty.'

The sly intriguer Pandarus brings them together: 'Just as with dice chance governs every throw / So too with love, its pleasures come and go.'

However, the love between Troilus and Criseyde cannot blossom for political reasons. The realist betrays the idealist.

For Troilus (Chaucer), the fundamental question is: 'Since all that comes, comes by necessity / Thus to be lost is but my destiny.'
Was his fate ruled by predestination or was there only foreknowledge by God? 'To prone predestination, yet again others affirm we have free choice. To question which is cause of which, / and see Whether the fact of God's foreknowledge is / the certain cause of the necessity.'
Chaucer's answer is `determinism': 'And this is quite sufficient anyway To prove free choice in us a mere pretence.'

However, the priests are not his favorites: 'The temple priests incline to tell you this / That dreams are sent as Heaven's revelations; / They also tell you, and with emphasis / They're diabolic hallucinations.'

For Chaucer, 'Think this world is but a fair / passing as soon as flower-scent in air.'

This poem is not as strong as the Canterbury Tales, but it is a must read for all lovers of world literature.

THE GO-BETWEEN - Rated
There surely can't be many tragic love stories more affecting and involving than this. Nor, it seems to me, can there be many that are more original, despite the conspicuous play the author makes of depending on ancient sources. The tale of Troilus and Cressida (Criseyde) derives ultimately from the Iliad through a multiplicity of mediaeval variations, cited in detail by the editor. It is original in the way Hamlet is original, in its depiction of characters and thought-processes, and it does not suffer from the comparison. There are four protagonists, and two are straightforward, contrasted with a wince-making clarity. Troilus himself, son of King Priam of Troy, is a mighty warrior but tongue-tied and shy when it comes to dealing with women, derisive to begin with at the agonies of those who fall in love and then falling hopelessly, suddenly and finally into the same trap himself. How often have we all seen just that happen within our own acquaintance? Diomede, sent to escort Cressida from Troy to the Greek camp as part of a prisoner-exchange, is uninhibited in that respect to the point of outright crassness, with an eye for an opportunity and an easy `nothing venture nothing gain' attitude that I would again guess most of us will recognise without much difficulty.

The other two are anything but simple. Chaucer stays deliberately vague regarding Cressida's relationship with Diomede (characteristically hiding behind his sources - he was anything but straightforward himself), and what if anything remains of her love of Troilus. However it seems to me that there was a calculating bit in her decision to give herself to Troilus in the first place. She could make herself fall in love, and her fascinating speeches with the twists and turns of their thinking say to me that she was no innocent, quite unlike her infatuated wooer. That leaves Pandarus, a creation to rival Iago in a different way. Again, it's left to us to decide what prompted such extraordinary vicarious commitment to bringing the pair together. There may or may not be hints that his motivation was not altruistic, but hints are the most they can be. It is not just a matter of his strange motivation but also of his extraordinary mental agility and speed of reaction. He plots the lovers' tryst in fantastic detail, when the fateful prisoner-exchange is decreed he tries to steer Troilus into a different outlook that in effect abandons the romance he has taken such incredible trouble to arrange, and to the very end he is still trying to manipulate the emotions of the devastated Troilus.

It is all told in an easy and relaxed verse, typical Chaucer in being at the same time deadly serious and tongue-in-cheek. This verse is not as 'poetic' as, say, The Ancient Mariner. It stands in much the relationship to that, poetry-wise, as Hamlet does to Macbeth or Othello. This is a psychological drama, not an opportunity to display the special `tone of voice' and `way of saying things' that Housman thought the essence of poetry. Obviously it is in mediaeval English, and this edition uses the authentic original spellings. This will slow most of us down a bit, but that can actually be a good thing. I found that it not only forced me to read with the close attention this drama needs, it kept me fascinated with the wonderful English language itself, and I had to notice how popular speech and even slang have kept alive ancient meanings of words (guess, deal, gear, right, sweetheart) that have been lost in more formal discourse. Where this edition is particularly helpful is in its footnotes reminding us of the meanings of certain words (and reminding us repeatedly, for which I bless the editor) and translating occasional phrases and lines where we might go wrong. I think I only had to refer some half-dozen times to the glossary at the back throughout a poem that is half as long as Paradise Lost.

The editor is no less a person than the Professor of English at Cambridge, so his introduction has the thoroughly thorough and also thoroughly stifling profundity that I associate with university literature courses. There are also notes at the back, very helpful in the main but obsessed with quoting parallels for the sake of quoting parallels. At V/1176 there is the line `Ye, fare wel al the snow of ferne year', and I thought immediately of Villon's `Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?' On turning to the back I found that the editor just quoted this obvious parallel without further comment on what the connection might be, and for a moment I nearly hurled the book across the room. Again I wondered whether the proem to book III might have influenced Milton's great invocation of light at the start of the same book of Paradise Lost, but no light was shed. In general, though, this is a very helpful edition. When reading the Iliad I found that after I had read the first 23 books the 24th was comparatively simple. You may find here that once you have got through the first four books you are quite fluent with the fifth.

Outstanding - Rated
Anyone with the merest interest in middle English and/or medieval romance and the cult of the lady simply cannot afford to pass this by. This edition is well annotated and has a reasonably informative introduction. Get it! Middle English, especially as written by Chaucer, is so beautifully economic. Why have cotton when you can have silk!?

What more could you need? - Rated
Windeatt's edition is a masterful bringing-together of both the variant manuscripts and the sources of Chaucer's wonderful long poem 'Troilus and Criseyde'. The text is presented on the left-hand page, along with the corresponding passages from Boccaccio's 'Il Filostrato' in a second column. The right-hand page provides detailed textual notes and variant readings, as well as noting other minor sources. All sources are given in the original language, but are well-referenced and therefore easy to find in an English edition. This is not a reading edition, but rather a reference work to which any student of the poem would continually turn for a deeper understanding of Chaucer's manipulation of his sources. Well worth the expense if you have to study the work in depth. Combine this book with Windeatt's 'Oxford Guides to Chaucer' volume on 'Troilus and Criseyde' and you would have a detailed and wide-ranging body of reference and critical work on the poem.

A real gem. - Rated
Chaucer's mastery of English verse and the subtlety of his narrative make this poem a rare performance. The poem's evocation of the tragedy (and humor) inherent in a first, innocent love creates a mood or atmosphere difficult to describe but wonderful to enjoy. The closest analogue is Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but this is the more subtle work.