Jenni Nuttall's Reading List

"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."

"Published in 1970, this is now an old book. It’s quite a short book. It’s written beautifully clearly. I remember reading it as an undergraduate, and I definitely read it as I was sitting down to write the Reader’s Guide . It’s a wonderfully lucid articulation of what the features of this text are which make its ultimate meaning debatable. There are places in the poem where characters are given parts of a philosophical work by Boethius called The Consolation of Philosophy , a work which would have been very recognizable to Chaucer’s readers. The central question in Gordon’s study of ambiguities is what those borrowings of Boethian material—the holding of Boethian material within the story—do for how we feel about these characters. Often, the bits of Boethius they quote are partial and not quite right. So, many readers have found this a way of introducing irony or another viewpoint on these characters. And just as Chaucer might be introducing Boethius into the poem in order to explore his narrative more deeply, he’s also using this narrative to see how meaningful or useful Boethius’s philosophical observations might be. Yes. And Gordon’s book works through the possible ambiguities and ironies which that creates. Can we apply a philosophical judgment to these characters? It’s tricky. Can we apply the Christian morals that are asserted at the end of the poem to these characters? We’re not sure. I like this book because it explains those debates in a way that’s very detailed, but it’s also schematic enough to let you know that to deal with any of those questions, you have to simplify the poem a fair bit. It shows you the levers and cogs and wheels of meaning that are working hard in the text."

"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."

"As you say, it’s not a translation; it’s a response. It’s a lyric sequence, but it finds across the whole of Troilus and Criseyde small moments of thought or memory or emotion. Greenlaw finds cracks of possibility which she expands in these seven-line poems. She also puts the story in the here and now, in our English. Her book is sympathetic to the notion that we might take this poem very seriously, and it might be very moving, and full of pathos and pity. She takes Troilus’s sorrow, which can be quite indigestible, longwinded, and not necessarily gripping in the original, and make you stop and dwell on it. It’s as if she ignites those moments in the poem like a firework, and you get to watch it burn out brightly. It’s the most moving set of lyrics. If you know Troilus and Criseyde , there are poems which utterly capture Chaucer’s spirit for a split second or two. There’s a brilliant interplay between the original and this book. Many of those instances are very much, as I said, to do with taking Troilus seriously—considering what it is to be in love for the very first time. We all know the self-deceptions of love, but that doesn’t cancel out what it feels like to fall in love, be betrayed, and have all one’s hopes raised and then dashed. Those moments are there in Chaucer, but they’re crowded round with other things. Lavinia Greenlaw isolates them. Like lots of lyrics, it makes it an ‘I’/‘you’ event. It captures the first-person perspective that’s sometimes only implicit in Troilus . That might be another way that the poem is timeless: it registers the psychological, physical processes of being in love. Greenlaw responds to its universals: the vanity of being in love, and the absurdity, and the self-regard, and the fear, and the delight of it. There’s a really interesting moment in one of Chaucer’s sources, Benoît’s Roman de Troie , where Briseida imagines what future generations will make of her, and Chaucer borrows that and has Criseyde reflect in the same way. It makes you think: what would it be to be Criseyde—to somehow magically know that you’re going to be held up as an example for all time? Just as women are trapped in Troy, women are trapped in stories. And so, anticipating its future, it’s a work that produces lots of literary responses. They’re not necessarily straight translations; Robert Henryson writes what might be considered a sixth book to the poem, answering the question of what happened to Criseyde. Later on, Shakespeare comes back to the story; Dryden retells it; Wordsworth translates bits of the poem into modern English. Many writers, all the way through to Greenlaw, re-engage with it. I love it too. Her lyrics take you into those feelings. As a poem about the experience of being in love, it’s brilliant to teach Troilus and Criseyde to 19-year-olds. At that age, you’re sort of teetering on the edge of all those questions. To be prepared both to take love absolutely seriously and to suggest that the center of the poem, when the lovers are in bed together, might be as-near-as-damn-it, heaven, but at the same time to give you all the tools to take love to pieces, this particular set of gender roles and relationships—all of those things—I find it startling that it has both strands. And Chaucer writes like this before the realist novel ever existed. And before Renaissance drama with its characters and psychologies on show. We’re invested in Troilus, Criseyde and Pandarus as much as we would be with any of the characters in novels we read or plays we see. That’s why it has to be there, on courses, in literary histories, in the hands of readers."