Themes and Ideas

Abstract

Abstract This chapter first explores how the poem constitutes a form of debate about the nature and value of love, before analysing the poem’s concerns with love within time and with love and freedom, concluding with sections on the poem’s principal figures and its problematic ending. After an introductory section on source awareness in Troilus, this chapter discusses how the poem includes debate and deliberation about the experience of love, and surveys the poem’s representations of how love can be understood as service, as quasi-religious devotion, and as illness, along with the role of compassion and of commitments to secrecy, honour and fidelity. A section is devoted to the poem’s presentation of subjectivity in its protagonists, followed by analyses of the personalities of Troilus, Criseyde, Pandarus and Diomede. A final section discusses the challenges to interpretation posed by how the poem ends.