Criseyde

Abstract

These are the opening and closing lines of the Proem to Book I of Troilus and Criseyde. In the Retraction to the Canterbury Tales Chaucer refers to the poem as ‘the book of Troilus’. This introduc¬tion gives the same emphasis. The story is to be about Troilus and his double sorrow. The parabola of his fortunes ‘fro wo to wele, and after out of joie’ (I 4) places him, according to a medieval definition, among the ranks of tragic heroes. Appropriate rhetoric, an invoca¬tion to one of the Furies, heralds the relation of the fall of a great man. Already it stirs profound emotion in the narrator: even the verses weep as he writes. As the Proem develops, the story of Troilus is invested with a quasi-religious significance, an occasion for prayerful contemplation in the audience. The narrator presents himself as a priest of love and delivers a kind of bidding prayer for lovers in their various circumstances, happy or sorrowful. He is apparently thinking mainly of male lovers: ‘Have he my thonk, and myn be this travaille! … preieth for hem that ben in the cas / Of Troilus … sende hem myghte hire ladies so to plese’ (I 21, 29–30, 45), though he does specifically include women when he considers lovers as the victims of slander, ‘that falsly ben apeired / Thorugh wikked tonges, be it he or she’ (38–9).

The double sorwe of Troilus to teilen,

That was the kyng Priamus sone of Troye,

In lovynge, how his aventures feilen

Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie,

My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye.

Thesiphone, thow help me for t’endite

Thise woful vers, that wepen as I write.

now wol I gon streght to my matere,

In which ye may the double sorwes here

Of Troilus in lovynge of Criseyde,

And how that she forsook hym er she deyde.

TC I 1–7, 53–6