United States or United States Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
All societies know the literary dangler in great houses, and the purveyor to fashionable prejudices. Not that he is always servile. The reader, I daresay, remembers that La Bruyère described a curious being in Troilus, the despotic parasite. Palissot, eighteenth century or nineteenth century, is often like Troilus, parasite and tyrant at the same time.
Even more considerable and conspicuous is Chaucer's obligation to Boccaccio in the Troilus and Criseyde, about a third of which is borrowed from the Filostrato.
In Boccaccio, Cressid is fair and false one of those fickle creatures with whom Italian literature, and Boccaccio in particular, so largely deal, and whose presentment merely repeats to us the old cynical half-truth as to woman's weakness. How, then, is the catastrophe of the action, the falling away of Cressid from her truth to Troilus, poetically explained?
'Take my advice, said she. 'Never mind love. After all, what is it? The dream of a few weeks. That is all its joy. The disappointment of a life is its Nemesis. Who was ever successful in true love? Success in love argues that the love is false. True love is always despondent or tragical. Juliet loved. Haidee loved. Dido loved, and what came of it? Troilus loved and ceased to be a man.
After three years of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly, in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he been Shakespeare he would then have written Troilus and Cressida to brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them.
Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer robbed verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation, though for another generation or so minstrels were to sing his long elaborated 'Troilus and Cressida; painting parted from religion in the later Renaissance that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while, that it might characterise, where it had once personified, it renounced, in our own age, all that inherited subject matter which we have named poetry.
Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provençal poets, and his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build his house.
"Take my advice," said she. "Never mind love. After all, what is it? The dream of a few weeks. That is all its joy. The disappointment of a life is its Nemesis. Who was ever successful in true love? Success in love argues that the love is false. True love is always despondent or tragical. Juliet loved, Haidee loved, Dido loved, and what came of it? Troilus loved and ceased to be a man."
"And either greet him not Or else disdainfully, which shall shake him more Than if not looked on." TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, iii. 3. Upton, expatriated from his study, was allowed to use one of the smaller class-rooms which were occupied during play-hours by those boys who were too high in the school for "the boarders' room," and who were waiting to succeed to the studies as they fell vacant.
In the Canterbury Tales he uses lines of ten syllables and five accents each, and the lines run in couplets: His eyen twinkled in his heed aright As doon the sterres in the frosty night. The same musical measure, arranged in seven-line stanzas, but with a different rime, called the Rime Royal, is found in its most perfect form in Troilus.