Troilus and Criseyde is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...

 which re-tells in Middle English

Middle English

Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....

 the tragic story of the lovers Troilus

Troilus

Troilus is a legendary character associated with the story of the Trojan War...

 and Criseyde

Cressida

Cressida is a character who appears in many Medieval and Renaissance retellings of the story of the Trojan War. She is a Trojan woman, the daughter of Calchas a priestly defector to the Greeks...

 set against a backdrop of war in the Siege of Troy. It was composed using rime royale

Rhyme royal

Rhyme royal is a rhyming stanza form that was introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer.-Form:The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can be constructed either as a terza rima and two couplets...

and probably completed during the mid 1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem

Long poem

The long poem is a literary genre including all poetry of considerable length. Though the definition of a long poem is vague and broad, the genre includes some of the most important poetry ever written....

 it is certainly more self-contained than the better known but ultimately uncompleted Canterbury Tales.

Although Troilus is a character from Ancient Greek literature

Ancient Greek literature

Ancient Greek literature refers to literature written in the Ancient Greek language until the 4th century.- Classical and Pre-Classical Antiquity :...

, the expanded story of him as a lover was of Medieval origin. The first known version is from Benoît de Sainte-Maure

Benoît de Sainte-Maure

Benoît de Sainte-Maure was a 12th century French poet, most probably from Sainte-Maure de Touraine near Tours, France. The Plantagenets' administrative center was located in Chinon - west of Tours....

's poem Roman de Troie, but Chaucer's principal source appears to have been Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...

 who re-wrote the tale in his Il Filostrato

Il Filostrato

Il Filostrato is a poem by the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, and the inspiration for Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and, through Chaucer, the Shakespeare play Troilus and Cressida...

. Chaucer's version can be said to reflect a less cynical and less misogynistic world-view than Boccaccio's, casting Criseyde as fearful and sincere rather than simply fickle and having been led astray by the eloquent and perfidious Pandarus

Pandarus

Pandarus is a Trojan aristocrat who appears in stories about the Trojan War. In Homer's Iliad he is portrayed as an energetic and impetuous warrior, but in medieval literature he becomes a witty and licentious figure who facilitates the affair between Troilus and Cressida...

. It also inflects the sorrow of the story with humour.

The poem had an important legacy for later writers. Robert Henryson

Robert Henryson

Robert Henryson was a poet who flourished in Scotland in the period c. 1460–1500. Counted among the Scots makars, he lived in the royal burgh of Dunfermline and is a distinctive voice in the Northern Renaissance at a time when the culture was on a cusp between medieval and renaissance sensibilities...

's Scots poem The Testament of Cresseid

The Testament of Cresseid

The Testament of Cresseid is a narrative poem written by the Scottish makar Robert Henryson. It imagines a tragic fate for Cressida in the medieval story of Troilus and Criseyde which was left untold in Geoffrey Chaucer's version. The poem also features graphically-realised portraits of the...

imagined a tragic fate for Cressida not given by Chaucer. In historical editions of the English Troilus and Criseyde, Henryson's distinct and separate work was sometimes included without accreditation as an "epilogue" to Chaucer's tale. Other texts, for example John Metham's Amoryus and Cleopes (c. 1449), adapt language and authorship strategies from the famous predecessor poem. Shakespeare's verse drama Troilus and Cressida, although much blacker in tone, was also based in part on the material.

Troilus and Criseyde is usually considered to be a courtly romance, although the generic classification is an area of significant debate in most Middle English

Middle English

Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....

 literature. It is part of the cycle the Matter of Rome

Matter of Rome

According to the medieval poet Jean Bodel, the Matter of Rome was the literary cycle made up of Greek and Roman mythology, together with episodes from the history of classical antiquity, focusing on military heroes like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar...

, a fact which is emphasized by Chaucer.

Characters

• Achilles, warrior who kills Troilus and Hector in battle
• Antenor, a soldier held captive by the Greeks, led to the fall of Troy, traded for Criseyde's safety
• Calchas, a Trojan prophet who joins the Greeks
• Criseyde, Calchas' daughter
• Helen, wife to Menelaus, lover of Paris
• Pandarus, Criseyde's uncle
• Priam, King of Troy
• Priam's children Cassandra (a prophetess), Hector, Troilus, Paris, Deiphobus

Synopsis

Criseyde, the daughter of the seer Calchas, lives alone in Troy after her father abandons the Trojans to help the Greeks. Eventually she catches the eye of Troilus, a man who had previously scoffed at love, and becomes the object of his overwhelming desire. With the help of Criseyde’s uncle Pandarus he wins her love but soon loses it when the Greeks and the Trojans conduct an exchange of prisoners. Calchas, who knows of Troy’s imminent destruction, persuades the Greeks to exchange Antenor for his daughter and thus saves her from the doomed city. Criseyde promises Troilus that she’ll return to him after ten days but once she’s back in the care of her father she realizes the impossibility of her promise. Resigned to her fate, Criseyde yields to the flirtations of Diomedes, and her love for Troilus fades. When Deiphobus wins the armor of Diomedes, Troilus discovers a brooch he gave Criseyde upon her departure pinned to it. Heartbroken, he tries to find Diomedes and take his revenge during battle but after slaying many is in his turn killed by Achilles. As his spirit goes to heaven he reflects on the absurdity of all life itself.

Further reading

• Boitani, Piero and Jill Mann. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
  
  , 2003.
• Brown, Peter, ed. A Companion to Chaucer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
• Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer's Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press
  University of Wisconsin Press
  The University of Wisconsin Press is a non-profit university press publishing peer-reviewed books and journals. It primarily publishes work by scholars from the global academic community but also serves the citizens of Wisconsin by publishing important books about Wisconsin, the Upper Midwest, and...
  
  , 1989.
• Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye. Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
  University of Minnesota Press
  The University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota.Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its books in social and cultural thought, critical theory, race and ethnic studies, urbanism, feminist criticism, and media...
  
  , 2002.
• Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press
  University of California Press
  University of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868...
  
  , 1992.
• Lombardi, Chiara. Troilo e Criseida nella letteratura occidentale. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005.
• Mann, Jill. Feminizing Chaucer. 2nd ed. Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2002.
• McAlpine, Monica. The Genre of Troilus and Criseyde. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
  Cornell University Press
  The Cornell University Press, established in 1869 but inactive from 1884 to 1930, was the first university publishing enterprise in the United States.A division of Cornell University, it is housed in Sage House, the former residence of Henry William Sage....
  
  , 1978.
• Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press
  University of Wisconsin Press
  The University of Wisconsin Press is a non-profit university press publishing peer-reviewed books and journals. It primarily publishes work by scholars from the global academic community but also serves the citizens of Wisconsin by publishing important books about Wisconsin, the Upper Midwest, and...
  
  , 1991.
• Robinson, Ian. Chaucer and the English Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
• Robinson, Ian. Chaucer's Prosody: A Study of the Middle English Verse Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
• Strohm, Paul. Social Chaucer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
• Wallace, David. Chaucerian polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press
  Stanford University Press
  The Stanford University Press is the publishing house of Stanford University. In 1892, an independent publishing company was established at the university. The first use of the name "Stanford University Press" in a book's imprinting occurred in 1895...
  
  , 1997.

Sources

• Chaucer, Geoffrey. " Troilus and Criseyde." The Online Medieval and Classical Library. Roy Tennant, March 1995. Web. 5 May 2010.