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Chaucer Review
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VIRGILIAN TRAGEDY AND TROILUS
by Charles Blyth
In the same stanza near the end of Troilus in which Chaucer places his
poem in subordinate but true relation to the major poems of classical
antiquity, he also calls his work as "tragedye."1 In this paper I want to
bring together those two gestures?limiting myself, of the classical
poets, to Virgil?and briefly indicate how a properly defined "Virgil
ian tragedy" may helpfully reflect on Chaucer's poem.
The notion of Virgil as tragic poet was familiar in antiquity and is
effectively represented in a second-century North African mosaic,
now in the Bardo Museum in Tunis, depicting an imperially robed
and enthroned Virgil seated between Clio, Muse of History, and
Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy.2 Clio is the enabling muse, reading
from a scroll and providing Virgil's text from recorded history, while
the utterly despondent Melpomene expresses the emotional response
elicited by that text. Tragedy is here depicted as a reaction to a text as
well as an attitude.
In Troilus also, Clio and History are invoked in the Prohemium to
Book II, and the idea of Tragedy is twice invoked in the Prohemia to
Books I and IV, first through the Fury Thesiphone, then through
Fortune.3 In both cases the narrator's response approximately mir
rors the Melpomene of the mosaic. Troilus like the Aeneid is poised
between remembered history and the tragic response to it; in both
poems the two modes are inextricably joined.
The link which the second-century mosaic figuratively suggests is
given textual support by Gavin Douglas, who completed the first En
glish translation of the Aeneid a little over a century after Chaucer's
death. In Douglas's translation each of Virgil's twelve books is pre
ceded by an orginal prologue written in one of a variety of metres. In
two of these, the prologues to the second and fourth books?the
books recounting the fall of Troy and the story of Dido?the form
Douglas chooses is rhyme royal. The significance of that choice is
evident in the two prologues, each of which names its subject a trag
edy and each of which echoes the language of Chaucer's Troilus and
Henryson's Testament. The prologue to Book II begins:
THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1990. Published by The Pennsylvania State
University Press, University Park and London.
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212 THE CHAUCER REVIEW
The striking movement is that from the neutrally present est to the
conditional imperfect dum . . . manebant, back to the present?this tim
devastatingly felt, signalled by nunc. The most famous passage in thi
mode is that reflecting on Priam's death (554-58):
haec finis Priami fatorum, hie exitus ilium
sorte tulit Troiam incensam et prolapsa uidentem
Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum
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CHARLES BLYTH 213
The second line, with its personified Fortune and deceptively Latin
ate "gloryus estait," is Douglas's "medievalizing" addition, or so we ar
apt to call it. But the tone and the syntax accurately capture t
structure and effect of Virgil's lines.
Three points about Book II are pertinent for the reader of Troilus.
The contrastive mode of the first two-thirds of the book resembles
mode familiar in a medieval tragedy such as the Testament of Cresseid
and in a number of lesser de casibus narratives. Secondly, we note th
absence of finger-pointing, of attributing the fall of Troy to Trojan
moral failure: the lust of Paris, the pride or acquisitiveness of Priam
The cause of Troy's fall is nothing more nor less than Fate, and t
last third of the book focuses on Aeneas's irrational (though humanl
understandable) resistance to following the dictates of Fate and aban
doning his country. Thus Virgil's Book II presents us with an exampl
of what might be called "no-fault" tragedy, an example especiall
pertinent to that aspect of Chaucer's narrative which explicitly link
the fates of Troy and Troilus. Thirdly, the Book II narrative is, like
the whole of Troilus, one in which the narrator is deeply implicated
for in it, of course, it is Aeneas who sadly recounts to Dido the exper
ence he lived through before arriving in Carthage. Virgil's Troy Boo
offers a model of classical tragedy in which moral culpability is not a
issue, in which individuals and a society are in simple, direct confron
tion with an opposing Fate, and in which the human response to the
story thus told is unqualified compassion and sorrow?the response o
Melpomene in the Tunis mosaic.
Virgil's Book IV, on the other hand, seems, and seemed to man
medieval readers, to represent a very different version of tragedy. On
indication of the difference between the two books is provided by th
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214 THE CHAUCER REVIEW
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CHARLES BLYTH 215
cally general observation about the style of the book, which he find
"almost comic":
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216 THE CHAUCER REVIEW
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CHARLES BLYTH 217
Dido. In this sense, they are tragedies because they have to be left
behind (so that the "form" of tragedy comes to resemble an
archeological treasure). Tragedy entails not simply a perspective, but
Prospective.
It is in these terms that the final link between Virgilian tragedy and
Troilus suggests itself. For one way of summarizing what Chaucer
achieves in bringing his poem to a close is as a complex act of
retrospection?looking back at the contents of his story, back at its
antecedents in the poetry of antiquity, and back at the writing of his
poem as itself an historical act.18 That is not all that is going on, but it
seems to me the dominating gesture.
As against the forward movement of the pilgrimage to Canterbury,
but also?less obviously?against the progressive movement of the
Boethian philosophizing which takes up so much of the poem, the
ending of Troilus places an unexpected and powerful moral and emo
tional weight on the view backward: the lesson of Orpheus is not heeded.
That Chaucer, only nine lines before the concluding Dantesque prayer,
can still invoke "the forme of olde clerkis speche / In poetrie" (V, 1854
55) is a telling indication of how difficult it was to let go.*
Cambridge, Mass.
*An earlier version of this paper was given at the Fifth International Congress of the
New Chaucer Society in Philadelphia in March, 1986.
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218 THE CHAUCER REVIEW
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