The Hero of the "Troilus."

Author / Editor
David, Alfred.

Title
The Hero of the "Troilus."

Published
Speculum 37 (1962): 566-81.

Description
Traces the development of Troilus' character in TC, arguing that he grows from ignorance to wisdom in confronting the "fundamental mystery of the human condition": his noble, "tragic error . . . is to have tried to love a human being with an ideal spiritual love." In this light, the poem is an "exemplum of "Boethius' lesson that life within time derives from and reflects the life beyond time"; its "final effect" is a "sense of profound exaltation."

Chaucer Subjects
Troilus and Criseyde
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations