#Troilus and criseyde

[lions-and-men-musical]

first & second designs for Cressida! (Chryseis)

she plays more of a spy role in Lions & Men, only getting caught by Agamemnon while sneaking in between Troy & Achaea, who captures her after she is found out to be a spy (I don’t want almost every female character to be a slave, so I’m making up new reasons for her captured)

Since she’s mostly just a plot device in the Iliad, I took inspiration from Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida as well.

I also already have a lot of characters do I just made her a favorite of Apollo rather than her father.

[shakespearenews]

While preparing my fall seminars, I had found it increasingly difficult to think about how to teach Chaucer and not discuss Gaza. Not only because, if Chaucer doesn’t resonate with the lives and concerns of students now, I personally see little point in teaching him. Not only because a depoliticized Middle Ages is a Middle Ages made available to the uses and abuses of white supremacist history.1 

Not only because my solidarity with Palestinian struggle does not end when I leave the protest crowd. And not only—although substantially—in memory of, the professor and poet murdered on or around December 6, 2023, who wrote about teaching Dickens and Shakespeare to students at the Islamic University of Gaza and watching them slowly come to identify with the despised Jewish figures of Fagin and Shylock.2

---

But, recently, while rereading Troilus in order to teach it, I was struck by the blunt reality of what lies at the core of Chaucer’s plot. Troilus is a poem about a city under siege. Its protagonists are a combatant—Troilus—seeking to defend that city, and a civilian woman—Criseyde—trying to negotiate her survival, even while being traded as a hostage as part of political negotiations in which she has no say. The war is not mere “backdrop.” It’s the engine of Troilus’s plot, grounding its every action: from the vulnerable Criseyde turning to Troilus for “lordshipe” (protection), to the revelation of Criseyde’s “betrayal,” when Troilus sees her brooch pinned on a coat of arms captured from the Greek soldier Diomede.

[midsummernightsmemes]

Troilus and Criseyde ...

[horatiowasgay]

I need some help! There are so so many versions of Troilus and Cressida and I’m inclined to start with either Chaucer or Shakespeare, but also wonder if I should go back to the works that inspired those or the epic that inspired another work that inspired another work that inspired Chaucer that inspired Shakespeare that hate-inspired Dryden, etc. So I don’t know whether it makes more sense to go chronologically or backwards or start with the famous ones or what. If I started with Roman de Troie I would then have to go read translations of Tanz salutz e tantas amors and Historia destructionis Troiae as a contrast to everything that Boccaccio inspired in every later version with his changes. Whether you have an actual preference or just want to press buttons, help me decide!

[syrupsyche]

her looks appear somewhat disdainful, for she lets fall her glance a little aside in such manner, as if to say: ‘What may I not stand here?’

— Geoffrey Chaucer; Troilus & Criseyde

[zoozoocala]

troilus and criseyde is a never ending nightmare

[0ghostwatcher]

Imagine Troilus finally reaching his father temple, thinking he's safe , praying is dad just for him not being able to save him

Imagine Odysseus putting is pride finally aside and pray 7 years his friend-his goddess to save him and receive no answer

[phantomato13]

Currently reading Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde!

[lions-and-men-musical]

WIP wednesday! Troilus & Cressida

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

As an early modernist, it's always bizarre to see so much writing advice along the lines of "I just wish more writers read broadly enough to understand the fundamental distinctiveness of original characters and story lines in fiction writing, the thing that separates true literature from all other forms of fiction writing..."

I mean, I wish people read broadly enough to understand that the value for originality as the foremost defining quality of publishable fiction is bound up in deeply modern assumptions driven by capitalism and intellectual property law, but none of us get everything we want, I guess!

...But seriously, even if you restrict yourself to English-language literature, please read some fiction written prior to 1700 before forming arguments about the fundamental nature of fictional literature through all of time and space. You don't get Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida without Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and you don't get Chaucer's Criseyde without Boccaccio's.

This isn't simply loose inspiration in the way that all things have inspirations, but active engagement with a very specific character and plot none of them had invented. Chaucer's version of Criseyde in particular is very much in dialogue with other iterations of her, and the sympathy and nuance he brings to the character really rewards familiarity with the Cressida figure as usually depicted—a familiarity he could, at the time, expect his audience to have.

That kind of intertextuality was extremely normalized at the time as a general rule, not only when it came to specific works or authors, and would be so for centuries afterwards. In fact, fiction writing involving pre-existing characters and plots was a common element of fiction written in English for far longer than capitalism has existed. We are still closer in time to when Shakespeare was writing Troilus and Cressida than he was to the medieval source of the story.

[anghraine]

It really is wild! For me, I'm sure it's partly that Spanish and French are more familiar culturally where I'm from (small town on the US-Canada border), so I'm used to seeing the English-French-Spanish interconnections despite only being fluent in English, but German does look lexically and grammatically so different to my eyes.

I'm not sure if you've seen much Middle English, but to me, it seems simultaneously a bit more visibly Germanic-ish and French-ish than modern English. For instance, I was struck when I first read Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, in passages like this:

It is wel wist, how that the Grekes stronge In armes with a thousand shippes wente To Troyewardes, and the citee longe Assegeden neigh ten yeer er they stente And, in diverse wyse and oon entente, The ravisshing to wreken of Eleyne, By Paris doon, they wroughten al hir peyne.

versus this:

Criseyde was this lady name a-right; As to my dome, in al Troyes citee Nas noon so fair, for passing every wight So aungellyk was hir natyf beautee, That lyk a thing immortal semed she, As doth an hevenish parfit creature, That doun were sent in scorning of nature.

versus this:

"Touching thy lettre, thou art wys y-nough, I woot thow nilt it digneliche endyte; As make it with thise argumentes tough; Ne scrivenish or craftily thou it wryte; Beblotte it with thy teres eek a lyte; And if thou wryte a goodly word al softe, Though it be good, reherce it not to ofte."

RIP other languages in the Anglic family that got wiped out. It'd be cool if English weren't so ... itself.

[dokjaism]

have i said i love chaucer's portrayal of troilus

[fromstormsend]

Arya Stark & Gendry Waters AU: Atonement

“There goes my mother’s employer’s daughter, he once said to a friend. He had his politics to protect him, and his scientifically based theories of class, and his own rather forced self-certainty. I am what I am. She was like a sister, almost invisible. That long, narrow face, the small mouth—if he had ever thought about her at all, he might have said she was a little horsey in appearance. Now he saw it was a strange beauty—something carved and still about the face, especially around the inclined planes of her cheekbones, with a wild flare to the nostrils, and a full, glistening rosebud mouth.”

“So they wrote about literature, and used characters as codes. At Cambridge, they had passed each other by in the street. All those books, those happy or tragic couples they had never met to discuss! Tristan and Isolde, the Duke Orsino and Olivia (and Malvolio too), Troilus and Criseyde, Mr. Knightley and Emma, Venus and Adonis. Turner and Tallis. Once, in despair, he referred to Prometheus, chained to a rock, his liver devoured daily by a vulture. Sometimes she was patient Griselde. Mention of “a quiet corner in a library” was a code for sexual ecstasy. ”

[fragbot]

Hope will emerge Like a gentle creature drawn from green shadows To steady his gaze. A fawn, soft in the wild, Followed only by more of its kind.

- from A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde, Lavinia Greenlaw