Critical Survey

The connection between Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is made evident from the outset of Henryson’s poem. It is not, however, the only work of Chaucer’s that infuses the Testament, for the Scottish poet reaches towards Anelida and Arcite in the complaint d’amour that is delivered at the climax of the work. This article considers the effect that the echoes of this text have upon judgement of Cresseid and of Troilus, and the complex embedded layers of what constitutes ‘truth’, whether for the lover, the narrator or the reader. It explores the notion of ‘doubleness’ of thought in both works, initiated by Chaucer in his exploration of the complex loves of Anelida and Arcite, and pursued by Henryson in a poem that takes textual and amatory doubleness as its foundation.

Whether or not we choose to identify the narrator of ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ as the Merchant described in the ‘General Prologue’, this narrative voice is certainly not Chaucer’s own, and it augments the malignity of the tale it tells. The narrator attacks a naїve fool from a disenchanted perspective, but unwittingly reveals the continuing blindness within his own knowing stance. The tale debunks all the noble, even sacred ideals it presents, and characterizes them as foolishly innocent elevations of the spiritual in a world defined by the body in its grossest aspects. The narrator’s rhetorical tropes, floridly presented and habitually misused, gesture towards a sordid reality that they pretend to gloss over. Yet despite itself, the tale implies a psychologically healthy middle ground outside the experience of the narrator or his characters, where body and soul, real and ideal, experience and innocence can meet.

This article examines Chaucer’s response to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in Troilus and Criseyde. I argue that Chaucer responds to a tension that he perceives in Boethius’s Consolation regarding the relationship between this world and the divine, in particular the value to be placed on romantic love. This tension is at the heart of the most recent critical discussion of Boethius’s text. I consider the morally improving qualities of romantic love and suggest that Chaucer envisages a version of romantic love that is a bridge between this world and the divine, rather than a divide.

Interpretation of the many instances of weeping by Chaucer’s characters is a key aspect of understanding his works. This article explores the relevance of models provided by tears in devotional contexts for viewing tears not simply as a corporeal symptom of emotion but as a mode of discourse that is as potent as it is paradoxical: both outward and inward, involuntary and applied, and forming a distinctive voice between passive and active.

The textual history of The Book of the Duchess challenges many spurious traditions encouraged by the apparently disordered state of Chaucer’s texts on his death. The lack of contemporary references casts doubt on whether the poem was circulated in the fourteenth century or commissioned by John of Gaunt as an elegy for his wife. The first witnesses, in three mid-fifteenth-century manuscripts, contain substantial lacunae, ‘resolved’ in Thynne’s printed edition of 1532. This article examines Bodleian MS Fairfax 16, which bears the arms of John Stanley of Hooton, a leading court functionary from a rising family. It argues that the selection of texts in that MS reflects Stanley’s contact with a cultural milieu centred on the Duke of Suffolk, while the inclusion of The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame may result from Suffolk’s wife Alice Chaucer making available material from her grandfather’s personal papers.