recount the story of Troilus and Cressida, here, but we’ll say that it is the best extra-biblical story of love we have read, and we find it both tragic and moving.
For our purposes, it is important to note that although the concept of courtly love is strong in the text, and love is embodied in fornication, Chaucer begins with prayers. This connection of love and true religion is unique and noteworthy. Chaucer asks the reader to pray for him that he might tell the story of Troilus and Cressida well. Shakespeare, who borrows from Chaucer, should have also asked his readers to pray for him, as he does not tell the story nearly as well.
Then Chaucer asks for more prayer. He asks for the reader’s prayers on behalf of those who have never loved, that they might know love. He asks for prayers for those who have been unrequited in their love, that they might find happiness and response from their true beloved. He asks for prayers for those who have once been in love, and have now fallen out of it, that they might be restored. He asks for prayers for those who are in love that they might remain in it. This turning to heaven to understand more fully the nature of love for the beloved is unique in its time. Yet it underscores a kind of desperation one might expect when all one’s hope is tethered to mere human love. It is filled with soaring expectations that are at risk of crashing disappointments due to human limitation and fallenness. Certainly, human love can be good, but it cannot replace divine love. Chaucer makes this clear.
Regarding the desperation of Troilus’s situation, Lewis observes, “All men have waited with ever decreasing hope, day after day, for someone or something that does not come, and all would willingly forget the experience.”26 Chaucer’s story ends with Troilus’s heart desperately broken, and he is defeated on the battlefield. Then he has an out-of-body experience where his soul transcends the battlefield after his death. From this elevated perspective, he sees what must ultimately be made of all earthly loves. Chaucer then includes one last prayer: “Blessed Jesus turn all our loves to Thee.”
As Lewis observes, “Chaucer, never more truly medieval and universal … recalls the ‘yonge, fresshe folks’ of his audience from human to divine love: recalls them ‘hom’, as he significantly says.”27 This idea, if not first encountered in Dante is, at least, developed in Dante and widely distributed through him, influencing many other authors following in his wake. For now, suffice it to say, Lewis underscores that “Chaucer has few rivals and no masters.”28 In his hands, this story of love and passion directs the heart to God if one ever hopes to make significant sense of human love. Passion in marriage is not yet emphasized but there is movement in a direction away from courtly love toward the management of the passions under God.
Setting the Stage for Edmund Spenser
Chaucer has set the stage for the coming of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, with its elevation of marriage as the place where romantic human passions ought to have their highest expression. Still, Lewis has his readers consider a few more phases in the transition from the idealization of adultery to God’s ideal—in Christian marriage—as the proper place, the God-given place, to express and find fulfillment for one’s earthly passions.
For example, Lewis observes that John Gower (1330–1408) is first among these transitional poets, and Lewis says Gower’s significant contribution lies in his explicit concern for form and unity. The great contribution he makes to the literature of this age is to take seeming contrasts and weave them together into a coherent whole.29 This feature in his writing resembles Christianity and how it works. If Christianity is true, and what is observed in the Scriptures is accurate, then existing tensions are often exacerbated in a fallen world. Estrangements lead to deeper estrangements and alienations proliferate unless they can be woven back together by grace. Thus, in Gower, as in Christianity, we see reconciled transcendence and immanence. Eternity can be encountered in mutability and God’s sovereignty and human free will may be harmonized and reconciled. So too, concord can be found between the genders: male and female can be made into one. The universe, created by the triune God, is a place where unity and diversity can coexist. This transition step found in Gower is important in the movement from courtly love to the Spenserian reconciliation 29 Lewis, 198–99. uniting passion and marital love with great literary success. Spenser, inheritor of all that has come before him, will rescue marriage from the challenge of courtly love and the practice of adultery. So Gower is an important link in the chain from Chaucer to Spenser.
Lewis again reminds his readers, “There are few absolute beginnings in literary history, but there is endless transformation.”30 While Lewis mentions many writers, the following will be sufficient to show that he keeps to his task. He is explaining how the literature of the Middle Ages went through incremental changes using allegory to connect passion and marriage.
The King’s Quair is the next highlighted by Lewis, and of this work Lewis wrote that James I of Scotland (1394–1437) “sat down to write what most emphatically deserves to be called ‘sum newe thing.’”31 This is because James wrote of his own love for the woman who became his wife. Lewis adds that in this work one sees clearly such transition that “As the love-longing becomes more cheerful it also becomes more moral.”32 Lewis describes The King’s Quair as the first modern book of love. Next, follows John Ludgate (c. 1371–1449) who wrote The Temple of Glas, in which the hero appeals to Venus that she might make a way not to “adultery but to marriage.”33 In a passage that makes the heart sink, Lewis descries the plight of young women in all times—be it in the Middle Ages, or today—who are trapped in the bondage of human trafficking, or groped by predators. Ludgate pleads on behalf of “young girls forced into marriage to mend their father’s estates, and for yet younger and more deeply wronged oblates, snatched from the nursery to the cloister for the good of their father’s souls.”34 This text is so contemporary. Each age has those who have drifted from a traditional view of marriage. The abusers become self-referential and thereby tend toward utilitarianism. In denying the humanity of others, their own is unwittingly diminished. The abuses against conjugal fidelity have underscored the need for some kind of restoration in every age. Again, this is a reason why the path charted in The Allegory of Love is so important, and in some ways, so contemporary.
In William Nevill’s (1497–1545) The Castle of Pleasure, the literary form develops into what Lewis calls “a moral allegory.”35 With Nevill, Lewis notes, “What was originally a moral necessity is becoming a structural characteristic” and “The love which he celebrates is a perfectly respectable love, ending in marriage.”36 The change is duly noted and the way is paved for Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
Spenser’s Goal for The Fairie Queene
The Fairie Queene was written to give pleasure to Spenser’s readers. Nevertheless, Lewis summarizes the author’s purpose: “The goal of love which Spenser here celebrates is lawful, carnal fruition within marriage.”37 To accomplish this, Spenser utilized the influence of the Italian epic. In fact, Lewis says, “‘Influence’ is too weak a word for the relation which exists between the Italian epic and The Faerie Queene.”38 The style was best used by Ariosto and even more by Boiardo’s Orlando Furioso (“The Madness of Roland”) and the Innamorato. Supreme characteristics of this genre are “The speed, the pell-mell of episodes, the crazy carnival jollity of Boiardo [which] are his very essence.”39
Lewis says the formula is to take any number of chivalrous romances and arrange such a series of coincidences that they interrupt one another every few pages. There is no rest. The action gives way to new and constant twists and adventure. For a popular, modern comparison, the action of an Indiana Jones movie would best capture something of the flavor. In addition, Spenser co-opts the Italian epic—a literary form already so beloved and popular in his day—for
