CHAUCER AND THE POETS CHAUCER AND THE POETS AN ESSAY ON Troilus and Criseyde WINTHROP WETHERBEE Cornell University Press ITHACA ANO LONOON Copyright © 1984 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850 , or visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1984 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2016 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wetherbee, Winthrop, 1938– Chaucer and the poets. Includes index. 1 . Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400. Troilus and Criseyde. 2 . Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 . Troilus and Criseyde—Sources. 3 . Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 .—Knowledge—Literature. 4 . Love in literature. I. Title. PR 1896 .W 48 1984 821'.1 84-7080 ISBN 978-0-8014-1684-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-5017-0723-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ To My Best Friend, Andrea Contents Preface 9 A Note on Texts 13 Introduction 17 1. The Narrátor, Troilus, and the Poetic Agenda 3 0 2. Love Psychology: The Troilus and the Roman de la Rose 53 3· History versus the Individual: Vergil and Ovid in the Troilus 87 4· Thebes and Troy: Statius and Dante's Statius 111 5· Dante and the Troilus 145 6. Character and Action: Criseyde and the Narrator 179 7· Troilus Alone 20 5 8. The Ending of the Troilus 224 Index 245 Preface T his book argues that Chaucer's Troilus is a major state- ment about poetic tradition. Chaucer, who was remark- able in his early and profound appreciation of the achievement of Dante, shared Dante's sense of the special excel- lence of the classical Latin poets, Vergil, Ovid, and Statius. Like Dante, he recognized that classical poetry presented an au- thoritative view of human experience which earlier medieval poets had assimilated only partially and with an imperfect awareness of the dynamic role the Latin poets could play in the development of a classical tradition of Christian poetry. The Troilus is, of course, one of the great medieval statements on love, deeply indebted to Boethius and the Roman de la Rose, and it owes an obvious debt as well to the tradition of the romans d'antiquité, but it adopts a new perspective on these medieval affinities. Chaucer places his medieval version of a pagan love story in a context of allusions to classical epic which deepen and complica te its meaning, making the story a significant foil to the religious perspective that surfaces in the final stanzas of the poem. Too little work has been done on Chaucer's poetics. There is still a persistent tendency to assume that he viewed "poetry" as synonymous with "courtly poetry," an assumption that 1 hope my discussion of the literary context of the Troilus may help to correcto The relations of different literary modes, in particular the opposition between courtly "making" and classically ori- [9] [10] Preface ented "poetry," seem to me a central concern in Chaucer's work. 1 have tried to provide a concrete illustration of how this opposi- tion functions in the Tmilus, tracing the poet-narrator's evolu- tion from a writer of romance who views his material in the idealizing light of the courtly lo ve tradition to a disciple of the poetae, capable of realizing the tragic and finally the spiritual implications of his story. In assessing Chaucer's debt to the classical poets and Dante I ha ve tried to show that his engagement with them was a literary one-the engagement of an individual talent with its tradition- that he read them as poets, and that their influence was as com- plex as that of any major poet on another. These would not be controversial assumptions if we were talking about Milton, but the case of a medieval poet presents special problems. Having been shown to our profit the importance of commentary, gloss, and mythographical compendium in accounting for medieval notions about classical poetry, we tend to substitute such tools for the texts of the poets themselves, forgetting that these texts were read as well as annotated. Fulgentius and John of Garland have proved more efficient than direct recourse to the Aeneid or the Metamorphoses as a way of "cracking" medieval allusions to Vergil and Ovid; and while the cold finger of moral pedantry sometimes touches the spirits of practitioners of this method, it clearly reflects certain medieval habits of reading. There is a risk, however, of confusing the categories and purposes of teachers and glossators with those of poets. Without questioning Chaucer's knowledge of the commentators, I have tried to show that there is a significant difference between his use of them and his direct recourse to the poets themselves and that his reading of Ovid and Statius acknowledges interplays of theme and con- text which the commentaries, with their very different purposes, often ignore. It is finally the texts themselves, "the forme of olde clerkis speche," that meant most to Chaucer, as to Dante. In exploring the relation of these texts to the Troilus I have tried to locate and explicate what Chaucer, at those moments when he felt himself to have made contact with it, called poetry. A great many friends and friendly institutions have helped me see this project through. Most of the reading and much of the Preface [ 11] writing were done with the benefit of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Cornell Univer- sity's wonderfully hospitable Society for the Humanities. Friends who gave generously of their time to read and criticize ponions of my manuscript include Stephen Barney, James Chandler, Carolyn Dinshaw, Judy Ferster, Nicholas Havely, Mark Lam- bert, Shirley Lukitsch, Michael Murrin, Lee Patterson, Allen Shoaf, and Michael Twomey. Jay Schleusener, in addition to reading most of the manuscript, spent several long afternoons of conversation helping me work out my ideas at an early stage, and Caron Cioffi, Rory Holscher, Rozalyn Levin, and Linda Lomperis have offered many helpful criticisms and suggestions along the way. Sherron Knopp produced a remarkably thor- ough and probing repon for Cornell University Press and point- ed the way to a number of important revisions. Finally, Allison Dodge, who edited for the Press what I had foolishly imagined was my final draft, made yet more valuable suggestions about organization and persuaded me to purge a great deal of gra- tuitous academese. I ha ve not followed all my friends' sug- gestions, even when they were right, but they are largely respon- sible for whatever coherence this essay may possess. Portions of two articles are incorporated at various points in the book: "The Descent from Bliss: Troilus 111, 1310-1582," first published in Chaucer's 'Troilus': Essays in Criticism, ed. Ste- phen A. Barney (Hamden, Conn., 1980), pp. 297-317, and "'Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano': Dante, Statius, and the Nar- rator of Chaucer's Troilus," which appeared in Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, ed. Lois Ebin (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1984), pp. 153-76. I am grateful to Medieval Institute Publications of Western Michigan U niversity for permission to reprint material from the latter article. WINTHROP WETHERBEE Chicago, Illinois A Note on Texts A II quotations from the Troilus are from the edition of R. K. Root, The Book of Troilus and Criseyde (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.]., 1926). For Vergil 1 ha ve used the Oxford Classical Texts edition of R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1969); for Ovid, the Budé edition of the Metamorphoses, ed. Georges Lafaye, 3 vols. (Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1928-30); for Statius, the Teubner edition of the Thebaid, ed. Alfred Klotz, rey. Thomas C. Klinnert (Teub- ner Leipzig, 1973); for the Roman de la Rose, the Classiques fran<;ais du moyen age edition of Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Cham- pion, París, 1965-70); for Dante's Commedia, the edítion of Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols. (Princeton University Press, Prince- ton, N.J., 1970-75); for Boccaccio, the Scrittori d'ltalia edition of the Filostrato, ed. Vincenzo Pernicone (Scrittori d'ltalia Bari, 1937). Translations are my own, except those from the Com- media, for which 1 have used the version of Singleton, and those from the Filostrato, most of which are taken from N. R. Havely, Chaucer's Boccaccio (D. S. Brewer, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1980). W.W. CHAUCER AND THE POETS Introduction A s the narrator of Chaucer's Troilus seeks to conclude his poem, he is anxious to preserve the decorum oI' his courtly lo ve story yet increasingly aware that there is more to be said than its conventional limits will allow him to express. The question what human lo ve is and means arises with a new urgency as the moment for separating from Troilus draws nearer, and the final portions of the poem are largely con cerned with finding the appropriate mode for dealing with this ques- tion. It is a problem with which Chaucer wrestled a good deal in the course of his poetic career. The richest of his early poems, the Parliament or Fowls, is largely about how traditional allegori- cal forms engage and fail to engage the question of the place of human love in the order oI' the universe. The unfinished Anelida and Arcite and the Complaint orMan are early symptoms of a lifelong concern with expressing in poetry the relationship between love and history. But the poem that comes closest to the Troilus in addressing the problema tic relations of love and poetry is the House ofFame, which deals not only with the problem of finding a form but with the nature of literary tradition. The House ofFame dramatizes the delusions and uncertainties that hinder a courtly lo ve poet's attempt to reconcile his commit- ment to love with a desire to write poetry of a higher order- more philosophical, more Dantean, more classical. The poem thus raises precisely tbe problem that the narrator of the Troilus confronts when he seeks to place bis lo ve story in its proper [17] [18] Introduction relation to the achievement of earlier poets, a status higher than that attained by his previous exercises in courtly "making" yet deferentially "subject" to the authority of the great poets of antiquity.l More than any other of Chaucer's works the House of Fame is a poem about poetic tradition. A brief review of its com- plex and cerebral allegory can help us understand what was at stake for Chaucer when he sought to come to terms with the great poetry of the past-a task inseparable from that of finding an adequately serious way of talking about love and one that becomes the central concern of the final stanzas of the Troilus. In the House of Fame, too, the task of engaging with tradition is central, but it is left wholly unaccomplished, and indeed most of the poem is devoted to illustrating the necessity for undertaking it. Despite the elaborate framework of the traditional celestial journey, the narrator's strenuous touting of his vision in the Proem, and the Dantean invocations to the several books, the quest undertaken in the House of Fame is radically disoriented. From beginning lO end of his threefold vision, the dreamer- narrator does not know what he wants to learn or what he should expect to learn at the House of Fame. He is presented as having concerned himself with lo ve in theory and with the courtly ritual of literary service to the god of love, to the point of losing touch with the world around him. The eagle who carries him to the House of Fame promises him "tydynges / Of Loves folk yf they be glade," which we may presumably understand to mean enlightenment as to the larger implications of his preoc- cupation with love, but he never receives the tidings themselves or any further information as lO their nature. The dreamer's problem is illustrated in the first book of the l. The opposition between "making" and "poetry" is important for my argu- ment. "Making" seems to have meant to Chaucer the production of literary work that meets the demand of one's own society to be edified, pleased, and refreshed on its own terms. This criterion tits the Troilus to the extent that we see it as programmed by courtly convention and con cerned with promoting courtly val- ues. "Poetry" meant the work of poetae, the classical poets and Dante (see also note 3 below). On the importance oi' this opposition for Chaucer see Glending Olson, "Making and Poetry in the Age 01' Chaucer," Cornparative Literature 31 (1979): 272-90; Anne Middleton, "Chaucer's 'New Men' and the Good of Liter- ature in the Canterbury Tales," in Literature and Society, ed. Edward W. Said, Selected Papers from the English Institute, n.s. 3 (Baltimore, Md., 1980), pp. 15-5 6. Introduction [ 19] poem, in whieh he reports and responds to the story of the Aeneid as set forth on the walls of Venus's temple of glass. The eenterpieee of the story is an aceount of Aeneas's relations with Dido, and at the point of his abandonment of her, the Vergilian narrative comes to a standstill while we are given an Ovidian view of the heroine's wrath and sorrow, punctuated with refer- ences to other abandoned heroines. The dreamer is ove reo me with "pity" again and again as Dido acts out her tragedy and is noticeably distraeted as he sums up the remaining eight books of Vergil's epie in thirty-odd lines. The pity that Dido's Ovidian passion inspires in the dreamer, hindering and then dissipating his ability to apprehend the larger framework of destiny and renunciation which the Ver- gilian narra ti ve expresses, is the index to a kind of alienation, a lack of moral orientation, which, though treated with a good deal of humor in the ensuing books of the poem, constitutes its serious theme. It is the poem's eounterpart to the passionate involvement with the lovers which makes it impossible for the narrator of the Troilus to aehieve a perspective on his love story through most of the poem, and its implieations for the dreamer of the House of Farne are foreefully illustrated by the ensuing action. The dreamer emerges from Venus's temple to find him- self in a desert inhabited by no natural thing. He is shoeked into prayer, but his prayer is answered only with the bizarre visions of Books 2 and 3, his journey through the heavens and his tour of the House of Fame itself. In one aspeet the celestial journey is a dramatization of the dreamer's sense of his capaeity for serious poetry. There are energy and exuberance in his reeognition that he too has joined Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Alain de Lille in recording the wonders of the spheres, and a sureness in his recognition of the rank and aehievements of the major and minor poets who have adorned Fame's palace. What he cannot do, however, is reeoncile his own ostensible purpose, the pursuit of love-tidings, with the emulation of any of these great models. He can find no adequate vehicle for the inspiration he feels, no way of ordering what he sees, and thus he is borne along from one speetacle to another, seemingly subject to forces beyond his control. At the climax of his journey he is on the point of receiving the long-