 Afflicted Love quiz Your current score...
5. Troy-boy
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is the story of the Trojan prince Troilus, whose lover Criseyde abandons him in favor of Diomedes, a Greek warrior. Soon Troilus is dead. Who kills him?
A) Achilles, the Greek champion ü
B) Calchas, a seer, Criseyde’s father
C) Criseyde, his former lover
D) Diomedes, his rival for Criseyde
Upon learning that Criseyde has betrayed him with Diomedes while a captive of the Greeks, Troilus runs mad on the battlefield, repeatedly attacking Diomedes. Before he can kill Diomedes, he himself is killed by Achilles. Some Chaucer authorities consider Troilus and Criseyde to be the author’s finest work. Even as a technical feat of poetry it is considered remarkable: it consists of more than a thousand fluidly-expressed stanzas in the challenging seven-line “rhyme royal” form. It is also one of the few amongst his major works that Chaucer actually completed. In time, Troilus and Criseyde was drawn upon by Shakespeare as a major source for his rather strange play Troilus and Cressida, which devotes less time to the central love story than to the sometimes bawdy comic scenes set in the Greek camp.
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