Sola, Ricardo J.

Universidad de Alcalá de Henares

Chaucer's Sense and Sensibility in Troilus and Criseyde

Chaucer, in Troilus and Criseyde, illustrates one of the capital currents in the tradition of sensiblity, in which painful emotions are cultivated by the man of feeling. His purpose is to tell us yhe double sorrow of Troilus, he considers himself the cruel furies' sorrowful instrument, and his story is going to be a sorrowful tale. Even more, he expresses the practice, in that mentioned tradition, of indulging in sympathetic responses to emotional pain in others: "that I have myght to shewe, in some manere,/Swich peyne and wo as Loves folk endure" (TC I 33-34), indicating the educative potential of sensibility

But ye loveres, that bathen in gladnesse, If any drope of pyte in yow be, Remembreth yow on passed hevynesse That ye han felt, and on the adversite Of othere folk, and thynketh how that ye Han felt that Love dorste yow displese, Or ye han wonne hym with to gret an ese. (TC I 22-28)