Reads TC allegorically, with sustained attention to astrological imagery, characterization, narrative structure, the biblical Book of Daniel, and the Augustinian theme of the transference of power.
Criseyde's sexually charged endearments for Troilus in bk. 3 of TC provided amusement for Chaucer's contemporary audience, adding new dimensions to Criseyde's character.
Four puns not previously uncovered in the poem are "astoned" (5.1728), "inne...oute" (5.1519), "in armes" (2.165), and "ese" (2.1659). The last three have sexual suggestiveness.
Criseyde's garden and Pandarus's home are integrated symbolically with the theme of mutability in TC. Both sites display Pandarus's dream of circumventing mutability and figure his attempts as a go-between to shape an unchanging earthly union in the…
Reads KnT and TC as "tales of fortune's fools" in which the traditional themes of romantic love and knightly chivalry are undercut by verbal play and the trivialization of notions of pity, mercy, grace, and love.
Harvey, Nancy Lenz.
David G. Allen and Robert A. White, eds. The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 48-56.
Chaucer plays on his audience's awareness that Boccaccio (not Lollius) is the true source of TC; he also engages in similar play between the pagan setting of the poem and its Christian message.
Tallies John Keats's early references and allusions to TC in his letters to Fanny Brawne and assesses how his lyric "What can I do to drive away" follows Chaucer's poem in representing the "rhythmic experience of pain passing into sweetness and…
Schowerling investigates the influence of Chaucer's TC on four writers of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Writers and works discussed include Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," Sidnam's paraphrase of TC, Shakespeare's "Troilus and…
Zeikowitz, Richard Evan.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 1394A, 2000.
Male-male intimacy evokes opposing reactions, positive or homophobic. Analyzes male-male bonds from biblical, classical, and medieval literature, including several English and French romances, together with chronicles attacking Edward II's and…
The ludic responses depicted in these two lines bear out Barry Windeatt's assertion that Chaucer's "displacement of tragedy by comedy" at the end of TC took its inspiration from Dante's "Commedia."
Andretta, Helen Ruth.
Dissertation Abstracts International 54 (1994): 3429A-30A.
Although recent criticism tends to classify Chaucer as an Ockhamist/nominalist, a close study of his most philosophical poem, TC, indicates that his thought was traditional and scholastic.
The word "hazelwode" in Pandarus's proverbs ridiculing the lovers' fatuous hopes indicates Chaucer's familiarity with the miraculous powers attributed to hazel in Celtic divination and healing rites.
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
American Imago 40 (1983): 103-13.
Several passages in TC indicate a covert incestuous strain between Criseyde and Pandarus, the "senex amans" who uses Troilus to fulfill vicariously his own sexual fantasies.
Knighten, Merrell Audy,Jr.
Dissertation Abstracts International 36 (1976): 8076A.
Chaucer's poetry should be regarded as aural rather than oral. Aural poetry is less formulaic and digressive than poetry composed extemporaneously, but it too has special characteristics since it was to be heard and not read. TC reveals Chaucer's…
Heffernan, Carol F.
Neophilologus 74 (1990): 294-309.
Considers the medieval medical views on "amor hereos" and Chaucer's descriptions of it, first in KnT and BD, then in TC. In TC 1, Chaucer shows Troilus as suffering from the lover's disease, to which the consummation of his love in bk. 3 is, from a…
Bestul, Thomas H.
Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 366-78.
Like other late medieval art, TC exhibits a growing concern with the portrayal of emotions, especially through the shifting role of the narrator. He sometimes resorts to "occupatio," claiming inability to describe an emotional state, and eventually…
Oka, Saburo.
Hans Sauer and Renate Bauer, eds. "Beowulf" and Beyond. Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature, no. 18. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 223-34.
Oka compares various classical and medieval descriptions of Troilus and then offers "The Book of Troilus" or simply "Troilus" as a more appropriate title for Chaucer's TC. Also traces the personal development of Troilus from a "fierse and proude…
Reichl, Karl.
Piero Boitani, ed. The European Tragedy of Troilus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 133-52.
In TC, philosophical terminology "provides a continual gloss on the text." A philosophical reading of the poem--free will versus determinism, fantasy versus reason--does not, however, detract from the poem's narrative, "an intensely moving story of…
Kim, Hyonjin.
Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 16 (2008): 77-111.
Surveys critical approaches to KnT, particularly New Critical, Feminist, and New Historical, focusing on discussions of order and disorder in the Tale. KnT functions as a "second prologue" to CT and, with GP, asserts and affirms the diversity of…
Steadman, John M.
Notes and Queries 201 (1956): 374-75.
Offers support for the notion that the whelp episode in BD (387-96)—likely derived from Machaut's "Dit dou Lyon"—serves as a "symbol of fidelity," adducing instances of Renaissance "canine symbolism" and the appearance of dogs "on medieval…
Duncan, Edgar H.
Modern Philology 66 (1969): 199-211.
Shows that in the Wife of Bath's account of her three "goode" husbands Chaucer "adopted a means of amplification which he found described and illustrated in the 'Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi' . . . attributed to Geoffrey of…
