Troy Book

Troy is one of the most ambitious attempts in medieval vernacular poetry to recount the story of the Trojan war. John Lydgate, monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, began composing the poem in October 1412 on commission from Henry, Prince of Wales, later King Henry V, and he completed it in 1420. Lydgate's poem is a translation and expansion of Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae, a Latin prose account written in 1287 but based, without acknowledgement, on BenoÐ"®t de Sainte-Maure's Old French Roman de Troie . Troy Book presents the full narrative and mythographic sweep that the Middle Ages expected for the story of Troy's tragic downfall. Though Lydgate wrote the poem some three decades after Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, it furnishes the essential background that educated medieval readers would have brought to Chaucer's poem and to Chaucer's source, Boccaccio's Filostrato. It is background as well for the myths of origins adopted by medieval nations and regions, which claimed descent from the heroes driven to new lands by Troy's fall.

Lydgate's poem is one of several translations of Guido's Historia into Middle English. The Laud Troy Book and the alliterative Destruction of Troy are near contemporaries. All three poems follow the arc of Guido's narrative as it moves from the remote origins of the war in Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece to the heroic battles and downfall of Priam's Troy and finally to the catastrophes awaiting the Greek victors on their homecoming. Lydgate gives, however, a defining shape to Guido's account where the other translations are content to reproduce its sequence of action. In a gesture of acknowledgement and homage to Chaucer's "litel tragedye," Lydgate brings a five-book structure to Guido's thirty-five shorter books. He thereby balances the opening and closing movements and makes Hector's death in Book 3 the narrative center and turning point of the story. Troy Book also differs from its contemporaries by making significant additions to the outlines of Guido's story. Lydgate adds materials from Ovid, Christine de Pisan (for Hector's death), and authorities like Fulgentius (for mythology), Isidore of Seville (for mythography), Jacobus de Cessolis (for the invention of chess), and John Trevisa (for the labors of Hercules). The result is a poem longer, more diffuse in focus, and more consciously learned than its predecessors or contemporaries. As Derek Pearsall remarks, "The Troy Book is a homily first, an encyclopedia second, and an epic nowhere"

In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Troy Book enjoyed considerable reputation and influence. Not long after it was composed, it served as the source for a prose Sege of Troy, which retold the story through the fall of the city at the end of Lydgate's Book 4. In The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (STC 15375), the first book printed in English (c. 1475), William Caxton professes that there is no need for him to translate the portion of his French source, Raoul LefÈvre's Recueil des Histoires de Troie, dealing with the fall of Troy: "And as for the thirde book whiche treteth of the generall and last destruccioun of Troye Hit nedeth not to translate hit into englissh ffor as moche as that worshifull and religyous man dan John lidgate monke of Burye did translate hit but late // after whos werke I fere to take upon me that am not worthy to bere his penner and ynke horne after hym, to medle me in that werke" .Troy Book's classical topic, narrative scope, and moral purpose probably had something to do with William Dunbar's inclusion of Lydgate with Chaucer and John Gower as a triad of originary English poets in his early-sixteenth-century "Lament for the Makaris": "The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour, / The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre" . Richard Pynson printed the first edition of Troy Book in 1513, under the title The hystorye / sege and dystruccyon of Troye (STC 5579). As A. S. G. Edwards and Carol M. Meale note, Pynson's edition was printed at the command of Henry VIII to manipulate public opinion in his first French compaign .Thomas Marshe printed a second edition in 1555, with a prefatory epistle by Robert Braham (STC 5580). The continuing influence of Troy Book can be detected in Thomas Heywood's modernization, printed in 1614 as The Life and Death of Hector (STC 13346a), and in the works of Robert Henryson, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. The sense of Trojan history and particularly of Cressida's character in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida bear the imprint of Lydgate's poem.

Troy incorporates a distinctly medieval approach to its subject matter. As Chaucer shows in the House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde, medieval writers knew Homer only as a name. Moreover, they discounted the poetic tradition associated with him, even as they recognized its cultural authority and struggled ambivalently to appropriate it to their own ends. For them, the claims of the Troy story lie not in the fables of the poets but in the truth of what they took to be historical witness. Such witness was provided by Dares and Dictys, who were supposedly contemporary observers of the war. A fragment of a Greek text of Dictys survives, but the chief sources are Dares's De excidio Troiae historia and Dictys's Ephemeridos belli Troiani, two late Latin texts purporting to translate Greek originals. However spare their accounts of heroes and battles may be, these accounts established the idea for the Middle Ages that the Trojan War could be approached as history with the same factual basis as found in chronicles. Joseph of Exeter's Frigii Daretis Ylias (dated 1188-90) is one example of the continuing claim to historicity that surrounded such chronicle writing. BenoÐ"®t drew on Dares and Dictys to compose his Roman de Troie. He goes beyond the accounts in his sources, however, to introduce an exotic and chivalric locale that figures prominently in subsequent medieval versions of the story. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (dated 1135) claimed a Trojan origin for the British monarchy and people. The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight deliberately frames his Arthurian romance with references to the fall of Troy. In addition to its narrative, the Troy story offered an example to be studied for its lessons in statecraft and moral conduct. Greeks and Trojans participate in the same chivalric culture, and their actions serve as examples of how to govern both a kingdom and its aristocratic subjects.

The medieval approach to the Troy story also implies a particular sense of authorship. Lois