A Double Sorrow
A Version of Troilus and Criseyde
LAVINIA GREENLAW
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
NEW YORK • LONDON
Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye
V. 1786
Contents
Introduction
Note on the Text
A DOUBLE SORROW
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
BOOK FOUR
BOOK FIVE
Introduction
The story is simple. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, fate intervenes. They are victims of circumstance, timing, each other and themselves. Their story takes place within a city under siege in the midst of a long, intractable war. There are walls within walls, actual and otherwise.
The Trojan War was part of the Ancient Greeks’ ancient history, events said to have taken place a thousand or more years before. Troy did, and didn’t, exist. Even the Greeks had trouble finding it. It was part of a series of cities on a hill by the sea in Anatolia. The sea has long since retreated and Anatolia has dissolved into Turkey but the site remains.
The seeds of war, like those of tragedy, are usually a series of consequences. In this case, an impossible judgement and a dangerous promise. Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam, was forced to choose the loveliest among three goddesses. As reward he was offered the most beautiful woman in the world, and set off to claim her. She was Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Her abduction (or, as would be asked of Criseyde, did she go willingly?) led Menelaus to rally an army to fetch her back. The Greeks arrived at Troy and surrounded the city.
The story of the siege of Troy is told in Homer’s Iliad, which also contains the earliest extant mention of Troilus. A prince, and Paris’s brother, he turns up before that in various stories in which his role is usually that of extreme youth and early death. Otherwise, he is remarked upon for his valiance. Medieval poets took hold of these old tales and established a practice of free borrowing and blithe reinvention, material now known as the Matter of Troy, an accumulation of versions and variations and component parts.
Troilus was given his own story, that of falling in love with a woman called Briseida, by the French poet Benoît de Sainte-Maure in his twelfth-century epic, Roman de Troie. This was adapted into a Latin prose version around 1287 by Guido delle Colonne, whose harsh view of Briseida set a lasting tone. Around 1340, the story was rendered into Italian poetry by Giovanni Boccaccio as Il Filostrato or ‘the one rendered prostrate by love’. Boccaccio broke down the romance into steps and strategies – like a war or a dance – evolved Briseida into Criseida, and introduced Pandarus, the go-between.
Chaucer completed his version around 1383, the year he turned forty. He was at the height of his powers. Troilus and Criseyde is generally held to be his greatest work and in terms of English literature as important as Beowulf and Spenser’s Faerie Queen. It stands alongside another great late-fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Although roughly two-thirds of Chaucer’s text is original, he borrowed hugely from Boccaccio as well as from Guido and de Sainte-Maure, none of whom he acknowledges. Instead he credits a source called Lollius, whom he appears to have invented. Boccaccio, too, is coy about his own starting point.
Chaucer takes hold of this story as if he caught it in the air and freely incorporates what it brings to mind of his other reading. He read widely, and across languages, having translated the Romance of the Rose from French, and, from the Latin, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. He darkens Pandarus, casts a searching light on Troilus and
listens to Criseyde. He goes to some lengths to remind us that he is not trying to provide any answers. Neither am I.
In activating rather than depicting courtly love, Chaucer unsettles everything, at times to the extent that things just don’t add up. You find yourself wondering how Troilus can be hunting in the forest when under siege (Chaucer later mentions, as if in afterthought, that there had been a truce) and the denouement is pinned on the discovery of a brooch that you’re not quite sure has been mentioned. They talk like medieval knights when they are ancient warriors, and refer to God but also to gods.
None of this matters. Troilus and Criseyde is the greatest account you will ever read of people arguing themselves and each other into and out of love. Like Boccaccio, Chaucer himself intervenes from the start. Whereas Boccaccio was asserting a personal connection, Chaucer is implicating us all: this is the lovers’ story but it could be yours or mine. As for who does what and why, nothing is simple. Each imperative and response is shown to be made up of densely packed filaments: hope, fear, sympathy, pragmatism, self-protection, ambition, desire, exhaustion . . . I don’t imagine that a fourteenth-century author was setting out in a twenty-first-century way to examine the lovers’ psychology, but that in dramatising their relationship he drew out their inner processes.
Chaucer does this most forcefully through his imagery, much of which is borrowed from Boccaccio. What reads like an embroidered emblem in Il Filostrato is here brought to life, unfolding in front of us. It was the imagery, rather than the story, that made me want to write my own version – which is not a version, and certainly not a translation, but an extrapolation. I’ve jettisoned characters and scenes, and made some borrowings of my own. I’ve taken an image or phrase (which in the Chaucer may be a passing mention or something played out over hundreds of lines) and have used it to formulate each small but irrevocable step in the story. At times these are different aspects of the compacted emotions mentioned above. At others, they are decisions, gestures and (rarely) actions.
I’ve used a corrupt version of the form Chaucer chose for the poem, a seven-line stanza known as rime royal which has a rhyme pattern of A, B, A, B, B, C, C. It interests me that he untidied Boccaccio’s neat eight-line verses (or octaves), and contrived a pattern that suggests circularity as much as development. Seven lines offer a sense of progression without conclusion and that fascinating fifth line doesn’t quite fit. It’s a spanner in the works; its echoing rhyme, a glance in the rear-view mirror.
The thread of the story runs above and below these poems through their titles and occasional subtitles, which I’ve placed at the foot of certain pages. These are an active and integral part of a work in which the margins are open and which was conceived overall as a form of detonation. I, too, have caught the story in the air and want to keep it there.
I was also encouraged by the resilience of this story and how over time, and through all its variations, its drama has deepened. The warrior prince, at first no more than a cipher, is filled out as a man trapped by convention in Boccaccio’s hands and then, in Chaucer’s, a man trapped in himself.
Troilus, ‘Il filostrato’, does not fall in love. He falls down, he is felled. The framework of his life gives way, for all its structures, and until Pandarus appears to make things
happen, he cannot act. He never quite grasps the idea that love is not a battle campaign, requiring only a strategy, and he never seems to wonder who Criseyde is beyond her beauty and fitness as the subject of a quest.
Who is she, this Briseida/Criseida/Criseyde who has surfaced through these retellings? ‘[A]n hevenyssh perfit creature,/That down were sent in scornynge of nature.’ Someone too beautiful, unearthly, whose presence makes those around her feel ordinary. But who is she? A widow without children, of some nobility but not equal to royalty, whose father Calchas has betrayed Troy and abandoned her to go over to the enemy. But who is she? A woman of uncertain age, ‘Tendre herted, slydynge of corage’, trapped in a besieged city.
Her response to Troilus is never less than reasonable and often more reali
stic than his declarations and dreams. When she is handed over to the Greeks, at her father’s urging, in an exchange of prisoners, he fails to speak up, telling himself he must above all protect her honour. They turn the matter over in a last night together, during which their absolute belief in each other is shown to be walled in (again, all kinds of walls) by doubt, fear, confusion, self-preservation. They hesitate and equivocate. It is all very human and very real.
When Criseyde arrives among the Greeks, her father subsides into the background. Once again alone she is preyed upon by the warrior sent to fetch her, Diomede. Unlike Troilus, who looks at her, Diomede reads her. At one extraordinary moment, he even asks her what she thinks (about the war), but this act of respect proves to be just another weapon. He is no less calculating than Troilus is self-regarding.
It is of course in the end not Troilus and Criseyde that make us weep but what we find of ourselves within them. For this story to have been passed so loosely across the centuries while losing nothing of its force is a reflection of the way in which stories outgrow and survive us by being about us at a far deeper level than any stories of our own.
LAVINIA GREENLAW
Note on the Text
Book and line numbers refer to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.
IF indicates that the source is Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato.
I would like to thank my editor Matthew Hollis for all he has done to make this peculiar work more itself rather than less so; and Jonathan Reekie, for room of my own.
– LG
A DOUBLE SORROW
BOOK ONE
A double sorrow
A sad story is sad to tell
But if it makes some part of sadness clear
To those who’ve suffered then it’s real and therefore
True and we who’ve suffered can trace the shape
Of our own despair and so the shadow lifts
Leaving an outline that could be anyone’s.
Take it or make it mine.
I. 1–21
A prayer
For lovers
For those who do not remember
For those who do not recover
For those trapped in another’s gravity
For those in love with love’s certainties
For those who forget what is fixed must break
For love to be more than for love’s sake.
I. 22–42
A thousand ships
As if the sea itself surrounds the city.
Why not? A brother’s wife has been taken.
Seven years without breath or pity. Heart-stopped.
A brother’s pride has been broken.
Trapped in the walls of this other story
An argument that has outgrown its truth
Why not argue themselves into love?
I. 57–63
Calchas
Renowned for the scientific nature
Of his divinations, he sees that Troy will fall
And sees no future
And sees a truth he cannot tell
And sees that it is valuable.
So he takes to the Greeks what we all want to hear:
There is nothing to fear.
I. 64–84
Criseyde’s father betrays Troy and flees
A loophole
What tempted the visionary?
Why would he go over to the enemy?
The people want him roast to the bone
Him and all his kin.
No one dares ask what he has seen.
Who among them is not losing hope?
Who is not looking for excuse, escape?
I. 85–91
Criseyde
Her beauty, so bright as to blank our gaze,
Empties the room.
In her presence we know ourselves most
Ordinary. She stands apart, is left alone.
A widow (why no child?) and now a traitor’s daughter.
She knows what it means for her.
This is a small town.
I. 92–105
Slub
She throws herself before Prince Hector
Shimmering with fear. He takes her in
As if running cloth between his fingers:
Of some nobility, husband dead (why no child?)
On her knees, small like a small word.
The court whispers of the rich thread
And modest lustre of her dress – so well chosen.
I. 106–112
Criseyde hurries to the palace
Small words
Perhaps he is easily touched
But this woman is of such unusual beauty
And in war how often is there opportunity
To relish an act of chivalry, of delicatesse?
Your father has done us great injury.
He is cursed now. Let him go. But feel no less
At home. You will be treated with respect. I insist on it.
I. 110–123
Hector offers Criseyde his protection
Locked
She leads a winter life.
Staying put so as to hold her place
Like the city to which she belongs.
The nights are locked and the days are done.
Wherever she sets foot is ice.
She treats each person with excessive care
And they respect her.
I. 127–133
Nothing moves
Things fall as they fall in war.
The wheel tips and the city pushes.
The wheel tips and the Greeks press.
Luck rolls back and forth.
Nothing moves
That does not then move on.
The days pass.
I. 134–140
Full well arrayed
The meadows beyond the walls are clothed
In new green, new pink, new sweetness.
Troy gathers for the feast of Pallas.
The high, the low and all between at their best:
Girls in their freshness, women in their brightness
Men in their fullness striding out and staring
As if walking the fields they could not walk that spring.
I. 155–168
A feast day in April
What men might in her guess
Among these candy colours stands Criseyde
A white veil above her widow’s black.
The crowd acknowledge her natural place
As before all others – only she holds back
Hovering near the temple doors.
Under such dark clouds so bright a star
For being so defined uncertain all the more.
I. 169–182, 286
Troilus
Young soldiers – who’ve seen a thing or two
These last seven years – swirl down the street.
It’s a feast day and here comes the sun
Lifting her skirt above her ankles. A little heat
And the fuse is lit. Except in him.
He judges some fair enough, some wanting
And does not burn in the taking or leaving.
I. 183–189
He’s heard it all before
Although he keeps a close watch on his men
Some young lovely will have one bedazzled.
He predicts the same old story:
Days dreamt away and the long nights empty
While she sleeps sweetly.
It will end and it will happen again.
No one heeds such warnings.
I. 190–203
He raises his eyes to the heavens
As if for a moment he doubts the wisdom
Of having declared himself immune.
As if the god of love might be provoked into
Proving his bow unbroken.
Might select his sharpest arrow
Take aim at this complacent heart
And shoot.
I. 204–210
So we set out
As sure
of where we’re going as if climbing stairs.
Not noticing how one step leads to another
And step by step we’re heading somewhere
Entirely other.
High hopes or none, we’ve no idea where we are
Until the stairs come to a stop
And the only way on is down not up.
I. 211–217
As if already
His men spill in feinting and flirting.
Troilus plays along while watching that none cross
A line. His gaze flits and swerves and falls upon
Criseyde just as she draws her veil about her face
And turns away. He feels the pull of himself
Propelled towards her, outside himself
If not beside her. As if already anchored there.
I. 266–273
The city gathers at the temple
A subject
So composed
Her every gesture confirms her grace.
Of such noblesse
A perfect woman, perfectly made.
(He only glimpsed her face.)
The prince must hide this joy, this fright.
He’s never felt so full, so light.
I. 276–294
Deep in his heart her image is fixed
Her veil slips. He looks no further.
His men are forgotten.
His attention folds like a dying star
As he takes her – black and white – to his core.
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