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Although only minor characters, Calkas, Helen, and Cassandra contribute significantly both to the double sorrow of Troilus and to the reader's knowledge of the origin, progress, and inevitable outcome of the conflict between the Greeks and the…

Hector, Antigone, and Deiphebus are all instrumental to the development of the poem, particularly to Troilus' initial elevation on the wheel of Fortune. Though their personal integrity remains unblemished, each is manipulated by Fortune into using…

Chaucer defines characters through both natural and conventional theories of etymology. Argyve, related to Argus and foresight, succintly describes the wife of Calchas the visionary. Convention, not inherent association, connects Criseyde with…

The alternation of "thou" and "ye" forms in TC may be seen as indicating characters psychological development.

Lyric conventions, syntax, and verb usage in Troilus's style show his role as traditional lyric hero. As a static but vigorous representative of conventional moral virtues, he characterizes values Chaucer tests, ironizes, and finally praises as…

Criseyde protects herself from self-knowledge by distancing indirections--dream, pun, reference to the dead husband, etc.--which still tell the truth.

Through his poetic wit Chaucer makes Criseyde resemble a religious, even Christ. These suggestions add to the irony of the love.

The literary history of the horse Bayard suggests that Chaucer's point in the reference is to underscore "a lack of providence" in Troilus conduct.

Negative elimination, sources, and proleptic passages isolate the moon, both symbol for inconstancy and threshold to immutability, as Troilus's port of death, logically compatible with the variants. Venus, traditionally combining the poem's themes…

The word may denote the better of two kinds of carts in normal manorial use: a cart used for hauling outside the manor.

The cushion Pandarus fetches Troilus in Book III of TC linked for Chaucer's audience "Luxuria" and "Fortuna." Juvenal, Boccaccio, and contemporary iconography associated cushions with Sardanapalus, and thence with beds and lust. The analogy of…

Medieval lapidary tradition strongly suggests that Troilus' ruby ring represents the powers and qualities of Criseyde.

Criseyde's allusion to Prudence with "eyen thre" is derived from Dante's "Purgatorio," 29.132; but since the Italian reference is cryptic in style and symbology, Chaucer was probably also influenced by glosses and illuminations for the passage,…

The stellar phenomenon of TC 3.624-25 certainly occurred in 1385, more likely May 12 (though Saturn was not quite in Cancer, something which Chaucer's Tables may have erred about) than June 9, when a crescent moon may not have been visible in London.

According to Virgil (Aeneid, VI) Deiphobus became the husband of Helen after Paris' death. Perhaps Pandarus reveals a covert knowledge of this burgeoning romance when, in TC II, he confidently sends Helen and Deiphobus into the garden for an hour,…

The dreamer's apparently inept, clumsy responses to the knight's complaint result not from sympathetic tactfulness, but rather from his ignorance of courtly love conventions. His recognition of the transience of all earthly things in the knight's…

The 1368 date for the death of Blanche of Lancaster in J. J. N. Palmer's article ChauR 8 (1974) is probably correct, but this does not vitiate the 1377 date proposed by Condren ChauR 5 (1971) for the composition of BD.

BD displays the process of consolation as emotional change effected through the medium of epideictic discourse. In the act of speaking, the grieved knight apprehends the cause of his grief in a new way, and is consoled.

The dreamer discovers the inner urgency of a love that sought to transcend death; the knight, the external actuality of death. Chaucer's consolation lies in the recognition of the emotional (and not doctrinal) ineffability that art is. Grief is not…

Comments on three "distancing-involving" devices in BD--the narrative pose, structural arrangement, and the "self-reflexive consideration of the poem's poetics." Include a brief Jungian analysis of the dream.

The variations in narrative structure from BD to PF reveal a shift in Chaucer's belief from faith in the capacity of experience, book, and dream as sources of absolute truth to skepticism about these same medieval traditions.

"Guy of Warwick" served as an object of serious imitation as well as parody. The scene in BD engaging the dreamer with the man in black as traceable to this source, as are the deliberately naive questioner and other such devices for achieving…

The systematized tradition of the "Chasse Royal," as described in contemporary handbooks of venery, establishes a pattern for the action of BD and explains many of the images and allusions.

Chaucer emphasizes the phallic deity Priapus as a figure of frustration in PF. He does not try to abolish or deify the sexual passion Priapus represents. Priapus and the noble suitors may represent unproductive extremes of a more balanced position…

Chaucer's unifying theme in PF is political rather than otherworldly. It involves the contrast between an orderly world governed by natural law (the gate's first inscription and Scipio's "commune profit") and a chaotic world controlled by selfish…