Christian Revelation and the Cruel Game of Courtly Love in Troilus and Criseyde

Abstract

Christian Revelation and the Cruel Game of Courtly Love in Troilus and Criseyde Tison Pughtpugh@mail.ucf.edu Scholarship has amply established that Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde concerns the failure of the earthly game of courtly love and its paradoxical pedagogical value in death.1 For Troilus, the limitations of play stimulate his Boethian—and ultimately Christian—understanding of the world and his place in it. Criseyde's part in the game is predicated upon her struggle for survival; traded by rival forces, she focuses on her earthly needs. Pandarus, with his playful vision of reality, directs the game of romance, knowing full well play's fun and possible deceptions.2 Playing the game of courtly love, the three characters advance their individual goals of romantic pleasure. Reading from this perspective, Richard Firth Green concludes that "The elegance and order of the game of love, truly played, is an attractive alternative to the chaos of a fallen world; that Troilus finally learns to relinquish it in favor of a higher order is an appropriate reminder . . . not to take the game . . . too seriously."3 Whereas Green insightfully analyzes the pleasures of play in Troilus and Criseyde, I seek to explore, in a complementary fashion, its perils. Quite simply, play and game are not always fun, and from this perspective we see that the play of courtly love partakes in the chaos of the fallen world by masking performative cruelties. By obfuscating their agency in the play of courtly love, the three primary characters reveal their willingness to resort to tactics of cruelty to advance their individual agendas. At the conclusion of the narrative, this game of courtly love is then transformed into a pedagogical experience of Christian revelation. The game ends, but only after Troilus and Criseyde suffer greatly from Pandarus's and each other's machinations. The ostensibly happy ending of Troilus's comic reve-lation exposes, moreover, the arbitrary cast of Christian teleology "rewriting" a pagan narrative, as readers find that Troilus "wins" the game of life for no real reason at all, and that this victory is ultimately meaningless. The narrative's end reveals a Christian game of salvation, reconfiguring [End Page 379] for all the ludic meaning of courtly love and life, and posing for the reader the troubling question of the meaning of Christian teleology for pagans, in that the pleasures of salvation are tantalizingly displayed but then hastily withdrawn. Game, Play, and Competing Cruelties The basic structure of a game comprises rules and players who agree to pursue a goal while abiding by the rules. Bernard Suits offers a definition of game that highlights this structure, discerning a universal framework to the many permutations of game: To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs (prelusory goal), using only means permitted by rules (lusory means), where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means (constitutive rules), and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity (lusory attitude).4 If one plays a game, one must obey its rules and requirements. Suits's belief that game players adopt a "lusory attitude" indicates that the players recognize their involvement in the game. Most games also include strategies (tactics by which players seek advantage over one another) and stakes (what is won or lost in the game, whether they be trivial or tremendous). In a similar vein, Johan Huizinga's famous definition of play offers a remarkably clear vision of a phenomenon notoriously difficult to pinpoint: we might call [play] a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.5 From these modern analyses of game and play, we see that both are ostensibly cordoned off from the "real world" through their valence as mirth and entertainment. Many medieval thinkers also describe play as such a mirthful experience and frequently compare...

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