Notes to Chapter 8

1. Poetria nova 43-45 (ed. Faral 1971:198; trans. Nims 1967:16-17).

2. See Arbusow 1963; Horace Ars poetica 361, and the commentary by Trimpi 1978:29-74.

3. Consult further Davis 1979:114. I hope to pursue further elsewhere the extent to which Chaucer modeled Pandarus on the contemporary character of lawyers or advocates. Obviously Pandarus is an "advocate" and a "representative" for Troilus; and if we consider only such medieval legal concepts as "Who does a thing through another--it is as if he did it himself, on his own" (Hofmann 1974:153), we can readily see the potential importance of the law for illuminating Chaucer's poem.

4. See B 2-4 and the excellent commentary by Yunck 1963.

5. See Krewitt 1971:231 (emphasis added); Brinkmann 1980:173-85.

6. De planctu naturae, pr. 4 (PL 210:453; trans. Moffat 1972:44); and see below, chap. 12 and n. 17. {258/259}

7. Anticlaudianus 2.404-408 (ed. Bossuat 1955:84; trans. Sheridan 1977:85); De nuptiis 3.226 (ed. Dick 1925:83; trans. Stahl 1977:66).

8. The best study of "ingenium" is that by Wetherbee 1972:94-98, 116-18; see, further, Wetherbee 1976:45-64; also Nitzsche 1975.

9. Consider, further, in this regard, Troilus's "sickness" at the end of book 2 (lines 1527-33; emphasis added):

Quod Troilus, "Iwis, thow nedeles
Conseilest me that siklich I me feyne,
For I am sik in ernest, douteles,
So that wel neigh I sterve for the peyne."
Quod Pandarus, "Thow shalt the bettre pleyne,
And hast the lasse nede to countrefete,
For hym men demen hoot that men seen swete."

10. See especially 3.1562-82 and the remarks by Donaldson 1975:294-95 and by Muscatine 1969:138.

11. I should perhaps make a special point of noting that Ovid's stories are moral in themselves, before later medieval allegory reads them--Lycaon is a wolf, and his metamorphosis only fulfills the truth of his character. Medieval allegory, then, cultivates what is already evident in Ovid's text. On this crucial matter the finest remarks I know are those by Allen and Moritz 1981:14-20 and by Demats 1973:107-77.

12. See Rowland 1969:9; Carton 1979:47-61.

13. At lines 124, 303, 314, 449, 450, 606, 770; and see Hatcher 1973:316-18. {259/260}

14. See, e.g., 2.579-81, 878, 1560-61, 1723-24; 3.124-26, 1165-66, 1184-89, 1226-29. In my text the two principal treatments of "entente" are in chap. 9 below. It almost goes without saying that this one term and its significance for Chaucer's poem deserve a study as long as this one, if not longer: in a sense, the Troilus is a poem about intentionality, moral and poetic intentionality alike.

15. At 3.310, 571. With this issue my work meets and joins that of Trimpi 1974:113-18, 117 especially: "For it is precisely through his release from ethical and historical circumstances that the artist can establish a temporary order of events and of emotions which has the power to increase the listener's understanding of the communal world after he has returned to it." Pandarus's falsification consists in just this: he does not have any such "release from ethical and historical circumstances" because he is imposing his images on real beings (real, that is, within the fiction)--he is still within "the communal world" when he practices his art. Early in Fellini's Satyricon, Vernacchio, the jester, as part of the entertainment he is staging, chops off the hand of a beggar, Muzio Scevola; assistants then take Scevola backstage and attach a golden hand to the bleeding stump; meanwhile, a child actor, in the role of Caesar, exclaims "`Now, through me, great Jove will restore that hand.'" Scevola is led back onstage, and the audience is properly awed by the spectacle. Here, from a great work of a modern master, is an example of the extreme of Pandarus's perversion of art--total disregard of the boundary between illusion and reality, between "the communal world" and the artist's "temporary order of events and of emotions."