Troilus and Criseyde: Love in a Manner of Speaking

Abstract

To reinvent the more personal first lines of Petrarch’s sonnet—are his feelings love or not, and is this good or bad?—into these universal questionings that open Troilus’s first song is emblematic of how Chaucer’s most ambitious poem poses such questions more largely about the experience of love that is its theme. Yet, far from the puzzling and questioning effect of so much of the poem, twentieth-century criticism of Troilus and Criseyde—and of love as its subject—was strikingly monolithic and religiose. Despite differences of emphasis, such criticism read much the same moralizing trajectory into the poem, whereby the love of Troilus and Criseyde is seen to become progressively subject to a moral critique, largely implicitly and ironically conveyed, and made explicit at last in the poem’s prayerful ending addressed to divine love.² This now-prevalent reading is driven by various imperatives of contemporary critical practice, but most pressing has been the modern literary-critical obsession with establishing unity in a text, in accordance with which the poem’s troublesome otherworldly conclusion must be accommodated and integrated with the Troilus as a whole. The narrative as it unfolds has come to be read exclusively in the light of the ending—and not just the foreknown end of the story and love affair but its moralization at the close.³

“If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo?” (1.400–402)¹

Précis: Challenging by the language of the emotions, Chaucer interrogates medieval stylizations of love in idiom and role-play across his works, and especially in Troilus and Criseyde. Love in a manner of speaking—variously exploiting or probing its own conventionality—is Chaucer’s mode of both celebrating and delimiting human love.