The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Geoffrey Chaucer · a narrative poem in five books · rhyme royal, with proems to the first four books · composed in the 1380s, c. 1385 · more than eight thousand lines · scored on Chaucer’s Middle English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Middle English quoted only where its words are certain, in the Riverside spelling
Mode
Tragedy in the medieval sense, a fall on Fortune’s wheel; courtly romance, comedy of contrivance, Boethian philosophy and lyric in one narrative
Mythos
Fortune’s wheel as the poem’s shape; Troy whose fall stands over the love’s; the white eagle that takes a heart and leaves its own; the boar of Tydeus’s line; the ascent through the spheres
Phase
The siege of Troy, from the beginning of the love to the death of Troilus: the courtship, one night of rain, the parliament and the exchange, ten days of waiting on the walls, and the ascent
Presentation
Narrative poem in five books of rhyme royal, seven-line stanzas of decasyllabic verse rhyming ababbcc; proems to Books I to IV; a lyric of Petrarch’s in the first book; the closing stanzas, the ascent and the dedication at the end of the fifth
Register
From Pandarus’s proverbs and rapid split dialogue to aubade, hymn and complaint, a soliloquy of philosophy, and the cold height of the eighth sphere; a narrator tender and ironic in one voice
Scale
Three minds followed day by day, a family compromised, a besieged city and its parliament, and the cosmos of Fortune, predestination and the spheres, all held through one love
Governing Proposition
A young Trojan loves a widow whose father has deserted to the Greeks; her uncle brings them together, the city trades her to the enemy, and in the Greek camp she gives her heart to another man while he waits for her on the walls. The story is Boccaccio’s, and the poem tells it on Fortune’s wheel, three books up and two down, through a narrator who will not judge the woman he cannot know. The wager of the work is that a love story followed stanza by stanza, the mind inside each choice made visible, can disclose how faith is made of circumstance, and that the same poem can then rise above its world and laugh.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The poem states its plan in its first stanza. Its matter is “The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen” (I.1), and its course is “Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie” (I.4)
“from woe to weal, and afterwards out of joy”. That line is the shape of the whole: three books rise and two fall. It is written in five books of rhyme royal, seven-line stanzas of decasyllabic verse rhyming ababbcc, more than eight thousand lines composed in the 1380s, and every stanza closes on a couplet before the next begins.
The story is Boccaccio’s. Its main source is Il Filostrato, written in ottava rima c. 1335 to 1340, which Chaucer never names; he gives his authority as “Lollius” (I.394). Behind Boccaccio stand Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (c. 1160), where the love of Troilus and Briseida first appears, and Guido delle Colonne’s Latin Historia destructionis Troiae (1287). Chaucer worked into it Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which he had himself translated as the Boece. The song Troilus sings in Book I, the Canticus Troili, is a version of Petrarch’s sonnet “S’amor non è”, the first Petrarch in English. The English poem is much longer than its source, and what it adds is where its knowledge lies.
Each of the first four books opens with a proem. Book I invokes Thesiphone; Book II, Clio; Book III, Venus and Calliope; Book IV, the Furies and Mars. Book V has none and opens on the Fates. Through them all speaks a narrator who says he only follows his author, who serves the servants of the God of Love, and who cannot know what his heroine feels. He claims to translate faithfully and visibly does not. His not knowing is the instrument: what the reader cannot be sure of in Criseyde, the poem makes its subject.
Movement II
Criseyde is a widow, and her father, Calkas, has deserted to the Greeks. She is a woman alone in a besieged city, the daughter of a traitor. Her uncle Pandarus takes up the cause of Troilus, who loves her. In Boccaccio this go-between was her cousin; here he is older, closer and more compromised, and his contrivances are among the largest of Chaucer’s additions. Book II is his: letters carried and answered, a feigned lawsuit, a dinner at the house of Deiphebus, each a stratagem for bringing the two together.
Troilus rides past her window, and she says to herself: “Who yaf me drynke?” (II.651)
“who gave me drink?” She means a love potion, and the convention becomes a mind catching itself. Then she reasons. The poem follows her consent stanza by stanza, turning one way and back, weighing her safety, her freedom and her name; she says “I am myn owene womman, wel at ese” (II.750)
“I am my own woman, well at ease”. In the same book she dreams of a white eagle that takes her heart and leaves his own.
The book is comedy and manoeuvre. Pandarus’s dialogue with his niece runs fast, split between speakers inside the stanza; his proverbs come in heaps, used and mocked at once. The book is long, and the three stratagems are one movement told three ways. What it gains by its length is the slowness of the woman’s yielding: nothing in it is sudden, and when she gives her love the reader has seen every reason she had.
Movement III
Book III opens on Venus and Calliope and brings the lovers together at Pandarus’s house, on a night of rain. The uncle’s farce sets the scene: the rain on the roof, his contrivances, and Troilus, overcome, falling in a swoon. The comedy and the consummation are told in one voice, and the narrator is tender toward both.
At the height of the night the poem sings. The hymn to Love, after Boethius, carries the lovers’ joy into philosophy, and the love of two people is sung as a power in the order of things. At dawn the lovers part in an aubade, the lyric of separation at daybreak. This is the top of the wheel, and the poem knows it is the top. What is joyful here is joyful because it will not last, and the reader has been told so in the fourth line of the poem.
The fourth book’s proem turns the poem over. It addresses Fortune, invokes the Furies and Mars, and announces the fall. The wheel is not an image the poem uses but the order of its books: the turn falls at the start of Book IV, after three books of rising, and the poem’s comedy and its tragedy are two speeds of the same motion.
Movement IV
There is a truce and an exchange of prisoners, and the Trojan parliament votes to give Criseyde to the Greeks for Antenor. It overrules Hector, and Troilus is silent before it. The irony is in the plot: the city trades the woman for the man who will betray it. The state’s power over the private person is the hinge of the book, and the love has no defence against it.
Troilus argues with himself whether all that comes is foreseen and therefore must come. The soliloquy on predestination is Boethius in the mouth of a despairing lover; the poem needs its substance, and it runs longer than its scene can carry. In Book V Criseyde is in the Greek camp, and Diomede comes to her on the day she most needs a protector.
Troilus waits for her ten days. He rides past her empty house; he keeps vigil on the walls, where every cart on the road is her. Cassandra reads the boar as Diomede, of the line of Tydeus, and the Theban past becomes a fate in the Trojan present. The narrator will not condemn the woman: “Men seyn, I not, that she yaf hym hire herte” (V.1050)
“men say, I know not, that she gave him her heart”. He reports the verdict the story has always carried and declines to make it his own.
Movement V
Near the end the narrator sends his book away. He calls it his “tragedye” (V.1786), sends it after the great poets, “Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace” (V.1792), and prays for its text: “So prey I God that non myswrite the” (V.1795)
“so I pray God that none miswrite you”. An English poem claims its place in the line of the classical poets and asks its copyists to keep it whole.
Then Troilus dies, and his spirit rises to “the eighthe spere” (V.1809). The ascent is taken from Arcita’s in Boccaccio’s Teseida. From the height “in hymself he lough right at the wo / Of hem that wepten for his deth” (V.1821 to 1822)
“laughed within himself at the woe of those who wept for his death”. It is the wheel seen from outside it. The love the poem has made beautiful is, from the eighth sphere, a thing to laugh at, and the poem lets the laughter stand.
The endings follow one on another. The narrator turns to “yonge, fresshe folkes” (V.1835) and bids them turn to Christ, holding this world in contempt; he dedicates the book to Gower and to Strode; he closes on a prayer to the Trinity. Each farewell is a frame the poem had not prepared, and stacked together they read as several laws asserting themselves at once. Yet Fortune has been named at every turn, and the laughter from the sphere is the poem’s own law completed. The seam is in the stacking, not in the law.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine passes the subtractive test. Remove Pandarus’s long work in Books II and III and the love has no world; remove the Trojan parliament that trades Criseyde for Antenor and the fall has no cause outside the lovers; remove the ten days on the walls in Book V and the betrayal is a report, not an experience. Against Boccaccio the scale is compelled: the added third makes Criseyde a mind and Pandarus a man. What holds the axis at its lowest is what could go. The courtship of Book II is one movement told three ways; Pandarus’s proverbs pile beyond their wit; the soliloquy on predestination outruns its scene; and the close stacks five endings where three would do.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: love in time is subject to time, and a person’s faith is made of circumstances as well as will. Criseyde is not a liar. She is a widow whose father has deserted to the enemy, alone in a besieged city, choosing each time what keeps her safe, and the poem shows prudence and inconstancy as one act seen from two sides. “I am myn owene womman, wel at ese” (II.750) is said by a woman a parliament will trade. The narrator refuses the verdict the story carries: “Men seyn, I not, that she yaf hym hire herte” (V.1050)
“men say, I know not, that she gave him her heart”. Held below the top because the close states its meaning outright.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height comes often, in two registers. The warm: Criseyde’s dream of the white eagle that takes her heart and leaves his own; the night of the consummation, with the rain on the roof and Troilus’s swoon; the hymn to Love after Boethius; the aubade at dawn. The dreadful: the news of the exchange; the empty house Troilus rides past; the vigil on the walls, where every cart on the road is her; Cassandra reading the boar. The cold summit is the ascent to “the eighthe spere” (V.1809), from which Troilus laughs at those who weep for his death. What holds it below the top is the long stretches of Book II, comedy and manoeuvre, deliberately unelevated.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth here is built, not evoked. Troy bears load: the city’s fall stands over the love’s throughout, and the irony is in the plot, since Criseyde is exchanged for Antenor, the man who will betray the city. Fortune’s wheel is not an allusion but the poem’s shape, three books up and two down. The archetypes the poem made are the evidence of construction: Criseyde became the type of the faithless woman for two centuries of English writing, and Pandarus’s name a common noun, while both stay particular, she counting her risks, he tired and funny and ashamed. Held a step below the top because the pagan gods are largely machinery of the courtly register, and the Christian frame is set on at the end rather than built through.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, a lyric narrative of a young man’s love and grief, with the French Troy matter and the conventions of fin’ amor behind it. The turn is large. Chaucer made Boccaccio’s cousin into an uncle, older and more compromised; made the heroine slower, more frightened and more reasoning; installed a narrator who claims to translate faithfully and visibly does not; put Boethius into a love story; and closed a pagan tragedy with an ascent and an address to “yonge, fresshe folkes” (V.1835). The stake: a long poem of the highest ambition in English, when the court still wrote in French, sent after “Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace” (V.1792). Held below the top because the story and much of its sequence are Boccaccio’s.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The rhyme royal stanza is the instrument of the poem’s deliberation: each stanza turns a thought, closes on its couplet, and lets the next reconsider, which is how Criseyde decides and how the narrator hesitates. The narrator is form become knowledge: a teller who says he only follows his author, serves the servants of the God of Love and cannot know his heroine’s heart makes the reader’s uncertainty about her the poem’s subject. The five books follow the wheel, and the turn falls where the fourth book’s proem addresses Fortune. “The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen” (I.1) is a plan executed. Held off the top because the closing stanzas append frames the form has not prepared.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over six centuries. Its open questions are still argued and lie deep: whether Criseyde is faithless, frightened or simply free; what Pandarus wants, and whether his service is love, voyeurism or politics; whether the narrator is Chaucer, a mask or an innocent; whether the ending’s contempt of the world cancels the love the poem has made beautiful or completes it; whether Troilus on predestination speaks the poem’s philosophy or its hero’s despair. Henryson answered it in The Testament of Cresseid, Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, Dryden in his adaptation (1679). C. S. Lewis (The Allegory of Love, 1936), E. Talbot Donaldson, D. W. Robertson and Carolyn Dinshaw (1989) have returned to it without exhausting it. Held below the top because its depths cluster round three figures and the end.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is English poetry of the late fourteenth century and, beyond it, the vernacular narrative of Boccaccio and the French. Its intrinsic force: it showed that English could sustain a long narrative in the high style, with philosophy, psychology and comedy in one verse; it brought rhyme royal to its full power; and it made the inner life of two lovers, followed day by day, the substance of a narrative poem as no English poem had and few European ones. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: rhyme royal became a principal stanza of English narrative and complaint for two centuries (Lydgate, Hoccleve, James I’s Kingis Quair, Henryson, Shakespeare’s Lucrece), and Criseyde’s story passed through Henryson to Shakespeare. Held below the top because much of Chaucer’s reach runs through The Canterbury Tales, and the poem’s psychological method waited for the novel.
Score: 8.8 / 10
A span of six centuries, and the text whole. On form: the poem survives entire, in manuscript and in print from Caxton’s edition (c. 1483); its five books, proems and ending are not in doubt, though the textual tradition carries variants, authorial or scribal, that editors still weigh. On presence: read without break from the 1380s through the sixteenth century, put into Latin by Sir Francis Kynaston (1635), adapted by Dryden, and edited and taught continuously since the nineteenth century. The charge is to presence. The Middle English stands between the poem and the general reader, and for three centuries it has been read mainly in the academy and by poets, with a thinner common readership than its rank implies; its wide and unbroken early life keeps it at the top of that band.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium is the poem’s most certain strength, and the making is load-bearing. Rhyme royal, three rhymes in seven lines, is hard in English, and Chaucer holds it for more than a thousand stanzas without visible strain, moving inside the stanza from lyric to rapid dialogue split between speakers, to argument, to narrative summary. The conversational verse has no equal in English before Shakespeare: Criseyde’s “Who yaf me drynke?” (II.651)
“who gave me drink?”, said to herself as Troilus rides past, turns a convention into a mind. Apostrophe, sententia and proverb are used and mocked at once. The care is on the surface: “So prey I God that non myswrite the” (V.1795). Charged a little for Pandarus’s proverb-heaps and the longueurs of Book II.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Pandarus’s farce on the night of rain in Book III, and Troilus laughing from the eighth sphere. For most of the poem one law governs both. Fortune rules, and what is joyful is joyful because it is unstable, so that comedy and tragedy are two speeds of the same wheel, and the narrator’s tenderness and irony are held in one voice. The range is wide: farce, lyric, philosophy, war council, heavenly ascent. The charge is the ending. The contempt of the world and the call to young lovers to turn to Christ come after a poem that has made earthly love its beauty, and the turn is abrupt; the stacked farewells read as several laws asserting themselves at once. It is partly a seam, and the axis stands below the other two of the floor.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what one narrative poem holds. Consciousness, fully, in three minds. Love, in its making, its consummation and its failure. The family, in Calkas’s desertion and the uncle’s ambiguous care. War and the city: the siege, the truce, the exchange of prisoners, the parliament that overrules Hector while Troilus is silent before it; the state’s power over the private person is the hinge of Book IV. The cosmos, in Fortune, predestination and the spheres; the sacred, in a pagan world framed by a Christian close; history, in Troy and Thebes behind it; the natural order, in May, the nightingale, the days Troilus counts. All of it is held through one love, which is the strength and the limit. What holds it at 8.4: labour, commerce and every class below the Trojan nobility are absent, and the war is ground, not agent, except once.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well at 9.0. Rhyme royal held through more than a thousand stanzas, from lyric to split dialogue to argument, with conversational verse unmatched in English before Shakespeare; a text whole and read for six centuries; a disclosure of how faith is made of circumstance, told by a narrator who refuses the verdict; and questions about Criseyde, Pandarus, the narrator and the ending still open.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 8.4. The first is held by what could go: the three stratagems of Book II, Pandarus’s proverb-heaps, the length of the soliloquy on predestination, and five endings where three would do. The second by the world left out: labour, commerce and every class below the Trojan nobility, with the war as ground more than agent. Next, The Inner Law at 8.6, charged for an ending whose stacked farewells read partly as a seam. The sounding of Chaucer’s final -e is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.4, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 105.8, an average of 8.82, which rounds to 8.8; the summit would need a sum of 107.4.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Troilus and Criseyde, scored as the poem as transmitted: five books in rhyme royal, with the proems to Books I to IV, the ascent of Troilus and the closing stanzas of Book V, composed in the 1380s (usually dated c. 1382 to 1386). Every axis is judged on Chaucer’s Middle English. No text was in hand and no quotation was checked against a file. Middle English is quoted only where its words are certain, in the spelling of the Riverside Chaucer (Stephen A. Barney’s text of the Troilus, 1987), with a close modern rendering beneath where one helps; line numbers follow the Riverside numbering as recalled and are approximate. Editions · the Riverside text, the one known best; Barry Windeatt’s parallel-text edition (Longman, 1984), which prints Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato beside it, for sense and for the sources; Nevill Coghill’s modern verse translation (Penguin, 1971), as an English poem to read at length. None is charged to the work. Sources, as the record gives them: Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (c. 1335 to 1340), Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (c. 1160), Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae (1287), Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Petrarch’s sonnet for the Canticus Troili, and Boccaccio’s Teseida for the ascent. The metre depends on the sounding of final -e, which editors reconstruct and readers dispute; the music of the line as Chaucer spoke it is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Figures that could not be verified, among them the line count of each book, the length of the Filostrato, the number of manuscripts and the line ranges of particular passages, are not given.