The Tragic Argument of 'Troilus and Criseyde' by Gerald Morgan (review)

Abstract

264 Reviews the theme of her book (now headlined as 'a latemedieval crisis in the language of self definition', p. 79) results in a forbiddinglyconvoluted discussion of theParson and his tale,which perhaps only an aficionado would appreciate. Finally, the status of 'confes sional self-identification' inGower's Confessiois set in antithesis to that discerned in Hoccleve's laterRegimentof Princes. Where the Confessiois stillable to 'retreat' from its Prologue's riven world of contemporary England into a confessional world where identitycan just about be secured, theRegimentframes a markedly 'laicized' confession within threatsof heresy and despair, and eventually abandons themode as if itwere contaminated. Katherine Little's book proposes a heady confluence of ideas, and presses details of large texts relentlessly into service tounderpin a completely speculative thesis.Among the serendipitous victims are PiersPlowzman, whose device of confession by a personified sin is subjected to an analysis that seems insensitive toLangland's loose technique with personification; and the conclusion of theRegiment, whose humility tropes are read as a 'miring [of thepoem] indespair' (p. 127). Confession andResistance isan initiallyabsorb ingbut eventually overwrought experiment in charting intangible evidence of how the understanding of identity formation evolved among writers responding toWycliffite polemic. The book's underlying thesis, notwithstanding, deserves the attention of medievalists. GoLDsMirHs, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ALcuIN BLAMIREs The TragicArgument of 'Troilus andCriseyde'. By GERALD MORGAN. 2 vols. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. 2005. xxi + 700 PP. f74.95- ISBN: 978-0-7734-5934-0 (vol.*), 978-0-7734-5936-7 (vol. 2). The appeal of the storyof Troilus and Criseyde has proved just as potent as thatof the city thatprovided so fittingly doomed a backdrop for theirdoomed love.Once Benoit de Sainte-Maure's twelfth-centuryelaboration of the sorrows of Homer's obscure Trojan prince and his treacherous loverBriseida had been put intoLatin by theSicilian jurist Guido delle Colonne, the tale of their deluded and faithless affection quickly gained popularity.GeoffreyChaucer's TroilusandCriseyde was repeatedly put through the presses, thus ensuring the lovers' continued notoriety in the earlymodern period: the unhappy pair arementioned by Shakespeare in at least eight plays other than his own full-scale reworking of their tragedy; his Petruchio even sentimentally (or perhaps presciently?) keeps a spaniel called Troilus. It isatChaucer's hands, however, thatTroilus's storycomes of age not just as a haunt inglypowerful depiction of the exhilarations and pains of romantic love,but also as an extended philosophical enquiry that sets about answering three universal questions: What happens touswhen we fall in love? Why do we betray thosewhom we profess to love?And, most pressingly,how farare we responsible for the bad things thathappen tous?Gerald Morgan's The Tragic Argument of 'Troilus andCriseyde' offersan extraordinar ilyattentive reading of Chaucer's poem. The three central characters (the lovers and Criseyde's meddling uncle Pandarus) receive close attention, andMorgan's patient eluci dation of thenuances of Troilus (at times stanza by stanza) sets thework not only in the YES, 38.I &2,2008 265 context of Chaucer's manipulations of his principal source,Boccaccio's II Filostrato, but also of thepoet's debt toa wide range of classical, scholastic, and vernacular influences. One of themost fascinating sections of thebook is Morgan's examination of attitudes towardsmelancholy and lovesickness inmedieval thought. Chaucer opens his poem by declaring thathe will traceTroilus's journey from 'wo to wele, and after out of ioie' (1.4),but suffering is of course not always deserved, and discussions of the role of Fortune in human affairs thread theirway throughout the poem. The influence of Boethius on the narrative isparticularlymarked: in probing Troilus's foolish puppy love and Criseyde's subsequent treachery,Chaucer balances moral accountability forone's actions against tougher notions of unyielding necessity; indeed, the poem is famously dispatched both toGower and toRalph Strode, the Merton logician who opposed Wyclif's necessitarianism (VI857). Chaucer salutes his finished work as 'litel myn tragedye' (V 1786), inall likelihood theearliest confidentusage of theword inEnglish, and the titleofMorgan's studyappears topromise a sustained discussion of thepoem as such; in fact,despite sections thataddress Aquinas and Brad wardine on freedomofwill and Fortune, thecursoryhandling of thisaspect of thepoem slightly disappoints. Morgan's careful exploration of the poem is an undeniably impressive accomplish...