No Greater Pain

No Greater Pain: The Ironies of Bliss in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

A paper published in Global Perspectives on Medieval English Literature, Language, and Culture. Edited by Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr. and Richard Scott Nokes. Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo, Michigan. 2007. 117 - 132.

Although it contains an indirect echo of St. John’s Gospel, the title of this paper is mainly inspired by a few words from Dante’s Commedia : “Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria” (V, 121-3) (no greater pain than to recall the happy time in misery). Those are the words by which Francesca da Rimini begins the pitiful account of her fatal romantic encounter with Paolo Malatesta in Canto 5 of the Inferno. They are a fairly precise translation of lines in Boethius’s Consolation (Book 2 prose 4): “nam in omni aduersitate fortunae infelicissimum est genus infortunii fuisse felicem” (for of all suffering from Fortune, the unhappiest misfortune is to have known a happy fortune). It may or may not be fortuitous that precisely that same Boethian line is quoted by Pandarus in Chaucer’s Troilus: “For of fortunes sharpe adversitee / The worste kynde of infortune is this, / A man to han ben in prosperitee, / And it remembren whan it passed is” (III, 1625-8). It is uncertain whether Chaucer himself was aware of the use of the passage in Dante, but there can be no doubting the irony of the warning provided by Pandarus, which is only increased once the parallel is seen; for while Francesca is in Hell, where there can be no hope of bliss although she and Paolo are eternally together, Troilus has just claimed to have attained “rest in bliss,” as a result of having spent one night in sexual union with Criseyde. His bliss stands for us, at least, in ironic contrast to that true, heavenly bliss, for ever lost by Paolo and Francesca, that is depicted in the closing lines of Dante’s Paradiso. What follows is an attempt to knot together these various strands, exploring the ways in which echoes from Boethius and Dante serve to provide ironic commentary on the evolutions of what Troilus takes to be happiness.

In his article on Chaucer for the Dante Encyclopedia (160-2), Winthrop Wetherbee suggests that in Troilus, a historically localized story of earthly love is played out against the background of the spiritual journey of the Commedia. The relationship is of course largely parodic: though the idealistic lover Troilus has much of the buono ardor of Dante’s pilgrim, Criseyde is an all-too-worldly Beatrice – enmeshed in desire, politics, and history—and Pandarus, the guide who leads Troilus to the ‘hevene blisse’ of sexual union, is a cynical and self-interested Virgil.

It might seem at first sight impossible to prove that Chaucer was conscious of these precise ironic parallels. It is clear, however, that the references to Dante found throughout the poem are sufficiently numerous and deliberate to show that Chaucer had an amazingly profound knowledge of the Commedia and was constantly recalling it as he was writing his version of Boccaccio’s story. The depth of Chaucer’s knowledge of Dante’s Commedia and the complexity of his references to it becomes clear from the very first lines of the poem.

The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen,
     That was the king Priamus sone of Troye,
     In lovinge, how his aventures fellen
     Fro woe to wele, and after out of joie,
   My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye.
     Thesiphone, thou help me for t'endite
     These woful vers, that wepen as I write.

These lines seem at first sight entirely self-justifying, a direct summary of the overall pattern of the poem that follows, and in one sense they are. Yet it surely cannot be mere coincidence that the words ‘double sorwe’ echo lines in Dante’s Purgatorio (22.55-6) where Virgil uses the phrase ‘le crude armi / della doppia tristizia di Iocasta’ (the cruel arms / of the double sorrow of Jocasta) as a summary of the contents of Statius’s Thebaid. He is formulating a question in which he asks Statius how he can reconcile the pagan darkness of his epic with the Christian faith he has just revealed he held in secret. One fundamental theme of Chaucer’s work, like Dante’s, is precisely the problematic continuity between pagan and Christian writing; another is the question of how much pessimism a writer can have without despairing of both humanity and literature. On the other hand, Chaucer may very well not have realized when he was writing ‘double sorwe’ that Dante was probably consciously echoing an expression found in St. Augustine’s Confessions, where Augustine says he ‘lamented his mother’s death with a duplicia tristitia’ (Patterson 132 note 118) because he was deeply tormented at her death—sad because she was dead and sad not to be able to rejoice at her salvation as he thought a Christian should. For Chaucer, the hidden reference to Statius’s Thebaid would have been sufficient. As Patterson, says, Troilus is ‘massively saturated with Thebanness’ (131) and Chaucer uses versions of the term ‘double sorrow’ several times in his “Theban” works, but nowhere else in his writing (Patterson 132 note 118).

While Chaucer’s debt to Dante often remains unnoticed, everyone knows that a number of Chaucer’s works have numerous, obvious, “Boethian” references; yet it is perhaps not always sufficiently stressed that those features are almost all derived from a small section of the Consolation of Philosophy, the second book. The various passages indicating the impermanence and fragility of human happiness, the figure of Fortuna as the presiding genius of mutability, and the use of the word “tragedy” are all found there. This is undoubtedly because the anguish at his unexpected misfortune expressed by Boethius in Book 2 makes him react like a character from literature, struggling to understand and express his feelings in adverse circumstances, drowning in self-pity. The philosophical teaching about Providence that is the concern of the later books is far less suggestive in literary terms. Chaucer is extremely interested in the shifts from unhappy to happy, happy to unhappy, fortunate to unfortunate, and whereas Boethius considers “tragedy” as a loss of political power, Chaucer is perhaps the very first modern writer to use it in referring to the unhappiness arising from a failed love relationship.

Troilus and Criseyde is very strongly structured as a triptych, centered on Book 3 and with patterns of contrasting thematic correspondance linking Books 1 and 5, 2 and 4 as frames to it. The rise “fro woe to wele” is the subject of Books 1 and 2, while the fall “out of joie” is the subject of Books 4 and 5. Chaucer’s liking for symmetrical patterning seems clear, for a rather similar symmetrical structure is seen in the Knight’s Tale, as Cooper shows (74). This need for a clearly defined central book, rather than a desire to imitate the five acts of classical tragedy, might underlie the division of Chaucer’s work into five books instead of Boccaccio’s eight. Several years ago, Dr. Kaylor suggested, refering to the Dantean features, that the physical structure of Book 3 of Troilus might have been carefully crafted to produce a poem almost as exactly centered in terms of line-count as Milton’s Paradise Lost. He also indicated similar patterns in Dante’s Commedia. Be that as it may, the result of Chaucer’s structuring is an emotional pyramid with Troilus’ moment of maximum happiness at what is virtually the poem’s center point. The poem unrolls, then, like a graph tracing the line of ascent then descent of Troilus on Fortune’s wheel as he rises toward, attains, then loses, what he counts as his greatest happiness, which is followed by a greater sorrow than he ever knew before.

Nearing the end of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer famously terms it “litel myn tragedie” (V, 1786) in a phrase that may perhaps echo Dante’s Virgil’s “L’alta mia tragedia’” (Inferno 20.113), but that is probably better seen as a Boethian echo. It was Boethius’ Consolation, after all, and Trivet’s glosses to it, that probably provided most of what Chaucer understood of the nature of tragedy. Commentators often point out that the first recorded use in English of the word “tragedy” occurs in Chaucer’s Boece, in his translation of Fortune’s rhetorical question to Boethius (Book 2, prose 2): “What other thynge bywaylen the cryinges of tragedyes but oonly the dedes of Fortune, that with an unwar strook overturneth the realmes of greet nobleye? (Glose. Tragedye is to seyn a dite of a prosperite for a time, that endeth in wrecchidnesse).” Kelly (50-1), in a major study of the medieval notions of tragedy, stresses the significant absence from Boethius’ definition, and also from the gloss as translated by Chaucer, of any notion of Aristotle’s hamartia, an error or a moral fault serving to provoke the tragic disaster, whereas Nicholas Trivet’s original gloss ran “Tragedia est carmen de magnis iniquitatibus a prosperitate incipiens et in adversitate terminans.” Boethius’ Fortune wishes to stress the entirely arbitrary nature of her operations, by which happiness naturally turns into unhappiness, and so too does Chaucer; in fact, Trivet’s introduction of the moralistic “great wrongdoings” shows a serious failure to understand Boethius’ argument, which would be invalidated if the movement of Fortune’s wheel were influenced by considerations of justice.

From the very start of Troilus, Chaucer makes it clear that he is going to focus on the alternating patterns of sorrow and happiness, happiness and sorrow that a morally innocent Troilus experiences:

The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen,
     That was the king Priamus sone of Troye,
     In lovinge, how his aventures fellen
     Fro woe to wele, and after out of joie,
   My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye.

   In this opening stanza Troilus is invested with a double dimension of sorrow. First, as Priam’s son, he is destined to be a heroic warrior, linked by blood and his very name to the sorrowful tale of the end of Troy; second, he is to be seen experiencing joys and sorrows in loving as the main male character of a chivalric romance. That may be what Chaucer’s “double sorrow” refers to, or it may be explicated by the pattern of his love story that is summarized in the next line: “Fro woe to wele, and after out of joie.” In this lapidary summary of the familiar Boethian pattern of Fortune’s wheel turning there is also a double sorrow, the sorrow which comes before joy and that which comes after it. The theme of the impermanence of human happiness irrespective of a person’s moral qualities, so lightly introduced here, can be considered to lie at the very core of the poem. Wetherbee points out that everyone knows how short-lived human happiness is, and everyone always forgets it, including Troilus and the narrator of his story; history is a tragic story that constantly repeats itself ― ‘the Theban legend (is) Chaucer’s chosen model of the fatally repetitive character of secular history’ (1998, 253).

   In closing the first stanza of the first book, Chaucer invokes Tisiphone to be his inspiring spirit. The reader needs first to recall that Tisiphone is not a classical muse but one of the furies, the dreadful keeper of Tartarus, the place of torment, glimpsed by Aeneas during his journey to the infernal regions in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. Boccaccio (in his commentary on the Inferno) and other commentators interpret the name Tisiphone to mean ‘voice of anger’ or ‘evil speech,’ which is hardly what we expect to find inspiring a love story. Chaucer must also have known that in the opening lines of Statius’s Thebaid, this same Tisiphone is summoned from Hell by blind Oedipus and sent to make his sons mad at the start of the action that leads to disaster. In this way, it seems, the first stanza of Troilus opens and closes with hidden references to Statius’s Thebaid.

The Furies also have their role in Dante, although Tisiphone is given no separate role there. Dante and Virgil are threatened by the three Furies in Inferno 9, in a passage that stresses their malevolent, hellish nature. Remorse, despair and darkness are suggested by these parallels, and recalled by the line in the next stanza where Chaucer establishes a parallel between himself as weeping narrator and the Fury: ‘Thou cruel Furie, sorwing ever in peyne.’ Yet why, after all, should the narrator of a love story, even a sad one, weep as he writes the opening lines? Pity, perhaps, would be a reason. But why then would he suggest a parallel with the infernal sorrows (see Wetherbee 1998 266 note 13) of a tormenting Fury?
Discussing this question, Wetherbee (1998 250) affirms that ‘In both the Troilus and Dante’s Commedia the influence of this ‘infernal’ vision, dominated by the sense of individual tragedy and historical fatalism, coexists with an idealizing poetics of love.’ We are made aware by this of the delicate nature of the responsibilities facing a story’s narrator, and of the risk that a narrator too may misread the tale he is telling. It is dangerously true, as the proverb says, that ‘All the world loves a lover’ for not all lovers should be loved, and excessive love of tales about loving can lead, as Paolo and Francesca know, to Hell.

More to the point, Chaucer’s weeping narrator might be thought to have a direct connection with his translation of Boethius quoted above: “What other thynge bywaylen the cryinges of tragedyes but oonly the dedes of Fortune...” (Book 2, prose 2). Kelly argues persuasively (50ff) that for Chaucer and his contemporaries, tragedy was a narrative genre, they had no awareness of its dramatic nature. Therefore, Chaucer probably imagined that the “cryinges” represented the tone of voice in which the tragedian declaimed his work from a pulpit, as depicted in the famous frontispiece to the Corpus Christi manuscript of Troilus. In that case, the weeping narrator near the start might be considered to be directly linked to and mirrors the “lttel my tragedie” found near the end of the poem.

Chaucer’s Troilus is essentially concerned with what happens to a man who does not understand that human happiness is always short-lived. Now the main concern of Philosophy in Book 2 of Boethius’ Consolation is to stress that the first thing people should do, in order to face the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” is think rightly about the limits of human happiness. People who have lost or who realize that they might easily lose their happiness have constantly turned to Boethius across the centuries for the hope his book proposes that there is an answer and a justice, a system and a pattern – a sustaining Providence. Now this is the teaching of Philosophy in the later books of the work, given to a Boethius who in the early stages, especially in Book 2, is in many ways very similar to Troilus, claiming a natural right to happiness and unable to see why he should have to be unhappy without deserving it, always ready to complain bitterly at the turning of Fortune’s wheel. It is above all the theme of the mutability of human happiness that seems to fascinate Chaucer, far more than the philosophy of Providence. Windeatt (1992, 104) indicates that there is “an alertness to mutability in Troilus which is not present in (Boccaccio’s) Filostrato.”

There is no need to repeat at length Windeatt’s detailed discussion, in which he shows clearly the extent to which Chaucer’s use of Boethius throughout Troilus mirrors what is also true of his use of Dante, by its implied ironical commentary on the attitudes of Troilus. He concludes (1992, 108-9):

Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus are made to lament and to analyse what happens in the love-story in terms of the operation of fortune, in a way that has no equivalent in Chaucer’s immediate source Filostrato, and which recurrently echoes the argument and phrasing of the Consolation, in a sustained dialogue between the worlds of romance and of philosophical debate. This pattern of echoes also suggests the limits and boundaries of their understanding. (. . .) As a narrative, Troilus quotes, as it were, from but one side of the dialogue: the lamentations and questionings, but not the higher answers and explanations. There is no Lady Philosophy to engage with Troilus as she does with Boethius and explain why he is not predestined – although a medieval audience could well remember what was lacking (. . .) the pattern of Troilus’ life may be understood as the obverse of the advancing understanding of the prisoner Boethius and as moving in thematic contrast with it.

It is surely no accident that Book 3 of Troilus, where the hero reaches what he considers to be his highest happiness in physical union with Criseyde, is the most intensely Boethian part of the work. Put briefly, Chaucer establishes a clear structural parallel and ironic contrast between Troilus’ claim of bliss and the critique of earthly happiness that is the main topic of Book 2 of the Consolation. Picking up Windeatt’s “there is no Lady Philosophy to engage with Troilus” we could argue that in fact there is a moment in Book 3 when Criseyde herself takes her place, only (ironically) Troilus is not there to hear her lesson. As he is preparing to unite the lovers in bed, Pandarus tells Criseyde (III, 792-8) the odd (apparently untrue) tale of Troilus’ jealousy to explain his presence in the house and the urgency of their meeting.

She responds in a lengthy speech (III, 813-840) containing a remarkable number of echoes of Philosophy’s teaching found in Consolation book 2, prose 4, to the effect that earthly happiness can never satisfy fully because of its limitations and transience. Windeatt indicates (1984, 291) that Criseyde’s first exclamation (III, 813-815) as to the bitterness which is always mingled with life’s sweetness derives from lines 118-9 of Boethius’ text; the second half of that stanza (III, 816-9) commenting on the resulting “angwissous” nature of prosperity derives from his lines 75-8. The following stanza (III, 820-6) expands the sharp remark of Philosophy on the blind ignorance of those who cannot see the changeableness of happiness found in lines 150-5. The final stanza, on the destructive effect the fear of losing happiness is bound to have on the happiness of one who recognizes its fragility, derives from elements in lines 155-62.

Criseyde’s Boethian meditation culminates in an exclamation “There is no verray weele in this world heere” (III, 836), paraphrasing Philosophy’s words in lines 180-1, (that Chaucer had translated in his Boece as a rhetorical question: “How myghte thanne this present lif make men blisful?”). This whole speech has no obvious place in the psychology of Criseyde, who is not generally noted for her wisdom, and it only serves to delay the climax of the unfolding love story. Criseyde is soon after this snugly bedded down with Troilus, but the memory of these words, of that last line in particular, offer a powerfully ironic commentary on the readers’ sympathetic response to Troilus’ increasingly ecstatic remarks on his happiness. In the archetectonics of Chaucer’s Book III, this Boethian excursus forms one side of a patterning framework of quotations from Boethius’ Book 2 that tightly encloses the moment of what Troilus claims is his highest bliss.

Near the exact center of the whole poem, as Troilus finds himself in bed with a consenting Criseyde, he bursts into a hymn of praise to Love: “O Loue, O Charite” (III.1254-74) that includes a stanza meditating on Love’s generosity:

Benigne Love, thou holy bond of thinges,
       Who-so wol grace, and list thee nought honouren,
       Lo, his desyr wol flee with-outen winges.
       For, noldestow of bountee hem socouren
1265   That serven best and most alwey labouren,
       Yet were al lost, that dar I wel seyn, certes,
       But-if thy grace passed our desertes.

Now that stanza opens with a strongly Boethian notion echoing the main contents of the closing metrum 8 of Book 2 of the Consolation. (cf. Chaucer’s translation Boece 2 metrum 8, “al this accordaunce and ordenaunce of thynges is bounde with love, that governeth erthe and see and hath also commandement to the hevene”) while the remaining lines are made doubly ironic by slight but certain echoes from the highest spiritual climax of Dante’s Commedia, the prayer addressed to the Virgin Mary by St. Bernard in Paradiso 33.13-21 before the final vision of God. This may be linked to the way Troilus begins with the double exclamation, “O Love! O Charite!” These are regular Christian names for God, but the very next line shows that he is blessing Eros, not the Christian God of whom he can of course know nothing, for he includes “Thi moder ek, Citheria the swete” in his praises, where Venus takes the place of the Virgin. For Troilus, erotic, physical love is his god and his highest bliss. Chaucer seems to be laying himself open to accusations of a complete lack of decorum here. However, we might rather want to suggest with Winthrop Wetherbee that these potentially shocking parallels form part of a deliberate but hidden strategy that culminates in the final lines of the poem, by which Troilus’s trajectory is deliberately and constantly contrasted ironically with Dante’s.

Winthrop Wetherbee writes of the transfer of St. Bernard’s address to the sexually triumphant Troilus (Dante Encyclopedia 162): “The barrier separating human from divine love is for a moment virtually translucent, but the context makes plain that Troilus is self-deceived and is destined in the end to be betrayed by the ‘grace’ that seems to inform his experience.” It is hard to believe that Chaucer was unaware of the ironic patterning he was introducing into his poem by these intertextual moments, yet they are never identified as such. He knew he was using words from Dante; we should not doubt that he knew exactly why he was using them as he did.

A few lines later, after he has returned home to his royal palace and is still in sexual ecstasy, Troilus tells Pandarus, “Thow hast in hevene ybrought my soule at reste” (III, 1599). He is shown to be utterly blind to the inevitable mutability of human happiness that Criseyde had so stressed. He claims that he has attained the eternal Now where all change ceases. To this, only a few lines later, Pandarus closes the Boethian framework opened by Criseyde earlier, as he responds to Troilus, again unexpectedly and ironically, with an unheeded warning of the mutability of all earthly joys: “For of fortunes sharpe adversitee / The worste kynde of infortune is this, / A man to han ben in prosperitee, / And it remembren whan it passed is” (III, 1625-8). This unwelcome though essential truth echoes the translation found in Chaucer’s Boece: ‘For in alle adversities of fortune the most unzeely kynde of contrarious fortune is to han ben weleful’ (Boece Book 2, prose 4 lines 5-9) where it introduces precisely the arguments summarized by Criseyde. That parallel is noted by Windeatt (1984, 331), together with an indication of a Dantean parallel in the Inferno, but he makes no further comment on this shared “proverb.” Yet given the depth of Chaucer’s knowledge of Dante, it seems at least possible to argue that the echo is a deliberate one.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the lines from Inferno parallelled by Pandarus’s words just quoted, and translating the same Boethian lines, are: “nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria” (V, 121-3) (no greater pain than to recall the happy time in misery) and they are the words by which Francesca begins the pitiful account of her fatal, romantic encounter with Paolo. Francesca recalls how she and Paolo, both married adults, were brought to commit adultery while reading a romance about Lancelot. She tells, her companion weeps, and Dante falls unconscious in one of the most emotional moments of his entire journey: “‘si che di pietade / io vienni men cosi com’io morisse; / e caddi come corpo morto cade” (Inferno V, 140-2) (While the one spirit said this the other wept so that for pity I swooned as if in death and dropped like a dead body).

Those conscious of this Dantean parallel are being invited by Chaucer, it seems, to notice the difference between his narrator’s way of telling the story of Troilus and Dante’s response to the tale of Paolo and Francesca. Chaucer’s narrator’s tears in the opening stanza of Troilus need to be recalled here, too, if only because both Dante’s fainting and Chaucer’s tears seem to echo Boethius’ Book 2 prose 2 “For what else is the crying and the weeping in tragedies but for the happiness of kings overturned by the random blow of fortune?” Now for Boethius, the happiness those kings have lost is essentially bound up with power and worldly privilege. It is Dante and Chaucer who transform the notion of tragedy into the private loss of the happiness that gendered, sexual love brings. Both locate this in the realm of the tales found in romantic literature and both suggest concern about the responsibility of the author for the readers’ ambivalent response to romantic sin.

Thus we might wish to claim that, while the poem’s narratorial voice is telling the story of the union of Troilus and Criseyde with seeming joyous complicity, Chaucer’s text nonetheless introduces a steady stream of strongly ironic references to the mutability of human happiness as it is affirmed in Boethius’ Book 2 prose 4. These references are arranged in a framing pattern, preceding and following Troilus’ claim of achieved bliss and providing an intensely ironic commentary on it.

Chaucer creates a quite new text for Troilus’ Song (III, 1744 – 1771) near the end of the book, Boccaccio’s text having been relocated in the book’s Proem. It is based on the final metrum 8 of Boethius’ Consolation Book 2. It celebrates the universal cosmic power of love in nature but, as Windeatt notes, “it is all the more striking that the song (in Chaucer’s text) avoids Philosophy’s climactic final lament that such an informing, cosmic sense of love does not govern the human heart, presumably because in Troilus’ view it does.” (1992, 105) The way in which Troilus’ declaration of having attained enduring rest in bliss is so solidly framed by, embedded in, and challenged by a steady, patterned stream of references to the words in which Boethius’ Lady Philosophy declares that he is utterly wrong needs to be noticed by readers, who today are far too ready to believe him unthinkingly, and rejoice with him in his error. The readers may still prove their wisdom if they recall better than the narrator that what follows in Books 4 and 5 of the poem is the movement ‘out of joie,’ (I, 4) announced in the very first stanza of the poem.
Once that movement is complete, Troilus dies as a heroic warrior, not as a lover, and is granted his final moment of insight into the truth of the matter. Here he is “out of joy” indeed. Looking down from the inner surface of the eighth sphere, high indeed, but not as high as God in heaven, he “fully gan despyse / This wrecched world, held al vanitee / To respect of the pleyn felicitee / That is in hevene above’ (V, 1814-7) but that Heaven, still unattainably above him with its true felicity, is not for him. Then ‘Ther he was slayn, his loking doun he caste; / And in him-self he lough right at the wo / Of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste,” (V, 1820-2) which is not a very positive response to the expressions of human affection and friendship common in heroic poetry. At last he admits his moral failure as a too physical lover: “And dampned al our werk that folweth so / The blinde lust, the which that may not laste, / And sholden al our herte on hevene caste” (V, 1823-5). But such a glimpse of Christian and moral truth can have no redemptive effect on him now, for what is represented in these lines is not some kind of apotheosis or special grace, but Troilus’s Particular Judgement.

Catholic doctrine teaches that each human soul without exception, Christian or not, receives knowledge of its eternal destiny at the moment of death. The (1913) Catholic Encyclopedia says: “Theologians suppose that the particular judgment will be instantaneous, that in the moment of death the separated soul is internally illuminated as to its own guilt or innocence and of its own initiation takes its course either to hell, or to purgatory, or to heaven.” There may be a double irony in the location of Troilus’ final moment of insight. The seventh heaven is that of Saturn, the last of the planets, of whose character the Knight’s Tale paints an appalling picture (2454-69). Rising to the sphere of Saturn is for Troilus a brief experience of the full scope of “the erratik sterres” (V, 1812), the planets that influence humanity by their constant changes. Above him lie only the unmoving sphere of the fixed stars and the Empyrean, beyond which lies the Christian Heaven, not a place but the eternal mind of God.
The judgement is not only for Troilus. The narrator who has for so long sided with him must share in it, and the readers too. From the height of the sphere of Saturn the soul of Troilus must be imagined to make an abrupt fall, to the sphere lying immediately above that of the Moon, for the text says it is Mercury who is to take him away to where he must go, to Limbo, presumably, as one who lived before the coming of Christ. In the eighth sphere, too, there is no resting place for Troilus. The delights of romantic love’s joys have suddenly been denounced as “blinde lust.” Naturally, the narrator speaks with a radically changed, repentant voice the denunciatory stanzas that follow.

While telling the story of the union of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s narrator maintains more or less successsfully his distance. Arriving at the end of his task, he is brought back to the emotions indicated in the opening lines of the poem, and to a fuller understanding of where such a passion must lead. The complexity of Chaucer’s debt to Dante in Troilus is nowhere clearer than in the words that close the poem (V, 1863-9):

    Thou oon, and two, and three, eterne on-lyve,
       That regnest ay in three and two and oon,
1865   Uncircumscript, and al mayst circumscryve,
       Us from visible and invisible foon
       Defende; and to thy mercy, everichoon,
       So make us, Iesus, for thy grace digne,
       For love of mayde and moder thyn benigne! Amen.

The stanza owes nothing to Boccaccio. The first three lines are a close translation of words from Dante’s Commedia (Paradiso 14.28-30) while Boitani (1983, 127) links the final line with the opening line of Paradiso 30. The lines celebrating the Trinity are taken from Canto 14 of Paradiso, which is set in the Sphere of the Sun, which Dante entered in Canto 10, and the singers are the spirits encountered in the first two circles of the wise. Eighth among the wise doctors forming the First Circle introduced by Beatrice in Canto 10 is “the holy soul who makes plain the world’s deceitfulness to one that hears him rightly; the body from which he was driven lies below in Cieldauro, and he came from martyrdom and exile to this peace.” Did Chaucer realize that this meant that one of the voices joining in this hymn is none other than that of Boethius? Given the difficulty of the identifying reference, we might wonder. Yet it is certainly a fitting final, hidden link to a Boethius already dear to Chaucer but now made more significant by the role assigned to him by Dante, as he dances in eternal bliss above, so very unlike Troilus whose discovry of “the world’s deceitfulness” only comes when he cannot benefit from the wisdom gained.

People have always turned to Boethius’ Consolation when they are directly confronted with unavoidable and undeserved loss of happiness. With the imprisoned Boethius, they struggle to understand: “Why do such unhappy things happen in life? How can I possibly make any sense of them?” The vagaries and sheer incomprehensibility of chance are the necessary starting points for a process of deep thought that cannot arrive with any ease at a concept of divine fore-knowing, since that insight is the highest form of wisdom. Fortune’s wheel expresses the constant human experience of abrupt loss of what had been considered essential, enduring happiness. The turning of the wheel brings the great transformations: “From wo to wele and after out of joie.” Troilus experiences that reality, but cannot make any sense of it until he is dead, which is too late, of course.

“Why did I not perish at birth?” asks Job, at the height of his unhappiness. “The reason I am unwilling to die is not because I would rather be unhappy than not be at all, but a fear that after death I may be still more unhappy,” replies Augustine (De Libero Arbitrio, III. i. 17). “Who would bear the whips and scorns of time... when he himself might his quietus make... But that the dread of something after death... puzzles the will,” asks Hamlet, as he scrutinizes his copy of Boethius. The ultimate answer comes in the closing moments of the Commedia. There, the love of a man for a woman, transcended when the limited possibilities of happiness it offers become evident, is found to lead to the vision of God and eternal bliss.

Works Cited

Primary sources

The Riverside Chaucer. Third Edition. General Editor Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1987.

Troilus and Criseyde: ‘The Book of Troilus’ by Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by B. A. Windeatt. London: Longman. 1984.

Secondary sources

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Subgit to alle Poesye.” Essays in Criticism. Edited by R. A. Shoaf. Binghampton, New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. 1992.

Cooper, Helen. The Canterbury Tales. (Oxford Guides to Chaucer), Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1989.

Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by Thomas C. Stillinger. New York: G. K. Hall & Co. 1998.

The Dante Encyclopedia. Edited by Richard Lansing. New York: Garland Publishing. 2000.

The European Tragedy of Troilus. Edited by Piero Boitani. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1989.

Kaylor, Noel Harold. “Holding the Center: Chaucer's Book of Troilus and Dante's Commedia,” in Medieval English Studies (Seoul) Volume 8 (2000) 95-114

Kelly, Henry Ansgar. Chaucerian Tragedy. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 1997.

Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. London: Routledge. 1991.

Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolute Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1997.

Wetherbee, Winthrop. Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1984.

Windeatt, Barry. Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford Guides to Chaucer). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1992

Abstract

Chaucer’s Troilus is essentially concerned with what happens to a man who does not understand that human happiness is always short-lived. It is constructed as an emotional pyramid with Troilus’ moment of highest bliss at the poem’s center point. The poem unrolls, then, like a graph tracing the line of ascent then descent of Fortune’s wheel in terms of happiness as Troilus rises toward, attains, then loses, what he counts as his greatest happiness which is followed by a greater sorrow than he ever knew before. The main concern of Philosophy in Book 2 of Boethius’ Consolation is to stress that people should try to think rightly about the limits of human happiness. In the archetectonics of Chaucer’s Book III, Boethian quotations form a patterning framework that tightly encloses the moment of what Troilus claims is his highest bliss. Before she is brought to meet Troilus, Criseyde makes a lengthy speech (III, 813-840) containing a remarkable number of echoes of Philosophy’s teaching in Consolation 2, prose 4, to the effect that earthly happiness can never satisfy fully because of its limitations and transience. Returning home after spending the night in bed with Criseyde, Troilus claims that he has attained the eternal Now where all change ceases. Only a few lines later, Pandarus closes the Boethian framework opened by Criseyde as he responds with a warning of the mutability of all earthly joys taking directly from the same Book 2 of Boethius’ Consolation. The fact that this same quotation was given by Dante to the eternally unhappy romantic lover Francesca in Canto V of the Inferno serves to give added significance to Pandarus’ words. Thus, while the poem’s narratorial voice is telling the story of the union of Troilus and Criseyde with seeming joyous complicity, Chaucer’s text nonetheless maintains a distance by keeping up a steady stream of strongly ironic references to the mutability of human happiness as it is affirmed in Boethius’ Book 2 prose 4. These references are arranged in a framing pattern, preceding and following Troilus claim of achieved bliss and providing an intensely ironic commentary on it that is confirmed in the closing moments of the poem.