Chaucer from Prentice to Poet: The Metaphor of Love in Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde (review)

Abstract

EDWARD I. CONDREN, Chaucer from Prentice to Poet: The Metaphor of Love in Dream Visions and Troilus and Crisyede. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Pp. xiv, 239. isbn: 978-0-8130-3241-2. $59.95. Chaucer from Prentice to Poet consists of six chapters that may be read either seriatim, as a chronological survey of the poet's early career, or singularly, as discrete analyses of the Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, House of Fame (two chapters), and the Troilus. Condren frequently offers complementary insights regarding Chaucer's other works as well. Condren provides an appendix that displays the parallels shared by all three of Chaucer's early dream visions and another explanatory appendix regarding the Golden Proportion (phi). The title-indicated thesis that conjoins Condren's chapters seems conventional enough: 'we cannot see subtle movement in Chaucer's maturation. Yet we are conscious it has occurred...All these before-and-after comparisons give evidence of Chaucer's progress as a poet' (p. 172). It is Condren's specific analyses of particular snapshots, however, that present some of his most truly startling insights. Condren contends, for example, that a rather bad 'Ur version' of the Book of the Duchess was composed as an elegy for Queen Philippa and only subsequently revised to commemorate the Duchess Blanche's death; that the man in black represents Chaucer as a young poet rather than the mourning Lancaster-'A bold claim, this' (p. 22); that the House of Fame was composed (and may have been recited) as a prologue to Troilus and Criseyde; that the man of great authority is likewise a projection of Chaucer himself; that Troilus almost dies of ejaculatio praecox; that Criseyde should be exonerated from the charge of untruth; and that mathematical proportions inform all these works, most perfectly the Parliament of Fowls. Over and over again, Condren challenges the prevailing consensus of professional Chaucerians. This persistently 'iconoclastic' (p. 64) contentiousness is the great appeal of Condren's readings and their vulnerability. Condren's study entails an intriguing synthesis of '[s]everal suspicions, hints, and logical inferences' (p. 126). He brews a concoction of structural analysis and very close readings to distill a secret elixir from the poet's 'clever mathematical encoding' (p. 55): for Chaucer, 'love' always ultimately signifies Neo-Platonic harmony. Condren himself is well aware that his methodology confronts a certain a priori skepticism. …