5 - Telling the story in Troilus and Criseyde

Summary

Especially in its first three books, Troilus and Criseyde is a wonderfully textured poem: places, talk, people, are rendered with a mastery of nuance, a love of the suggestive detail, unexampled in earlier English literature. Nor is the art of the Troilus only an art of detail, of charming cornices and misericord carvings: Troilus and Criseyde has a large, clear architectural plan; it is a structure of emphatic bilateral symmetry. It is also a work which knows, and makes sure the reader knows, that it has important thematic concerns: fortune and the good things of this world; human love; fidelity. The Troilus, in short, has the elements of a well-made work of serious literature. But perhaps the most subtle of the things which make it not merely a worthy but a truly great poem, a poem both exhilarating and disturbing, is the way these elements are combined with and related to one another. Texture does not merely echo, enhance, unproblematically enrich the meaning suggested by thematic statements and by structure. Almost the reverse proves to be the case; particularly as we read the second half of Chaucer's poem, our response to texture interferes with our 'proper' response to bilateral symmetry and to theme - particularly the theme of fidelity. As we move toward the conclusion of the work, trouthe has become both truly admirable - almost what Arveragus calls it in the Franklin's Tale, 'the hyeste thyng that man may kepe' (1479) - and also something we covertly dislike and are ashamed of ourselves for disliking. In the present essay I shall be discussing some of the salient features of narrative technique in the Troilus and also trying to show some of the ways in which texture, theme, and structure are related.