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...unavoidable conclusion that he is and always will be her "owne aboven every creature" (5.154), is this one: "And that ye me wolde as youre brother trete" (5.134). (1) Because that request is one of many in rather astonishingly sudden "come on" by the Greek hero, the emphasis on the brotherly relationship is easy to overlook. Yet it results from what has to have been a remarkably careful selection of terms, and not just because that term is a timelessly effective exploitation of familiarity, as in the lyric "Brother, can you spare a dime?" (2) Diomedes' use of "brother" here serves as the climax to Chaucer's development throughout his poem of the theme of brotherhood and the complex ways in which that relationship and the term itself get exploited--by the poem's characters and even to a lesser extent by the narrator.
Scholars have touched upon the brotherly relationship in the Troilus only to the extent that they focus on some related element--friendship, for instance, or the poem's claustrophobic setting and the close, even cliquish and in many cases familial relationships depicted in that setting, not to mention the related and certainly more sensational concern among scholars with hints of incestuous elements within the story and its allusions. Though the term "brother" and the relationship it names often comes up in these connections, I think it is productive to untangle it from them at least partially so that we can understand what Chaucer does with words, with cultural terms, in this poem.
Such a focus is not lacking in discussions of the Canterbury Tales. In fact, because of David Wallace's identification of the social forces determining that work's "associational" structure, particularly the influence of the guild language, with its emphasis on horizontal, fraternal relationships, the poem's repetition of terms for brotherhood makes even more sense than it did before, when the term was seen primarily as a key element in Chaucer's portrayals of religious hypocrisy. (3) Such characters as the Friar in the Summoner's Tale and the monk in the Shipman's Tale use terms of familial attachment--brotherhood and cozenage--as a way to hoodwink the unsuspicious "consumer" of those terms. Emphasis on the guilds leads Wallace to regard the obviously religious satire implied by the use of "brother" within the Friar's Tale as, in fact, Chaucer's interrogation of the guilds' use of that term and of the confrontation of the urban and expansive associational structure with the more traditional, limited structure of the country parish. (4)
According to Jean Jost, "brother" or a variant occurs 101 times in the Canterbury Tales. This frequency, she writes, "[suggests] the concept's strong linking function throughout the work," whether the term is employed positively or negatively. On the basis of these occurrences Jost draws the following picture of brotherhood within the Tales, the list going from the strongest to the weakest bonds:
(1) literal brothers of the same mother such as Placebo and Justinus in the Merchant's Tale; (2) closely related kin such as the cousins Palamon and Arcite in the Knight's Tale; (3) the putative "cousins," the monk and the merchant, in the Shipman's Tale; (4) the three comrades who pledge sworn brotherhood in the Pardoner's Tale; (5) men connected in some affectionate or emotional bond such as the philosopher and his "leve brother" in the Franklin's Tale (V. 1607); (6) those bound together in a religious confraternity such as the Franciscans in the Summoner's Tale; and (7) simple acquaintances who acknowledge the other's friendship, as does Harry advising the Miller, "Robyn, my leeve brother" (I 3129). (5)
Primarily, the first and fifth of these manifestations of brotherhood are in play in the Troilus. In addition, the appearance of the term in the Troilus and its allusions includes the relationship of brother to sister, of brother in law, and of heterosexual friends--as in Diomedes' request to become Criseyde's brother. As a linking device in the Troilus, "brother" connects the relationships between Troilus and Pandarus, Troilus and Criseyde, Diomedes and Criseyde, and the narrator and his readers, each of which involves a brotherly component. A term by which Chaucer depicts friendship, love, avuncular manipulation, and predatory sexuality, "brother" is also a problem to be explored in itself. It is a word whose utility seems to have intrigued Chaucer, its easy transferability from one social order to another always enriching the word's complex and powerfully ironic function within the poem. Probably encouraged by the front piece picture to the Corpus manuscript depicting Chaucer reciting the Troilus--I anachronistically imagine Chaucer, not the persona/narrator, lifting his two hands to give the double quote sign, or being tempted to do so, whenever he uses the term brother. Those quotes, to extend this image, represent the cultural baggage that Chaucer and his actual, as opposed to the narrator's imagined, audience understand to be carried by that term. They represent the times in the narrative when the term activates a wider perspective then the one through which it is spoken by a particular character. They mark in simple terms the incongruity of irony. The temptation to lift the hands to form the quotations without actually doing it represents Chaucer's resistance to an irony that he knows is there but which he refuses to activate, largely because he is a participant in the world of the particular brotherhood he is tempted to criticize.
Let's acquiesce to Wallace's notion that Chaucer was not just textual in his observations of life, that he was partly shaped by the customs and the language of the guilds, that he "was influenced ... by his daily acquaintance with a pattern of social practice that is drastically undertheorized: the Germanic tradition of the guilds." (6) Though Wallace's claim relates primarily to Chaucer's great associational project of the Canterbury Tales, it applies to an earlier period in his life as well. In other words, the language of the guilds, the pervasive use of "brother" and "sister" as designators of its members and as expressions of an egalitarian, rather than authoritarian view of social behavior, exists as an important context within which Chaucer, a vintner's son, understood the meaning(s) of the term brother. Not just an institution, the guilds, according to Wallace, comprised "a form of consciousness, a mentality." (7) At the same time, however, Chaucer was a friend to knights and a servant of the royal family. In Russell's words, he understood them, surely better than they understood themselves: he understood their compelling, almost inborn sense of noblesse oblige, their principles, their truculence, their violence, and their unpredictability.... He could understand ... their irresistible romance with the past, what Donald Howard would have called their obsolescence. He could understand from his distance their obsession with bloodlines, with generations and family honor, considerations that loomed all the larger as economic upheavals of the fourteenth century made them less and less the center of society. (8)
Existing between these two fraternal cultures, the guilds and the court, Chaucer also might very well have been close to a more intimate fraternal association, that of brother-in-arms. Even without the evidence in the Knight's Tale of the relationship between Palamon and Arcite, Chaucer's connections with such knights as John Clanvowe and William Neville, for instance, make it likely that he knew well the language and conventions of sworn brotherhood. It is probably going too far to imagine that Chaucer himself was party to such an association as might be suggested, for instance, by Clanvowe and Neville's serving as witnesses to Cecily Campaigne's signing of the document releasing Chaucer from the charge of raptus in 1380. Their doing that, however, has all the signs of the response of members of a fraternal organization--a brotherhood of knights--to the predicament of one of its members, whom they are bound to assist even in legal and personal affairs.
It is not going too far, however, to imagine that Chaucer knew of such a brotherhood between two knights, perhaps between Clanvowe and Neville themselves, who died in 1391 near Constantinople, either on a pilgrimage or crusade. The knights were entombed together in a Dominican church. The tomb slab, depicting their arms impaled, all but certainly signals that they were brothers in arms. (9) Such an agreement would require the knights to swear allegiance to one another. A legally enforceable agreement according to the documents that Maurice Keen examines, brotherhood-in-arms created a relationship in...
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