ABSTRACT
For T. S. Eliot makes a similar point in relation to the play and the poem. Shakespeare’s play, he says, is ‘the passing fury of a prodigious and, for the moment, irresponsible Titan, working almost blindly through destruction towards his own ends’. In Shakespeare’s play, inner and outer are violently rent apart: for Troilus ‘a thing inseparate divides more wider than the sky and earth’. From the beginning in the play Troilus had, in fact, appealed not to absolute value but to a romantic and existential willed commitment. Where Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida is paradoxical, multifold and full of evident warring contradictions, Geoffrey Chaucer offers something that is clear and simple when close at hand, shimmering, shifting and elusive in the middle distance, opening on an infinitely recessive profundity. Troilus’ language as Chaucer gives it is conversational, direct, entire and extensive.
