Hating Criseyde: Last Words on a Heroine from Chaucer to Henryson

"What sholde I seyen? I hate, ywis, Cryseyde; And, God woot, I wol hate hire evermore!"

—pand ar us (troilus and criseyde, V, 1732-33) ¹

Pandarus's vituperative rejection of his niece near the end of Troilus and Criseyde is hardly auspicious as a literary sendoff, a first gloss on Criseyde's infidelity that models the ugly tongue-rolling and finger-pointing that Criseyde so fears. This malediction is as alien to the spirit of Chaucer's poem—a poem in which even a decade-long war is prompted by a surfeit of love—as are Criseyde's own bewildering last words to Troilus in her final letter. Were it not for the series of increasingly dramatic perplexities that Chaucer himself visits upon the reader in the last hundred and twenty lines of Book V, these characters' unsettling attempts to close off their own story might have attracted more critical attention. I propose here to read Pandarus's last speech as a locus not only of narrative reconstruction (what Criseyde's actions now "mean") but of textual transmission (what should be done with this meaning)—one that, in direct and highly charged ways, impacts a future text: Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. In Henryson's sophisticated "displacement" of Chaucer's Trojan poem, ² Pandarus's rhetoric surfaces, surprisingly, in the final reflections of Troilus on his erstwhile beloved—in stark contrast with the concluding sentiments of Chaucer's Troilus—and in turn infiltrates the poem's moralistic last stanza, spoken by the narrator. In this, Henryson at once returns to an earlier tradition of Troilus's characterization, deriving from Benoît de Saint-Maure, and deploys this tradition to unsettle Chaucer's poetic authority. Following an exploration of the nuanced intertextuality of these assessments of the ruined Cresseid in the Testament, I more broadly consider attempts by characters or authors in the medieval Troy tradition to get the "last word" on Cressida, ³ to close her off—as often happens—by demonizing her. These, I show, are strategically disingenuous acts that arouse interest in (even desire for) Cressida as a subject, thus reopening her story for continued transmission and exemplary application. To illuminate this textual dynamic, I draw methodologically on modern psychoanalytic notions of hatred, juxtaposing these with ancient (especially Ovidian) and medieval conceptions of love and hate. A conflicted rhetoric of odi et amo, inexpressibility, and linguistic violence underscores those moments in which Cressida's sexuality is textualized by men and even, I will suggest, by modern critics struck by Cressida's sheer "lovability."

In Chaucer's Troilus Pandarus's declaration of undying hatred for the woman he has so callously manipulated into a love affair is bookended by uncharacteristic speechlessness. Although Pandarus has long since deduced Criseyde's infidelity, he is nonetheless stunned into silence at the ocular revelation of her betrayal: to Troilus's anguished outcry he initially "nought a word . . . answerde;/ . . . /As stille as ston; a word ne kowde he seye" (V, 1725, 1729). After expressing hatred for Criseyde and urging her imminent death, Pandarus concludes, "I kan namore seye" (V, 1743)—his last words in the poem. The word "namore" resonates further in connection to Pandarus's admission in the same speech that "I may do the namore" (V, 1731). Juxtaposed sharply with Pandarus's self-righteous hostility is Troilus's moving (and pitiful) vow that, even faced with Criseyde's "despit" (V, 1693), he "ne kan nor may,/For al this world, withinne myn herte fynde/To unloven yow a quarter of a day!" (V, 1696-98). Pandarus's hatred is contrasted with Troilus's perpetual love (he cannot even utter the word "hate," hence the neologism "unloven"). If Pandarus "kan namore seye," quite literally, Troilus "ne kan" cease to love (a double negative reborn as an affirmative). Pandarus's hate and Troilus's love, as E. Talbot Donaldson observed, exist here in a dialectical relationship as "the two simple attitudes to Criseide that Chaucer has carefully nurtured—simple, but in combination infinitely complex": no less than "the most powerful emotions of...