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The Problem of the Performative in Chaucer's Prioress Sequence

Situated at the center of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus's commandment that Pandarus "perfourme it out" marks a point of no return. 1 More specifically it signifies the exact moment at which the plans to seduce Criseyde become a plan-in-action. It is here that indeci- sion gives way to decision, thought gives way to act, and romance gives way to tragedy. All this occurs by virtue of a special valence in the lan- guage used. Troilus's utterance is in every way a performative utterance. It does something; in other words, it enacts, commits, transforms. That this performative contains the very word perfourme is intriguing. It perhaps tempts us to investigate the passage as one that somehow prefigures or suggests ideas native to contemporary performance and speech-act the- ory. This temptation is undoubtedly a powerful one. Discovering such proto-awareness in medieval literature would provide deep historical val- idation for the upstart field of performance theory. 2 Regrettably, further analysis makes clear that Troilus's "perfourme," and indeed Chaucer's perform in general, is not at all the "perform" of contemporary theory. The reasons for this are many. Up until the fif- teenth century, for instance, perform appears only as a verb, and so the attendant critical-theoretical notions of "performance" and "performer" are absent. 3 More importantly, however, the verb refers almost exclusively in Middle English to the finite product of a finite act. (We shall look at two examples of this shortly.) One might perform a chair, therefore, or even a great enterprise, but the notion of performing something like "gender"—a performance that unfolds through reiteration—is a notion absent from Middle English. Additional complications obtain in the fact that the central medieval force of perform is one in which the form sub- sumes the per. This is to say, Middle English usage typically emphasizes