Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s Cressida by Laura D. Kellogg (review)

REVIEWS LAURA D. KELLOGG. Boccaccio's and Chaucer's Cressida. Studies in the Humanities, vol. 16. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Pp. xi, 144. $42.95. Like a beautiful puzzle with a few pieces missing, Criseyde continues to enthrall and frustrate us. Though Chaucer reveals some ofher thoughts, Criseyde's motives remain a mystery, and this enigmatic quality is part ofher charm. Laura Kellogg's book sets out to dispel some ofthe charm. Working against the current practice ofreading Criseyde as a victim of her circumstances, Kellogg traces Criseyde's origins back through Boccaccio, Guido, Beno1t, and Dares, in an attempt to expose Criseyde in all her incarnations as the embodiment ofinfidelity who teaches pru­ dence and morality through her negative example. Kellogg's central claim is that both Boccaccio and Chaucer create narrators who miss the moral lesson Criseyde's example is supposed to teach. The irony created by this blindness to Criseyde's "true" meaning is supposed to make the reader see that each poem is actually a con­ demnation of excessive desire and inconstancy. Creating a sense of con­ tinuity between the various depictions of Criseyde is thus one of Kellogg's main tasks, though it also becomes one of the book's weak­ nesses. Kellogg explains away the differences in characterization be­ tween Boccaccio and Chaucer by establishing a kind of Ur-character (whom she calls Cressida) who is a combination of inconstant women from Virgil, Ovid, Dares, Guido, and Beno1t. However, the essentializ­ ing drive of such an approach hobbles Kellogg's analysis, because she must forgo any nuanced consideration of the changes in Criseyde that Boccaccio and Chaucer introduce into their versions of the story. Kellogg devotes her first chapter, "Cressida's Literary History and Her Inheritance from Dido," to the origins of her character in classical sources. She begins with a brief account of the classical sources-the Iliad, Dares and Dictys, and Ovid's Heroides-and then moves into a more detailed discussion of Beno1t de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie. Here she focuses on Benoit's asides in which he predicts Briseida's fu­ ture infidelity. Next comes a briefdiscussion ofthe more frankly misog­ ynistic portrait of Briseida as a seductress in Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae. Kellogg claims, surprisingly, that Guido condemns Briseida more openly than Benoit because he is writing his­ tory rather than fiction. She then generalizes that "(m}edieval histori­ ography has determined that Cressida can only epitomize patent in267 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER constancy. Her fickle nature, evil motives, and heinous behavior make Briseida's personal qualities as clear and true, therefore, as the destruc­ tion of Troy" (p. 10). Ignoring the fact that such language seems more suited to a serial murderer than an unfaithful lover, how is it that Guido's Briseida has suddenly become the true Cressida? Kellogg makes no mention of contemporaneous historiographic accounts that would confirm Guido's portrait as universal, but rather moves hurriedly on to an entirely new area of inquiry: the influence of various portray­ als of Dido on depictions of Criseyde. Kellogg maintains that we can­ not understand Cressida without a broader view of her connections to other classical heroines, especially Dido. This is a worthwhile point, and Kellogg notes that medieval poets were often caught between Virgil's condemnation of Dido's behavior and Ovid's more sympathetic por­ trayal of her as a wronged woman. However, she deals rather awkwardly with Chaucer's clear preference for the Ovidian version of Dido's story by suggesting that Chaucer is somehow denying reality: "A knowledge of Virgil, however, undermines that which Ovid and Chaucer have writ­ ten" (p. 18). Such a reading rather anachronistically makes Chaucer and Ovid seem like contemporaries, and completely overlooks the possibil­ ity that Chaucer may be asking us to read Dido as more complicated than Virgil made her. Chapter 2, "Boccaccio's Criseida and Her Narrator," starts out more auspiciously with a sustained consideration of the attitude of Boccaccio's narrator toward the Filostrato. Kellogg is right to point out the ironies of the situation. The poem begins with a letter from the nar­ rator to his...