Chaucer "Troilus and Criseyde" Literary animation

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• published: 10 May 2013
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Here's a virtual movie of Geoffrey Chaucer reading from Troilus and Criseyde Spoken beautifully by the celebrated veteran Australian actor director, writer Peter O'Shaughnessy in his own translation/adaptation. Troilus and Criseyde is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war in the Siege of Troy. It was composed using rime royale and probably completed during the mid 1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem it is certainly more self-contained than the better known but ultimately uncompleted Canterbury Tales. LOVE UNDER SIEGE The tragic tale of Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer Once the battle cry of Havoc sounds and the dogs of war are let slip, for all their pledges of undying love, the bonds of lovers sometimes crack under the strain. Love itself is under siege England's first great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, knew war at first hand. At about the age of seventeen he was thought old enough by Edward 111 to be sent to France for four months active service in the Hundred Years war. It may well have been this experience which attracted him to the story of the Trojan war and one of the greatest of all tragic love stories, that of the valiant young warrior Knight, Troilus, son of King Priam, for Criseyde, daughter of the Trojan soothsayer, Calchas. This prophet, having forseen the defeat of Troy has gone over to the camp of the besieging Greeks. His daughter, Criseyde, is exchanged as a hostage and, having pledged undying love for Troilus, is soon under siege: hardly has the sturdy Grecian, Diomede, appointed to escort her to the Grecian camp, set eyes on the lovely Criseyde, than he starts to contrive a crafty plot to lure her to his bed. The very name Troy might also have drawn Chaucer to the story. During the middle ages, the Troy story was a part of the British national myth. In the twelfth century, Geoffrey Monmouth had declared, on what he claimed to be good authority, that Britain, originally called Albion and populated by a race of giants, had been invaded by Felix Brutus, a Trojan prince and great grandson to Aeneas. Brutus landed at Totnes, and renamed the country after himself. In Chaucer's day this myth was so flourishing that there was a movement afoot to rename the country Troynovant (New Troy). All that concerned Troy and the Trojans was therefore of patriotic and poetic interest. The late Professor Nevill Coghill, foremost among Chaucerian scholars and celebrated for his popular translation of The Canterbury Tales, regarded Troilus and Criseyde as the most beautiful long poem in the English language. In the Preface to his translation he also writes of other aspects of Chaucer's masterpiece: 'There is one element in Chaucer's vision of romantic love that cannot be found in the work of his continental contemporaries or elsewhere and that is Chaucer's full awareness that a romantic hero is sometimes ridiculous, especially at his most romantic; but he is not in the least less sympathetic for being so. Infatuation is simply funny, because it takes itself so seriously. The character of Pandarus is the first great study in idiosyncrasy and personality in modern English literature. He is full of stratagems, proverbs, jokes and fibs, a character memorable in the ways in which a Shakespeare or a Dickens character is memorable... the reader becomes aware of Chaucer's own presence in the poem. He makes no personal application of the story to himself; on the contrary, he continually disclaims all knowledge of the experience of love; he is to to be the spokesman of lovers, the servant of the servants of love. Knowing nothing of it himself but having, or seeming to claim, a particular vocation for expressing their blisses and their griefs. By this ironic declaration Chaucer achieves a grave but smiling detachment from his story.' Peter O'Shaughnessy performance of the first half hour of the text, Professor Coghill wrote: 'You gave us a consummate reading... your voice was superb... the audience felt as if they were listening to poetry as if it were an entirely new thing, a new kind of pleasure. I shall never forget it. Nor I think will your audience. One man in the audience said to me that he had no idea that poetry could be so touching and meaningful. I think you opened many doors in many minds with your marvellous interpretation.' Kind Regards Jim Clark All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2013