Importance of Thinking in Troilus and Criseyde and Hamlet

Importance of Thinking in Troilus and Criseyde and Hamlet

Troilus and Hamlet have much in common. Both have represented the quintessential tragic heroes of two literary periods. Both lovers, Troilus and Hamlet lose what they love despite their earth-shaking groans. Both are surrounded by traitors and are traitorous in kind. Both are embattled and--this is no secret--both die. But somewhere on that mortal coil on which they are both strung, they confront a similar question, a question which divides them in no sense less than the waters divide England and Denmark--the question of action. This essay pretends to do little more than probe the circumstances of that question in relation to a speech that appears prominently in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and tangentially as a “Proem”to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. I will delve into the specific and larger textual contexts for both of these instances, seeking to show that the manner in which the speech is reworded shows in miniature the gulf that separates Troilus and Hamlet.

Hamlet opens famously with sickness. Francisco, a simple soldier, who has thus far endured an uneventful watch, describes himself as “sick at heart”(1.1.9-10). We find our ubiquitous cliche soon afterwards inserted in a conversation on the prison-like nature of Denmark: “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison”(2.2.255-257). With this epistemology in mind, it is not difficult to see how a cloud ) may be weasel-like, and “very like a whale”in the next instant. Such is our power to determine truth: we name it so, and so it is. Hamlet’s remark is that of one who has suddenly been bathed in the reality of life. He is confronting directly, perhaps for the first time,...

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...ism is finally indeterminate. If Krapp me Gant to draw a direct parallel between the two works, it was a matter of vanity: “I do not find you [Chaucer] full of mysteries./ The world is much the same from day to day?(30-31). Though a comparison between Hamlet and Troilus and Criseyde is possible, we must finally discover how different they are from one another. The chasm that separates the two is one of depth and attitude: it is the difference between recognition and non-recognition, the difference between a self-created future and the pandering of one’s will to a human leech.

Works Cited

Benson, Larry D., gen. ed. The Riverside Chaucer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Krapp, George Philip. Troilus and Criseyde: A Love Poem in Five Books. New York: Random House, 1932.