Name: Troilus and Criseyde
ISBN: 9781425060206

Troilus and Criseyde

A 1932 translation into modern English of a text written by Chaucer in c.1385, the story being set in Classical Antiquity around 800 B.C. and being a love story concerning its two principal characters, the Trojan soldier Troilus and his Greek paramour, Cressida, set during the ten years of the Trojan War between Greece and the city state of Troy. The story is based on Classical sources, principally Homer's verses describing the Fall of Troy, and tells of the love between a hero of Troy and a Greek lady, at a time when they belonged to opposite sides in that war, a love beset by the difficulties which the conflict caused them.

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The_BladeJul 2026

i read half of Troilus and Criseyde out loud to myself one summer in college and i may be a weirdo but it paid dividends. unbowdlerized Chaucer is the tits

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jackfoxyOct 2023

I was in Prof. Marvin Mudrick's Troilus and Criseyde course at UCSB in the '70s. Things I learned: it is high literature (whereas one could argue the Cantebury Tales are in a more popular genre), and it is long. I'm sure I never finished it.

A good portion of the class time was spent listening to Mudrick's phenomenal reading of the text. I knew at the time he should have been recorded for posterity and I'm sure today no such recordings exist and he liked it that way. There are plenty of audio recordings of Mudrick from his writing seminars.

The really big thing Mudrick maintained about this work is it contains a chapter that is the single greatest description of love-making in all of world literature. (And Mudrick should know, he was a great scholar.) Every other work attempting this reduces to mere pornography in comparison. (My words, not his, so you know I agree.)

https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/mr-mudrick-is-100/

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justifierJan 2017

professors teach to their opinion

i took a shakespeare course at university where we were asked to read troilus and cressida and compare it to its source troilus and criseyde by chaucer

i wrote that i disliked the piece because it just read like someone who recently got burned in love venting irrationally, noting that i liked shakespeare's version more because he gives the last word to pandarus(o) who uses it to comically complain about his health and i felt this beautifully subverted the assumed tragedy the characters felt subject to in their stories.. woe is me!

i failed the exam

frustrated i went looking for evidence to defend my claim(i).. though contrary to the linked comic i did find some interesting notes

first off chaucer was a source for shakespeare, but hardly the source of the work

chaucer's main source was boccaccio's il filastrato.. which was based off an earlier version known as le roman de troie by benoît de sainte-maure

but the interesting bit comes from boccaccio's version(ii) because the story itself is only 8 cantos long, even the wikipedia page says the work itself is only 8 cantos long!(iii), but there is an additional canto, a ninth canto, wherein the author, boccaccio, addresses the reader and apologises for writing the poem and states he's unsure where it came from but asserts that he was recently dumped

(o) http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/full.html

(i) https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/06

(i/2) https://store.penny-arcade.com/products/agree-with-me-tee

(ii) http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/filostrato_griffin.pdf

(iii) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Filostrato

front page of reddit right now.. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_i... ;P

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