Chaucer the Love Poet

433 Pages·2017·12.75 MB·English

CHAUCER THE LOVE POET
CHAUCER THE LOVE POET:

A STUDY IN HISTORICAL CRITICISM

By

JOHN B. TREILHARD, B.A., M.A.

A Thesis
Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies
in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
McMaster University

September 1978
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY McMASTER UNIVERSITY
(English) Hamilton, Ontario
TITLE: Chaucer the Love Poet: A Study in Historical
Criticism
AUTHOR: John B. Treilhard, B.A. (University of Winnipeg)
M.A. (McMaster University)
SUPERVISOR: Dr. Chauncey Wood
NUMBER OF PAGES: viii, 424
ii
ABSTRACT
This thesis is an historically based inquiry into
the aesthetic function and moral significance of the themes
of marriage, fornication, and adultery in Chaucer's poetry
about sexual love. Its first aim is to construct a
philosophic and historical framework within which to study
Chaucer as a love poet and thereby to help dispel the
common but fallacious idea that Chaucer's poetic composi­
tions on the subject of love are archetypally and themati­
cally similar to those of the romantic poets of the
nineteenth-century. Chaucer's attitude toward love is
interpreted as a composite product of the influences of
Ovid, St. Augustine, and the Christian Church of the Middle
Ages and is shown to be morally incompatible with the idea,
popular in the romantic literature of another era, that the
world is well lost for love.
The first chapter of the thesis is mainly devoted
to an investigation of the salient differences between
Chaucer's conception of love, which is in essence abstract
moral, and impersonal, and the romantic conception, which
tends to be emotional, amoral, and highly subjective. This
chapter describes the intellectual background of the dis­
tinctively medieval traditions of cosmological love, married
iii
love, and Ovidian love and attempts to the in­
interp~et
fluence of these traditions on the mind and art of Chaucer.
After the first chapter, the focus of discussion
becomes much narrower, and descriptive treatment of the
history of ideas gives way to close analysis of specific
cruxes in love poems like Troilus and Criseyde, the Knight's
Tale, and the Parliament of Fowls. These cruxes, which
include the problematic function of Chaucer's various
apostrophes and invocations to Venus, and the complex moral
relationship of Venus to Nature,are examined for their
relevance to the question of how Chaucer actually views
erotic passion in his great love poetry. The conclusion
reached in the second chapter is that the various cruxes
treated here can all be by showing that Chaucer
r~solved
consistently subscribes to Augustinian doctrines of nature,
grace, and sexual morality.
The third and last chapter of the thesis departs
from the conceptual approach to love taken in the previous
two in that it adopts a more formalistic and aesthetically
orientated mode of criticism. However, this chapter, like
the preceding one, concentrates on the elucidation of cruxes
and supports its generalizations about Chaucer's artistry
through close analysis and attention to poetic detail.
Chapter 3 deals solely with Troilus and Criseyde, analyzing
iv
the concept of "love as an art" to which the poem repeatedly
alludes; interpreting dynamics of response in the poem's
audience; and discussing the metaphoric association of
verbal prevarication with amorous enslavement in the
behaviour of Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus. The general
conclusion of this chapter, as of the others, is that
Chaucer was unquestionably a man of his time -- an orthodox
member of the Church and a firm follower of the teachings
of St. Augustine in matters of art as in ethics.
v
To the memory of my father

·DONALD GEORGE TREILHARD

May 29, 1925-Apri1 11, 1978

vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks, in all that concerns the research and
writing of this thesis, are exclusively due to Dr. Chauncey
Wood, whose levity and good humour in times of Sturm und
Orang I shall never be able to r~pay in kind.
To Dr. Alvin Lee and Dr. Laurel Braswell, the second
and third readers on my examining committee, I extend thanks
and appreciation for having promptly and efficiently read
and criticized the first completed draft of the thesis.
vii
T A B L E 0 F C 0 N T E N T S
Page
I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. THE THEME OF LOVE IN CHAUCER'S POETRY
1. Courtly Love in Literary Criticism about

Chaucer 10

2. Chaucer's Love Poetry: Its Interpretation

and Historical Context 35

3. The Tradition of Cosmological Love 48

4. Married Love and Ovidian Love 100

III. NATURE AND LOVE
1. The Figure of Nature in Chaucer's Love

Poetry 131

2. Chaucer's Invocations to Venus 153

3. Nature, Venus and Reason 192

IV. LOVE, LANGUAGE, AND THE ART OF POETRY
1. Love as an Art in Troilus and Criseyde

and Other Poems 261

2. The Role of the Audience in Troilus and
Criseyde
3. Language as a Metaphor for Bondage and
Chaos in Troilus and Criseyde
v.
CONCLUSION 376

NOTES 379

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 409

viii
INTRODUCTION
I anticipate resentment from some readers for having
occasionally applied the word "romantic" to literary
criticism which, either consciously or inadvertently, assigns
meanings to Chaucer's love poetry that are not indigenous
to the intellectual background of the fourteenth century;
and since this thesis is the product of an effort to practise
what in contradistinction to "romantic" will be referred to
as "historical" criticism, I feel an immediate need of fore­
stalling questions by explaing why I have used the slightly
ambiguous terms "romantic" and "historical" in the way that
I have.
D. W. Robertson Jr., who nearly thirty years ago
alerted us to the actual scarcity of historical criticism,
defines it as "that kind of literary analysis which seeks
to reconstruct the cultural ideas of a period in order to
1
reach a fuller understanding of its literature." Historical
criticism is thus not simply literary history or history
of ideas; as Robertson points out, "the literary historian
is usually preoccupied with purely literary rather
than with intellectual traditions", whereas the historian
of ideas frequently centers his attention on a single
thought pattern so that "his materials only apply to
1