ll.1101-1200

1106 ‘Sey “Al foryeve” and stynt is al this fare!’: how would you translate Pandarus’s advice? What is the role of past participles?

1126-7 ‘Is this a mannes game? … wol ye do thus for shame?’: see above, line 1098.

1147-8 for evey wight, I gesse, / That loveth wel, meneth but gentilesse: what are the effects in this book of the narrator’s fond (absurd?) partiality in everything to do with love?

1154-5 she bar hym on honde / That this was don of malice , hire to fonde: (‘she accused him that this was done with ill intent in order to test her’). So Criseyde is perfectly well aware that what has happened may be trickery. How do such hints at her awareness affect your reading of how she goes along with what happens in this book?

1158: And for the lasse harm , he moste feyne: does the poem address the harm, less or more, in the feigning or pretending that it describes?

1168: ‘Wol ye the childish jalous contrefete?’ To ‘contrefete’ is to counterfeit or imitate (see also 2.1532, 5.1578). How does this form part of a larger theme in the poem? For Criseyde’s preoccupation with jealousy, see also 2.753-5, 2.837; 3.837, 987, 1010-30. For another reference to an effect as childish see 4.804.

1177   ‘Of gilte misericorde!’: (‘upon guilt, forgiveness’). Why does Chaucer give Criseyde’s expression of her forgiveness such solemn formality and religious associations (‘misericordia’ is Latin for mercy) that he has to have Criseyde explain her meaning in the next line?

1188-9   And Pandarus … leyde hym to slepe: Pandarus goes to sleep in the same room and is unmentioned until he is described reentering Criseyde’s bedroom next morning (3.1555). Is an interest in his whereabouts in the interim just an anachronistic modern preoccupation or a part of the poem’s theme?

1191-2 What myghte … in his foot?: (‘What can the hapless lark say, when the sparrowhawk has her in his talons?’) How does this comparison relate to the action described in the previous stanza?

1199 As writen clerkes in hire bokes olde: how do the old clerks know how it felt to Criseyde to be embraced by her lover? How is the conventional invocation of bookish authorities being revised by attributing to the old books an unlikely knowledgeability about such intimate inward feelings?