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Is there not a touch of Gretchen in Cressid, retiring into her chamber to ponder over the first revelation to her of the love of Troilus? Cressid arose, no longer there she stayed, But straight into her closet went anon, And set her down, as still as any stone, And every word gan up and down to wind, That he had said, as it came to her mind.
Under Charles I "Troilus and Cressid" found a translator in Sir Francis Kynaston, whom Cartwright congratulated on having made it possible "that we read Chaucer now without a dictionary." A personage however, in Cartwright's best known play, the Antiquary Moth, prefers to talk on his own account "genuine" Chaucerian English.
How truly, for instance, in "Troilus and Cressid," Chaucer observes on the enthusiastic belief of converts, the "strongest-faithed" of men, as he understands! Than they can in their lewdness comprehend, they gladly give the worst interpretation which suggests itself!
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?
The "Troy-book" is not founded on "Troilus and Cressid," though it is derived from the sources which had fed the original of Chaucer's poem; but the "Temple of Glass" seems to have been an imitation of the "House of Fame"; and the "Story of Thebes" is actually introduced by its author as an additional "Canterbury Tale," and challenges comparison with the rest of the series into which it asks admittance.
"'In such a night, Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls, And sighed his soul towards the Grecian tents, Where Cressid lay that night." "In such a night, Stood Dido with a willow in her hand, Upon the wild sea banks, and waved her love To come again to Carthage." "Talk to me about Surrey, Cassandra." "Not a word." "Why did you call me?" "To see what mood you were in."
Inasmuch as both this poem and "Troilus and Cressid" are mentioned in the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," they must have been written earlier than it; and the dedication of "Troilus" to Gower and Strode very well agrees with the relations known to have existed about this time between Chaucer and his brother-poet.
This solution of the conflict may be morally as well as theologically unsound; it certainly is aesthetically faulty; but it is the reverse of frivolous or commonplace. Or let us turn from Cressid, "matchless in beauty," and warm with sweet life, but not ignoble even in the season of her weakness, to another personage of the poem.
With Troilus it was love at first sight with Cressid a passion of very gradual growth. But so full of nature is the narrative of this growth, that one is irresistibly reminded at more than one point of the inimitable creations of the great modern master in the description of women's love.
Had he not begun by translating the wicked satire of Jean de Meung, "a heresy against the law" of Love, and had he not, by cynically painting in his Cressid a picture of woman's perfidy, encouraged men to be less faithful to women That be as true as ever was any steel?
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