Troilus and CriseydeGeoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer's longest completed poem, written in the 1380s, adapts Boccaccio's Il Filostrato into a five-book tragedy set during the siege of Troy. Troilus, son of Priam, falls in love with the widowed Criseyde; her uncle Pandarus arranges their secret union; a prisoner exchange sends Criseyde to the Greek camp, where she takes up with Diomede; Troilus dies in battle and his soul ascends through the spheres, looking down on the little earth and laughing at those who weep for worldly love.

The poem is saturated with Boethius. Chaucer had translated the Consolation of Philosophy shortly before, and the frame of Fortune's wheel, the problem of foreknowledge and free will, and the final turn from earthly to heavenly love all derive from it. Troilus delivers a long set speech on predestination taken almost directly from Book V of Boethius.

Chaucer's handling of Criseyde is the work's great innovation over Boccaccio. Where his source offers a straightforward faithless woman, Chaucer gives her fear, calculation, and grief, so that her abandonment of Troilus becomes a psychological act rather than a moral label. The narrator, present throughout, protests against condemning her even as the story forces him to record her change. The result is a courtly romance that questions the convention of courtly romance, and a love tragedy that reframes itself, in its final stanzas, as a Christian contemptus mundi.