Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde tells the story of the twin sorrows of Troilus, son of King Priam of Troy. First we are told of the lovesickness (and also great joy) he experienced after falling in love with Criseyde, a Trojan noblewoman, and later we see his despair following her forced departure from Troy and subsequent betrayal of him. Chaucer completed the poem in the early to middle part of the 1380s, when he was about forty years old. By this point in his literary career, he had composed three works in the dream-vision genre, namely the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame and the Parliament of Fowls. He had also written several of the narratives which he would later incorporate into the Canterbury Tales framework. In the early part of the decade, Chaucer translated Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (‘the consolation of philosophy’) into English prose (for the influence of Boethius’s work on Troilus and Criseyde, see the textboxes at pp. 87, 98, 112 and 133 below). During this period, he was also experimenting with verse which drew on, translated and adapted works of the Italian scholar and poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75). Whilst Anelida and Arcite and the story of Palamon and Arcite (which would later become the Knight’s Tale) are indebted to Boccaccio’s Teseida (see textbox at p. 193 below), Troilus and Criseyde is an adaptation of his Il filostrato (‘the one prostrated by love’).