The Allegory of Troilus

The Allegory of Troilus July 18, 2017

Troilus appears in the Iliad and Aeneid, but only in death scenes. Ancient epics don’t tell the story of his tragic love for Criseyde or Cressida. Characteristically enough, the love story became the main Troilus legend during the middle ages, first recounted by Benoit’s Roman of Troie, who tells of Troilus’s love for Briseis, Achilles’s war bride. Boccaccio changed Briseis to Cressida, and Chaucer and Shakespeare followed his lead. 

In Chaucer’s telling, Troilus renounces and mocks love at the beginning of the poem, but love has its revenge. He becomes a devout devotee of the god of love. Pandarus teaches him the laws of love, and his experience is a caricature of a courtly lover. His experience is very close to that of the dreamer in The Romance of the Rose, though Chaucer displays typical psychological “realism.”

Critics often puzzle over Cressida/Criseyde’s behavior. Why does she wait so long to accept Troilus, and why does she so immediately turn from him? C. S. Lewis says her love is overwhelmed by fear, which proves the stronger passion. Her fear of being left to herself leads to her accept the first male who offers his protection, the Greek Diomedes. 

Perhaps, though, we’re modernizing Chaucer. Perhaps he’s as allegorical as other medievals. He closes his poem on a moralizing note, with a recommendation that his readers, especially his younger ones, take warning from the story and devote themselves to divine, rather than temporal and carnal, love. It seems a tacked-on bow to convention, like the Parson’s sermon at the end of The Canterbury Tales. 

In fact, the contrast of divine and human love is written into the fabric of the poem. Pandarus himself raises the issue in an early discussion with Criseyde, when he claims that everyone, man and woman, has a tendency toward love of one kind or another, whether celestial or earthly. The central scene of the book raises this issue in a graphic way, by describing the love-making of Troilus and Criseyde as a touch or taste of heavenly bliss. It’s a moment of religious as well as sexual ecstasy. The entire poem is arranged around this scene, as Barry Windeatt explains in his edition of the poem: 

A. Prayer
B. Smile
C. Reference to Lollius (Boccaccio’s creation)
D. Dream
E. Letters
F. Venus
G. Hymn to Love
H. Consummation
G’. Hymn to Love
F’. Venus
E’. Letters
D’. Dream
C’. Reference to Lollius 
B’. Laughter
A’. Prayer 

The consummation is the exact center of the poem, at the central line. In line 4120 of 8239, Troilus says that he is at a “high place” because of the god of love (2.1271). Troilus’s story is driven by fortune’s wheel. At the center of the poem, he reaches his highest point, but we expect the wheel to take another turn and crush him underneath. In his excitement, Troilus speaks of his sexual experience in religious terms, a connection reinforced by the references to Venus that frame the scene. Chaucer repeatedly describes the bliss of their love, indicates that Criseyde is a heavenly creature, and treats love-making as an exploration of heaven (2.891; 3.704; 3.1204, 1322; 3.1251; 1.104; 4.864; 5.817). 

In the light of Pandarus’s comment and the moralistic conclusion, it seems that Chaucer wants us to see that this heaven is inferior to the real heaven, this bliss nothing like the bliss the lovers ought to seek. Other mythological references in the poem (e.g., Orpheus and Eurydice) reinforce the theme, since medievals saw these myths as cautionary tales against preferring earthly to heavenly things.

This in turn might support an allegorical-tropological reading of the whole poem. For many medievals, the fall of Troy was the result of Paris’s preference for Venus, the goddess of carnal love, over Juno or Athena, who represented higher and wiser forms of love. By virtue of his name, Troilus embodies the Trojan people, and hence also re-commits the Trojan error. Like Paris, Troilus chooses Venus. Venus can take him only so high, but soon enough he’ll fall. 

In Chaucer’s hands, Troilus and Criseyde becomes a cautionary tale against the vice of lust.


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