The Chaucer Review

The Chaucer Review 35.3 (2001) 223-259

Sartorial Signs in Troilus and Criseyde

Laura F. Hodges

[Appendix]

Geoffrey Chaucer's costume signs, metaphors, and allusions in Troilus and Criseyde ¹ collectively comprise a more substantive list than has been analyzed previously, a list that includes widow's weeds with appropriate headdress, armor, weapons, coat armor, two rings, one or two brooches, hoods, shirts, furred cloak, pilgrim's weeds, a sleeve, and a glove. Further, his methodology in deploying a number of significant costume images and his skill in doing so are overlooked by the majority of critics. Pregnant with literary as well as contemporary social and moral significance, these images function as sartorial metaphors which highlight the plot structure while they explicate and elucidate characterization. In addition, an assessment of Chaucer's sartorial images in Troilus and Criseyde offers insight into this poet's poetic technique of employing costume rhetoric.

Signature Costumes:

A signature costume or garment marks each of the major characters at significant points in the plot. Chaucer plays these costume images against each other in a rhetorical technique best described as "interlacing"; therefore, each signature costume must be considered in conjunction with those of other characters. Further, the text invites, even requires, successive comparison and evaluation of each sign in context, as some of the sartorial items reappear in changed circumstances, go from hand to hand accumulating significance, and are modified in the process.

Chaucer gives his most complete description of Criseyde's signature costume, gleaming widow's weeds, just prior to Troilus's first sight of her so that readers comprehend the vision that causes his subsequent surrender to love; similarly, the initial description of a costumed Troilus in armor, as Criseyde sees him for the first time from her window, depicts the sight which Criseyde recognizes, the vision of the man she loves and acknowledges in her "who yaf me drink" exclamation. For other characters, Chaucer supplies a synecdotal signature garment or accessory such [End Page 223] as weapons for Ector, coat armor for Diomede, and most significantly a hood for the lovers' go-between Pandarus. Weapons, coat armor, and hood each suggest the complete knightly costume of which they are a part, at the same time they function metonymically: the weapons standing for Ector's prowess, the coat armor for Diomede's lineage, and the hood for Pandarus's trickery. Chaucer's choice of garment images and his placement of them as markers for pivotal events and crucial elements of characterization in this poem comprise a distinctive pattern of costume rhetoric and a deliberate technique of judicious highlighting. In contrast to many elaborate descriptions of costume in romances, Chaucer's sartorial images in Troilus and Criseyde are spare in diction and in length, even though he expands the meagre images found in his sources. As Sanford Brown Meech states, "Chaucer takes over most of the scanty particulars in the Filostrato about clothing, ornament, or weapons and adds to them always realistically and often with symbolic implications." ²

Criseyde's Widow's Weeds

Chaucer underscores the importance of Criseyde's costume by centering his first visual image of her in widow's weeds against the backdrop of information pertaining to the Trojan War and an explication of the war's three-fold effect upon her as a native citizen of besieged Troy, as a widow, and as the daughter of a traitor to that city (I, 57-154). We never know if she is a widow because of the war, but we do know that she lacks a husband's protection and that her position in Troy is threatened as a result of her father's treason against this city and its ruler. Consequently, in fear of the groundswell of ill feeling against her family, Criseyde, a "widewe . . . and allone" (I, 97), humbly begs Ector's protection (I, 110-12). The narrator renders her petition more pathetic through a delineation of Criseyde in "widewes habit large of samyt broun" (I, 109).

The reader of medieval courtly romances who is interested in the semiotics of...