The Reproduction vs. The Original

There are lots of reasons why one artist is moved to rework the creation of a previous artist. Foremost, I think, the author of the reproduction must genuinely like the original in order to be inspired to do anything with it at all. Usually, the desire is to adapt a great piece of art to a modern audience. Overall, however, there is a particular practicality in using an already familiar piece of work. The audience approaches the story with built-in expectations and preconceived notions which the author can then manipulate by dashing and fulfilling at will. There is much that is gained and lost in the process of changing a story, and there will always be a debate about which version is superior. One of the primary effects of this sort of revision is that, for better or for worse, a story is adapted to a new culture, which now owns the story in a way they couldn’t before. C.S. Lewis talks about the process of medievalization that Il Filostrato undergoes to become Troilus and Criseyde, and the changes Chaucer made solely for the purpose of adapting the story to his own contemporary audience.

Because we are more familiar with Chaucer than Boccaccio today, we have the interesting perspective of being exposed to the adaptation before the original; of reading the original for the exclusive purpose of researching the copy. Hubertis Cummings, the translator of the version of Il Filostrato I read for this paper, says in his preface, “I have wished to make it possible for students of Chaucer more readily to compare Troilus and Criseyde with the story of Troilo, as Boccaccio told it, that they more properly may appraise the merits of both narratives, the English and the Italian.”

The Comedy of Chaucer

The thing that struck me most when I read Il Filostrato, is that it’s not funny. There is irony and satire, but it was never meant to be a comedy. The second thing that struck me was that, the more I read Il Filostrato, the funnier Troilus and Criseyde became. Much of Chaucer’s humor depends on the play between the two stories. The character of Pandarus in particular, is even more humorous when contrasted with his counterpart in Il Filostrato. Boccaccio's Pandaro is smooth and manipulative, and a wonderful character, but he’s not comical. Chaucer takes the groundwork laid by Boccaccio and exaggerates Pandarus into an outlandish caricature of Pandaro.

Pandarus and Pandaro are both very manipulative characters, but Pandaro’s manipulations are ingeniously subtle. For example, just before he tells Griseida about Troiolo’s interest, he artfully pauses in the middle of their conversation and stares at her lovingly until she becomes a little uncomfortable.

He praises and flatters her just enough to get her into the right frame of mind to hear his news.

Pandarus also lavishes Criseyde with flattery, but uses a completely different technique to pique her interest, which is more overtly manipulative.

After telling her that he is in possession of the most wonderful news that she could ever possibly imagine, he teases and torments her for nearly two hundred lines before telling her what he knows,

but he wastes no time slipping his own expectation of her into the very same sentence,

This is clearly intended to manipulate the audience as much as Criseyde, for by the one hundred and ninety-seventh line of this exchange, we’re hanging on the edge of our seats saying, “For the love of God, tell her already!” Chaucer’s ability to captivate his audience by manipulating information they are already familiar with is a skill that is also useful when rewriting a popular story.

Chaucer takes his manipulation of the audience to the extreme with his revision of Pandaro and Griseida's familial relationship. First he makes Pandarus her uncle instead of her cousin, which turns him into more of an authority figure. Then he changes a number of scenes just enough to make them slightly suggestive of there being another side to Pandarus' affection for his niece. One example of this is when he brings Criseyde a letter from Troilus. She is reluctant to take the letter in both stories, but in Boccaccio she finally takes it and puts it down the front of her dress, while in Chaucer, Pandarus grabs her by the arm and thrusts the letter into her dress himself. Still, this is nothing compared to the liberties Chaucer takes with Pandaro's only apparent indiscretion in Il Filostrato, when he enters Griseida's bedroom.

Although this action is probably a little forward on Pandaro's part, it occurs after Griseida finds out she is being handed over to the Greeks, and she is in her room crying.

If it's on the borderline of acceptable behavior for an Uncle to be at his niece's bedside, then the manner in which Chaucer places Pandarus there clearly crosses that line. The fact that it is technically his bed only makes the scene more suggestive, I think, because all of the love scenes in Boccaccio are at Griseida's house, and Chaucer went to extraordinary lengths to get Criseyde into her uncle's bed. Ultimately though, it doesn't matter whose bed it is because it's the bed that she and Troilus were making love in all night, which brings the scene to a whole new level of inappropriateness.

Many scholars believe that this may be an incestuous love scene between Pandarus and Criseyde, and this conclusion really doesn't require a lot of reading between the lines. He is reaching under the sheets where she is most likely naked. Chaucer also uses many key words with sexual connotations in this passage: swerd, arm, thriste, and pleye. And finally there are the narrator's comments: "I passe al that which chargeth nought to seye," and "Pandarus hath fully his intente." While I do not believe that Pandarus has sex with Criseyde, I do believe that the suggestions are intentional. Chaucer is a master of words and all of their connotations, and he chose these words very carefully. I think the joke here is on the audience; they should be ashamed for thinking such things.

Chaucer also creates humor by drawing out scenes and exploring the characters' actions more closely. The dramatic prolonging of the story in general, as well as in specific points in the narrative, have the comedic effects of being cleverly insightful or absurdly funny. There are several examples where the character of Troilus is the subject of these comical exaggerations, but the most ingenious of them, I think, is in the temple scene. In both stories, Troilus is struck with love the moment he sees Criseyde. He abruptly stops and stares, which gets her attention, and she gives him that flirtatious, What are you looking at? expression. But Chaucer slows this moment even more, and we get yet another side of that wonderful human courtship dance, where one partner, usually the most interested party, plays it cool and pretends not to be interested at all.

This is one of those moments that’s funny because it is so true.

But Chaucer is more than willing to sacrifice Troiolo’s dignity altogether for the sake of comedy. Just before his consummation with Criseyde, Troilus has a less-than-charming fainting spell.

Troiolo has a fainting scene in Il Filostrato in the senate, when he discovers that Griseida is being handed over to the Greeks, but Chaucer exaggerates this absurdity to its breaking point, and puts poor Troilus swooning at his lady’s bedside.

Chaucer the feminist?

The most admirable of Chaucer's additions, at least from a modern perspective, is the story's positive attitude toward women. I believe the desire to change the general attitude of the story is Chaucer’s primary motivation for deleting Troilus’ description of his previous romantic experiences, though C.S. Lewis has a very different take on this particular matter. “The whole passage is a typical example of that Latin spirit which in all ages (except perhaps our own) has made Englishmen a little uncomfortable; the hero must be a lady-killer from the very beginning, or the audience will think him a milksop and a booby” (Schoeck, 27). But Troiolo’s deleted confession is hardly one of an arrogant young Don Juan.

I think the removal of Troiolo's previous lessons in the ways of love served the purpose of removing his scorn of women in general as his motivation for scorning love in Boccaccio's version.

This passage foreshadows the eventual outcome of the poem, which Chaucer’s audience is already privy to, but it also foreshadows Boccaccio’s moral of the story: be wary of women; a moral that Chaucer almost completely abandons in his own version.

Griseida’s primary concern, which is very important in Boccaccio’s characterization of her as a slightly less than admirable lady, is not chastity, but her reputation for chastity in the eyes of society.

Chaucer complicates her character greatly, while still managing to cast her in a more positive light, at least in the eyes of a modern reader. Criseyde is also concerned with discretion as it pertains to her reputation in society, but this is not her primary concern. Chaucer’s lady is a precursor to the Wife of Bath, and is concerned primarily with her freedom and sovereignty. When she is still contemplating whether or not to entertain Troilus’ affection, she seems fond of the freedom that being a widow affords her, and unsure if she wants to complicate her life with the demands of a man.

It seems to me that there is some intended irony in this passage as well. Boccaccio makes a point to have Troiolo give a speech about the shortcomings of women, and Chaucer turns it around and has Criseyde list the shortcomings of men. All irony aside, Criseyde’s disdain for male domination is one of her primary concerns throughout the story. Her long awaited acceptance of Troilus’ love comes with a stern warning attached.

Another alteration in favor of the rights of women, is when Chaucer turns Hector into a shining chivalric knight, standing up for Criseyde against the Greeks, and refusing to treat her like a prisoner.

In Boccaccio, no one questions the moral correctness of handing Griseida over to the Greeks; it’s just not an issue. Even Troiolo, as much as he loves her, does not see Griseida as a valid member of society with inherent human rights, which is apparent when he explains to Pandaro why he did not ask his father to intervene in the trading of Griseida for Antenor.

Chaucer's attitude toward women is particularly interesting since he lived in a society when women had very few rights at all, and were not considered equal to men. There were many heretical religious groups that valued the equality of women, but society in general, and the Catholic church in particular still viewed women as second-class human beings.

Clash of the Narrators

One very interesting aspect of both of these poems is that the narrators, though not characters in the story, are meticulously characterized and extremely self-conscious. Boccaccio's narrator is in love, while Chaucer's repeatedly claims to have no experience at all in this area. Boccaccio invokes his mistress for inspiration and addresses her directly throughout the poem, while Chaucer invokes a fury and muses, and addresses his audience. Both speakers have very different perspectives which, by the end, come to have a bearing on their motivations for telling the story to begin with.

Il Filostrato ends with a warning for all young men to choose their lovers wisely, and that a woman's appearance of chastity and honor cannot be trusted. Because his mistress is the only audience member the speaker ever directly addresses, the revelation that she is currently absent from him seems particularly important. As he pleas with her to be kind to him while he is away, the reader gets the feeling that the speaker's motivation for telling this story has been his own insecurities and faltering confidence in the lady he has been addressing throughout the poem.

Chaucer's insistence on his ignorance in the ways of love is puzzling. Through most of the story, I thought it seemed exaggerated and unnecessary. My first thought was, what kind of grown man has had absolutely no experience in an area as vital to being a human being as love? My second thought was, how is this so relevent to the story that it needs repeated so many times? But the characterization of the narrator as someone completely ignorant of love does make sense at the end of the tale, when the moral becomes a Christian sermon. Suddenly, the speaker steps completely into his role as a religious man, and since Catholicism was the only official gig in town at the time, his being a man of God would justify his having no experience in the ways of the flesh. The speaker never claims to be a priest, but even without the clerical demands of celibacy, Christian thought in general exalts spiritual over physical pursuits, and the narrator uses the entire story to illustrate this very theme.

Chaucer's narrator is also extremely conscious of time. He speaks about the effects of time on language,

on poetry,

and on the story itself.

Criseyde is also conscious of her reputation lasting far into the future.

Criseyde's consciousness of the future, as well as the narrator's, is a result, I think, of Troilus and Criseyde being the retelling of a much older story; older even than Il Filostrato. Chaucer's absolute confidence that this story will be remembered, and concern that his version may be remembered incorrectly, must certainly be the result of the story having already been remembered for a very long time, and his consciousness of the changes imposed over the years; as well as the changes he has imposed himself.

Bibliography

Boccaccio, Giovanni. Il Filostrato. Translated by Hubertis Cummings. Princeton University Press. Princeton. 1924.

Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by Richard Green. Collier Macmillan Publishers. London. 1962.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. General Editor: Larry D. Benson. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. 1987.

Donaldson, E. Talbot. Speaking of Chaucer. W. W. Norton & Company Inc. New York. 1970

Murphy, Michael. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/webcore/murphy/troilus/troilus3ful.pdf. 7 June 2005.

Muscatine, Charles. Chaucer and the French Tradition. University of California Press. Berkeley. 1957.

Schoeck, Richard J. Chaucer Criticism. Volume II. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame. 1961.

Strohm, Paul. Theory and the Premodern Text. Medieval Cultures Series, volume 26.

University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. 2000.