Love, history and emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida 9781784996796

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lsanctity O V E , H I Sand T O R Ypornography AND EMOTION Iin N medieval CHAUCER A N D SHAKESPEARE culture

Founding series editors j. j. anderson, gail ashton

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Series editors: Anke Bernau and David Matthews Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton

This series is broad in scope and receptive to innovation, bringing toge approaches. It is intended to include monographs, collections of commi and editions and/or translations of texts, with a focus on English and literature and culture. It embraces medieval writings of many different kind historical, political, scientific, religious) as well as post-medieval treatme material. An important aim of the series is that contributions to it should style which is accessible to a wide range of readers.

Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Nicola McDonald, Andrew James Johnston, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon and Stephanie Trigg already published

The Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture seriesLanguage publishes new and imagination in theresearch, Gawain-poems J. J. Anderson informed by current critical methodologies, on the literary cultures of medieval Britain Water and fire: The myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England (including Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Latin and Celtic writings), post-medieval Danielincluding Anlezark Parlement of Foulys (by Geoffrey Chaucer) engagements with and representations of the Middle AgesThe(medievalism). ‘Literature’ D. S. Brewer (ed.) is viewed in a broad and inclusive sense, embracing imaginative, historical, political, Greenery: Ecocritical readings of late medieval English literature Gillianmonographs Rudd scientific, dramatic and religious writings. The series offers and essay ­collections, as well as editions and translations of texts. Titles Available in the Series Language and imagination in the Gawain-poems J. J. Anderson Water and fire: The myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England Daniel Anlezark Rethinking the South English legendaries Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds) The Parlement of Foulys (by Geoffrey Chaucer) D. S. Brewer (ed.) Sanctity and pornography in medieval culture: On the verge Bill Burgwinkle and Cary Howie Between earth and heaven: Liminality and the Ascension of Christ in Anglo-Saxon literature Johanna Kramer Reading Robin Hood: Content, form and reception in the outlaw myth Stephen Knight In strange countries: Middle English literature and its afterlife: Essays in memory of J.J. Anderson David Matthews (ed.) A knight’s legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian lore in early modern England Ladan Niayesh (ed.) Greenery: Ecocritical readings of late medieval English literature Gillian Rudd Transporting Chaucer Helen Barr

Love, history and emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida EDITED BY ANDREW JAMES JOHNSTON, RUSSELL WEST-PAVLOV AND ELISABETH KEMPF

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2016

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 9022 6 hardback First published 2016

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

Acknowledgements page vii Contributorsviii Introduction: performing the politics of passion: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida and the literary tradition of love and history Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

1

  1 ‘Expectation whirls me round’: hope, fear and time in Troilus and Cressida17 Kai Wiegandt   2 ‘Potent raisings’: performing passion in Chaucer and Shakespeare32 Andreas Mahler   3 The space of desire in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Troy 46 Paul Strohm   4 What’s Hecuba to him? Absence, silence and lament in Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida61 Hester Lees-Jeffries   5 Remembering to forget in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: narrative palimpsests and moribund epochalities 76 Russell West-Pavlov   6 ‘Language in her eye’: the expressive face of Criseyde/ Cressida94 Stephanie Trigg   7 The presence of Troilus and Cressida: Shakespeare’s refurbishment of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde109 John Drakakis   8 ‘Stewed phrase’ and the impassioned imagination in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida125 Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

vi

Contents

  9 Arrogant authorial performances: Criseyde to Cressida 141 Wolfram R. Keller 10 Changing emotions in Troilus: the crucial year 157 David Wallace 11 Gendered books: reading, space and intimacy in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde172 Andrew James Johnston 12 ‘The formless ruin of oblivion’: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and literary defacement 189 James Simpson Index207

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements

As we put together this volume we received kindness, generosity and encouragement from numerous quarters. We especially wish to thank Anke Bernau, Martin Bleisteiner, John M. Bowers, Marion Campbell, Klaus Dietz, Sven Duncan Durie, Simon During, Indira Ghose, David Matthews, Robert Meyer-Lee, Adrian Poole, Margitta Rouse and Richard Wilson. Andrew James Johnston wishes to extend particular thanks to Ute Berns and Ulrike Herrmann. Russ West-Pavlov would like to thank Tatjana, Joshua, Iva and Niklas for their love and support and for the privilege of witnessing some fine instances of contemporary medievalism ‘live’. The editors Berlin and Tübingen, June 2015

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contributors

JOHN DRAKAKIS, Professor, Department of English Studies, University of Stirling ANDREW JAMES JOHNSTON, Professor, Institute for English Language and Literature, Freie Universität Berlin WOLFRAM R. KELLER, Professor, Department of English and American Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ELISABETH KEMPF, Graduate Student, Freie Universität Berlin HESTER LEES-JEFFRIES, Lecturer, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge ANDREAS MAHLER, Professor, Institute for English Language and Literature, Freie Universität Berlin VERENA OLEJNICZAK LOBSIEN, Professor, Department of English and American Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin JAMES SIMPSON, Professor, Department of English, Harvard University PAUL STROHM, Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York STEPHANIE TRIGG, Professor, Department of English and Theatre Studies, The University of Melbourne DAVID WALLACE, Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania RUSSELL WEST-PAVLOV, Professor, Department of English, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen KAI WIEGANDT, Lecturer, Institute for English Language and Literature, Freie Universität Berlin

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction: performing the politics of passion: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida and the literary tradition of love and history Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov For the last three decades or so, literary studies, especially those dealing with premodern texts, have been dominated by the New Historicist paradigm. Texts have generally been seen to exist in a dialogic relationship with their contexts, as both deriving from and contributing to a vibrant matrix of contemporary discourses. Ever since the turn of the new millennium dissatisfaction with this state of affairs has been growing – without, however, producing any privileged alternative to the New Historicism. While some voices have been calling for a new formalism and others have been promoting a return to humanism, it seems obvious that the issue of historicism and its implications will remain one of the fundamental challenges to present-day criticism. This is where this collection of essays seeks to intervene. The editors of this volume hold that the New Historicism’s tendency to let a text ‘rest easy within a contemporaneous sign system’1 – that is, to embed a text in a purely synchronous context – helps to obscure a variety of aspects which fundamentally constitute the nature of the historical text and the range of meaning(s) it is capable of generating. On the one hand, the New Historicism’s insistence on a discursive synchronicity threatens to efface the extent to which texts themselves interrogate their own moment in history. After all, texts from the past may well be capable of seeing themselves as belonging to a textual tradition or a specifically intertextual dialogue that both bridges and questions the boundaries of a text’s specific moment in history. In so doing, a text may actually begin to cast doubt on those very period boundaries that have contributed to consolidating its position in literary history in the first place. For all their conspicuous attention to history, New Historicist critics have, by and large, been content with leaving intact the established period boundaries we have inherited from the nineteenth century. In some

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

cases, the perspective from which histories were written was questioned, as was the access to discursive power, but the fundamental sequentiality of history, and the segmentation upon which that sequentiality depended (that is, periodization), remained largely untouched. On the other hand, the New Historicism, by eschewing what it perceived as an outmoded focus upon time, turning instead towards synchronicity, contextuality and spatiality, unwittingly left intact the very temporal logic it scornfully dismissed.2 Though this is paradoxical, it should not come as a complete surprise: if one conceives of a text as floating in a specific synchronic system of discourses then the fact that a text may seek to disrupt that very sense of synchronicity will easily be neglected. There have been a number of recent attempts to rethink the various logics assumed by the nineteenth-century historicism which even putatively radical undertakings such as the New Historicism have failed to address or question. One recent initiative has been alternative history or counterfactual history. Counterfactuals imagine multiple alternative outcomes to the courses of history that we know. By inventing plausible deviations from documented history, but couching them in the factualist idiom of modern ­historical writing, such hypothetical historiography brings back into view a fundamental fallacy within historical commonsense: namely, the assumption that, because history happened as it did, it had to happen that way. In other words, the contingency of historical causality, which from the retrospective viewpoint of the present congeals into a sort determinism, is pushed back into the foreground. It is no chance that many counterfactuals are in fact a sort of metahistoriographic fiction.3 They are a type of fiction which possesses the capacity to lay bare as contingency what we take to be pre-determined causality. Such fiction questions not merely the status of individual historical events as ‘factual’ but the entire course of history as a ‘fact’ which has only retrospectively gained that aura of objective neutrality. Conversely, however, it is precisely the fictive tenor of counterfactuals which defuses their potential to disturb the certitudes of historiographical thought. To the extent that they deviate from historical fact, thereby participating in the realm of fiction, they almost automatically disqualify themselves as serious interventions into the business of historiographical reflection. Counterfactuals ultimately capitulate to the regime of historical realism. Postcolonial scholars, too, have been critical of Western concepts of periodization and of the general urge to periodize. Dipesh

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

3

Chakrabarty, for instance, has drawn attention to the ways in which historicism has tended to reinforce the notion of clear developmental stages in history, a notion inevitably relegating nonWestern societies to a status of immaturity, to an eternal ‘not yet’ in comparison with the supposedly superior Western societies. Thus he argues: ‘Historicism thus posited historical time as a measure of a cultural distance … that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West.’4 Chakrabarty’s observation did not, however, prevent many postcolonial critics themselves from remaining ­inattentive to issues of periodization and temporality. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has pointed out, much postcolonial criticism and theory has ‘neglected the study of the “distant” past, positing instead of interrogating the anteriority against which modern regimes of power have supposedly arisen’.5 In many respects, the postcolonial project has primarily conceived of itself as a result of modernity concerned exclusively with problems deriving from modernity.6 The sociology of science, too, has provided important critiques of Western regimes of periodization. Bruno Latour chastises progressivist historians of modern science for relying uncritically upon the principle of radical periodization – a principle that forms the very foundation on which the idea of modernity rests. Modernity posits temporality as a linear and unidirectional progress highlighted but never actually reversed by a succession of more or less violent ruptures, such as revolutions and spectacular historic events resulting in radical breaks with the past: The moderns have a peculiar propensity for understanding time that passes as if it really were abolishing the past behind it. They all take themselves for Attila, in whose footsteps no grass grows back. They do not feel that they are removed from the Middle Ages by a certain number of centuries, but that they are separated by Copernican revolutions, epistemological breaks, epistemic ruptures so radical that nothing of the past ought to survive in them.7

A more concerted attack on the monolith of historiographical common sense can be found in the recent development known as queer history. Though the contributions in this volume may not explicitly align themselves with the approach of queer history, its agenda is useful for refracting some of the theoretical assumptions which frame the readings presented here. Even as these contributions endorse a variety of different theoretical frameworks, the fundamental theoretical challenges that they respond to closely

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

resemble those that set in motion the evolution of queer history. Like much contemporary theory, queer history suggests that scholarly neutrality and objectivity is more rhetorical façade than genuine fact, and that historical scholarship should lay bare the politically motivated agendas which underpin its particular version of intellectual procedure. This may not appear, at first glance, to be a particularly remarkable assumption, but it drives a number of more unsettling assertions. Queer history posits, first, that the past, like anything else, can be the object of strong affective valencies, indeed, that affect is what governs our relationship to the past. The relationship of present to past(s) evinced in ‘a queer desire for history’8 is corporeal, visceral, desire-laden. The historiographical relationship would thus be laced with such affects as passion, haptic possessiveness, curiosity, compassion, envy, avarice, aggression, violence and the desire to deface. Troilus and Cressida, Troilus and Criseyde and their avatars (Henryson’s version, etc.), are exemplary in this respect because they lay bare the centrality of affect within history and historiography. Upon the back of the primary love story between Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida all the other affect-driven relationships and causalities in the narrative are thrown into stark contrast. Not only this, affect proves to be the main element which drives readings of those affects – in the first instance by the artists themselves, as Chaucer reads the post-Homeric Trojan tradition from Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis through Benoît de SainteMaure and Guido delle Colonne down to Boccaccio, as Lydgate reads both the post-Homeric tradition and Chaucer, as Henryson reads the post-Homeric tradition, Chaucer and Lydgate and as Shakespeare rereads Homer, Chaucer, Lydgate and Henryson, and so on; and then by the critics, who by and large have shared the overwhelmingly masculinist standpoint of Chaucer’s Troilus and Pandarus or of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Ulysses themselves, thereby also generating affect-driven readings dislodged only in the past half-century by feminist readings propelled, in turn, by a different complex of affects. We are confronted here by a typical instantiation of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, for which James Wood has recently offered a neat translation, ‘afterwardness’.9 ‘Secondary revision’ overlays, retroactively, previous versions of a psychic state which becomes buried under successive layers of renarration until the putative ‘original’ state becomes inaccessible – to the extent that the very notion of ‘originality’ begins to lose its meaning. In the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

5

case of the Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida narratives, each reading of affect, driven itself by a new configuration of affect, rereads and rewrites, often reinscribing in a structure ever more powerful in its authority, earlier accounts of affect. Such a process moves forwards from reading to reading, while in fact always working backwards to effect ever-new revisions of the archive upon which it depends. This means, secondly, that the causal relationship of sequential order which nineteenth-century historicism imposed upon time, and whose measure was that of various scales of periodization, is fundamentally disturbed in its logic. This is an altogether more radical notion than the mere assertion of political tendentiousness or individual and/or collective affect as a factor in scholarly readings of the past and its texts. Forward movement through textual history is generated by a constant backwards gaze and a reworking of accounts of the past. The irreversible sequentiality of past and present, deemed to be the only residue of classic physics left intact by relativity, is radically questioned by queer history. Just as relativity posited the mutability of time under the effect of gravitational forces, for instance, so too queer history suggests that the pull of affect can upset classical models of historical causality. From this standpoint sequential ordering appears as a mode of disciplining temporality – indeed, nineteenth-century French historians were enjoined by their disciplinary masters at the Sorbonne not to deviate from sequential historiography.10 Queer history, by contrast, allows for temporal relationships which work against the flow of time, constantly recreating the past that they assemble out of the detritus of archival and material cultures piling up behind them. Queer historiography is non-linear, running in different directions at once, both backwards and forwards, and is driven by affect. Taking such revisionism to its logical extreme, Žižek hyperbolically concludes from a reading of Richard II that the play’s action ‘proves beyond any doubt that Shakespeare had read Lacan’.11 In the context of the present volume, one might similarly quip that Troilus and Cressida demonstrates Shakespeare’s assiduous study of René Girard’s theory of imitative desire.12 Queer literary history confirms what literary studies in general has always known: namely, that literary texts, attached to their own intertextual precursors by powerful affective valencies, unceasingly strive to rewrite their own textual pasts. Thirdly then, if ‘a challenge to chronology is also a challenge to periodicity’,13 queer history questions that other disciplinary

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6

Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

measure, evinced in Jameson’s more recent injunction, ‘we cannot not periodize’.14 Yet periods are notoriously fluid and their labels polysemic. ‘Long centuries’ in cultural and literary history make a mockery of the segmentation they repose upon. Terms such as the modern, modernity, modernism, and modernization have multi­ ple overlapping and conflicting denotations exacerbated by their various disciplinary affiliations, for example literary high modernism versus architectural international modernism, not to mention the via moderna of medieval nominalist philosophy. The very term ‘modern’ is, after all, a medieval coinage that did not exist in classical Latin. Central to the project of queer (literary) history, one in which (literary) texts would themselves participate, would be not only the contravention of forward-moving sequentiality but also of the periodizations which calibrate and regulate such sequentiality. Indeed, affect, that dynamic which connects and reconnects bodies, territorializes and reterritorializes entities, would by definition transgress the very boundaries that periodizations so spuriously seek to erect. Periods are ways of keeping historical moments apart from each other, just as the past, in depoliticizing modes of historicism, must be kept apart from the present. Queer affect joins the present to the past, in a manner already described by Walter Benjamin, ‘grasp[ing] the constellation which [its] own era has formed with a definite earlier one’, thereby eroding the barriers set up by periods, so as to ‘blast a specific period out of the homogeneous course of history’.15 If periodization is generally an instrument for defining the present in contradistinction to the past, queer affect would seek unruly connections to the pre- or the proto- which would in turn possess the potential to transform our own moment of historical theorization. The focus of the current volume, then, is of particular import. For the tradition of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida is one that both crosses and casts doubt on one of the most significant and ideologically charged borders in literary history, that between the medieval and the early modern. Indeed, the emergence of such borders around the foundational triad ancient/medieval/modern may have been coeval with what has often been described as the emergence of modern historical consciousness itself, indeed, with modernity per se, with periodization and its concomitant fear of anachronism developing on the early modern cusp which our two principal Troilus narratives, Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s, straddle.16 The medieval/early modern divide is a border that was by and large left untouched both by postmodernism (exemplified by Foucault

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

7

in the opening chapter of The Order of Things) and by the New Historicism. The Troilus tradition presents us with a unique case where the Middle Ages battles aesthetically with its classical heritage, just as much as the Renaissance battles with the ancient past it ostensibly endorses and the medieval history against which it seeks to define itself through a stance of intensely felt ambivalence. A specifically medieval tradition of classical material continuing well into the Renaissance, the story of the Trojan prince and his paramour must be considered to be the most spectacular example of a selfconsciously literary tradition in English literary history. Indeed, Troilus constitutes a subject matter always already conceived of as a literary tradition that stands in a conflict-ridden relationship to history. And precisely because in the case of Troilus that relationship has, since its very inception, been seen as both troubled and troubling, the story of the unhappy lovers has also been employed to establish a particular relationship between affect, literature and history. Love in Troy is not simply about a seemingly universal emotion, or, alternatively, about the culturally specific expression of human feelings, but rather a potential response to all attempts at establishing ideologically prescribed links between the literary and the historical, between the history of a love affair and the history of an empire. Emotions in Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida provide the necessary complications which help to preclude any clear and final definition of the role of the aesthetic in time and of its relationship to periodization and to the temporalities of periodization. By claiming a distance from their historical environment and the overarching historical narrative they occur in, the emotions discussed in the Troilus-tradition help to stage a model through which the idea of an aesthetic not directly subject to the pressures of history can be imagined and questioned simultaneously. In the story of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida history, literature and love – with all the other emotions love encompasses and entails, for example, hope, fear, anger, jealousy, bliss – form a triangle of complex relations in which none is ever wholly commensurate with the others. This is what this collection of essays sees as its point of departure: the volume posits that the discussion of emotions in Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida constitutes a literary site where the ideological underpinnings of periodization and temporality can be questioned and held in suspense aesthetically. And since the single ideologically most important period boundary in Western

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8

Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

culture seems, to this very day, to be the one between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the volume brings together an international group of scholars from both fields, that is, that devoted to the medieval and that to the early modern, to focus on the vast analytical potential the Troilus-tradition offers for the question of periodization. Central to the project embodied in this volume is the conviction that what empowers the Troilus tradition in this respect is its specific locus in the spaces between – and possibly beyond – the positions conventionally assigned to the medieval and the early modern. In as much as the volume deliberately fosters a dialogue between medievalists and early modernists it joins a rapidly growing impetus in both scholarly communities to destabilize a period boundary so powerful that it has remained untouched by two of the most conspicuously radical movements in the last few decades of literary criticism: postmodernism and the New Historicism.17 This collection of essays sees itself as a contribution to question­ ing the established boundaries both between the medieval and the early modern and equally between the political and the aesthetic by focusing intensely on one of English literary history’s most important and most self-conscious textual traditions, that of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida. By establishing a dialogue between medievalists and early modernists the editors aim, first, to problematize the issue of period boundaries per se. Second, they seek to investigate the ways in which specific relationships between the literary and the historical, on the one hand, and between the literary and the emotions, on the other, help to shape, maintain and critique those very notions of temporality without which periodization could not exist. Kai Wiegandt’s chapter on hope and fear treats these emotions as metatheatrical operators and, as a consequence, as more general metatemporal moderators. He suggests that hope and fear are central in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida because the two protagonists are aware of the way their reputations are being forged for eternity; by the same token, however, they can only project these emotions into the future on the basis of already extant e­ xperiences – in the case of this play, extant textual experiences which go back via Chaucer and beyond. Emotions such as hope and fear thus connect the play’s characters to the future and to the past, thus dissolving any clear distinction between the various temporal phases traversing the play. Affect, according to Wiegandt, precedes and produces historicity. It is affect, in his reading, which anchors the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

9

play within a literary historical tradition whose nature by definition resists the facile segmentation afforded by periodization. Within this very broad framework, a number of authors in this volume focus upon the vicissitudes of various emotions as they are represented within Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s texts. Andreas Mahler suggests that Chaucer plays off against one another the various Renaissance discourses about love, refusing their customary hierarchy and above all refusing their tendency to make exclusive truth claims for themselves at the expense of other discourses. As Mahler sees it, Chaucer marks the moment of the emergence of a specific discourse of love in the fourteenth century. By contrast, according to Mahler, by 1600 love has been exhausted as a serious topic of literary treatment – it degenerates into mere ‘satyrical comedy’. In Mahler’s reading, following the thesis of Troilus and Cressida as an Inns of Court revels play, love is burlesqued – and explored as a series of discursive registers between which the dramatist does not feel impelled to choose. Chaucer begins this process, Shakespeare extends it and takes it to its logical conclusion, namely, a form of discursive inconclusiveness. A single arc of discursive pluralization connects the two texts. Paul Strohm, surveying the patent lack of privacy in the crowded Londons of Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s times, wonders whether this atmosphere of surveillance, gossip, far from being experienced as a lack, may not have been produced by the early modern conditions of staging, in which everything is on show, and an audience watches actors watching other actors. All this amounts to a fundamental scopic drive at work within the theatre, a form of generalized erotic incitement. Strohm grants a certain minimal difference in crowdedness between Chaucer’s London, whose population was depleted by the plague, and Shakespeare’s whose population doubled within the Bard’s own lifetime, but essentially reads both texts as indulging with the same tension between illusory privacy and general knowledge and surveillance of the open secret of the sexual liaison. The dialectic of privacy and visibility, indexed by Thersites as ‘secretly open’ (5.2.24), is what drives the erotic tension in both works. It is a generalized, social affect which transcends the boundaries of the individual and the couple in both texts, and the boundaries of historical epoch which link rather than separate them. Other contributions are less optimistic in their readings of affect in these texts. Tracing the genealogies of Hecuba across a number of early modern intertexts, then via Chaucer through

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10

Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

to Shakespeare, Hester Lees-Jeffries notes the frequent role of Hecuba as a representative of feminine suffering and as a catalyst for empathetic affective identification. She focuses upon the absence of Hecuba in Troilus and Cressida, an absence which would have been palpable for early modern audiences, right through to the smaller number of female roles to be covered by the boy players in an early modern troupe. She suggests that this absence removes particular textual sites around which collective affects might otherwise have coagulated, thereby disadvantaging Cressida as a character, deprived as she is of earlier modes of affective advocacy. Cressida, like Hecuba, suffers beyond words, but this failure of language is exacerbated in Shakespeare’s play by the occlusion of Hecuba as a character, stripping her even of the audience’s – or later readers’ – affective solidarity. Russell West-Pavlov’s chapter similarly scrutinizes a trans­ historical regime of conflict-ridden affect. The chapter suggests that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida situates itself within an affective temporality which is explicitly textualized. The past out of which Shakespeare’s play emerges is a past defined by a succession of prior texts, stretching from the Homeric epic to Chaucer’s and Henryson’s versions of the Troilus and Cressida narrative. Shakespeare refashions, or, better, misreads, defaces or disfigures his textual predecessors in order to attack a social structure of selfperpetuating violence which draws its inspiration from notions of chivalric honour encoded in such narratives. Shakespeare’s approach to his predecessors is ‘emulative’, a term used in the early modern period to refer to a form of imitation of superiors which was subversive in tenor; for that imitation sought not merely to honour but also to displace the person imitated and thus upset the social hierarchy. If Shakespeare’s appropriation of Chaucer or others is ‘emulative’ in form, the content which he appropriates is also connected to ‘emulative’ factionalism: courtly social climbing, a scramble for favour which involves an aggressive competition with aristocratic peers whose virtual identity with oneself generates an affect which is both narcissistic and deeply aggressive. Shakespeare places this deadly affect in close connection with the self-perpetuating violence of the Trojan War, the similarity of the Greeks and Trojans, and the moral bankruptcy of their hollow ethos of warrior manliness. Thus Troilus and Cressida participates in an economy of aggressive-desiring affect which it intensifies to the point of crisis. The play does this by acerbically scrutinizing and re-enacting the stories told and retold by the narrators of a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

11

mythic warrior class, only to corrode their authority at each successive performance. What the play lays bare is a nefarious temporality both condemned and underpinned yet ultimately eroded by the relentless literary epochality of the successive Troy narratives. Stephanie Trigg poses the question of the readability of affect: how do we gauge others’ emotions in their faces, whether unthinking affects or performed demeanour? – turning to the representations of Criseyde’s face in Chaucer to answer this question. The obliqueness of Criseyde’s gaze inaugurates the interiority of herself and her inaccessibility to the male gaze, but also the fickleness of her emotions, her putative propensity to infidelity. In her chapter, the non-transparency of facial expression as a mediator of feeling is isomorphic with the non-transparency of language to mediate the body and its affect, and furthermore the non-transparency of the past for the present (indeed, even for other pasts). In Shakespeare, by contrast, transparency of physical language is abruptly available, but only to advertise the promiscuity of the feminine body, all too easily readable as excessively loose. Several of the contributions in the volume concentrate upon the affective tensions knitting Chaucer and Shakespeare together. John Drakakis argues that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida constitutes a radical recrafting of Chaucer’s work, in which, however, the tone is pessimistic and the tenor almost entropic. In contrast to Chaucer’s poem, which skirts around the Trojan War as a ‘long digression’ (Troilus and Criseyde, I.143), and whose relatively stable narrative contexts and stereotyped gender identifications allowed the relationship between the lovers to be explored in depth, Shakespeare’s version foregrounds the war between the Greeks and the Trojans and the repetitions that the conflict generates and sustains. Drakakis suggests that this in turn means that the relationship between Troilus and Cressida echoes that of Helen and Paris, while, at the same time, the onward movement of events shapes, and overtake the lovers, thus transforming what might have been, in plays such as the earlier Romeo and Juliet, a romantic attachment into something that is reductively material. Shakespeare thus orchestrates a significant shift of dramatic emphasis away from the emotional vicissitudes of the ‘characters’, thereby reshaping the relationship between subjectivity and event, and thus imbuing the action with a deeply political resonance that affects the generic innovations that the Shakespearean drama instantiates. In Troilus and Cressida, unlike in Chaucer’s poem, all that remains is a ubiquitous sense of contingency, generated by a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

12

Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

representation of cause and effect that empties the play of its ostensibly chivalric identifications, thus collapsing action into meaningless sequence. This emptying of the characters’ emotional life, however, is anything but an emptying of affect, as the ­remaining contributions show. What drives the dynamics at work between Chaucer and Shakespeare is thus a set of affects inhabiting the texts themselves. As David Wallace writes in his chapter, ‘the succession of texts, the work performed by a new text upon its predecessors, might itself possess emotional content – in this case, chiefly, violence’. Verena Lobsien treats Troilus and Cressida as a compendium of commonplaces, a rag-bag of rhetorical topoi and received wisdom whose rehearsal in the mouths of the various characters serves a means of inciting, channelling, dominating or bridling the respective passions which take hold of them: aggression, emulation, fury, desire, love, and so on. Central to Lobsien’s thesis is the notion that commonplaces have a history which consists of their repetition not just in everyday social intercourse but also from one intertextual instance to another – for instance, as in this case, from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Affect, in other words, is regulated by its encoding in stock phrases which persist across a temporal span, various texts within identifiable genealogical chains relaying their continuity and transformation across time. Troilus and Cressida can predict their own future reputations (‘as true as Troilus’, ‘as false as Cressid’) because they know what those have been in the (Chaucerian, Henrysonian) past. This is perhaps why, for Lobsien, the characters so spectacularly fail to practise a ‘therapy of desire’, as derived from the Stoic philosophers, which was the early moderns’ customary way of understanding the disciplining and fashioning passion by reason – mediated, though not overruled, according to the Aristotelian notions which governed early modern theories of the faculties, by imagination. What is left is a cynical moral contingency which, anticipating upon the sceptical Continental moralists of the seventeenth century, strips both reason and affect of all pretence. In a similar manner, Wolfram R. Keller’s chapter focuses upon arrogance as an affect with a particular resonance in medieval and early modern thought. Keller traces the genealogy of arrogance from one of the typified sins through to its development into an affective marker of novelty and innovation, finally being configured around the notion of authorship. Keller explores the poetological dimension of arrogance in Chaucer’s Troilus and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

13

Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Both authors, he argues, utilize their Troy stories in order to investigate notions of ­counter-authorship by means of arrogant poet-playwright characters. Shakespeare’s self-concealing authorship, he suggests, constitutes a ‘counter-authorship’ by virtue of the fact that the dramatist embeds his bid for authorial fame deeply in encoded form in the works themselves. Shakespearean authorship thus not only combines poetry and drama but also orchestrates the collision of two opposing models of literary authorship, Chaucerian self-effacement and Spenserian self-crowning. Shakespeare’s concealed bid for literary fame in poet-playwright figures, however, finds a precursor in Chaucerian authorship. Keller suggests parallel versions of ‘counter-authorship’, ranging from the narratorial poet-figure, via intra-diegetic narrators, to Criseyde, in Chaucer’s Troilus, whose narrative individuality – her (and the Poet’s) model of authorship – is encoded as arrogant. Building upon this material, Shakespeare, during the competitive rivalry of arrogant ­poet-playwrights during the War of the Theatres, revisits Chaucer’s Criseydan authorship. While Shakespeare seems to dichotomize humble, ‘­medieval’ Trojan poetry and arrogant, ‘modern’ Greek theatrical performance, his Cressida, like Chaucer’s Criseyde, partakes of both worlds. In doing so, Shakespeare appears however to turn the Chaucerian conception of authorship on its head: Cressidan humility reinscribes topoi of authorial arrogance. Shakespeare thus recuperates a putative medieval topos of humility, thereby attributing to his arrogant precursor poet-playwright figures a modicum of humility. In this way, Keller claims, Shakespeare pursues the advancement of a self-concealing model of counter-authorship­ever more deeply embedded in successive layers of intertextuality. David Wallace makes a similar set of claims, but sees the competition between the texts and authors as being played out in much more explicitly violent terms. Shakespeare, like most early modern readers, would have had access to printed versions of Chaucer that included Henryson’s Testament of Cressid alongside, indeed almost as part of the Chaucerian Troilus and Criseyde. In this reading of inter-authorial affect, Shakespeare hijacks Henryson’s leprous animosity towards Cressida and turns it against Chaucer. The disease content of Henryson seeps into Shakespeare’s drama like a ­creeping, contagious affect. Andrew James Johnston focuses on the issue of affective and gendered politics of reading as highlighted in Troilus and Criseyde itself. Juxtaposing Criseyde’s reading of a Theban romance in her

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

14

Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

paved parlour, on the one hand, with Pandarus’s feigning to be reading an old romance to disguise his presence in the consummation scene, on the other, he investigates the way that specific types of reading are shown to create particular emotional spaces. Criseyde’s reading and Pandarus’s pseudo-reading turn out to be moves in a battle not merely for emotional space but for the way that different practices of reading either open up or close off these gendered spaces. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde old books become frames capable of providing emotional protection, or, alternately, of rendering readers helpless before strategically directed floods of overwhelming affect. James Simpson generalizes the bleak readings offered by Keller and Drakakis even further, demonstrating how the Troilus texts were successively positioned within a long, transhistorical tradition about war, and engage with each other, to a lesser or greater extent, in relations of martial opposition, characterized by affects towards each other such as hostility, aggression and the impulse towards defacement. Whereas Chaucer apparently tries to stay above the fray, devoting his attention to the lovers themselves, Shakespeare’s attack on the long tradition of the Trojan war, drawing upon the sceptical, anti-theogonal resources of the late medieval ephemera tradition, is the most corrosive of all, seeking to discredit that narrative as utterly void of any moral content whatsoever. Using weapons provided by the late medieval ephemera tradition, Shakespeare takes particular aim at Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, pushing the ignominious war itself into the foreground to discredit Chaucer’s narrative. In particular, according to Simpson, it is the notion of temporal segmenting that allows Chaucer to protect his two lovers’ narrative from the encroachments of war; similarly, Agamemnon, welcoming Hector to the Greek camp, marks out from ‘What’s past and what’s to come’, ‘strewed with husks / And formless ruin of oblivion’, a protected ‘extant moment [of] faith and troth’ (4.7.50–2). Such protected spaces are precisely, however, what Shakespeare consistently breaks down, evoking their fleeting possibility only the more ­brutally to demolish them. Extrapolating from Simpson’s argument, it is possible to take up Agamemnon’s notion of a brief present respite protected in only the most illusory manner from the encroachments of a violent past and present, and imagine, in the tradition of Henryson’s Cressida and Shakespeare’s Thersites, a corrosive infection of putative historical periods by one another’s representative texts. What effects

Introduction

15

that contagion between texts, and, in the final analysis, affects us as modern readers, is nothing other than affect, in all its forms.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes  1 P. Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 150.  2 See D. H. Wood, Time, Narrative and Emotion in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 5.  3 See for example C. S. Forester, Gold from Crete (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), pp. 183–263; R. Harris, Fatherland (London: Arrow, 1993); S. Fry, Making History (London: Arrow, 1996).  4 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), reissued with a new preface by the author 2008, p. 7.  5 J. J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, Medieval Cultures 35 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 19.  6 Hence John Dagenais and Margaret R. Greer comment: ‘The history of “The Middle Ages” begins at the precise moment when European imperial and colonial expansion begins. The Middle Ages is Europe’s Dark Continent of History, even as Africa is its Dark Age of Geography’. (J. Dagenais and M. R. Greer, ‘Decolonizing the Middle Ages: introduction,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30 (2000), 431–48, 431).   7 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 68.  8 C. Dinshaw, in C. Dinshaw et al., ‘Theorizing queer temporalities: a roundtable discussion’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13:2–3 (2007), 177–95 (178).  9 J. Wood, ‘On not going home’, London Review of Books, 36:4 (20 February 2014), 3–8 (8). 10 H. White and F. E. Manuel, Theories of History: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, March 6, 1976 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1978), p. 8. 11 S. Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 9. 12 See R. Girard, ‘The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida’, in P. Parker and G. Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 187–209. See also R. WestPavlov, ‘Trumpets and strumpets: time, space, emulation and violence in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’. Anglia: Journal of English Studies, 132:1 (2014), 1–22. 13 M. Menon, ‘Queer Shakes: introduction’, in Menon (ed.), ShakesQueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 1–27 (here p. 3).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

Andrew James Johnston and Russell West-Pavlov

14 F. Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2003), p. 9. 15 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 255, 254. 16 M. de Grazia, ‘Anachronism’, in B. Cummings and J. Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 13–32. 17 To mention only a few of the last decade’s attempts at rethinking the medieval and early modern period boundary and/or the question of periodization with special emphasis on the Middle Ages: A. Cole and D. V. Smith (eds), The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); H. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010); K. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); C. Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2012); A. J. Johnston. Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); G. McMullan and D. Matthews (eds), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); R. Morse, H. Cooper and P. Holland (eds), Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); C. Perry and J. Watkins (eds), Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2009); P. Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

1 ‘Expectation whirls me round’: hope, fear and time in Troilus and Cressida Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Kai Wiegandt

Despite being the eponymous protagonists in Troilus and Cressida, the main characters hardly ever make any deliberate decisions. When they act, they do not seem masters of themselves,1 but, in any case, they hardly seem to act at all. Their lack of action is made up for by an excess of anticipation. While the story of the lovers is quickly told, the hopes and fears tearing at Cressida and Troilus give new life to their story by adding anticipatory fantasy to factuality.2 I say new life because the story of Troilus and Cressida was well known to Shakespeare’s audience; Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde was its most prominent version. The question arises as to what functions Troilus’s and Cressida’s hopes and fears have if their story is known to the audience. Because hope and fear are the only emotions directed exclusively towards the future – with happy anticipation, confidence and curiosity being derivatives of hope, and alarm, terror and dread being derivatives of fear3 – this question can be asked in broader terms. What stance towards the future do hope and fear express if that future is known? And in contrast, what roles do hope and fear play in the construction of an open future? Moreover, the play’s specific configuration of hope and fear appears to serve a metatheatrical reflection on the play’s status in (literary) history. Indeed, it seems that Shakespeare’s treatment of hope and fear can be understood as a strategy enabling him to break free from existing expectations about an early modern play which is a remake of both classical and medieval sources. In the following I argue that, by emphasizing Troilus’s and Cressida’s hopes and fears, Shakespeare sets in motion a triangle of narrative, emotion and temporality, the spectacle of which tells something about the play but also about the relation between anticipatory emotion and temporality, which allows the play to interrogate its own position in literary history. Firstly, I will address hope and fear’s most obvious functions in the play. With these in mind,

Kai Wiegandt

18

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

I will then switch perspectives and discuss what Shakespeare’s staging of hope and fear suggests about these emotions more generally. Finally, I will discuss the relationship between hope, fear and future as exhibited by the play and explore how Shakespeare uses this relation in an aesthetic strategy that seeks to unhinge the idea that a play is incapable of transcending a point of view defined by its historical situation. Troilus and Cressida read through hope and fear Hope and fear are the emotions lending themselves most easily to a metadramatic reading of Troilus and Cressida because they highlight the fact that the play draws on a well-known story. When Troilus promises that the world shall call all faithful men ‘As true as Troilus’ and that if Cressida be unfaithful, all unfaithful women shall be ‘As false as Cressid’ (3.2.168, 183), the spectators are, on the one hand, made aware of the long literary history of the characters and the story.4 The hope lying in Troilus’s and Cressida’s promises at once makes the audience aware of the fear that these promises might be unfounded. On the other hand, the spectators’ awareness of citationality is undermined by the characters’ power to move them. Knowledge of the story does not prevent the audience from feeling compassion with the protagonists,5 and this also holds for the emotions directed towards the future; the spectators fear and hope with Troilus and Cressida. The play thus manages to pursue an aesthetic double strategy of movere (in the rhetorical sense) and of initiating a conscious discourse on historicity. Selfconsciously performing its own literariness and thereby defending the aesthetic against the usurpations of history, it rises above being a mere mirror of contemporary discourses informing its rewriting of the classic story. Interestingly, the question whether experience can be the cause of hope was not an uncommon one in medieval theological thought. Thomas Aquinas is the theologian who commented most comprehensively on hope and fear. When discussing the question whether experience can be the cause of hope in the Summa Theologiae (1265–73), his answer includes the following: [I]nstruction and persuasion can, up to a point, give rise to hope. This is also the way in which experience causes hope; through experience a man may discover that something is within his power which he had thought of previously as impossible. But from another angle experience can cause hope to fail. Experience may indeed convince a

‘Expectation whirls me round’

19

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

man that something is possible which he had regarded as impossible; contrariwise, experience may also bring one to judge that what he had thought possible is in fact not so.6

Shakespeare did not necessarily know this passage, but the intellectual climate he inhabited was strongly influenced by medieval theology, not least because the printing press gave unprecedented access to works like Aquinas’s.7 Troilus and Cressida’s many discussions of hope and fear bring Aquinas’s passage to mind because they themselves – and not only the audience – seem to show a half-awareness of the fate awaiting them. They are characters torn between true hope and fear (with which the audience sympathizes) and an awareness that their fate is sealed by literary history. When Troilus and Cressida first meet, the relevance of hope and fear for the play’s metatheatrical design is already obvious. They talk of fear, which they find either to have eyes or to be blind. The fact that they figuratively anthropomorphize their fears suggests that the lovers’ agency is challenged by an emotion that foresees an undesirable future while distorting their eyes’ ability to recognize the here and now: TROILUS:

… What too-curious dreg espies my sweet lady in the fountain of our love? CRESSIDA: More dregs than water, if my fears have eyes. TROILUS:  Fears make devils of cherubims; they never see truly. CRESSIDA:  Blind fear, that seeing reason leads, finds safer footing than blind reason, stumbling without fear. To fear the worst oft cures the worse. TROILUS: O let my lady apprehend no fear … (3.2.62–9)

Fear is defined as an unpleasant emotion triggered by an impending threat to life and health, status, power, security, a beloved person or anything a person holds valuable; it should be distinguished from, but is closely related to, anxiety as a response to threats that are perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable.8 If fear is a helpful means of perception, as Cressida claims, then it is genuinely unhelpful for the lovers who are then forced to foresee the infelicitous end of their union, and Troilus’s exclamation ‘O let my lady apprehend no fear’ is then a conscious denial of better knowledge. If, as Troilus argues, fear is instead a bad guide and best discarded by the lovers, Troilus and Cressida can hope to walk

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

Kai Wiegandt

their way to failure innocently, gaped at by spectators who know better. Either way, Troilus and Cressida discuss fear in order not to come to know through fear what they cannot help knowing. Their discussion is a metadramatic highlighting of fear underlining the play’s sense that all is already lost, a reinforcing of the play’s characteristic sarcasm. It is this sarcasm that prevents the play from turning into a happy comedy since it ends with Pandarus verbally spreading syphilis, but this sarcasm also prevents the play from developing into tragedy as no character behaves nobly enough to deserve pity. Hopes are illusions in Troilus and Cressida, and the worst of fears are hardly more terrible than these illusions because Troilus’s and Cressida’s fears cannot exceed what the characters already know. Cassandra’s fearful prophecy, for instance, contains the worst and yet is merely tragicomic when she is ‘raving, with her hair about her ears’ (2.2.99): ‘Lend me ten thousand eyes / And I will fill them with prophetic tears’ (2.2.100–1). Troilus’s hope for Cressida To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love, To keep her constancy in plight and youth, Outliving beauty’s outward, with a mind That doth renew swifter than blood decays (3.2.147–50)

also creates an ironic effect because his rhetorically exuberant hope is known to be unfounded. The same irony applies to the military plot when Ulysses shows Agamemnon young Troilus and tells the commander that the Trojans ‘on him erect / A second hope as fairly built as Hector’ (4.6.111–12). The only hope that is truly erect on Troilus grows from his loins, and that erection is worth only a ‘second’, that is, second-rate hope in military terms. Hope and fear read through Troilus and Cressida Hope and fear as presented in Troilus and Cressida not only give the play a metadramatic dimension but also tell something about hope and fear more generally, including their relation to the experience of time. In this way, they complicate Shakespeare’s aesthetic strategy of questioning the play’s historicity. I will address this strategy after discussing three points the play makes about hope and fear, namely about their interdependence, about their dependence on an appraisal of the subject rather than on particular triggers, and about hope and fear’s location on the same axis of value.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Expectation whirls me round’

21

‘Where no hope is left, is left no fear’, writes Milton in Paradise Regained.9 The first point Troilus and Cressida makes about hope and fear is what Milton suggests sixty-nine years after Shakespeare: hope and fear engender and implicate each other. They form what one could call a double emotion: never is there one without the other, and, if their co-presence is not necessarily simultaneous, they necessarily follow each other in short succession. The concept of a double emotion is unknown to modern affect theory but was suggested by classical antiquity where hope and fear were together seen as passions to be controlled by virtue. Christianity changed the relation between hope and fear by making hope itself a virtue, but Christian theologians likewise interpreted hope as the counterpart of fear and despair.10 Troilus’s anticipation of sex with Cressida links hope and fear as well: I am giddy. Expectation whirls me round. Th’imaginary relish is so sweet That it enchants my sense. What will it be When that the wat’ry palates taste indeed Love’s thrice-repuréd nectar? Death, I fear me, Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine, Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness For the capacity of my ruder powers. I fear it much … (3.2.16–24)

Where there is hope, there is fear that hope is unfounded; where there is fear, there is hope that fear is unfounded; and where there is no fear, there is no need for hope, just as there can be no fear where no hope exists, as Milton writes. Shakespeare introduces this reciprocity early on in the play when Troilus, in a state of great fear, warns Pandarus: ‘When I do tell thee “There my hopes lie drowned”, / Reply not in how many fathoms deep / They lie endrenched’ (1.1.46–8). The escalation of 4.5, in which Troilus evokes fear in Cressida by expressing the hope that she will be faithful, is possible only because hope and fear imply each other. When Troilus tells Cressida ‘be thou but true of heart –’ (4.5.57), he disguises his ‘unmanly’ fear of infidelity as hope in the shape of a ‘manly’ imperative. Cressida senses the source of Troilus’s speech, however: ‘I true? How now? What wicked deem is this?’ (4.5.58). Pressed to justify himself, Troilus admits that fear made him voice that hope: ‘a kind of godly jealousy – / Which I beseech you call a virtuous sin – / Makes me afeard’ (4.5.80–2). Now that the link between hope

Kai Wiegandt

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

and fear is explicit, Cressida cries out: ‘you love me not!’ (4.5.83), and finally echoes Troilus’s initial fear disguised as hope: ‘will you be true?’ (4.5.101). Another demonstration of hope and fear’s reciprocal nature is given when Troilus sees evidence of Cressida’s unfaithfulness with Diomedes. Hope (here: ‘esperance’) and fear tug at him with ‘bifold authority’ so that he seems inclined to disbelieve his own eyes like Othello when he ‘sees’ Desdemona’s betrayal: Sith yet there is a credence in my heart, An esperance so obstinately strong, That doth invert th’attest of eyes and ears, As if those organs had deceptious functions … If there be rule in unity itself, This is not she. O madness of discourse, That cause sets up with and against thyself! Bifold authority, where reason can revolt Without perdition, and loss assume all reason Without revolt! This is and is not Cressid. Within my soul there doth conduce a fight Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate Divides more wider than the sky and earth, And yet the spacious breadth of this division Admits no orifex for a point as subtle As Ariachne’s broken woof to enter. (5.2.120–3, 141–52)

The example shows that to Troilus, hope and fear seem far apart in his soul and at the same time so close that not even a weaving thread can enter between them. Hope and fear are indeed interwoven, and this double emotion troubles Troilus so much that reason is suspended: to ‘lie’ and ‘publishing a truth’ seem the same. Troilus invokes the ‘rule in unity itself’ to no avail because the unity of hope and fear is a paradoxical, split unity. Cressida who ‘is and is not Cressid’ is the living proof of this. Shakespeare’s reciprocal conception of hope and fear goes back to a classical and medieval tradition of thought. While today there is a large corpus of psychological literature on fear, there are surprisingly few studies of hope.11 Hope has traditionally been discussed by theology, treating it as a supplement to faith and charity (love); faith, hope and charity being the so-called ‘theological’ or ‘supernatural’ virtues because they refer to God himself. The theological literature on hope is essentially of medieval origin and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Expectation whirls me round’

23

differentiates hope from faith and charity because hope is directed exclusively toward the future, as fervent desire and expectation of a future good. The ancient Greeks used the term hope (elpis) in reference to an ambiguous, open-ended future; but the resurrection of Jesus Christ gave the term, for Christians, a positive expectation and a moral quality. Throughout the New Testament and particularly in 1 Thessalonians 1:3; 5:8; 1 Corinthians 13:13; and Romans 8:22–6, Christian hope is closely tied to the ultimate hope of the return of Jesus Christ as the redeemer of the living and the dead.12 Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas suggests that hope and fear are reciprocal and thus anticipates Shakespeare’s view of these emotions: [A] future evil may be regarded as not future at all; one may be constrained by its inevitability to think of it as present. Thus Aristotle says that those who are under sentence of death are not afraid, seeing that for them death is inescapably at hand. For a man to be afraid there must be some hope of rescue.13

Looking at Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which is not only a book on rhetoric but also the first treatise on psychology, we find Aristotle writing that ‘[i]t is a necessary incentive to fear that there should remain some hope of being saved from the cause of … distress’.14 In his treatment of hope and fear, Shakespeare seems to draw on a tradition spanning from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the early modern age (as does the literary history of Troilus and Cressida). Although modern psychology does not stress the reciprocity of hope and fear, it remains a constant that alongside fear, only hope is exclusively directed towards the future. It is defined as the perceived ability to produce pathways to achieve desired goals and to motivate oneself to use those pathways.15 Thus in his philosophical account The Principle of Hope Ernst Bloch counts hope amongst the expectant emotions: hope is associated not with the night dreams concerned with immediate fulfilment of desire but with waking dreams which are future-directed. Bloch counts among the expectant emotions anxiety, fear, terror, despair, hope, confidence, which can arguably be summed up under hope and fear. According to Bloch, hope and fear are the only emotions that do not need a concrete object and can therefore relate to something totally new and inconceivable, whereas other emotions refer to something that must be concretely represented in the mind. While hope retains the quality of a mood, it is also a utopian emotion in anticipating the not-yet-conscious.16 Freud implicitly makes use of the concept

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

Kai Wiegandt

of hope in his theory of fear and deserves attention because he is the rare case of a modern thinker hinting at the reciprocity of hope and fear. In his seminal study ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’ Freud acknowledges that fear serves purposes of survival and is therefore not pathological per se. It is a defensive mechanism against the danger of being helpless in a situation where vital needs cannot be satisfied (neurotic fear differs from normal fear merely in being out of proportion to the respective danger). Although fear is directed towards the future, the scenario in the fearful mind is an imaginary repetition of a traumatic experience of helplessness, the reason being that a person in fear tries to avoid such an experience by anticipating it in a less intense form. Revealingly, Freud writes that the ego produces fear in the hope of controlling a situation in which it had once been helpless (‘in the hope of being able itself to direct its course’).17 Freud drops the word ‘hope’ only once, almost unconsciously, it seems, but the reciprocity of hope and fear is evident enough in his argument. Freud’s theory allows us more fully to understand the function of hope and fear as metadramatic emotions in the play. As Linda Charnes writes, the play afflicts the characters with a histori­ cal ‘knowledge’,18 and in fact it is as if Troilus and Cressida had already experienced the trauma of separation and infidelity, and as if they are now in fear it will repeat itself. On the other hand, they seem unknowingly to hope they can control the future – a motivation that helps explain why Shakespeare’s metadramatic use of Troilus’s and Cressida’s hopes and fears does not render the characters implausible and thus impossible to sympathize with. We can now see that Troilus’s and Cressida’s metapoetic fears and hopes are plausible as defensive mechanisms that add to the characters’ depth and lifelikeness. The play makes a second point about hope and fear when it raises the question of whether the emotional value of an event lies in the eye of the beholder or also in the thing itself. The topic of value and evaluation is prominent in Troilus and Cressida and is linked with hope and fear. Troilus’s remark ‘What’s aught but as ’tis valued’ and Hector’s reply that it has its worth ‘As well wherein ’tis precious of itself / As in the prizer’ (2.2.51, 54–5) also apply to hope and fear. They are uttered immediately after Hector, who describes himself as being ‘spongy to suck in the sense of fear’ (2.2.11), says he fears for Troy’s future if Helen is not delivered to the Greeks, and after Troilus argues that fear is an inappropriate reaction to the present situation. Troilus’s and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Expectation whirls me round’

25

Hector’s shared view that the emotional value of an event depends wholly or in part on the prizer is echoed by recent theories of emotion. The appraisal theory of emotion proposes that emotions come from people’s evaluations of events, particularly evaluations of how events relate to important goals, values and concerns.19 Appraisal theory focuses on the subject of the emotion; emotions are produced not by stimuli but by the way they are evaluated. Each emotion is attributed a specific appraisal structure. Joy, for instance, is the result of a positive evaluation of goal relevance und goal congruence; fear, on the other hand, results from evaluating an event as goal relevant and goal obstructive, combined with a low coping potential. Appraisal theory is an attempt to come to grips with the fact that one and the same event can produce  differ­ ent emotions in individuals, a problem that Troilus and Cressida explores insightfully. A third point the play makes about hope and fear is that both are located on one axis of value, hope in its positive and fear in its negative section. This is again a thought already suggested by the medieval tradition. In the Summa Theologiae Aquinas writes: Hope looks to what is agreeable and attainable; whatever enhances a man’s resources naturally increases hope and by the same token diminishes fear. Fear looks to what is disagreeable and not easily resisted. Experience, then, makes a man more capable of acting, diminishing fear as it increases hope.20

If hope and fear are reciprocal, they can still be of different value. Aquinas suggests that they are located on the same axis of value because one emotion can, to put it simply, be ‘subtracted’ from the other. In Shakespeare’s play, hope and fear are also emotions the Greeks and the Trojans can calculate with. Depending on whether the value of hope or of fear is higher, one can be subtracted from the other, leaving either an expectation of profit or of loss. The ratio of hope and fear, the examples in Troilus and Cressida show, is the emotional substratum of all economic reckoning. For instance, Aeneas looks for a man ‘That seeks his praise more than he fears his peril’ (1.3.264) when he is casting Greek men for the duel with Hector. Hope of profit is to outweigh fear of loss. When Ulysses develops his strategy of sending Ajax instead of Achilles to the duel with Hector, hopes weighed against fears govern his choice, and the imagery of his speech is that of the marketplace: Let us like merchants show our foulest wares And think perchance they’ll sell. If not,

26

Kai Wiegandt

The lustre of the better yet to show Shall show the better. Do not consent That ever Hector and Achilles meet, For both our honour and our shame in this Are dogged with two strange followers.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(1.3.352–8)

Fear of losing Achilles by sending him to the fight outweighs the hope of making profit. It is safer to send the ‘foul ware’ Ajax whose loss will neither much hurt Greek military power nor Greek pride, and who might still luckily win.21 It fits the play’s working with parallels that, on the Trojan side, Hector calculates fear and hope in a similar manner: ‘There is no lady of more softer bowels,’ he says, ‘More spongy to suck in the sense of fear, / … Than Hector is’ (2.2.10–13). The reason is that he hopes to gain much less by keeping Helen than he fears to lose by keeping her: Since the first sword was drawn about this question, Every tithe-soul, ’mongst many thousand dimes, Hath been as dear as Helen – I mean, of ours. If we have lost so many tenths of ours To guard a thing not ours – nor worth to us, Had it our name, the value of one ten – What merit’s in that reason which denies The yielding of her up? (2.2.17–24)

Hector’s anti-war stance lasts only until Troilus presents him yet another calculation of hope and fear. Though fighting will be dangerous, Hector will receive ‘fame … for the wide world’s revenue’ (2.2.201–4). Since the Trojans value fame and honour more than the Greeks (after all, the cowardly idea of the Trojan horse will be devised by the latter), Troilus’s calculation of hopes and fears convinces Hector – but in the end he will have to pay for it. As one might expect, this economic reckoning with feelings does not go entirely uncontested in the Trojan camp where chivalric values are held high. Troilus exclaims: ‘Beggar the estimation which you prized / Richer than sea and land? O theft most base, / That we have stol’n what we do fear to keep!’ (2.2.90–2). He argues that it is better to be forced to act by stern laws of honour than to depend on volatile hopes and fears. Paris also claims that there is something transcending human hopes and fears and compelling man to action when he tells the gods that ‘your full consent / Gave

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Expectation whirls me round’

27

wings to my propension and cut off / All fears attending on so dire a project’ (2.2.131–3). The words coming from a notorious ­braggart, the spectator must conclude that their value is small, however, and the play generally makes the point that fear and hope are constantly weighed against each other, just as one takes measure with a spirit-level in order to find out whether there is an incline towards either side. What is measured is no spatial relation, however, but a dimension of time: the future. Time and (literary) historicity read through hope and fear It is their exclusive directedness towards the future that makes hope and fear singular among the emotions, and it can be said that fear and hope are the Janus face that men and women wear when they turn to the future. Phenomenology has argued that human experience is enabled by emotional states underpinning the perception of the world. Not only does this emotional state precede all thoughts and considerations; it is the very condition of their possibility: human beings get in touch with the world only through emotions, or rather the world touches them through emotions, signalling that something needed for their survival is always lacking.22 Modern researchers argue that emotions, in constant interplay with the body’s physiology, are necessary for human c­ onsciousness, rational thought and action.23 This means that what is to come is accessible only through hope and fear. This is what Troilus and Cressida suggests: that there is no future without hope and fear. This means that, as long as men and women live, they cannot turn to the future with equanimity.24 Remembering Freud’s observation that fear and hope are mental repetitions of a traumatic or else a desired event in the past, one can now see that the metatheatricality of hope and fear in Troilus and Cressida is a form of metatemporality. Fear and hope show that the future is anticipated only as something one already knows, like, for example, the story of Troilus and Cressida. The play explicitly alludes to this aspect of temporality. When Cressida learns that she is to be exchanged for Antenor, she is in great fear and tries not to leave Troy. Her resistance is a rebellion against literary history, a history she knows, as the play’s metatheatrical passages suggests, but the wording of her protest betrays her secret expectation that the future will be a version of her past. She ‘must be gone’ (4.3.15), for it is ‘so concluded’ (4.2.68). She may not ‘temporize with [her] affection’ (4.5.6).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

Kai Wiegandt

The derivative nature of the play made obvious in this way, in combination with hope and fear which always picture a potential repetition, lays open the literariness and artificiality of the text and at the same time reveals hope and fear to be conditions of what is called the future. Troilus and Cressida does not contradict the historical construction of emotions,25 and yet it resists readings that interpret hope and fear exclusively as constructed. Hope and fear are not only emanations of the early modern period but self-consciously exhibit the notion that they are necessary for the very construction of historicity: Only they allow a separation of the present and the past from the future. The play thus turns the traditional concept of historicity upside-down by demonstrating that emotion precedes historicity and that aesthetic representation of emotions can precede and avoid a locking of the literary text into its own period whose discourses allegedly minimize the text’s aesthetic freedom. Literary works such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde provide models for emotions such as hope and fear and precede historicity in so far as they influence conceptions of particular emotions, but Shakespeare’s play demonstrates that the influence of literary precursors is mediated through the author and can be qualified through aesthetic choices. Notes  1 See J. C. Oates, ‘The ambiguity of Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 17 (1966), 141–50 (150).  2 Janet Adelman has called attention to the importance of fear in the play. She retells the stories of Cressida and Troilus as struggles against fear: in 3.2, Cressida amplifies our sense of fear especially of betrayal; fear defines her relation to Troilus but also to herself (see 3.2.66–71). Throughout the scene, she is divided between an impulse towards self-protective and manipulative coyness and an impulse towards selfrevelation that seems to her like dangerous self-betrayal. In her fear of self-betrayal, she tries to leave Troilus to break from her ‘unreliable self’ that has betrayed her, making her Troilus’s fool (see 3.2.142–9). She ultimately decides to be a coquette; her sexual wit serves a defensive function and is the only way for her to survive. In Troilus, desire and fear converge: His desire for Cressida is invested with the power of nostalgic longing for, and fear of, union with an overwhelming maternal figure. From the first, he wants to believe in Cressida’s power and his own weakness and identifies his love with infantilisation (see 1.1.9–12). Throughout the play, love reminds him of the powerlessness of an infant. Love therefore promises fulfilment and death (see

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Expectation whirls me round’

29

J. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 47–56).  3 Psychologists disagree on the question of whether curiosity is an emotion.  4 All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J. E. Howard and K. E. Maus (New York: Norton, 2008).  5 See E. Freund, ‘“Ariachne’s broken woof”: the rhetoric of citation in Troilus and Cressida’, in P. Parker and G. Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 19–36 (p. 24). Troilus’s and Cressida’s promises of being true (or of not being false) compete with literary citations and predict the clichés with which they are already associated. This splits their identity, for the origin of their speech is already a citation. Their promises, expressing hope but being spoken out of fear, make them Cretan liars: if Cressida is true, for instance, she will be false; if she is false, she will be true (see Freund, ‘Ariachne’s broken woof’, pp. 24–6).  6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vol. 21: Fear and Anger, ed. J. P. Reid (London: Blackfriars, Eyre & Spottiswoode and McGrawHill, 1963), p. 15.  7 See H. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden, 2010), p. 21.  8 See A. Öhman, ‘Fear and anxiety: evolutionary, cognitive, and clinical perspectives’, in M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones (eds), Handbook of Emotions (New York: Guilford, 2000), pp. 573–93.  9 John Milton, Paradise Regained (Menston: Scolar Press, 1968), III.206. 10 See J. Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 6 (New York: Scribners, 1967), pp. 779–82, and F. L. Cross (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 794. 11 It seems that the discipline’s focus on fear, which is studied in the majority of experiments on emotion because it is the strongest emotion whose physiological symptoms are easily detected, has considerably contributed to eclipsing the issue of hope. Another reason for the lack of psychological research on hope might be that it does not qualify as easily as an emotion as fear does. Today’s psychiatry, for instance, defines emotions commonly as reactions to specific stimuli which are of relatively short duration (as fright, for example is the normal reaction to being scared). While certain events can trigger hope, hope can also be a state of mind independent of stimuli, in which case it might better be called hopefulness. In a similar fashion, anxiety can be regarded as a relatively stable mental state that is independent of stimuli. It persists longer than fear and by some experts is called generalized fear without

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

Kai Wiegandt

a ‘real’ cause since they see the distinction between fear and anxiety in analogy to that between norm and pathology. 12 See Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 6, pp. 779–82, and Cross (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 794. 13 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, p. 43 (original emphasis). 14 Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (London and Cambridge, MA: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 207. 15 See K. L. Rand and J. S. Cheavens, ‘Hope theory’, in S. J. Lopez and C. R. Snyder (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 323–33. 16 See E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 108–13. For the role played by hope in utopias such as Thomas More’s Utopia, see K. L. Berghahn (ed.), The Temptation of Hope: Utopian Thinking and Imagination from Thomas More to Ernst Bloch – and Beyond (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2011). 17 S. Freud, ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), pp. 75–175 (p. 167). 18 Qtd in D. Hillman, ‘The worst case of knowing the other? Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida’, Philosophy and Literature, 32 (2008), 74–86 (79). 19 See P. J. Silvia and E. M. Brown, ‘Anger, disgust, and the negative aesthetic emotions: expanding an appraisal model of aesthetic experience’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 1:2 (2007), 100–6 (101). 20 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, p. 51. 21 Girard also makes the point that choosing Ajax is invested with less fear and more hope (see R. Girard, ‘The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida’, in P. Parker and G. Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 187–209 (pp. 202–3)). 22 See M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), §29, where Heidegger discusses mood (Stimmung) and emotion (Befindlichkeit). 23 Their function is to facilitate the creation of circumstances advantageous to the organism, i.e. to serve survival by triggering behaviour conducive to the attainment of goals and to the avoidance of dangers (see A. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999), pp. 35–56). 24 Imagination might come to mind as another access to the future, but it is a faculty closely linked with hope and fear, enabling humans to

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Expectation whirls me round’

31

picture the future in more finely differentiated ways. If picturing the future in order to be prepared and to control is imagination’s original function, hope and fear can possibly be seen as the basic roots of imagination. Scientists like Damasio might argue that hope and fear guarantee men and women’s interest in survival, and that, as Cressida and numerous examples suggest in contrast to Troilus who thinks fear pathological, it is the interplay of hope and fear that is crucial for this function (see 3.2.62–9). 25 Since this chapter has followed a text-immanent approach to emotion in Troilus and Cressida, and since historical accounts of emotion can complement such an approach, a number of exemplary historical studies should be mentioned. Barbara Rosenwein has shown that the early Middle Ages had norms of emotional valuation and expression that are different from ours. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Adela Pinch has likewise demonstrated that emotions are historically and culturally constructed (see B. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), B. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), A. Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)). Daniel Gross has uncovered a continuous intellectual current from Aristotle to Seneca, Thomas Hobbes and Judith Butler that interprets emotions not as psychological states universal in human beings but as psychosocial phenomena that are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies (see D. M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2006)).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2 ‘Potent raisings’: performing passion in Chaucer and Shakespeare Andreas Mahler ‘Love’ as problem Around 1600, in England, the passion of love, at least in its textual representation, seems to have become largely exhausted. In the programmatic first poem of his collection The Forest, written in 1611/12, Ben Jonson insists on informing the reader right from the start, ‘Why I Write Not of Love’,1 an idea which is prefigured in his previous comedy practice of avoiding ‘Shakespearean’ plots or ‘arguments’ ‘as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke’s son, and the son to love the lady’s waiting-maid: some such cross wooing, with a clown to their serving-man’.2 Most clearly, the Maker is not for love. The same drift can be observed in poetry. The production of sonnets that had flooded the English market since the early 1580s seems to have brought with it a kind of surfeit that begins to disqualify both the genre and the topic. Where Shakespeare, in 1609, still sought fame, Donne had long turned to other forms or subjects.3 In a way, then, 1600, at least in England, pretty much looked like the end of love. If the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries put an end to (literary) love, the fourteenth century may somehow be considered to mark one of its beginnings. Within the context of the present volume’s concern for an ‘aesthetic’ suspension of historicity and temporality in ‘literary’ texts,4 the leading hypothesis of this chapter is the emergence of what can be termed fourteenth-century ‘literature’ through a particular kind of textualization of what is commonly known as ‘love’. This emergence seems to have found one of its most prominent first monuments in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). Therefore, this chapter will explore the different discursive conceptualizations of ‘love’ equally prevalent both in the late

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Potent raisings’

33

Middle Ages and in the early Renaissance. It will then discuss Chaucer’s fictionalizing treatment of the different concepts of love in his Trojan romance of Troilus and Criseyde as a kind of counterdiscursive (or adiscursive) ‘literarization’, that is precisely as a moment of aesthetic suspension with regard to their ideological and historical validities. It will finally have a look at Shakespeare’s (‘literary’) use of the matière de Troie as a highly allusive satirical Inns of Court play, radically extending the scope of ‘love’ to all its levels and thus manifesting yet another ‘emergent’ moment of aesthetic ‘critique’ of worldly issues in his, as what it is seen here, ‘comedy’ of Troilus and Cressida. ‘Love’ as discourse The eternal question ‘What is love?’ seems to have no definitive answer. ‘Love’ seems to belong to those contingent elements of human life that man and woman cannot fathom; that determine the human condition, as it were, from the outside; that, of necessity, remain, as the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has it, a figure of latency, withdrawn from human insight, which cannot satisfactorily be described in rational terms but may well be compensated for in the field of the aesthetic.5 Despite this apparent ineffablity, however, there have always been ideas and theories about love. One of the most influential theories has been the one of seeing love as malady. In this, love is considered to be something irrational, a passion (or emotion) infringing on the human capacity of reason which turns the animal rationale, as which man and woman find themselves conceptualized according to the idea of the ‘chain of being’, into some foreign, unreasonable thing that cannot make itself understood and must be treated with special care.6 ‘Love’ thus finds itself conceptualized as a sickness of the mind that must be treated and that can be healed.7 This is the idea of amor hereos,8 as it is described in the medical and anthropological discourse of the time, for example, in the Viaticum peregrinantis by Constantinus Africanus, or its shorter excerpt, the Liber de hereos morbo by Johannes Afflacius, a pupil of Constantinus’s, and their successors, and as it pertinently appears in the second book of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, characterizing Arcite’s ‘loveris maladye / Of Hereos’9 that, apparently, if one follows the sixteenth-century emendations of ‘hereos’ to ‘eros’, as early as in Shakespeare’s time, was no longer properly understood.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Andreas Mahler

Amor hereos can largely be described as a dysfunction of the virtus estimativa of the brain causing further dysfunctions in the other virtutes, both in the mind and in the body, which end in a ‘fixation’ of the (dried-up) imagination on the love object (or, rather, its illusion or delusion) that finds itself thus indelibly and permanently represented.10 It expresses itself in symptoms such as mental absences, sleeplessness, an incessant flow of tears and unmotivated laughter or both, a rolling of the eyes, deep and frequent moans, unmotivated sadness and a marked penchant towards loneliness, as can be seen in Cervantes’s Don Quixote as well as in the Shakespearean character of Orsino in Twelfth Night or even, as a caricature, in his Malvolio.11 The malady of amor hereos thus finds itself in opposition (or at least rivalry) to other contemporary concepts of love such as courtly and Platonic love. On the one hand, courtly love or amour courtois must be seen, even though it can, above all in ‘literary’ texts again, lead to extremes, first and foremost less as a malady than as a social ritual, as a kind of educative ‘code’ according to which the courtier learns how to act reasonably in public so as to signal his willingness to take part in the rationality of the courtly game of love.12 On the other hand, ‘romantic’ or Platonic love differentiates itself from the concept of love sickness through its (vertical) sequentiality of leading from earthly beauty to some higher aspect of perfection or sublimation. Christianity, with its tendency towards interiority and subjectivity as well as its dissociation, and hierarchization, of body and mind, seems to have blocked both the courtly ideal of love as a collective ritual and the vision of love as a mental and physical disease at the same time.13 An analysis of the medical as well as the philosophical treatises on love is thus apt to bring about a synopsis of three different levels on which love was discussed throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. If one accepts that the term ‘discourse’ may be taken to designate systems of thinking and arguing about a certain semantic or thematic phenomenon or topic (such as politics, economics, religion or, say, love),14 one can argue that there may have been at least three different types or levels of erotic discourse characterizing the contemporary debate about love: the divine or contemplative type (amore contemplativo) celebrating the idea of perfection; the human or ‘honest’ type (amore morale/onesto) focusing on the earthly aspect of the vita activa and remaining, at least in its Petrarchan variety, largely unfulfilled, that is physically unfulfilled, centred on the mind and its faculties of perception; and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Potent raisings’

35

the lowest and bodily type (amore lascivo) celebrating sexuality and corporeality but also forgetting about the specifically human factor of ‘rationality’. These three (mutually exclusive) systems of thinking and arguing about love as an angelic, human or animal-like phenomenon have been labelled the ‘Platonic’, the ‘Petrarchist’ and the ‘hedonist’ discourse respectively.15 If one further accepts the Foucauldian notion that each ‘discourse’ has a ‘will to truth’ in trying to disqualify its ‘rivals’,16 one can see that these three types of erotic discourse must be conceived of as antagonistic in the sense that each of them seems to affirm that it is the one and only representation of what can truthfully be said about love. Pluralizing love in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is one of the first texts in English extensively deliberating on the subject of love in the fictionalized ‘novelistic’ form of the romance:17 The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, That was the kyng Priamus sone of Troye, In lovynge, how his aventures fellen Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie, My purpos is … (I.1–5)

This ‘double sorrow’, Troilus’s ‘unsely aventure’ (I.35), his ‘cas’ (I.29) of a Fortune-dependent rise and fall, is precisely taken by the narrator of the romance as the ground of deploying, debating and performing ‘love’ as a topic apt to rouse pity in the alleged hearers of the tale: ‘And for to have of hem compassioun’ (I.50). As a consequence, love finds itself described as an uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, emotion triggering off intratextual – figural – emotions such as sadness and joy as well as extratextual – readerly – ones such as fear and pity. It is the basis of performing passion. In the romance, ‘love’ is first introduced through an object of perfection. Following the idea of the divine ideal, Criseyde is described by the narrator as some heavenly being: Criseyde was this lady name al right. As to my doom, in al Troies cite Nas non so fair, forpassynge every wight, So aungelik was hir natif beaute, That lik a thing inmortal semed she,

Andreas Mahler

36 As doth an hevenyssh perfit creature, That down were sent in scornynge of nature.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(I.99–105)

Criseyde is seen as ‘heavenly’, ‘immortal’ and ‘perfect’, which brings into play the contemplative aspect of love, whereas the idea of ‘scorn’ already introduces a potential Petrarchist aspect into the poem. The idea of perfection is further corroborated by her portrait which states that ‘In beaute first so stood she, makeles’ (I.172), which creates the opportunity for the young Troilus, ‘this fierse and proude knyght’ (I.225), scornful of love and its effects, to arouse the God of Love’s wrath and to ­immediately fall in love: Yet with a look his herte wex a-fere, That he that now was moost in pride above, Wax sodeynly moost subgit unto love. (I.229–31)

Love finds his way through this ‘look’, piercing Troilus’s ‘eye’ (I.272) through hers (‘hire yen’, I.305), presenting him with ‘nevere … so good a syghte’ (I.294) of ‘Honour, estat, and ­wommanly noblesse’ (I.287), which makes him exclaim: ‘O mercy, God,’ thoughte he, ‘wher hastow woned, That art so feyr and goodly to devise?’ (I.276–7)

This is the moment of the innamoramento, which leads to Troilus’s first song: ‘If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo? If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me, When every torment and adversite That cometh of hym may to me savory thinke, For ay thurst I, the more that ich it drynke. ‘And if that at myn owen lust I brenne, From whennes cometh my waillynge and my pleynte? If harm agree me, wherto pleyne I thenne? I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte. O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte, How may of the in me swich quantite, But if that I consente that it be?

‘Potent raisings’

37

‘And if that I consente, I wrongfully Compleyne, iwis. Thus possed to and fro, Al sterelees withinne a boot am I Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, That in contrarie stonden evere mo. Allas, what is this wondre maladie? For hote of cold, for cold of hote, I dye.’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(I.400–20)

Troilus’s song is not only a description of the antinomous and paradoxical contrari affetti (‘between two winds that will forever stand contrary to each other’), of the lover’s oxymoral inner turmoil characterizing his paralysis and inactivity, his (maladylike) ‘state of exception’ of not knowing what to do.18 It is also, as is well known, a structural imitation of Canzoniere 132,19 introducing elements of an interminable and unfulfilled amore onesto that places the lover between life and death: ‘But as hire man I wol ay lyve and sterve’ (I.427). Above all, however, it is a description of the symptoms of amor hereos, which finds itself then developed into a full deployment of the typicalities of the love sickness and finally finds correspondence in Criseyde’s reaction to his sight: ‘Now was hire herte warm, now was it cold’ (II.698). In thus juxtaposing the ‘Platonic’ and the ‘Petrarchist’ discourse of thinking and arguing about love, Chaucer begins to produce a non-hierarchical, that is ‘aesthetic’ plurality that clearly goes against a single ideological will to truth normally connected to historical discursive practices. He begins to construct, as well as deconstruct, different historical ways of speaking about love, opening up some kind of discursive (or rather adiscursive) game of abeyance apt to articulate several – figural, narratorial, a­ uthorial – truths about love at the same time without having to decide which will eventually have to be seen as the ‘right’ one.20 This represents the kind of openness and undecidability that Jonathan Culler, among others, has identified as the place, and potential, of ‘literature’.21 This possibility of deconstructing truths, of circumventing discursive authority by a non-discursive (or counter-discursive), ‘literary’ language use,22 has already convincingly been claimed with regard to Petrarch’s work, notably his Canzoniere, as an instance of ‘poetic fiction’, that is literature, being ‘the systematic site of all work of deconstruction’.23 It introduces the idea of a no longer ‘functional’ (pragmatic) but rather ‘autonomous’ (dysfunctional)

Andreas Mahler

38

variety of fiction,24 suspending ‘realities’, inventing alternative truths and opening up other possibilities than the ones seemingly obviously at hand.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Pluralizing love in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida In contrast to Chaucer’s narrative ‘love poem’, Shakespeare’s theatrical play on Troilus and Cressida has always radically puzzled literary scholars. One habitual way of reading it, after its belated rediscovery in the second half of the nineteenth century, was as an Ibsenian ‘problem play’, ‘bitter, dark, unpleasant, pessimistic and decadent’; the other way, the ‘Alexander’ mode, suggested in the late 1920s and adopted here, is to see the play as a satirical comedy (or ‘comicall satyre’) written for, and privately acted by, the men of the Middle Temple in one of the Inns of Court revels around 1601/2.25 The Middle Temple revels, as is well known, were significantly organized around a Prince d’Amour.26 In a way, ‘love’ was thus always at the centre of the Middle Temple’s festive activities. We know that Shakespeare at least presented two of his comedies within the context of the Inns of Court revels: the Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn on 28 December 1594, and Twelfth Night, in honour of one his Warwickshire relatives, at the Middle Temple on 2 February 1602. In this respect, a ‘play of foolish war and love’27 such as the one of Troilus and Cressida would equally have served the purpose. As has been pointed out by W. R. Elton, again particularly around 1600, the matière de Troie, which had already come in for increasing criticism in the preceding decades ever since Juan Luis Vives’s influential treatise on De Tradendis Disciplinis (1531), seems to have entirely lost its seriousness for English poets. There is already some decisive criticism in the, at the time, much esteemed Horace: Fabula, qua Paridis propter narratur amorem Graecia barbariae lento collisa duello, stultorum regum et populorum continet aestus.28 The story in which it is told how, because of Paris’s love, Greece clashed in tedious war with a foreign land, embraces the passions of foolish kings and peoples.29

Adding to this, there is also some severe comment on the matter in Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond de Sebonde:

‘Potent raisings’

39

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Toute l’Asie se perdit et se consomma en guerres pour le maquerellage de Paris. L’envie d’un seul homme, un dépit, un plaisir, une jalousie domestique, causes qui ne devraient pas émouvoir deux harangères à s’égratigner, c’est l’âme et le mouvement de tout ce grand trouble.30 For Paris lustfull love (as Stories tell) All Greece to direfull warre with Asia fell. The hatred of one man, a spight, a pleasure, a familiar suspect, or a jealousie; causes, which ought not to move two scolding fish-wives to scratch one another, is the soule and motive of all this hurly-burly.31

‘Hurly-burly’ may precisely be the word with which the treatment of the matière de Troie in Troilus and Cressida can be characterized. ‘Be thou the Lady Cresset-light to mee’, we find in one of Samuel Rowland’s satires published in 1611, ‘Sir Trollelollie I will proue to thee’.32 What we encounter, then, in the play is a happy-go-lucky, if not carnivalesque, juxtaposition of all the different erotic discourses circulating at the time.33 On the one hand, there is the Platonic discourse, celebrating ‘fair Cressid’ as a ‘goddess’ (1.1.30, 27),34 and performing love in a trajectory of ascending steps, traditionally beginning with the sight. On the other hand, this finds itself already mixed with the symptoms of amor hereos, the love sickness,35 which then both conjoin to develop a largely Petrarchist discourse of suffering in the sight of the beautiful but ‘cruel’ lady: Why should I war without the walls of Troy, That find such cruel battle here within? … The Greeks are strong, and skilful to their strength, Fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valiant; But I am weaker than a woman’s tear, Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance, Less valiant than the virgin in the night, And skilless as unpractis’d infancy. (1.1.2–3, 7–12)

Accompanied by the typical arsenal of ‘sigh[s]’ (1.1.35) and the like, Troilus thus displays his predicament of being ‘mad / In Cressid’s love’ (1.1.51–2) as well as his need of help. To this, Shakespeare now adds the third variety of love, the hedonist discourse. As he does in the Sonnets where, above all in the ‘dark lady’ sequence, he freely uses all three different discourses in one and the same argument, juxtaposing the incompatible within

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

40

Andreas Mahler

the narrow space of fourteen lines,36 Shakespeare here begins to display a discursive game on the topic of love that obliterates all the truth claims normally connected to discursive language use. Shakespeare prepares this effect through the use of bawdy language, of a ‘bas matériel’37 apt to appeal to an audience of  young male law students, as in the pun on ‘Ajax’/‘a jakes’ (1.2.1ff.), causing some kind of semantic gravitation levelling the Trojan hero with his all-too-human needs.38 It also pertinently shows itself in the treatment of the gradus amoris as a ‘ladder of lechery’, leading from visus (‘sight’) via alloquium (‘talk’), contactus (‘touch’), osculum (‘kiss’) to factum (‘deed’).39 And it reappears in the relentless mocking of Achilles (and his ‘love’), which draws attention not only to the ‘potent raisings’ of the greatest of all wars but to the analogy between what keeps Achilles from war and what should induce him to committing himself to it: ACHILLES: Of this my privacy I have strong reasons. ULYSSES: But [Butt] ’gainst your privacy The reasons [raisings] are more potent and heroical. (3.3.190–2)40

Shakespeare thus extends the discursive game to all levels of love. In juggling with the Platonic, the Petrarchist and, additionally, the hedonist discourse of love, he confronts his audience not only with an encyclopaedia of what is historically known about love in his day but also opens up, as he does in the Sonnets, the opportunity of weighing the truth values of all these ideological discourses against each other without having to make an exclusive truth claim of his own. He – ‘literally’/‘literarily’ – manages to perform the passions of love without committing himself to the one variety that ­temporarily looks as if it were, contingently, the right one. ‘Love’ and the literary The ‘literary’ has been seen as a space of ‘suspension’ where historical and topical sense-making can be relativized again into the asking of open and innocent questions.41 This seems to be especially true for the contingencies of life such as the ever elusive phenomenon of ‘love’. The argument pursued has traced two moments in English history in which the ‘literary’ can be seen to emerge, one (predictably) around 1600, the other one (not so predictably) roughly two centuries earlier. It has tried to show that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Potent raisings’

41

Geoffrey Chaucer, as early as 1385, in juxtaposing the Platonic and the Petrarchist discourse on love (and mingling this with the idea of amor hereos), managed to display the rivalry of two incompatible discourses without having to commit himself to one single truth arrogantly pretending to answer the ‘problem’ once and for all. It has then shown how the same problem re-emerged in a different context in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where its negotiation is extended to the inclusion of the whole gamut of discursive possibilities of speaking about ‘love’ without, however again, having to opt for one of them in particular. In thus textually performing a passion without attributing to it an (overall) explanatory truth value, the ‘aesthetic’ seems characteristically apt to emerge again and again, continuously readdressing the unsolvable and, in doing so, raising a distinct potency of its own. Notes  1 See Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 95.  2 This is Mitis’s irritated comment against Jonson’s new comedy practice of ‘vetus comœdia’ in Every Man out of His Humour, III.6.169ff. (The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, vol. 1, ed. G. A. Wilkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981–82)), which stands in marked contrast to the approved Shakespearean model, following Greek New Comedy, of providing the audience with easily consumable, love-based ‘As-youlike-its’ and ‘What-you-wills’, at least up until 1601/2.  3 For a dating of John Donne’s love poetry, largely written within an Inns of Court context in the early 1590s, see A. F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).  4 The ‘literary’ can, for the purpose of the argument here, briefly be seen as characterized by a (depragmatizing) gesture of distanciation reflecting on, rather than acting in, the world, as well as by a (performative) gesture of imagination producing difference rather than reproducing sameness.   5 See N. Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz and D. Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) as well as his Art as a Social System, trans. E. M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).  6 See, classically, E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, repr. 1978), pp. 33–6, as well as the still useful corrective summary in W. R. Elton, ‘Shakespeare and the thought of his age’, in S. Wells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, repr. 1991), pp. 17–34; for the idea of the ‘chain of being’, cf. A. O.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42

Andreas Mahler

Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, repr. 1964).  7 See M. F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1990); cf. also C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, repr. 1972).  8 See J. L. Lowes, ‘The loveres maladye of hereos’, Modern Philology, 11 (1913/14), 491–546; in the following, I owe a lot to the fine informative essay by J. Küpper, ‘(H)er(e)os: Petrarcas Canzoniere und der medizinische Diskurs seiner Zeit’, Romanische Forschungen, 111:2 (1999), 178–224 (esp. 186ff.).  9 See Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale, I.1373f.; all quotations from Chaucer are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 1988). For a treatment of the medical implications in this passage cf. also S. Kohl, Wissenschaft und Dichtung bei Chaucer (Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 1973), pp. 218ff. 10 See Küpper, ‘(H)er(e)os’, 190f.; for the different virtutes in the functioning of the mind, cf. also V. O. Lobsien and E. Lobsien, Die unsicht­ bare Imagination: Literarisches Denken im 16. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2003), pp. 11ff. 11 See Küpper, ‘(H)er(e)os’, 192f. 12 See Lewis, The Allegory of Love. For the idea of a courtly game of love, with particular reference to Sir Thomas Wyatt and the court of Henry VIII, see R. Southall, The Courtly Maker: An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964); cf. also W. Weiß, ‘Petrarkismus am Hofe Heinrichs VIII.: Sir Thomas Wyatts Übersetzungen aus dem Canzoniere’, in K. W. Hempfer and G. Regn (eds), Interpretationen: Das Paradigma der europäischen RenaissanceLiteratur (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1983), pp. 201–16 (esp. pp. 204ff.). 13 See Küpper, ‘(H)er(e)os’, 194ff.; for the conceptualization of love as idealization and its (early modern) transfer to paradoxicality, cf., again, N. Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. J. Gaines and D. L. Jones (Cambridge: Polity, 1986). 14 See M. Titzmann, ‘Kulturelles Wissen – Diskurs – Denksystem: Zu einigen Grundbegriffen der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung’, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 99:1 (1989), 47–61; cf. also my ‘Diskurs: Versuch einer Entwirrung’, Zeitschrift für fran­ zösische Sprache und Literatur, 120:2 (2010), 153–73. 15 See, with reference to Benedetto Varchi’s Ficino-based treatise Lezione sul Petrarca (c. 1560), G. Regn, Torquato Tassos zyklische Liebeslyrik und die pertrakistische Tradition (Tübingen: Narr, 1987), pp. 21–70 (esp. pp. 39ff.). 16 See M. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 19ff.,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Potent raisings’

43

as well as its English translation: ‘Orders of discourse: inaugural lecture delivered at the Collège de France’, trans. R. Swyer, Social Science Information, 10:2 (1971), 7–30 (esp. 11f.). 17 For a short introduction to Chaucer’s ‘love poem’ see The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 471–2, and the accompanying ‘Explanatory Notes’, pp. 1021–4; for a discussion of the poem’s genre in terms of the political and historical discourses that the text participates in see L. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 84–164. 18 For the paradoxical structure of love as being characterized by the copresence of mutually exclusive emotions or ‘contrari effetti’, see Regn, Torquato Tassos zyklische Liebeslyrik, pp. 26ff. 19 See Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. G. Contini (Turin: Einaudi, 6th edn, 1975), p. 184. 20 For the notion of a ‘discursive game’ or ‘game with discourse types’ (Diskurstypenspiel), see K. W. Hempfer, ‘Shakespeares Sonnets: Inszenierte Alterität als Diskurstypenspiel’, in D. Mehl and W. Weiß (eds), Shakespeares Sonette in europäischen Perspektiven: Ein Symposium (Münster: Lit, 1993), pp. 168–205 (esp. pp. 187ff.). 21 See J. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, repr. 1987); cf. also, with reference to Foucault, J. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006). 22 For the notion of the ‘counter-discursive’ as typical of a specifically ‘literary’ use of texts, see R. Warning, ‘Poetische Konterdiskursivität: Zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Umgang mit Foucault’, in Die Phantasie der Realisten (Munich: Fink, 1999), pp. 313–45 (esp. pp. 317ff.), as well as my ‘Diskurs’, 167ff. 23 See R. Warning, ‘Imitation und Intertextualität: Zur Geschichte lyrischer Dekonstruktion der Amortheologie: Dante, Petrarca, Baudelaire’, in K. W. Hempfer and G. Regn (eds), Interpretationen: Das Paradigma der europäischen Renaissance-Literatur (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1983), pp. 288–317 (esp. p. 291: ‘daß die poetische Fiktion selbst der systematische Ort aller Dekonstruktionsarbeit ist’); cf. also, with regard to Petrarch’s writing as a symptom of an underlying epistemic change, the concluding remarks in Küpper, ‘(H)er(e)os’, 220ff. 24 For this distinction, as well as the idea of a boost of ‘autonomization’ around 1200, see J.-D. Müller, ‘Literarische und andere Spiele: Zum Fiktionalitätsproblem in vormoderner Literatur’, Poetica, 36:3–4 (2004), 281–311 (esp. 283ff.). 25 For the different approaches, see W. R. Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), the quotations on p. 1; the idea of placing the play in the context of the Inns of Court Revels goes back to P. Alexander, ‘Troilus and Cressida, 1609’, The Library, 9 (1928/9), 267–86. In the following, I owe a lot to

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

44

Andreas Mahler

Elton’s highly suggestive and erudite reconstruction; for Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court background cf. also my ‘Beginning in the middle: Strategie und Taktik an den Inns of Court’, Zeitsprünge, 13:1–2 (2009), 1–22. 26 P. J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 1–80 (esp. pp. 45ff.); cf. also A. Arlidge, Shakespeare and the Prince of Love: The Feast of Misrule in the Middle Temple (London: Giles de la Mare, 2000), as well as Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, pp. 1–17, and, in particular, the list of ‘revels criteria’ on p. 7. 27 See Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, p. 37. Shakespeare’s play can thus be seen as a playful answer to the Chaucerian romance, traditionally classified as ‘a story of love and war’; see, e.g. G. T. Shepherd, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, in D. S. Brewer (ed.), Chaucer and Chaucerians (London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 65–87 (p. 65). 28 Horace, Satires and Epistles, ed. Edward P. Morris (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1968), Ep. I.2, 6–8; for this and the following, cf. also Elton’s epigraphs (p. v) as well as the references on p. 169. 29 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars poetica, trans. H. R. Fairclough (London: Heinemann, repr. 1970), cf. Ben Jonson’s pointed translation of Horace’s criticism of Homer in his Ars Poetica, l. 359, as ‘Sometimes, I hear good Homer snore’ (Horace, of the Art of Poetry, in Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, pp. 354–71, l. 536). 30 See Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. J. Céard, Les Classiques modernes (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2001), II.12.741. 31 See Michael Lord of Montaigne, The Essayes, trans. J. Florio, Everyman Library (London: J. M. Dent, n.d.), II.12.169. 32 Quoted according to Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, p. 22 (original italics). 33 For the notion of the carnivalesque, see M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, repr. 1984); for a discussion of the concepts of ‘hurly-burly’, ‘handy-dandy’, ‘mingle-mangle’, or the ‘mingling of kings and clowns’ in Shakespeare, see R. Weimann, Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis: Autorität und Representation im elisabethanischen Theater (Berlin: Aufbau, 1988), esp. pp. 31ff. and 195ff., as well as his Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 34 All quotations are from William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982). 35 See Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, p. 23. 36 For the pluralist co-presence of mutually exclusive erotic discourses in the Sonnets see Hempfer, ‘Shakespeares Sonnets: Inszenierte Alterität als Diskurstypenspiel’, pp. 181ff.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Potent raisings’

45

37 Thus the felicitous coinage in the French translation of Bakhtin’s Rabelais book; cf. M. Bakhtine, L’Œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, trans. A. Robel (Paris: Gallimard, repr. 1983), pp. 366ff. 38 For an explication of the innuendoes and allusions involved, see Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, pp. 24ff.; for the concept of ‘semantic gravitation’, see J. Bentley, ‘Semantic gravitation: an essay on satiric reduction’, Modern Language Quarterly, 30:1 (1969), 3–19. 39 See Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, p. 23. 40 For the alternative reading in square brackets, see Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, pp. 29f. 41 For such a functionalist theory of literature as questioning ‘sense’ by (freely) negotiating the contingencies of ‘life’, see W. Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. D. H. Wilson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 51ff.

3 The space of desire in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Troy Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Paul Strohm

Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s fictional Troys are shadowed and abetted by each poet’s (and each audience’s) experience of London. Each author has the luxury of creating his Troy in broad strokes, confident of its supplementation by his audiences’ experiences of the contemporary city. Fourteenth-century Londoners were already predisposed to compare their city to Troy anyway, given its founding myths and their habit of styling it New Troy or Troynovaunt.1 Both authors remove obstacles to comparison by giving us London-like Troys with walls and gates and ramparts. Both Troys are, like London, also capitals. (For, although Westminster as seat of government was still physically and administratively separate from London, contemporaries of both Chaucer and Shakespeare correctly regarded their city as the kingdom’s strategic and ceremonial centre.) In fact, Shakespeare reproduces the early seventeenth-century relation between Westminster and London: His Illion – Priam’s royal palace – is similarly situated both inside and outside the city of Troy in which it resides. Both imaginary Troys reduplicate London’s public and, especially, private gardens. All boast aristocratic townhouses – not just fine homes but, in all four cases, virtual palaces – with their own gates and multiple rooms and a promise that one might find at least a modicum of privacy inside. Privacy is a matter of crucial concern, if not obsession, in all four sites, and in every case it is an elusive objective, more often sought than actually achieved. This quest gains heightened significance for those in love, and especially for those in love relations better concealed from view. Both authors understand privacy as a complicated objective, and know that the conditions of life in a medieval or early modern city are obstacles to its realization. Most obviously, the Londons of 1385–86 and 1602–3 and their Trojan counterparts were crowded cities, cities in which people are

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The space of desire

47

jammed up against one another and have trouble finding ways to be alone – a problem alleviated, but not solved, even within stately palaces.2 Residents of the two real and the two imaginary cities are likely to be looked at – gazed upon – sometimes cultivating the public gaze by presenting themselves proudly to view in civic ceremonies and processions, and at other times wishing for more privacy than the crowded conditions of urban living were likely to afford. This matter of crowding is, in many senses, relative. Chaucer’s London had been thinned to something like forty to fifty thousand inhabitants after the mid-century plague.3 Urban historians like Caroline Barron and John Schofield have pointed to records of vacant tenements in the second half of the century.4 It was full of greenery and open space, and Schofield has said that ‘[u]ntil the middle of the sixteenth century, London would have seemed quite rural to modern eyes’.5 But, even in the relatively thinly populated London of Chaucer’s day, the public thoroughfares of the city were jammed – certainly for common citizens, but also for the nobility who had no choice but to traverse them. With the exception of the processional route along the Cheap between Aldgate and Paul’s, no street in the city was wide enough to contain more than a single mounted rider, and that with difficulty. City streets were notoriously cramped, of course, with a typical width of fifteen feet or less.6 That width was itself compromised by protruding tavern signs (‘alestakes’) and other commercial signage and emblems of rank displayed when the elite were in town or in residence. Chaucer does allow Troilus and his retinue free passage, riding two-by-two (II.620).7 He remains available to close-up viewing, closely observed by Criseyde. Her people throw open the gate of her palace, in order to view him passing on the street, and she appears to view him more discreetly, from her first-floor soler, overlooking the street. She is able to view his blush at the people’s cheers, and to clock his facial expressions: For which he wex a litel reed for shame When he the peple upon hym herde cryen, That to byholde it was a noble game How sobrelich he caste down his yën. Criseÿda gan al his chere aspien. (II.645–9)

By the time of Shakespeare’s birth, Chaucer’s London had doubled in size and then doubled again by the year of his death to two

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

48

Paul Strohm

hundred thousand inhabitants and, if anything, street-level activities were even more emphatically available to public view. Troilus and his cohort enter the city on foot, as a concession to the conditions of staging, but they’re no less closely observed. Pandarus arranges himself and Cressida to watch them pass by: ‘Hark, they are coming from the field. Shall we stand up here and see them as they pass toward Illion? … Here, here, here’s an excellent place, here we may see most bravely’ (1.2.177–81).8 The entourage In these crowded streets a certain availability to view is taken for granted. But how then can one arrange, in London or its Troy equivalents, to transact business in privacy? Some privacy is available within the palaces and townhouses of the great. Chaucer’s Troilus lives in a palace (I.323, III.1529, V.512), as does Criseyde (V.523–5, 540), and Shakespeare’s Cressida lives in her father’s fine home, with her own chamber for herself (although Pandarus regards himself as somewhat its impresario) and guest accommodation for Pandarus and with a spacious and much-frequented courtyard. So what then is the problem? Part of the problem, especially in Chaucer, is self-inflicted. The problem of privacy is posed not just by outsiders but also by relations, friends and, not least, one’s own retinue. Of Pandarus’s oppressive over-presence I need hardly speak. And Criseyde considers herself smothered by an unsolicited farewell visit from her circle of friends, even as Troilus finds himself restless in Sarpedon’s party house. For Chaucer’s characters, unwieldy retinues may constitute the biggest problem of all. We first encounter Chaucer’s Troilus in his posse of ‘yonge knyghtes’ (I.184), mingling with the crowd at the ceremony of the Palladium. When Pandarus visits Criseyde he finds her seated with ‘two othere ladys … / Withinne a paved parlour’ (II.81–2), being read to by a third and, after he leaves her, she withdraws to her garden, accompanied by three nieces while ‘other of hire wommen, a gret route, / Hire folowede in the gardyn al aboute’ (II.818–19). When Criseyde comes to supper with Pandarus for what he imagines, and she has cause to suspect (III.193–6), will be her first private rendezvous with Troilus, she is accompanied by certain of her own men, Antigone and ‘other of hire wommen nyne or ten’ (III.596–8). Troilus, for his part, revives his entourage whenever his mood permits. Assured of Criseyde’s love, he socializes madly,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The space of desire

49

‘And held aboute hym alwey … / A world of folk’ (III.1720–1); and even at the disastrous moment of Criseyde’s exchange for Antenor he holds form by appearing ‘with an huge route / Of knyghtes’ (V.65–6). As a consequence of these habits of accompaniment, our protagonists have a simply terrible time arranging any privacy at all. Newly aflame with love, and wishing to be alone, Troilus must dismiss his retinue, bidding ‘his folk to gon wher that hem liste’ (I.357). Criseyde, wanting time alone to weigh her course of action with Troilus, must feign a need for sleep, and ‘voided … thei that voiden oughte’ (II.912) leaving her more alone, although not necessarily entirely so. In order to be alone after the disastrous parliament Troilus must clear his own chamber of a lingering ‘man of his or two’ (IV.221), on pretext of (unneeded) sleep. Troilus, wanting to go mope around Criseyde’s empty palace, has to invent an errand in town to deceive his meyne or household retainers (V.526–7).9 Shakespeare’s characters aren’t quite so beset by their own servants, but the men of his play seem to go almost everywhere in large groups. It is a society of men, of warriors, and huge assemblies of them traipse back and forth across the stage. Stage directions give their own impression of this rout of men. For example: ‘Enter Priam, Hector, Troilus, Paris, and Helenus.’ Or, ‘Enter Ajax, armed; Achilles, Patroclus, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Ulysses, Nestor, Calchas, etc.’ Gossip Constantly attending and being attended, everyone is always to one degree or another observed, and the business of observation is shared out across the city as a whole. From the outset, Chaucer’s protagonists take extreme precautions against discovery, and various hints about heightened public awareness suggest their necessity. Initially discussing with Criseyde the feasibility of her and Troilus’s affair, Pandarus concedes that his visits to her palace would be noticed, and ‘Men wolde wondren sen [seeing] hym come or goon’ (II.368). No problem, though; it would not matter if the whole town beheld his visits, since such visits are commonplace in a general culture of friendship: Swych love of frendes regneth al this town; And wre you in that mantel evere moo. (II.379–80)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

50

Paul Strohm

No problems of friendship complicate life in Shakespeare’s Troy, in which everyone is nakedly out for himself or herself, but the two societies share a common denominator in the prevalence of gossip. In Chaucer’s Troy, Criseyde is engulfed in rumour and general hearsay from the moment of her father’s departure (I.85–6), and she ‘alday herd at ere / Hire fadres shame’ (I.106–7). Even when spared publicity’s full glare, Criseyde remains subject to the power of collective opinion; the first time we see her, at the festivity of the Palladium, she is an object of general comment (‘Hire goodly lokyng gladed al the prees’ (I.173) … ‘everichone’ (I.176) expresses a favourable view). Pandarus is afraid that, if his role as go-between were known, ‘al the world upon it wolde crie’ (III.277). Heedless ‘tonge’, he insists, has undone many a woman bright of hue (III.302). Criseyde, preparing to visit Pandarus’s for the night of consummation, fears no gossip about her normal relations with her uncle, but still requests extra caution lest ‘goosissh poeples speche / … demen thynges whiche as nevere were’ (III.584–5). ‘Swifte Fame’ (IV.659) flies, mingling falsity and truth, when the news breaks of the prisoner exchange. Then, when Troilus proposes her abduction, she raises the consideration of what ‘peple … al aboute / Wolde of it seye’ (IV.1569–70). These are not baseless fears. We have already seen what might be considered a community of potential gossips, in the friends who visit Criseyde on the brink of her departure, with their vain tales and baseless speculations (IV.680– 730), and we have also seen the more virulent blaze of public opinion in the parliamentary discussion that decides Criseyde’s fate: ‘The noyse of peple … / As breme as blase of strawe iset on-fire’ (IV.183–4). Thus, Pandarus can take satisfaction in the fact that, in the early stages of their courtship at least, the lovers have not yet been found out; that ‘ther yet devyneth noon / Upon yow two’ (II.1741–2). Were they to be found out, he says, people would invade their privacy with vain conjectures; in his parodic rendition of such gossiping conjectures, ‘For she, and she / Spak swych a word; thus loked he, and he!’ (II.1747–8).10 Shakespeare’s city is similarly gossip-filled. Gossip is, in fact, the Trojans’ favourite game. Consider the moment in the play when Pandarus spars with Paris and Helen about Troilus’s evening plans, and Paris guesses that he intends to visit Cressida, and Pandarus attempts an alibi. Paris sums it all up as a game, perhaps the favourite game of Shakespearean Troy. To Pandarus’s alibi that Cressida is too ill to be spending the evening with Troilus, Paris replies with ‘I Spy’ (3.1.86) – declaring himself winner in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The space of desire

51

the traditional game of guesswork about the choices and motives of others. No wonder that, in watchful Troy, Cressida represents herself in banter with Pandarus as if she were a city, furnished out with wards and watches, and imagery of watching (1.2.240–8), declaring herself to lie ‘at a thousand watches’, including vigilance against Pandarus, non-consensual sex and unwanted pregnancy. Their bawdy double-entendres on rough courtship and unwanted impregnation augment the gossipy side of the climate of speculation and watchfulness that surrounds all the action of the play. As in Chaucer, Shakespeare’s Pandarus remains a constant watcher, the original ‘participant-observer’. He is hovering around Troilus and Cressida when they first react to the news of her exchange, and even tries to worm his way into their first embrace. His spectatorship is explicit. ‘What a pair of spectacles is here’, he exclaims to the sorrowing couple (4.5.13). Garden and chamber Of course, privacy has defensive resources of its own, especially when the high stakes of erotic privacy are put in play.11 I am thinking of privileged spaces of private encounter – the private garden and the bedchamber – both new technologies of space in the later fourteenth century, and still vital in Shakespeare’s conception.12 Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde avail themselves of gardens, though separately: it is in her garden that Criseyde, influentially, hears Antigone sing and resolves to love, and Troilus and Pandarus spend a half-day ‘In-with the paleis gardyn, by a welle’ (II.508), wherein Troilus complains about his love and Pandarus, naturally, eavesdrops. More thematically still, an ‘herber greene’ provides a place of resort for Helen and Deiphoebus (II.1704–8). This garden, entered only by an interior stair, affords a place for them to consider a letter from Hector that Pandarus offers them as a pretext for their withdrawal. Earnestly perusing it, while ‘romyng outward’ (II.1704), the two head down an interior stair and into the presumably private space of the arbour, and spending their hour ‘largely’ (II.1707) upon it, suggesting that they had a motive of their own to seek a private place. (A reading of this episode might be conditioned by the fact that Chaucer probably knew the tradition that Helen would marry Deiphoebus after the death of Paris.)13 This garden allows Helen and Deiphoebus to enjoy what Shakespeare’s Thersites will later and in another connection describe as a ‘secretly open’ connection (5.2.24), the secret

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

Paul Strohm

of the unknown knowledge of their love. So too, in Shakespeare, does a garden furnish Troilus and Cressida’s first trysting-place. Pandarus sends Troilus to an ‘orchard’ to await her (3.2.15), and brings her there. The orchard provides an important opportunity, although they don’t stay long. It is evidently near to Calchas’s house; Cressida invites her temporarily agitated lover to ‘walk in’ (3.2.58), and Pandarus then gets down to it with his offer of a chamber and bed … which brings me to my main interest: the origin of the private bedroom or chamber. John Schofield has observed that ‘a concern with privacy of the individual within the household may be traced … in the multiplication of bedrooms and of chambers generally … in the London house from the fourteenth century’.14 The bedchamber is an indispensable place for privacy – either solitude or the mutual privacy that lovers seek. Chaucer’s Troilus uses his chamber for solitary swooning and delicious death-wishing despair. When smitten by Criseyde, Troilus’s first thought is to ‘hiden his desir in muwe’ (I.381). He ‘muwes’ his desire – locks it up in the small cage to which moulting hawks were confined – both personally (by locking it within, so it cannot be publicly exposed or ‘wide yblowe’ (I.384)) and also spatially, in the confined space of his chamber. Then, learning of Criseyde’s imminent departure, he returns to his chamber again. Clearing his chambre (IV.220) of lingering retainers, ‘every dore he shette, / And wyndow ek’ (IV.232–3). His confinement within his room is correlative to the self-enclosure of the metaphor with which Chaucer describes him: a tree in winter, stripped of leaves, ‘Ibounden in the blake bark of care’ (IV.229). The chamber is not just a place of solitude but, equally often, a putatively private social space. Think of Troilus and Criseyde’s, and Troilus and Pandarus’s, and Pandarus and Criseyde’s, ‘pillow talks’. And think of the ‘chaumbre … lite’ in Deiphoebus’s house, so small that multiple occupancy makes it overheat (II.1646f.), where Troilus and Criseyde have their first assignation. Then, in preparation for the Liebesnacht of Book III, we are invited inside Pandarus’s house, and shown an extensive range of interior spaces, in which domestic architecture provides the preconditions of enjoyment. Prior to the encounter, Troilus once again muwes himself. When Criseyde and her entourage arrive at Pandarus’s house for dinner, Troilus has been long ensconced there, on the second storey, viewing her arrival from a little window in a small room or stewe, which he entered the night before ‘thorugh a goter, by a pryve

The space of desire

53

wente [passage]’ (III.787), unobserved. Viewing the arrival, who rejoiced But Troilus, that stood and myght it se Thorughout a litel wyndow in a stewe, Ther he bishet syn mydnyght was in mewe.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(III.600–2)

Variously described as a heated room, or perhaps some kind of cloakroom, this stewe, entering upon Pandarus’s ‘closet’ via a trap door (III.741), can hardly be considered a spacious, or ­comfortable – or, for that matter, dignified – accommodation for a king’s son, but is answerable to Troilus’s extreme desire for privacy and secrecy … as is, in fact, Pandarus’s entire floor plan. Pandarus’s announced scheme, once Criseyde and her party have agreed to spend the night, is to place himself in an ‘outer hous’ or reception room (III.664) with the women in a ‘myddel chambre’ (III.666) connected to the ‘litel closet’ (III.663) in which Criseyde will sleep, by a closet door which Pandarus will, at the proper moment, softly shut (III.749). Even leaving aside the fact that the city is itself enclosed – within its walls and by the besieging Greeks – we still have here an enclosure (the stewe), tenuously connected to another enclosure (the litel closet), surrounded by another enclosure (the myddel chambre), surrounded by yet another (the outer hous). Could anything more closely contained possibly be imagined as a site for this liaison? ‘Now be ye kaught’ (III.1207), says Troilus, straining her in his arms … but she is of course correct to remind him that she has long since consented, as might be surmised from her entry into this enclosure within an enclosure within an enclosure. These confined spaces function as the obverse counterpart of anchor-houses or eremitical cells, permitting in this case not sense deprivation but sensual fulfilment. Troilus’s stewe seems a place of mounting – and in fact almost debilitating – erotic excitement, functioning like one of Wilhelm Reich’s twentieth-century orgone boxes to feed and stoke desire. The same may, perhaps, be said of Cressida’s chamber in Calchas’s house in Shakespeare’s Troy. Pandarus’s first thought, Troilus and Cressida having sworn their short-lived compact and Pandarus witnessing it, is to conduct them to a chamber. Amen. Whereupon I will show you a chamber with a bed – which bed, because it shall not speak of your pretty encounters, press it to death. Away! [Exeunt Troilus and Cressida]

Paul Strohm

54 And Cupid grant all tongue-tied maidens here Bed, chamber, pander to provide this gear.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(3.2.193–7)

Chamber is here elided with ‘bed’ and bed with its erotic purpose, in the course of which, assuring its silence in the matter of their amours, the lovers will ‘press it to death’. Pandarus’s ‘gear’ comprises his own connivance, and also the crucial fittings of erotic encounter, bed and chamber, a fusion of place and purpose. Although Pandarus presides over it, this ‘chamber’ seems actually to be in Calchas’s house. We next encounter Cressida and Troilus in Calchas’s gated courtyard, having consummated their love. Troilus coughs up a minimal, mandatory aubade. Hearing a knock, Cressida says, TROILUS: CRESSIDA:

Who’s that at door? Good uncle, go and see. – My lord, come you again into my chamber. You smile and mock me, as if I meant naughtily. Ha ha! Come, you are deceived, I think of no such thing. (4.2.35–9)

Cressida wants Pandarus to answer the gate, while she and Troilus withdraw to the chamber for reasons of discretion. But Troilus, through with the night’s excitements but still ready for randy wordplay, engages in schoolboy humour by associating the erotic associations of the chamber with Cressida’s own ‘chamber of Venus’ – an association which Cressida disclaims, but which has been rendered practically inevitable by the overheated possibilities of the chamber in medieval-Elizabethan imagination. Privacy as illusion The chamber promises to become a privileged erotic arena by ­fostering privacy even as it protects reputation … but it turns out to be a highly permeable line of defence. There is a sense in each text that, whatever protections are observed and whatever illusions of privacy are entertained, everybody actually already and inevitably knows what is going on; that, whatever precautions are taken, all secrets are finally fully legible and, as Thersites will say, ‘open’. For instance, Chaucer’s Diomede, seeing Troilus and Criseyde’s farewell at the prisoner exchange, immediately figures out the entirety of their situation:

The space of desire

55

… his courser torned he aboute With face pale, and unto Diomede No word he spak, ne non of al his route; Of which the sone of Tideus took hede, As he that koude more than the crede In swich a craft …

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(V.85–90)

And would not any other observant person have done so? Might this be the final irony? That, for all their precautions, Troilus and Criseyde never enjoyed the privacy they sought? Were always on display? And all of Troy, in that sense, one big showcase, one big primal scene? So, too, do we learn that Troilus and Cressid’s pretension to privacy has been a delusion – that everybody knows. Shakespeare turns this state of affairs into a highly comic ‘morning after’ situation, as Calchas’s courtyard fills up with people, all of whom seem to know exactly what is going on. Firstly, we have gossipy Paris, having drawn his conclusions, shopping Troilus to Aeneas and a whole crowd of torch-bearing Trojans and Greeks. Urging them on to Calchas’s house, he says, … I constantly do think – Or rather, call my thought a certain knowledge – My brother Troilus lodges there tonight. (4.2.41–3)

Then we have Aeneas, who, needing to find Troilus on the morning after his night with Cressida, knows exactly where he is. AENEAS: Is not Prince Troilus here? PANDARUS: Here? What should he do here? AENEAS: Come, he is here, my lord. Do not deny him. (4.2.49–51)

Troilus appears, speaks with Aeneas, and makes a brief and now pointless request for Aeneas’s discretion in the matter: TROILUS: We met by chance: you did not find me here. AENEAS: Good, good, my lord: the untold secrecies of nature. Have not more gift in taciturnity. (4.2.73–5)

This business ‘between men’ having been concluded, Aeneas and Troilus leave. But now the courtyard begins to fill up: first Pandarus and Cressida, and then a throng of Trojans and Greeks alike: Paris, Troilus, Aeneas, Deiphoebus, Antenor, Diomedes.

56

Paul Strohm

Although they are outdoors rather than in, this is a bit like the ‘stateroom’ scene in A Night at the Opera; in this place of nominal privacy, everybody eventually shows up!

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Overlooking Some illusion or delusion of privacy is essential to the erotic encounter, but its illusory nature is made evident in both works by the sheer amount of scrutiny and ‘overlooking’ that goes on. As evidence, two crucial scenes. The first is that moment in Chaucer’s poem when, Troilus and Criseyde having ‘chambered’ themselves in their ‘litel closet’ and got into bed, Pandarus remains in the room. There he is, in that confined space within a space within a space, throughout the consummation scene, seated by the fire with a light, having ‘fond his contenaunce, / As for to looke upon an old romaunce’ (III.979–80). This business about looking at an ‘old romaunce’ is, of course, open to two different interpretations. Either he is pretending to read a book – a shallow pretence, one would think, given their close quarters – or else he is enjoying the spectacle of Troilus and Criseyde’s consummation, as if they were characters in an old romance. Either way, this is disturbingly intrusive activity. Less so, undoubtedly, in medieval terms, when bedchambers were far more permeable than they are today, but I would still argue that even a medieval audience would have seen some kind of breach of propriety, or at any rate privacy rights, here. Shakespeare may or may not have had this particular scene in mind when he created an equivalent transgression of privacy rights in his play, this time involving Cressida’s tryst with Diomede. In any case, Shakespeare is confidently unhesitant in setting his own play’s depiction of problematic voyeurism. In this scene, set within the Greek camp, Diomede summons up Criseyde from her father’s interior and their ensuing conversation is overseen and heard, first by Troilus and Ulysses, and then – simultaneously – by Thersites as well. By general agreement, a large post or pillar stood at either side of the Globe stage, often used for scenes of concealment and overlooking.15 One pillar for Troilus and Ulysses, the other for Thersites. Andrew Gurr suggests that the posts provide ‘a place for concealment from other characters on stage while in full view of ­the surrounding audience’16 – an apt resource, in a play where looking and overseeing are themselves principal themes. We hear Cressida’s and Diomede’s dialogue interruptedly, but

The space of desire

57

we finally know well enough, though, what kind of agreement they are working toward. As a sample:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CRESSIDA:

Now, my sweet guardian. Hark, a word with you. [She whispers to him] [Enter Thersites, unseen] TROILUS: Yea, so familiar? ULYSSES: She will sing any man at first sight. THERSITES:  And any man may sing her, if he can take her clef. She’s noted. (5.2.7–11)

She is ‘noted’ indeed: within the musical sex metaphor, and ‘noted’ in the sense of ‘notorious’, and ‘noted’ also in the sense of ‘looked at’, ‘seen’, ‘observed’. Troilus is driven nearly mad by what he sees and hears. Ulysses spends most of his time trying to restrain him. Thersites finds ample matter for cynical commentary. And, in addition, this scene is additionally overlooked by its audience, by us, thus multiplying the effect of observed action to the third power. And – have you ever seen Coppola’s The Conversation? – we find our curiosity heightened by the way in which we must assemble their pact from scattered and half-overheard evidence; like all good snoops and voyeurs we must strain a bit to hear, assemble a puzzle, although the answer is finally an easy one. Continuing from the previous quotation, DIOMEDES: Will you remember? CRESSIDA: Remember? Yes. DIOMEDES: Nay, but do then, And let your mind be coupled with your words. TROILUS [aside]: What should she remember? ULYSSES [aside]: List! CRESSIDA: Sweet honey Greek, tempt me no more to folly. THERSITES [aside]: Roguery! DIOMEDES: Nay, then! CRESSIDA: I’ll tell you what – DIOMEDES: Fo, fo! Come, tell a pin. You are forsworn. CRESSIDA: In faith, I cannot. What would you have me do? THERSITES [aside]: A juggling trick – to be secretly open. (5.2.12–24)

‘Secretly open’, to be sure. They are referring to an earlier compact, to which we are not privy, and their speech is frequently

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

58

Paul Strohm

interrupted and overspoken and half-heard. Moreover, it means to be secret. Diomede and Cressid suppose they are conducting it in circumstances of complete privacy (if such a thing be possible in the world of this play). Yet it is open. Open in the sense that various parties, up to and including us, are processing its every inflection, and also open in the sense that its ultimate outcome – Cressida’s capitulation – could not be more clear. Shakespeare could certainly have invented all this within the logic of his play, in which Cressida is an object of constant observa­ tion and speculation, especially by Ulysses, who draws the worst conclusions of all, but by everybody else as well. Act 1 Scene 1 begins with a lengthy discussion of her appearance, and we, along with the others, are prepared to mark her doings. Thus, any scene involving close and curious looking at Cressida need have no outside source; may be potentially assignable to terms developed wholly within the play. The elaboration of this scene could be fully understood and explained as an invention within the resources of the Elizabethan stage, as a virtual spin-off of the conditions of Elizabethan stagecraft. The stage is itself highly conducive to scopic situations, constantly providing means to sharpen avenues to a heightened viewing situation through ultra or redoubled vantage points: plays within the play, actors beheld by actors, snoops like Polonius looking on, dupes like Othello stationed to view exchanges for which they lack appropriate interpretative context. Comfortably as this Shakespeare scene sits within the norms and resources of the Elizabethan theatre, I cannot resist the conclusion that its invention and execution are also reliant on the constricted environment of Chaucer’s Troy. Consider all this common ground: that both works explore privacy problems, project a sense of everybody in everybody else’s business, portray lovers striving constantly to escape view and deluding themselves when they think they have been successful, mock privacy as an unattainable illusion. In any case, whether directly inspired by Chaucer or independently derived, Shakespeare’s scene certainly provides us with a brilliant analogue for Troilus and Criseyde’s privacy problems, as well an epitomization of the problems of proximity in both Troys and both Londons too.

The space of desire

59

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes  1 On Troynovaunt see S. Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 1–7 and 65–7, and M. Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 56–92.  2 The general layout of the City of London is best grasped by the collection of historical maps edited by M. D. Lobel, The City of London: From Prehistoric Times to c. 1520, British Atlas of Historical Towns, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), maps 2–4.  3 On late medieval population, see F. Sheppard, London: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 92, 101.  4 See C. Barron, ‘The later Middle Ages: 1270–1520’, in Lobel (ed.), The City of London, vol. 3, p. 56.  5 J. Schofield, Medieval London Houses (London: Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 1994), p. 89.  6 Sheppard, London, p. 110.  7 All Chaucer quotations are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 3rd edn, 1987).  8 All references to Troilus and Cressida are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J. E. Howard and K. E. Maus (New York: Norton, 2008).  9 Furthermore, Chaucer’s characters have their own time-consuming and highly public responsibilities of retinue. As Troilus laments Criseyde’s exchange, Pandarus reminds him of his responsibility to attend upon the king, admonishing him to ‘wassh thi face, and to the kyng thow wende, / Or he may wondren whider thow art goon’ (IV.646–7), and, when Troilus most needs him, Pandarus is unable to free himself, since ‘with the kyng Priam al day was he, / So that it lay nought in his libertee / Nowher to gon’ (V.284–6). 10 At least once, the resourceful Pandarus is able to harness this prevailing fear of gossip on his own behalf. Wishing to deliver ­ Troilus’s first letter to her, and fearing she might refuse it, he thrusts the letter down her bosom, and then challenges her to remove it and risk becoming an object of regard and speculation: ‘“Now cast it awey anon, / That folk may seen and gauren on us tweye”’ (II.1156–7). So challenged, Criseyde agrees to retain the letter until possible witnesses are gone. 11 On matters of subjectivity and private space, see A. Kern-Stähler, A Room of One’s Own: Reale und mentale Innenräume weiblicher Selbstbestimmung im spätmittelalterlichen England (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002). She offers a sophisticated view of the interplay of architectural and mental space, privacy and cogitation, in the Book of Troilus and its depictions of Criseyde’s predicament, pp. 198–209.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

Paul Strohm

12 On private gardens see C. Barron, ‘Centres of conspicuous consumption: the aristocratic town house in London’, London Journal, 20 (1995), 12; Schofield, Medieval London Houses, p. 89; J. Schofield, The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (London: British Museum Publications, 1984), p. 97. On the invention of the private chamber, see Schofield, Medieval London Houses, pp. 66–81 and 93. 13 H. McKay Sundwall, ‘Deiphoebus and Helen: a tantalizing hint from Virgil’, Modern Philology, 73 (1975), 151–6. 14 Schofield, Medieval London Houses, p. 93. 15 The Stationers’ Register of 7 February 1602/3 attests to the play’s first performance by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and hence the Inns of Court as a possible venue. For discussion of this citation, as well as the general issue of the Inns of Court versus the Globe as the play’s location, see F. A. Shirley (ed.), Shakespeare in Production: Troilus and Cressida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Shirley’s reasonable proposal is that ‘presumably the company would have followed a special performance with presentations at the Globe, rather than staging the play just once’ (p. 3). On the Globe’s columns or ‘stage posts’, see A. Gurr, ‘Staging at the Globe’, in J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewring (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 163–4. 16 Gurr, ‘Staging at the Globe’, p. 164.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4 What’s Hecuba to him? Absence, silence and lament in Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida Hester Lees-Jeffries

One of many things that might have surprised the early audiences of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida would have been the absence of Hecuba, who is often mentioned in the play but never appears. This chapter argues that Hecuba is a potent absent presence in the play, and focuses on the effects of her absence, especially on the characterization of Cressida. In classical tragedy, Hecuba is an archetype of mourning, and this tradition can be traced through early modern translations or versions of classical texts, where she often appears as a figure legitimating or occasioning the expression of grief. Her absence in Shakespeare’s play frustrates the possibility of such lamentation by Cressida in particular. Hecuba’s absence also points towards two other women on the margins of the Troy story, Dido and Penelope, whose stories have much to say about female suffering and its expression; their literary tradition is an important context for both Hecuba and Cressida/Criseyde. Looking for Hecuba In his ‘Life of Pelopidas’, Plutarch relates an anecdote about Alexander Pheraeus, a notorious tyrant: [B]eing in a Theater, where the tragedy of Troades [The Trojan Women] of Euripides was played, he went out of the Theater, and sent word to the players notwithstandinge, that they shoulde go on with their playe, as if he had bene still amonge them: saying, that he came not away for any misliking he had of them or of the play, but bicause he was ashamed his people shoulde see him weepe, to see the miseries of Hecuba and Andromacha played.1

Sidney refers to this story as a ‘a notable testimony’ of the ability of art to move the emotions in The Defence of Poesy.2 The history of Hecuba as a type of suffering is therefore a long one, although she

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

Hester Lees-Jeffries

plays only a small, albeit vivid part in its initial stages. In her first appearance in the Iliad, she is ‘gentle, generous’, but she is most prominent in the episodes around Hector’s death, when she first joins Priam in begging Hector not to fight with Achilles, baring her breast to him and lamenting, and then leads the mourning after his death, maddened by grief. When Priam recovers his body, Hecuba, Andromache and Helen lead the formal lamentations.3 Euripides’ Hecuba portrays her savage revenge on Polymestor for the death of her youngest son Polydorus (she blinds him and kills his sons), and in The Trojan Women she faces the sacrifice of her daughter Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles. In both plays, Hecuba has long passages of lamentation, both alone and with other women: of her role in The Trojan Women in particular, Edith Hall observes that ‘it is the reactive presence of the widowed old queen which draws into a coherent vision all the other characters’ perspectives’.4 While there was no English edition of Erasmus’s Latin translation of Euripides’ Hecuba (1524), some around 1600 might have known it, or have been familiar with Jasper Heywood’s translation of Seneca’s Troas (1581), which begins and ends with Hecuba’s laments. More in Shakespeare’s audience would remember her fate in Book 13 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (which borrows from Euripides): maddened by grief, she is eventually transformed into a dog: … Anon Queene Hecub ronning at a stone, with gnarring seazd theron, And wirryed it beetweene her teeth. And as shee opte her chappe Too speake, in stead of speeche shee barkt … [she] Went howling in the feeldes of Thrace. Her fortune moued not Her Troians only, but the Greekes her foes too ruthe: Her lot Did moue euen all the Goddes to ruthe: and so effectually, That Hecub too deserue such end euen Iuno did denye.5

Here Hecuba becomes the type of all that is pitiable, moving all who see her, human and divine, to ‘ruth’, pity. As Charles Segal points out, Hecuba has two aspects, ‘the desperate suppliant and the demonic avenger’;6 in the Euripidean tradition she is not only the catalyst for lamentation among the other Trojan women but is the locus of affect more generally for other participants, mortal and divine, and for readers and audiences; Plutarch’s tyrant’s response is entirely in keeping with this tradition. Shakespeare seems to have read Chaucer’s poem long before he wrote Troilus and Cressida and one of the strands I want briefly

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s Hecuba to him?

63

to trace here is the relationship between Chaucer’s Troilus and The Rape of Lucrece. Shakespeare would have found a version of the rape of Lucretia in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (like his own poem closely based on Ovid’s Fasti) but he also presumably looked closely at Troilus, most obviously to explore its rhyme royal stanza, called the ‘Troilus verse’ by James VI of Scotland, who described it as most appropriate ‘[f]or tragicall materis, complaintis, or testamentis’.7 There are close analogues in both Troiluses to Tarquin’s threat to Lucrece that, if he accuses her of adultery, her ‘trespass’ will be ‘cited up in rhymes’ (Lucrece, 524), and Lucrece’s own fear that ‘The nurse to still her child will tell my story, / And fright her crying babe with Tarquin’s name’ (Lucrece, 813–14).8 Lucretia does indeed become a type, of chastity, as Cressida becomes the type of falsehood, self-referentially expressed by Shakespeare’s characters: ‘Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood, / “As false as Cressid”’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.82–3), and, in Pandarus’s helpful summary, ‘Let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokers between-­ panders’ (3.2.188–90). Troilus’s sense of his future reputation is more explicitly literary (‘Yet, after all comparisons of truth, / As truth’s authentic author to be cited, / “As true as Troilus” shall crown up the verse’ (3.2.167–9)), but both of these, and Lucrece in particular, also recall Criseyde: ‘Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende, Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende. O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge!’ (V.1058–61)9

This passage is cited by Susan Gubar when she suggests that ‘[w]hen the metaphors of literary creativity are filtered through a textual lens, female sexuality is often identified with textuality’.10 Lucrece’s sense of lasting reputation in explicitly literary terms recalls, even echoes, Criseyde’s; it is an intermediate stage between Chaucer’s poem and Shakespeare’s characters in 3.2. Both narrators describe their heroines as being ‘publysshed’/‘publish[ed]’ (Troilus and Criseyde, V.1095; Lucrece, 1852); the word resonates differently for Shakespeare, but its specifically material, textual associations are already there for Chaucer.11 This sense of multiple literary futures, explored in Lucrece and so fundamental to Troilus and Cressida and its eponymous protagonists, is also shaped by Shakespeare’s Chaucer, and in particular by

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

64

Hester Lees-Jeffries

Troilus and Criseyde. Shakespeare did not ‘read’ Troilus as most of Chaucer’s first readers did, hearing it read aloud, but almost certainly read it in one of the many editions of Chaucer’s works printed in the sixteenth century. Given this chapter’s concern with literary multiplicity, the awareness that ghost characters from the Troy story, past, present and future, cluster around the edges of the play and are in conversation with it, Shakespeare’s reading of Chaucer is an especially useful context, for the sixteenth-century Chaucers are deeply invested in their own material status as books and their identity as literary texts, often expressing this paratextually. The Legend of Good Women specifically cites Troilus and Criseyde in order to declare itself as a palinode to that preceding text; it draws heavily and self-consciously on Ovid’s Heroides, sometimes directing readers to Ovid in order to fill lacunae in its own action.12 Chaucer’s Troilus includes letters (V.1316 and V.1589; in the 1561 edition, Troilus’s letter is introduced as ‘The copie of the letter’),13 and songs; one of the most poignant moments in Chaucer’s poem is the delicate transition from direct to reported speech or summary in the account of the letters sent between the separated lovers: ‘This lettre [i.e. Troilus’s] forth was sent unto Criseyde, / Of which hire answere in effect was this: / … ’ (V.1422–3, my emphasis). Lucrece as a whole responds to Shakespeare’s reading of Troilus and Criseyde, and the Troy painting episode becomes one of his own Trojan sources; his reading of Chaucer gave him a model of plural­ ity, of texts and characters in dialogue with each other, and this surely shaped his acute and developing sense of form and genre, and the different potentialities of showing and telling, poetry and drama, private reading and public performance, seen especially in The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, above all when they look back to Troy. That Hecuba enables grief and lamentation as much as she epitomizes them is central to what Lucrece looks for in the Troy painting, ‘a face where all distress is stelled … where all distress and dolour dwelled’ (Lucrece, 1444–6), something that will allow her to put into words her own emotional torment. As Burrow points out, when ‘she despairing Hecuba beheld’, ‘the participle dangles sympathetically between Hecuba and Lucrece’,14 and thus the very syntax of the poem functions as a miniature of the painting itself in terms of its opening up of a space for affective identification. For Lucrece, Hecuba’s face becomes an icon of suffering: ‘In her the painter had anatomized / Time’s ruin, beauty’s wreck, and grim care’s reign’ (1450–1), but it is a suffering beyond words, that

What’s Hecuba to him?

65

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

cannot be expressed. For a time, Lucrece herself tries to find the words to express both Hecuba’s suffering and her own: On this sad shadow Lucrece spends her eyes, And shapes her sorrow to the beldame’s woes, Who nothing wants to answer her but cries, And bitter words to ban her cruel foes. The painter was no god to lend her those, And therefore Lucrece swears he did her wrong To give her so much grief, and not a tongue. (1457–63)

Lucrece’s response, even as she promises that she will ‘tune [Hecuba’s] woes with my lamenting tongue’ (1465) draws attention to the limitations of art: the picture cannot speak, Lucrece’s eloquence cannot fully express her complex emotions, and the solace that she has found in the painting is insufficient: Being from the feeling of her own grief brought By deep surmise of others’ detriment, Losing her woes in shows of discontent. It easeth some, though none it ever cured To think their dolour others have endured. (1578–82, my emphasis)

In Titus Andronicus, Hecuba is recalled as having ‘[run] mad for sorrow’ (Titus Andronicus, 4.1.21), and that play shares many of Lucrece’s experimental interests in the performance of extreme emotion: as Lucrece explores what a poem can do that a painting cannot, Titus probes the limitations of both drama and language, and the differences that a physically present body can make. Lucrece may find some temporary consolation in the picture of Hecuba, but, on stage, Tamora’s own Hecuba-like pleading is ignored, and she becomes the vengeance-seeking monster of the Euripidean tradition. And the rape victim is horrifically silenced: on the stage, to lack a tongue can be given a physical ‘reality’ which goes far beyond Shakespeare’s exploration of the limitations of making pictures speak. Even in literary rather than pictorial form, Hecuba often ‘lacks a tongue’ because words are insufficient for the expression of her suffering. Before her dreadful revenge on Polymestor, Ovid’s Hecuba grieves eloquently for Polyxena, but when she looks on the body of Polydorus, … shee was dumb for sorrow. The anguish of her hart forclosde as well her speech as eeke

66

Hester Lees-Jeffries

Her teares deuowring them within. Shee stood astonyed leeke As if shee had beene stone.15

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

In his long account of the fall of Troy in Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage, Aeneas tells his audience that after Pyrrhus has cut off Priam’s hands, … the frantic queen leap’d on his face, And in his eyelids hanging by the nails, A little while prolong’d her husband’s life. At last the soldiers pull’d her by the heels, And swung her howling in the empty air.16

Marlowe’s debt to Ovid is clear: Hecuba’s attack on Polymestor (she ‘[d]id in the traytors face bestowe her nayles, and scratched out / His eyes’)17 is transferred to Pyrrhus and to the fall of Troy itself. But Marlowe’s Hecuba does not speak at all: she howls. The eloquent, plangent figure of the Euripidean and Ovidian tradition has lost her voice. And she is excluded from the Shakespearean play in which she might be expected almost automatically to appear, her archetypal, authoritative expression of female suffering lost, a felt absence in the emotional spectrum of the play, above all for Cressida, whose eloquence and wit, borrowed from Chaucer, is not allowed the answering correlative of Criseyde’s complaints, but must give way, like Hecuba’s fierce supplications and laments, to inarticulacy and silence. Felt absence and the mobbled queen Troilus and Cressida was probably written very soon after Hamlet, and Shakespeare was certainly thinking about the Troy story when he was composing Hamlet. When the players arrive, Hamlet greets the boy who plays the women’s parts: What, my young lady and mistress. By’r Lady, your ladyship is nearer heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine. Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring. (2.2.408–11)

There may be a company in-joke here, that the boy himself, or, perhaps, the boy playing Gertrude, is reaching the end of his career as a player of women. It would be logical for the actor playing Gertrude to have played Hecuba and there are connections between the two characters in Hamlet’s mind at least, but whereas Hamlet needs three boys (Gertrude, Ophelia and the Player Queen are all

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s Hecuba to him?

67

on stage at once) Troilus can be played with only two: Cressida can double Andromache and Helen, Cassandra.18 This must remain conjecture, but the first cast of Troilus and Cressida (if it were ever performed) might also have felt an absence in their ranks. Later in the same scene, the Player readily complies with Hamlet’s request for ‘a passionate speech’, specifically ‘Aeneas’ tale to Dido’ (this is sometimes connected with Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage).19 And one of the most striking vignettes in the Player’s speech, approved by both Hamlet and Polonius, is the description of Hecuba: But who, O who had seen the mobbled queen – … Run barefoot up and down, threat’ning the flames With bisson rheum; a clout upon that head Where late the diadem stood, and for a robe, About her lank and all o’er-teemèd loins, A blanket in th’ alarm of fear caught up – But if the gods themselves did see her then, When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs, The instant burst of clamour that she made – Unless things mortal move them not at all – Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven, And passion in the gods. (2.2.482–98)

Florence Percival includes an illuminating discussion of pathos in ethical terms, noting the assumption of pleasure for readers in being moved to tears by the plight of Dido, Philomel, Ariadne or Lucretia (Dido, like Hecuba, had become a topos of the affective power of literature: Augustine castigated himself as ‘an unhappy wretch unaware of his own sorry state, bewailing the fate of Dido, who died for love of Aeneas, yet shedding no tears for himself as he dies for want of loving [God]’).20 Here, the Player’s speech emphasizes the pathos of Hecuba’s plight: she is an old woman, a queen, reduced to a grotesque spectacle. It is Hecuba’s grief that has the most impact on both the Player and on his audience, as Hamlet comments in his subsequent soliloquy: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his whole conceit That from her working all his visage wanned,

68

Hester Lees-Jeffries

Tears in his eyes, distraction in ’s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing. For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(2.2.528–37)

Hamlet’s incredulity at the Player’s tears for Hecuba is perhaps a sign of the shift that Percival traces in literary (and ethical) taste, whereby ‘modern readers experience difficulty in valuing the pathetic’, but ‘for late medieval man the experience of shedding tears for the pathos of the feminine state was an enjoyable one … [and] considered morally uplifting’.21 But Hecuba, in Hamlet as in The Rape of Lucrece, still both catalyses and legitimates the expression of grief, even if that expression is indirect, frustrated or found insufficient. Moreover, it is the invocation of Hecuba that makes Hamlet so dissatisfied with any of the ways in which he might express his own grief, when he ‘like a whore, unpack[s] [his] heart with words’ (Hamlet, 2.2.563). What, then, of Hecuba’s non-appearance in Troilus and Cressida? She is mentioned on a number of occasions in the play. In 1.2, Cressida and Alexander apparently watch as the Queen goes with Helen ‘to see the battle’ from ‘the eastern tower’ (1.2.4, 2), and she is described as laughing that ‘her eyes [ran] o’er’ when Troilus’s youth is mocked (1.2.139). She has written to Achilles in 5.1, to remind him of his pre-contract with Polyxena, and is invoked several times as the death of Hector approaches: Troilus tells Hector that he will fight no matter what, ‘Not Priamus and Hecuba on knees, / Their eyes o’er-gallèd with recourse of tears … should stop my way’ (5.3.56–9), Priam tells Hector that ‘thy mother hath had visions’ (5.3.65) and Cassandra prophesies ‘Hark how Troy roars, how Hecuba cries out’ (5.3.86). Following Hector’s death, Troilus thinks of their parents first: ‘Who shall tell Priam so, or Hecuba? / Let him that will a screech-owl aye be called / Go into Troy and say their Hector’s dead’ (5.11.15–17). In Euripides, Ovid, Marlowe, elsewhere in Shakespeare and in her (non)appearances in Troilus, Hecuba’s suffering puts her beyond language; she becomes at once the type of grief and is denied the language to articulate it. It is this suffering which is both without and beyond words which I want to explore in relation to Cressida, suggesting that Hecuba’s total absence compromises the ability of other ­characters to lament.

What’s Hecuba to him?

69

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cressida’s complaint Without Hecuba and her authorizing capacity to howl, Cressida’s responses to an impossible situation, whether resistance, accommodation, acceptance, levity, realism, reluctant or agonized acquiescence, remain largely unexpressed or inexpressible, silenced or unheard. This is a grim inversion of the topos of inexpressibility: ‘You have bereft me of all words, lady’, Troilus greets Cressida when the lovers finally meet (3.2.52), yet he repeatedly denies Cressida the opportunity to be heard. Her voice in the play is muffled: she announces her intention to ‘hold … off’ (1.2.264); earlier she has invoked her ‘wiles’ and her ‘secrecy’ (Troilus and Cressida, 1.2.241); in 3.2, the reason why she has decided to accept Troilus’s suit remains obscure, save that she has wanted to speak but felt unable: Why have I blabbed? Who shall be true to us, When we are so unsecret to ourselves? … Sweet, bid me hold my tongue, For in this rapture I shall surely speak The thing I shall repent. See, see, your silence, Cunning in dumbness, in my weakness draws My soul of counsel from me. Stop my mouth. (3.2.113–14, 118–22)

Wanting to speak and not to speak, it is not Troilus who is bereft of words but Cressida, transformed from Chaucer’s eloquent heroine, from the witty woman who outsmarts her uncle, to an inarticulate lover. As she says to Troilus, ‘Where is my wit? / I would be gone. I speak I know not what’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.137–8). If the true heir to Chaucer’s Troilus is not Shakespeare’s Trojan prince but Romeo, then Criseyde’s descendant is not her Shakespearean namesake but Lucrece, and there is no straightforward place for her complaint in drama (as John Kerrigan points out, ‘[c]omplaint is problematic because stagey before it is staged’).22 When Chaucer’s narrator sympathetically comments, of Criseyde in the Greek camp, ‘And this was yet the werste of al hire peyne: / Ther was no wight to whom she dorste hire pleyne’ (Troilus and Criseyde, V.727–8), he ironically introduces one of many lengthy passages of her verbatim laments; the reader, like the narrator, ‘is there’ for Criseyde, as she is for Lucrece. At least in the early part of Chaucer’s poem, Criseyde has friends and companions, for whom there are no counterparts in Shakespeare, although Priscilla Martin

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

70

Hester Lees-Jeffries

points out the asymmetry of Chaucer’s narrator’s ‘knowledge’ of his characters: whereas the narrator ‘can tell us when [Troilus] is lying’ (Troilus and Criseyde, II.1077) ‘he stresses his ignorance about Criseyde … he foregrounds the difficulty of representing her feelings’ (II.666–79).23 Jill Mann notes Cressida’s lack of female friends or interlocutors and soliloquies, arguing that Shakespeare ‘denies us access to Cressida’s inner life’.24 This sense of occlusion is only sharpened by the shift in genre from poem to play, and the concomitant loss of a narrator. Cressida may be embodied as an actor, unlike Lucrece, and, unlike Lavinia, she has a tongue and a voice, but she is given few or no words. And when Cressida promises that she will ‘go in and weep’ (Troilus and Cressida, 4.3.30, my emphasis), the audience cannot follow her. When Cressida states that she will Tear my bright hair, and scratch my praisèd cheeks, Crack my clear voice with sobs, and break my heart With sounding ‘Troilus’ (4.3.32–4)

she promises actions that appear in many versions of her story, not least in Chaucer’s, specifically anticipating the destruction of her voice. Her only word will be ‘Troilus’; it is she, now, who has been bereft of words; she cannot ‘weep’ on stage, but must ‘go in’. Cressida’s speeches when the lovers part are dazed in their brevity. She promises Pandarus a Hecuba-like grief (‘Why tell you me of moderation? / The grief is fine, full, perfect that I taste, / And violenteth in a sense as strong / As that which causeth it. How can I moderate it?’ (Troilus and Cressida, 4.5.2–5)), but in the rest of the scene speaks no more than single and half lines, her only two consecutive lines fearfully anticipating the dangers that Troilus must face if he is to pay her ‘nightly visitation’ (4.5.72). The scene which follows is concerned with noise, not speech, framed by two trumpets, Ajax’s, described as a ‘brazen pipe’, and the notorious ‘Trojans’ trumpet’ (Troilus and Cressida, 4.6.7, 65). Cressida is silent as she is kissed ‘in general’. Her desperately pert responses are drowned out, literally by the trumpet and metaphorically by Ulysses’s reinscription of her as one who is eloquent, and audible, only in her body: ‘There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip; / Nay, her foot speaks’ (4.6.56–7). Diomedes asks her for ‘a word’ (4.6.54, at which some editions supply the stage direction ‘they talk apart’), and it is perhaps telling that it is Ulysses, married to the constant Penelope, who so vehemently condemns Cressida as

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s Hecuba to him?

71

a whore. Diomedes asking for ‘a word’ that then remains unheard sets the pattern that recurs in 5.2, Cressida’s last appearance, where the scene’s sophisticated multiple perspectives obscure just how little she has to say. It is a bitter inversion of her first appearance, when she has been the privileged observer of the returning Trojan warriors. Nothing is made clear: after their first whispered conversation, Diomedes asks Cressida ‘Will you remember?’ and she replies ‘Remember? Yes’, but the audience must, with Troilus, ask ‘What should she remember?’ She says to Diomedes ‘I’ll tell you what’ but the sentence breaks off; she asks Diomedes for ‘one word in your ear’ but whispers again; the asides of Troilus, Ulysses, and Thersites only emphasize that the scene’s main conversation is almost entirely concealed (5.2.12–32). The reason for her reticence perhaps appears later in the scene when, Diomedes having threatened to leave again, the scene’s dominant pattern, Cressida tells him ‘One cannot speak a word / But it straight starts you’ (5.2.101–2). The immoderate grief that she has promised Pandarus has been replaced by the anxious, perhaps flirtatious, pacifications of a woman trying not to anger a bully.25 Cressida disappears into silence as Hecuba disappears into violence, madness and howling, the only option apparently left to her without even these other possibilities that Hecuba represents. And whereas Hecuba’s letter to Achilles is shared with Patroclus and the audience, and represented as having a potent, if temporary effect on Achilles’ actions, Cressida’s letter is staged only to remain unheard, a starker and more abrupt withdrawal of her character from the play than the gradual disappearance of her voice, spoken and written, from Chaucer’s poem. It is rejected by Troilus and, very unusually for a letter, its contents remain unknown, dismissed by Troilus only (and recalling Hamlet) as ‘Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart’ (Troilus and Cressida, 5.3.110). There is perhaps an analogue in Chaucer’s tendency to omit the letters from the Legend of Good Women, instructing his readers to consult their Ovid instead: Troilus, and Shakespeare, do something similar with Cressida’s letter in the play, drawing attention to its inaccessibility, even suppression, in both text and performance, but suggesting nowhere else for the audience to go. Constant Penelope, abandoned Dido Two other absent presences in the play, in addition to Hecuba and implicitly Cressida herself, are the women who wait in the literary

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

72

Hester Lees-Jeffries

afterlives of Ulysses and Aeneas, Penelope and Dido.26 Both, like Hecuba, lament; like Hecuba and Cressida herself (and the muchfetishized Ariachne), they are also figures of doubleness. Is Dido the Virgilian Dido, the abandoned lover of Aeneas who commits suicide, or is she the widow of Sichaeus, who kills herself rather than surrender her chastity? Is Penelope the constant wife, or is she cunning like her husband as she strings along the suitors and unravels her weaving? Dido allows to Cressida the possibility of being the abandoned one, and ‘constant’ Penelope the possibility of ‘craft’, metis, a word Cressida also uses. What is at stake here is kleos, reputation or renown; in more purely etymological terms it is ‘what is said about one’ (from kaleo, ‘call’), overlapping with Latin fama and Chaucerian fame.27 Kleos is a quality in which Troilus and Cressida is vitally interested, for reputation in a broader sense is also a concern of the lovers, as they consider their metatextual existence as types of fidelity and faithlessness. In the early modern tradition, Penelope is the type of constancy, but in the Odyssey she is a more complicated figure. She is, after all, the wife of Odysseus and, as Marylin Katz puts it, ‘Penelope’s dolos (“trickiness”) and metis (“wiliness”), like those of Odysseus, contribute to her kleos’.28 Penelope’s reputation combines constancy and cleverness, devisings, artifice, qualities often associated with deceit.29 While for Chaucer, Penelope is the opposite of Criseyde (‘Ye may [Criseyde’s] gilt in other bokes se; / And gladlier I wol write, yif yow leste, / Penolopeës trouthe and good Alceste’ (Troilus and Criseyde, V.1776–8), Cressida recalls Penelope’s doubleness in both her constant inconstancy and her admissions of craftiness. Cressida warns Troilus that she perhaps ‘show[s] more craft than love’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.140); the language of doubleness is hers too: ‘I have a kind of self resides with you – / But an unkind self, that itself will leave / To be another’s fool’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.135–7). Cressida here not only asserts her doubleness but also notes the possibility of ­abandonment, and becomes both abandoner and abandoned.30 In her resistance to simple categories, Shakespeare’s Cressida frustrates what Mary Behrman suggests is the real desire of Chaucer’s hero, a muted fading out from the story by his beloved: [H]e wants her to act like the nondescript tragic heroines in the Legend of Good Women, to pine away like Ariadne or to commit suicide like Dido. Such behavior would prove a fitting end for the object of Troilus’s desire, enabling him to compose tragic lays about the death of his beautiful, beloved dame.31

What’s Hecuba to him?

73

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

It’s Dido’s words from the Heroides, translated by Chaucer in the  Legend of Good Women, which resound most bitterly for Cressida: Not that I trowe to geten yow ageyn, For wel I wot that it is al in veyn, Syn that the goddes been contraire to me. But syn my name is lost thourgh yow … I may wel lese on yow a word or letter, Al be it that I shal ben nevere the better. (Legend of Good Women, 1358–63)

Cressida’s loss of agency in the play is shown above all in her loss of words, and the transformation of her words, of lamentation, explanation, plea, into noise or silence. Do we weep for Cressida, as the Player, and the tyrant, and Lucrece and perhaps Hamlet himself, weep for Hecuba? Without Hecuba, Cressida herself cannot weep, and neither, perhaps, can we. Notes  1 Plutarch, The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. T. North (London, 1579), p. 325.  2 Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. G. Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 1–54 (p. 28). See also W. A. Ringler, ‘Hamlet’s defense of the players’, in R. Hosley (ed.), Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 201–11.  3 Homer, The Iliad, trans. E. V. Rieu, ed. P. Jones (London: Penguin, rev. edn, 2003), 6.251–2, 22.78–89, 429–38, 24.208–13, 749–60.  4 Euripides, Hecuba, The Trojan Women, Andromache, trans. J. Morwood, introd. E. Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. xxiv–xxv.  5 Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.567–75; Metamorphosis, trans. A. Golding (London, 1567), Y6v.  6 C. Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 179.  7 The reulis and cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis poesie (Edinburgh, 1584), M3v–4.  8 All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J. E. Howard and K. E. Maus (New York: Norton, 2008).  9 All Chaucer quotations are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 1988).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

Hester Lees-Jeffries

10 S. Gubar, ‘“The blank page” and the issues of female creativity’, in E. Abel (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 73–93 (p. 75). 11 They were already there in Benoît de Saint-Maure’s Roman de Troie, where Briseida laments that ‘De mei n’iert ja fait bon escrit / Ne chantee bone chançon’ (Henceforth no good will be written of me, nor any good song sung), 20238–41; see G. Mieszkowski, The Reputation of Criseyde, 1155–1500 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1971), p. 86. Another analogue is Dido’s lament in The House of Fame: ‘O wel-awey that I was born! / For thorgh yow [Aeneas] is my name lorn, / And alle myn actes red and songe / Over al thys lond, on every tonge’ (345–8). See A. McTaggart, ‘Shamed guiltless: Criseyde, Dido, and Chaucerian ethics’, The Chaucer Review, 46 (2012), 371–402. 12 On the Heroides as an influence on Chaucer’s Troilus, see inter alia S. C. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 20, 131, 146, 157 and passim; J. Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), p. 131; and J. C. Fumo, ‘“Little Troilus”: Heroides 5 and its Ovidian contexts in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Studies in Philology, 100 (2003), 278–314. 13 The woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer (London, 1561), Nn5. 14 The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. C. Burrow, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1447n. 15 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 13.538–41; Metamorphosis, trans. Golding, Y6. 16 Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage 2.1.244–8, in The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). 17 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 13.561–2; Metamorphosis, trans. Golding, Y6v. 18 As in the 2008 Cheek by Jowl production, directed by Declan Donellan and designed by Nick Ormerod. 19 ‘The play of dido & enevs’ appears in the Henslowe papers in January 1598, perhaps referring to a revival of Marlowe’s play. 20 Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 1.13, pp. 33–4. 21 F. Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 254 and 257. 22 J. Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 56. 23 P. Martin, Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 164. 24 J. Mann, ‘Shakespeare and Chaucer: “What is Criseyde worth?”’, Cambridge Quarterly, 18:2 (1989), 109–28 (116–17). See also N. Cartlidge, ‘Criseyde’s absent friends’, The Chaucer Review, 44 (2010), 227–45, which draws specific comparisons with the Filostrato.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What’s Hecuba to him?

75

25 My reading of this scene has been shaped by Laurie Maguire’s essay ‘The anatomy of abuse(s): performing anger in Troilus and Cressida’, Renaissance Drama, 31 (2002), 153–84. 26 The influence of Dido on Chaucer’s Criseyde has been considered by many critics. See for example Mieszkowski, The Reputation of Criseyde, and L. D. Kellogg, Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s Cressida (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). More generally, see M. Burden (ed.), A Woman Scorn’d: Responses to the Dido Myth (London: Faber, 1998), and R. Martin (ed.), Énée et Didon: naissance, fonctionnement et survie d’un mythe (Paris: Éditions du centre nationale de la recherche scientifique, 1990). 27 On reputation, see R. A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 28 M. A. Katz, Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 21. 29 On Penelope’s metis, see also R. Heilman, Taking Her Seriously: Penelope and the Plot of Homer’s Odyssey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 5. 30 On abandonment, see L. Lipkins, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). As Lipkins puts it, ‘the epic hero … tends to define himself by leaving a woman behind’ (p. xvi). 31 M. Behrman, ‘Heroic Criseyde’, The Chaucer Review, 38 (2004), 314–36 (330, my emphasis).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

5 Remembering to forget in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: narrative palimpsests and moribund epochalities Russell West-Pavlov Time as a theme, as a personified force, and as topos, indeed as a performed dimension of the theatrical event itself, is ubiquitous in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.1 If the play opens with the indexical ‘In Troy there lies the scene’ (Prologue, 1), this spatiality rapidly becomes a spatialized temporality: says the Prologue, ‘our play/Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils,/Beginning in the middle, starting then away/To what may be digested in a play’ (Prologue, 26–9).2 This ‘space-time compression’3 shows how time is embedded in the very fabric of the theatre itself, as it seeks to transpose the time of ancient history into the time of performance. Indeed, imitating the classical ‘in media res’ topos evinced for instance in Homer, both its ‘matter’ and its explicit mobilization of an imitative proairetc code of plot structure are less secondary and dependent than ferociously appropritive.4 This is a violent process of ‘digestion’ which perhaps even imitates, albeit while resisting, the way ‘honour, […] travail, expense,/Wounds, friends, and what else dear’ are ‘consumed/In hot digestion of this cormorant war’ (2.2.4–6). In this chapter I will argue that the play’s attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives which transmit versions of the past into the present and the future, and in part a rehearsal of a failure to disrupt the historical processes which are propelled by those narratives. Put differently, I suggest that the past in Shakespeare’s Trojan War drama is a literary past, exemplified primarily but not only by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, whose legacy is a heavily conflicted and controversial ethic of chivalry that belies its embellishments of courtly-love motifs and mainly feeds a repeating cycle of aristocratic violence. By waging war, so to speak, upon a narrative of war and the codes of warrior manliness it subtends, Shakespeare contributes a further turn of the screw to a perhaps perennial sense of crisis at the heart of the

Remembering to forget

77

chivalric ethos, a sense of crisis which may, paradoxically, be part of its temporal structure. He performs on the stage the open-ended temporality of that destructive social dynamic in order to provoke a crisis which may in some way be genuinely generative of the new.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Time as threat If ‘loss of time’ indexes one of the costly values ‘consumed’ by the ‘cormorant war’ (2.2.4–6), time itself is a rapacious devourer, a thief: ‘Injurious time now with a robber’s haste/Crams his rich thievery up’ (4.5.41–2). Indeed, time is the stick with which Ulysses threatens Achilles, who has withdraw from active combat (honour and fame, of course, being the carrot):   Time hath, my lord, A wallet at his back, wherein he puts Alms for oblivion, a great-sized monster Of ingratitudes. Those scraps are good deeds past, Which are devoured as fast as they are made, Forgot as soon as done. Perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright. To have done is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mock’ry. Take the instant way, For honour travels in a strait so narrow, Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path, For emulation hath a thousand sons That one by one pursue. (3.3.139–51)

Time is figured as a ‘way’ or ‘path’, upon which one can easily be overtaken by those coming behind; the image of pursuit by ‘emulators’, that is, is analogous to the pursuit to be found in some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In Sonnet 60, however, it is not competitors which threaten the self, but ‘envious and calumniating time’ (3.3.168) itself, an avatar of time-as-robber, which is the competitor, embodied in a sequence of waves which follow one upon the other. Time’s undulating segments pursue each other, ‘Each changing place with that which goes before;/In sequent toil all forwards do contend’ (Sonnet 60, 3–4). It is such an image of pursuit which is mobilized against Achilles by Ulysses in the long excerpt from Troilus and Cressida cited above. Ulysses reminds Achilles of the constant pressure from emulators crowding behind, threatening oblivion, much as Marvell’s speaker worries, ‘at my back I alwaies hear/Times winged Charriot hurrying near’.5 Achilles is

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

Russell West-Pavlov

supposed to remember how easily the world will forget one – but before forgetting and oblivion there seems to come some form of physical, visceral catastrophe which is perhaps more frightening. Ulysses is telling Achilles all this in order to provoke him to action, and in particular to spur him on to take up Hector’s challenge to the Greeks, communicated by Aeneas (1.3.257–80). Nestor sees this as an important challenge because it will give a foretaste of the future course of the war, ‘a scantling’ ‘[o]f things to come at large’, and deems that it is Achilles who is the intended addressee of the challenge (1.3.335, 340, 327–9). Ulysses however is less interested in the fortunes of war than in the fame of those who fight it, and in the fluctuating stocks of fame. For that reason, seeking to diminish Achilles’ overblown pride, he suggests instead that Ajax should accept the challenge (1.3.370, 367–9). In all these respects, time functions, true to the early modern period’s heightened sense of ‘time as an urgent pressure’,6 as a privative force, manifest in the threat of the loss of fame, and conversely, in the dangers that others’ prowess may overshadow one’s own. This is the latent threat mobilized by Ulysses’ discourse. Here is the temporal structure of masculine warrior prestige and its fragility in the face of competition, ‘emulation’ and its ‘thousand sons’ (3.3.150). Such a threat to the masculine self is not merely individual, however. Ulysses’ discourse is a ‘scantling’, as it were, as a more generalized sense of the decline of warrior virility, a slackening of the warriors’ prowess which threatens the very conduct of the war and its outcome: a structure of chivalry-in-crisis whose purpose is to maintain an impending sense of decline, paradoxically, as a form of self-perpetuation. Earlier on, in a passage I will have case to return to on several occasions, Ulysses uses the ubiquitous topos of illness to describe the Greeks, ‘sick’ with a ‘fever’ which makes them ‘pale and bloodless’: ‘And ’tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,/Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length:/Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength’ (1.3.132–7).7 But such prophecies of doom may also serve to keep the Greeks ‘on foot’, against their imminent demise. Thus, this topos of failure of warrior virility as it fades into pallid sickliness is also a tale of temporality: ‘To end a tale of length’ … or not. Ulysses’ lament is the last – for the moment only, however – of a long series of elegies for an ‘aristo­ cratic excellence whose historical moment, for better or worse, has already passed’, in Katherine Eisaman Maus’s formulation.8 The performative contradiction here is that far from bringing the long tale of decline to an end, Shakespeare’s play reiterates and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Remembering to forget

79

continues its ending, buttressing a social structure by warning of its imminent demise, a demise so imminent that it has, again and again, always already begun to take place.9 Shakespeare’s drama, to the extent that it replicates and sharpens the caustic scepticism already present in precedessor texts, both imitates and overloads this sense of a state of emergency become the rule.10 To this social and temporal threat underpinning masculine honour I will return below. Time as reprieve It is striking, however, that when Hector and Ajax do actually meet in combat, Ulysses’ scheming intrigues (which he calls ‘a young/ Conception in my brain’, requesting that Nestor ‘be you my time/ To bring it to some shape’ (1.3.307–9)) produce a rather different temporal result. Ajax and Hector fight, but are soon enjoined by Diomedes and Aeneas: ‘You must no more’; ‘Princes, enough, so please you’ (4.7.1). At this point, Hector finds a reason for complying with the admonition to put an end to the duel: ‘Thou art, great lord, my father’s sister’s son,/A cousin german of great Priam’s seed./The obligation of our blood forbids/A gory emulation ’twixt us twain’ (4.7.4–7). At this juncture, kinship intervenes in the battle for honour, preventing a ‘gory emulation ’twixt us twain’. Famously, kinship both joins and divides. As St Augustine (in an English translation of 1610) wrote, ‘for there was a iust care had of charity, that them to whom concord was most vsefull, might be combined togither in diuerse bonds of kindred and affinity: … that euery peculiar should be bestowed abroade, and so many, by as many, should be conglutinate in honest congiugall society’.11 Kindred relationships are ‘bestowed abroade’ so as to extend networks of alliance, but also to keep people apart, to prevent ‘incestuous’ relations of ‘emulation’, a form of imitation too close for liking, with an unpleasant hint of generativity falling over into a form of inter- or intragenerational devoration.12 The word ‘emulation’ is also used by Ulysses in his admonition to Achilles as a goad to return to battle; in Ajax and Hector’s fight ‘emulation’ is explicitly eschewed, and honour as competition is subordinated to the bonds of dynastic loyalties. Temporality is brought back into a clear generative logic, rather than one which might be described as ‘de-generative’. By the same token, the temporal dynamic of relentless competition is braked, and ‘our rank feud’ (4.7.16), which might otherwise grow in an uncontrolled manner, is reined

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

80

Russell West-Pavlov

in. This moment of temporal delimitation is significant, because it resists the overall dynamic of the war, which, as we learn early on, has already lasted seven years (1.3.11) and is destined to last another three, despite Agamemnon’s optimistic prognoses to the contrary (5.10.8–9). Such delimitation, however, is in the long run ineffectual, because the restraining force of ‘[t]he obligation of our blood’ that ‘forbids/A gory emulation ’twixt us twain’ (4.7.4–7) is ironically mocked by the ongoing conflict, exemplified, for instance in Troilus’s (almost) closing word at the terminus of the play: ‘No space on earth shall sunder our two hates’ (5.11.27). The brief pause in the combat between Ajax and Hector also has its temporal equivalent as the warriors break off for a moment of comradely fellowship and carousing in Agamemnon’s tent (4.7.155), a refraction of traditions of guest friendship and aristocratic hospitality.13 Agamemnon welcomes Hector with a ­significant temporal conceit: What’s past and what’s to come is strewed with husks And formless ruins of oblivion, But in this extant moment faith and troth, Strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing, Bid thee with most divine integrity From the very heart, ‘Great Hector, welcome!’ (4.7.50–5)

The moment of fellowship, like the cessation of the challenge, is a transitional moment between battles, where the Greeks and Trojans are united in their mutual admiration of their common prowess. But their reciprocal praise easily falls over into aggression. Hector and Achilles indulge in verbal sparring that barely conceals hostility (4.7.113–44), thereby revealing an amalgam of erotic love and murderous hate already evinced in the Trojan warrior Aeneas’s words to his Greek counterpart Diomedes in a moment of truce: ‘By Venus’ hand I swear,/No man alive can love in such a sort/The thing he means to kill more excellently’ (4.1.23–5). The same ambivalent blend of brotherly love and warlike aggression is evinced in Paris’s oxymoronic evocation of the ‘noblest hateful love, that e’er I heard of’ (4.1.34). Thus the moment of peaceful fellowship displays its ephemerality and ­manifests the fragility of the boundaries that keep the previous and coming battles at bay. Yet the brief moment of respite marks a countervailing effort to reverse these imperious structures of military aggression and the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Remembering to forget

81

particular temporal dynamics they entail. Though warrior prestige and ‘fame are valuable counters in the war against nothingness and oblivion’ for the early modern temperament,14 it is precisely such values which in their turn are consigned to ‘formless ruins of oblivion’ in this precarious moment of pacificity. ‘[T]his extant moment faith and troth,/Strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing’, is thus explicitly opposed to the moments of preterity and futurity which butt up against it. Such a ‘bank and shoal of time’ (Macbeth, 1.7.6) is thus posed against the behaviour of warrior competition such as Hector’s ‘brag’ (4.7.141) which define the moment’s immediate past and its subsequent future. The moment is short, and, despite the best efforts of all involved, is inevitably contaminated by the ambient conflicts, but the brief truce marks a significant moment of utopian peace-making – one which might, for instance, have resonated with James I’s attempts at European diplomacy,15 but may be closer in its structure to the cyclical, ritual moments of feasts, church ales, aristocratic potlatch, and so on, which a Protestant temporal regime sought to discipline and regulate.16 In this moment, the play appears to yearn via a textualized past, in a form of ‘nostalgia for the future’,17 for an imagined moment-tocome beyond the turbulence of civil and military violence which marked the first half of the century in England, Ireland and on the Continent18 – or a nostalgia tout court for imagined modes of arcadian rural harmony. I am contending therefore that in Shakespeare’s play there is a complex overlaying multiple senses of temporality such as modern theorists have, amongst other things, associated with postcolonial temporal experience: ‘multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement’.19 This ‘laminated time’ contains multiple temporalities: a sense of temporality that is poetic, metaphorical and strongly personified and allegorical; a notion of historicity as yet uncrystallized into either the classical time of tabularity or the subsequent ‘historicist’ time of ‘biological-organic linearity’,20 and predating both modern dating sytems and the classical/medieval/modern triad (elaborated in the 1620s and 1680s respectively);21 and a notion of history indebted to biblical narratives and chronicle form22 as much as to classical epic literature and its poetic avatars, lingering on in discourses of chivalric heritage with widespread validity for the aristocracy, but also arcing towards antiquarian discourse.23 All this adds up to a composite notion of temporality quite different from our own,24

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

82

Russell West-Pavlov

but which contains the core of a caustic critique of the play’s own moment. Thus the ‘husks and formless ruins of oblivion’ which are scattered on both sides of this brief moment of presentness can also be taken as referring obliquely to literary texts – not unlike like the ‘good old chronicle’ embodied in Nestor, or ‘the book of sport’ which Hector feels himself to be as he is ‘read o’er’ (4.7.86, 123). Even more appropriately, Ulysses is reading what is perhaps a conduct book when he is interrupted by Achilles. The ‘author’s drift’, according to Ulysses, is that that ‘no man is the lord of a­ nything …/Till he communicate his parts to others …/Till he behold them formed in th’applause/Where they’re extended’ (3.3.110, 112, 114–15). This exposition of the intersubjective nature of identity could also be turned, self-reflexively, via the allusion to ‘applause’, to include the play’s knowing relationship to its own audience. Other plays by Shakespeare, such as The Tempest, where Prospero solicits the approval of the audience (‘my project … Which was to please’ is dependent upon ‘your hands’ (Epilogue, 12–13, 10)), are explicit about this aspect of theatrical communication. Yet applause, ostended here as a form of temporal closure (‘release’ (Epilogue, 9)), is ephemeral, fragile and must be solicited again and again. The theatrical self-reflexivity displays the negative face of performativity, its intersubjective and temporal open-endedness, and the perennial lack of fulfilment which is laid bare in the moment of demand. But for a knowing audience, the allusion to ‘applause’ may also have evoked relationships with the play’s other literary interlocutors.25 In this way, the play might be seen to acknowledge its debts to literary texts intimately involved in its own identity to the extent that they bear the same or similar names (titles and proper names): typically, the many versions of the Troy narrative, of which a number of versions from the Greek and Roman epics onwards in Chapman’s rendering, the Caxton and in particular Lydgate versions, as well as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, would have been most familiar to Shakespeare and his spectators;26 Cressida’s wanton ‘language’ infamously beckons to ‘every ticklish reader’ (4.6.56, 62). But debt goes hand in hand with destruction. Shakespeare’s abrasive ‘deconstruction’ of Chaucer’s more generous and Henryson’s considerably less optimistic versions of the Troilus narrative seeks to relegate past versions of the couple, and their future afterlives, to ignominious ‘oblivion’:27 ‘The Troilus and Cressida

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Remembering to forget

83

story is medieval and chivalric, and it is that which is deflated.’28 Shakespeare directs the sort of violence to be found in the Troy narratives back at those narratives and their avatars themselves.29 This work of debunking, however, is not merely anti-mythological, it also addresses their temporal form in much more ambivalent ways. On the one hand, Shakespeare’s refashioning of the medieval narrative is a creative ‘misreading’, or perhaps more violently ‘defacing’ or ‘disfiguring’, of its predecessor;30 conversely, however, to the extent that this appropriation extends the ‘afterlives’ of the text, it may also address the manner in which medieval narratives and early modern narrative precursors lived on in socio-temporal structures of repetition and perpetuation. Here, remembering the proto-antiquarian, textual past may work less towards its preservation as substance than towards its erasure, so as to escape from the morbidly perennial influence of that substance. In the place of such predecessor versions of Troilus and Cressida, already relegated to a comparatively marginal position within Shakespeare’s war-obsessed rather than love-focused drama,31 his play occupies, in the actual time and place of performance in which these words are uttered, ‘[t]his extant moment’ – though the precise meaning of ‘faith and troth,/Strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing’ will transpire to be highly ambiguous. This chapter suggests that it is in the way that the chivalric texts accruing to the Troy narratives and the residual early modern ethos of a mythologized medievalism are relentlessly dismantled in a process of hyper-critique which also targets their perennial rhetoric of crisis, that Shakespeare, via his cynical presentation of the warring parties, implicitly imagines other futures. ‘Factious emulation’ It hardly comes as a surprise to discover that the topos of warrior masculinity in decline, whose symptoms are the ‘fever … pale and bloodless’ (1.3.133–4) I commented upon above, is closely linked to the temporal ‘structures of feeling’ enumerated here. Ulysses’ diagnosis of the malaise in the body politic, it transpires, is more accurate than he himself probably realizes, but in ways he doubtless does not intend. The temporal structures I have outlined here are generated by a social habitus of aristocratic competition which the early modern period knew of as ‘emulation’, and upon which Ulysses dwells at length in just that speech on degree.32 The speech condemns ‘an envious fever/Of pale and bloodless ­ emulation’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

Russell West-Pavlov

(1.3.133–4), and the concept recurs in Thersites’ evocation of ‘emulous factions’ (2.3.72) and in Diomedes’ notion of ‘emulous honour’ (4.1.29). Shakespeare had long targeted this habitus, asking in 1 Henry VI, ‘Good Lord, what madness rules in brainsick men,/When for so slight and frivolous a cause/Such factious emulation shall arise?’ (4.1.111–13) (Troilus and Cressida reverses and recycles the latter term). Shakespeare’s critical perspective upon this dysfunctional habitus is expanded further on in 1 Henry VI: But howso’er, no simple man that sees This jarring discord of nobility, This shouldering of each other in the court, This factious bandying of their favourites, But that it doth presage some ill event? (1 Henry VI, 4.1.187–91)

The last line contains a specifically temporal critique of this mode of courtly competitiveness. The ‘rank feud’ referred to in Troilus and Cressida (4.7.16) is a feud centred on ‘rank’, that is, on hierarchies within the aristocracy in which peers competed for a privileged attention in the sight of a superior, jostling for favour, ‘shouldering […] each other in the court’ (1 Henry VI, 4.1.189). Yet the feud is also ‘rank’, growing, multiplying, self-generative in its effects because any advantage achieved is immediately under threat from others pursuing the same position as oneself. Such reciprocally endangered competitiveness roused passions that were inversely proportionate to the advantage sought, ‘so slight and frivolous a cause’, to reiterate 1 Henry VI’s caustic assessment (4.1.112). If the perfect courtier, in Castiglione’s phrasing, was ‘an emulator’ prepared ‘to wade in everye thyng a litle farther then other menne’,33 the operative word appears to be ‘litle’. The insignificance of the gains to be won in this hierarchical competition arose from the fact that the main axis of struggle was not vertical, but rather horizontal: ‘Because court factionalism was an equilibrating structure, it spurred the nobles to augment the distinctions that it dissolved … In a system that promoted nullifying balance, that calibrated power relations to the disadvantage of those most actively engaged in it, every self-creative gesture produced only imitation.’34 An ‘emulous’ (2.3.228) identity had to differentiate itself via imitation (that is, doing the same thing better) against a background of identification with similar others, thus generating what Nestor calls ‘Co-rivalled greatness’ (1.3.43). In other words, emulation was a fundamentally narcissistic, and thus aggressive,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Remembering to forget

85

structure of identification in difference and sameness in differentiation.35 As Ulysses pointedly remarks, ‘pride hath no other glass/ To show itself but pride’ (3.3.47–8).36 Because similarity between equals was so great and ‘emulation’ meant excelling at recognizable and identifiable activities, the need for differentiation produced exaggerated effects. This impulse to imitation in the service of differentiation was expressed hyperbolically in its chiastic twin, differentiation in imitation, that is, in violence against one’s identical peers, exemplified in the impulse to ‘Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy’ (4.1.88). Competitive violence, then, was a self-generative structure, one that always exceeded its object and thus tended to increase in amplitude, as in a positive feedback loop, borne out in Thersites’ description of ‘a good quarrel to draw emulous factions/And bleed to death upon’ (2.3.72–3). Such ‘quarrels’, however, do not culminate in a terminal equilibrium, as Thersites’ images suggests – and as is exemplified in the corpse-strewn stage of Hamlet, or in the ‘tragic bodies’ carried out at the close of The Revenger’s Tragedy, of which Antonio concludes, ‘Pray heaven their blood may wash away all treason’.37 Rather, ‘emulative’ violence is paradoxically anti-entropic in direct proportion to its tendency to resist containment. It may be true that ‘Troilus shows conflict issuing in stalemate, frustration and inertia, rather than “progress”’ (in the sense that the war is shown to be achieving no definitive victory).38 Conversely, what is even truer, though, is that the play displays conflict generating more conflict, in a sort of viral, pathological ‘progress’: this war works to abolish its own end. The war has its own apparently autonomous temporality that operates seemingly beyond the control of its most central actors; they are scripted by its timeframe just as they are scripted by the almost palimpsestic succession of prior narratives which programme their action. The notion of such viral, escalating violence as a literary as well as a social structure was familiar to early modern readers: Thomas Cooper’s The Cry and Revenge of Blood (1620) was constructed as ‘a series of scenes in a “bloody Tragedy”, each scene “more bloody and desperate” than the previous one’.39 Thus Ulysses’ famous speech condemning ‘an envious fever/Of pale and bloodless emulation’ (1.3.133–4) is ingenuous in claiming that emulation leads to the ‘neglection of degree’ (1.3.127). On the contrary, emulation depends upon degree, and exacerbates its essentially violent structure. Emulation, in Shakespeare’s vision, is at the heart of hierarchy, maintaining and exaggerating differences, and thus

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

Russell West-Pavlov

generating a fundamental social energy within warlike aristocratic society. This energy has a temporal component, propelling a social structure forwards even as it casts a glance sideways to take the measure of its competitors and over its shoulder to check for pursuers. Emblematically, Ulysses, in his diatribe against ‘emulation’, illustrates and epitomizes the very trait that he denigrates, for his discourse is a masked critique of Agamemnon’s leadership.40 In the very act of decrying ‘emulation’, Ulysses perpetuates it in the same way that peer-competition perpetuated itself via a performative identification with the object of self-distancing discrimination. His performance of emulation is not merely positional and illocutionary; it is also spatial, playing it out on the locus of the stage, and temporal, repeating it from performance to performance. To the extent that ‘Ulysses’ is an actor, one of the lower sort in the garb of a noble (but like soldiers, freed from the full force of sumptuary sanctions), and a civilian commoner bearing a sword (and thus also contravening the legislation on the carrying of weapons), the player Ulysses ‘emulates’ subversively the aristocratic warrior, thereby propelling a threatening ‘neglection of degree’.41 Shakespeare’s drama thus appears to instantiate, at yet another level, the selffulfilling nature of this temporal structure. Paradoxically however, when Ulysses the character complains of Achilles’ and Patroclus’s private theatre, where ‘with ridiculous and awkward action,/ Which, slanderer, he imitation calls,/He pageants us’ (1.3.149–51), Ulysses the actor is performing just that which his alter ego ­critiques – again and again in successive stagings. Thus, by virtue of its subversive performance from the realm of ‘centrifugal’ ­vernacular forms and from the margins of the polis,42 the play introduces a vital element of difference, as I shall suggest below. The romance element in Troilus and Cressida offers little refuge from this dynamic. Romance, or what little there is in a drama which relentlessly sidelines the relationship between the eponymous lovers in favour of the overarching, all-consuming ‘cormorant’ war between the Greeks and the Trojans, is brutally assimilated to the economy of military conflict. Troilus’s sleeve, given to Cressida as a token of love, is transferred to Diomedes (5.2.96–7, 172–4), who in turn will wear it in battle as a challenge to the Trojan. Cressida is a mere conduit here for a sartorial ‘shifter’ she has only briefly donned, just as the ‘luxurious drab’ (5.4.8) herself circulates between warriors, as exemplified in the infamous kissing scene where she is branded a ‘daughter of the game’ (4.6.64). Cressida’s putative unfaithfulness is generated by an exchange whose ultimate

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Remembering to forget

87

context is that of the war. Troilus self-righteously claims, ‘I am as true as truth’s simplicity,/And simpler than the infancy of truth’, to which Cressida unwisely replies, ‘In that I’ll war with you’. Troilus ripostes, ‘O virtuous fight,/When right with right wars who shall be most right!’ (3.3.167–8). Troilus’s conceit accurately predicts the long-running discursive war for public legitimacy and spurious moral high ground from which he will for the most part emerge as victor. The temporality of Cressida’s unfaithfulness is one of a self-perpetuating futurity in which her infidelity is confirmed time and again in critics’ readings. From Chaucer (‘Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende,/Shal neither been ywriten nor ysonge,/No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende,/O, rolled shal I been on many a tonge!’)43 to Shakespeare (‘If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,/When time is old and hath forgot itself/… “Yea,” let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood,/“As false as Cressid”’ (3.2.180– 1, 191–2)) Cressida is made to repeat and reinforce her assumption, indeed, her assertion of guilt. But the topos of lovers’ battles at the heart of her rhetoric does much more than point up her status as eternally vanquished textual or literary underdog. Far more, this topos demonstrates Cressida’s entrapments in the deadly futurity of a self-replicating literary machine which devours everything in its path, especially in the narrative of chivalric romance which merely provides a noble façade to endless killing. Any affective residue which may have survived Cressida’s putative unfaithfulness is relentlessly channelled back into the relationship of male-to-male bonding-in-battle. Tearing up Cressida’s letter, Troilus rants, ‘My love with words and errors still she feeds;/But edifies another with her deeds’ (5.3.114–15); he exits, and re-enters a moment later pursuing Diomedes: ‘Fly not; for shouldst thou take the river Styx,/I would swim after’ (5.4.18–19), chasing, as it were, his lost amorous investment which now accrues to another male; romantic attachment to a woman has been transmuted into an (inverted) warrior attachment to an enemy. Such a structure provides a further instantiation of Girard’s notion of mimetic rivalry, in which two males relate to one another via their imitative desire for the same woman; in this case, the mirrored desire for the same object diverts heterosexual desire back into a mortiferous homosociality.44 Here the synchronic repetitions of mirroring appear to ‘generate’ a futurity which is merely the repetition of negative textual elements. In this manner, Shakespeare demonstrates that ‘emulative’ violence is not merely contagious and resistant to containment

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

88

Russell West-Pavlov

but, more radically, that, buttressed by a substratum of powerful social affect, it also exhibits a specific temporal structure, one that is self-perpetuating and thus generative of a malignant futurity which vitiates genuine futurity. As 1 Henry VI succinctly puts it, ‘This jarring discord of nobility … doth presage some ill event’ (4.1.188, 191). If, in Troilus and Cressida, time itself is ‘envious and calumniating’ (3.3.168), it is because the temporality of theatrical war and its set-piece hand-to-hand duels has become infected with the endless mutual adhesion (on the synchronic axis) and continuation (on the diachronic plane). Such an over-determined dynamic is expressed in Aeneas’s injunction before Hector and Ajax’s duel, ‘Will you the knights/Shall to the edge of all extremity/Pursue each other’ (4.6.69–71). Here, the frequently reiterated notion of pursuit adumbrates both the sense of affect and desire underpinning ­emulation and reciprocal violence and its attachment to something eluisve and unattainable – that unstaunchable lack which precludes temporal closure. Together they form a ‘structure of feeling’ which, unparadoxically, as Williams’s concept combines the inertia of structure with the processuality of affect, imagines itself as perennially exhausted but also open-ended.45 Troilus’s parting words to his arch-enemy, ‘I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still’ (5.10.26–8), similarly hesitate between a mutually mirroring bond of vengeful attachment, hinting at the absolute character of judgement, and an infinite incompletion indexed by a ghostly persistence beyond the finality of death. Haunting, closely connected to early modern concerns with violence, as evinced of course in Hamlet as elsewhere, embodies a disembodied notion of ‘eternal return’; but haunting also, playing on the notion of guilt and early modern techniques of popular justice and redress, represents the ghostly imagination of some sort of judicial closure.46 Foregrounding thus its own uneasy mix of participation in the ‘afterlives’ of the Troy narratives and its concomitant its play with an undecidable tension between completion and closure,47 Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida intervened in contemporary socio-literary temporal structures in multifaceted and ambivalent ways. From the outset heavily freighted with historical ambiguity,48 each successive performance of the drama has intensified a metatheatrical agon between ‘coming after’ and ‘living on’ and mobilized complexes of conflicting affects associated with such high-tensile temporalities.49 Troilus and Cressida participated in that complex of forces, whether symbolic, social or material-economic by pitting them

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Remembering to forget

89

against each other in its own version of epic conflict. The theatre’s own form of ‘emulation’, the imitation of aristocratic figures drawn from chivalric narratives by common players, extending to the assumption of ‘sumptuary livery’, gave performative weight to the drama’s own preoccupations. Shakespeare’s theatre wielded the various inflections of ‘emulation’ to reflect upon an ambient concern with the multiply-laminated temporalities of the Troy narratives and their self-generating tales of a war without end, while simultaneously signalling the ‘emulative’ theatricality of the dramatic medium itself. It is this self-reflexive turn which, by addressing the problem of imitation, literary and social, may have performed an aggravation of the play’s sense of crisis as the only possible route towards a putative resolution of temporal structures that its action portrays as hopelessly self-perpetuating. Riposting cleverly to Pandarus’s listing of the heroic virtues which constitute the core motor of the war’s spiralling dynamic, ‘the spice and salt that season a man’, Cressida puns that ‘the man’s date is out’ (1.2.251–3). Her witticism embodies the play’s double sense of a temporality of self-perpetuating warrior narratives and of the complex imbrications of a rhetoric of crisis. Cressida’s typically equivocating pun exemplifies the perennial sense of decline within which ‘glorifying warriors has always been tied up with a sense of nostalgia … for the mighty soldier himself’ and for ‘an alternative always already lost’,50 a nostalgia which paradoxically buttresses its embattled sense of self-preservation. Thus Troilus and Cressida acerbically scrutinizes and re-enacts the stories told and retold by the narrators of a mythic warrior class, only to corrode their authority at each successive performance. What the play lays bare is a nefarious temporality simultaneously condemned and underpinned yet ultimately eroded by the relentless literary epochality of the successive Troy narratives. Notes  1 All references in the text, where not otherwise indicated, are to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, in The Complete Works: Compact Edition, ed. S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1988).  2 Compare of course an analogous case of this rhetorical techniques in Henry V, Prologue, 10–18.  3 D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 240.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

90

Russell West-Pavlov

 4 See R. Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 25.  5 Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. Macdonald (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 22.  6 R. J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 349.  7 See more generally, D. Hillman, ‘The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48.3 (Autumn 1997), 295–313.  8 K. E. Maus, cited in A. J. Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), p. 13.  9 For a contemporary avatar of this argument, from which I have drawn much inspiration, see M. Titlestad, ‘South African end times: conceiving an apocalyptic imaginary’, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 51:2 (2014) (Special number: Shadows of the Past, Visions of the Future in African Literatures and Cultures, ed. R. West-Pavlov), especially 52–8, 67–8. 10 Compare of course W. Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999). 11 St Augustine, Of the Citie of God, trans. J. H. (London, 1610), [Bk 15, Ch. 16], 552. 12 Compare F. de Boeck and M.-F. Plissart, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City (Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa / Vlaams Achitectuurinstitut / Ludion, 2004), p. 194. 13 See for instance, George Chapman, Chapman’s Homer: The Illiad, The Oddessey, and the Lesser Homerics, ed. A. Nicoll (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), vol. I, p. 268 (Iliad, Book 13, line 560); Homer, The Illiad: With an English Translation, ed. A. T. Murray (London: Heinemann, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), vol. II, pp. 48–9 (Book 13, lines 624–5); for the putative decay of such traditions, see Donald Lupton, London and the countrey carbonadoed and quartred into several characters (London, 1632), pp. 100–4, or Thomas Middleton, Father Hubburd’s Tales: Or, The Ant and the Nightingale, in The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen (New York: AMS Press, 1964), vol. VIII, p. 75. 14 Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time, p. 346. 15 Compare for instance Macbeth’s references to James I’s impulses for ‘universal peace’ and ‘unity on earth’ (4.3.99, 100). 16 See for instance F. Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 17 See C. Piot, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 18 See F. Barker, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 19 A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 14.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Remembering to forget

91

20 See D. Rosenberg and A. Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), for instance pp. 76–8; M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), p. 237. 21 D. J. Wilcox, The Measure of Time Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 8; J. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009), p. 93. 22 See for instance H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 7–8, on the chronicle; Sir Walter Raleigh, The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh (New York: Burt Franklin 1964), vol. II, p. 58, for humanity’s place within eternity as ‘universal’ history. 23 Nestor, for instance, is ‘Instructed by the antiquary times’ (2.3.246); see also A. Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 24 See R. West-Pavlov, Temporalities (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 56–80. 25 See W. R. Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 26 See R. K. Presson, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Legends of Troy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953); W. R. Keller, Selves and Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008), pp. 569–94. 27 A. M. Potter, ‘“Troilus and Cressida”: deconstructing the Middle Ages?’, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 72 (October 1988), 23–35; see also M. C. Bradbrook, ‘What Shakespeare did to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 9:3 (Summer 1958), 311–19; K. Davis-Brown, ‘Shakespeare’s use of Chaucer in Troilus and Cressida: “That the Will Is Infinite, and the Execution Confined”’, South Central Review, 5:2 (Summer 1988), 15–34; J. Mann, Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Malory, ed. M. D. Rasmussen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 20–41. 28 A. P. Rossiter, ‘Troilus as “Inquisition”’, in P. Martin (ed.), Troilus and Cressida: A Selection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 100–21 (p. 101). 29 See R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 18–25. 30 See R. K. Root, ‘Shakespeare misreads Chaucer’, Modern Language Notes, 38:6 (June 1923), 346–8; Bradbrook, ‘What Shakespeare did to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, 308; compare also M. Fried, ‘Realism, writing, and disfiguration in Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic, with a postscript on Stephen Crane’s upturned faces’, Representations,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

Russell West-Pavlov

9 (Winter 1985), 33–104; and H. Bloom, A Map of Misreading (1975; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 31 K. Palmer, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 1–93 (p. 39). 32 See R. West-Pavlov, ‘Trumpets and strumpets: time, space, emulation and violence in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’. Anglia: Journal of English Studies, 132:1 (2014), 1–22. 33 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of The Courtier, from the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, Anno 1561 (1900; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1967), p. 54. 34 E. S. Mallin, ‘Emulous factions and the collapse of chivalry: Troilus and Cressida’, Representations, 29 (Winter 1990), 145–79 (151). 35 See J. Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink, H. Fink and R. Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), pp. 75–101; G. Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parson (New York: H. Holt, 1903); M. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). 36 Compare L. Charnes, ‘“So Unsecret to Ourselves”: notorious identity and the material subject in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40.4 (Winter 1989), 413–40 (433). 37 Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy, in Three Jacobean Tragedies, ed. G. Salga¯do (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 136 (5.3.136–7). 38 J. Adamson, Troilus and Cressida (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), p. 115. 39 Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence, p. 31. 40 K. Ryan, ‘Troilus and Cressida: the perils of presentism’, in H. Grady and T. Hawkes (eds), Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 164–83 (p. 176). 41 K. Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 60; E. Fernie, ‘Action! Henry V’, in H. Grady and T. Hawkes (eds), Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge: 2007), pp. 96–120 (p. 97). 42 M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 272; S. Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 43 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V.1058–61, in L. D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition with a new foreword by Christopher Cannon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 574. 44 Compare R. Girard, ‘The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida’, in P. Parker and G. Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 187–209; and E. K. Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Remembering to forget

93

45 R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 129–34. 46 See J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 4; S. During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 208–12. 47 Compare J. Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 17–18. 48 According to the (replacement) title page of the play in the 1609 quarto, Troilus and Cressida was ‘a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar’: R. A. Foakes (ed.), William Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006), p. 131; see also E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), vol. III, p. 487. 49 J. Derrida, ‘Living on: Border Lines’, in H. Bloom, P. de Man, J. Derrida, G. H. Hartmann and J. Hillis Miller, Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 75–176. 50 K. E. Maus, cited in Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello, p. 13.

6 ‘Language in her eye’: the expressive face of Criseyde/Cressida Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Stephanie Trigg

The poetic and descriptive conventions of medieval rhetoric and romance direct our attention to the heroine’s face, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is no exception: Criseyde’s beauty is described many times. While the narrator often emphasizes Criseyde’s gracious demeanour and ease of bearing, it is her face that is lit up for us time and time again, as Troilus, Pandarus and the narrator in turn pause to gaze upon it. Without ever offering a Petrarchan blazon of her features, Chaucer often reminds us of Criseyde’s ideal beauty, deferring until the mid-point of the fifth book the distinguishing feature of her monobrow (V.813).1 Most commonly, her beautiful face is described in general, superlative terms. When she is first introduced, it is as an angelic model of rare perfection: As to my doom, in al Troies cite Nas non so fair, forpassynge every wight, So aungelik was hir natif beaute, That lik a thing inmortal semed she, As doth an hevenyssh perfit creature, That down were sent in scornynge of nature. (I.100–5)

This encomium, with its appeal to the trope of unearthly and divine beauty, is echoed in the descriptio (where the portrait of Criseyde is placed, tellingly, between those of Troilus and Diomede) in Book V, where we are told that ‘Paradis stood formed in hire yën. / And with hire riche beaute evere more / Strof love in hire ay, which of hem was more’ (V.817–19). These similes and comparisons all express an indirect or allegorical drama: Criseyde is a perfect, heavenly creature who shows up the imperfections of the natural world; while her face is the site of a struggle between love and beauty. Book-ended between these two examples, however, are other allusions to Criseyde’s face that foreground its active role in the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language in her eye’

95

narrative drama. In many of these instances, the narrator struggles to reconcile the unchanging beauty of the heroine’s face with her changing affections, her ‘slidyng’ heart. But what is the relationship between the physical beauty and the emotional and expressive life of the late medieval heroine? Chaucer’s poem offers a series of experiments in the expression of emotion on the human face. Specifically, Chaucer often invites us to look intently, with Pandarus or Troilus, on Criseyde’s face, not just to admire its beauty but in ways that pause the narrative and problematize the very act of looking. In my first example, Pandarus is making Criseyde wait to hear his great news, his ‘thing to doon yow pleye’ (II.121). He stops speaking: And with that word he gan right inwardly Byholden hire and loken on hire face, And seyde, ‘On swich a mirour goode grace!’ (II.264–6)

He looks on her for so long without speaking that he reduces her to curious, awkward questioning under his silent gaze: ‘“Lord! so faste ye m’avise! / Sey ye me nevere er now? What say ye, no?”’ (II.276–7). Her exclamation is echoed by the narrator in Book III when he marvels at the way Troilus cannot take his eyes from Criseyde as they make love: And Lord! So he gan goodly on hire se That nevere his look ne bleynte from hire face, And seyde, ‘O deere herte, may it be That it be soth, that ye ben in this place?’ (III.1345–8)

Criseyde reassures him, calls him ‘herte myn’ and kisses him. This direct expression of love is utterly confounding to both body and soul: ‘where his spirit was, for joie he nyste’ (III.1351). Troilus’s spirit may be in an uncertain state, but he has recourse to a familiar and reliable rhetorical trope in regards to female beauty. He kisses Criseyde’s eyes, and addresses them through a Petrarchan synecdoche, where the defamiliarized body part – ‘ye humble nettes’ – stands for the whole woman and her capacity to trap him: ‘O eyen clere, It weren ye that wroughte me swich wo, Ye humble nettes of my lady deere!’ (III.1353–5)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Stephanie Trigg

Troilus here seems to recall his first sight of Criseyde, when he is transfixed by her facial expression and demeanour in the crowded temple of Athena. I will turn to this scene shortly. At this point of greatest intimacy, though, Criseyde’s face still represents a mystery to Troilus. Even though he can read the mercy ‘written’ on her face, it remains a puzzle to be resolved, and a text to be uncoded as he gazes fixedly at her. He finds his way through this paradox of reading and unreading only by resorting to courtly metaphors of trapping and binding: ‘Though ther be mercy writen in youre cheere, God woot, the text ful hard is, soth, to fynde! How koude ye withouten bond me bynde?’ (III.1356–8)

The word ‘cheere’ seems to suggest a direct equivalent with ‘face’ ten lines earlier. In contrast to her unease under Pandarus’s gaze, Criseyde’s response is not remarked on here, and she accepts Troilus’s kisses and his scrutiny in silence and without resistance. This is the ideal response for the adored woman, while Troilus answers his own rhetorical question about her capacity to ‘bynde’ him by actively taking Criseyde firmly (‘faste’) in his arms, and sighing a hundred loving and happy sighs: ‘esy sykes, swiche as ben to like, / That shewed his affeccioun withinne’ (III.1363–4). Earlier in Book III, however, when the narrator describes the lovers’ brief and discreet conversations, Troilus is shown to be such an attentive lover, so skilled at ‘reading’ her, that Criseyde finds he anticipates her wishes and desires without the need for speech: ‘It semed hire he wiste what she thoughte / Withouten word, so that it was no nede / To bidde hym ought to doon, or ought forbeede’ (III.465–7). This is the occasion of great joy and pleasure to her, that she does not need to speak to express her desires: ‘For which she thought that love, al come it late, / Of alle joie hadde opned hire the yate’ (III.468–9). For Pandarus, Criseyde’s face is less a mystery than a commodity or an asset to be organised and directed. He regularly gives instructions and injunctions to his niece about her face. When he first comes to announce Troilus’s love, he tells her to discard her widow’s veil and show her face (II.110); he reminds her that crows’ feet will eventually mar her beauty and devalue her (II.403); and, distressed by the sight of the purple ring around her eyes, he counsels her to stop crying lest Troilus find her in that state (IV.915–16)

‘Language in her eye’

97

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(he also advises Troilus, similarly, to wash his own face of tears (V.646)). The most striking apparition of Criseyde’s face, however, is her appearance in the temple. We see her through Troilus’s eyes: To Troilus right wonder wel with alle Gan for to like hire mevynge and hire chere, Which somdel deignous was, for she let falle Hire look a lite aside in swich manere, Ascaunces, ‘What, may I nat stonden here?’ And after that hir lokynge gan she lighte, That never thoughte hym seen so good a syghte. (I.288–94)

This rightly famous account of Criseyde’s expression is of a different order from the other appearances of her face in the poem. This is a dynamic face in motion, in a precisely choreographed image of Criseyde’s ‘mevynge’ and her ‘chere’. It is a dramatic and compelling representation of feeling, not in response to an intent or intimate gaze from someone else, but glimpsed as Criseyde seems to express then resolve her anxiety about appearing in public under fear of public shame. Yet there is little that is simple or naturalistic about the trope of the speaking face. This form of prosopopeia raises a number of issues about the way we read agency, performance and interiority in medieval literature. When a face is described in terms of the words it appears to speak, this imagery sets up a complex circularity: A text describes a visual appearance by seeming to translate it into a secondary text of direct, if unspoken speech. Criseyde’s unspoken question functions like a caption, a bandeau or banderole, a scroll that floats next to a person illustrated in a manuscript, carrying words understood to be literally spoken by that figure.2 But the hermeneutic circle of Criseyde’s facial expression cannot be closed so easily. Criseyde’s face does not declare its meaning directly; it ‘speaks’ only to ask an unanswerable rhetorical question: ‘may I nat stonden here?’ As Paul de Man shows, the rhetorical question is an undecidable form that divides along grammatical and rhetorical lines.3 In the grammatical sense Criseyde’s face asks permission to stand where she does; while rhetorically, or figuratively, it may be read as asserting her right to stand there. And once we start unpicking the imagery, we have to acknowledge that the face does not speak: The translation into words is performed by the narrator, through the fiction of the invisible observer, and the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

Stephanie Trigg

delicate hinge of Chaucer’s ‘ascaunces’, ‘as if to say’. Moreover, Criseyde’s facial expression is not at all fixed like a static icon of an allegorical character or an index of emotion; it is caught, as it were, in the process of changing, shifting from one expression to another. In so many ways, then, this characterization of Criseyde’s face is more complex than the passage it echoes, when Troilus’s face is captured by the narrator’s gaze in the act of seeming to speak. The young prince speaks contemptuously to his companions, and then appeals to a higher authority: ‘I have herd told, pardieux, of youre lyvynge, Ye loveres, and youre lewed observaunces, And which a labour folk han in wynnynge Of love, and in the kepyng which doutaunces; And whan youre prey is lost, woo and penaunces. O veray fooles, nyce and blynde be ye! Ther nyst nat oon kan war by other be.’ And with that word he gan caste up the browe, Ascaunces, ‘Loo! is this naught wisely spoken?’ (I.197–205)

Separated by fewer than a hundred lines, these two examples invite comparison as a formal parallel, especially with the echo of Ascaunces, ‘as if to say’; and the expression of these two faces translated as rhetorical questions. Each moment is crucial to the plot, too. Troilus’s expression invites the ire of the God of Love, who has no trouble interpreting the unspoken question on Troilus’s face, as he immediately ‘gan loke rowe / Right for despit’, and takes his revenge, shooting Troilus with an arrow, and thus inaugurating his fateful career in love. In the temple, Troilus’s gaze ranges up and down over this lady and that, until it lights on Criseyde. ‘Astoned’ by the sight, he immediately dissembles, and resumes ‘his first pleyinge chere’ in order to observe her better. In Criseyde’s case, it is the defensiveness of her expression, immediately followed by the lightening of her gaze, that becomes the ‘fixe and depe i­mpressioun’ (I.298) that strikes deep into Troilus’s heart. Troilus’s expression follows his spoken address to the unhappy lovers in his troop. The continuity in syntax and expression make it easy to mistake his question as a continuation of that discourse: a silent commentary, accompanied by raised eyebrows, on his scornful teasing of his companions. In contrast, however, we have not yet heard Criseyde speak in the poem; and this trope – her own

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language in her eye’

99

unspoken rhetorical question – is introduced as the primary means of characterizing her. Her expression is also more oblique than Troilus’s. Where he ‘casts up’ his brow directly to appeal to the heavens, she lets her look fall a little to the side. The MED and the OED make careful distinctions between this ‘ascaunces’, which they derive from Old French quanses (que), ‘in such a way’, ‘as if’, etc., and the sixteenth-century English word ‘askance’, sideways, obliquely (of unknown or uncertain etymology). But it is hard not to hear the more modern uses, ‘obliquely’, or even ‘scornfully, suspiciously, with disapproval, distrust’, in Criseyde’s stanza, especially since her look falls ‘a lite aside’, in the indirect gaze that becomes a key feature of her characterization, and her ‘slidying’ heart. This face is sometimes difficult to read, as we saw above, and is introduced here as an instantiation of her ‘somdel deignous’ countenance. A quick comparison with Chaucer’s source in Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato shows how Chaucer has developed these two scenes. There is no equivalent to Troilus’s unspoken appeal to the heavens, so it is Chaucer who introduces this expressive parallel between the two lovers. Boccaccio’s Criseida uses a more elaborate gesture, too, holding her mantle out before her face to create a space for herself in the crowd, though her face, similarly, speaks silent words. Her somewhat disdainful (alquanto sdegnosetto) expression speaks, but in a statement, not a question: ‘quasi dicesse: E non ci si può stare’ – ‘as if she were to say, “No one may stand here”’. In contrast to Chaucer’s Troilus, and Boccaccio’s Criseida, then, Criseyde’s expression is more complex. She has a look, which she lets fall a little aside, which asks a question without reference to other speech or gesture. In contrast to Troilus, her look is almost separate from her, and it’s something that she seems to control: She lets it fall – a downward trajectory as opposed to Troilus’s appeal upwards – and a little aside, and in a particular manner (‘she let falle / Hire look a lite aside in swich manere, / Ascaunces …’). Most importantly, though, for my reading, after casting her expression down, she lightens it up a little: ‘after that hir lokynge gan she lighte’. It is this drama that is attractive to Troilus, not just her awkward, defiant expression. Jill Mann assumes that her gaze (‘hir lokynge’) is directed at Troilus; indeed, that it is in response to Troilus’s fixed attention on her that she responds in defensive alarm,4 but Chaucer does not show Criseyde responding to any particular face, and she seems to me to be responding to the fear of a more generalized social disapproval, in what may

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

100

Stephanie Trigg

well be her first public appearance in Trojan society after the departure of her father.5 If she lightens her expression, it may equally be suggested that she has seen that no one looks on her with disapproval or scorn; that she may indeed take her place at court. And it is this ‘lokyng of hire eyen’ that wounds Troilus so painfully (II.533–4). The rhetorical question in her face invites comparison with the famous moment in Book II, after Criseyde has witnessed Troilus pass by her window, just after Pandarus has told her of his friend’s love. Criseÿda gan al his chere aspien, And leet it so softe in hire herte synke, That to hireself she seyde, ‘Who yaf me drynke?’ (II.649–51)

This is an internalized dialogue with herself, rather than a verbal translation of a facial expression, but the form of the question produces a similar dynamic impression: the construction of a narrative about herself, the sense of her self as a social creature, positioned in relation to others, inspired by gazing on another. These are startling moments by any measure. They raise intriguing questions about Chaucer’s representation of emotion and affect, whether we read them as primarily unconscious, or performative, or in terms that stress their affiliations with visual images. Jill Mann describes both these moments in Criseyde’s story, very suggestively, as examples of ‘arranged behaviour’.6 As John Burrow says, they are rare in medieval narrative: he describes Chaucer’s characterization of Criseyde’s face in Book I as ‘quite exceptional’.7 When we start to look at medieval faces, we must also engage with difficult words like ‘lokyng’, ‘chere’ and ‘countenance’, words which even a scholar as attuned to linguistic subtlety as Burrow finds problematic,8 since they can range from unthinking emotion to the conscious performance of demeanour. They thus ask difficult questions about the relationship between private and public expressions of emotion. Two other examples from Chaucer’s writing can help us explore the cultural and semiotic work performed by these speaking faces; and the critical problems they pose. There is a similar verbal and facial drama in the Black Knight’s description of the lady White’s face. The appearance of her face, particularly of her eyes, is White’s characteristic, self-defining expression, not tied to any particular narrative moment.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language in her eye’

101

Hyt nas no countrefeted thyng; Hyt was hir owne pure lokyng That the goddesse, dame Nature, Had mad hem opene by mesure And close; for were she never so glad, Hyr lokynge was not foly sprad, Ne wildely, thogh that she pleyde; But ever, me thoght, hir eyen seyde, ‘Be God, my wrathe ys al foryive!’ (The Book of the Duchess, 869–77)

Her eyes always – ever – seemed to the Knight to say, ‘By God, my anger is all forgiven’. Like Criseyde’s, White’s expression is part of a dynamic movement between shifting states, though the alteration here seems to be perpetual. First there is anger; and then it is gone. The editorial exclamation mark also seems to make White’s face express surprise, implying perhaps a lower degree of self-knowledge. This attempt to capture a dynamic facial expression is of a different order to the description of Criseyde, however. Without the drama of Criseyde’s first public appearance after her father’s desertion, the portrait of White floats free of any immediate social context, apart from the unspecified ‘day’ and ‘place’ when the Knight first sees her in a company of ladies. Without any obvious cause for anger that needs to be forgiven, White’s face risks appearing not so much mobile as frozen, the poet’s attempt to capture a distinctive personality locking her into a state of perpetual surprise. Chaucer seems to strain here to find language to portray the natural beauty of White’s expression, introducing this section of the effictio by reassuring us of the naturalness of White’s look. It was no counterfeited thing, but ‘hir owne pure lokyng’. This defends White against any accusations of a deliberately cultivated or mannered expression. There is no sense that, like the Prioress in The Canterbury Tales, White might be counterfeiting chere of court, or copying, or needing to copy, the style of her social superiors. The MED’s examples show that counterfeten is often used in this way, as an imitation of elevated class behaviour. Chaucer here deliberately opposes such manufactured, counterfeit and aspirational demeanour with the idea of a gaze that is White’s own. But the invocation of Nature is problematic, since, for Chaucer, Nature is the great artisan, as she is in Alain de Lille, coining the true copies from God’s original models, or hammering them into shape at her forge. For modern readers, the idea of someone

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

Stephanie Trigg

making White’s eyes open and close in perfect moderation makes the woman seem doll-like or puppet-like. This somewhat mechanical understanding of Nature and its production of women’s facial expressions constitutes a substantial challenge to Chaucer and the knight’s attempt to lift the description of White out of the static forms of rhetorical descriptio and blason. This conceit – the beautiful woman as the exemplar of Nature’s work – is developed at greater length in the Physician’s Tale, where Chaucer seems untroubled by the conceptual vocabulary of artisanal manufacture: engraving, painting, forging or beating (the terms are multiplied and repeated here). No one, not Pygmalion or Apelles, or Zanzis, can compete with Nature, or countrefete her exemplary work in the creation of Virginia: Fair was this mayde in excellent beautee Aboven every wight that man may see; For Nature hath with sovereyn diligence Yformed hire in so greet excellence, As though she wolde seyn, ‘Lo! I, Nature, Thus kan I forme and peynte a creature, Whan that me list; who kan me countrefete? Pigmalion noght, though he ay forge and bete, Or grave, or peynte; for I dar wel seyn Apelles, Zanzis, sholde werche in veyn Outher to grave or peynte, or forge, or bete, If they presumed me to countrefete. For He that is the formere principal Hath maked me his vicaire general, To forme and peynten erthely creaturis Right as me list, and ech thyng in my cure is Under the moone, that may wane and waxe, And for my werk right no thyng wol I axe; My lord and I been ful of oon accord. I made hire to the worshipe of my lord; So do I alle myne othere creatures, What colour that they han or what figures.’ Thus semeth me that Nature wolde seye. (Fragment VI.7–29, my emphasis)

In this example, it is the whole body of Virginia through which Nature speaks, in an extreme example of the speaking face or body.9 Nature appears in a far more sustained speaking allegorical role than she does in The Book of the Duchess; and once more we observe the idea of Nature ‘speaking’, like a supernatural ventriloquist, through her creation: ‘Thus semeth me that Nature wolde

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language in her eye’

103

seye’. Here it is Nature who speaks, in this example of ethopoeia, speaking instead of Virginia. Like White, this young girl is the produced and manufactured exemplar of Nature’s best work. In fact, Chaucer goes on to explain how Nature has ‘peynted’ this noble creature, before she was born, ‘Where as by right swiche colours sholde be’ (Fragment VI.36): that is, putting all the right colours in the right places. In this description, Nature’s ‘painting’ and ‘forming’ are terms of positive valence; contrasted with ‘countrefeting’, the work of the inferior human artists. The description of White’s look as not ‘counterfeted’, but the work of Nature, is echoed in the next section of the Physician’s Tale, in which it is said of Virginia: No countrefeted termes hadde she To seme wys, but after hir degree She spak, and alle hire wordes, moore and lesse, Sownynge in vertu and in gentillesse. (Fragment VI.51–4)

Once more the idea of counterfeiting is associated with reaching beyond one’s degree, whether this suggests aspiring to compete with Nature, or one’s social superiors. Curiously, when Nature seems to speak through Virginia’s body, her opening utterance takes the form of a rhetorical question: ‘who kan me countrefete?’ Unlike Criseyde, she answers herself ­in the negative, so that much of her speech takes the form of a dialogue with herself, played out across Virginia’s body, which thus becomes expressive not so much of her own character, or her own emotions, but of someone else, and a goddess at that. Chaucer’s representation of Nature as the ultimate artisan is a textbook case of medieval alterity: our understanding is hampered by the radical difference between medieval and modern concepts of what is ‘natural’. Even Chaucer does not seem entirely comfortable with this idea, as suggested by the contradictory example of White’s eyes, opening and closing ‘by mesure’. The more he draws attention to Nature’s technical mastery, the less ‘natural’ White seems. Indeed, in all these examples, Chaucer emphasizes that these women’s faces are made or produced by someone else, either by Nature or by the more direct heavenly agency responsible for Criseyde’s face. We may draw on these three texts together to assemble an aesthetic hierarchy. At the bottom would be the human artisans, the painters and sculptors who depict beauty; second would be Nature whose work in women like White and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

104

Stephanie Trigg

Virginia exceeds human representation, because she works in full accord with God; and at the top would be the seemingly more direct result of heavenly intervention we see in Criseyde. And yet in Troilus and Criseyde we see Chaucer not content to leave Criseyde on this supernatural plane, but experimenting with different ways of animating the female face and the female body, different ways of showing the movement of emotion and character. We have seen how it is the drama of changing emotions on Criseyde’s face that first attracts Troilus to her; and how both Troilus and Pandarus study her face intently at different times, not just admiring its beauty but studying its meaning. The face, then, becomes a hermeneutic puzzle that may or may not be opened to disclose the character within, or behind the face. But as soon as the female face is described as the creative work of some other agency, its expressive capacity is heavily mediated, if not downright ventriloquized. Facial expressions are often discussed as gestures, and this is certainly appropriate when they change, as they do on the occasion of Troilus’s first sight of Criseyde. But nor are gestures transparent indicators of character or emotion. As John P. Hermann points out, much work on gesture theory treads an awkward line between appealing to sources such as conduct literature to interpret ­medieval gesture and body language while also appealing to a ­transhistorical humanism to interpret them. Hermann diagnoses another problem in the reading of literary texts; that to translate gesture into words effectively defeats the purpose: Gestures in Troilus and Criseyde are not always translatable into some scholarly meta-language of paraphrase that recuperates their meaning. Indeed, gesture is often employed in life and literature to avoid being pinned down. The poem’s gestural code is ambiguous from the standpoint of the narrator, author, and characters as well. The very attempt to eliminate the ambiguity of gesture, one comes to realize, runs curiously counter to its purposes, especially in literature, which frequently strives for a fertile suspension of meaning.10

This is precisely the paradox of the speaking face: Chaucer solves the problem of the doll-like, ventriloquized woman by making Criseyde’s face seem to speak directly, but speaking in a way that conjures up a mysterious ambiguity. Mann invokes Criseyde’s expressive face as one of the many means by which Chaucer produces the idea of a large ‘reservoir of thoughts and feeling’, to

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language in her eye’

105

which Criseyde only sometimes gives voice, a notion of a complex inner life that Troilus must learn to read.11 This is not the only moment where suggestive and changeable faces feature in Chaucer’s poem. This is a strong theme in Book IV, for example, which opens with Fortune turning ‘hire brighte face’ away from Troilus (IV.8–9). Calkas, too, petitions the Greeks to ask for his daughter in exchange ‘with a chaunged face’ (IV.68). When Troilus hears the news in the parliament, ‘ful soone chaungen gan his face’ (IV.150). These three examples all signal important shifts in the poem’s narrative action. When Pandarus comes to visit Criseyde and finds her weeping, Chaucer harks back to his first description: She was right swich to seen in hire visage As is that wight that men on beere bynde; Hire face, lik of Paradys the ymage, Was al ychaunged in another kynde. The pleye, the laughter, men was wont to fynde On hire, and ek hire joies everichone, Ben fled; and thus lith now Criseyde allone. (IV.862–8)

Not only has Criseyde’s heavenly face become marked by grief (Chaucer goes on to describe the purple rings around her eyes, in lines 869–70) but, worse, she is as if dead, abandoned by joyful emotions. No longer is her beautiful face the site of the playfulness and the laughter men used to find there; and indeed, as the poem proceeds towards its dark conclusion, Criseyde herself becomes harder and harder for the poet, and his audience to read. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare also invokes the trope of the speaking face, or the speaking body. But where Criseyde’s face speaks silently and evocatively in a way that is utterly captivating to Troilus, Shakespeare’s Ulysses ‘reads’ Cressida far more negatively. For him, her promiscuity is easily legible in her silent body language, which he equates with her quick tongue. His analysis follows the scene in which she has been passed in greeting from one to another among the leaders of the Greek host. NESTOR: A woman of quick sense. ULYSSES: Fie, fie upon her! There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,

106

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ALL:

Stephanie Trigg That give accosting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every ticklish reader! Set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity And daughters of the game. Trumpet within The Troyans’ trumpet. (4.5.54–64)12

This is an almost hysterical account of the uncontrolled female body, whose metaphorical language matches the complexities of her actual spoken language. Cressida is accorded some interiority here, but it is an undisciplined interiority that escapes through every part of her speaking body in her body language. When she does speak, she speaks improperly, too much, and discloses too much of what should remain interior, private (as she herself admits, when she first declares her love to Troilus in Act 3, Scene 2). This lack of physical and verbal economy or restraint is further mirrored in her undisciplined use of spoken language to reveal the ‘tables of [her] thoughts to every ticklish reader’. Ulysses’ speech provides a powerful corrective to any reader taken, as Nestor is, by Cressida’s ‘quick sense’. That quickness, which may first appear as female autonomy and agency is condemned by Ulysses as producing too many meanings. Jill Mann, contrasting Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s heroines, argues that Shakespeare resolutely flattens his Cressida, denying us all access to her inner life in order to foreground the problem of value in the play: the value attributed to women by others.13 These examples from Chaucer and Shakespeare are very diverse, but all point to the inevitable ventriloquism in which authors make their characters speak, whether through spoken or unspoken words or through body language. These writers also frequently add an additional layer of mediation through male characters translating female silence and appearance into words: Ulysses, the Black Knight, the Physician and the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde. In the Chaucerian examples, the introduction of the goddess Nature, and the associated discourses of manufacturing and the idea of the perfect copy, further complicate the idea of female expressiveness, autonomy and agency. What sets Chaucer’s characterization of Criseyde apart is the speed with which her expression moves from her startled, defen­ sive reaction to the lightening of her gaze. It may well be a sequence of ‘arranged’ faces, in Mann’s terms – or a kind of performative

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language in her eye’

107

sequence – but we may read this rapid transition as Chaucer’s attempt to escape the static, fixed quality of many courtly images of female beauty, a type particularly evident in the portrait of Virginia. When Chaucer describes Criseyde’s speaking face, it is presented as entirely captivating, not just for the beauty of her body but for the sense of lively interiority and personality it sets before us, prefiguring her quick wit, her sensitivity to nuance and her fear of public shame that we will see played out again and again in the dramatic narrative of the next four books. In writing his Cressida, however, Shakespeare reduces these characteristics of quick wit and lively communication to a heavily sexualized characterization that is authoritatively interpreted by Ulysses as a sign of promiscuity. Chaucer’s trope of the speaking face, the displaced eloquence of the ‘as if’, and the rapid change of Criseyde’s expression captures a moment of seductive and erotic promise that entrances Troilus. This will eventually be followed, in Chaucer’s poem, by a transition to amorous changeability, and in Shakespeare’s play, by an excess of eloquence. It is hard to resist Shakespeare’s dispiriting conclusion that these two things – a woman’s expressive eloquence; and her sexual availability – are intimately related. Notes  1 All quotations from Chaucer are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 1988).  2 See P. Saenger, Space between Words: The Origin of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 187; and L. Grove, ‘Emblems with speech bubbles’, in A. M. Saunders and P. Davidson (eds), Visual Words and Verbal Pictures: Essays in Honour of Michael Bath (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2005), pp. 89–104.  3 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 9–12.  4 J. Mann, ‘Shakespeare and Chaucer: “what is Criseyde worth?”’, Cambridge Quarterly, 18:2 (1989), 109–28 (112). See also M. Behrman, ‘Heroic Criseyde’, Chaucer Review, 38 (2004), 314–36.  5 In a detailed reading of this scene, John Burrow also maintains that Criseyde does not see Troilus in the temple: Gesture and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 130.  6 Mann, ‘Shakespeare and Chaucer’, p. 110.  7 J. A. Burrow, ‘Nonverbal communication in medieval England: some lexical problems’, in R. F. Green and L. R. Mooney (eds), Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

Stephanie Trigg

A. G. Rigg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 44–54 (p. 44). See also J. A. Burrow, ‘Alterity and Middle English literature’, Review of English Studies, 50 (1999), 483–92, for a discussion of this passage in the context of the history of non-verbal communication.  8 Burrow, ‘Nonverbal communication in medieval England’.  9 This may also be described as a form of ethopoeia, the rhetorical form of amplificatio in which a character self-characterizes. See H. Specht, ‘“Ethopoeia” or impersonation: a neglected species of medieval characterization’, Chaucer Review, 21 (1986), 1–15. 10 J. P. Hermann, ‘Gesture and seduction in Troilus and Criseyde’, in R. A. Shoaf (ed.), Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: ‘Subgit to alle poesye’: Essays in Criticism (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), pp. 138–60 (p. 143) (originally in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 7 (1985), 107–35). 11 Mann, ‘Shakespeare and Chaucer’, p. 113. 12 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. K. Muir, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 13 Mann, ‘Shakespeare and Chaucer’, esp. p. 117.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

7 The presence of Troilus and Cressida: Shakespeare’s refurbishment of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde John Drakakis

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida occupies an intermediate position, first, in its belated appearance in the Folio between Henry VIII and Coriolanus: between ‘history’ and ‘tragedy’, and then in its title between two ‘tragedies’, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. This might suggest a number of generic reasons for its appearance vis-à-vis other plays in the Shakespeare canon. In Romeo and Juliet (c. 1594) for example, the young lovers sacrifice their youth for a ‘glooming peace’ (5.3.216)1 but even the raising of Juliet’s statue ‘of pure gold’ as a representation of ‘lovèd Juliet’ (5.3.298, 301) will not compensate for a future that has been tragically denied to them. And yet, as A. P. Rossiter once pointed out, the idealization of the young lovers is ‘respectable’ in a way that Troilus’s ‘idealization’ of Helen and Cressida is not.2 In Antony and Cleopatra, the lovers are not young, and their fate is that they appear to transcend the quotidian material life of imperial Rome. Unlike in the case of young Juliet, ‘truth’ and ‘fidelity’ are not epithets that can be easily attached to a Cleopatra who deploys her sexuality repeatedly, and seductively, as a political weapon to redirect Roman military ambition. Cleopatra may be able to fashion an Antony who is ‘past the size of dreaming’ and to ‘imagine’ him as ‘nature’s piece ’gainst Fancy, / Condemning shadows quite’ (5.2.97–100),3 and yet her relationship with him is one of the most sensual, the most passionate, in the Shakespeare canon. Between these two extremes, the one monumentalizing and memorializing female constancy, and the other extolling a fecund orientalist sensuality, lies Troilus and Cressida, a play that partakes of elements of both its forerunner and its successor, and yet is radically different from either. In Antony and Cleopatra, the strategy that Freud suggests, that ‘[i]f willingness to engage in war is an effect of the destructive instinct, the most obvious plan will be to bring Eros, its antagonist,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

110

John Drakakis

into play against it’,4 is pursued to a tragic conclusion. In Troilus and Cressida, however, Mars and Eros, or Venus, ‘politics’ or even ‘commerce’, are not alternative ways of proceeding, or, indeed, deities that control human existence, but, synonymous entities that collectively represent topographically an indivisible core of ‘man’s social existence’.5 Approaching the issue from a rather different perspective, L. C. Knights, in a perceptive gloss on Ulysses’ speech on ‘order’ at 1.3, and his comment on the latter’s subsequent strategy to entice the reluctant Greek champion Achilles into battle, observes that ‘Man … needs society because it gives him honour and applause’.6 But as René Girard has argued more recently, in this play ‘[t]he politics of eroticism and the politics of power are one and the same’.7 We know from Georges Bataille’s analysis of eroticism that its main feature is its capacity ‘to destroy the selfcontained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives’.8 So much for the search for an ‘essence’ of ‘personality’. One further extension of this might be the proposition developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their chapter on ‘The War Machine’ in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), and the necessity of conceiving ‘the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking’.9 From the point of view of the state, war is ‘an irruption’ whose energy can be internalized and read as the negative of state power, but, ‘returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine is seen to be of another species, of another nature, of another origin’.10 They go on to note that feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a ‘subject’, to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects. And these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the becoming-animal of the warrior.11

The ‘milieu of pure exteriority’ as Deleuze and Guattari express it, raises questions about the role of ‘contingency’ in this process since we are prompted to wonder what the ‘affects’ of ‘becomingwoman’ and ‘the becoming-animal of the warrior’ might look like. In Chaucer’s poem, one of the acknowledged ‘sources’ of Shakespeare’s play, the ‘interiority of the subjects’ is preserved, with emphasis upon the lovers’ ‘feelings’, and this is the consequence of the diminution of the poem’s emphasis upon the ‘war’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language The presence in her of Troilus eye’ and Cressida

111

itself; Criseyde’s infidelity is a consequence of her inscription in a symbolic order that commits her to weakness in the face of masculine power. In Shakespeare’s version of the story the issue is, as we shall see, a question of identity, of the female subjectivity that is both the cause of war and the irruptive force that sustains it; although it is a question whether it is ‘the becoming-woman’ or the ‘becoming animal’ that is manifest, or the dynamics of the historical (and/or narrative) situation itself that produces these forms of behaviour. At this point we need to remind ourselves that the narrative of Troilus and Cressida has an ‘ancestry’. Walter Benjamin’s general dictum that an ‘origin’ ‘is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being’, but rather ‘what emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance’12 is worth bearing in mind. Indeed, from one perspective it would appear, pace Benjamin, that the ‘idea’ of Troilus and Cressida as an ‘original phenomenon’ embodies ‘a determination of the [narrative] form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history’.13 We might have reservations about the nature of the ‘revelation’ that lies at the heart of the play, but this dictum is as applicable to Chaucer’s version of the story as it is to Shakespeare’s, and the differences between the two narratives, leaving aside the Renaissance willingness to regard Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and the afterlife of the poem as Chaucer’s, not to mention the versions of Boccaccio or Lydgate, among others, are those of a material ‘history’ functioning as a dominant discourse that interpellates the lovers and all those around them. Shakespeare’s inheritance E. Talbot Donaldson’s intelligent, but naturalized, view of Chaucer’s Criseyde is that of ‘a portrait of a woman of almost mythological femininity, and readers respond to such a portrait by becoming their own mythmakers’.14 Linda Charnes in her ­treatment of the play puts the matter thus: Paradoxically, the figures who inhabit this play are notoriously ‘known’. And yet it is precisely these legendary figures who are at great pains to secure their own and each other’s identities as they try to lay to rest a haunting sense that they are, and are not,‘themselves’.15

Her objective is to uncover the processes whereby the ‘subjectivity’ of the dramatic characters in the play is ‘materialized’ as a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

112

John Drakakis

c­ onsequence of a dialectical tension between the ‘roles’ authorised by their ‘existence’ on the one hand and their ‘official’ – that is to say mythological – functions on the other. The result is a deconstruction of ‘their own origins’ that is articulated through the materialization of the characters’ ‘neuroses’ or ‘the return, in various forms, of what they attempt to repress’.16 The projection of this dilemma back on to the characters’ curiously ‘literary’ psychologies themselves threatens to obscure a different kind of materiality that, I want to argue, Shakespeare’s play discloses, although Charnes is right to emphasize that the repressed material, in part, comprises the earlier versions of the story. In this way her analysis stops short of becoming just another way of talking about dramatic ‘character’ by emphasizing ‘characters’ who are ‘already deeply encoded in their meaning’, and who possess a ‘self-histrionicism or theatricality’ that is ‘built into their [the dramatic characters’] texts’.17 Charnes is caught here, however, between the demands of a hypostasized narrative, with its own particular form of ‘ancestry’, and its incarnation in the form of individual ‘characters’ who appear to resist (up to a point) the process of hypostasization.18 Charnes’s conclusion is an interesting example of astute political analysis but one that culminates paradoxically in a Beckettian nihilism: ‘Troilus and Cressida reveals the ideological contingency of a telos that is both absolute and utterly devoid of value.’19 The phrase ‘ideological contingency of a telos’ conflates (perhaps, even, confuses) a number of important issues that Shakespeare’s play appears to resist in the form of what we might describe as a critique of ideology. Indeed, it is the radical contingency of the ‘action’ (in a strictly non-Aristotelian sense) that challenges the very conception of an ‘ideology of a telos’ in the play. In a much earlier account of the play, and in a much clearer, though prescient, critical vocabulary, Terence Hawkes observed that the structuring binary of Troilus and Cressida was the dialectic between ‘intuition’ and ‘reason’, but that in a formal, thematic sense, ‘the villain of this piece’ was ‘Time’.20 What in L. C. Knights’s account was assumed to be a detachable heuristic theme is, in Hawkes’s version, integrated into the textual fabric of the play as part of the index of a historically specific mindset. He retains Knights’s capitalisation, ‘Time’ but he strips it of  any metaphysical force by insisting that it occupies a space in the ‘world’ and in ‘reason’: ‘In a sense, Time is the villain of this piece, and it performs the role which, say, Iago primarily has in Othello, of reducing spiritual values to a merely worldly status. It

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language The presence in her of Troilus eye’ and Cressida

113

constitutes, by this, a “rational” force, and Ulysses, as a Greek, regards it in this light.’21 We might be prompted to wonder if this is an early instance of the ‘de-sacralization of space’ that Foucault identified.22 For Hawkes, ‘reason’ becomes instrumental, in that he invokes the pragmatic secular, instrumental reasoning of an Iago who is the exemplification of an early modern Machiavellian politics.23 Hawkes’s claim that, when ‘reason’ of this kind confronts Troilus’s ‘non-rational love for Cressida’ it destroys it, transforms what begins as a philosophical argument into one that detaches the play’s ‘bifold authority’ (5.2.142)24 from the realm of ‘ideas’, thus opening the way to the alignment of ‘reason’ firmly within the purview of the ‘discursive’.25 The events that Shakespeare represents, like Chaucer, are always already textualized. Whatever the motivations, be they historical and/or artistic, for revitalizing the story of Troilus and Cressida, we may ask ourselves to what extent it invites ‘both mind and language to reverse themselves, and thus to move from present to past and back again, from a complex situation to an anterior simplicity and back again, from one point to another as if in a circle’.26 These are the words of Edward W. Said, and I might also have quoted the opening of Michel Foucault’s lecture on ‘The order of discourse’ in which he expressed the desire ‘to be freed from the obligation to begin’:27 to renounce the position that Said outlined with a theoretical clarity, and that Shakespeare evidently embraced in the decision to revisit a narrative whose broad contours were familiar to his audience. Hawkes’s philosophical manoeuvre, and Charnes’s shift into a psycho-politics both come to rest in theories of signifying practice of which this play is a particularly complex instance. In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare’s lovers are not hypostatic, and in so far as they exemplify an ‘inaugural logic’ of ‘authority’28 their actions are circumstantial, and they effectively undermine the process whereby meaning is ‘authorized’. In this sense Shakespeare’s version is revisionist, a dramatisation, rather than a hypostasization, of a process in which dramatic characterization itself is shown to be in dialectical tension with exemplarity. In his analysis of the ‘double plot’ of the play, William Empson wrestled with this dialectic,29 but, extended to the play itself, the ‘mirroring’ of situations – fashioned into a strategic weapon by Ulysses – ­oscillates between the lovers’ fragile utopia, and those ‘represented, contested, and reversed sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable’, places that Foucault labels

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

John Drakakis

‘heterotopias’. It is to these heterotopias that move between contingent situations that the play, as well as feeding off the instability of the characters’ identities, seems to be appealing.30 From the very beginning of the play Troilus is caught in the throes of a delusional passion: he should be male but the desire for Cressida feminizes him; Pandarus’s idealizing descriptions have the opposite effect on him in that, like Chaucer’s Troilus, and, to some extent the speaker of Sonnet 129,31 they increase rather than satisfy his desire. Pandarus’s ‘discourse’, which offers a blazon of Cressida’s body, adds further to the ‘infection’ of Troilus’s love for her. And yet, of course, he cannot express it without reference to the perlocutionary force of language itself, or to the process of creating a text of her body: ‘O that her hand, / In whose comparison all whites are ink / Writing their own reproach’ (1.1.54–6). Later in the play, at the point of consummation, Troilus withdraws from this, and acknowledges that Cressida’s appearance actively robs him of language: ‘You have bereft me of all words, lady’ (3.2.51). In fact, he goes much further in his confession of the radical disjunction between language, desire and action: ‘This is the monstruosity in love, lady – that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit’ (3.2.75–8). Both are aware of the inconsistency in each other’s and their own respective positions. Cressida sketches out the ‘monstruosity’ of those who have ‘the voice of lions and the act of hares’ (3.2.83–4), and yet Troilus still insists upon his capacity for ‘truth’ (3.2.92). For her own part she confesses that she was ‘Hard to seem won; but I was won, my lord, / With the first glance that ever – pardon me’ (3.2.110–11), and on the point of leaving she becomes a ‘split’ subject: I have a kind of self resides with you, But an unkind self that itself will leave To be another’s fool. I would be gone. Where is my wit? I know not what I speak. (3.2.138–41)

Of course this exchange is shot through with irony since Troilus’s hold on ‘truth’ proves tenuous, and Cressida will be shown in his eyes to divide herself. The irony is deepened even further as the lovers ‘war’ to stake a claim to the permanence of their commitment to truth in the face of the ravages of time itself, and, by implication, in the face of the diseases that accompany mutability. Troilus’s love will remain constant ‘Outliving beauties outward, with a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language The presence in her of Troilus eye’ and Cressida

115

mind / That doth renew swifter than blood decays!’ (3.2.152–3); he will be that most tautologous of abstractions, ‘truth’s authentic author to be cited’ (3.2.171), while Cressida, for her part, balances Troilus’s ‘authority’ with a conditional statement of equal ironic force: ‘If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth … let memory, / From false to false, among maids in love, / Upbraid my falsehood!’ (3.2.174–80). This parody of ‘war’ (3.2.160ff.), which is also at the same time a parody of ‘love’, empties language of referential meaning, creating Troilus, and by implication Cressida, as ‘a fictional construct’ who is ‘created of desire and words’, whose ‘faith is an illusion which cannot survive her [Cressida’s] falsehood’.32 The double vision to which this leads is finally realized in discourse once Troilus has seen the evidence of Cressida’s infidelity: Bifold authority, where reason can revolt Without perdition, and loss assume all reason Without revolt! This is, and is not, Cressid. (5.2.142–4)

The repetition of the conditional, which effects the recuperation of many of the play’s larger political themes, is a rhetorical figure that according to Puttenham, is designed to ‘much alter and affect the eare and also the mynde of the hearer’.33 What appears here as an attempt to resolve the tension between ‘Eros’ and ‘Agape¯’ that might allow Troilus to ‘ascend towards that perfect goodness which defines the end of desiring’,34 collapses as meaning is drained away in contradiction. Moreover, as auditors we are drawn into the texture of the play’s own spiralling linguistic contingency whereby we ourselves ‘That cause [set] up with and against itself’ (5.2.141) because we can never approach the ‘real’ Cressida any more than Troilus can. To this extent the play ends not in ‘nothingness’ but in the prospect of a never completed process, an endless deferment of meaning, whose contours are finally and fully exposed. Not only that, but the war, like the characters, is emptied of its meaning even though it continues to invest itself with meaning. The tawdry contingency of ‘desire’ – or what we might call, following Deleuze and Guattari, the forcible insertion of ‘desire’35 into a ­philosophical discourse that would under normal circumstances be the ideological expression of a particular constellation of social relations – infects the play’s venereal language like a disease. Indeed, there appears to be a break here between a particular regime of signs (one that in Chaucer is preserved) and their objects.36 One of the play’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

John Drakakis

embodiments of that disjuncture is, of course, Shakespeare’s most scabrous ‘bastard’ Thersites. Everything in Troilus and Cressida hinges upon the performative language of ‘promise’. In the exchange between Pandarus and Paris’s servant at Act 3 Scene 1, the go-between – who in this play is as much an entrepreneur as a facilitator, and will become a brothel-keeper – elides the attributes of Helen and Cressida. As the Servant describes them she is ‘the mortal Venus, the heart-blood of beauty, love’s visible soul’ (3.1.30–2), to which Pandarus responds: ‘Who? My cousin Cressida?’ The rejoinder is swift and cutting: ‘No, sir, Helen. Could you not find out that by her attributes?’ (3.1.33–5), a comparison that Pandarus has nurtured since the beginning of the play: ‘An her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen’s – well, go to – there were no more comparison between the women’ (1.1.41–3). Helen, of course, has already been implicated in the breaking of a promise to Menelaus, as indeed Cressida will be in breaking hers to Troilus. Thus, both Helen and Cressida exemplify violation, and their violations of ‘law’ are augmented by the existence of others who are the effects of such violations, notably Thersites, and (in a much more perfunctory vein) Priam’s bastard son Margarelon. In a sense, the war in Troilus and Cressida is a prolongation of ‘desire’ rather than ‘the protractive trials of great Jove’ (1.3.19). Cressida’s account of sexual skirmishing offers a secular context for Agamemnon’s inflated alternative, and hers is one that involves not an expression of identity but a strategic withholding of self: ‘Things won are done – joy’s soul lies in the doing’ (1.2.273): That she beloved knows nought that knows not this: Men prize the thing ungained more than it is. That she was never yet that ever knew Love got so sweet as when desire did sue. (1.2.274–7)

For Cressida, ‘desire’ has to be ‘managed’, otherwise the woman is vulnerable to masculine authority, but that process of management requires a degree of ‘improvisation’ even as it presents a challenge to the symbolic order of language. Indeed, the entire play is concerned, at one level, with the management of ‘passion’ and the disorders to which it leads if it cannot be contained, and at another, with the problem of imposing order on a political situation that seems to have got out of control. It is Nestor who ‘translates’ Cressida’s sexual strategy into a chivalric register with his ­observation that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language The presence in her of Troilus eye’ and Cressida

117

‘In the reproof of chance / Lies the true proof of men’ (1.3.32–3), although the play problematizes ‘truth’ in such a way that it infects his utterance with a retrospective irony. Ulysses’ call for a return to a hierarchical order appears to support Nestor’s inflated chivalric rhetoric, but in reality it demystifies the ethic of an identity that expresses itself in action. If ‘degree’ is ‘vizarded’, so Ulysses asserts, ‘Th’ unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask’ (1.3.82–4), indicating that there is nothing that can withstand imitation. By this point in the play, we begin to grasp the ‘real’ nature of the appeal from the Prologue, who comes ‘armed, but not in confidence / Of author’s pen or actor’s voice, but suited / In like conditions as our argument’ (Pro., 23–5). It is the actor who is, by virtue of his ‘profession’, split, and whose task it is to ‘imitate’ or ‘personate’ the dramatic character: this is and is not Cressid indeed. To this extent, the play is a dynamic metaphor of itself, a kind of scripted improvisation on the variegated operations of ‘desire’, an energy that incessantly escapes the order that the play’s politics would impose upon it, and the language that would anchor that order. All is ‘but the chance of war’ (Pro. 31). In fact, ‘chance’ and the anarchy of ‘passion’ mount a serious challenge to the metaphysical inevitability that is inscribed in the historical dynamic of the story. We see Cressida violating her oath as though it were for the first time, just as we see Hector’s ignominious death that is the direct consequence of momentary material greed, or Troilus’s despairing commitment to a chivalric ethic transformed into the anarchic ‘passion’ of revenge. There is only contingency as we watch characters that are, on the one hand, disarmingly self-conscious, and yet, on the other, appear to have no clear idea of the consequences of their actions. Hawkes notes that Ulysses’s speech on ‘order’ and ‘degree’ over-emphasizes medieval principles, the use of ‘old’ notions to effect a ‘modern’ purpose’, and that ‘[t]he play provides no further evidence that he believes in what he says here’.37 Hugh Grady has, more recently, pointed out that the Tillyard of The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) reads it ‘as a straightforward definition of a hegemonic ideology’. It is Grady’s contention that ‘[m]any of Shakespeare’s contemporaries probably endorsed Ulysses’ announced political values and vision’ to the extent that it may have been the focus of a ‘conservative vector’, an anti-modern ‘critique’ of the play’s own identification of a process of reification. Grady is perfectly aware of the perils of imposing ‘our own post-Enlightenment political categories on to pre-Enlightenment societies’. But he goes on to argue that the questioning of the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

118

John Drakakis

values that Ulysses articulates ‘(beyond that implied through his own Machiavellian actions) can be discerned in the unstable textuality of his own argument’38 in so far as it emphasizes that at the heart of ‘order’ there is ‘an inherent tendency in the nature of things to disorder’.39 This, Grady describes as ‘ideology in the service of reified power’ whereby, in this case, ‘the values of chivalry’ are abstracted ‘from the traditions and cultures which create their meaning and then transports these evacuated signifiers into a matrix of value-free logical operations through which they can be manipulated as desired by the instrumentalizing subject’.40 Extended to the ‘love’ of Troilus and Cressida, the issue is not so much a question of ‘Cressida’s perfidy’ as exemplary female ‘but the crashing of Troilus’ idealising perceptual field in the face of the resisting materiality of the world – and of Cressida herself’,41 thereby inaugurating contingency. The emptying of language is a consequence of the ‘deflating logic’42 that commodifies everything it touches in the play. The frequency of mercantile imagery has often been the subject of critical commentary, but Grady takes this a stage further in his observation that both Helen and Cressida are ‘reified properties’.43 Of course, in the play Cressida is and is not a commodity. Both she and Helen have an exchange value, implicated as they both are within the demands that patriarchal culture makes upon them. In fact, the tension that is endemic in their ‘roles’ is part of a larger tension that the play explores, and that is clearly articulated in the exchange with Cassandra immediately following the Trojan debate about ‘the value of value’. Cassandra’s ‘divination’ emanates from an ordered moral universe where to yield to the driving force of an anarchic sexual passion is to embrace destruction: ‘Our firebrand brother, Paris, burns us all’ (2.2.109). It is to Troilus that Hector pointedly directs his response: Now, youthful Troilus, do not these high strains Of divination in our sister work Some touches of remorse, or is your blood So madly hot that no discourse of reason, Nor fear of bad success in a bad cause, Can qualify the same? (2.2.112–17)

Hector is caught here between the perception of a ‘world order’ to which, he acknowledges, Cassandra may have a privileged access, and an instrumental reason that can see in the persistent retention

‘Language The presence in her of Troilus eye’ and Cressida

119

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

of Helen ‘a bad cause’. Ironically, Troilus responds by dismissing the principle of contingency altogether, and by appealing to the ethic of a chivalry that will bestow upon Trojan resistance some authority: We may not think the justness of each act Such and no other than th’ event doth form it, Nor once deject the courage of our minds, Because Cassandra’s mad. (2.2.118–21)

It is ironic because later in the play both Troilus and Cressida will get caught in an act that is ‘no other than th’event doth form it’, and at the very point of the consummation of their relationship. The negotiation that takes place, with the aid of the go-between Pandarus, which will allow Cressida to yield to the man of her choice, is mirrored in her exchange for Antenor that her father Calchas engineers. In the first exchange there appears to be a reciprocity whereby Cressida can retain a degree of control, but in the second she is ‘no other than th’event doth form it’, and this is perhaps why Troilus’s subsequent jealousy reduces the ethic to which he commits himself in the exchange with Hector to the status of a ‘madly hot’ revenge. In the exchange in Act 2 Scene 2 it is Hector who appeals to the ‘law in each well-ordered nation / To curb the raging appetites that are / Most disobedient and refractory’ (2.2.179–81), which is that of ‘wife … to the husband’ (2.2.175). Troilus, on the other hand, appears to relegate this law to the category of the contingent, while yielding to his own ‘raging appetites’. In fact, what he abandons is Hector’s middle term, the ‘discourse of reason’ (2.2.115) that would give him access to the quasi-metaphysical source of the very ‘law’ to which Hector refers, and whose violation he will later experience for himself as he watches, Othello-like, Cressida transfer her affections to Diomed. In short, Troilus will become a mirror image of Menelaus, as the Greek patriarchal desire for possession gradually infects Troy. The relativism that informs the larger structure of the play is a consequence of divesting an object (any object) of its just ‘value’; and Hector’s rejoinder to Troilus’s question ‘What’s aught but as ’tis valued?’ is to draw a distinction between intrinsic worth, and what we might, call, with the benefit of hindsight, ­commodity fetishism: But value dwells not in particular will: It holds his estimate and dignity

120

John Drakakis

As well wherein ’tis precious of itself As in the prizer. ’Tis mad idolatry To make the service greater than the god; And the will dotes that is attributive To what infectiously itself affects, Without some image of th’ affected merit.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(2.2.52–9)

In the Greek camp the issue of ‘worth’, intrinsic or otherwise, will be debated in another register – that of personal worth – as Ulysses pits Ajax against Achilles in an attempt to draw the latter into battle. Both Achilles and Ulysses share the same ethical standards. Ulysses asserts that ‘man’ cannot ‘make boast to have that which he hath, / Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection’ (3.3.98–9), while Achilles concurs with ‘speculation turns not to itself / Till it hath travelled and is mirrored there / Where it may see itself’ (3.3.110–11). Ulysses’ response undercuts completely any doctrine of intrinsic or absolute value, with the observation that all value is not ‘absolute’ but socially constructed, and that intrinsic worth is no more than a (utopian) delusion: That no man is the lord of anything, Though in and of him there be much consisting, Till he communicate his parts to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught Till he behold them formèd in th’applause Where they’re extended; who, like an arch, reverb’rate The voice again; or, like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat. (3.3.115–23)

According to this philosophy even the sun can only appreciate its heat by reflection, and in his treatment of Ajax we have already seen how the process of reflection is, itself, open to distortion. Later, when Troilus ‘observes’ Cressida he opposes to what he sees and hears the ‘credence in my heart’ whose strength ‘doth invert th’attest of eyes and ears; / As if those organs had deceptious functions’ (5.2.118–21). Here the Cressida of one discursive regime where value is absolute, opposes, rather than reflects, that of another that threatens to undermine contingent reality itself: If beauty have a soul, this is not she; If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies, If sanctimony be the gods’ delight,

‘Language The presence in her of Troilus eye’ and Cressida

121

If there be rule in unity itself, This is not she. O madness of discourse, That cause sets up with and against itself! Bifold authority, where reason can revolt Without perdition, and loss assume all reason Without revolt! This is, and is not, Cressid.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(5.2.136–44)

For Cressida, that ‘madness of discourse’ has always been a possibility, a protection against the power vested in patriarchy. But when patriarchy is forced to confront the effects of its own power, it abrogates responsibility and lays the blame elsewhere. Thus, when Troilus reads the letter that Pandarus brings him from Cressida he dismisses it as ‘Words, words, mere words; no matter from the heart’ (5.3.108) and concludes: ‘My love with words and errors still she feeds, / But edifies another with her deeds’ (5.3.111–12). Of course by this point in the play, Troilus’s own ‘heart’ – which would make an ‘idol’ of Cressida – is itself no more than a figure of discourse. As such it is subject to the fate of all language in the play. Words are little more than free-floating signifiers, and all meaning is contingent. In a play where absolutes war with contingencies, exchange is a cardinal motif. And central to that process is the figure of Pandarus. In Shakespeare’s plays the figure of the go-between occupies a precarious status: as both facilitator and procurer whose ambivalence mirrors the gap between the infinite power of desire and the comparative limitation of performance. ‘Thus’, Pandarus laments, ‘is the poor agent despised’, and he goes on to ask, almost in a vein that parodies the lovers, ‘Why should our endeavour be so desired, and the performance so loathed?’ (5.10.38–9). But Pandarus is the ‘agent’, the means whereby desire circulates in the play, and the model of its corrosive potential. In a play that we might expect to be constrained by a pre-existing authoritative narrative, the action, the structure and the language – not to mention the dramatis personae – sever themselves from an overdetermining past and are resituated in a Troynovant that is just beginning to wake up to the dangers of new, more challenging, and potentially disruptive forms of social organization. It is not, perhaps, reification as we know it, but it is the beginning of a process that threatens to rip the heart out of the body politic. To what extent does Troilus and Cressida challenge such defi­ nitions of the ‘human’ and, indeed, of ‘identity’, by producing a critique of what we might call the constitutive consciousness of  the ‘human’? Indeed, as Heather James has recently suggested, ‘to …

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

122

John Drakakis

seek out a critique of representation on the grounds of Troy is to unsettle Western culture at its putative foundation’.44 Whatever Shakespeare’s intention was in resurrecting the story of Troilus and Cressida, the play’s unsettling effect upon language and the materiality of performance challenges and negates the ethical basis of what, for late Elizabethan and early Jacobean culture, constituted the ‘human’. Interestingly the play ends in the heterotopia of the brothel even as it ‘names’ Pandarus. The play in the theatre is, to appropriate Foucault, ‘a space of illusion that denounces all real space’45 but only in the sense that it reduces a high-flown rhetoric to its materiality in the exchange of flesh and the contagion of disease. Notes  1 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. J. L. Levenson, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).  2 A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 141–2.  3 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. M. Neill, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).  4 S. Freud, ‘Why war?’, The Pelican Freud, vol. 12, ed. A. Dickinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 359.  5 Freud, ‘Why war?’, p. 359.  6 L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes and An Approach to Hamlet (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1960), p. 62.  7 R. Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 146.  8 G. Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. M. Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), p. 17.  9 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988), p. 354. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 354 11 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 356. For a definition of the ‘becoming-woman’ see earlier, pp. 276–7, as a return to a ‘molecular’ state from that of a subject fabricated by a masculine symbolic order, a break with ‘history’ itself. 12 W. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), p. 45. 13 Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, pp. 45–6. 14 E. T. Donaldson, The Swan at The Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 81. 15 L. Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 70–1. 16 Charnes, Notorious Identity, p. 75.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Language The presence in her of Troilus eye’ and Cressida

123

17 Charnes, Notorious Identity, p. 75. 18 I am using the term ‘ancestry’ here, borrowed from Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. R. Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 8ff. Meillassoux is concerned in his analysis with the much larger philosophical question of ‘ancestral witness’ to ‘any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species’ (p. 10). 19 Charnes, Notorious Identity, p. 75: ‘What exactly does it mean, that the teleology in the play is entirely retro-textual? That while pointing “forward” it points only backward, to preceding texts? That, while steadily leading us toward the “promised end,” the end itself promises absolutely nothing?’ 20 T. Hawkes, Shakespeare and The Reason (London: Routledge and Paul, 1964), p. 78. 21 Hawkes, Shakespeare and The Reason, pp. 78–9. 22 Michel Foucault, ‘Different spaces’, in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2, ed. J. D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 177. 23 Cf. H. Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 17–18. 24 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. K. Muir, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 25 Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, pp. 80–1. 26 E. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 29–30. 27 M. Foucault, ‘The order of discourse’, in R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-structuralist Reader (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 51. 28 Said, Beginnings, p. 32. 29 W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 33. 30 Foucault, ‘Different spaces’, p. 179: ‘The mirror functions as a heterotopia in the sense that it makes this place I occupy at the moment I look at myself in the glass both utterly real, connected with the entire space surrounding it, and utterly unreal – since, to be perceived, it is obliged to go by way of that virtual point which is over there.’ 31 Cf. Sonnet 129: ‘Mad in pursuit, and in possession so, / Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme’ (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), p. 129). 32 G. Greene, ‘Shakespeare’s Cressida: a kind of self’, in C. R. Swift Lenz, G. Greene and C. T. Neely (eds), The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 141. 33 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), p. 165. 34 I. Singer, The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2009), pp. 269–70.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

124

John Drakakis

35 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane (London: Continuum, 1984), p. 145. 36 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 7. 37 Hawkes, Shakespeare and The Reason, p. 75. Cf. also L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes and an Approach to Hamlet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966) pp. 60–1: ‘I cannot feel … that Shakespeare is behind this speech until his imagination catches fire at the vision of the “chaos” consequent on the unchecked exercise of “appetite”.’ 38 Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, p. 64. 39 Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, pp. 65–6. 40 Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, p. 67. 41 Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, p. 82. 42 Cf. Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, p. 84, where the phrase is associated with Thersites, to expose ‘a perceived lack or gap within this reified world’. 43 Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, p. 88: ‘[T]he reified property is Helen, not as a person in her own right, nor as a material body, but as the great prize for whom thousands give up their lives in this endless and senseless war. Similarly, Cressida exists as an object for Troilus’ arbitrary desire, not in an act of inter-subjectivity, but through the processes of reification which make of “her” Troilus’ unquestionable absolute – a role which, quite sensibly, she refuses to let define her life.’ 44 H. James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 91. 45 Foucault, ‘Different spaces’, p. 184.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8 ‘Stewed phrase’ and the impassioned imagination in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida Verena Olejniczak Lobsien A play unpleasant Critics have found Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida notoriously difficult. On the whole, fascinated discomfort prevails, as most readers and spectators consider the play ‘markedly unpleasant’.1 This may help to explain why this play did not really find an audience before the twentieth century. The drama’s pessimism, sceptical relativism and universal debasement of values, its lack of closure, its imagery of disease, commodification and wasteful consumption, and its refusal to extol either heroism in war or fidelity in love, seem to suggest that, to echo Anne Barton, war no less than love is an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.2 Still, it seems worthwhile to ask why this play appeals to us in its unpleasantness, its ‘brilliant but scarifying vision of a world in pieces, all value and coherence gone’.3 How does Troilus and Cressida affect us? Topical truth In Troilus and Cressida4 the major characters revel in all kinds of received wisdom, commonplaces and topical truths. Whenever possible, they recommend them to others or use them to justify their actions. These are indeed ‘stewed phrases’,5 more than current, devoid of individuality, suitable for all seasons, schematic and adaptable, clichéd, tasteless and diseased. Their language is promiscuous, prostituted. But they are helpful. Theirs is a readymade, often proverbial rationality, sententious, pithy and easily remembered. And they always seem to come true. While critics have noticed the characters’ penchant for platitudes, they have paid little attention to the fact that this topicality is not restricted to the Greek camp, let alone to Ulysses’ famous speech on degree. As the play seems to adopt an affirmative

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

126

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

attitude towards the time-hallowed orthodoxies of Elizabethan commonplaces, it is worthwhile to enquire into the origins of these ‘stewed phrases’ and ask to what effect they are employed. For a provisional answer, let us glance at some of the central instances of these topical encodings of moral, social, political and literary knowledge. The characters’ predilection for sententiousness unfolds gradually. Troilus first shows his ability to turn a phrase as he rationalizes his refusal to fight because he is lovesick and incapable of dissembling his feelings any longer: ‘But sorrow that is couched in seeming gladness / Is like that mirth fate turns to sudden sadness’ (1.1.39–40). His aphorism’s formal qualities already express a truth claim – the couplet’s metrics, its (feminine!) rhyme, syntactic parallelism and its simile all suggesting a pre-existent, stable and indisputable analogy between different phenomena. Attempting to manage and control both her own and her lover’s passion, Cressida employs a different type of proverbial thinking. She, too, succeeds in appearing worldly wise, as she admonishes herself: Yet hold I off: women are angels, wooing; Things won are done – joy’s soul lies in the doing. That she beloved knows nought that knows not this: Men prize the thing ungained more than it is. That she was never yet that ever knew Love got so sweet as when desire did sue. Therefore this maxim out of love I teach: ‘Achievement is command; ungained, beseech’. Then though my heart’s content firm love doth bear, Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear. (1.2.272–81)

As Cressida seeks both orientation in the tumult of her feelings and a response to Troilus’s and Pandarus’s combined assaults, she too uses couplets resembling proverbs, whose strong closural force pretends that they are the last word to be spoken on the subject. Line by line she builds her rhetorical fortification against the attack of ‘Words, vows, gifts, tears’ – and nevertheless will answer with ‘love’s full sacrifice’ (1.2.268). Whereas Troilus pretended to articulate a timeless insight into the conditions of mental health (his own), she formulates a whole series of home truths about men’s fluctuating desire, culminating in a didactic ‘maxim’ she teaches ‘out of love’ and which ominously mixes martial with amorous diction. From a masculinist point of view, ‘Achievement is command’ casts love in terms of war. If a woman seeks to engage

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Stewed phrase’ and the impassioned imagination

127

in this military antagonism successfully, she has to answer it on its own terms by a refusal to surrender. The whole passage can be read as an amplification of this worldly wisdom, recommending not so much affective economy but the distancing of desire by means of impression management. Interestingly, while Cressida chooses to dissemble her passion in a Petrarchan manner, Troilus has already abandoned this dimension of courtliness. Neither will, however, follow their carefully formulated precepts. Cressida especially is about to act against her better knowledge, with dire consequences. Moreover, Cressida’s speech is charged with dramatic irony, for we already know how the lovers will fare. The literary clichés of eponymous fidelity and inconstancy, of adherence to and violation of the chivalric ideal, which the lovers will soon voice themselves – ‘As true as Troilus’ (3.2.172) and ‘As false as Cressid’ (3.2.186) – already resonate through the earlier scenes. Not only does Cressida prepare to relinquish her resistance and her chastity: Troilus’s courtliness, too, has already been seriously undermined by his confessed lack of sprezzatura, emphasized by the ironic contrast created during the parade of the Trojan leaders (all presented as walking stereotypes), with Pandarus praising Troilus as ‘Brave Troilus, the prince of chivalry!’ (1.2.216–17). Given Troilus’s vengeful style of fighting, his impatient wooing of Cressida, and his unrestrained passion, this epithet is entirely misplaced. The audience knows this, much as it knows about the play’s other episodes from the Trojan War. If the lovers, and especially Cressida, appear knowledgeable beyond their years, the play repeatedly places us in a position where we command yet even more clichéd knowledge than they. And in their vows they even seem to be aware of the literary straitjackets waiting for them. The problem is that they act upon neither this nor any other kinds of wisdom. Rather: where the characters let their lives be ruled by commonplaces, the result is foreseeable and devastating – but where they don’t, it is too. The play’s highest dose of topicality is administered in the first council scene (1.3). As the Greek leaders debate the politics of war, action on the battlefield and internal discipline, sententiousness runs high; later to be paralleled, though not exceeded, in the Trojan council (2.2). There is nothing original in Agamemnon’s and Nestor’s dilations on the topos that adversity and misfortune, if rightly considered as god-sent trials, may lead not only to renewed effort and ultimate success, but also to ‘Distinction’ (1.3.26), singling out for reward true virtue and worth. Nestor’s polyptotic rephrasal of the platitude – ‘In the reproof of chance / Lies the true

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

128

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

proof of men’ (1.3.32–3) – is sheer rhetorical vanity. So is, basic­ ally, Ulysses’ famous oration on the necessity of hierarchical order for upholding the unity of political purpose and military success. Its excessive topicality is, however, precisely the point. Containing truisms current at least since Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Ulysses’ speech reiterates claims about the correspondence of cosmic and human spheres, macro and microcosmos, which serve the purposes of stabilizing existing topologies of domination and subjection. As the oration on degree is to be just that, a re-evocation of what everybody knows, it must not contain anything new. Its efficacy lies in its rhetorical suavity – and this, in turn, is exactly what is expected of the speaker: evidence of Ulysses’ facunditas, and as such an affirmation of just another literary stereotype. The fact that, on the pragmatic level, the speech assumes a strategic and an openly duplicitous function in the service of rigging the ballot only adds to the Machiavellian quality of its wholesale affirmation of orthodoxy. What makes it particularly significant in our context, however, is another dramatic function, to which I shall return: the speech is addressed primarily to the emotional imbalance of the greatest of the Greek heroes, sulking Achilles. In fact, as I shall argue, the Greeks are concerned not really with the advantages of political order within a universe of correspondences but with ways of disciplining what ought to be one of the mainstays of martial prowess: excessive ‘emulation’. Similarly, in the Trojan council on the question of what to do with Helen, those present do not really discuss questions of moral philosophy. Instead, they shuffle commonplaces for the purpose of managing their self-centred passions, in particular unrestrained masculinist aggression. Troilus expresses the winning position with a tendentious aphorism, whose spurious truth claim rests mainly on rhyme and alliteration: ‘Reason and respect / Make livers pale and lustihood deject’ (2.2.48–9). While good reason remains powerless, brash assertiveness posing as received wisdom prevails. No matter that Troilus’s verse merely mimics proverbiality, wisdom-shaped words guide potentially fatal action just as well as the real thing. If this may strike us as oddly pointless, irritation increases as Troilus and Cressida’s love affair reaches its apex and starts to deteriorate. Again, the crucial scenes may be read as illustrations of well-worn topoi. In 3.2, as we witness the lovers’ preparations for the consummation of their desire, we witness a performance of the truism that you cannot both ‘be wise and love’ (3.2.146). As the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Stewed phrase’ and the impassioned imagination

129

drama of the lovers’ troubled passion is played out and they struggle with fears of impotence and surrender, with appetite and anxiety, the wish to lose and the wish to keep self-control, they grope for home truths again, trying to find their bearings in the face of an uncontrollable passion. Sayings like ‘To fear the worst oft cures the worse’ (3.2.67–8) or ‘Few words to fair faith’ (3.2.89–90) do not, however, provide orientation. Instead of serving as remedies for the lovers’ agitation, they appear as its symptoms, ­cancelling each other out in their frantic competition for relevance. Even as Cressida confesses her love (3.2.106–26), panicking midway in the realization that she might be saying too much, she is fully aware that her clichéd fears are about to become real. Her words will come home, since passion and wisdom are mutually exclusive – and if Cressida, if only for the duration of her confession, succeeds in reconciling them as she articulates her knowledge that this is so, this results in her losing the one and betraying the other. That love and wisdom are incompatible is the central cliché ruling the love plot. In its either-or logic, it is both aporetic and pessimistic; the lovers know this, and they act against it. As they unwisely refuse to moderate their passion, received knowledge appears both true and utterly futile. Once again, this could be understood as yet another stanza in the swan song of courtly love. Especially in its Neoplatonist and Petrarchan variants, courtly love aims at nothing less than reconciling love with wisdom in an act of transcendence at the expense of the physical. As Cressida is given up, various commonplaces once again structure the action. Indeed, Pandarus’s grieved exclamation ‘No sooner got but lost?’ (4.2.73) might serve as the scene’s motto. Furthermore, we observe that Cressida’s fears of male passion cooling after possession are borne out (4.2.16–18). And these affirmations of the expectable and expected are succeeded by yet another – literary – cliché, that of false Cressida: ‘Make Cressid’s name the very crown of falsehood, / If ever she leave Troilus!’ (4.2.98–9). This is precisely what is going to happen. It is made the more poignant as she is ready to break all family ties for her lover’s sake and to defy the demands of ‘consanguinity’ (4.2.95), while, as we already know, for him loyalty to his brothers provides the unquestioned reason for obeying the command to deliver her. It is not surprising that Cressida’s grief is as immoderate as her affection. As the latter could not be contained by clichéd apprehension, so the former will be ‘full perfect’ (4.4.3), as it is (at any rate for the spectator) seasoned with the added consciousness of having known

130

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

all along. Little is needed now to turn her into the walking stereotype of inconstancy waiting for her like a dress ready to slip on. As she finally seems to open not only her body but her mind to Greek accostings, the listeners overhearing her negotiation with Diomedes experience the dubious satisfaction of witnessing her affirm yet another misogynistic commonplace – that women’s hearts are where their eyes are: Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find, The error of our eye directs our mind; What error leads must err – O, then conclude Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude. (5.2.107–10)

Nothing is safe from contamination any more, and Cressida appears lost in platitude. Thersites’ comment nastily radicalizes this, once again stressing the commonness implied by the com­ monplace confession: ‘A proof of strength she could not publish more, / Unless she said “My mind is now turned whore”’ (5.2.111– 12). As ‘turpitude’ is the last word she says, Thersites speaks the final verdict over her. Pain and jealousy are Troilus’s response to this confirmation of the commonplace. His unmanageable passion now devours all other feeling, turning into vengeful aggression, into ‘Mad and fantastic execution’ in battle (5.5.38). But if ‘Hope of revenge’ (5.10.31) is what spurs him on, it is from the outside only and ­ironically that he will look the very peak of chivalry. The wisdom of impassiveness In Troilus and Cressida, the ‘therapy of desire’ fails spectacularly.6 Before we discuss why it fails, we should remember that, by Renaissance standards, the characters seek entirely conventional remedies. Often blending with an indigenous tradition of folk wisdom, it was the cultural techniques for the management of emotion developed in classical antiquity which held considerable sway in Elizabethan everyday life. Here, the authorities were above all the Stoics, like Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Cicero. To Renaissance scholars and educators, they appeared capable of providing the foundations and elements of an art of life (ars vitae). If their views ran parallel to the received wisdom of folklore, to Biblical traditions or to many of Christianity’s tenets,7 so much the better.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Stewed phrase’ and the impassioned imagination

131

Stoicism may be a philosophy of coherence, of living in accordance with oneself (by implication, with one’s nature and with society),8 of the good flow of life, but it is all this by virtue of its also being a philosophy of self-mastery.9 If early modern thinkers preferred Stoic ethics to Stoic physics or logic, this was because of Stoicism’s practical, indeed instrumental side: its promise of a practicable art of life, involving imitable and teachable techniques of proper care for the self (cura sui) which, if faithfully performed, would lead to happiness (eudaimonia). This happiness consists in a peace of mind and a mental equilibrium implying constancy in the face of adversity. To achieve and maintain this profound indifference towards external influence as well as interior disturbance requires self-mastery. This pertains, above all, to the management of feeling – to the regulation and moderation of affects, to a therapeutic distancing from, even eradication of, fear, desire and the affective turbulences they produce. Ultimately, this discipline will lead to the ideal of perfect self-possession and impassivity (apatheia): the characteristic of the sage. Notwithstanding the Stoic thinkers’ attentiveness towards the everyday, the self they project is a heroic one: the self of a man completely aware of himself, in perfect command of his feelings in that he refuses to be troubled by them should they become inevitable; absolutely and affirmatively at one with himself and his life. This is a gendered self: Stoic virtus is, in the majority of authors read by Elizabethan schoolboys, a predominantly male affair. In some respects this is less a model of emotional repression than one of fashioning – of ordering, redefining and evaluating the passions. Hence it is also a cognitive model, as it seeks to provide therapies and techniques, indeed a mental technology for marshalling the affects into an economy capable by means of rational agency of helping to avoid being troubled by them. The passions are capable of being subjected to the rule of reason because they themselves hold affinities with it. They possess a cognitive dimension to the extent that they imply value judgements which in turn rest on perceptions and their interpretation, connected with estimates of good or evil. It is here that training and self-habituation become particularly relevant: Stoicism resembles a kind of cognitive behavioural therapy10 since it offers strategies for dealing with troublesome emotions through understanding them as non-harmful, thus ­enabling the individual to remain aloof from them. In practice, this involves various types of exercises and disciplines (such as confession, self-examination or ascetic experiments

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

132

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

such as temporary self-deprivation) but also the memorizing and repetition of guiding insights and maxims. At this point, Stoicism also reveals its literary efficacy: The writing of Stoic thinkers tends to be not only didactically efficient – plain, brief, rhetorically pointed, personally addressed and vivid to the point of histrionics (as in the letters of Seneca) or enlivened by interactive elements (as in Cicero’s dialogues) – but also of an aphoristic character, running to anecdotes, pithy sentences and maxims, easily memorized and repeated. Stoic wisdom is handbook wisdom, compact, portable and communicable, as epitomized in Epictetus’s Encheiridion.11 Passionate imagination Troilus and Cressida affords numerous examples for Stoically tinged received wisdom. Cressida provides a striking example when she tries to convince herself that she ought to fear the worst: ‘Blind fear, that seeing reason leads, finds safer footing than blind reason stumbling without fear. To fear the worst oft cures the worse’ (3.2.66–8). At first glance, this does no more than paraphrase a typically Stoic recommendation, making it sound proverbial. To fear thus certainly assists reasonable valuation, hence aids Stoic mental hygiene: since fearful apprehension will always exceed the anticipated dreadful event, the event itself, should it actually happen, will strike you as comparatively bearable. This is a way of habituating oneself to, and at the same time steeling oneself against, future pain, learning to comply with what cannot be helped.12 At second glance, however, Cressida is saying more than this; and indeed, on closer consideration, the first part of her utterance appears to qualify the second. As she leads up to the maxim which clinches her reflection, she makes explicit that what is at stake is a reciprocal relationship between emotion and reason. Both mutually affect each other, to an extent that shows that her final sentence does not so much reiterate a classical topos about feeling having to be rationally restrained, but is equally a statement about fear effectively guiding reason. This notion of a productive and reciprocally supportive relationship between emotion and reason, with emotion guiding reason, with emphasis on the quasi-visual and on the images evoked by passion and presented to reason, points towards a second model of the human mind relevant to Elizabethan affective regimes: that of the faculties and the way they interact in the soul, a model resting predominantly on Aristotelian foundations. Cressida seems to be

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Stewed phrase’ and the impassioned imagination

133

repeating, in effect, that, as Aristotle argues in De anima, ‘the soul never thinks without an image’ (431a 16–17).13 Stoicism offers a simplified and somewhat reduced version: Mental representations as the products of the imagination exist either to be assented to in their factuality and under the provision that they correspond to what is irrefutably given, or, alternatively, to be negated in their implicit valuation (namely that the thing imagined is also emotionally relevant, either a good to be desired or an evil to be feared and shunned). Aristotelian faculty theory, however, appears to ascribe to them a rather more important role in the interaction of the various faculties that makes up mental processes and constitutes thinking.14 The principal actors in the interplay between the faculties of the mind are perception, imagination, memory, reason and passion. In the models current in Shakespeare’s time,15 imagination, memory and reason reside in different chambers or ventricles (cellulae) of the mind, which are not, however, hermetically sealed against each other. Interaction is actually necessary, since sense perceptions have to be grasped, interpreted and stored for reason to process them adequately and guide our will to sensible and ethically correct action. Of course, errors and misjudgements can and do occur. In early modern eyes, these were often due to failures of the imaginative faculty, as imagination was located precariously close to perception as well as the passions, both of them in turn closely allied to the corporeal with its palpable and material manifestations. Theorists like Thomas Wright16 and, before him, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, place imagination in the confines of the senses and reason.17 Conversely, and positively, imagination appears as an all-important catalyst in this system, portal on the one hand to the more pronounced physical dimensions of being human, and on the other to the higher faculties of estimation and intellect, with reason held to be receptive as well as responsive to the metaphysical dimensions of life and capable of intuiting transcendent truth. In Cressida’s view, too, reason clearly needs passion, mediated by imagination, in order to be able to ‘see’, much as passion needs to be moderated by the evidence presented to it and placed before the inner eye by reason through imagination.18 Still, in the Aristotelian model, too, reason ideally maintains the upper hand, for it alone is capable of guiding us towards virtuous action. The ideal of reliable and lasting virtue is to be reached by a habituation to the good, the gradual building of predispositions towards morally right action through a training of the faculties.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

134

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

This in turn appears to be just as much a matter of education as of an unthinking imitation of what is known to be right, possibly prompted by the memory of precepts in the shape of ­commonplaces containing ready-made, rational advice. Shakespeare’s play as a whole is closely attuned to contemporary psychology patterned on faculty theory. Its Aristotelian and other ingredients are uneasily blended, at times only juxtaposed, with the less complex demands of a self-governance relying mainly on the situative remembrance of received wisdom. Again, topicality is emphasized: as in Stoic worldly wisdom, so in Renaissance psychology there seems to be nothing new under the sun. However, in this play particular, and critical, stress is placed on the imagination. Thus Cressida knows from the first that imagination is the better part of love, for women as well as men. For what she sees in Troilus is much more than words can circumscribe (cf. 1.2.268–71) – an imaginative transfiguration not dissimilar to that habitually projected by men on to women: ‘women are angels, wooing’ (1.2.272). And Troilus himself affirms this in the giddiness of his amorous anticipation: ‘Th’imaginary relish is so sweet / That it enchants my sense’ (3.2.17–18). For the lovers, disenchantment follows soon, whereas among the warriors imagination continues to exert its power. This becomes obvious in the Greek leaders’ conflict with Achilles. In the first council scene (1.3), their aim is not only to preserve internal peace, to keep up morale, discipline and proper respect for hierarchy, but primarily to find means to manipulate Achilles back into a fighting mood. Marshalling the respective topoi in their rhetoric, Agamemnon, Nestor and Ulysses deliberate how to regulate and govern various destructive emotions – among the common soldiers: unrest, dissatisfaction and defeatism, and among the princes: the passions leading to ‘hollow’ factionalism (1.3.79), aggressive rivalry, inordinate pride based on an all-consuming ‘appetite’ for power (1.3.120) and, above all, ‘pale and bloodless emulation’ growing into ‘an envious fever’ (1.3.132–3). The Greek leaders thus address their collective, military self – ‘The fever whereof all our power is sick’ (1.3.138) – as epitomized in Achilles. What is here cast in terms of sin (envy, pride) and infectious bodily disease also has its germ in imagination. And worse: ‘emu­ lation’ is motivated by the image of the self triggered by the very same affective impulse to excel that lies at the very heart of courtliness. The perfect courtier must above all be an emulator, ready ‘to wade in everye thyng a litle farther then other menne’.19 It is this

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Stewed phrase’ and the impassioned imagination

135

passion to go beyond the achievements of others, gracefully avoiding the temptation to betray the underlying effort, which has gone wrong in Achilles, losing all courtly appeal in the process. From an essentially social and intensely admirable demonstration of super­ ior competence, it has turned inward, symbolized by the hero’s withdrawing from battle. Ajax shrewdly diagnoses this attitude as melancholy (2.3.82–4) – a disease, among other things, of the imagination, flooding the sufferer’s mind with unbidden fantasies. Whatever it is called in humoral pathology or moral philosophy, Achilles’ depraved emulation becomes toxic because imagination has perniciously interfered with the economy of the passions in their interplay with reason. ‘[C]rown[ed]’ by ‘opinion’ (1.3.141), the Greeks’ greatest hero is now ‘full of his airy fame’ (1.3.143) and bloated by self-conceit. His fancy has become both fastidious and insatiable, as he is (in Ulysses’ malicious replay of his affectation) ready to split his ribs ‘In pleasure of [his] spleen’ (1.3.177), when Patroclus tickles it still further by his parodies of the Greek leaders and their warlike antics. Ulysses defines Achilles’ condition as that of a victim of the violent uproar among his faculties, literally subject to his own narcissistic passions incited and misled by imagination: … Imagined worth Holds in his blood such swollen and hot discourse That ’twixt his mental and his active parts Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages And batters down himself … (2.3.166–70)

The hero’s once sovereign desire to transcend is now distorted beyond recognition, destructively turning against itself. As love in Shakespeare’s analysis thrives on imagination as long as it remains unfulfilled, so courtly life depends on imagination, provided it serves the courtiers’ noble competition for the highest grace. Conversely, the passions seem to be dangerous not in themselves but in their imaginative consequences. And those are, by their very nature, anarchic. In this light, the model of disturbed order evoked in Ulysses’ ‘degree’ speech becomes a metaphor for Achilles’ imaginative excess, amplifying it to make his crime appear even greater, capable of shaking the foundations of the universe. At the same time, Ulysses’ refurbishing of familiar notions and hackneyed phrases is also singularly unpleasant, spiced as it is with his barbed imitation of Patroclus’s satirical ‘pageant[ing]’ of his betters for

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

the amusement of Achilles and thus re-evoking what it criticizes (cf. 1.3.141–83). This is especially disgusting since Ulysses expli­ citly assumes the voice of ‘wisdom’, ‘prescience’, the ‘still and mental parts’ of warfare, ‘finesse’ of soul and ultimately ‘reason’ (1.3.197–9, 208–9), displaying brilliant intellectuality devoid of moral substance. Here the voice of reason insidiously manipulates the very faculty it pretends to cure and thus degenerates to a source of opportunistic strategy. However, what impresses Ulysses’ fellow councillors signally fails when addressed to Achilles. Ulysses’ attempt to validate Stoic magnanimity crashes, the cognitive therapy of pride failing to affect the patient’s imagination. Far from being cured of his passion, Achilles is merely agitated, his mind the opposite of apathia and reflective self-knowledge: ‘troubled like a fountain stirred, / And I myself see not the bottom of it’ (3.3.302–3). Ulysses’ famous facunditas proves incapable of producing in Achilles’ mind the rational self-transparency necessary for virtuous action. Thersites’ contemptuous comment closes the scene and perfectly expresses the problem: ‘I had rather be a tick in a sheep than such a valiant ignorance’ (3.3.305–6). As, over the next two acts, incontinent love founders, military decency collapses and the last remnants of courtliness dwindle to farce, so are the relics of commonplace rationality sucked into the vortex of mindless violence that ends the play. Shakespeare the moralist? Is this, then, really nothing but ‘the tawdry cynicism of late Elizabethan disillusionment’?20 On the whole, as I have argued, the unpleasantness of Troilus and Cressida does not arise from a sense that the characters are somehow ill-equipped to cope with their lives. On the contrary, in general they appear too smart for their own good. They certainly do not lack the pragmatic knowledge provided by the resources of received wisdom, but abound in ‘stewed phrase’. Indeed, one reason for discomfort results from the fact that the play’s type of sagacity seems to be above all that of knowing better. This is also Thersites’ sagacity, and this does not render it any more attractive. Still, if we strip it of its foulness, cynicism and utter lack of compassion, we might argue that the clear-sighted intelligence and wit it is based on display the contours of a stance that was to become familiar in the course of the seventeenth century, especially in France and Spain: the stance

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Stewed phrase’ and the impassioned imagination

137

of the moralist.21 Early modern Continental moralism is keenly and pessimistically aware of humanity’s shortcomings, not least as regards its use of reason. Moralism is supremely conscious, too, of the utter contingency of all things human, including supposedly absolute passions like love. This sceptical relativism appears to resonate with Shakespeare’s play, although by giving it the voice of Thersites, the author draws attention to its deficiencies. But the possibility – or the hope? – that the moralist is really an idealist manqué not only acts as a saving grace but may also explain why some critics respond with a heartfelt ‘would it were otherwise!’22 Is this, then, the task Shakespeare, the reticent moralist, has set us, that of imagining how it could be otherwise? But how could it be envisaged as different from its Homeric blueprint and a literary matrix shaped by later stereotypes (‘As false as Cressid’), unless we ourselves resort to the commonplace wisdom so plentifully on offer? Still, the play offers ways of discriminating more finely. True, in particular when it contains Stoic precepts for regulating the passions, the ‘stewed phrase’ appears to be discredited even where it is right. But neither does the play provide a clear-cut justification of impassioned imagination. In the management of passion, phantasy is not a master to be preferred over reason. In giving rein to desire, vanity, greed, ambition, envy, jealousy, anger and the rage for revenge it proves finally destructive. Or does it? For the kind of imagination ruling these passions also appears curiously reductive. Not only is it wholly self-centred and geared towards short-term satisfaction of appetite. It also falls short cognitively, both in its severe limitations – less ingenious than it could be – and with respect to the fact that it is literally opinionated – based on dogmatic, commonplace and in the last resort unalterable opinions and judgements. The utter futility of the Greek and Trojan councils yields ample evidence. In this sense, the characters are too Stoical: their phantasy produces mere representations which are prone to turn into what Gianfrancesco Pico would call dogmata – opinions to be re-evoked by stewed phrases. However, this does not exhaust the spectrum of imagination as staged in Troilus and Cressida. There is one type that does not conform to this pattern. Despite being quite spectacular, it goes largely unheeded and is accorded little space in the play. This is the prophetess Cassandra’s imaginative wisdom. Disregarded and disparaged by the other characters, it is ultimately validated as the play’s only true wisdom, simply because what Cassandra

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

sees will, as we know, come disastrously true. Divinely inspired, her prophecies suggest a perspective so different from that of the others, indeed so far beyond their imaginations, that they cannot grasp it. In their world, there is nothing new, because their impassioned imaginations run rampant, while imagination’s intellectual potential lies dormant and its capacity to teach us how to view contingency without despairing is ignored. Still, even if Cassandra’s imaginative appeal to transcendence remains impotent, hers is also a mode of ‘Seeing-as’ potentially open to the human soul.23 If not a creative mode in a later, Romantic, sense, it does enable us to see differently, to project our thoughts beyond the present, helping to render our actions more flexible and responsive to truths hitherto beyond our perception. In Shakespeare’s unpleasant play it is perhaps the only – gratuitous – indication that things could indeed be otherwise. Under the conditions of Troilus and Cressida this offers little consolation. But this is not Shakespeare’s last word on the topic. Notes   1 J. Bate, ‘Introduction to Troilus and Cressida’, in William Shakespeare: Complete Works ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1456–60 (p. 1456).  2 The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 445.  3 Blakemore Evans (ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 443.  4 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. K. Muir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). All quotations follow this edition.  5 Cf. the Servant’s reply to Pandarus, with sexual innuendo: ‘Sodden business! There’s a stewed phrase indeed’ (3.1.40).  6 See M. Nussbaum’s classic study The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice of Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).  7 Cf. R. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).  8 P. Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, trans. M. Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), see e.g. p. 75.  9 For many of the ideas summarized in this paragraph, see A. A. Long, From Epicurus to Epictetus: Studies in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). See also Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, and A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley (eds), The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Stewed phrase’ and the impassioned imagination

139

10 Cf. also H. Landweer and U. Renz, ‘Zur Geschichte philosophischer Emotionstheorien’, in H. Landweer and U. Renz (eds), Klassische Emotionstheorien: Von Platon bis Wittgenstein (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 1–17. 11 Cf. A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). 12 The recommendation to anticipate misfortune is common to many Stoics, cf. e.g. the rather chilling passage quoted in Long, Epictetus, p. 248. See also Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, 3.29. 13 ‘On the Soul’, trans. J. A. Smith, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 14 C. Tilmouth, in Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), stresses the shift from the ascetic model of Stoic selfgovernance towards an Aristotelian model, which emphasizes the co-operation between reason and the passions. I agree with much of the grand narrative he offers, although I think that, in focusing on the struggle between affective and rational parts of the mind, he tells only part of the story. This becomes rather more complicated if the other faculties as well as early modern Neoplatonic thinking are taken into consideration; for the latter, see V. O. Lobsien, Transparency and Dissimulation: Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). 15 See e.g. R. Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975); for a discussion of faculty theory with particular emphasis on the role of the imagination, cf. V. O. Lobsien and E. Lobsien, Die unsicht­ bare Imagination: Literarisches Denken im 16. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2003). For a systematic philosophical account of the theory of emotion, see D. Perler, Transformationen der Gefühle: Philosophische Emotionstheorien 1270–1670 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2011). 16 The Passions of the Minde (1601). 17 Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Über die Vorstellung: De imaginatione, ed. E. Keßler (Munich: Fink, 1997), pp. 78–9. 18 The question of just how much cognitive potential accrues to imagination in Aristotle’s account remains controversial. See e.g. R. Polansky, Aristotle’s De anima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); K. Corcilius, Streben und Bewegen. Aristoteles’ Theorie der animali­ schen Ortsbewegung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008); see also K. Corcilius, ‘Phantasia’, in C. Rapp and K. Corcilius (eds), Aristoteles Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), pp. 298–302. 19 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of The Courtier, from the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, Anno 1561 (London 1900, repr. New York: AMS Press, 1967), p. 54.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

20 Tilmouth’s otherwise stimulating reading of Troilus and Cressida finally reverts to this critical commonplace: Passion’s Triumph Over Reason, p. 156. 21 Cf. e.g. A. Levi, French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585 to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), also, with reference to Shakespeare, F. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878), vol. I, p. 176, in K. Schlechta (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in drei Bänden, Erster Band (Munich: Hanser, 1966), pp. 561–2. 22 J. Adamson, Troilus and Cressida (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), p. 165 (original emphasis). 23 For a concept of imagination as ‘Seeing-as’ that seems particularly congenial to Shakespeare’s drama, cf. also Lobsien and Lobsien, Die unsichtbare Imagination.

9 Arrogant authorial performances: Criseyde to Cressida Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Wolfram R. Keller

In the burgeoning research field of medieval and early modern emotions and in studies of the performance of passion, little space has been devoted to arrogance. Defined by modern psychology as ‘an acute or chronic affective state characterized by attitudes of undue superiority towards others and manifested by an overbear­ ing manner, presumptuousness, haughtiness, superciliousness, insolence and even insulting behaviour’,1 arrogance may seem a straightforward, slightly uninteresting phenomenon, especially compared to the more ‘dramatic’ emotions, love and hate. In the Middle Ages, however, arrogant behaviour was highly problematic, given that arrogance, disdain and haughtiness were discussed and perceived of as a modality, ‘if not [the] chief incarnation of that fountainhead of vice, pride’, operating at the other extreme of the foremost virtue, humility.2 Arrogance was exclusively valued negatively, engendering ‘more moral indignation than any of the other venerable vices of the old theological set’, many valuations of which have changed in the course of time.3 As a branch of Pride (with six twigs: Singularity, Prodigality, False Strife, Boasting, Scorn, Rebellion), arrogance was ‘the sin of rebellion against God … of exaggerated individualism’.4 Arrogant individuals believed they were someone they were not, or they boasted qualities or abilities they lacked, deeming themselves aloof of social norms and responsibilities, treating others with disdain. Such definitions of sourquyderie can be found in many widely circulated compendia like the Somme le roi by Lorens d’Orléans (1279) and are echoed by Chaucer’s Parson: ‘Arrogant is he that thynketh that he hath silke bountees in hym that he hath noght, or weneth that he sholde have hem by his desertes, or elles he demeth that he be that he nys nat’ (395).5 Embedded in such definitions are social claims that are problematic in so far as they bespeak ‘a sharpened sensibility, if not anxiety, over the overt exploitation of new venues for social

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

Wolfram R. Keller

advancement’ and ­concomitant transcendence of the social order. Arrogance becomes a threat to the fabric of communities in that it encodes excessive forms of individualism. As Petkov writes, arrogance ‘best accommodates anxiety over the shifting relations between social dynamics and normative values. Residing within the relatively stable parameters mapped out by scriptural morality and ancient Greek ethics was a permeable core that soaked up the angst engendered by the particularly Western showdown between individual and society.’6 Given arrogance’s association with pride and attendant anxieties about individual(ist) transgression, it perhaps deserves closer scrutiny, both with a view to the history of e­ motions and vis-à-vis attendant aesthetic concerns. In literary works, as Petkov illustrates, arrogance not only connotes the negotiation of valuation, it often determines new valuations; it signifies novelty and innovation. The originality often marked by arrogance is not reduced to negotiations of social and political claims and group identities, however; especially on account of its relation to the opposing virtue of humilitas, arrogance frequently operates poetologically as well, that is, arrogance negotiates anxieties about (new models of) literary authorship. In this chapter, I trace the poetological and literary-historical dimension of arrogance in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s treatments of the story of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida. Both authors, I argue, utilize arrogance in their Troy stories to test notions of ‘counter-­authorship’ by means of poet-playwright characters who self-consciously, albeit obliquely stage their own literary-historical predicaments, reflecting issues of temporality, of periodization. In order to show how arrogance functions as a means to test and advance models of literary authorship across the period divide,7 I first situate arrogance within recent discussions of authorship, starting with Patrick Cheney’s work on the deeply embedded bid to literary fame in Shakespeare’s works, his counter-authorship: the oblique representation of the conflation of poetry and drama, of Chaucerian self-effacement and Spensarian self-crowning. Such a conception of authorship finds an analogue in Chaucer, not so much in the often-studied, self-effacing extra- and intradiegetic narrators, but in his characterological representation of authorship, especially in Criseyde. It has to be pointed out, however, that her poetic ­individuality – that is, her (and the Poet’s) model of authorship – is explicitly encoded as arrogant. Through Criseyde, Chaucer’s Poet displaces authorial humility as arrogance. Revisiting the Troy story (and the negotiation of authorship therein) during the competitive

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial performances

143

rivalry of poet-playwrights of the Poets’ War, Shakespeare consciously constructs a dichotomy of humble, ‘medieval’ Trojan poetry and arrogant, ‘modern’ Greek playwriting and performance, in which Cressida, like Criseyde, synthesizes Trojan and Greek poetological characteristics. Shakespeare’s Troilus, however, inverts the Chaucerian conception of authorship: Cressidan humility is displaced as authorial arrogance. Recuperating the medieval humility topos and reinvesting his arrogant poet-playwright figures with a modicum of humility, Shakespeare advances his (seemingly) innovative model of counter-authorship, embedding even more deeply the authorial bid for self-crowning and obfuscating analogi­ cal, medieval conceptualizations of counter-authorship, tangible in Chaucer’s Troilus and the fifteenth-century engagement with Chaucer, both of which are increasingly acknowledged as i­ mportant for early modern poetics and languages of statecraft.8 The question of Shakespeare’s authorship has recently incited much debate and further scrutiny. Reading both Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, Cheney presents a revaluation of Shakespeare’s strategies to represent his own authorship in the many poetplaywright characters who can be read as proxies of Shakespearean authorship – and who, I would add, are frequently (if not exclusively) arrogant. ‘Conspicuously’ avoiding self-representation, the Bard advances a form of ‘counter-authorship’: the authorial imprint is obfuscated, but traceable, translucently hidden, as it were, ‘behind the veil of his fictions’. Such a hidden form of authorial self-representation rejects the popular Renaissance model of the laureate poet, of which Virgil is the model and Spenser the Renaissance representative. Writers like Marlowe challenged such Virgilian-derived models by means of adopting the competing Ovidian paradigm, following the Roman author in penning both poems and plays, becoming poet-playwrights. Shakespeare, too, Cheney argues, ‘invents his famed authorship – self-concealment, complementarity, undecidability, negative capability – by countering the idea of the laureate or national poet’.9 This view of Shakespearean authorship suggests not only that the latter is a matter of engaging ancient career models but that there are medieval precursors for a self-concealing, anti-laureate, counterauthorship. Comparing the ‘politics of authorship’ in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules and ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, Cheney argues that Shakespeare’s poem is not about the clarification of the poet’s voice but about the displacement thereof, which amounts to

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

Wolfram R. Keller

the ‘most self-reflexive representation of authorship in his canon’. As Cheney concludes, ‘[t]he paradox of an authorial voice clarified yet displaced results …, because Shakespeare lets collide the two major English models of authorship then available: Chaucerian self-effacement and Spenserian self-crowning’.10 The potential collision of medieval humility with Renaissance self-crowning notwithstanding, Chaucer’s self-effacement emerges, at a second glance, as entailing an oblique Virgilian claim to fame. Especially concerning questions of arrogance and humility, there appears to be a strong connection between Chaucerian and Shakespearean counter-authorship in their representations of Criseyde/Cressida. Unlike Shakespeare, Chaucer does represent ‘himself’ in his works, usually as a humble narrator rejecting fame. Studies of Chaucerian authorship by and large conclude that Chaucerian self-presentation amounts to ‘the presence of a self-conscious ­ author’, as Alastair Minnis puts it, while others highlight a l­atemedieval rejection of authorial fame and Chaucerian humility with the aim, as Stephanie Trigg argues, of attracting ‘sympathetic readerly identifications’ through ‘attractive narrative voices’.11 As far as Chaucerian self-representation in extradiegetic narrators is concerned, audiences witness such a humble author, cautious not to transgress against auctoritas and seemingly avoiding literary innovation. While in the narrative poems, Cheney summarizes, Chaucer ‘foreground[s] himself as the primary character, … in The House of Fame he presents himself as humbly rejecting selfidentification, producing a fiction in which his name is left blank and his identity held in question. Cunningly, Chaucer’s strategy for securing literary fame works through a fiction that rejects the quest for fame.’12 The humility of the self-conscious medieval author, fearing inventio and the transgression against auctoritas, confirms the idea of a late-medieval rejection of authorship, and yet, this rejection itself lends itself for articulating a bid for fame. Such claims to authorial fame are frequently entailed in the excessive humility attendant upon self-presentation – as in Geffrey’s rejection of fame in the House of Fame (counteracted in Troilus and Criseyde) where, at the end of the poem, he includes himself immodestly as the major English Trojan poet.13 While studies have largely focused on such extradiegetic representations of authorship, Minnis has pried more deeply into the fabric of Chaucerian fiction, identifying the authorial work reflected by means of intradiegetic narrators, specifically the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. Robert Edwards extends the study of medieval authorship further beyond

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial performances

145

external factors, by asking ‘how … authorship function[s] internally, not as a condition of writing but as a part of its meaning’. The fictionalization of authorship is best studied in the dialectics of imitation and rejection. Imitation, Edwards observes, impossibly demands the production of ‘original copy’, while rejection need not end in cancellation but rather becomes ‘a literary strategy that relocates authorship within a new set of terms, as a possibility strategically denied in favour of other possibilities of invention. Refusal thus repositions authors and their works with respect to literary canons, institutions, and tradition.’14 Chaucer’s advancement of a kind of counter-authorship ensues through the related dialectics of humility and arrogance, and it is fictionally negotiated across several diegetic levels. In Chaucer’s Troilus, a poetics of arrogance emerges as the basis for alternative articulations of literary authorship, developed in the interplay between the Poet and ‘his’ Criseyde. Troilus, like the Troy story in general, investigates the paradoxes of humility and pride in several ways: One may think, for instance, of Troilus’s disdain for the God of Love that initiates the story.15 Criseyde, too, is perceived as arrogant at the beginning, which is consistent with Chaucer’s ‘source’. Strolling about, Boccaccio’s Troiolo gawks at several ladies, his gaze finally chancing on the ‘charming Criseida’. She has removed her veil from her face and is pushing the crowd aside to make space for herself, an action paired with a social claim. With this self-assertive moment, Il Filostrato shifts from her appearance to its effect on Troilus: ‘As she recovered her composure, that very action – somewhat disdainful [alquanto sdegnosetto], as if she were to say “one may not stand here” – proves pleasing to Troilus.’16 Chaucer maintains this moment, but introduces a small change to the passage in which Criseyde’s look is described as ‘somdel deignous’ (I.290). Chaucer’s emphasis on Criseyde’s look is more prominently placed at the beginning of a line. Moreover, while Troiolo is clearly attracted to Criseida’s claim to her space, Chaucer’s Troilus is attracted to Criseyde’s cheer and movement.17 The ‘somewhat arrogant’ look is therefore registered mainly by the Poet, establishing a link between him and Criseyde that emerges most fully towards the end of the poem, when the Poet echoes Criseyde’s worries about her (literary) reputation. Much of the first half of the Troilus focuses on the fearful Criseyde;18 notably, however, there are other moments, when she is perceived as haughty. Readers are prepared for this character trait already in the initial description of her as excessively

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

Wolfram R. Keller

beautiful, a ‘hevenyssh perfit creature, / That down were sent in scornynge of nature’ (I.104–5), who n ­ evertheless has to humbly beg for Hector’s protection. A crucial moment that captures Criseyde’s vacillation between humility and arrogance occurs when she considers whether she is worthy of Troilus’s love. Initially deeming herself worthless,19 she rapidly gains more confidence, culminating in her rhetorical question ‘What wonder is though he of me have joye?’ After all, she is ‘oon the faireste’ in Troy and her ‘owene womman, wel at ese’ (II.749, 746, 750). Later in the Troilus, after learning of the pending prisoner exchange, she also boasts about qualities she does not have, making promises she cannot keep, for instance, her stratagems to fool her father and the promise to return.20 This and other moments belie the repeated narratorial claim that she has ‘no lak’ (e.g. V.814, similarly in V.824). Perhaps the most prominent nexus of humility, arrogance and authorship occurs in Criseyde’s farewell letter, which E. Talbot Donaldson described as one of ‘the most poisonously hypocritical letters in the annals of literature’, in which, ‘with exquisitely selfish cruelty’, she refuses to assert that she does not love Troilus and will never come back.21 In this letter, Criseyde, seemingly disdainfully, prays for Troilus’s ‘good word and of youre frendship ay’ (V.1622). The letter highlights Criseyde’s and the Poet’s transgressive poetological predicaments in that it alludes to the Epistulae ex Ponto, where Ovid laments his exile on account of his ‘error’ (in all probability the Ars amatoria), asking his Roman friends to stay friends and to intervene on his behalf, restoring his literary fame. This reference is oblique, however, and, read outside this Ovidian context, the letter must appear despicably disdainful.22 In its oscillation between arrogance and humility, between authorial invention and literary tradition, it ultimately remains ambiguous – although, for Troilus, Criseyde’s action cannot stem from anything ‘But for despit’ (V.1693). Both at the beginning and the end of the Troilus, then, Criseyde is perceived as arrogant, significantly at narrative junctures that are related also to the generation of a new narrative of Criseyde. Criseyde’s arrogance, I believe, has to be seen in the context of a displaced bid for literary fame, a bid enabled by the Poet’s rejection thereof. All three characters have, of course, been linked to the narrator (albeit not always regarding authorship), especially Pandarus, given that his (theatrical) machinations drive forward the Poet’s plot.23 Pandarus’s curtailed literary knowledge, however, pales in comparison with Criseyde’s literary self-consciousness, so that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial performances

147

Pandarian theatre can only be half of the picture. The poetological overlap between Troilus and the Poet represents the other half, and both halves are literally combined in the changeable correlative of the fickle Poet, in Criseyde. As the late Charles Muscatine observed, Criseyde speaks both Troilus’s and Pandarus’s idioms, she assimilates both Troilus’s poetic emotionality – encoded in the poem as Trojan–Ovidian discourse, and Pandarus’s theatrical pragmatism, associated with Virgilian epic. Criseyde is a poet-playwright: she is a performer aware of the dramaturgy she utilizes and, within the limits that curtail her autonomy, she is able to stage-manage some of the scenes.24 Moreover, Criseyde is the embodiment of literary invention, and the Poet’s altered characterization marks Chaucer’s chief departure from tradition. The narrative bestows on Criseyde the kind of sympathy Chaucer’s actual author-figures are meant to evoke in the audience, and both self-consciously reflect upon their literary afterlives, anticipated as blackened; Chaucer later even uses the construction of his heroine to promote a ‘querelle de Criseyde’.25 Criseydan authorship, then, hybridizes Trojan elegy and Pandarian theatre as a means of warranting her exilic self; it is a self-concealing authorship, however, that displaces the arrogant authorial bid to literary fame so deeply into the poem that the humble authorial rejection of authorship threatens to obscure it. And yet, it is a Criseydan arrogance sympathetically looked upon or determined by the Poet and his author, Chaucer. By Shakespeare’s time, arrogant performances had become cornerstones of courtly self-presentation (sprezzatura), associated with the Inns of Court where Troilus might have first been staged. Arrogance likewise becomes an instrument in artistic self-representation, especially in the Poets’ War, in which the arrogant poet-playwright Ben Jonson played a chief role. Whether or not Shakespeare was involved in the Poets’ War – Shakespeare apparently had insolent Jonson in mind when penning the Troilus – the play certainly broaches questions of literary authorship qua arrogance and poet-playwright figures. Already at the outset, the Prologue sets the scene (Troy), drawing attention to the arrogant Greeks: ‘The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed’. Anticipating the Greeks’ likewise arrogant performances, the Prologue subsequently muses on the play’s humble status, too: ‘And hither am I come, / A Prologue armed, but not in confidence / Of author’s pen or actor’s voice’ (Pro. 2, 22–4). The professed lack of confidence in author and actors introduces a metatheatrical

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

148

Wolfram R. Keller

performance anxiety that permeates the play, while simultaneously highlighting arrogance/humility as an important yardstick for judging (authorial) performances.26 On the plot level, Shakespeare’s Greeks confidently believe they are able to deliver what they promise, as criticized by Ulysses in his speech on degree, which, by means of the mentioned mask/masque, alludes also to theatrical performances: ‘Degree being vizarded, / Th’unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask’ (1.3.83–4, 162n), kindling a pageant of ‘disdained’ superiors in ‘an envious fever / Of pale and bloodless emulation’ (1.3.129, 133–4). Such (dramatic) emulation appears to leave little room for invention. Achilles’ performance is a case in point: ‘full of his airy fame’, he ‘pageants’ the Greek leaders with Patroclus, ‘like a strutting player’, infecting others to do likewise, as evidenced by ‘self-willed’ Ajax, keeping ‘full as proud a place’ and directing Thersites (associated with the imprinting of money) to slander their uppers (1.3.144, 151, 153, 188–9). The nature of pride as its own mirror and chronicle (2.3.151–5) is further explicated – and staged by Agamemnon and Ulysses. In turn, they direct the Greek generals to walk by Achilles and ‘either greet him not / Or else disdainfully, which shall shake him more / Than if not looked on’ (3.3.52–4). Achilles should thus realize his arrogance, since ‘Pride hath no other glass / To show itself but pride; for supple knees / Feed arrogance, and are the proud man’s fees’ (3.3.47–9). Indeed, Achilles is perplexed, given how he was formerly approached ‘humbly’ (3.3.72). Confronting Ulysses, the latter refers to the book by a ‘strange fellow’ (3.3.996) that he is reading, which emerges as the ‘playbook’ for the procession in so far as it imparts ‘That man, how dearly ever parted, / How much in having, or without or in, / Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, / Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection’. Moreover, ‘no man is the lord of anything, / Though in and of him there be much consisting, / Till he communicate his parts to others; / Nor doth he of himself know them for aught / Till he behold them formed in th’applause’ (3.3.97–100, 116–20). With this nod towards the author’s dependence on audiences in the public (authorial) theatres,27 Ulysses makes an important point about ­ arrogance: one cannot claim one’s own (literary) greatness. Ulysses’ (not-so-)modest interventions notwithstanding, the Greek camp is characterized by arrogant dramatic performances, while the Trojans appear to be remnants of a medieval world, associated with a humility that is suitably disdained by the Greeks,28 for instance, when Hector courteously interrupts his duel with Achilles

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial performances

149

so that the latter can catch his breath (5.6.15). Trojan humility also emerges when Aeneas stops boasting of the Trojans’ military skills to Agamemnon: ‘The worthiness of praise distains his worth / If that the praised himself bring the praise forth. / But what the repining enemy commends, / That breath Fame blows; that praise, sole pure, transcends’ (1.3.241–4). Questioned about his identity by Agamemnon, he implicitly matches the honesty that goes handin-glove with medieval humilitas by addressing Agamemnon as Greek, associating him with cunning and wiliness, with ‘modern’, Machiavellian dissimulation (173n). Additionally, the play seems to oppose arrogant Greek performance with humble Trojan poetry, highlighted, as Gary Schmidgall observes, in Troilus’s ‘ornate’ poetry of the ‘old age’ and his ‘oath-plighting duet with Cressida’ (e.g. 3.2.167–91) that alludes, tellingly, to the defamed women in the false compare of poets of Sonnet 130.29 After all, it is the (ill-) fame of women that fames the Trojans (and Trojan authors); thus Troilus, when describing Helen as a ‘theme of honour and renown’ (2.2.199–202). On the one hand, the binary of medieval Trojans and Renaissance Greeks seems to organize also the opposition of humble Trojan poets and supercilious Greek playwrights. On the other hand, as the example of Troilus illustrates, these dichotomies do not always obtain. As with the binarism of Renaissance, Machiavellian Iago and chivalrous, medieval Othello, such temporal dichotomizing, as Andrew James Johnston argues, serves to veil continuities with the Middle Ages: Othello obscures the medieval origins of Renaissance Man.30 In the case of Troilus, the play veils the medieval advancement of counter-authorship. Several characters synthesize Trojan and Greek qualities, for instance, the arrogant poet-playwrights Ulysses and Pandarus. Ulysses’ arrogance has already been mentioned; Pandarus, who performs two songs, directs the consummation scene and overrates the effects of his performance (3.1.109–21, 5.11.35–44), arrogantly mistaking himself for a god. Cressida, by contrast, is a humble character whose self-sacrificing nature obscures an authorial conjunction of poetry and playwriting. Discussed in scholarship as ‘open to multiple interpretations’, as a ‘creature of intertextuality’, she is also a ‘creature’ of intratextuality, being versed in Pandarus’s and Troilus’s idioms.31 Moreover, before she appears on stage, Troilus describes her with a veiled reference to authorship. Among her many charms, he singles out her hand, ‘In whose comparison all whites are ink’, an observation extended by Pandarus to include her ability to seem fair even if she were not: ‘she has the mends in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

150

Wolfram R. Keller

her own hands’. Cressida, by logical extension, writes in invisible ink (1.1.53, 64–5). Related to her transformational (un-)writing skills is her ability to engage effortlessly in courtly repartee and her (constrained) directing of events, for instance, when she (up) stages the ‘sneaking’ Troilus (1.2.218–21). She also draws attention to her acting skills: ‘Upon my back to defend my belly, upon my wit to defend my wiles, upon my secrecy to defend mine honesty, my mask to defend my beauty, and you to defend all these; and at all these wards I lie, at a thousand watches’ (1.2.251–5), which, in her soliloquy (if it is a soliloquy (155n)), emerge as performances in the service of self-protection: since ‘Men prize the thing ungained more than it is’ and even though she sees a ‘thousandfold’ more in Troilus than does Pandarus, ‘Yet hold I off’ (1.2.280, 275, 277). Additionally, Cressida is associated with poetry. Besides her ‘oath-plighting’ with Troilus, other scholars have commented on her ‘singing’ (5.2.10–13),32 and she is also linked to a more obvious poet-playwright in Shakespeare’s oeuvre – Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost – through an intertextual reference in Ulysses’ oft-cited comments on her acting skills and the unclasping ‘of the tables’ of women’s thoughts to ‘every ticklish reader!’ (4.5.56–7, 61–2), which also point back to Chaucer’s description of Criseyde’s beauty as disdaining Nature and, implicitly, her ‘deignous’ look.33 In the absence of narratorial commentary, the veiled poet-­ playwright Cressida could be perceived as arrogant, especially perhaps in her ‘teasing’ in the Greek camp, which, however, is used to prevent her from being kissed by the Greeks ‘in general’ (4.5.22). While the perception of her actions finally depends on the staging, the text notably mutes references to Cressidan disdain. Moreover, among the few Chaucerian insights into Criseyde’s emotional life retained by Shakespeare, it is Cressida’s humility that stands out:34 when Troilus laments, with reference to an authorial Will, that ‘the will is infinite and the execution confined’ (3.2.78–9, 233n; see Sonnet 135), Cressida concurs: ‘They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able … They that have the voice of lions and the acts of hares, are they not monsters?’ (3.2.81–6) The (repeated) reference to lions relegates issues of performance to the discourse of arrogance (and ethical lack), with which the play’s lions are associated. Given his professed inability to conform to Greek standards of performance (especially 4.4.74–90), Troilus is incapable of reconciling his two Cressidas: the ‘woeful Cressid ’mongst the merry Greeks’ (4.4.55), the Trojan poet’s performance in the Greek theatre. It is Thersites who appreciates Cressida’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial performances

151

poet-playwriting, characterizing her ability ‘to be secretly open’ as her ‘juggling trick’ (5.2.26). Cressida’s secret openness, her counter-authorship is subsequently published, as she speaks for the last time, humbly musing on the ‘error’ she did not commit,35 one eye on Troilus and Trojan poetry, one eye on the Greek performance culture she will join, ‘A proof of strength she could not publish more’, as Thersites discerns (5.2.113–19). Cressida inhabits a temporal and cultural liminality here in which she emerges, as Heather James remarks about her selves in Act 3, ‘a closed and open book’.36 Cressida’s secret openness is that of a humbler, published poet-playwright, without the option to redeem or explain herself fully: and this is precisely the raison d’être and predicament of the voice of the ‘counter-author’: clarified, yet displaced. Amidst the rivalry of arrogant, self-crowning poet-playwrights during the Poets’ War, Shakespeare, like Chaucer before him, characterologically reconsiders questions of counter-authorship through poet-playwright Cressida. From a seeming dichotomy of humble, medieval poets and overly self-assertive Greek actors and playwrights, Cressida emerges as partaking of both Trojan and Greek discourses, whereby Shakespeare inverts the Chaucerian configuration of counter-authorship, authorial humility displaced as Criseydan arrogance, to Cressidan humility displaced as authorial arrogance. The Bard recuperates a seemingly medieval humility topos and reinvests formerly arrogant poet-playwright figures with a modicum of humility in the advancement of a ­(seemingly) new model of counter-authorship. In ways that invite further study, vacillations between arrogance and humility from the late medieval to the early modern and attendant, self-conscious constructions of temporality frequently appear to connote veiled re-negotiations of literary (counter-)authorship, the question as to when and how to ‘hold … off’. Notes  1 C. W. Socarides, introduction to W. R. Bion, ‘On arrogance’, in C. W. Socarides (ed.), The World of Emotions: Clinical Studies of Affects and Their Expression (New York: International University Press, 1977), pp. 283–93.  2 K. Petkov, ‘The cultural career of a “minor” vice: arrogance in the medieval treatise on sin’, in R. Newhauser and S. Ridyard (eds), Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2012), pp. 43–64 (p. 44). See e.g. Opus Caroli Regis Contra Synodum: Libri Carolini, eds

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

152

Wolfram R. Keller

A. Freeman and P. Meyvaert (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1998), p. 312; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. H. McCabe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 162.4.  3 Petkov, ‘Cultural career’, p. 44; see further his ‘“Hom orgoilloz ne puet longues durer”: mobility, arrogance, and class in the French fabliaux’, Exemplaria, 18 (2006), 137–74; and ‘Mobility and resentment in a world of flux: arrogance in the Old French fabliaux’, in H. A. Crocker (ed.), Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (New York: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 113–27. For arrogance and resentment, see J. M. Barbalet, Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 62–81 and 126–48.  4 M. W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952), pp. 74–5; see further L. K. Little, ‘Pride goes before avarice: social change and the vices in Latin Christendom’, American Historical Review, 76 (1971), 16–49; M. E. Dyson, Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).  5 The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century English Translation of the Somme le roi of Lorens d’Orléans, ed. W. N. Francis (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 12–22; Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition, 2 vols, ed. R. Hanna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 118–42; Vices and Virtues. Being A Soul’s Confession of its Sins, with Reason’s Description of the Virtues. A middleEnglish dialogue of about 1200 A. D. Edited, with an introduction translation, notes and glossary from the stowe MS.240 in the British Museum, vol. 1, ed. F. Holthausen (London: Trübner & Co. 1888), pp. 5–7. All references to Chaucer’s works are to The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 3rd edn, 1987).  6 Petkov, ‘Cultural career’, pp. 51, 44. See further A. J. Greimas and J. Fontanille, The Semiotics of Passions: From States of Affairs to States of Feelings, trans. P. Perron and F. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 49 and 104; R. Newhauser (ed.), The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals (Leiden: Brill, 2007).  7 There are hardly any monographic cross-period treatments of authorship, but cf. R. J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).   8 See Meyer-Lee, Poets; P. Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Poetological arrogance is certainly a cornerstone in the works of the poet-playwright Lydgate, who is an important mediator between Chaucer and Shakespeare. See e.g. W. R. Keller, ‘Shakespearean medievalism: conceptions of literary authorship in Richard II and John Lydgate’s Troy Book’, in U. Berns and A. J. Johnston (eds), Medievalism, special issue of European Journal of English Studies, 15:2 (2011), 129–42.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial performances

153

 9 Quotations in P. Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 14 and 19 (original emphasis). See further P. Cheney, Shakespeare, National PoetPlaywright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 14. 10 P. Cheney, ‘The voice of the author in The Phoenix and the Turtle’, in C. Perry and J. Watkins (eds), Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 103–25 (pp. 112–13, original emphases). 11 A. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2nd edn, 2010), p. 210; S. Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. xviii. For summary, see A. Bennett, The Author (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 42–3. 12 Cheney, ‘Voice’, p. 113. 13 H. Cooper, ‘Chaucerian poetics’, in R. G. Benson and S. J. Ridyard (eds), New Readings in Chaucer’s Poetry (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003), pp. 31–50. 14 R. R. Edwards, ‘Authorship, imitation, and refusal in late-medieval England’, in G. Bolens and L. Erne (eds), Medieval and Early Modern Authorship (Tübingen: Narr, 2011), pp. 51–73 (pp. 52–3). 15 For Troilus’s (and Troy’s) pride, see J. M. Bowers, ‘How Criseyde falls in love’, in N. B. Smith (ed.), The Expansion and Transformations of Courtly Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 141–55 (pp. 146–8). 16 The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. and trans. N. Griffin and A. B. Myrick (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1928), 1.26–8. 17 See e.g. P. A. Knapp, ‘Criseyde’s beauty’, in C. L. Vitto and M. S. Marzec (eds), New Perspectives on Criseyde (Asheville: Pegasus, 2004), pp. 231–54 (p. 236); Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’, ed. Barry A. Windeatt (London: Longman, 1984), p. 105n. 18 For the fearful Criseyde, see esp. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 182–7. 19 After Pandarus observes that there is no prouder woman in Troy (II.138–9, MED s.v. proud [adj.], 1a). 20 On Criseyde’s contempt for her father, see J. V. Fleming, ‘Criseyde’s poem: the anxieties of the classical tradition’, in C. L. Vitto and M. S. Marzec (eds), New Perspectives on Criseyde (Asheville: Pegasus, 2004), pp. 277–98 (p. 279). 21 E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 82. 22 Slightly later, the Poet refers readers to other books discussing Criseyde’s infidelity, wishing rather to speak of ‘Penolopeës trouthe and good Alceste’ (V.1778), two heroines whom Chaucer saw

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

154

Wolfram R. Keller

conjoined in a headnote in a commentary on Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto. See S. Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 105. 23 C. D. Benson, Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 112. For the Pandarian generation of the poem, see N. M. Reale, ‘“Bitwixen game and ernest”: Troilus and Criseyde as a post-Boccaccian response to the Commedia’, Philological Quarterly, 71:2 (1992), 155–71 (156). 24 C. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 153–4. For Criseyde’s Trojan Ovidianism and Greek Virgilianism, see W. R. Keller, Selves & Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), pp. 450–75. For Criseyde’s ‘self-conscious performance’, see J. E. Jost, ‘The performative Criseyde: self-conscious dramaturgy’, in C. L. Vitto and M. S. Marzec (eds), New Perspectives on Criseyde (Asheville: Pegasus), pp. 207–30 (pp. 209–10), but cf. G. Mieszkowski, ‘Chaucer’s much loved Criseyde’, Chaucer Review, 26:2 (1991), 109–32. 25 On the close proximity of the Poet and Criseyde, see e.g. J. L. Lowes, Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 152–4; Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer, pp. 64–9; G. Mieszkowski, ‘The reputation of Criseyde, 1155–1500’, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 43 (1971), 144–6; E. T. Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). With reference to S. Delany, Trigg observes that Chaucer’s awareness of commentary on his work would have been ‘exhilarating and frightening’, a vision as disturbing as Criseyde, ‘frozen into a tradition “rolled … on many a tongue”’ (Trigg, Congenial Souls, p. 61). For the attempted querelle de Criseyde, see A. Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 33. 26 Parenthetical references are to Troilus and Cressida, ed. David Bevington, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998). For the play’s references to Jonson’s Poetaster, see J. P. Bednarz, Shakespeare & the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 32–52. The play’s ‘performance anxiety’ and Greek (literary) emulation are discussed in G. E. Minton, ‘“Discharging less than the tenth part of one”: performance anxiety and/in Troilus and Cressida’, in P. Yachnin and P. Badir (eds), Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 101–19; H. James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Transmission of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 97–106. F. Whigham discusses the sprezzatura at the Inns of Court in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 27 See A. B. Kernan, ‘Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s view of public theatre

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial performances

155

audiences’, in I. Donaldson (ed.), Jonson and Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 74–88 (pp. 83–4); Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, pp. 6–8; J. Gregory, ‘The “author’s drift” in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: a poetics of reflection’, in G. Bolens and L. Erne (eds), Medieval and Early Modern Authorship (Tübingen: Narr, 2011), pp. 93–106. 28 For medieval Trojans and ‘Renaissance’ Greeks, see E. S. Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 38–9; A. M. Potter, ‘Troilus and Cressida: deconstructing the Middle Ages’, Theoria, 72 (1988), 23–35; J. R. Briggs, ‘“Chaucer … the story gives”: Troilus and Cressida and The Two Noble Kinsmen’, in M. W. Driver and S. Ray (eds), Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009), pp. 161–77 (p. 167). 29 G. Schmidtgall, Shakespeare and the Poet’s Life (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990), p. 137. For Troilus’s (and Shakespeare’s) quest of fame, see D. Mehl, ‘Shakespeare and the siege of Troy’, in C. Jansohn (ed.), In the Footsteps of William Shakespeare (Münster: Lit, 2005), pp. 103–19 (p. 113). 30 A. J. Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), chap. 4. 31 Briggs, ‘Troilus’, p. 164; C. Cook, ‘Unbodied figures of desire’, Theater Journal, 38 (1983), 34–52 (50); H. C. Adams, ‘What Cressid is’, in C. Levin (ed.), Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama (Lewiston: Mellen, 1991), pp. 75–93 (pp. 75–6). 32 See K. Davis-Brown, ‘Shakespeare’s use of Chaucer in Troilus and Cressida: “that the will is infinite, and the execution confined”’, South Central Review, 5:2 (1988), 15–34; Adams, ‘Cressid’, p. 85. 33 Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998), 2.1.69–76; Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, pp. 140–2. The allusion to the opening of Chaucer’s Troilus is discussed by E. Talbot Donaldson, ‘Cressid false, Criseyde untrue: an ambiguity revisited’, in M. Mack (ed.), Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 67–83. 34 See esp. C. Asp, ‘In defense of Cressida’, Studies in Philology, 74:4 (1977), 406–17; Davis-Brown, ‘Shakespeare’s use of Chaucer’, 25; S. J. Lynch, ‘Shakespeare’s Cressida: “A woman of quick sense”’, Philological Quarterly, 63:3 (1984), 357–68; James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 106–12. 35 As Bradley Greenburg observes in his Ovidian reading of the play, ‘“The double variacioun of worldly blisse and transmutacioun”: Shakespeare’s return to Ovid in Troilus and Cressida’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 5 (2008), 293–312 (306–7). There

156

Wolfram R. Keller

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

is another Ovidian subtext entailed in Cressida’s ‘error’, given the authorial context in which Chaucer’s Poet and Criseyde refer to Ovid’s carmen et error. 36 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, p. 107.

10 Changing emotions in Troilus: the crucial year Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

David Wallace

The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga is a perfect vehicle for tracing the history of the emotions, in that it offers an unparalleled darkening of mood over time. This saga begins with Boccaccio, who isolates and expands the love affair between Troiolo and Criseida to vent his sexual frustration. The conceit of the work, as laid out in its prose prologue, is that the teenage Boccaccio, living in Naples, has been abandoned by his female love object (who has moved on to another town). The story of Troiolo and Criseida thus functions as a scudo or shield that both protects and reveals the sufferings of its youthful author. The poem gives literary form to the sighs or sospiri that leak from the authorial body: Che dirò de’ sospiri li quali nel passato piacevole amore e dolce speranza mi soleano infiammati trarre del petto? Certo io non ho altro che dirne se non che, multiplicati in molti doppi di gravissima angoscia, mille volte ciascuna ora di quello per la mia bocca di fuori sono sforzatamente sospinti. (Proemio, 15)1 (What shall I say of the sighs which, in the past, pleasing love and sweet hope used to draw inflamed from my breast? Certainly I have nothing other to say of them except that, multiplied in many duplications of the gravest anguish, a thousand times each hour they are violently forced out through my mouth.)

Boccaccio thus marks the turn from pre-articulate emotional excess to regulated literary expression. The literary artifice of this barely post-adolescent composition is so palpable that issues of truthfulness and historical veracity hardly arise. There was a great cult of Trojan narrative at the French Angevin court of Naples; the Filostrato is very much focused upon contemporary Neapolitan fashions rather than upon ancient civilizations.2 The joys of lovemaking here are relatively straightforward: Criseida tosses off her shirt, and the lovers enjoy ‘the ultimate value of lovemaking’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

158

David Wallace

(‘d’amor sentiron l’ultimo valore’, 3.32.8). The sorrows of Troiolo are lachrymose, rather than tragic: nothing much more seems at stake than losing a girlfriend. This impression is strengthened by Boccaccio’s use of a popular narrative form, the cantare, used by street-singers known as canterini. There are scraps of Dantean citation, but these are decorative rather than deeply thematic; nothing really breaks the lightness and brightness of the poem’s popular mood. Chaucer recognized the popular aspects of Boccaccio’s ottava rima verse form because many of its tags, tropes and epithets – derived from the street singers of cantare – were shared by an equivalent English verse tradition: tail rhyme romance.3 Of course, Chaucer freights his poem with much deeper knowledge of Troy and of Thebes, and with the metaphysics of Boethius and Dante. And yet popular romance elements remain in his Troilus and Criseyde: there are tags such as ‘eyen tweyne’ (IV.129, 314, 748)4 and ‘armes two’ (IV.911, 1219); and his heroine’s name conveniently rhymes with seyde. Chaucer also takes over from Boccaccio the staging of authorly emotion. But whereas much of this is performed by Boccaccio in his prose preface or proemio, where the poem is established as the shield or Trojan horse for authorly feeling, Chaucer’s first-person narrator performs within the body of the poem itself. He, this Chaucerian ‘I’, becomes subjectively over-invested in the plight of his protagonists; and when their love can no longer run true he goes to war with his own literary sources – the book says this, not I.5 In Shakespeare, of course, we have no first-person, authorial presence – there is a preface of sorts, added in 1609,6 but this is very likely the work of the publishers, Richard Bonian and Henry Walley,7 and is not the work of the author. And yet there is, I shall argue, some sense of authorial animus at work in this play – some suggestion of Shakespeare’s being at war with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as his prior text. The original invitation to this project spoke of love in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as ‘a kind of umbrella emotion which integrates and generates other emotions, such as fear, hope or mourning’. Such expansive understanding of love is certainly one of the great achievements of Chaucer’s text, visible from the very beginning. Book I of the Troilus retraces, in effect, the trajectory of Dante’s Vita Nuova.8 Its young protagonist moves from melancholic, selfenclosed obsession to the realization that his lady actually might be pleased by diligent service; he lifts his eyes from the pool of Narcissus. But it is in Book III that the ‘umbrella of love’ spreads

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial Changing emotionsperformances in Troilus

159

widest: for here the protagonist develops an understanding that connects his feelings for one particular woman with the energy that governs oceans, moves the heavens, reconciles enemy peoples and holds civil society together. All this unfolds upon a symbolic terrain that vividly juxtaposes Christian and pagan terms of reference: a landscape comparable with the Dantean paradiso terrestre. Such an imaginative space poses the question, one of Dante’s most urgent questions – can a pagan who loves truly and well find the right path to eternal salvation? 9 If we make a jump cut to Shakespeare at this point, we can perhaps marvel at how little such a question exercises his mind, or the mind of his drama. Act 3 Scene 2 of Troilus and Cressida does see Troilus characterizing Pandarus as the Charon who will ­ transport him to ‘those fields’ (3.2.10) where he will find Cressida: but such appeals to the mechanisms of a pagan afterlife, here and elsewhere, seem decorative. Fourteenth-century authors – such as Dante, Langland and Chaucer – find the existential dilemmas of illustrious pagans compelling, and fascinating – but Shakespeare (so it seems) does not. Why so? Perhaps because the crucial borderline lies no longer between Christendom and paganism but between Christian denominations. A question with equivalent frisson might be, in Protestant England: can a Catholic be saved? Such a question seems too fraught for public stages, although Elizabethan publics did repeatedly witness pageants or cavalcades of English Catholicism as they watched, for example, Shakespearean histories. The question ‘What’s Hecuba to him?’, posed so urgently by Hamlet, yields a larger existential question that Troilus and Cressida leaves unanswered.10 The Boccaccian and Chaucerian texts, I have argued, figure the authorial persona as an active agent within the text that he is shaping. No equivalent figure haunts the Shakespearean text: even the possibilities for parallelism between the playwright and Pandarus, as textual mediators, are not exploited. We might, however, imagine the play’s author as a distinct force or personality in his shaping of source materials. If we can isolate the dominant emotion of what Shakespeare really does to Chaucer’s poem, we would have to say that he does it violence – one of the harsher species of love. Muriel Bradbrook observed that each of Chaucer’s five books is represented by one or two scenes in Shakespeare.11 But it is readily apparent that Shakespeare does not work verbatim from Chaucer,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

David Wallace

as he does from Caxton: there is no copy of Chaucer’s Troilus anywhere near his desk, as there is of Caxton’s The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. And his cutting of Chaucer is savage, showing scant respect for structure, temporal scheme or poetic mood. The first tall tree to fall is the innamoramento, in which Troilus, on first seeing Criseyde, is smitten by the God of Love. This great scene, with its bow of Cupid, might have seemed musty stuff in 1602: although perhaps it was ahead, rather than behind, its time – it would have performed well in a Whitehall masque. The cutting of this fateful moment, which Ted Hughes adopts as the absolute icon of his falling for Sylvia Plath,12 forms part of a greater play-onpoem violence: namely, the wrenching, compression and shunting forward of its temporal frame. It takes Chaucer’s Troilus 874 lines to first mention the name ‘Criseyde’. Shakespeare’s Troilus blurts it out, unbidden, after just twenty-eight; and the second mention, soon following, associates her with ‘the open ulcer of my heart’ (1.1.50). The characteristic keyword or call-sign of Chaucerian Troilus, which is truth or trouthe, is first spoken by Pandarus; it is then batted about like a shuttlecock between the bantering Pandarus and Cressida: PANDARUS: Faith, to say truth, brown and not brown. CRESSIDA: To say the truth, true and not true. (1.2.93–4)

Troilus does finally claim this attribute for himself in Act 3, where he pins it on his own shirt, prosaically, like a jewel: ‘Troilus shall be such to Cressid as what envy can say worst shall be a mock for his truth, and what truth can speak truest not truer than Troilus’ (3.2.92–4). This last phrase suggests an extraordinary moment of medievalism, in that it yields a perfect alliterative line: ‘what truth can speak truest / not truer than Troilus’. Except that such an alliterative line is too perfect, hence violates medieval poetics: aa/ aa, rather than aa/ax. Truth thus figures as exterior ornamentalism, rather than as interior quality. And this forms part of the larger philosophical and theological downgrading of Chaucer’s poem in Shakespeare’s play. ‘Well, the gods are above’, says Pandarus, ‘time must friend or end’ (1.2.75–6). Ulysses’ long and celebrated speech on ‘degree’ pointedly reverses the cosmic speculations of Chaucer’s Troilus Book III, and of Chaucer’s Theseus in the Knight’s Tale. For whereas Chaucer’s Theseus imagines a ‘faire cheyne of love’ (I.2988) connecting the First Mover to all things, Ulysses imagines a downward-descending chain of anger and resentment:

Arrogant authorial Changing emotionsperformances in Troilus

161

The general’s disdained By him one step below, he by the next, That next by him beneath; so every step, Exampled by the first pace that is sick Of his superior, grows to an envious fever Of pale and bloodless emulation.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(1.3.129–34)

The most challenging philosophical or epistemological statement in Shakespeare’s play occurs in Act 5, where Troilus remarks ‘This is and is not Cressid’ (5.2.153); but this comes from a man contemplating not the motion of stars and planets but rather the infidelity of his beloved. There is one religious figure in Shakespeare’s play who finds no counterpart in Chaucer: that is, Helenus, designated representative of the Trojan state religion. This prompts us to appreciate how, remarkably, the practice of speculating upon divinity, matters of theology, is not monopolized or even mediated by a priestly class in Chaucer’s Troy-world. We might also notice that once the decree of Cressida’s exile is ‘concluded’ by king and parliament, ‘Priam and the general state of Troy’ (4.2.68–9), Shakespeare’s Troilus proves an obedient state subject. There is, he tells Cressida, ‘No remedy’ (4.4.54). The gods are weak and remote, in Shakespeare, but the state is strong. Shakespeare of course maintains the five-book structure imposed by Chaucer upon the nine books of the Filostrato: but even here, authorial violence prevails. Chaucer’s Troilus follows the happy ascent of comedy: the middle line of Chaucer’s poem is r­ eckoned to be III.1271, ‘And me bestowed in so heigh a place’, and the ending of Book III sees the lovers ‘in lust and in quiete’ (III.1819). The last lines of Shakespeares’s Act 3 are spoken by Thersites, who makes comparison to a flea-bitten sheep (3.3.312–13). Before this, at the apogee of Act 3, we see Calchas demanding the translation of his daughter, and Achilles spurned in the Grecian tents. So the natural 3-plus–2 book structure in Chaucer, which would surely have allowed Elizabethans to seek out their half-time oranges, if not ice creams, is deliberately discarded. James Simpson describes how Renaissance England essentially reduced and simplified the rich multiplicity of medieval literary forms and registers.13 But whereas Chaucer’s Troilus maintains a fairly stable, middling band of decorum (accommodating both Pandarus’s proverbialism and Troilus’s philosophy), Shakespeare covers a wider range: from elevated speeches of counsel and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

David Wallace

policy to the lower discursive reaches of barnyard, brothel and leprosarium. We can assume that Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales was familiar to Shakespeare, given his borrowings from the Knight’s Tale for both Two Noble Kinsmen and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Dream, especially, features a wide social range of characters, including one (Bottom) who takes up the tail-rhyme of Chaucer’s Sir Thopas. The urban mechanicals do get to perform at the end of the play, but their performance is carefully ring-fenced by aristocratic critique. Troilus and Cressida, however, encompasses the full discursive range of Chaucer’s first Fragment: which is to say, the tales of the Knight, Miller, Reeve and Cook. Following the Miller’s rebellion, which seizes the initiative of tale-telling for speakers of lower degree, things run downhill. The Fragment ends by describing a gambler’s wife: she maintained a shop, for appearance sake, but fucked for a living. What the text actually says is that she ‘swyved for hir sustenance’ (I.4422); she used one hole to fill another. This tale is told by a Cook, described as an excellent maker of blancmanges, who has ‘a mormal’ on his shin: ‘a species of dry scabbed ulcer, gangrenous rather than cancerous’.14 This Cook’s Tale ends unfinished: which also seems true, remarkably, of Shakespeare’s play. The full generic range of Chaucer’s first Fragment – leading from perfect, gentle knight to putrid, suppurating Cook – feeds into Shakespeare. And remarkably, the model of time governing Shakespeare’s drama seems much more that of the Cook than the Knight: the time of now, unfolding before our eyes. ‘The present eye praises the present object’, says Ulysses (3.3.181), perfectly suggestive of carnivalesque, rather than epical, Bakhtinian time. Drama, of course, always unfolds as a continuous, performative present: but our sense of being immediately jammed up against the action seems especially acute in Troilus and Cressida; pit perspective floods the stage. The 1609 publishers’ preface confirms this impression in seeking to protect us from it: supplying the clean sheets of a new edition, saving us from ‘the smoky breath of the multitude’, promising us ‘a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar’.15 But our sense that the play might sully us, even as readers, is confirmed late on by Thersites’ use of that ungainly, compound verb (taken up by the publishers), ‘clapper-clawing’ (5.4.1) – in this case, applied to the grapplings of Cressida and Diomede. The generic indeterminacy of Troilus and Cressida as a ‘problem

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial Changing emotionsperformances in Troilus

163

play’ is acknowledged by its changing title pages: it is successively a ‘Historie’ and a ‘Famous Historie’ in Quarto, then a ‘Tragedie’ in Folio, which drops it between the histories and the tragedies. This is the kind of problem that Chaucerians are well used to, since there is no stable genus of Chaucerian narrative. Each Canterbury Tale discloses its own generic parameters as it goes along; some, like the Merchant’s Tale, flirt with anarchy. It was for this reason, the story runs, that Elizabethan England rejected that unstable isotope, the Chaucerian tale, in favour of the homogeneous Boccaccian novella. So what can account for this roiling unrest, this generic instability, in Troilus and Cressida? Desperately, we go in search of historical correlatives: what feeds the promiscuous and volatile e­ motionalism of this strange, sui generis playworld? Stepping beyond the merely biographical – the notion that Shakespeare was having a hard time in his marriage, or was at a loose end after Hamlet – we might consider contemporary disturbances, such as the ‘war of the theatres’, or trouble with Essex. Essex, it has been noted, was often referred to as Achilles, and Achilles’ corresponding within the play with Trojan Hecuba might be likened to Essex’s dalliance with the powers of Scotland and Spain.16 Millennial fears, in the approach to 1600, segued into misgivings over the end of a very long reign; Westminster courtiers, unnerved by the ageing and decaying body of a virgin queen, hurried north to negotiate. Fearful imaginings conjured what might descend upon England from Scotland: the unknown absolutist offspring of a murdered Catholic queen. ‘The end crowns all’, says Hector in Shakespeare’s 1602 edition, in heading off to die, ‘And that old common arbitrator, Time, / Will one day end it’ (4.5.224–6). But here is my alternative theory. I have spoken of violence done to the Chaucerian text by Shakespearean authorial animus: the temporal shunt that sees Cressida quickly won, quickly lost, and then Hector assassinated at a leisurely pace. I wish to explore now pressure exerted upon the play from a quite different direction: not from circumambient historical factors, nor from a fearful future – but rather, from an earlier year, namely, 1532. This date suggests differently turbulent times; the art of printing forms part of them, and their politics. I refer here to William Thynne’s great Chaucerian opera omnia, and specifically to his including Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid immediately after Troilus and Criseyde. Robert Henryson was a schoolmaster of Dunfermline, very likely a priest, who died c. 1500.17 His

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

164

David Wallace

1  The Workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed (London, 1532), f CCxix r, detail

Testament of Cresseid survives in manuscript hardly at all: just three stanzas in the Ruthven manuscript (University of Edinburgh Library MS Dc.I.43), and one in the Book of the Dean of Lismore (ascribed to ‘Bochas that wes full gud’).18 The most authoritative complete witness to Henryson’s poem is in fact Thynne’s 1532 edition.19 Henryson’s Testament thus survives almost exclusively through association with Thynne; and from the first, which is to say 1532, Chaucer’s Troilus and Henryson’s Testament appear as a single conceptual package. The decisiveness of Thynne’s conjointure may be grasped by examining the point at which his ‘fyfthe boke of Troylus’ transitions, in the running head, to ‘The testament of Creseyde’; and where ‘fifth and laste book’ yields, mid-page, to ‘dolorous testament’: half-way down the left column of Thynne’s folio 219 recto we find the following explicit, conjoined with an incipit: ‘Thus endeth the fyfth and laste booke of Troylus: and here foloweth the pyteful and dolorous testament of fayre Creseyde.’ Since we do have those three stanzas from the Ruthven manuscript we are able to observe Thynne’s Londonizing of Henryson’s Scottish locutions. So in the rhyming couplet of the first stanza, for example, Scots fra becomes Middle English fro; and metrical regularity is sacrificed for a c­ larifying ‘me’:

Arrogant authorial Changing emotionsperformances in Troilus

165

Schouris of haill gart fra the north discend, That scantlie fra the cauld I micht defend. (6–7)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Showres of hayle can fro the northe discende That scantly fro the colde I myt me defende.

(Thynne 1532)

Thynne supplies nothing to alert the reader that the Testament is not by Chaucer. The enterprising reader, however, needed only to read six stanzas in to find the narrator taking down a ‘queare’ or book, ‘Written by worthy Chaucer glorious’; four stanzas later the narrator wonders aloud Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew? (64) Who wot if al that Chaucer wrate was trewe (Thynne 1532)

But sixteenth-century readers were simply not willing to divorce Chaucer’s Troilus from Criseyde’s Testament; such remains the sequence in all editions, amazingly, down to 1721. The publishing of Chaucer goes rather quiet in the later sixteenth century, following Thynne’s editions of 1532 and 1542, but perks up towards the end with Speght’s editions of 1598 and 1602.20 Speght depends heavily upon Thynne, as suggested by that linking explicit/incipit. Suspension marks are expanded, and there are some light modernizing touches. But not too many: for by now, insistence upon Chaucer’s linguistic strangeness was routinely employed to justify a new industry of glossing, annotating and dictionary making.21 The strangeness of Henryson thus merges with the strangeness of Chaucer: for still there is nothing in the edition to advise us that the Testament is not the work of the English poet. Readers seemed not to notice, or to care: all except one, that is. Francis Thynne, son of the printer William, greeted Speght’s edition of 1598 with his Animaduersions vppon the Annotacions and Corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucers workes.22 Having noted very many errors made by Speght, Thynne junior makes the ­following recommendation: yt wolde be good that Chaucers proper woorkes were distinguyshed from the adulterat, and such as were not his, as the Testamente of Cressyde, The Letter of Cupide, and the ballade begynnynge ‘I haue a layde, where so she bee’, &c. whiche Chaucer never composed, as may suffycientlye be proued by the thinges them selues. (p. 69)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

166

David Wallace

But nobody cared. Speght hoovered up very many of the corrections put forward by Thynne and emended his new and improved edition of 1602; but he does not disavow the Testament as a Chaucerian work (fol. 182r). Sir Francis Kinaston, in latinizing Troilus and Criseyde in the 1630s, also provides us with a Latin version of the Testament; he works from Speght’s 1598 edition.23 This extraordinary piece of classicizing provides perhaps the most compelling evidence of the long-established habit of reading the Troilus and the Testament as a single entity; and this, I am ­proposing, is how Shakespeare read them, or rather, it. At this point it might be useful to give a thumbnail summary of the Testament.24 The action proper begins as Diomede, having ‘all his appetyte / And more, fulfylled of this fayre lady’ (71–2), sets his eye to another and divorces Cresseid. The ‘desolate’ Cresseid now changes her ‘femynite’ into ‘fylthe’; ‘with fleschly lust so maculate’, she wanders among the Greek tents, ‘gyglotlyke’. She seeks out her father, Calchas, now priest and keeper of a temple dedicated to Venus and Cupid. Within a secret oratory, Cresseid curses and blames these gods. She falls into a dream, and Cupid immediately calls a parliament of the seven planetary gods. The sentence passed upon Cresseid, for her blasphemy, deprives her of her beauty and condemns her to the life of a wandering leper: This shalte thou go beggyng fro house to hous With cuppe and clapper lyke an lazarous. (342–3)

Having seen his daughter’s ‘ugly leper’s face’, Calchas conveys her to a hospital at the edge of town; here she learns the craft of begging among a crowd of lepers. Troilus one day rides forth from Troy, sees Cresseid among the leper crowd, and recognizes her not at all – although his heart does, mysteriously, palpitate. He departs, and Cresseid delivers a balade, with the refrain ‘O false Creseyde and trewe knight Troylus’. She then makes her testament, bequeathing her ‘corps and carioun’ to be torn apart by worms and toads; she dies and, some say, is buried by Troilus beneath a tomb of grey marble. The golden letters on her ­tombstone read as follows: ‘Lo fayre ladyes, Creseyde of Troy the town, Somtyme compted the flour of womanheed, Under this stone, late leper, lyeth deed.’ (608–10)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial Changing emotionsperformances in Troilus

167

Following one further stanza of exhortation to women, the Testament ends abruptly with the line: ‘Sithe she is deed I speke of her no more’ (616). There is solid internal evidence of Shakespeare’s familiarity with the Testament, or with the Troilus–Testament complex. In Henry V, Pistol refers to ‘the lazar kite of Cressid’s kind’ (2.1.77); and in Twelfth Night, Feste observes that ‘Cressida was a beggar’ (3.1.54).25 Cressida also encounters Troilus ‘with beggars’ in the lost Troilus and Cressida by Chettle and Dekker, performed at the Rose in April 1599 by the Admiral’s Men.26 The suggestion that Shakespeare’s ‘profound understanding’ of Chaucer might in any way have been coloured by familiarity with the Testament has been vigorously resisted by E. Talbot Donaldson: ‘No’, says Donaldson, ‘this composite Henry Chaucerson simply will not do’.27 Donaldson, arguably the most influential Chaucerian of the mid to late twentieth century, was a man deeply invested in the analysis of autonomous human personhood, of human character and of human emotions.28 Such commitment to authorly genius and human emotions sets Donaldson squarely against what we would now call the history of material texts: talk of editions that fall between Chaucer and Shakespeare – of 1532, 1542, c. 1550, 1561 and 1598 – is to Donaldson ‘a school of red herrings’.29 My contention here is and has been that the succession of texts, the work performed by a new text upon its predecessors, might itself possess emotional content – in this case, chiefly, violence. Henryson’s leprous assault upon Criseyde might be read as emotional hijacking of Troilus and Criseyde; Criseyde’s body functions, in this limited sense, as the body of Chaucer’s poem. Shakespeare reshapes and re-temporalizes the Troilus–Testament complex, I have argued, with great authorly animus – although the human lightning rod who catches such emotional violence within the play is not so much Cressida as Pandarus. Remarkably, Donaldson excludes all mention of plague and disease – excepting the observation that ‘leprosy in the later Middle Ages was generally considered a venereal disease’.30 The steady accumulation of such imagery surely suggests the Testament’s seeping into general understanding of the Troilus and Criseyde saga. Even a casual oath early on, in Act 1 Scene 1, might trigger thoughts of the Testament: ‘O gods’, says Troilus, ‘how do you plague me! / I cannot come to Cressid but by Pandar’ (1.1.90–1; my emphasis). Thersites proliferates imaginings of pestilence and disease, à la Chaucer’s Cook: ‘A red murrain o’ thy jade’s tricks’,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

168

David Wallace

he says, where ‘red’ is understood as a term ‘applied to various diseases marked by evacuation of blood or cutaneous eruptions’.31 Such images multiply in the fifth act, as Thersites details ‘the rotten diseases of the south’ (5.1.17–18), or declares ‘I care not to be the louse of a lazar so I were not Menelaus’ (5.1.63–4). Cressida’s first words on seeing Pandarus, once she has slept with Troilus, are ‘A pestilence on him!’ (4.2.22); her first thought, in yielding to Diomede, is ‘I shall be plagued’ (5.2.111). And Troilus, towards the end of the play, appeals to the gods: ‘let your brief plagues be mercy’ (5.11.8); a rather tortured locution, concealing perhaps the Latin plaga or wound within the more general u ­ nderstanding of disease. The figure who ultimately becomes diseased within the play, rather than simply wishing disease upon others, is Pandarus. Act 5 Scene 3 sees him complain of ‘rheum in mine eyes … and such an ache in my bones that, unless a man were cursed, I cannot tell what to think on’t’ (5.3.104–6). By the time he appears at play’s end his sickness is terminal; he is moved to speak as if addressing a livery company: As many as be here of Pander’s hall, Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pander’s fall; Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans, Though not for me, yet for your aching bones. Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade, Some two months hence my will shall here be made. (5.11.47–52)

In glossing this last couplet, David Bevington is uncharacteristically flat-footed, seeing it as ‘the possible promise … of a sequel play that appears not to have materialized. It would appear’, continues Bevington, ‘as though there was not enough material left in any case’ (p. 353). Bevington is right: we are running out of Trojan war, and Troilus must soon be dead. But another word for will, of course, is testament. If Henryson directs the violence of all unresolved issues, and of his own agitated emotions, upon Criseyde, Shakespeare transfers them to Pandarus. Cressida fades from the play in the arms of Diomede, and even Thersites escapes to curse another day. Only Pandarus knows his case to be terminal; the play’s ending is his ending, and it only remains for him to return and read his own last rites. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer punctiliously observes the great distances separating his audience from ancient Troy, and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial Changing emotionsperformances in Troilus

169

finally between ancient Troy and his hero, Troilus, as he ascends to the eighth sphere (V.1807–27). Troilus and Cressida, however, collapses such buffering distances. Pandarus closes the play by promising to bring us diseases. Fear of infection lingers, and the 1609 preface’s bid to save us from ‘the smoky breath of the multitude’ seems newly attractive; the clean sheets of a Quarto seem preferable to the perils of the pit. Shakespeare, I have argued, acts violently upon Chaucer’s poem in shaping his play: but the ultimate animus of Troilus and Cressida is saved for Pandarus. This might be read as a clever diversionary tactic, or as an act of bad faith: for, in Chaucer’s poem, the scheming Pandarus clearly functions as a figure of the author. In occluding this correspondence between plot-maker and play-maker, Shakespeare suppresses consideration of the playwright as fomentor of disease: for it is he, the maker of plays, who crowds people into playhouses.32 The emotions of fear and loathing that linger after Troilus and Cressida has been performed owe something to the events of the time, to the architecture of the time, even to the weather of the time. But they also connect with an earlier time: William Thynne’s decision, in 1532, to create the strange, composite creature that we might as well recognize, after Donaldson, as Henry Chaucerson. Notes   1 The text cited throughout is Filostrato, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 2, ed. V. Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1964); author translation. See further D. Wallace, ‘Lovestruck in Naples: Filostrato’, in V. Kirkham, M. Sherberg and J. L. Smarr (eds), Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).  2 I am indebted here to the ongoing work of Marilynn Desmond and Charmaine Lee; for now see M. Desmond, ‘History and fiction: the narrativity and historiography of the matter of Troy’, in W. Burgwinkle, N. Hammond and E. Wilson (eds), The Cambridge History of French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 139–44 (esp. pp. 142–3).  3 See further D. Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 75–93.  4 All Chaucer quotations are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 1988).  5 See, for example, V.1037–50 and V.1765–78.  6 Reproduced in Troilus and Cressida, ed. D. Bevington, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998), pp. 120–2. All references are to this edition.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

David Wallace

 7 For an astute account of Bonian and Walley as both publishers and readers of the play, see Z. Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–4 and 9.  8 See further D. Wallace, ‘Italy’, in P. Brown (ed.), A Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 218–34 (pp. 230–2).   9 For moving and extended meditation on Dante’s simultaneous attachment ‘to Christianity and to paganism’, see K. Foster, The Two Dantes (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977), p. 156. 10 Hamlet, ed. A. Thompson and N. Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 2.2.494. 11 Cited in Troilus and Cressida, ed. Bevington, p. 382, n. 1; M. C. Bradbrook, ‘What Shakespeare did to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 9.3 (1958), 311–19 (313). 12 See ‘St Botolph’s’, in T. Hughes, Birthday Letters (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 14–15. 13 J. Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 14 I.386 and note (Riverside Chaucer, p. 814; the term derives from the French mortmal). 15 Troilus and Cressida, ed. Bevington, pp. 121 and 120. 16 See Bevington, ‘Introduction’ to his Troilus and Cressida edition, pp. 11–19; E. S. Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 25–61. 17 See The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. D. Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Robert Henryson, The Complete Works, ed. D. J. Parkinson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010); my citations follow Fox. 18 National Library of Scotland, Gaelic MS XXXVII; see Complete Works, ed. Parkinson, p. 9; Poems, ed. Fox, pp. xcvi–xcvii. 19 The poem is listed in the original table of contents of the Asloan MS (NLS MS 16500). The relevant portion of Asloan has not survived; its Testament may have derived from a print of c. 1508 (Poems, ed. Fox, p. xcix). The Henrie Charteris edition printed at Edinburgh in 1593 (STC 13165) survives in a single copy at the British Library. 20 On Thynne’s editions of 1532 and 1542 (and his undated third edition), and on John Stow’s not negligible, Thynne-based edition of 1561, see the essays in P. G. Ruggiers (ed.), Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1984). 21 See M. Cook, ‘Managing the past: lexical commentary in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) and Chaucer’s Works (1598/1602)’, Spenser Studies, 25 (2011), 179–222. 22 Francis Thynne, Animaduersions vppon the Annotacions and Corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucers workes, ed. F. J.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Arrogant authorial Changing emotionsperformances in Troilus

171

Furnivall (London: Oxford University Press for Early English Text Society, rev. edn, 1875). 23 Bodleian Libraries, MS Add. C. 287, dated 1639 on the title page; see Poems, ed. Fox, p. xcviii. 24 I follow the spellings of Thynne 1532, with an eye to Fox for punctuation. 25 King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Routledge, 1995); Twelfth Night, or What You Will, ed. K. Elam, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Cengage Learning, 2008). 26 See Bevington, ‘Shakespeare’s sources’, in his edition, pp. 393–4. 27 E. T. Donaldson, The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 77. 28 See further Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone Press, 1970), and C. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 28–64. 29 Donaldson, The Swan at the Well, p. 75. 30 Donaldson, The Swan at the Well, p. 75. 31 2.1.18 and note (citing OED 16b). 32 Ironically, and supplementarily, Bonian and Walley stop the press of  their edition so that their title page might suggest, might market, a pristine closet drama rather than a theatrical hit (Lesser, Politics of Publication, p. 1).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

11 Gendered books: reading, space and intimacy in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde Andrew James Johnston

In purely structural terms, Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde erects a narrative edifice impressive for its classical austerity. In fact, the text seizes every opportunity of showcasing its highly artificial symmetry: for example, each of the five books begins with an invocation of the Muses or a similar rhetorical topos – the first instances of such invocations in English literary history. This penchant for order and symmetry emphasizes what Allen J. Frantzen has identified as one of the text’s principal aesthetic devices, namely the ubiquitous occurrence of framing of all types and on all levels.1 This holds especially true for the way in which the action is staged: frequently, we encounter enclosed spaces opening up onto other spaces which may themselves contain further enclosed spaces, such as the chamber-like bed that provides the setting for the lovers’ union half-way through Book III. Seth Lerer has invented the highly apposite term ‘enchamberment’ to describe this effect of multiple enclosure.2 Yet another layer of complexity is added by the fact that these multiple instances of framing – structural and otherwise – are accompanied by a complex network of intertextual references to Statius’s Thebaid.3 The intertextual links to Thebes thus may themselves be seen as a kind of framing device linking Troy’s tragic, but still supposedly heroic history with an even darker and more ominous past. After all, the legendary matter of Thebes is brimming with all the horrors classical mythology can muster – patricide and incest, fratricide and cannibalism. Revisited by Chaucer time and again, this thematic complex is characterized by what Lee Patterson has termed ‘Thebanness’. Fraught with the inescapable heritage of an endless circle of violence, devoid of any deeper sense and frequently motivated by incest, Thebanness ultimately robs history of all potential meaning, let alone purpose: ‘Theban history in its pure form has neither origin nor end but

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gendered books

173

only a single, infinitely repeatable moment of illicit eroticism and fratricidal rivalry – love and war locked together in a perverse fatality.’4 Small wonder, then, that the matter of Thebes provides far more than just an ominous rumble in the background. In fact, the larger part of the poem’s action is framed by two highly conspicuous intertextual references to the Thebaid. In both cases, the text deploys female characters in the double function of readers or interpreters well-versed in Theban history. Hence the poem appears to be linking an awareness of history and its continuing influence and impact on the present to hermeneutical acts conspicuously gendered female.5 In Troilus and Criseyde reading is a gender issue and moreover, as I will show in the following, a question of the particular spaces where emotions are both gendered and engendered. The first of the two scenes that link acts of interpretation to Theban subject matter occurs at the beginning of Book II. It is the one where Pandarus encounters his niece and her ladies reading a version of Theban history. The second is placed at the beginning of Book V, where Cassandra, Troilus’s sister, interprets her brother’s dream of a wild boar that tears out the prince’s heart and consumes it.6 The horrible beast represents Diomede, who has succeeded in stealing away Criseyde’s love – this is Cassandra’s way of letting her brother know that his fate is sealed. Rather than with this instance of a woman interpreting a man’s dream, my main concern lies with the scene’s close-to-symmetrical counterpart in Book II. Here, Pandarus seeks out his niece for the first time in his newly acquired role as Prince Troilus’s gobetween. Traditionally, this passage has been interpreted as the place where the text establishes a politics of emotion predicated upon a gendered usage of reading matter, thereby connecting powerful emotions to the issue of gender-specific expectations and experiences involved in the reading process itself: ‘But I am sory that I have yow let To herken of youre book ye preysen thus. For Goddes love, what seith it? telle it us! Is it of love? O, som good ye me leere!’ ‘Uncle,’ quod she, ‘your maistresse is nat here.’ With that they gonne laughe, and tho she seyde, ‘This romaunce is of Thebes that we rede; And we han herd how that kyng Layus deyde

174

Andrew James Johnston

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thorugh Edippus his sone, and al that dede; And here we stynten at thise lettres rede – How the bisshop, as the book kan telle, Amphiorax, fil thorugh the ground to helle.’ Quod Pandarus, ‘Al this knowe I myselve, And al th’assege of Thebes and the care; For herof ben there maked bookes twelve. But lat be this, and telle me how ye fare. Do wey youre barbe, and shew youre face bare; Do wey your book, rys up, and lat us daunce, And lat us don to May som observaunce.’ (II.94–112)

In what used to be the predominant interpretation of this scene, Pandarus encounters Criseyde in a tiled room, where she and two of her ladies-in-waiting are busy reading. This scene gives Pandarus reason to hope that the perusal of a courtly romance has left Criseyde in an emotional state conducive to his wooing. Much to his chagrin, however, it transpires that Criseyde seems to have been reading the Roman de Thèbes, a work he apparently deems incapable of inducing the desired affective conditioning. Thus, Pandarus harshly brushes Criseyde’s autonomous reading habits aside with a reference to his own educational background. His knowledge of the subject matter does not derive from a paltry courtly romance written in French, but rather from the original itself, that is, from the Thebaid. Moreover, by explicitly emphasizing what he considers to be the text’s duodecimal structure, Pandarus leaves no doubt as to the specifically epic credentials of Statius’s hypercanonical masterpiece. In so doing, this school of reading argues, Pandarus re-establishes male dominance over literature and its usage: while the historical genres proper are best left to men, women ought to content themselves with suitably light and preferably ‘romantic’ fare. Needless to say, the appropriate male way of engaging with historical subject matter involves recourse to the text’s original version – unaltered and untranslated, and most certainly ­unblemished by overly ­emotional, let alone erotic, overtones. According to this well-established type of interpretation, what we encounter here is a neat set of binary oppositions, all merging seamlessly into each other: women are associated with potentially identificatory readings of romantic subject matter presented in the vernacular, whereas men satisfy their need for a quasi-classicist, distanced and hermeneutically sophisticated reading experience

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gendered books

175

with texts in Latin.7 The anachronism inherent in Criseyde’s and Pandarus’s references to literary works that were composed several centuries later than the chronological level of the action would seem to allow is a typical example of Chaucerian intertextual irony. Even if one is not inclined to follow the traditional reading, the scene’s intertextual anachronism clearly demonstrates that the references to the matter of Thebes accomplish a lot more than merely illustrating the aftereffects of violence throughout the course of history – here, the texts themselves, their layout and their ­interpretation move into the very focus of our attention. Yet this scene is somewhat less unequivocal than earlier research would have us believe: in 1998, Catherine Sanok demonstrated that there is no truly compelling reason to assume that the text that Criseyde and her retinue are reading is actually meant to be the Roman de Thèbes – in fact, there is not a single piece of textual evidence to support this claim. One of the most important arguments in favour of the traditional reading is based on the semantics of the Middle English romaunce, usually interpreted as ‘courtly romance’ in the context of Troilus and Criseyde.8 This, however, is a term with an extremely rich texture of meaning, capable of denoting anything from ‘a text with a knightly/courtly plot’ through ‘a text dealing with history’ to ‘a text written in French’.9 Were we to opt for the utterly plausible ‘a text dealing with history’, for example, the alleged opposition between Pandarus’s and Criseyde’s texts would immediately collapse. Given the absence of indications as to precisely which book Criseyde is reading when her uncle enters the room, it seems far more natural to assume that she is engrossed in the same text Pandarus himself has in mind, namely Statius’s Thebaid.10 Pandarus’s dismissive reaction would then be a consequence of Criseyde’s failure to read the courtly romance that he had hoped would facilitate his task. What is more, Pandarus’s irritation would derive from a feeling of having been caught on the wrong foot, from a perception of his cultural competence having successfully been challenged and called into question.11 If we follow the implications of Sanok’s line of thought beyond her own reading, the extent of Pandarus’s cultural competence does, indeed, appear to be rather limited: remarkably, he does not respond to Criseyde’s description of the scene featuring Amphiorax, the priest.12 Ultimately, the only proof of whatever literary expertise he might possess remains his awareness of the fact that the text in question is an epic and therefore comes packaged in twelve books. Addressed on the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

176

Andrew James Johnston

subject of a key scene in Statius’s ultra-canonical work, Pandarus avoids a direct response and resorts to a commonplace statement concerning nothing more specific than the genre of the text as a whole. Put in a consciously anachronistic way, the scene reads as follows. Expecting an intimate boudoir, Pandarus has inadvertently chanced upon a literary salon, where the frivolous matchmaker can offer the sophisticated literary ladies no more than a superficial knowledge easily gleaned from the pages of an encyclopaedia. Facing a quandary, he quickly changes the subject and asks his niece to dance. Hence, in order to establish the erotically charged atmosphere that literature has obviously failed to provide, he resorts to a ritualized physical activity with safely conventionalized gender roles. This interpretation of the scene amounts to a full reversal of the gender dynamics involved in the act of reading as assumed by traditional research. Instead of a quasi-structuralist binary that establishes a contrast between ‘male’, ‘classicist’, ‘Latin’, ‘epic’, ‘historical’ and ‘hermeneutically sophisticated’, on the one hand, and ‘female’, ‘focused on the present’, ‘vernacular’, ‘romance’, ‘love-related’ and ‘identificatory’, on the other, we encounter a highly context-dependent pair of opposites: the literary competence of a female reader is juxtaposed with a superficial male fixation on gendering, with the latter possibly even serving as a rather transparent fig-leaf for plain and simple ignorance. At least potentially, this involves a further reversal: the gender-specific purposes of the two types of text in question are changed into their diametrical opposites. Here, it is not women who use literature as an erotic stimulant. On the contrary, it is the men who do, that is, Pandarus does – even as, paradoxically, he appears to be insinuating that the emotion-generating model of literary consumption he implicitly recommends is typically female.13 In so doing, Pandarus becomes the personification of the erotodidactic literary tradition of the Middle Ages, reaching back to Andreas Capellanus and even further back to Ovid.14 As we thus follow a trajectory suggested by Catherine Sanok’s ground-breaking interpretation, we realize that there is yet another problem about the traditional way of reading the scene, a drawback Sanok’s interpretation incidentally shares. Like the vast majority of existing scholarship including Carolyn Dinshaw’s seminal post-structuralist/feminist interpretation,15 Sanok claims that Pandarus’s interruption cuts short what is essentially Criseyde’s first and only encounter with the Thebaid and consequently curtails her knowledge of the text:

Gendered books

177

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

But the importance of the sudden violence of Amphiaraus’ disappearance for Criseyde’s own situation is left unspecified, the pertinent passage left unread by Criseyde and her women. The ‘lettres rede’ … at which they stop suggest rubrics either at the heading of a book or a section within a book; that is they cease reading at the chapter heading that announces Amphiaraus’s death, without having read the narrative itself.16

According to this interpretation, Criseyde must remain dangerously ignorant of the terrible events the Thebaid depicts after the scene with Amphiorax, events that will ultimately shape her future lover Diomede’s historical origins and thus, in a way, influence her own. Unbeknownst to her, the unique chance of catching a glimpse of her fate in the pages of history has passed – what remains is dramatic irony. Closer examination of the passage reveals, however, that this interpretation rests on assumptions the text fails to bear out. There is, after all, no textual evidence whatsoever that the interruption of the public reading process must of necessity bring to an end a first reading of the text. In other words, there is no reason to assume that when Pandarus enters the room Criseyde has no previous knowledge of the text she and her companions are reading. Actually, the contrary is the case: under closer scrutiny, Criseyde’s remarks imply that she is thoroughly familiar with the text. Hence, Joyce Coleman has provided a substantial argument in favour of Criseyde’s familiarity with her reading matter. For Coleman, the scene shows that Chaucer places the reading experience itself at the very heart of his notion of literature. By referring to the red letters, Criseyde not only demonstrates an exact knowledge of the text, but also emphasizes her status as a self-consciously competent reader. After all, it is a mark of the competent reader that he or she is capable of confidently moving back and forth within the text, that is from one set of ‘lettres rede’ to the next.17 And apparently, Criseyde automatically assumes Pandarus to possess a similar degree of familiarity. Consequently, his reaction turns out to be as brusque as it does precisely because he is so painfully aware of not having the knowledge expected of him. In this scene, the Thebaid is referenced as a highly canonical cultural asset, ignorance of which constitutes a deplorable flaw in the circles of the Trojan aristocracy.18 The particular setting Pandarus encounters reinforces this impression: it is evident that the scene describes a semi-­public reading, with the aristocratic widow Criseyde holding court

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

178

Andrew James Johnston

surrounded by a circle of ladies-in-waiting – in a paved parlour, no less. This clearly is a luxuriously furnished room with a highly visible public and official function, one reserved for social gath­ erings of a formal nature, a fact emphatically underlined by the text’s pointed reference to the chamber’s tiled floor, the only, but nevertheless highly significant feature disclosed about the parlour’s interior decoration. This room’s specific character elevates the reading’s social relevance to a much higher level than that of a mere sociable gathering. Annette Kern-Stähler has actually classified the scene as a lectio.19 The setting evokes a humanist reading of the classics rather than an image of Criseyde leafing through courtly romances in the relative seclusion of her bedroom – even though the latter scenario would, in all likelihood, have been much more to her uncle’s taste. So, when Pandarus questions Criseyde on the nature of her reading matter, she reveals herself both as a highly knowledgeable and as a self-consciously public reader of classical literature. Not only does she reject the affective and thus allegedly female reading habits imputed to her, she also exhibits an educational horizon far wider than Pandarus’s own; a horizon, moreover, that seems to play a deliberate part in her public self-fashioning. Slightly anachronistic as it may be, the term ‘educational horizon’ proves all the more helpful here as it reminds us of how strongly the staging of the reading process is linked to a particular space, the ‘paved parlour’. Reading a widely accepted – and thus equally widely known – classic in a semi-public, almost ritualized setting establishes for the Trojan widow a protected domain of respectability. For the time being, this physical, social and cultural space makes it possible for the daughter of a notorious traitor to reject her uncle’s emotional and erotic importunities. Criseyde thus makes use of the official-cum-public reading environment as a means to protect her private sphere as well as her public reputation: ‘Reading with her women, Criseyde is engaged in a communal yet chaste activity, over which she has control and in which she is free and safe.’20 There is yet another argument in favour of assuming that the narrator is depicting a Criseyde well aware of Theban history in general, and of the Thebaid in particular. As Lee Patterson has shown in what has become one of the classic studies on the subject, Chaucer’s main concern in Troilus and Criseyde is to demonstrate how deeply Trojan history is imbued with the ‘Thebanness’ briefly mentioned earlier. Despite or rather because of the significance medieval historiography attached to the matter of Troy in its bid to

Gendered books

179

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

legitimize historically the European monarchies, Chaucer aims to expose the pointlessness of Trojan history.21 As Patterson argues, this sense of futility is ultimately revealed in the protagonists’ inability to grasp their own historical situation: The poem defines historical experience in Theban terms as iterative and compelled, and like Troilus before Cassandra, habitually – and necessarily – blind to its own meaning. This message preempts not only local lessons about the meaning of Criseyde’s betrayal and Troilus’ disillusionment but large-scale historical hypotheses about the Fall of Troy and the meaning of history itself.22

Such a lack of insight pertaining to one’s own role within the course of history becomes even more significant, however, if the protagonists are equipped with a modicum of historical knowledge. Characters blissfully ignorant of history in the first place can hardly be blamed for their blindness to its workings. Only when a lack of historical understanding manifests itself against the backdrop of historical knowledge does the condition of historical blindness assume its full perfidious force. All the more reason, then, to assume that Criseyde and, by extension, her fellow-Trojans in general possess an intense familiarity with the Theban subject matter that forms the poem’s all-pervasive subtext – even though the two most important male characters remain largely unaware of its consequences for their own existence. Pandarus’s lack of literary or historical knowledge so trenchantly betrayed in the pavedparlour scene is thus relentlessly put on display in all its cultural culpability. Any reading that grants Criseyde a deeper knowledge and awareness of history, especially of Theban history, must naturally have considerable consequences for the way we understand the poem as a whole. Every interpretation that draws on the reading scene as evidence of Criseyde’s being little more than a passive victim of her uncle’s manipulations must now be called into question. For example, Carolyn Dinshaw’s important feminist interpretation cites this scene in support of reading Criseyde primarily as the passive object of a specifically male hermeneutics, of her being subject to strategies of ‘reading like a man’.23 Dinshaw casts the poem’s female protagonist as the object of a male-encoded act of reading aimed at a one-dimensional disambiguation of Criseyde’s semantic potential – even if this disambiguation paradoxically consists of hermeneutically defining the female as an unreadable signifier, an unknowable being. According to Dinshaw, Criseyde

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

Andrew James Johnston

thus enacts the role of a text whose semiotic instability necessarily implies the ‘slydynge of corage’,24 the emotional gliding or sliding that enables the female protagonist not only to swap besieged Troy for the Greek camp but also to leave the embrace of Troilus for the arms of Diomede, just as the circumstances may require. In Dinshaw’s reading, the semiotic instability assigned to the heroine fulfils a crucial political function in an aristocratic or patriarchal world shaped by male homosociality: women become bartering objects men use amongst themselves to settle their relationships. Within a system that classifies female emotions as inherently capricious, volatile and enigmatic,25 it is easy to turn women into bargaining chips in the service of a male-dominated economy of power. Not only are females pushed around at will but they are also branded as faithless so that their true function in the network of male relations remains obscure. While Carolyn Dinshaw’s analysis still constitutes one of the most important interventions in the debate on Criseyde’s specific role in the poem, to a certain extent her reading seems to perpetuate the male perspective Dinshaw set out to criticize. In Dinshaw’s view, Criseyde’s lament that later generations of female readers will accuse her of being inconstant is no more than a powerless cry for help.26 Ultimately, in her helplessness, Criseyde conforms exactly to the role she is intended to play within the patriarchal framework described.27 If, however, we wish to take Criseyde’s semi-public act of reading seriously, then we must examine the alternative to Dinshaw’s reading. In this context it is worthwhile to devote closer attention also to Pandarus’s characterization as a reader. Close to half-way between his exchange with Criseyde on the issue of Theban reading matter and Cassandra’s ominous act of dream interpretation at the beginning of Book V, we encounter Pandarus in the role of a reader once again. As the story approaches its absolute climax with Troilus and Criseyde finally finding themselves in bed together, Pandarus withdraws after he has quite literally pushed Troilus into bed with his beloved: And with that word he drow hym to the feere, And took a light, and fond his contenaunce, As for to looke upon an old romaunce. (III.978–80)

Dinshaw provides the following summary: ‘he reads the lovers’ persons as characters in a script he has himself written – reads

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gendered books

181

them as if they constituted an “old romaunce”’.28 If Dinshaw is to be believed, the gaze of their protector Pandarus, voyeuristic and romanticizing at the same time, turns the two lovers into characters from an old romance, that is, into insipid literary stereotypes. At this juncture, the Middle English wording makes possible an alternative interpretation of what Pandarus is actually doing. After all, Middle English finden countenaunce does not necessarily mean ‘look at something’, but can also be translated as ‘create the impression of (doing something)’.29 It is a term frequently used in a courtly environment, where it refers to a courtier’s capacity for dissimulation, hence it is a particularly apt term to use in connection with Pandarus. If we accept this alternative meaning of finden countenaunce, then the text is primarily concerned with Pandarus’s withdrawal from the situation under the pretext of reading, while actually remaining present as a voyeur.30 After all, one of the striking peculiarities of Troilus and Criseyde’s consummation scene – and a source of marvel for modern readers – is the fact that despite its brilliantly staged literary intimacy, the lovers’ union is in no way shrouded by privacy. Pandarus may be withdrawing from the bed itself – but only as far as the fireplace, where he pretends to be reading in the candlelight. He never actually leaves the room. He remains present as a voyeur, his intrusive attention scantily concealed behind his book. Why the need for such a curious and only too transparent concealment? Why the need for pretending to be reading? Pandarus himself has already provided the key: as the question he has addressed earlier to the reading Criseyde has shown, for him texts have a certain practical value, a vulgar version of the Brechtian Gebrauchswert. In Pandarus’s view, texts are useful in that they provide emotional and erotic stimulation. The act of reading is thus conceptualized as an act of intimacy, as an experience governed by and conducive to emotions. This is why Pandarus can act as if he were absent. By the light of his candle, he claims the existence of  an alternative space of intimacy, a space defined by the presence of  a book. Instead of a single private space within the room – the lovers’ bed – now there are two, both of which claim the right of constituting a sphere of particular emotional intimacy. One of these spheres is, however, only make-believe. As in the first reading scene, for Pandarus erotic reading is here meant to create a particular space; yet whereas Criseyde’s semi-public reading in the paved parlour allowed her not only to protect her intimacy but actually to claim a formal intellectual space for herself, a non-romantic and non-erotic

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

182

Andrew James Johnston

semi-public space, Pandarus now manages to invade the lovers’ intimacy with an act of reading that only seems to be private and that does not really constitute an act of reading anyway. As A. C. Spearing has noted in this context: ‘looking is not identical with reading’.31 As a pseudo-reader, Pandarus now prevails where ­previously he failed. The point is not so much whether Pandarus’s camouflage is truly successful – we learn nothing about that from the text – but rather what notion of the reading process enables him to resort to such a transparent kind of concealment in the first place. As far as the narrator is concerned – an entity critics often see as Pandarus’s alter ego32 – his camouflage seems to be effective. In the course of the erotic events that unfold in the bed, Pandarus is not mentioned again. Criseyde’s uncle really has disappeared into his very own bibliogenic alternative space of intimacy. Busy as he is in describing the fascinating erotic scene, the ­narrator appears simply to have forgotten about his voyeuristic alter ego. What happens on the narrative level is exactly what Pandarus’s camouflage is hinting at on the level of the plot: both the narrator and the audience are gripped by the same maelstrom of textually generated passion, causing Pandarus to slip from the reader’s vision. Pandarus’s camouflage is successful, then – though not on the level on which it takes place. The act of intimate reading produces exactly those powerful emotions Pandarus had hoped to draw on previously when he was wooing Criseyde on behalf of Troilus. Yet there remains an important difference between the earlier reading scene and Pandarus’s vanishing act at the beginning of the consummation scene. Ironically, Pandarus only pretends to be reading an old romance as the use of the phrase finden countenaunce emphasizes. Consequently, this is not, strictly speaking, a reading scene after all. Here, the book turns into a mere material signifier referring to nothing but the emotionally charged act of reading itself, an act that does not really happen. It seems as though the only thing that matters here is how reading may serve as a signifier capable of creating an emotionally charged space, rather than reading as a hermeneutic activity. Pandarus’s book functions as a mere cipher of a particular, that is emotional, style of reading. It is through this contrast that the special importance of the reading scene in the paved parlour reveals itself. There, the conflict between Criseyde and Pandarus is not one between a male way of reading with a tendency towards reductive semantic disambiguation, on the one hand, and a female way of reading that emphasizes

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gendered books

183

a text’s openness and complexity, on the other. Read in comparison with Pandarus’s feigned reading during the consummation scene, the earlier conflict seems to be far more basic in nature, or, to put it differently, much more primitive – it is a conflict between a male attitude towards reading that instrumentalizes the book in order to manufacture extra-literary emotions intended to meet a particular purpose, and another attitude towards reading, female in the case at hand, seeking to protect the character of the book as a text and to gain respectability from that very textuality. It is only because books serve the principal purpose of creating suitable emotions in the Pandaric universe that Pandarus is permitted to reduce the book to the status of a mere material object in Troilus and Criseyde’s climactic scene, abusing it as mere signifier of certain emotional processes and instrumentalizing it for an emotional immersion that is after all only feigned. The tension between Pandarus and Criseyde in the reading scene reminds us to beware of a concept of reading in which the production of powerful emotions ultimately renders superfluous the type of reading that focuses on the activity of i­nterpretation. What kindles this conflict is thus not the difference between competing hermeneutical approaches, as Dinshaw sees it,33 but rather the difference between a notion of reading that invokes hermeneutical traditions and one that, in favour of achieving an overwhelming effect in erotic or emotional terms, seeks to do away with hermeneutics altogether. As, we have seen, in Troilus and Criseyde the act of reading is always in some way ‘about’ spaces. In the scenes we have been scrutinizing, the spaces in question are, in fact, constituted via the specific nature of acts of reading. As far as the spatial structure associated with the reading process is concerned, Criseyde’s reading contributes to the protection both of her respectability and her intimacy by establishing a sense of distance while simultaneously providing a way of politely rejecting her uncle’s importunities. Pandarus’s way of reading, on the other hand, reveals a powerful urge to overstep the borders of intimacy even when he appears to be protecting these very borders – the objective here is to instrumentalize reading as a means of evoking suitable emotions. In Troilus and Criseyde, reading is always mentioned in the same breath with emotions. Yet ultimately, both the emotions themselves and the reading processes they are associated with assume their proper meaning only within spatial contexts, contexts inextricably linked to the issue of power in gender relations. Thus

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

184

Andrew James Johnston

through its very formality, through its quality of being paved and, hence, semi-public, the first reading scene’s paved parlour not only produces a level playing field on which male and female readers can compete – and a female reader actually wins – but also guarantees, through what one might call its very lack of intimacy and emotion, that a style of reading that privileges hermeneutic activity over affective immersion remains possible. Paradoxically, as we have seen, in the paved parlour privacy is protected through a public act of reading and through the act of reading at a distance. At this point, a final word on the problem of framing as mentioned at the very beginning of this chapter seems in order. At the end of the day, Pandarus’s presence in the bedchamber, too, constitutes an act of framing, produces a frame around Troilus and Criseyde just as the box-like bed itself frames the lovers. But while the bed does, to a certain extent, appear to be serving as a protective frame – amongst other things it helps to permit readers to forget about Pandarus’s presence – Pandarus’s feigned act of reading with its voyeuristic purpose by contrast results in something that resembles what one might paradoxically term ‘an intrusive frame’, a form of framing that does not so much close off the scene as render it accessible. And this frame could become even more ominously intrusive if we permitted ourselves, for a brief moment, to speculate on the nature of the reading matter Pandarus employs to hide his voyeuristic presence. What if the ‘old romaunce’ he feigns to be perusing is the very same book that Criseyde and her ladies were reading earlier? After all, Criseyde refers to the previous book with the words: ‘This romaunce is of Thebes that we rede.’ If Criseyde is capable of calling Statius’s epic a ‘romaunce’, then might it not be equally possible to imagine – and, obviously, we can do no more than merely imagine – that Pandarus’s book, too, represents a copy of the Thebaid? If Pandarus were actually pretending to be reading the Thebaid while watching Troilus and Criseyde consummate their love, he would be following a poignant logic of revenge. The very book that threatened to obstruct his advance in its early stages, and that simultaneously made him look intellectually inferior to his niece, would now turn into an ideal metaphor for his triumph. Alas, there is absolutely no textual evidence to support this idea. Speculative though this suggestion admittedly is, it does draw attention to the fact that we know nothing of Pandarus’s book, except that it is ‘old’ and a ‘romaunce’. If we read ‘romaunce’ with its specifically modern meaning, that is as denoting ‘(chivalric) romance’, then the adjective ‘old’ must automatically take on a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gendered books

185

nostalgic ring. If, however, we prefer to see ‘romaunce’ in terms of the relative semantic flexibility it possessed in Middle English, then the word ‘old’ could actually express a sense of historical authority rather than nostalgic quaintness. In that case, Pandarus would indirectly be insisting on the gendered hermeneutics he seemed to be supporting in the first reading scene. In the final analysis, the question of what exactly it is that Pandarus pretends to be reading must, of course, remain unanswered. Yet, if we see his reading as a motif responding to that earlier reading scene which exposed both his comparative literary ignorance and his particular approach to reading, then there is a certain logic to his so visibly exploiting an act of apparent reading. Just as the earlier scene highlighted the ever-present Theban subtext, the bedroom scene reminds us once more that the poem as a whole is characterized by powerful intertextual resonances, the most important of which is the Theban one. Despite remaining unread as well as unnamed, Pandarus’s book cannot but draw attention to the poem’s manifold intertextual, emotional and spatial entanglements. Even as they consummate their love, Troilus and Criseyde must share their intimate space not only with a voyeur but with a book. Seth Lerer’s concept of ‘enchamberment’ thus assumes another, a specifically intertextual quality: thanks to Pandarus, the lovers are framed by a book, even if we have no idea what book that may actually be. Notes  1 A. J. Frantzen, Troilus and Criseyde: The Poem and the Frame (New York: Twayne, 1993), pp. 34–46.  2 S. Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 8.  3 C. Sanok, ‘Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid: women and the Theban subtext of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 20 (1998), 41–71 (41).  4 L. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 77.  5 Sanok, ‘Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid’, 44.  6 Troilus and Criseyde, Book V, lines 1450 ff. All quotations taken from L. D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 2008).  7 For a fairly recent example of this school of interpretation see T. E. Hill describing Criseyde’s way of reading as ‘affective and intuitive’,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

186

Andrew James Johnston

based among other things on the argument that the text she is reading is the Roman de Thèbes (T. E. Hill, ‘She, This in Blak.’ Vision, Truth, and Will in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 69).  8 See for instance B. Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the ‘Roman Antique’, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 15 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 228.  9 P. Strohm, ‘Storie, spelle, geste, romaunce, tragedie: generic distinctions in the Middle English Troy narratives’, Speculum, 46 (1971), 348–59. 10 Sanok, ‘Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid’, 47. Sanok offers a concise overview of the arguments that are usually deployed in support of the hypothesis that the book in question is the Roman de Thèbes, and convincingly refutes them. My reference here is to Sanok’s deliberations in general – I shall refrain from discussing each issue individually, such as the fact that Amphiaraus is referred to as a ‘bishop’ or that the death of Laius is mentioned in the Roman de Thèbes while it is absent from the Thebaid. 11 It is typical of discussions of the reading scene that the content of the dialogue between Pandarus and Criseyde is examined with a positivist attention verging on sophistry, while the dramatic situation and the emotional dynamics of the conversation are all but ignored. Lee Patterson, despite adhering to the conventional version involving the Roman de Thèbes, does at least emphasize that Pandarus expresses himself ‘pretentiously’ (Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 132). 12 This is not to say, however, that Pandarus is portrayed as entirely uneducated in Troilus and Criseyde. On the contrary, as Michael A. Calabrese has shown, Pandarus is well versed in Ovidian matter, for example the Heroides. Significantly, Troilus proves not to be familiar with that text (M. A. Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts of Love (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), p. 37). 13 For a recent political reading that places Pandarus’s frivolity in the context of the Ricardian court see S. Federico, ‘Two Troy books: the political classicism of Walsingham’s Ditis ditatus and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 35 (2013), 137–77 (162–3). 14 J. M. Newman, ‘Dictators of Venus: clerical love letters and female subjection in Troilus and Criseyde and the Rota Veneris’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 36 (2014), 104–38 (134–5). 15 C. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 28–64. 16 Sanok, ‘Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid’, 50. 17 J. Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 68 and 165.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gendered books

187

18 In the further course of her interpretation, Sanok relies heavily on the argument that it is impossible for Criseyde to be aware of Diomede’s origins because she never had a chance to read the pertinent passages of the Thebaid (Sanok, ‘Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid’, 53). Yet the text remains silent on this subject; there is no evidence as to the extent of the historical knowledge Criseyde has at her command. Given the text’s reticence, neither positive nor negative conclusions can be drawn here. 19 A. Kern-Stähler, A Room of One’s Own: Reale und mentale Innenräume weiblicher Selbstbestimmung im spätmittelalterlichen England (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 193. 20 Coleman, Public Reading, p. 165. 21 For a recent critique of Patterson’s view stressing how it was precisely the downfall of Troy that gave meaning to medieval Europe’s symbolic order, see G. Edmondson, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), p. 105. 22 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 154. 23 Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, pp. 28–64. 24 Troilus and Criseyde (V.825). 25 For a fascinating interpretation of what one might call Criseyde’s semiotic instability see W. R. Keller, Selves and Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages, Britannica & Americana, 3rd series, vol. 25 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), pp. 450–75, who sees Criseyde as a hybrid figure in both literary and cultural terms. As Keller explains, Criseyde’s ineluctable liminality – first she appears as a traitor’s daughter deliberately left behind in a potentially hostile environment, and then she is a Trojan woman in the enemy camp – results, amongst other things, from her being a poetic construction at the crossroads of two different traditions of Ovidian literary discourse: the abandoned woman of Heroides and the exile of the Tristia. 26 ‘Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende, Shal neyther ben ywriten or ysonge No good word, for this bokes wol me shende’ (V.1058–60). 27 For a critic who supports Dinshaw’s reading, see for example S. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 217. 28 Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 49. 29 The relevant entry in the Middle English Dictionary states: ‘(a) finden herte, to take heart or have the heart (to do something); ~ in herte, to make up one’s mind, be inclined or willing (to do something); (b) ~ countenaunce, to assume (a certain) expression’. And entry (b) cites exactly the scene we are discussing: ‘(b) a1425(c1385) Chaucer TC (Benson-Robinson) 3.979: He … fond his contenaunce As for to looke upon an old romaunce’. H. Kurath and S. Kuhn (eds), The Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1954–2001).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

188

Andrew James Johnston

30 For an analysis of Pandarus as voyeur see S. Stanbury, ‘The voyeur and the private life in Troilus and Criseyde’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 13 (1991), 141–58. 31 A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 125. 32 W. Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 35. 33 Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 51.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

12 ‘The formless ruin of oblivion’: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and literary defacement James Simpson

The main late medieval Troy tradition does two things: it r­ epresents ferocious military combat, and also practises ferocious literary combat against other, competing traditions of Troy. The competing forces, Greek and Trojan, of the later medieval account of the Trojan War are represented playing a zero-sum game, in which war is fought over the same territory that will, eventually, be wholly possessed by one side or the other. The narrative moves entirely within the destructive circuit of the Aegean, never out into shared or new territory. The problem posed by this narrative is how technologically equal, monarchical and chivalric societies can, above all, preserve what territory they already hold, especially when the chivalric shame culture of those societies can readily propel them forward into self-destruction. These texts represent, that is, the military problematic of Western European monarchical societies between the twelfth and the ­fifteenth centuries.1 If zero-sum struggle characterizes the represented action of these narratives, zero-sum struggle also characterizes the literary traditions competing for the ‘territory’, as it were, of Troy. I broadly distinguish the following competing traditions of the Trojan War available to Shakespeare: Homer’s Iliad (c. eighth century BCE), Virgil’s Aeneid (Virgil d. 19 BCE); Ovid’s Heroides, letter 7 (Ovid d. 14 CE) and its tradition; the Galfridian tradition, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136); and what I call the ephemera tradition, derived from the Cretan Dictys and ‘Trojan’ Dares. These texts were probably composed in the first century CE, in Greek. The Latin versions of these two texts were of later date: that of Dictys, fourth century CE and Dares sixth century CE.2 The late medieval instances of the ephemera tradition vastly expand the abbreviated narratives of  their late classical sources.3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

190

James Simpson

Some notable late medieval examples of this, the main medieval tradition, are as follows: Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s French verse Roman de Troyes (c. 1160);4 Guido delle Colonne’s Latin prose Historia destructionis Troiae (1287);5 the English, alliterative verse Destruction of Troy, by John Clerk (1385–1400);6 John Lydgate’s English verse Troy Book (1412–20);7 and William Caxton’s English prose The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473).8 Shakespeare also, of course, knew the separate, inset traditions of the Troilus and Criseyde narrative, represented by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385),9 and by Henryson’s corrosive sequel to that poem, The Testament of Cresseid (c. 1475).10 This text, written in Middle Scots, was placed immediately after Troilus and Criseyde, as part of the works of Chaucer, in all the printed editions of Chaucer’s works available to Shakespeare (i.e. those editions ­published between 1532 and 1602). These traditions are for the most part intensely hostile to each other. Nothing breaks friendships as readily, and nothing promotes new alignments as forcefully, as disagreement over war. There is room for one account only. So not only do these traditions offer an account opposed to that of their competitor, but some go one further, as they deface the competitor. Virgil competes with Homer; Ovid is hostile to Virgil; Dares and Dictys are hostile to Homer and Virgil; Geoffrey of Monmouth competes with Virgil; the late medieval ephemera tradition is hostile to Virgil; Chaucer tries to avoid the Trojan War as much as he can, dismissing it as a ‘long digression’ from his matter (Troilus and Criseyde, I.143); both Lydgate and Henryson, in their different ways, differ significantly if not trenchantly from Chaucer.11 In the Prologue to Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare likens theatrical practice to military: whether or not the audience likes the play, ‘ ’tis but the chance of war’ (Prologue, 31): this metaphor underlines the broader practice of this literary theatre of war in the context of competing versions of the Troy narrative.12 The defacement of the prior tradition is sometimes literal. In Shakespeare’s own Rape of Lucrece (1594),13 the first act of Lucrece now raped is to ‘read’ a Troy narrative painted in her chamber. Read thus, the whole war is now seen from the perspective of a woman, in this case a recently raped woman. Lucrece marks her primary sympathy with Hecuba, in whose face the painter had ‘anatomized / Time’s ruin, beauty’s wreck, and grim care’s reign’. Hecuba’s ‘blue blood’ is now ‘changed to black in every vein’ (lines 1450–54). Shakespeare does not, however, stop at opening the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘The formless ruin of oblivion’

191

space for an alternative, feminist reading of war; instead he goes further, and has Lucrece actively deface the artefact of the competing, pro-Greek tradition responsible for the defacement of women. Lucrece scratches iconoclastically at the face of traitor Sinon: ‘She tears the senseless Sinon with her nails’ (line 1564). These defacements, of both Hecuba and Sinon, evoke another in the late medieval British Troy tradition, that of Henryson, who brutally closes down Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Nowhere does Henryson do this more aggressively than in his defacement of Criseyde, in whose eyes, by Chaucer’s memorable account, had stood Paradise.14 Cresseid’s ‘lustie lyre’ will henceforth be ­shockingly and hideously transformed: Thy Cristall Ene minglit with blude I mak, Thy voice sa cleir, unplesand hoir and hace, Thy lustie lyre ouirspred with spottis blak, And lumpis haw appeirand in thy face. (lines 337–43)

As Henryson opens a further alternative tradition, so too must he actively deface not only Cresseid but also Chaucer’s ‘quair’ of ‘fair Cresseid and worthy Troilus’ (line 42). In this chapter I argue that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida participates in a set of traditions with a long history of fierce internal hostility. I briefly outline some alignments of that prior history, before turning to Shakespeare’s contribution to a tradition of literary defacement. Shakespeare draws, I suggest, primarily on the sceptical, late medieval ephemera tradition, and in particular its vernacular English and Scots examples. My principal argument, however, is that Shakespeare is going one better than all his predecessors, as they fight over this literary territory. Whereas his predecessors open up spaces within the tradition for opposed accounts of the Trojan War, Shakespeare wants permanently to deface and disable the entire territory of the Troy tradition, to render it unfit for any but the lowest human habitation.15 The narrator of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women complains that the very act of reading about Tereus infects his eyes that ‘wexe foule and sore also’; the ‘venym of so longe ago’ remains so active that ‘it enfecteth hym that wol beholde’ the story of Tereus;16 so too Shakespeare, I argue here, wants less to open up a new literary space within the Troy material than to infect it. He seeks to relegate the entire tradition as fit only for the sex trade: Pandarus ends the play by insulting the audience, first encouraging ‘good traders

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

192

James Simpson

in the flesh’ to set this story in their ‘painted cloths’, and then by wishing infection on the audience themselves: until he is certain that no ‘galled goose’ will hiss at him, he will ‘sweat and seek about for eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases’ (5.11.22–4). Here there is no monumental tomb in which the infected body of Henryson’s infectious Cresseid is contained (Testament of Cresseid, lines 603–9); the infection of Troy will continue to spread to anyone who witnesses it, defacing them and leaving them weeping with Pandar, weeping with ‘their eyes, half out’ (5.11.3–16). We leave Troilus and Cressida shaken by insult, infection and defacement. In 1679 Dryden described the play as ‘a heap of rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried’;17 I argue here that this is precisely the effect that Shakespeare sought, though the heap of rubbish is the whole Trojan tradition, and the excellent thoughts are deliberately buried under it, and defaced by it. The ephemera tradition: anti-Homer, anti-Virgil, anti-Geoffrey of Monmouth In my view the sceptical ephemera tradition (derived from Dares and Dictys and adapted through the much enlarged versions of Guido, the alliterative Destruction of Troy, Lydgate and Caxton for example), is resolutely anti-Homeric, anti-Virgilian and anti-­ Galfridian. Chaucer underlines this internal competitiveness among the poets of Troy in his House of Fame (c. 1373), where the narrator witnesses Homer, Dares, Dictys, ‘Lollius’, Guido and Geoffrey of Monmouth bearing up the fame of Troy, but not without dispute: So hevy therof was the fame That for to bere hyt was no game. But yit I gan ful wel espie, Betwex hem was a litil envye. Oon seyde that Omer made lyes, Feynynge in hys poetries, And was to Grekes favorable; Therfor held he hyt but fable.18

Only among the poets of Troy does the narrator Geoffrey register internal strife, but that strife is, after all, writ large into the poem as a whole, since the entire narrative of The House of Fame is driven by profoundly inconsistent accounts of Trojan material, with respect to the fate of Dido as represented by the Virgilian and the Ovidian traditions. 19

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘The formless ruin of oblivion’

193

The ephemera poets immediately repudiate Homer, because he tells a narrative in which gods fought, and because Homer was prejudiced in favour of the Greeks. The resolutely human tradition of the ephemera tradition takes its discursive cue instead from the very title of Dictys’s work, the Ephemeris belli trojani (The Diary, or day to day account, of the Trojan War). This is a tradition hostile to partisan promotion or theological pretension of any kind. The ephemera poets also distance themselves from Virgil, in many ways. In the Aeneid, history is set by Destiny; read by the gods; and disseminated to oracles and Muses, who inspire the human poet. In the Aeneid, the whole of history is often painfully immanent in each moment of the narrative. In the late medieval ephemera tradition, by contrast, history is made by aristocrats in committees, and recorded by bureaucrats in diaries. In this tradition, history is initiated by the volition of swaggering aristocrats driven by self-destructive honor codes; history in the ephemera texts takes its course from the contingent and entropic force of events spiralling out of individual human control. Council sessions and diplomatic receptions are of vital significance, pregnant as they are with different possible futures (there are few council sessions in the Aeneid, where advice comes more often than not from heaven). Whereas Virgil’s text begins in medias res in such a way as to propel the narrative into a future determined by its past, the ephemera texts proceed by a ‘natural’, almost journalistic order, where anything can happen tomorrow. Royal power depends on nothing but itself and especially its management of bureaucratic procedure. History turns, that is, on the entirely contingent decisions of council sessions, and on the practice of diplomatic missions; the record of history is the record of bureaucratic failure. The most striking and incontrovertible sign of anti-Virgilianism in this tradition is, however, the representation of Aeneas: for the ephemera tradition, Aeneas is, along with Antenor, a traitor of the worst kind, the ‘tulk that the trammes of treson ther wroght’.20 These texts try not merely to displace Virgil so much as to deface him, thrusting traitor Aeneas into the face of Virgil’s epic. Texts in the ephemera tradition seek not to divinize their heroes: on the contrary, these texts underscore the purely human, m ­ echanical effects required to preserve the fame and corpse of the noble, heroic dead.21 The ephemera tradition is not only anti-Homeric and antiVirgilian. It is also, in England, anti-Galfridian, since it promises no occupation of new territory. In the ephemera tradition, the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

194

James Simpson

victorious Greeks return home within the Aegean to slaughters and betrayals as the reward of ten years’ fighting. In sum, the ephemera tradition entertains no hopes for the divinely-sanctioned foundation of empire, however painfully achieved. Victory in the Trojan War is, to be sure, painful in itself, but in this tradition the victors are destroyed on return home no less savagely than the Trojans themselves. The tradition is intensely historical, but history holds no promise of transition from catastrophe to empire; history is instead the story of societies imploding under the pressure of self-destructive ideologies, poor decisions and the cumulative weight of events. The gods, let alone a Christian God, have no serious role to play; no territory is won, and humans with the best intentions are drawn into a vortex of historical forces that destroys them and their cities. Troilus and Cressida and the ephemera tradition I suggest that Troilus and Cressida’s deepest affiliations are with the ephemera tradition, even if, via Thersites, Shakespeare wants also to deface the ephemera tradition itself. Just as the play focuses most insistently on intensely rivalrous male factions within both warring parties, so too does the play itself manifest intensely rivalrous hostility towards its competitors for the literary territory of Troy. The play represents scenes of men brutally losing face: think of Ulysses’ account of the mocking, private theatre of Achilles and Patroclus in 1.3.142–84, in which Patroclus cruelly mimics, to degrade, the ‘abilities, gifts, natures, shapes’ of the Greek lords; or think of Menelaus and Ulysses being humiliated as Cressida enters the Greek camp in 4.6. In like manner does Shakespeare work with the one sceptical Troy tradition – the ephemera tradition – finally to deface all his Trojan materials. Shakespeare may have had precise historical motives for his own sack of Troy: most specifically, he faced a newly resurgent Trojan tradition with George Chapman’s translation of Books 1, 2 and 7–11 of the Iliad, published in 1598 and dedicated to the Earl of Essex as ‘the most Honored now living Instance of the Achilleian vertues eternized’.22 In the same year Chapman also published a translation of the Shield of Achilles passage from Book 18 of the Iliad.23 In the preface to that translation, after having trashed Virgil’s Aeneid, Chapman appeals to the Earl of Essex, with his ‘Achilleian vertues’, to lead English readers to the ‘yet poisoned fountain’ of English Homer, infected by ‘venomous galles’.24 In

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘The formless ruin of oblivion’

195

1601, the Earl of Essex, after a failed insurrection, was convicted of treason and beheaded, after less than Achilleian confessions and incriminations.25 Faced, then, with a resurgent Trojan tradition (this time Homeric), and faced with the disgraceful fall of its avatar, the Earl of Essex, Shakespeare may have taken the chance to poison more than the Earl of Essex’s reputation. Shakespeare’s disgusting butcher Achilles is the ‘idol of idiot worshippers’ (5.1.6–7). Through his Achilles Shakespeare also repoisons the Homeric well itself, along with the entire Trojan tradition, pro- and antiHomeric. So in the fin de règne atmosphere of 1602, when the play was likely first performed, Shakespeare takes aim at the following: the fallen courtier; the ideology of chivalry behind him; the resurgent Trojan material available through Homer; and, not least, the entire Trojan tradition along with it. It’s an ambitiously destructive play, using late medieval tactics to destroy both classical and late medieval traditions.26 Troilus and Cressida and the defacement of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde Shakespeare’s closest affiliations are, as I have said, with the late medieval ephemera tradition. Lydgate’s Troy Book (available to Shakespeare through the 1555 edition)27 provides the closest English structural model for Troilus and Cressida: among English purveyors of the Trojan material, only this text sets the specifically Chaucerian amatory narrative within the larger narrative of the Trojan War.28 And only this text represents dramatic council sessions about the wisdom of the war.29 Shakespeare targets this text, as we shall see. Even if Shakespeare finally inflicts damage on the ephemera tradition itself, his prior target is, however, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, freshly available in the editions published in 1598 (three times) and 1602 (twice).30 I consider Shakespeare’s aggressive reception of Troilus and Criseyde via Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, before turning to his no more receptive response to Lydgate. Lydgate’s approach both to the Knight’s Tale (late 1380s) and to Troilus and Criseyde had been to set those narratives, which Chaucer had deliberately enclosed off from larger, darker histories, right back into the broader and destructive sweep of terrible histories. Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes (c. 1422) sets the Knight’s Tale into

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

196

James Simpson

the larger, darker history of Thebes,31 just as his Troy Book trenchantly opens the larger historical forces of the Trojan War from which the micro-history of Troilus and Criseyde takes refuge.32 Shakespeare, following Lydgate, also sets the Trolius/Criseyde narrative into the wider narrative of the Trojan War. By contrast with Lydgate, however, Shakespeare is more than trenchant: he sets the Chaucerian narrative into larger historical perspective with pitiless aggression. Shakespeare inflicts this aggression by demolishing the principal aesthetic feature of Troilus and Criseyde, which is physical and temporal division. Physical division manifests itself in highly divided, articulated spaces of the poem’s represented action. In so far as the pressures of war permit, these discrete spaces are shielded from each other. Temporal divisions manifest themselves in the narrative’s highly articulated account of the ‘process’ (Troilus and Criseyde, II.678) of Troilus and Criseyde’s love. These represented physical and temporal divisions have their corresponding formal features, of juxtaposed blocks of narrative written in very different styles. Despite the finally irresistible, ­invasive pressures of war, then, Chaucer insets protected spaces that permit the small-scale, powerful narrative of two lovers within a larger historical sweep, where, Chaucer tells us, ‘how this town com to destruccion’ is not his ‘purpose … to telle’ (I.141–2). The overall effect of the poem is created by the subtle and painful attempt to correlate these heterogeneous perspectives, as the reader, prompted by Chaucer, takes heed of his ‘books’, the very books of this poem, only to discover that there is ‘no author telleth’ what the truth of this story is; there is no authorized truth about Criseyde and Troilus (V.1086–92). We bid farewell to Criseyde as Chaucer does, watching her move into opacity and enemy territory.33 How does Shakespeare manage the dividedness of Troilus and Criseyde? In Troilus and Cressida Agamemnon voices a crucial narrative principle that had permitted the subdivided narrative of the Chaucerian poem. In welcoming his enemy Hector into the Greek camp in Act 4, Agamemnon declares that, however much ‘What’s past and what’s to come is strewed with husks / And formless ruin of oblivion’, this ‘extant moment of faith and troth’ is an exception (4.7.50–2). The exceptionality of such enclosed moments permits trusting contact otherwise prohibited, or outscaled, by war. Such exceptionality characterizes Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde up to the point in Book 4 when the invasive pressure of war becomes

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘The formless ruin of oblivion’

197

predictably irresistible. In the context of invading war, that is, Chaucer’s narrative establishes spatial and emotional areas of protection. In the provisionally protected spaces of these narrative enclaves, Chaucer draws on and develops literary traditions devoted to the representation and expression of refined love, spaces for the ‘extant moment of faith and troth,’ spaces provisionally protected from the ‘formless ruin of oblivion’. If, through Agamemnon, Shakespeare articulates the very principle of Troilus and Criseyde’s narrative possibility, he does so, however, only to demolish that possibility in his own play, as he demolishes Chaucer’s narrative enclaves. In the play we almost never see either Troilus or Cressida alone; Greeks and Trojans mix promiscuously with increasing frequency; we finally join Troilus as he spies on Cressida’s infidelity in the Greek camp; and the slow events, the ‘process’ of Chaucer’s poem, are at every point ­accelerated as they rush towards their sour consummation. The play’s very first scene points less to the start of an amatory narrative than to its end. Troilus enters to unarm, weakened by desire for Cressida; from Pandarus he receives dismissive and vulgar counsel. Chaucer’s Pandarus abandons the project of bringing Troilus and Criseyde together only in Book V of Troilus and Criseyde: ‘My brother deer, I may do the namore. / What sholde I seyen? I hate, ywis, Criseyde’ (V.1730–1). Shakespeare’s Pandarus, by contrast, strikes that pose at the very beginning: he will, he says, ‘not meddle nor make no farther. He that will have a cake out of the world must tarry the grinding’ (1.1.13–15). Vulgarity is accompanied by indifference: Pandarus is indifferent with regard to his niece: ‘But what care I? I care not an she were a blackamoor. ’Tis all one to me’ (1.1.73–4). In Book II of Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer’s readers are at their most intimate with Criseyde; Pandarus’s pressing invasion of her space is indiscreet, to be sure, but also incomplete, since Criseyde preserves ever more private enclaves for her own self-reflection. Shakespeare certainly evokes this Chaucerian sequence of Book 2, but he does so in order almost entirely to collapse the divisions of its micro-diversity. Pandarus enters asking what Cressida is talking about at 1.2.43 (cf. Troilus and Criseyde II.94–7); displaces Cressida’s attention from Hector to Troilus at 1.2.51–6 (cf. Troilus and Criseyde 2.176–82); and then proceeds to witness the warriors’ return from battle with Cressida. Chaucer has two such scenes, one planned by Pandarus, one not (II.610–51 and 2.1247–74). Chaucer’s Pandarus

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

198

James Simpson

is present for the second, but the injustice of his manipulative pressure in that scene is much diminished by the effect of the first ride-by, unplanned by Pandarus, since in that scene Criseyde, by ‘process’, falls in love. Shakespeare merges the two scenes, but ­traduces the uplifting intimacy of Criseyde’s private vision and contemplation of the single warrior Troilus. For Shakespeare crafts a procession of warriors, prior to the sight of Troilus, each of whose names except Hector evokes grievous narratives: Aeneas (a traitor in this tradition); Antenor (another traitor); Hector; Paris (the immediate cause of the war); Helenus (the one Trojan prince who unsuccessfully tries to stop the war); Deiphobus, the Trojan prince who in the Virgilian tradition is supposed to have had an affair with Helen, and whose utterly mangled face confronts Aeneas in the underworld (Aeneid, lines 6.494–9). Only then, possibly confused with Deiphobus, as ‘a sneaking fellow’ (1.2.208) does Troilus appear. Once Troilus has been exposed to this sorry parade, Pandarus claims that he could have his sister; this depressing declaration is in fact drawn from Troilus and Criseyde (3.407–13); in that poem it strikes the reader as wholly out of place; in Troilus and Cressida, by contrast, it sits well with the diminution of the entire set of Trojan princes being conducted in this scene; it also sits well with Cressida’s farewell to Pandarus here: ‘By the same token,’ she insists, ‘you are a bawd’ (1.2.259). It’s true that Troilus and Cressida share one night together, across Act 3.2 and 4.2. Even across that single night, however, the temporal, ethical and spatial enclaves of Chaucer’s poem are demolished. It’s a single night, prepared by stale rhetoric about fidelity (3.2.158–69), and finally by Pandarus’s wholly accurate, depressing, masculinist prophecy: if either lover proves false, then ‘let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name: call them all panders. Let all constant men be Troiluses, and all false women Cressids, and all brokers between panders’ (3.2.185–90). In Chaucer’s poem that night expands into a much longer, if indefinite space of trusting love. In Shakespeare’s play it shrinks, where the lovers’ space is invaded by, in order, Pandarus, Aeneas and, just outside, Paris, Deiphobus, Diomede and Antenor, all come to announce the exchange. Each of those names is freighted with male treachery. Male treachery invades the space and brutally extinguishes Chaucerian possibilities. As Shakespeare brutally closes down the possibilities of Chaucer’s Book 3, so too does Cressida promise to deface herself, to ‘tear my bright hair, and scratch my praised cheeks’ (4.3.32).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘The formless ruin of oblivion’

199

Unlike Chaucer’s Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Cressida is given no room to question the literary tradition that condemns her. She is literally given no room of her own, and neither are we. As soon as she enters the Greek camp, her Henrysonian fate is sealed: Ulysses judges that her ‘wanton spirits look out / At every joint and motive of her body’, before all the Greeks join in a rousing, sexist pun at her arrival: ‘The Trojans’ trumpet’ (4.6.55–65). Chaucer’s Criseyde talks twice privately with Diomede (5.120–82 and 5.841–1015); Shakespeare’s Cressida is also represented as speaking twice with Diomede (4.5.117–35 and 5.2.1–107), but neither dialogue is private, and the subtle shifts in Chaucer’s texts are collapsed into a single, accelerated rush towards a sour consummation. Cressida predicts that she ‘shall be plagued’ (5.2.105), and Thersites pushes the scene directly into the brutal, sex trade environment of Henryson’s sequel to Troilus and Criseyde, in which ‘giglotlike’ Cresseid has become a prostitute before succumbing to leprosy (Testament of Cresseid, line 83). Thersites comments that Cressida’s actions speak these words: ‘My mind is now turned whore’ (5.2.115).34 Above all, however, the scene is secretly witnessed by the enemies Troilus and Ulysses, whose enmity is set aside as they promiscuously share in an invasive male gaze, a sexist gaze that finds no resistance as Cressida rapidly accedes to the advancing Diomede. And all those on stage, both actors and spectators, are themselves watched over by the presiding genius of the scene and the play, the dyspeptic Thersites. What in Chaucer had been private, enclosed spaces becomes for Shakespeare public theatres of degradation and shame, where spectators are humiliated no less surely than actors. We are, then, deprived of Chaucerian intimacies, however ­provisional, with Cressida. Neither are we given access to Troilian enclaves of Chaucer’s text. Not once in the entire play are we are alone with Troilus, but for one very brief moment, consisting of eleven lines in 3.2.16–27, in which Troilus luxuriates in ‘swooning destruction’ at the thought of his imminent meeting with Cressida. The almost total absence of protected spaces for Troilus immediately deprives the Chaucerian narrative of an extraordinarily rich resource. No less damaging, however, is Troilus’s performance in the council scene of 2.2, and here I turn to Shakespeare’s reception of the ephemera tradition as represented by Lydgate’s Troy Book. Council sessions are crucial to the ephemera tradition, precisely because no gods are looking out for cities. Troy falls not primarily

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

200

James Simpson

through military weakness: the crucial events happen not on the battlefield but in the council-chamber or parliament. Civil implosion is a much more significant factor than military action in the overall destruction of the city. In these council sessions, the ephemera poets shape a discursive space for prudential, broadly ‘clerical’ (though by no means divinely inspired) voices, who argue against war. This recognized division of power allowed clerics a permissible voice that is trenchantly opposed to aristocratic military, marital and bureaucratic practice. The clerical voice of the narrator holds up to aristocratic readers the spectacle of their own downfall, cast down by their own readiness to mount the wheel of Fortune. There are relatively few such ‘clerical’ voices heard from within the work, and, unless they flatter militarist impulses, as in the case of Calchas, they are dismissed by knightly swagger. This is the fate of Helenus’s intervention in the first Trojan counsel session, just as the philosopher Pentheus fails as he warns Priam to set aside old rancour and not to submit Troy to the vagaries of Fortune (Troy Book, 2.3196–202). His failure gives way to the impassioned but useless prophecy of Cassandra, and, finally, to the rueful voice of the poet himself, who reflects that, if the council had been swayed by Hector, Helenus, Pentheus and Cassandra, Troy would still be standing (2.3295–318). The absence of effective clerical voices from within Trojan and Greek societies is, however, made good by the presence of the prudential poet in the work itself. If these societies of the past failed for want of philosophical reflection, the work presents itself as saying, then contemporary readers might be able to avoid the same mistakes by attending to this very work, and to the clerical voice of its author and translator. How does Shakespeare present council sessions? In the first, in the Greek camp, no sooner has Ulysses attacked Achilles for demeaning respect for proper degree with mocking theater than he proposes a mocking theatre of his own. ‘Everything includes itself in power, / Power into will, and will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf … / Must make perforce an universal prey’ (1.3.119–23), he declares, before deciding with Nestor to meet the Trojan challenge by setting Ajax against Hector: ‘Two curs shall tame each other; pride alone / Must tarre the mastiffs on, as ’twere their bone’ (2.1.383–4). Ulysses’ anti-democratic philosophy is beside the point of the practical issue at hand, but he ignores it himself in his plan to meet bristling, animalistic force with ­bristling, ­animalistic force.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘The formless ruin of oblivion’

201

The second council session is conducted by the Trojans in 2.2. This is modelled on an extraordinary, extended scene from the ephemera tradition, where the Trojans deliberate on the wisdom of abducting Helen in repayment for the Greek abduction of the Trojan Hesione (Troy Book’ 2.2063–3318). Shakespeare’s Trojans articulate roughly the same positions as Lydgate’s: prudent Hector and Helenus, no less than prophetic Cassandra, are overborne by the rash, swaggering, honour-driven voices of youth, Paris and Troilus. But in Troilus and Cressida, Troilus is the main proponent of war. He prosecutes his stupid, pro-war position by repudiating the voice of caution, that of Helenus, in very much the same way as Lydgate’s Troilus repudiates Helenus: priests are timorous and they should stay in their studies (cf. Troilus and Cressida, 2.2.37–49 and Troy Book, 2.3001–69). He then goes on to propose a disgraceful position not articulated at all in the ephemera tradition: we have stolen Helen, so let’s not seem as we have ‘stolen what we do fear to keep’ (2.2.92). In the ephemera tradition, this council session takes place before the rape of Helen; here the options are radically foreclosed, and it’s Troilus who leads the charge of catastrophic aristocratic stupidity. So forceful is his rash, chivalric swagger that Hector repudiates precisely the position he articulates with such precision in Lydgate’s version: there Hector acknowledges the force of chivalric honour, which stands to be dimmed by refusal to pay the Greeks for the abduction of Hesione; but he gives priority to prudence. Hector argues very forcefully here that the Trojans will be worse off for this war, and they need only consider the strategic situation to recognize that. If Troy initiates a war, Hector argues, the Trojans will be put ‘alle to destruccioun’ for one woman, who might in any case die very soon. So, he recommends, the Trojans should act ‘by dissymulacioun’, by which he means that they should pretend that no injury has been done, and thereby avoid the need to activate the entropic forces of war. Having articulated the chivalric position by speaking like a knight, that is, Hector looks to the future and speaks as a secular cleric (Troy Book, 2.2183–304). The position of Shakespeare’s Hector is the diametrical opposite: Hector of Troilus and Cressida begins by counselling prudential wisdom: let Helen return. Overborne, however, by the passion of youth, this Hector continues to recognize the law of nations, by which the Trojans should return Helen, but finally caves in to the honour argument, and agrees that Helen should be kept: ‘For ’tis a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

James Simpson

cause that hath no mean dependence / Upon our joint and several dignities’ (2.2.191–2). The evidently disgraceful, and eventually stupid pro-war position, then, is conducted principally by Troilus. Not only does Troilus’s position undercut any possibilities for the Chaucerian Troilus throughout the rest of Shakespeare’s play. He also voices a law of might being right that will rob him of Cressida, and destroy his brother Hector, not to speak of his city. Like Lucrece, then, Shakespeare defaces Chaucer’s poem, savaging both Troilus and Cressida, merging Troilus wholly with the ephemera tradition idiot, and Cressida with Henryson’s ‘gigelot’. Troilus and Criseyde is itself conscious of defacement lying just behind the surface: when Helen and Deiphobus play their roles in the social comedy at the end of Book II of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer alludes to, but shields us from, the vision of Deiphobus’s mangled face from Aeneid, 6.494–9, the earless, sliced visage of horror in hell, punished by the invading Greeks for his affair with Helen. Chaucer protects us from that defacement, just as he also refuses ‘childishly to deface’ Criseyde’s protestations of grief about leaving Troilus, by repeating them. Here he uses ‘defacement’ as a literary term. If he were to attempt to describe her grief, ‘It sholde make hire sorwe seme lesse / Than it was, and childishly deface / Hire heigh compleynte, and therefore ich it pace’ (IV.803–5). Unlike Chaucer, Shakespeare does not protect us from the ­experience of defacement. In sum, Shakespeare works as a medieval author in Troilus and Cressida: his commitments are most obviously to the late-medieval ephemera tradition, which, like Shakespeare, is hostile to both Virgilian and Homeric accounts of Troy. He uses the possibilities of the ephemera tradition to demolish the pretensions of the classical traditions, just as he demolishes the enclaves of the late medieval tradition created by Chaucer. In breaking down the protected spaces of Chaucer’s narrative, Shakespeare conducts a kind of literary demolition, taking every chance he can get to demolish the emotional and or ethical nobility of a range of Trojan War traditions. Through the great Grub-Street journalist Thersites, Shakespeare also degrades the ephemera tradition itself, until all we are left with are ‘the fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics’ (5.2.159) of the entire tradition.

‘The formless ruin of oblivion’

203

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes  1 For the broader historical context of these works, see J. Simpson, ‘The other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in fourteenth and fifteenth-century England’, Speculum, 73:2 (1998), 397–423, and further references. This article is abbreviated in J. Simpson, ‘Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547’, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 3. Some paragraphs in the present chapter are drawn from this chapter.  2 For translations of these texts, see The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian, trans. R. M. Frazer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).  3 For the whole later medieval tradition, see C. D. Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s ‘Historia Destructionis Troiae’ in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1980). See also F. Ingledew, ‘The Book of Troy and the genealogical construction of history: the case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae’, Speculum, 69:3 (1994), 665–704; Simpson, ‘The other Book of Troy’; and Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).  4 Benoît de Sainte-More, Der Trojaroman des Benoît de Sainte-Maure, ed. K. Reichenberger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1963).  5 Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel Edward Griffin (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1937); and Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, trans. M. E. Meek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974).  6 Guido delle Colonne, The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy, ed. G. A. Panton and D. Donaldson, 2 Parts, EETS, 39 and 56 (London: Trübner, 1869 and 1874). For the authorship of this extraordinary text, see T. Turville-Petre, ‘The author of the Destruction of Troy’, Medium Aevum, 57 (1988), 264–9.  7 John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. H. Bergen, 4 Parts, EETS, e.s. 97, 103, 106, and 126 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1906, 1908, 1910 and 1935). Citations of the Troy Book are made by book and line number from this edition.  8 William Caxton, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, translated by William Caxton, ed. H. O. Sommer, 2 vols (London: Nutt, 1894).  9 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, in The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, gen. ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). All citation from this poem is made by book and line number from this edition in the body of the text. 10 Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid, in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. D. Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). All citations from this poem are made by line number in the body of the text.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

204

James Simpson

11 For which see N. Watson, ‘On outdoing Chaucer: Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid as competitive imitations of Troilus and Criseyde’, in K. Pratt (ed.), Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr Elspeth Kennedy (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), pp. 89–108. 12 All citations from Troilus and Cressida are drawn from Comedies, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J. E. Howard and K. E. Maus (New York: Norton, 1997). 13 William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, in Early Plays and Poems, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. S. Greenblatt, vol. 1. All citation of this text are made by line number from this edition in the body of the text. 14 ‘But for to speken of hire eyen clere, / Lo, trewely, they written that hire syen / That Paradis stood formed in hire eyen’ (Troilus and Criseyde, V.815–17). 15 My argument about Shakespeare’s aggressive deflation of the entire late medieval tradition (not to speak of Homer and Virgil) extends arguments that he deflates Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The most powerful of these cases are as follows: M. Bradbrook, ‘What Chaucer did to Troilus and Criseyde’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 9:3 (1958), 311–19 (‘The high and heroic romance [of Troilus and Criseyde] is in every way deflated … a poetic ideal was being ironically distorted and defaced’, 312); and J. Mann, ‘Shakespeare and Chaucer: “what is Criseyde worth?”’, in P. Boitani (ed.), The European Tragedy of Troilus (New York: Oxford University Press and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 219–42. This essay first appeared in The Cambridge Quarterly, 18:2 (1989), 109–28. For a detailed account of the larger tradition of Criseyde between Chaucer and Shakespeare, see H. E. Rollins, ‘The Troilus–Cressida Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare’, PMLA, 32 (1917), 383–429. 16 Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, lines 2240–3. For infections of the Troy tradition, see also Lydgate, who accuses Homer of infecting the atmosphere with his praise of Achilles: ‘For his [i.e. Achilles’] name whan I here nevene, / Verrailly up unto hevene / (As semeth me) infect is the eyr’ (Lydgate, Troy Book, 4.2837–40). 17 John Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, ed. M. E. Novak and G. R. Guffey, in The Works of John Dryden, gen. eds E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, 20 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–), Preface, vol. 13, p. 226. 18 Chaucer, House of Fame, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, lines 1466–80. 19 For which, and for the hugely influential, anti-Virgilian Ovidian tradition of Troy, see M. Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality and the Medieval ‘Aeneid’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), and Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, chapter 4.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘The formless ruin of oblivion’

205

20 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. M. Andrew and R. Waldron, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies, rev. edn (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1987), line 3. 21 See, most notably, the description of Hector’s tomb in Lydgate, Troy Book, 3.5579–764. 22 George Chapman, Seauen bookes of the Iliades of Homere, prince of poets, translated according to the Greeke (London, 1598), A3 (RSTC 13632). 23 George Chapman, Achilles shield Translated as the other seuen bookes of Homer, out of his eighteenth booke of Iliades (London, 1598), RSTC 13635. 24 Chapman, Achilles shield Translated as the other seuen bookes of Homer, B1. Virgil is diminished beside Homer thus: ‘For Homers Poems were writ from a free furie, an absolute & full soule: Virgils out of a courtly, laborious, and altogether imitatorie spirit: not a Simile hee hath but is Homers: not an inuention, person, or disposition, but is wholly or originally built vpon Homericall foundations’ (Chapman, Achilles shield, A2v). 25 For which see Paul Hammer, ‘Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex (1565–1601), soldier and politician’, in B. H. Harrison (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 26 For a persuasive new historicist reading of Troilus and Cressida, see E. S. Mallin, ‘Emulous factions and the collapse of chivalry: Troilus and Cressida’, Representations, 29 (1990), 145–79. For valuable ‘old’ historicist readings of Shakespeare’s Achilles as Essex, see note 69. 27 The auncient historie and onely trewe and syncere cronicle of the warres betwixte the Grecians and the Troyans (London, 1555), RSTC 5580. Lydgate’s Troy Book had also been printed in 1513: The hystorye, sege and dystruccyon of Troye (London, 1513), RSTC 5579. 28 Caxton makes extremely brief mention of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde; see Caxton, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, ed. Sommer, vol. 2, p. 604. Compare the more extensive and passionate account in Lydgate’s Troy Book, at 3.4077–263. 29 For a detailed account of Shakespeare’s debts to the distinct Trojan traditions available to him see R. K. Presson, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Legends of Troy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953). Shakespeare could have known Caxton through the 1597 reprint (The auncient historie, of the destruction of Troy (London, 1597), RSTC 15379). Contra Presson, however, I do not bracket the Caxton and Lydgate versions, since Caxton, translating from a different set of sources, includes vast tracts of mythological matter (his entire Books 1 and 2) extraneous to the Guido narrative. Lydgate’s translation is the closest structural model for Shakespeare.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

206

James Simpson

30 The workes of our antient and lerned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (London, 1598), RSTC 5077; The workes of our antient and lerned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (London, 1598), RSTC 5078. The workes of our antient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer (London, 1598), RSTC 5079. For 1602: The vvorkes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (London, 1602), RSTC 5080, and The vvorkes of our ancient and lerned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (London, 1602), RSTC 5081. 31 For which see J. Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies and Fatal houres”: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, in H. Cooper and S. Mapstone (eds), The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Douglas Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 15–33, and further references. 32 For which see L. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991), chapter 2. 33 The moment from the poem’s narrative that is, intelligently, chosen to accompany the image of Chaucer reading to a courtly audience, in Corpus Christi College Cambridge, MS 61, fol. 1v. 34 For the commonplace of Criseyde as a whore in Elizabethan tradition, see Rollins, ‘The Troilus Cressida story from Chaucer to Shakespeare’.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Note: Individual works by Chaucer and Shakespeare are listed under the authors’ names. ‘n’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Admiral’s Men, The 167 Andreas Capellanus 176 Aristotle 12, 23, 31n25, 112, 132–4, 139n14, 139n18 Augustine of Hippo 67, 79 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 44n33, 45n37, 162 Bartholomaeus Anglicus 128 Bataille, Georges 110 Benjamin, Walter 6, 111 Benoît de Sainte-Maure 4, 74n11, 190 Bloch, Ernst 23 Boccaccio, Giovanni 4, 99, 111, 145, 157–9, 163 Boethius 158 Bonian, Richard 158, 170n7, 171n32 Brecht, Bertolt 181 Butler, Judith 31n25 Castiglione, Baldassare 84, 134 Caxton, William 82, 160, 190, 192, 205n28–9 Cervantes, Miguel de 34 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2–3 Chapman, George 82, 194 Chaucer, Geoffrey Book of the Duchess, The 101–2 Canterbury Tales, The 101, 162–3 Cook’s Tale 162, 167 Knight’s Tale 33, 160, 162, 195

Merchant’s Tale 163 Miller’s Tale 162 Parson’s Tale 141 Physician’s Tale 102–3 Reeve’s Tale 162 Sir Thopas 162 House of Fame, The 74n11, 144, 192 Legend of Good Women, The 63–4, 71–3, 191 Parlement of Foules 143 Chettle, Henry 167 Cicero 130, 132 Clerk, John 190 Constantinus Africanus 33 Cooper, Thomas 85 Dante Alighieri 158–9, 170n9 Dares Phrygius 4, 189–90, 192 Dekker, Thomas 167 Deleuze, Gilles 110, 115 de Man, Paul 97 Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex 163, 194–5, 205n26 Dictys Cretensis 4, 189–90, 192–3 Donne, John 32, 41n3 Epictetus 130, 132 Erasmus of Rotterdam 62 Euripides 61–2, 65–6, 68 Foucault, Michel 6, 35, 113–14, 122 Freud, Sigmund 4, 23, 27, 109–10

Index

208

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Geoffrey of Monmouth 189, 192–3 Girard, René 5, 30n21, 87, 110 Guattari, Félix 110, 115 Guido delle Colonne 4, 190, 192 Heidegger, Martin 30n22 Henry VIII 42n12 Henryson, Robert 10, 12–14, 82, 111, 163–5, 167–8, 190–2, 195, 199, 202 Heywood, Jasper 62 Hobbes, Thomas 31n25 Homer 4, 10, 44n29, 76, 137, 189–90, 192–5, 202, 204n16, 205n24 Horace 38, 44n29 James VI and I 63, 81, 90n15 Johannes Afflacius 33 Jonson, Ben 32, 41n2, 44n29, 147, 154n26 Kinaston, Francis 166 Langland, William 159 Latour, Bruno 3 Lorens d’Orléans 141 Lydgate, John 4, 82, 111, 152n8, 190, 192, 195–6, 199, 201, 204n16, 205n21, n27–9 Machiavelli, Niccolò 113, 118, 128, 149 Marcus Aurelius 130 Marlowe, Christopher 66–8, 74n19, 143 Marvell, Andrew 77 Milton, John 21 Montaigne, Michel de 38–9 More, Thomas 30n16 Ovid 28, 62–6, 68, 71, 143, 146–7, 154n24, 155n35, 176, 186n12, 187n25, 189–90, 192, 204n19 Petrarch 34–7, 39–41, 43n23, 94–5, 127, 129 Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco 133, 137 Plato 34–5, 37, 39–41 Plutarch 61–2

Reich, Wilhelm 53 Rowland, Samuel 39 Said, Edward W. 113 Seneca 31n25, 62, 130, 132 Shakespeare, William 1 Henry VI 84, 88 Antony and Cleopatra 109 Comedy of Errors 38 Coriolanus 109 Hamlet 64, 66–8, 85, 88, 163 Henry V 89n2, 167 Henry VIII 109 Macbeth 81, 90n15 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 162 Othello 22, 112, 149 ‘Phoenix and the Turtle, The’ 143 Rape of Lucrece, The 63–5, 68, 190–1, 202 Richard II 5 Romeo and Juliet 11, 69, 109 Sonnets 39–40, 44n36, 77, 114, 123n31, 149–50 Tempest, The 82 Titus Andronicus 65 Twelfth Night, The 34, 38, 167 Two Noble Kinsmen 162 Sidney, Philip 61 Speght, Thomas 165–6 Spenser, Edmund 13, 143–4 Statius 172, 174–6, 184 Stow, John 170n20 Thomas Aquinas 18–19, 23, 25 Thynne, Francis 165 Thynne, William 163–6, 169, 170n20 Tourneur, Cyril 85 Virgil 72, 143–4, 147, 154n24, 189–90, 192–4, 198, 202, 204n15, 204n19, 205n24 Vives, Juan Luis 38 Walley, Henry 158, 170n7, 171n32 Wright, Thomas 133 Wyatt, Thomas 42n12 Žižek, Slavoj 5