Virgilian Tragedy and "Troilus"

Author(s): Charles Blyth

Source: The Chaucer Review, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Winter, 1990), pp. 211-218
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25094121
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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

Dyrk beyn my muse with dolorus armony.

Melpomene, on the wald clerkis call
Fortill compyle this dedly tragedy
Twiching of Troy the subuersioun and fall.4
Similarly, the last stanza of the prologue to Book IV refers to th
"tragedy" of Dido he must write, and earlier in the prologue, address
ing Dido, Douglas as narrator says:
Thy dowbill wound, Dido, to specify,
I meyn thyne amouris and thi funeral fait,
Quha may endyte, but teris, with eyn dry?3
In choosing rhyme royal for these prologues Douglas is thus allud
ing to the tragedies of Chaucer and Henryson, and expressly associat
ing Chaucerian tragedy with Virgil's tragedies of Troy and Dido. In s
doing, he invites us to place Chaucer's "litel . . . tragedye" not simply
in relation to Virgil's Aeneid?the gesture Chaucer himself made in th
great stanza?but specifically in relation to tragedy as exemplified
the second and fourth books of the Aeneid.
As was recognized in antiquity, those two books were greatly influ
enced in language and structure by Virgil's reading of Greek an
Republican Roman tragedies.6 In both books Virgil offers narrativ
adaptations and modifications of classical dramatic tragedy
"modifications" since in both instances a basic theme of Virgil's
poem, Aeneas's imperial mission, requires a transcending movemen
which leaves the stories of Troy and Dido behind.
In the first two-thirds of Book II Virgil movingly recounts the de
struction of Trojan civilization. The characteristic structure of that
part of the book is the alternation of extended scenes of reporte
action with briefer passages of eloquent reflection, typically contrast
ing past glory with present ruin. The latter mode first appears briefly
in lines 21-23:

est in conspectu Tenedos, notissima fama

?nsula, diues opum Priami dum regna manebant,
nunc tantum sinus et statio male fida carinis.7

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

regnatorem Asiae. iacet ingens litore truncus,

auulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.

Douglas translates this passage as follows:

Of Priamus thus was the finale fait?
Fortone heir endit his gloryus estait,
Seand Ilion albyrn in fryis brown
And Troys wallis fall and tumlyt down.
That ryal prince, vmquhile our Asya
Apon sa feil pepil and realmys alswa
Ryngnyt in welth, now by the cost lyis ded
Bot as a stok and of hakkit his hed,
A corps but lyfe, renown or other fame,
Onknawyn of ony wight quhat was his name.8

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

twelfth-century allegorical commentary attributed?wrongly, it now

appears?to Bernard Silvestris.9 Like Fulgentius, pseudo-Silvestris
reads the poem as an allegory of the stages of human life. Of the story
of the fall of Troy he writes that "nothing else is allegorically repre
sented in this second book except the beginning of speech and the
ability to speak."10
It is a different world when he comes to Book IV: "Aeneas is driven
to a cave by storms and rain, that is, he is led to impurity of the flesh
and of desire by excitement of the flesh and by the abundance of
humors coming from a superfluity of food and drink. This impurity
of the flesh is called a cave, since it beclouds the clarity of mind and of
discretion."11 As against the "no-fault" tragedy of the second book, we
evidently have here what D. W. Robertson, Jr., in a well-known essay
on Troilus, calls "the old tragedy of Adam."12 The difference between
the two books bothered Gavin Douglas. While his prologue to Book II
is the shortest in his entire work?just three rhyme-royal stanzas con
cisely, movingly evoking the pathos of the story and concluding with
the proverb "All erdly glaidnes fynysith with wo"?his prologue to
Book IV is ten times as long, consisting of a fascinatingly disjointed
disquisition on love and lust based on such named authorities as Au
gustine, the Virgil of the Georgics, and "morale Ihonne Gower." The
range of tone reflects this diversity of sources. There is the invective
of Scots-style flyting:
Thou swelch, devourar of tyme onrecoverabill,
O lust, infernal furnys, inextingwybill,13
but also Chaucerian politely playful lesson-pointing:
Be the [Dido] command I lusty ladeis quhyte,
Be war with strangeris of onkouth natioun.14
And while, in this range of tones, Douglas also includes the compas
sion of his Book II prologue, there is the important difference that in
this instance moral responsibility is asserted:

Danter of Affryk, queyn foundar of Cartage,

Vmquhil in ryches and schynyng gloyr ryngyng,
Throw fulych lust wrocht thine awyn ondoyng.1*
If the allegorical and moral traditions of Virgil commentary, which
Christopher Baswell has usefully characterized, push Book IV sharply
away from the pathos and compassion of Book II, Baswell's third
commentary tradition?the "humanizing" tradition exemplified by
Servius?moves us away from Book II from a different angle.16 Ser
vius introduces his commentary to Book IV with an uncharacteristi

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 CHARLES BLYTH 215

cally general observation about the style of the book, which he find
"almost comic":

est autem paene totus in affectione, licet in fine pathos habeat

ubi abscessus Aeneae gignit dolorem. sane totus in consiliis e
subtilitatibus est; nam paene comicus stilus est; nee mirum, ub
de amore tractatur."17

[It is written almost entirely in an affected manner, even if a

the end it produces pathos, where the departure of Aenea
occasions grief. Indeed it is all a matter of strategems and sub
tleties; for the style is almost that of comedy; nor is that strang
where the subject is love.]

Whether Servius is here closer to the Theseus of the Knight's Tale, o

to the Robertson of the Troilus essay, I leave to the reader to judge. In
the remaining time I want to show that the difference between Virgi
two tragedies is of secondary importance, and that what they have i
common provides the most useful reflection on Chaucer's poem an
especially its conclusion.
However, Virgil's text initially seems readily to support the late
interpretations we have sampled, for in Book IV Virgil employs
heavily-charged moral vocabulary. Early in the book Dido makes clear
her vow not to remarry, and refers to the tempting exception she is
thus far resisting as "this one fault" [huic uni. . . culpae] (IV 19). She
swears that she will call on Earth and Zeus to destroy her before she
will violate pudor. Her sister Anna, to an extent in the role
Pandarus, urges her to take a more practical view, and to this th
narrator comments (IV 54?55):

His dictis impenso animum inflammauit amore

spemque d?dit dubiae menti soluitque pudorem.
Of course Aeneas too is at fault, delinquent in forgetting his destined
Fame and Fate. After the hunt and cave episode, and the famili
passage on the personified Fame, Zeus looks down on the lovers w
have forgotten their good reputations and sends Mercury to remind
Aeneas of his duty. Most of the remaining nearly 500 lines of the book
focus on Dido as passionate Medea-figure raging against Aeneas an
finally killing herself: certainly there is little in these lines to connec
with Troilus.
But what we have forgotten in all this is that Book IV, unlike Book
II, is not an independent structure. The book begins, as the whol
Aeneid does, in medias res. The Dido story begins in the second half o
Book I, in which Dido graciously receives first Aeneas's men, the

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216 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

Aeneas himself, after their landing in Carthage. Books II and III

Aeneas's narratives, are an interruption; Book IV goes back to, an
completes, the action of Book I. And it is particularly in Book I that
we learn of the conniving of the gods, especially Venus, to trap Dido
into loving Aeneas in order to protect him. Two of the most notable
instances are Venus's covering Aeneas and Achates in a protectiv
cloud before they reveal themselves to Dido, and Venus's trick (nouas
artis . . . noua . . . consilia [I 657?58]: surely the basis for Servius's re
mark quoted above) of substituting Cupid for Ascanius to ensure
Dido's love. It is significant that the Chaucerian narrator utters disbe
lieving asides on both of these occasions in retelling them in the Legen
of Dido. On the first (Legend 1019-22):

Whan he was in the large temple come,

I can nat seyn if that it be possible,
But Venus hadde hym maked invysible?
Thus seyth the bok, withouten any les.
And on the second (Legend 1139?45):
But natheles, oure autour telleth us,
That Cupido, that is the god of love,
At preyere of his moder hye above,
Hadde the liknesse of the child ytake,
This noble queen enamored to make
On Eneas; but, as of that scripture,
Be as be may, I take of it no cure.
Granting the presence of wit and playfulness, it seems plain that Cha
cer is also, at some level, reacting against the element of divine mach
nation and intervention in Virgil's Dido narrative. And it is precisely
against that background of divine interference that Dido appears, not
as willing sinner, but as entirely tm-free victim. Chaucer's ironic aside
unexpectedly serve to support a morally neutral, tragic perspective on
Dido, which puts her tragedy on the same plane as that of Priam and
Troy. Both tragedies, I think, lie behind Chaucer's Troilus.
There is an elementary point to be made from this, one which takes
us back to the Melpomene of the mosaic as well as to the end of
Troilus. To see the Dido story as a tragedy is to see it from a distance
with knowledge of its progress in time, of its historical and huma
meaning. The tragic response presupposes understanding. It is th
rich understanding Virgil gives us of the value of Trojan civilization
and the worth of Priam that allows us to view their fall with profoun
sorrow, and so it is with Dido of Carthage. The overarching political
and historical theme of the Aeneid requires the tragedies of Troy and

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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.

1. Chaucer, Troilus V, 1786?92, in F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chau

cer, 2d ed. (Boston, 1957), 479. All subsequent Chaucer quotations are from this edi
tion.
2. Illustrated and briefly described by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome, the Late
Empire: Roman Art A.D. 200?400, trans. Peter Green, The Arts of Mankind 17 (New
York, 1971), 236.
3. Robinson, 401-02, 389, 441.
4. David F. C. Coldwell, ed., Virgil's "Aeneid" Translated into Scottish Verse, 4 vols.,
Scottish Text Society, 3rd ser. 30, 25, 27-28 (Edinburgh, 1957-64), 2: 65, lines 1-4.
Citations are to volume, page, and line numbers. I eliminate Coldwell's italicization of
expanded contractions.
5. Coldwell, 2: 153, lines 215-17.
6. See especially the editions of separate books with commentary by R. G. Austin, P.
Vergili Maronis, Aeneidos Liber Secundas (Oxford, 1964) and Aeneidos Liber Quartus (Ox
ford, 1955).
7. Vergili Maronis, Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969; rev., rpt. 1985).
Subsequent Virgil quotations are from this edition.
8. Coldwell, 2: 93, lines 79-88.
9. On the attribution most recently see Christopher Baswell, "The Medieval Allego
rization of the Aeneid: MS Cambridge, Peterhouse 158," Traditio 41 (1985): 181?237.
10. Commentary on the First Six Books of Virgil's "Aeneid," trans. Earl G. Schreiber and
Thomas E. Maresca (Lincoln, 1979), 16.

*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

11. Commentary, 25.

12. D. W. Robertson, Jr., "Chaucerian Tragedy," in Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome
Taylor, ed., Chaucer Criticism Vol. II: "Troilus and Criseyde" and the Minor Poems (Notre
Dame, 1961), 118. Rpt. from ELH 19 (1952): 1-37.
13. Coldwell, 2: 154, lines 243-44.
14. Coldwell, 2: 154, lines 266-67.
15. Coldwell 2: 153, lines 226-28.
16. Christopher Baswell, " 'Figures of Olde Werk': Visions of Virgil in Later Medi
eval England," diss. Yale U, 1983.
17. Servii Grammatici quiferuntur in Vergilii carmina Commentarii, ed. Georg Thilo and
Hermann Hagen, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1881-84), 1: 459.
18. The unsurpassed and indispensable account of the way the poem concludes
remains E. Talbot Donaldson, "The Ending of Troilus," in Speaking of Chaucer (New
York, 1970), 84-101. Rpt. from Arthur Brown and Peter Foote, ed., Early English and
Norse Studies Presented to Hugh Smith (London, 1963), 26-45.

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