The Pity of It

At nearly 700 pages, Gerald Morgan's is the longest critical study of Chaucer's great poem so far, and arguably the best. Though at five times the length of Ida Gordon's The Double Sorrow of Troilus (1970) it hardly occupies litel space; it is fructuous without prolixitee. Volume 1 ends with the catastrophic news of Criseyde's impending exchange for Antenor, while volume 2 minutely examines the lovers' separation, Criseyde's infidelity and 'the end of the affair'. This seeming disproportion in handling may seem odd, volume 1 having to deal with Pandarus and Criseyde as well as Troilus, and most of Book V concerning only the hero's fate. But to Morgan 'th'ende is every tales streng the' (ii. 260) and his concern with both 'purpose' and 'conclusion', implying a full-blooded critical certainty about Chaucer's artistic certainty, makes reading him a (not always comfortably) close encounter with Troilus in the company of a guide who is passionate, precise and erudite.

The passion is evident in Morgan's response to the poem's local intensity and structural beauty and in his wholehearted engagement with the issue of the value of human love. The precision is that which characterises the author's many trenchant earlier essays on major medieval texts (including the Troilus). Assisted by the clarity and force of the writing, his division of the titled chapters into numbered sections with topic headings greatly helps even a reader daunted by the book's 'treatise'-like appearance. Much eruditionmarks Morgan's constant comparisons and contrasts with Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, which demonstrate this poem's central relevance for understanding Troilus. The lengthy supporting citations from sources in Italian, Latin or French are always translated, and lexical entries from the Middle English Dictionary, sometimes augmented by glosses from the standard editions by Barry Windeatt and Stephen Barney (and amounting to a running glossary), direct attention to the exact sense of the poem's rich vocabulary and subtle syntax. To argue with Morgan's argument one must produce counter-evidence as massive and detailed as his. Some 'heroic' footnotes become Curtius-like excursuses, such as one on page 650 glossing Chaucer's 'I fynde that' (V. 1758), which begins with MED's definition of finden and continues, to show how 'It is a common formula in Lydgate, although not always a guarantee of fidelity to a source'. Invariably focusing on what Chaucer is doing (or not doing, or pretending to do), the notes return us to the poem's text with sharpened understanding. Morgan's 'humane literacy' (in George Steiner's phrase) is evident as, with a breadth not usual amongst medievalists, he shrewdly compares aspects of what is possibly our first true novel with works by Jane Austen, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and L. P. Hartley. Finally, drawing on history, he can tellingly highlight Pandarus's 'awareness of the importance of time and timing in his direction of others' by apt reference to Napoleon's delay and Wellington's decisiveness at Waterloo. Meeting Arnold's requirement that 'criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge' ('The Function of Criticism'), such a study of our greatest medieval poem should appeal to readers of this journal. Not often can one say of a long book that one wishes it would not end; but the end of Chaucer's poem brings Morgan's book to a close by returning, in 'a universal frame of reference', to the question of 'goodness and evil in loving' that concluded his first chapter.

The model for Morgan's formal procedure is an authority whose work there is no direct evidence that Chaucer knew. References to St Thomas Aquinas occupy seven times the index column space of those to Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (commonly seen as the fount of the poet's doctryne). And it is, notably, the 'Secunda Pars' of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas's treatise on man and morality, that provides a framework for elucidating Chaucer's 'argument'. [End...