(1.676-79) Chaucer's
Pandarus is an outright pragmatist who is strikingly conversant with a host of proverbs, adages, and colloquial expressions.
Feste 20 Little Tine Boy" (5.1) 1601-2 Troilus and "Love, Love,
Pandarus 12 Cressida Nothing but Love" (3.1) 1602-3 All's Well That "Was This Fair Lavatch 10 Ends Well Face" (1.3) 1604 Measure for "Take, O, Take Boy 6 Measure Those Lips Away" (4.1) (102) 1604 Othello "And Let Me the lago 5 Canakin Clink" (2.3) "King Stephen" lago 8 (2.3) "Willow, Willow" Desdemona 14 (4.3) "Willow" (5.2) Emilia 1 1605 King Lear "Fools Had Neer Fool 4 Less Grace" (1.4) "Then They for Fool 4 Sudden Joy" (1.4) "Whoop, Jug!" Fool 1 (1.4) "He That Has ...
using her wits to help her negotiate the minefield
Pandarus and Fortune
[10] The OED cites the word as a mark of sympathy in the following passage from Chaucer's Boece: "Al pe entencioun of pe wil of mankynde whiche pat is lad by diueise studies hastip to comen to blisfulnesse." [30] In another passage, Chaucer is the first recorded author to use "study" in the sense of "devotion to another's welfare." [31] In Troilus and Criseyde he writes, "But
Pandarus, that in a study stood" (Bk 2.1180): the "study" in this instance probably refers to
Pandarus' anxious abstraction, a "mental perplexity," not a place of learning.
Troilus and Cressida enter via one door after sleeping together in
Pandarus' house, and she is showing him out.
Romeo does not demand a Thersites, a
Pandarus, or a Ulysses; its tragedy is more domestic.
There is another brief reference to Wade in Chaucer: during the party at
Pandarus's house in book III of Troilus and Criseyde, the evening's entertainment is described, 'He song; she pleyde; he tolde tale of Wade.' It appears here as a trace of medieval popular or court culture.
Robert Breault, in the Peter Pears role of the oleaginous
Pandarus, was terrific, as were Mark S.
by Corinne Pierreville (Lyon: Presses Universitaires JeanMoulin--Lyon 3, 2007), or Gretchen Mieszkowski's forthcoming Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer's
Pandarus (New York: PalgraveMacmillan).