Reading Order
Troilus and Criseyde Reading Order
Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1382–86) by Geoffrey Chaucer is the longest and most formally ambitious of his completed works — a 8,239-line narrative poem in rhyme royal, adapted from Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, that tells the story of the Trojan warrior Troilus's love for Criseyde, their brief happiness, and her eventual transfer to the Greek camp and new relationship with Diomedes, which Troilus interprets (perhaps correctly) as betrayal. Chaucer is far more sympathetic to Criseyde than his Italian source — his Criseyde is a complex, intelligent, self-aware woman trapped by the male power structures around her — and the poem's tragic outcome is presented not as the result of Criseyde's faithlessness but of the impossible situation that the Trojan War places everyone in. Troilus and Criseyde is Chaucer's most sustained psychological achievement — his portraits of Troilus's idealized, courtly love and Criseyde's more realistic, self-protective response to it are among the finest in medieval literature. The poem was also enormously influential: it established rhyme royal (seven-line stanzas in iambic pentameter) as a major English poetic form; it gave Shakespeare his source for Troilus and Cressida; and the figure of Criseyde as a byword for infidelity — despite Chaucer's sympathy for her — was established by subsequent literary tradition that read her character against his intentions. Reading Troilus and Criseyde today, alongside the legend of Cressida's faithlessness that the poem generated, is itself a lesson in how literary history works.
Where to start
Troilus and Criseyde — the Riverside Chaucer is the scholarly standard; Barry Windeatt's Penguin translation is the best prose version for readers who don't want to work through the Middle English.
Complete Troilus and Criseyde Book List
- 1Buy
Troilus and Criseyde
Geoffrey Chaucer·1385·The poem — Troilus's love for Criseyde, their happiness, her transfer to the Greeks, his grief. - 2Buy
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer·1400·Chaucer's comic masterpiece — the other great achievement of his career, in a completely different mode. - 3Buy
The Legend of Good Women
Geoffrey Chaucer·1386·Chaucer's poem partially written as penance for Troilus — the God of Love accuses him of defaming women; Chaucer's self-conscious engagement with his own work. - 4Buy
Il Filostrato
Giovanni Boccaccio·1335·Boccaccio's Italian poem — Chaucer's primary source; reading it alongside Troilus reveals Chaucer's transformations. - 5Buy
Troilus and Cressida
William Shakespeare·1602·Shakespeare's bitter problem play — the dark, ironic afterlife of Chaucer's characters; Cressida here is the faithless figure the legend made her. - 6Buy
The Aeneid
Virgil·-19·Virgil's epic of Troy's aftermath — the classical source tradition that Chaucer was drawing on and transforming. - 7Buy
The Book of the Duchess
Geoffrey Chaucer·1368·Chaucer's early dream-vision elegy — the beginning of his career with the love allegory tradition that Troilus perfects. - 8Buy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Anonymous·1400·The other great Middle English narrative poem — contemporary with Chaucer; entirely different tradition (alliterative northwest Midlands vs. London rhyme royal).
Troilus and Criseyde — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Troilus and Criseyde about?
Troilus and Criseyde is set during the Trojan War. Troilus, a Trojan prince who has mocked love, falls hopelessly in love with Criseyde, the daughter of the Trojan priest Calchas who has defected to the Greeks. With the help of his friend Pandarus (Criseyde's uncle), Troilus finally consummates his love for Criseyde, and they have a period of happiness. But Calchas arranges an exchange — Criseyde for the Trojan prisoner Antenor — and Criseyde must go to the Greek camp. She promises to return; she doesn't; she eventually becomes involved with the Greek warrior Diomedes. Troilus dies in battle, and his soul ascends to the eighth sphere, where he looks down at the earth and laughs at the vanity of human love.
How does Chaucer treat Criseyde in the poem?
Chaucer's treatment of Criseyde is one of the most remarkable aspects of the poem. His source, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, treats Criseyde (Criseida) as simply faithless. Chaucer goes to considerable lengths to make her sympathetic: she is a widow in a precarious social position (her father has defected), she is intelligent and self-aware, she resists Troilus's advances for a long time, and when she is sent to the Greek camp, she is placed in an impossible situation (she cannot return to Troy without her father's support). Chaucer's narrator repeatedly expresses sympathy for her and regret at what he must report. The poem's tragedy is that Criseyde's failure — however understandable — destroys Troilus, and the legend of her faithlessness that the poem generated is the price she pays in literary history for being a complex, self-protective human being.
What is the significance of Pandarus in Troilus and Criseyde?
Pandarus is one of the most fully realized characters in medieval literature — Criseyde's uncle and Troilus's friend, who engineers their relationship with a combination of genuine affection, comic cunning, and what the poem leaves deliberately ambiguous about his motivations. Pandarus is where the word 'pander' comes from (via Shakespeare's use of the character): he facilitates the love affair, sometimes through deception, and the poem raises questions about the nature of his role that it doesn't fully answer. He is simultaneously the poem's comic engine (his conversations with Troilus are some of the most entertaining passages in Chaucer) and its moral problem: is he a good friend, a voyeur, a pimp? The poem lets him be all of these at once.
What is the ending of Troilus and Criseyde?
The ending of Troilus and Criseyde is one of the most discussed in medieval literature. After Troilus's death, his soul ascends to the eighth sphere of the heavens and looks down at the earth, laughing at human vanity. The narrator then addresses the young lovers in the audience and urges them to love God rather than perishable earthly things, and closes with a tribute to Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius. The 'palinode' (the withdrawal from the poem's content in favor of religious instruction) has been read as sincere, ironic, and as everything in between; it is certainly not simple, and readers have been arguing about Chaucer's final intention for the poem since the fourteenth century.
What should I read after Troilus and Criseyde?
After Troilus and Criseyde, readers typically move to Chaucer's other works — The Canterbury Tales is the essential next step; The Legend of Good Women and The Parliament of Fowls are shorter poems that explore related territory. For Chaucer's source, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato reveals what Chaucer transformed. Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1602) shows what happened to the characters in a later tradition that was far less sympathetic to Criseyde. For the broader tradition of medieval love narrative, The Romance of the Rose and Andreas Capellanus's The Art of Courtly Love provide the theoretical context.
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