SOURCE: "Troilus," in Chaucer and His Poetry, Harvard University Press, 1915, pp. 108-21.

Kittredge is renowned as the editor of the Complete Works of Shakespeare (with Irving Ribner) and for his collections of English and Scottish ballads as well as for his studies of Chaucer, including Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Troilus and Chaucer and His Poetry from which the following excerpt is taken. In this passage, Kittredge summarizes the situation and action of Troilus and Criseyde and argues that it is a superlative love tragedy.

Chaucer is known to everybody as the prince of storytellers, as incomparably the greatest of our narrative poets. Indeed, if we disregard the epic, which stands in a class by itself, I do not see why we should hesitate to call him the greatest of all narrative poets whatsoever, making no reservation of era or of language. His fame began in his...