The only moment in the poem when Chaucer’s insight seems to fail him is at the very end; he has to account for Cressida’s unfaithfulness, and he is at a loss to know how he shall do it. Shakespeare, when he re-handled the theme, had no such difficulty. His version of the story, planned on much coarser lines than Chaucer’s, leads obviously and inevitably to the fore-ordained conclusion; his Cressida is a minx who simply lives up to her character. What could be more simple? But to Chaucer the problem is not so simple. His Cressida is not a minx. From the moment he first sets eyes on her Chaucer, like his own unhappy Troilus, falls head over ears in love. Beautiful, gentle, gay; possessing, it is true, somewhat “tendre wittes,” but making up for her lack of skill in ratiocination by the “sudden avysements” of intuition; vain, but not disagreeably so, of her good looks and of her power over so great and noble a knight as Troilus; slow to feel love, but once she has yielded, rendering back to Troilus passion for passion; in a word, the “least mannish” of all possible creatures—she is to Chaucer the ideal of gracious and courtly womanhood. But, alas, the old story tells us that Cressida jilted her Troilus for that gross prize-fighter of a man, Diomed. The woman whom Chaucer has made his ideal proves to be no better than she should be; there is a flaw in the crystal. Chaucer is infinitely reluctant to admit the fact. But the old story is specific in its statement; indeed, its whole point consists in Cressida’s infidelity. Called upon to explain his heroine’s fall, Chaucer is completely at a loss. He makes a few half-hearted attempts to solve the problem, and then gives it up, falling back on authority. The old clerks say it was so, therefore it must be so, and that’s that. The fact is that Chaucer pitched his version of the story in a different key from that which is found in the “olde bokes,” with the result that the note on which he is compelled by his respect for authority to close is completely out of harmony with the rest of the music. It is this that accounts for the chief, and indeed the only, defect of the poem—its hurried and boggled conclusion.
I cannot leave Cressida without some mention of the doom which was prepared for her by one of Chaucer’s worthiest disciples, Robert Henryson, in some ways the best of the Scottish poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Shocked by the fact that, in Chaucer’s poem, Cressida receives no punishment for her infidelity, Henryson composed a short sequel, The Testament of Cresseid, to show that poetic justice was duly performed. Diomed, we are told, grew weary as soon as he had “all his appetyte and mair, fulfillit on this fair ladie” and cast her off, to become a common drab.
O fair Cresseid! the flour and A per se
Of Troy and Greece, how wast thow fortunait!
To change in filth all thy feminitie
And be with fleshly lust sa maculait,
And go amang the Grekis, air and late
So giglot-like.
In her misery she curses Venus and Cupid for having caused her to love only to lead her to this degradation:
The seed of love was sowen in my face