The elements of Chaucer's Troilus

Abstract

This study of T&C, which we ought to have noticed here somewhat sooner, is notable for its use of VC to create what Wood openly calls a Gowerian reading of Chaucer's poem (pp. 168-69). The passages from VC that he draws upon most heavily are opening chapters of Book 5, on love and knighthood; Book 6, chapter 12, on king; indictment of contemporary England in Book 7, chapter 24; and general treatment of free will and fortune in Books 1 and 2. Citing dedication of T&C to moral and the likelihood of extensive personal contacts between two men, he argues that Chaucer could not have presented poem to Gower if it contained a view of love radically different from dedicatee's. He concludes that T&C, like VC, is a condemnation of illicit passion, particularly among nobility; that like VC, it was written at least in part in response to grave social and political disturbances of the 1370's; and that the issues of love, freedom, marriage, and loyalty in Old [in T&C] are essentially same as those treated by John Gower in his poem Vox Clamantis about New Troy (p. 165). Wood refers to CA only in passing, and then implying it advances same straightforward view of love as VC; he gives short shrift to suggestions that Gower's reading of T&C might have inspired more complex and more sophisticated treatment of love in CA. On at least one small point Wood may be corrected: many references to blind ness in a poem dedicated to Gower are merely coincidental, for Dedicatory Epistle to VC that Wood cites as evidence of Gower's blind ness (p. 162) was only added after 1399. Reviews by Ian Bishop, SAC, 7 (1985), 270-72; and A.V.C. Schmidt, Medium AEvum, 55 (1986), 135-37). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.1]

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