Love and the Code: "Troilus and Criseyde."

Author / Editor
Bayley, John.

Title
Love and the Code: "Troilus and Criseyde."

Published
John Bayley. The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality (London: Constable, 1960), pp. 51-123.

Description
Explores the characterizations in TC of Troilus, Pandarus, and, most extensively, Criseyde, explaining how Chaucer modifies their antecedents in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" by adapting the conventions and rhetoric of courtly love and creates rich personalities, comparable to those of Shakespearean drama and modern novels. Though he "neither analyses nor moralizes," Chaucer depicts the "random circumstances of love and living" as well as awareness of psychology. Includes comments on the relations between characterization and the theme of love in LGW, PF, and KnT.

Alternative Title
The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality.

Chaucer Subjects
Troilus and Criseyde
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Parliament of Fowls
Legend of Good Women
Knight and His Tale