Love and Ethics to Come In troilus And Criseyde

Abstract

Fortune has long been treated as a cliché, ideological concealment, or negative theology when it appears in medieval literature. Rarely is it taken seriously on its own terms to signify something fortuitous or aleatory, as characters do within Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. There Pandarus, with his infectious optimism and fraternal affection, consoles the lovelorn Troilus by assuring him of the mutability of Fortune, “That, as hire joies moten overgon, / So mote hire sorwes passen everechon” (1846–47).² Chaucer added the passage in his rendering of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, amplifying and enriching the original Italian love story and raising the stakes on the moral and metaphysical issues involved in the ensuing events. The sentiment, expressed in all kinds of late medieval court poetry, attests to love’s radical dependency on Fortune. Troilus’s sorrow happily does turn to joy when he eventually consummates the affair, though certainly his weal proves quite transitory as his initial woe, a tragic conclusion some take a spessimistic proof that fortune has no merits, at least not in this case. But why should the lover not have hoped for a more fortuitous and durable end to his affair? Or rather, what else can a lover do but hope for the good fortune of reciprocal affection and lasting fidelity? Love is not unlike death in this fundamental respect: “Love and death will strike, come their time; only you have no inkling when that time is.

Chance says, come here, chance says, can you bear to part? H. D., “Chance”¹