Abstract
As rapid linguistic change rendered Chaucer’s language increasingly obscure, the poet’s singular ability to represent human emotions became a key weapon in his canonisation by early modern poets and critics. In an essay prefacing Speght’s edition of 1602, Francis Beaumont adduced this element of Chaucer’s craft to claim Chaucer as the equal of the ancients:
Besides, one gift he hath above other Authors, and that is, By excellencie of his descriptions, to possesse his Readers with a more forcible imagination of feeling that (as it were) done before their eies, which they read, than any other that ever hath written in any tongue.1
The crucial role allotted to feeling, in tandem with the more expected imagination, is reinforced by Beaumont’s repetition of the word, made more present by its use as an adverb:
Chaucers deuise of his Canterbury Pilgrimage is meerely his own: his drifte is to touche all sortes of men, and to discover all vices of that age, which he doth so feelingly, and with so true an ayme, as he never failes to hit whatsoever marke he levels at.
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Notes
G. Speght, ed., The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (London: Adam Islip, 1602).
John Dryden, Prefaces to Fables, Ancient and Modern; translated into verse from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio and Chaucer: with original poems (London: 1700).
An important, if isolated, exception is Derek Brewer, who emphasizes Troilus’s youth and ‘trouthe’. See Derek Brewer, ‘Troilus’s “Gentil” Manhood,’ in Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Pugh & Marzec, (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 237–52.
Marilyn Reppa Moore, ‘Who’s solipsistic now?’ Chaucer Review 33.1 (1998), 43–59 at 43.
Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1351–1900, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), lxxvi.
L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 2.
‘It is only in Troilus that a single male consciousness becomes the central locus of poetic meaning; whatever the prominence given to Criseyde, the central subject of this poem is the loss of happiness, and it is to Troilus and not to Criseyde that this experience belongs.’ Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 165.
Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love, ed. R. A. Shoaf (Kalamazoo: TEAMS/University of Rochester, 1998), 267, III line 568.
The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, ed. William Thynne (London: Thomas Godfray, 1532).
Robert P. ap Roberts, ‘Criseyde’s Infidelity and the Moral of the Troilus,’ Speculum 44.3 (1969), 383–402, at 383.
E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, in Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader, 2nd edn. (New York, 1975; repr. 1984), 1132.
Jane Flax, ‘Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,’ Signs 12 (1987), 621–43, at 629.
Tison Pugh, Michael Calabrese and Marcia Smith Marzec, ‘Introduction: the myths of Masculinity in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, in Men and Masculinities, 1–8, at 2.
Clare A. Lees, ‘Introduction’, in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xv–xxv.
Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 7, quoted in Lees, Medieval Masculinities, xvi.
David Aers, Community, Gender and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360–1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), 120.
Stephanie Dietrich, ‘“Slydyng” Masculinity in the four portraits of Troilus,’ in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter Beidler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 219.
Michael A. Calabrese, ‘Being a Man in Piers Plowman and Troilus and Criseyde,’ in Men and Masculinities, 161–82, at 173.
Thomae Walsingham quondam monachi Sancti Albani Historia Anglicana, 2 vols. ed. H. T. Riley (London: Rolls Series 28, 1866); The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham 1376–1422, trans. David Preest, with Introduction and notes by James G. Clark, (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 248. Ormrod suggests that the contrast between the Knights of Mars and Venus, which Walsingham included in both the first recension (c. 1388) and the 2nd recension (c. 1397), refers not to the ‘feminising’ effect of love (even heterosexual love, as noted by Richard Firth Green), but to the failure to take up arms against the French. W. M. Ormrod, ‘Knights of Venus,’ Medium Ævum 73 (2004), 290–305; Richard Firth Green, ‘Troilus and the Game of Love’, Chaucer Review, 13 (1979), 201–20.
Alcuin Blamires, ‘Questions of Gender in Chaucer, from Anelida to Troilus’, Leeds Studies in English, New Series XXV (1994), 83–100, at 84.
Aers, Community, Gender, 123; Monica E. McAlpine, The Genre of Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 83.
Timothy D. Arner, ‘Chaucer’s Second Hector: The Triumphs of Diomede and the Possibility of Epic in Troilus and Criseyde’, Medium Aevum 79.1 (2010), 161–82, at 169.
Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 143.
D. W. Robertson, jr. A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 497.
Jean Paul Sartre, Les Chemins de la Liberté (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Fradenburg similarly argues that ‘Troilus and Criseyde shares … a knowledge of the tight bond between desire and trauma.’ Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 218.
‘Indeed, in order to understand Criseide properly we should first have to send the narrator to a psychoanalyst for a long series of treatments and then ask him to rewrite the poem on the basis of his own increased self-knowledge’. E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (Durham NC: Labyrinth Press 1983), 678; E. Talbot Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry: an Anthology for the Modern Reader, 2nd edn. (New York, 1975; repr. 1984).
Tatlock noted that ‘his valor mostly is conveyed in the background’. See J. S. P. Tatlock, ‘The People in Chaucer’s Troilus’, PMLA 56.1 (1941), 85–104, at 92.
Recently, for example, by Butterfield: ‘… Troilus is another and vastly more extended poem of, about, and immersed in war.’ Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 197.
The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy: An Alliterative Romance Translated from Guido de Colonna’s Hystoria Troiana, ed. George A. Panton and David Donaldson, 2 vols., EETS OS 39 and 56 (London: N. Trubner, 1869 and 1874).
R. F. Yeager, ‘Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 9 (1987), 97–121; Simon Meecham-Jones, ‘The Invisible Siege: the depiction of warfare in the poetry of Chaucer,’ in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses, ed. Corinne Saunders, Françoise le Saux and Neil Thomas (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 147–167.
This is not to suggest that Chaucer had first hand knowledge of Walsingham’s text. The close relationship of Walsingham, Gower and others to the official dissemination of texts by Lancastrian sources has been demonstrated by Carlson (though Chaucer was not part of this network). David Carlson, John Gower, Power and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012).
Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 488. For Steinberg and Hansen, Troilus’s experience of love is ‘feminizing’ while for Chance, ‘Troilus is effeminized by courtly love.’ Diane Steinberg, ‘“We do usen here no women for to selle”: Embodiment of Social Practices in Troilus and Criseyde’, Chaucer Review 38.4 (2004), 259–73, at 264; Elaine Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 149; Jane Chance, The Mythographic Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 110.
Gretchen Mieszkowski, ‘Revisiting Troilus’s Faint’, in Men and Masculinities, 43–54; Barry Windeatt, ‘The Art of Swooning in Middle English’, in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 211–30. They return to a tradition of interpretation previously marked out by Jill Mann; Jill Mann, ‘Troilus’ Swoon’, Chaucer Review 14 (1980), 319–35.
Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 213.
Holly A. Crocker, Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 143.
Milo Kearney and Mimosa Kearney, ‘The Flaw in Troilus’, Chaucer Review 22.3 (1988), 185–91.
For example, Mieszkowski, ‘Revisiting Troilus’s Faint’, 44. In a recent return to the subject, Mann disputes the charge of passivity, or that passivity is an inevitable element of ‘courtly’ love-making; Jill Mann, ‘Falling in Love in the Middle Ages’, in Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Middle English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer, ed. Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), 88–110.
Mary Carruthers, ‘On Affliction and Reasoning, Weeping and Argument: Chaucer’s Lachrymose Troilus in Context’, Representations 93.1 (2006), 1–21, at 1.
Boccaccio, Teseida and Filostrato, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: I Classici Mondadori, 1964).
Simon Meecham-Jones, ‘Intention, Integrity and “Renoun”’: the Public Virtue of Chaucer’s Good Women’, in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women: Reception and Context, ed. Carolyn Collette (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), 132–56.
See Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press), 360–1.
John M. Bowers, ‘Richard II, Chaucer’s Troilus, and figures of (un)masculinity’, in Men and Masculinities, 9–27, at 18.
Maud Burnett McInerney, ‘“Is this a mannes herte?”: Unmanning Troilus through Ovidian Allusion’, in Masculinities in Chaucer, 221–35.
Peter Godman, ‘Literary Classicism and Latin Erotic Poetry of the Twelfth century and the Renaissance’, in Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition, ed. Peter Godman and Oswyn Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 149–82, at 163.
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Meecham-Jones, S. (2015). ‘He In Salte Teres Dreynte’: Understanding Troilus’s Tears. In: Downes, S., Lynch, A., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Emotions and War. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_5
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