Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: A Critical Study

Description: The poem's central interest lies in the attempt by two human souls to establish the deepest and most testing of relationships. The representation of this relationship involves more than a dialogue: it insinuates a dialectical process that worries out the true natures of the lovers. Although their voices blend in the "love duet" in Book III, they are heard in almost acrimonious debate in the concluding scene of Book IV.; The contrast between these scenes is itself part of a wider dialectic that induces a searching anatomy of love. The generalized notion of love is diffracted into a living spectrum of merging attitudes embodied in the "dramatis personae," and the narrative of human intercourse is poised between a Prologue that declares allegiance to the cult of Cupid and an Epilogue that affirms the only true source of love to be the religion of Christ.