Abstract
Shakespeare's changes to Chaucer's story of Troilus and Cressida are entailed by his placing it in the larger Troy story first created by Benoit de Ste. Maure. This not only compresses Chaucer's story; it turns it inside out. Chaucer's story is an indoor affair, with war and politics out of sight. On Shakespeare's stage, Chaucer's great love scene in Book Three is hidden. We only see the lovers emerging from it, exposed to common daylight. In another sort of exposure Chaucer disappears as a mediating (and defensively shading) narrator, and yet the vanished narrator's longing for and dread of the erotic returns to infect Shakespeare's Troilus, with his self-absorption and performance anxiety. Moreover, Chaucer's double image of Criseyde (beautifully vulnerable and yet troublingly in control) leads Shakespeare's Troilus to say that he has been betrayed by one who “is and is not Cressid! ” The ambivalence of Chaucer's narrator provided Shakespeare with a vehicle for expressing the erotic tensions analyzed in psychoanalytic terms by Janet Adelman. It also shadows the Troy story episodes not found in Chaucer by identifying Ulysses with the role of Chaucer's “olde bokes” that broke his heart by branding Criseyde as false.
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