The Tragic Argument of Troilus and Criseyde

"I suppose in some senses, this is an opposite book to Gordon’s slim volume: this is an exhaustive, brilliant thinking-through of almost every detail in the poem. The tragic argument is that Troilus is a noble figure, through his philosophy and through the ennobling features of love, who loves Criseyde too much, and falls into all sorts of follies. The tragedy is very much Troilus’s, and Morgan is perhaps less good on Criseyde. He has a rather harsh view of Criseyde that many readers might not agree with. He sees her perhaps as a bit too much like Boccaccio’s Criseida: I would argue that he doesn’t pay quite enough attention to how much she’s manipulated. Chaucer’s Criseyde does, it’s true, seem to know what she’s doing in some of her interactions with Pandarus and Troilus. But if you spend Books One through Three wanting her to fall in love with Troilus, willing Pandarus’s ingenuity to succeed and delighting in the seemingly random coincidences, then you have to be sympathetic to her later on, I think. Chaucer makes you complicit in this. There are passages where Chaucer is giving us the evidence to think quite harshly of Criseyde, and there are passages where he is giving us reasons why we might have sympathy or empathy for her. In A V C Schmidt’s review of Morgan’s book for Essays and Criticism , he talks about there being a little bit too much antipathy directed towards Crisedye in the book. Yet many readers have that reaction to her; that’s the fun of teaching it—you don’t need to set up debates because they happen by themselves, intense arguments about blame, and about who’s the victim, and whether this is love or not, and how much freedom each character has. “The poem has a lot to say about manly behavior—the way in which women are passed back and forth between men” Do we hate Criseyde as Pandarus says he does in his final speech in the poem? Can we have the pity that Chaucer’s narrator wants us to have for her? We see very clearly that the poem has a lot to say about manly behaviour—the way in which women are passed back and forth between men. In the text, women are offered casually to men, or manipulated, or ignored. I’m not sure I fully share Morgan’s view of Troilus’s nobility. He is literally noble, of course, and he has fine feelings and an ability to suffer, but his complicity in what’s happening is clear. All the characters are to some degree aware and complicit, but simultaneously trapped in their particular roles and destinies."