Chaucer’s Troy in Early Modern Wales: Time and History in the Welsh <i>Troelus a Chresyd</i>

ABSTRACT The Welsh play Troelus a Chresyd, a translation and adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, has received comparatively little attention from scholars. This article shows how Troelus reworks Chaucer’s and Henryson’s conceptions of time and history-writing in response to early modern skepticism about whether Britain was founded by Trojans. During the sixteenth century, writers increasingly questioned whether the Welsh were descended from the Trojan Brutus, as Geoffrey of Monmouth had famously claimed. By expanding some of Chaucer’s and Henryson’s ideas about predeterminism, time measurement, and historiography, while minimizing other aspects of their poems, Troelus fashions an approach to historical interpretation that is flexible enough to ride out fluctuations in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s early modern reputation. In doing so, Troelus broadens our view of Chaucer’s and Henryson’s reception in the early modern period.