Love and Gender Roles in Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde” and “Anelida and Arcite”

Introduction

This paper discusses Love and Gender Roles in Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde” and “Anelida and Arcite”. Anelida and Arcite is a 357 line poem by Geoffrey Chaucer. It tells the story of Anelida, queen of Armenia and her wooing by false Arcite from Thebes, Greece. Although short, it is a poem with a complex structure, with an invocation and then the main story. The story is made up of an introduction and a complaint by Anelida which is in turn made up of a proem, a strophe, antistrophe and a conclusion. After the complaint there are a few lines which continue the story but these may have been added by a later scribe. Like many of Chaucer's works it ends abruptly. The date of the poem's composition is not known but it is often placed in the late 1370s.

Analysis

The poem is never mentioned by Chaucer himself but scholars do not usually doubt his authorship. The poem uses some of elements the Teseida of Boccaccio a work which Chaucer would use again as a basis for The Knight's Tale. This influence of Italian literature is a point of transition from Chaucer's earlier works which were mainly influenced by French poetry. The poem itself is a rather ungainly mixture of the two traditions, with an epic invocation typical of Italian poetry giving way to a much less epic story more French in character. Despite these jarring styles, the part of the work which forms Anelida's complaint is one of the most highly regarded uses of the "lover's-complaint" motif. Chaucer wrote several other short poems in the complaint genre such as The Complaint unto Pity and The Complaint of Venus and this may have been an unsuccessful attempt on Chaucer's part to extend the form into a much longer poem. Troilus and Criseyde is arguably Geoffrey Chaucer's masterpiece. It's the same tale told by William Shakespeare and Bocaccio and lots of other people; but Chaucer's version is a bit special. It's set against the background of the Trojan War. Basically: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy gets girl's uncle to persuade her to go out with him, girl gets swapped for a valued prisoner, girl swears to return and her undying love, girl gets off with someone else within about ten minutes, heartbroken boy gets killed in battle and gets some perspective in heaven. Although it's set in a heathen world, it's got a Christian narrator, which raises all sorts of interesting moral questions. Chaucer seems particularly interested in free will (see Boethus' Consolations of Philosophy, from which he borrows heavily) and the role of women and the interplay between both society and the individual and the internal and the external. It's arguably the greatest of the medieval romances. Because Chaucer wrote in a London dialect - unlike, for example, the Gawain poet - it's not too dissimilar to modern English, and the layman can get into ...