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‘‘And Nysus doughter song with fressh entente’’: Tragedy and Romance in Troilus and Criseyde Roy J. Pearcy University College, London Areference to Nysus’s daughter, Scylla, appears at lines 1107–13 in Book 5 of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, between a stanza describing Troilus’s unease on the day before Criseyde’s anticipated return to Troy, and another recounting his vigil with Pandarus as they wait until noon on the tenth day for Criseyde to appear and to confirm their trust in her fidelity: The laurer-crowned Phebus with his heete Gan, in his cours ay upward as he wente, To warmen of the est se the wawes weete, And Nysus doughter song with fresshe entente, Whan Troilus his Pandare after sente; And on the walles of the town they pleyde, To loke if they kan sen aught of Criseyde.1 Before the significance of Chaucer’s reference to the story of Scylla is discussed, something needs to be said about the immediate context of the citation. Unless he was being uncharacteristically careless, Chaucer did not cite Nysus’s daughter merely to enhance a descriptio loci. Ovid, from whose Metamorphoses the story of Scylla ultimately derives, was vague about the precise nature of Scylla’s transformation. He did specify that her father Nysus was changed into a sea eagle, and that this transformation enabled him to persecute his daughter for the betrayal that led to his death. Scylla, that is to say, was evidently metamorphosed 1 All quotations of Chaucer’s text are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). 269 ................. 9680$$ $CH9 11-01-10 12:35:43 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER into a sea bird, not a songbird.2 If Chaucer is to be excused for this minor deviation from the account as given in his sources, it should probably be on the basis that his reference has thematic rather than purely rhetorical implications. It is also worth remarking that Scylla is introduced at a particularly significant moment in Chaucer’s narrative, although the significance is not immediately apparent, and requires some examination of how different perceptions of Fortune affect our view of the poem as a tragedy. There are two related but distinct views of Fortune operative in Troilus and Criseyde, and that relationship is central to a great deal of the scholarship devoted to explicating the poem’s aesthetic appeal, particularly regarding its generic affiliations. One view of Fortune, as the executrix of implacable Fate, accommodates well to the idea of the poem as a tragedy, but requires that the epilogue be dismissed as the irrelevant postscript of an overly zealous Christian commentator.3 At the other extreme, Fortune’s influence is seen as subordinate to human free will, so that her powers are restricted to only those temporalia over which she has control, and individuals are free to reject, or to hold in despite, the gifts of Fortune in a sublunary world. Such a view is essential to any system of rewards and punishments , and accommodates the attitudes expressed in the epilogue, but comes dangerously close to transforming the work into a moral tract, with adverse effect on any conception of the poem as a tragedy.4 2 The story of Minos and Scylla occupies lines 91–104 in Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses . See P. Ovidii Nasonis, Metamorphoses, ed. William S. Anderson (Leipzig, 1977), pp. 174–79. There is an English translation by A.D. Melville in the World’s Classics Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 171–75. 3 The extreme position is represented by Walter Clyde Curry, ‘‘Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde, chap. 10 in Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2d ed. (New York, 1960) pp. 241–98, repr. in Chaucer Criticism II: Troilus and Criseyde and the Minor Poems, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame; University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), pp. 34–70. 4 This is the stance taken by D.W. Robertson, Jr., ‘‘Chaucerian Tragedy,’’ ELH 19 (1952): 1–37, repr. in Schoeck and Taylor, Chaucer Criticism, pp. 86–121. That the tripartite process by which Troilus is depicted falling in love corresponds closely to Augustine’s...

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