Last month I had the pleasure of working with a small group of “amateurs” in intense discussions of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde [1].  My fellow instructor was the distinguished medievalist John Fleming.  During John’s final lecture I became aware of two instances of Chaucer’s playful response to Dante that I do not believe have been previously discussed, if one of them has been noted.  Found in the stanza marking the conclusion of the Middle English "epic," they reflect, among others, texts in the Commedia.  Here is Chaucer’s witty envoi to his very big book:

Go, litel book, go, litel myn tragedye,
Ther god thi makere yit, [e]r that he dye,
So sende myght to make in som comedye!
But, litel book, no makyng thow nenvie,
But subgit be to alle poesie;
And kis the steppes, where as thow seest space
Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.           (V.1786-92) [2]

In his accompanying note, Robert K. Root (p. 558) discusses the Statian provenance of this gesture.  Two lines before the end of the Thebaid (XII.816-817), Statius does obeisance to a greater poet: [...] nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, / sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora (do not attempt to rival the divine Aeneid, but follow at a distance, always worshiping its footsteps) – no prideful rivalry in him.  What Root does not observe (in company with many) are the Dantean references I noted while John Fleming was discussing this stanza, particularly Chaucer’s awareness of Dante’s deployment of the Statian passage [3].  With his gesture Dante attempts to perform a somewhat different task than does Statius, to reassure himself (and his reader) that, for all the difficulties he, as poet, has put Virgil through in the circle of barratry, he nonetheless, like Statius, reveres his guide and asserts that he now follows humbly in Virgil’s footsteps, "dietro a le poste de le care piante" (Inf. XXIII.148).

There is still another Dantean "moment" in this stanza.  Root sees – surely convincingly – Boccaccio as Chaucer’s source: the conclusion of the Filocolo  (V.97.5-6), another among Boccaccio’s early opere minori  (1336-38?) known to Chaucer along with the Filostrato (1335?).  There Boccaccio, as does the envoi-writing Chaucer (who lists Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius as his precursors), offers the names of his five predecessors in "epic," i.e., extended narrative: Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, and Dante, "il quale tu sì come piccolo servidore molto de[v]i reverente seguire [4]."  Considering these two lists of five poets, a reader of Dante senses a source: Inferno IV.88-90: "quelli è Omero poeta sovrano; / l'altro è Orazio satiro che vene; / Ovidio è 'l terzo, e l'ultimo Lucano," as Virgil, the first classical poet present in this scene, tells us [5].  Like Boccaccio and Dante before him, Chaucer here presents himself as having five precursors, and thus is also sixth among "cotanto senno" (Inferno IV.102).  It is hard to imagine that Chaucer did not observe Boccaccio’s playfulness in also making himself sixth, in imitation of Dante.  But where Boccaccio, a champion of his vernacular model, revels in Dante’s presence in his "bella scola," Chaucer keeps his Dantean debts to himself, behavior hardly surprising in a poet who never mentions the name of his main Italian source.  Boccaccio has dropped Homer for Dante.  Chaucer drops Dante’s Horace (as does Boccaccio – probably both wondering why Dante included a versifying satirist among narrative poets) and, of course, Dante; but both include Statius, omitted by Dante (who "saves" the pagan poet and thus does not mention him here in Limbo).  It is difficult to believe that each successor poet was not assembling his authorizing precursors – in Chaucer’s case, not a single one of the tre corone, with Boccaccio not present among Chaucer’s "greats" but surely disguised as "Lollius," recipient of Horace’s second verse epistle [6].  We glimpse Chaucer’s game – erasing Boccaccio’s Dante and Dante’s Horace but elsewhere having included Horace’s creature, the putative epicist, Lollius, as Boccaccio, "myn auctour" (I.394).

The envoy returns to the subject of the poem’s opening verse, "the double sorwe of Troilus."  By any medieval code of literary conduct, all but the final five stanzas of the work recount a tragedy.  Having bid that tragedy farewell, Chaucer will soon suddenly and pivotally change genres – and poetic identities.  The second and third verses of this stanza have been a stumbling-block to their interpreters [7].  I would like, conjecturally, to paraphrase them as follows: "May God grant the power to your maker, before he dies, to compose (in it) some comic verses."  I am aware that the phrase "er that he dye" makes that reading problematic.  If Chaucer is thinking of a later work as yet unwritten, as almost all believe, this passage nonetheless surely foretells the change of generic signals we will be receiving within fifty verses.  Indeed, the comedic spirit, especially of Dante’s Commedia, informs much that follows.  Chaucer has assumed the humble role of Statius, at the close of the Thebaid, before all-mastering Virgil.  His five classical precursors remind the Italian reader of similar lists in Dante and in Boccaccio [8].  Chaucer is, however, a good deal less honest about his debts to precursors in "epic" than were the two Italians; for while Dante had good reason to believe himself first among the modern princes of poetry, and while Boccaccio pointedly adds Dante to his list of "greats," Chaucer does not bend to kiss the feet of his two main Italian sources (not to mention other less significant vernacular ones for the Troilus: Petrarch, Benoît, or Guido delle Colonne).  Nonetheless, "makyng in som comedye," he will shortly rely heavily on both of them, if the next stanza (V.1793-1799), Chaucer's defense of his London vernacular, puts an Italian reader in mind of the (pointedly?) absent references to his Italian predecessors.  Treating his English as though it had the valence of classical text or, indeed, the Bible (no tittles or jots to be miswritten or omitted here, either), he may also be reflecting Dante's own défense et illustration of his vernacular poem, at once proudly Latinate and defiantly vernacular.

Chaucer’s anglicizing vaunt has another effect.  Whether or not Chaucer understood Dante's association of vernacular with the language of comedy (while Virgil's high style is equated with tragedy), he could have grasped exactly such formulaic distinctions from the text of the Commedia itself [9].  If Chaucer held similar conceptions, this self-conscious and dazzling stanza carries considerable weight, no matter how playful it is.  The last five stanzas of the work turn from tragedy to comedy, as Troilus’s double sorrow is transcended by Dantean cosmic joy – or such is my contention.  To put that idea into schematic terms, after Chaucer’s two stanzas of envoi [10], the final ten stanzas of the Troilus are divided into two parallel groups.  The first five are composed by a Chaucer lollying about in the tragic swamps of Boccaccian aegritudo amoris; the last five reflect a comic poet, offering a Dantean view from the heaven of the Fixed Stars in Paradiso XXII.  But that discussion is developed in "What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato."

[2] Troilus and Criseyde, ed. R.K. Root (Princeton, 1945 [1926]), p. 402.

[3] For Dante’s awareness of this passage in the Thebaid in Inf. XXIII see my "Dante's 'Georgic' (Inferno XXIV, 1-18)," Dante Studies 102 (1984): 115-17.

[4] Boccaccio, Filocolo, ed. A.E. Quaglio (Mondadori, 1967).

[5] For notice of this reference, see the brief mention in the note to vv. 1789-92 in the Riverside Chaucer, C.D. Benson’s edition of F.N. Robinson’s text (Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 1056.  Now see J. Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (Cambridge, 2007), p. 139.

[6] Epistulae I.ii.1; see J.V. Fleming, Classical Imitation & Interpretation in Chaucer’s "Troilus" (Nebraska, 1990): 179-200, reviewing the history of this identification, beginning with Latham in 1873 [p. 189]).  Lollius is named again at V.1653; see also Hous of Fame, verse 1468.

[7] See J. Garbaty, "Troilus V, 1786-92 and V, 1807-27: An Example of Poetic Process," Chaucer Review 11 (1977): 299-305.

[8] And possibly of Jean de Meun’s similar gesture in the Romance of the Rose toward his five precursors in amatory verse (Tibullus [verse 10,478], Gallus, Catullus, Ovid [verse 10,492], and Guillaume de Lorris [verse 10,496]).

[9] See J.S.P. Tatlock, "The Epilog of Chaucer's Troilus," Modern Philology 18 (1920-21): 631n.-632n., discussing Chaucer’s classical/vernacular juxtaposition in terms of the dichotomy "poesie"/"makyng" found in the preceding stanza.

[10] Boccaccio’s concluding envoi, forming the Filostrato’s ninth section, is surely reflected in Chaucer’s.