"Little Troilus ": Heroides 5 and Its Ovidian Contexts in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

When considering Chaucer's debt to Ovid's Heroides, it is common for our minds to fix upon that work promised by a sheepish Chaucer in the first lines of the narrative implosion that is the epilogue of Troilus and Criseyde: "And gladlier I wol write, yif yow leste, / Penolope&eumls trouthe and good Alceste" (5.1777-78).¹ Chaucer appears to have relished the tension availed by the Heroides as intertext within his work—its capacity to subvert, as it does the Virgilian veneer of the Dido story in the House of Fame, or be subverted, as it is by Chaucer's flattened and de-individualized reworking of the collection of complaints in the Legend of Good Women. It is doubtful, had Chaucer agreed with the many modern readers who find the Heroides to be thin, repetitive, even boring exercises, that he would have rechannelled them into his own poetic world as strikingly as he did, and in such writerly environs as Venus's temple and Alcestis's garden. Rather, I am inclined to think that Chaucer found many of his own interests reflected in what one of the most important modern defenders of the Heroides has called "a mirror of the relative nature of reality," wherein "[t]he world of myth is no longer reality or a symbolic reflection of reality, but to a large degree projections or extensions of individual minds" and each event "becomes a multi-faceted thing depending on who sees, experiences, and recounts it."²

Since Edgar Finley Shannon brought to light more than seventy years ago Chaucer's infusion of Criseyde's psychological process of falling in love with motifs from Helen's Ovidian heroid to Paris,³ much of Chaucer's intertextual treatment of individual heroides within Troilus and Criseyde —a notably epistolary poem itself—has gone unexplored. However, in the intervening decades, our appreciation of the special affinity between Chaucer and Ovid has been greatly advanced by Richard L. Hoffman, John M. Fyler, and Michael A. Calabrese, among others, and our recognition of the "deep classicism" and complex intertextuality that permeates the Troilus preeminently among Chaucer's writings has been enhanced by the important studies of Winthrop Wetherbee and John V. Fleming.⁴ The present essay re-approaches the question of Chaucer's relationship to Ovid, as well as that of Chaucer's allusive style, by investigating the function of Heroides 5, Oenone's letter to Paris, in the design and structure of the Troilus.

Though numerous critics have made passing note of Chaucer's curious use of Heroides 5 in two isolated moments in books 1 and 4 of the Troilus, and several have commented upon the irony embedded in these outof-context allusions to an Ovidian text that describes sexual betrayal and forecasts the fall of Troy,⁵ no one has recognized Chaucer's sustained and allusive use of Heroides 5 and its function as a metanarrative structural device in the design of the poem. The intratextual energy of Heroides 5 within Ovid's own body of writings has likewise been overlooked, and regrettably so, for it is largely this aspect of the Oenone story that attracts Chaucer's creative interest and structures his own rewriting of it. In the hope of better illuminating the often shadowy contours of the Ovidian contexts of the Troilus, my approach is twopronged: (1) to assess the details of Chaucer's reworking of Oenone's letter where it is explicitly cited and (2) to gauge the rich multivalence of the Ovidian text, its more implicit and deeply situated relevance to the design of Chaucer's poem, as an intertextual backdrop to many of the special formal and narrative qualities of the Troilus.

Heroides 5 as intertext, I would like to suggest, is a microcosm, an epitome, of the action of Chaucer's poem. The Ovidian text acts in Chaucer's poem as does the symbol of "Troilus" in early tradition as Piero Boitani describes it: like Troilus—"little Troy," in his youth the image of Troy's vitality and in his death the...