Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry, Volume 1 by P. M. Kean;

Author:P. M. Kean;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 1972-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

Troilus and Criseyde

The House of Fame, whenever we date it and however we understand it, forms an interlude in Chaucer’s exploration of the theme of love. In the Troilus, with one of the stories that he found among the trophies in Venus’s temple in the Parlement of Foules, he once more takes up the subject of love’s problems and paradoxes. He does so, however, with a difference. In the Parlement, he writes as one who knows not ‘love in dede’, and the material for his discussion is largely drawn from books. What is presented as direct experience is still kept at a distance by the use of the birds to suggest and comment on the human problem, but not to represent it directly. In the Troilus, on the other hand, ‘love in dede’ is exactly what is put before us, in a story about human beings who make their impact on us with no veil of animal fable or allegory between. Moreover, although there is still much exploration of the theory of love, the tragedy lies, as much as anything, in the failure of theory, however complicated, to cope with the complexity of human reactions. In this respect, we could regard the Troilus as expanding the suggestion contained in the difficulties of the noble birds in love in the Parlement.1

It is true, of course, that all directness of impact is contained in the story itself: the poet is still cautious in claiming for himself knowledge derived from experience. But there is a difference between the total disclaimer of the Parlement and his cautious qualification of his own position at the beginning of the Troilus:

For I, that God of Loves servantz serve,

Ne dar to Love, for myn unliklynesse,

Preyen for speed, al sholde I therfore sterve,

So fer am I from his help in derknesse.

(I, 15–18)

There is a claim in the paraphrase of the papal title, as well as a denial in the ‘derknesse’; and we are left with an author who occupies a more ambiguous, but also a more ambitious position than was the case in the Parlement.

Again, it is true that, throughout the poem, Chaucer is careful to disclaim personal responsibility for his story. He refers, again and again, to his author – to what the book tells us, even to what people say – with poignant effect in his reluctant report of Criseyde’s dealings with Diomede, at the end:

Men seyn – I not – that she yaf hym hire herte.

(V, 1050)

The result of the device, it seems to me, is not to build up the theme – which is certainly present in the Parlement and, though with a difference, in the House of Fame – of authority versus experience, but rather to increase our sense of the objectivity of the story-telling. This, we are told by a poet who is still, as he was in the Parlement, ‘astonyed’ by the ‘wonderful werkynge’ of love, is how it is all laid down as having actually happened. Like most of Chaucer’s interventions

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