Troilus and Criseyde (Norton Critical Edition)

This is a very good edition of the text. Being a Norton edition, it provides a very good gloss by the side of each line, for the Middle English; critical material and responses; an introduction with very good background information; and a translation of Chaucer's main source alongside the text.

I have to confess I've never been that enthused with Chaucer before. As with Shakespeare, I feel that he's presented far too often as the be-all and end-all of his period. They are massively influential, of course, but there's so much focus on these texts that pre-university, I had little idea of the breadth of literature. It pretty much narrowed down to them and Dickens.

I didn't like The Canterbury Tales very much when I came to it in first year. I won't say that an academic viewpoint spoils Chaucer, because I came to Troilus and Criseyde for a class, too, but I do wish people could come to Chaucer and Shakespeare on their own terms. It was much easier to do that, with Troilus and Criseyde, because I knew almost nothing about this before I started this module of my MA.

I loved it. Chaucer's command of language and of his material is superb; it's not like a modern novel, of course, but anyone familiar with medieval literature would be prepared for that, and this is surprisingly accessible even without that familiarity. It's full of hyperbole and courtly love and Troilus being pretty flippin' pathetic, as we see it -- and yet Chaucer's pity for his characters still creeps through.

I highly recommend reading this in Middle English, with a glossary: it's not hard, as long as you work out how to pronounce the words, and a translation would lose that innate Chaucerian touch. The rhyme scheme often helps out, as it's very regular. I can understand reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in translations -- it looks less familiar, usually, and is a different dialect which didn't survive as well into Modern English, and some people have done fantastic things with it -- but don't do that with this, if you can help it. It gets easier as you go along.

The Norton edition is great, packed with information and a good -- indeed, overly exhaustive at times -- glossary. They gloss 'desolat', for goodness sake. I don't think you could be steered wrong in getting this edition. ( )

It's a difficult story to love; Chaucer does much better than Shakespeare with it. ( )