Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde

"It’s so efficient in the way it gives you the information you need to see the range of possibilities in the poem in three or four hundred pages. None of the editions quite have space to do this. Windeatt gives you information about the sources that we’ve been talking about, and about Chaucer’s structuring of the plot, its symmetry and repetitions, the architectural mirroring of events in the first half and events in the second half. He mentions some 20 themes—it’s that rich thematically. Working through it as a student, you begin to see how the poem’s wide range of preoccupations drift in and out of focus in any one scene. For example, Windeatt has a section on genre, saying we need to know about epic, romance, history, tragedy, drama, lyric, allegory, and fabliaux to capture all of Troilus ’s diversity of genre. He goes through all of that in 50 pages! Absolutely. And that might be Oxford’s crazy defense for keeping the whole poem on the syllabus: you revise the entire poem in order to write a short commentary on four or five stanzas in the exam. Certainly, if you’re studying English literature from the middle of the 14th century to the middle of the 16th century, this is a primer for many different things. It teaches you about Boethianism; it teaches you about faith and fortune; it gives you a grounding in what might be good about courtly love, and what some of the problems with it might be. And its language and style are very fertile and abundant too. It’s not exactly a hidden gem, but I think it does sometimes get left by the wayside. In the last fifteen years, I’ve found Troilus and Criseyde to be this marvellous touchstone; it works to hold together a broad period-based module like Oxford’s ‘Literature in English, 1350 to 1550’ paper. And I think students bond over it and bond themselves to it. It deserves the label of masterpiece for its capacity to be more than one genre, and to pose questions that generations upon generations of readers cannot agree upon—not because the answers are necessarily difficult, but because one bit of the poem might make you think one thing, and another might lead you to consider something else. That’s its strength. Reading Troilus and Criseyde , we become pagans in our own imaginations, not really certain what to believe and what to resist. Chaucer makes a space, both for his own contemporary audience and for us, to ask questions like: Do we make our own decisions? What is free will? What is love? By the end of the poem, you’re not even sure what ‘truth’ might mean—whose truth? There are many kinds of truth. And all of this occurs within a story whose plot you already know, which should have no capacity to engage you to the degree it does. In its gender politics and exploration of gender roles, it is extraordinarily relevant and intriguing. Students are frustrated by many aspects of the poem, but it’s a delighted frustration, an attempt to fix a poem that’s protean and always moving. One of the reasons I wrote Troilus and Criseyde: A Reader’s Guide was I thought there was a danger it might be getting out of students’ reach, as training in Middle English has grown more sparse. Windeatt’s Guide is great, but I wondered if there was a way of writing through and with the poem, showing it in situ . It’s full of local detail, and you can see Chaucer figuring out what he wants to do, scene by scene."