The Word of Apollo: Prophecy and Vatic Poetry in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

Abstract

G Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1382–86) revolves around the sexual conduct of women in a martial society, most significantly, for the narrative’s avenging Greeks, the conduct of Helen of Troy, whose “ravyssyng to wreken . . . / By Paris done, they wroughten al hir peyne.”1 One of the poem’s less prominent assessments of Helen and Paris is that of Oenone, the shepherdess of Ovid’s epistolary Heroides 5 (c. 25–16 BCE).2 The former lover of Paris, Oenone lost his affections to Helen following the contest of beauty between Venus, Juno, and Minerva. Early in Book I of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer places Oenone’s story in the mouth of Pandarus, who comically discusses the Ovidian source as if it were a physical letter received within the fiction of the romance. Pandarus describes the epistle that Oenone “Wrot in a compleynte of hir hevinesse,” asking Troilus if he has seen “the lettre that she wroot” (I.655–56). When Troilus answers that he has not seen it, Pandarus recites part of its closing section. Neatly dodging readerly expectation that he might set out the directly relevant backstory of Helen and Paris that the letter contains, he rather quotes Oenone’s account of Apollo: