Troilus and Criseyde

Prophetic dreams are a recurring motif throughout Troilus and Criseyde, illustrating The Tension Between Free Will and Divine Providence. Many of Chaucer’s poems employ dreams and dream visions to create ambiguity and doubt—with dream interpretation essentially paralleling the practice of textual analysis. Chaucer borrows a common medieval way of understanding dreams, having Pandarus caution Troilus that many dreams are merely the result of diet or external stimuli affecting the sleeping body, while Cassandra interprets the dreams as genuinely prophetic.

The first prophetic dream in Troilus and Criseyde occurs when Criseyde first learns that Troilus is in love with her. She falls asleep to the sounds of bird song, but the birds that appear in her dreams foreshadow the turbulence of her love affair:

[A]s she slep, anonright tho hire mette

How that an egle, fetherered whit as bon

Under hire brest his longe clawes sette,

And out hire herte he rente, and that anon,

And dide his herte into hire brest to gon (2.925-29).

The white eagle that tears her heart out seems to represent Troilus, as hunting raptors were often affiliated with the nobility. The transfer of her heart into the eagle’s breast represents how her heart literally belongs to him after she falls in love.