ABSTRACT
The minor changes that Chaucer made in Troilus and Criseyde, changes of a word, revisions of a line or two, the shifting and cancellation of stanzas, present a special opportunity and a challenge to the critic. They bring him into intimate contact with the poet at work, as he scraped and rubbed at the mistakes of Adam and corrected or improved his own wording. Occasionally they point beyond the immediate detail, beyond the individual stanza to problems of characterization, to form and proportion, parallel and contrast, to questions of narrative technique as they relate to the communication of emotional intensity, in effect to the kind of concern revealed by the study of major additions to the poem. Such revisions I have discussed elsewhere. 1 That a poet like Chaucer revised his work should surprise no one. That evidence of the changes should have come down to us with the clarity Root’s meticulous work on the manuscripts made manifest, this is the miracle. 2 We owe it, I suspect, to the evident popularity of the poem.
