Chaucer from Prentice to Poet: The Metaphor of Love in Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde (review)

Chaucer from Prentice to Poet consists of six chapters that may be read either seriatim, as a chronological survey of the poet's early career, or singularly, as discrete analyses of the Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, House of Fame (two chapters), and the Troilus. Condren frequently offers complementary insights regarding Chaucer's other works as well. Condren provides an appendix that displays the parallels shared by all three of Chaucer's early dream visions and another explanatory appendix regarding the Golden Proportion (phi).

The title-indicated thesis that conjoins Condren's chapters seems conventional enough: 'we cannot see subtle movement in Chaucer's maturation. Yet we are conscious it has occurred…All these before-and-after comparisons give evidence of Chaucer's progress as a poet' (p. 172). It is Condren's specific analyses of particular snapshots, however, that present some of his most truly startling insights. Condren contends, for example, that a rather bad 'Ur version' of the Book of the Duchess was composed as an elegy for Queen Philippa and only subsequently revised to commemorate the Duchess Blanche's death; that the man in black represents Chaucer as a young poet rather than the mourning Lancaster—'A bold claim, this' (p. 22); that the House of Fame was composed (and may have been recited) as a prologue to Troilus and Criseyde; that the man of great authority is likewise a projection of Chaucer himself; that Troilus almost dies of ejaculatio praecox; that Criseyde should be exonerated from the charge of untruth; and that mathematical proportions inform all these works, most perfectly the Parliament of Fowls. Over and over again, Condren challenges the prevailing consensus of professional Chaucerians. This persistently 'iconoclastic' (p. 64) contentiousness is the great appeal of Condren's readings and their vulnerability.

Condren's study entails an intriguing synthesis of '[s]everal suspicions, hints, and logical inferences' (p. 126). He brews a concoction of structural analysis and very close readings to distill a secret elixir from the poet's 'clever mathematical encoding' (p. 55): for Chaucer, 'love' always ultimately signifies Neo-Platonic harmony. Condren himself is well aware that his methodology confronts a certain a priori skepticism. He anticipates most objections and uses several diagrams to buttress his perception of ratios within (editorially reconstructed) texts and parallels among the dream visions. Nevertheless, the main criticism Condren's readings must confront is that they are too contrived. Condren's counting seems hyper-precise at times—a charge he recognizes and addresses (p. 90; pp. 204–5 n. 43; pp. 212 n. 33). Condren's evidence is no doubt sufficient to demonstrate Chaucer's 'experimenting with mathematics' (p. 76)—occasionally. But Chaucer intermittently toys with almost every medieval expertise. Such quasi-Pythagorean analyses as that of Condren (who rightly admires the work of T.E. Hart and V. Rothschild as well) can be self-hypnotic—prone to see very-like-a-whale projections of interpretive grids. Critical consent amounts to passing a rite of initiation.

So too, Condren often hears (lexically undocumented) puns that subvert the artificial decorum of the printed word; he seems to take for granted that Chaucer recited these works (p. 136). Condren's explications generate especially intriguing probings of Troilus' faint and Criseyde's hidden heart. And again, skeptics may define these 'hidden' meanings as 'non-existent.' That an author intended to pun is self-evident to readers inclined to desire some double entendre, but this intent is never demonstrable to critical guardians of a sincere reading. Condren's re-readings are extremely strong at casting doubt upon institutionalized (and so largely unexamined) critical assumptions. For example, Condren persuasively argues that the presentation of a ring in the Book of the Duchess (BD 1273) originally signified an act of largesse rather than marriage (p. 54); if so, the reference to 'mercy...