Troilus and Criseyde is Geoffrey Chaucer's poem in rhyme royal re-telling the tragic love story of Troilus, a Trojan prince, and Criseyde. Many Chaucer scholars regard this as his best work, even including the better known but incomplete Canterbury Tales. The comparisons are not really fair as they are very different styles: Troilus and Criseyde is a single, coherent story, whereas The Canterbury Tales is a story cycle containing many different sections with different styles representing a range of narrators.
It can be argued that Troilus and Criseyde is an example of a courtly romance, and although it does contain many common features of the genre, generic classification is an area of significant debate in most Middle English literature.
Although mentioned in Homer the story of Troilus and Criseyde was first written by Benoît de Sainte-Maure in his poem, Roman de Troie, Boccaccio re-wrote the story in his Il Filostrato which in turn was Chaucer's main source.
The poem was continued by Robert Henryson in his Testament of Cresseid.
Troilus is never really compared with other knights – Hector is more of a supreme knight – and the only interaction he has is with a female and her male pimp.
In contrast, in Book V Criseyde does not use the term “heart” the same way she did in Book III, “when Troilus was her heart and when his absence meant that both her heart was sorrowful in her breast as well as with her lover” (321).
The rhetoric hooks Criseyde on the concept of courtly love, while soon she becomes addicted to the stability of the situation and asserts this need in agreeing to be sent to the Greeks.
The word entente is sometimes used with Criseyde's name when she is avowing that her intentions are pure, either toward Troilus in a broad sense (as in 3.1166) or in a specific circumstance (as in 4.1415, when Criseyde proposes her plan to join her father briefly, then return).
Criseyde wonders about Troilus' motives, just as he wondered about hers (3.123-124, for instance); the word is used to express Troilus' desires (4.1220); and Criseyde finds out that Troilus' motives are pure, just as he finds out that hers are (3.1229, for instance).
Criseyde usually seems content to accept a situation that is out of the realm of things that could be easily influenced, while Troilus prefers to justify and bemoan his fate.
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