Friends to the end: Varieties of friendship in Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde'

A poem about love, Troilus and Criseyde has a broader concern with friendship than is sometimes acknowledged. However, Chaucer's engagement with the notion of friendship does not constitute a highly-generalized, totalizing definition. Rather, the poem dramatizes a diverse number of relationships, all of them sharing a number of overlapping qualities that allow them to be called friendships. One such quality is what I refer to throughout the thesis as "living-with." Each pair or group of friends in the poem takes up its own form of living-with, and the three main chapters of this thesis consider the successes and failures of each form in overcoming the self-absorption that forms a recurring barrier to friendship. Thus Ector and Criseyde's political friendship, centered on an Aristotelian definition of justice as a personal virtue, offers a challenge to the more familiar but less pragmatic friendship offered by Criseyde's other royal protectors. In Pandarus's friendships with Troilus and Criseyde, the discourse of confession, which may look to modern readers like a spontaneous and obviously friendly form of living together, becomes the means to obtaining an obscene variety of distinctly non-mutual enjoyment. Troilus and Criseyde form a friendship in the middle of the poem through a synthesis of religious love and Aristotelian philia, but these structures also symbiotically contribute to the affair's demise, offering both lovers the means of solipsistically denying the other's subjective experience as they refuse to negotiate new forms of living-with. Finally, in the epilogue Chaucer turns his critique of various forms of coexistence towards the practice of reading. There he places squarely on the shoulders of the poem's readership the burden of being a charitable friend, which is to say, of carving out new forms of living-with that tend towards a truly inclusive friendship.