Letters as a Type of the Formal Level in 'Troilus and Criseyde'

Published: Mary Salu, ed. Chaucer Studies III: Essays on Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge: Brewer, 1979), pp. 73-89.

Description: Trevet's commentary on Seneca's "Hercules Furens," which Chaucer may have known, reveals that medieval theorists gave weight to the "formal cause" of tragedy. In TC, the interpolated songs, dreams, prayers, and letters may be analyzed as elements that comprise, in part, this "formal cause." The letters often follow the prescriptions of the contemporaneous "artes dictaminis."; Letters were considered the repository of the spoken word, and therefore we should not imagine that they would cause any problem in a poem that was doubtless read aloud. They serve to shed light on the characters who composed them, or respond to them in other ways.