Troilus - The Story in The Medieval and Renaissance Eras

The Story in The Medieval and Renaissance Eras

In the sources considered so far, Troilus' only narrative function is his death. The treatment of the character changes in two ways in the literature of the medieval and renaissance periods. First, he becomes an important and active protagonist in the pursuit of the Trojan War itself. Second, he becomes an active heterosexual lover, rather than the passive victim of Achilles' pederasty. By the time of John Dryden's neo-classical adaptation of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida it is the ultimate failure of his love affair that defines the character.

For medieval writers, the two most influential ancient sources on the Trojan War were the purported eye-witness accounts of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan which have both survived in Latin versions. In Western Europe the Trojan side of the war was favoured and therefore Dares was preferred over Dictys. Although Dictys' account positions Troilus' death later in the war than was traditional, it conforms to antiquity's view of him as a minor warrior if one at all. Dares' De excidio Trojae historia (History of the Fall of Troy) introduces the character as a hero who takes part in events beyond the story of his death.

Twelfth and 13th century authors such as Joseph of Exeter and Albert of Stade continued to tell the legend of the Trojan War in Latin in a form that follows Dares' tale with Troilus remaining one of the most important warriors on the Trojan side. However, it was two of their contemporaries, Benoît de Sainte-Maure in his French verse romance and Guido delle Colonne in his Latin prose history, both also admirers of Dares, who were to define the tale of Troy for the remainder of the medieval period. The details of their narrative of the war were copied, for example, in the Troy Books of Laud and Lydgate and also Raoul Lefevre's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Lefevre, through Caxton's 1474 printed translation, was in turn to become the best known retelling of the Troy story in Renaissance England and influenced Shakespeare among others. The story of Troilus as a lover, invented by Benoît and retold by Guido, generated a second line of influence. It was taken up as a tale that could be told in its own right by Boccaccio and then by Chaucer who established a tradition of retelling and elaborating the story in English-language literature which was to be followed by Henryson and Shakespeare.