William Shakespeare : Troilus and Cressida 9781847600615

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Running Head  1

Literature Insights

General Editor: Charles Moseley

  A Guide to

Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida Terry Hodgson

“The most modern of Shakespeare’s Plays”

William Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida Terry Hodgson

Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2008

Publication Data © Terry Hodgson, 2008 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Humanities-Ebooks LLP Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-061-5

Contents A Note on the Author 1. Foreword 2. Story and Sources 3. Elizabethan Background 3.1. Date and position in the canon 3.2. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men 3.3. The Theatre and the Globe Theatre 3.4. The Social and Cultural Background 3.5. Publication and Performance 4. Dramatic Structure 4.1. Prologue 4.2. Act I 4.3. Act 2 4.4 Act 3 4.5 Act 4 4.6. Act 5 5. Problems and Questions 5.1. Is Troilus a ‘Problem Play’? 5.2. The Play’s Dramatic Form 6. Characterization 7. Main Themes 8. The Play’s Language 9. Performance History 10. Critical Views Selected Bibliography

A Note on the Author Dr Hodgson is a Cambridge graduate and Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Literature and Drama of the University of Sussex. After a post-graduate Certificate of Education at Cambridge he spent three years teaching a variety of science and arts subjects at secondary level in the Royal Navy followed by two years in Paris where he taught English in a French lycée, studying at the Sorbonne and as a scholar of the British Institute in Paris. He married and became a British Council lecturer for four years in Turku, Finland where he taught English Language and Literature at the Finnish and Swedish speaking universities. Leaving Finland, he obtained a post for three years as Staff Tutor at the Oxford University Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies where he organized and lectured on courses of his own devising in English and European literature and drama. When the University of Sussex took over responsibility for adult education he took up a joint post shared between the Sussex Schools of European and English and American Studies and the new Sussex Centre for Continuing Education where he became responsible for the organisation and teaching of many part-time undergraduate certificates and engaged in the full-time English undergraduate and post-graduate arts programme. He continued to teach summer and short intensive adult courses for Oxford and Cambridge University Continuing Education Departments. He has been teaching Shakespeare, drama and literature for many years and has found it important and enlightening to teach with and perform under professional actors and directors. Taking many roles in Little Theatre productions of plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht and many others has been similarly instructive. He has published books on modern drama, including one on Tom Stoppard, and an extensive dictionary of dramatic terms (The Batsford Dictionary of Drama). His post-graduate qualifications include a diploma in dramatic writing and his doctorate, consisting of an anthology of fifty poems with a related thesis, reflects his interest in creative writing generally.

1. Foreword Troilus and Cressida was probably written soon after Hamlet when Shakespeare was at the height of his powers. This may be confirmed by his brilliant creation of character, his complex handling of stage movement and his mastery of multiple styles of prose and blank verse. We have no evidence, however, that was it performed on the English stage before the twentieth century and for this there are several possible explanations. It is a play with a double plot, in which the love element, relating especially to the figure of Cressida, is counterpoised against a representation of the Trojan war. This would seem an attractive subject, as it was to Chaucer, although the general tone of Shakespeare’s treatment of the two themes of the play is disconcertingly bitter and satirical. This would not, in itself, in the early seventeenth century, have made it unpopular, since it is in accord with the astringent tone of Jacobean plays by contemporaries such as Jonson, Webster and Middleton. But the play has a surprising structure, an apparent lack of conclusion, which is initially puzzling. It also contains a series of demanding intellectual debates which require considerable concentration in the theatre and may have been aimed, it has often been suggested, at a highly sophisticated audience, perhaps at the Inns of Court, rather than at the popular theatres. In addition it contains material which might have been seen as offensive to contemporary and powerful Elizabethan figures, especially at the dangerous period, just before the death of the old Queen. This may help to explain why there is no evidence of production in Shakespeare’s time. The puzzling form and the astringent, intellectual quality of the play may also be reasons why it was, in all likelihood, not produced on an English stage, with the exception of John Dryden’s moralistic reworking of it, for three hundred years until the twentieth century. Since then, however, it has become very popular. Shakespeare’s clinical analysis of idealist views of the nature of love would become more acceptable with the growth of Freudian depth psychology. So, too, would his mockery of heroic attitudes and martial rhetoric which anticipates the new style whereby Sassoon and Owen conveyed the experience of the wars which have ravaged the world since 1914. This eBook treats Troilus and Cressida as a masterpiece in tune with human attitudes and literary and dramatic forms which developed through the last century. It

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is highly dramatic and emphasis will be placed on the theatricality and modernity of a play unlike any other in the canon, even the ‘problem’ plays, such as Measure for Measure and Alls Well That Ends Well, with which it has been compared. The play which is closest would seem to be Hamlet, a very good reason for studying it in the depth it deserves. I would like to salute the scholars, theatre directors, actors and theatre workers who have brought this play back to life on the stage. Among the scholars I count Charles Moseley, literary editor of this series, and thank him for his persistence in asking me to write this book. I would also like to include my wife in these acknowledgements for her recommendations and assiduity in checking and rechecking the text.

2. Story and Sources The story of Troilus and Cressida developed in the mediaeval period from vestigial references to it in classical Greek and Latin literature. But it derives from one of the most famous legends of antiquity, recounted in Homer’s Iliad, which depicts the famous Ten Year War between Greeks and Trojans. Zeus, King of the Gods, decides that the earth contains too many human beings and allows the Goddess of Strife, Eris, to provoke a quarrel by throwing an apple, destined for the fairest, between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Aphrodite bribes Paris, brother of Troilus and son of Priam, King of Troy, to find her more beautiful than her two fellows. His reward will be the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta. When Paris steals her, Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, assemble a fleet of the kings of Greece, sacrifice Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia, to get a fair wind and sail across the Aegean to Troy. The long war for the recapture of Helen ensues. Troilus is one of the fifty sons of Priam, King of Troy, and brother to Hector, the most valiant Trojan warrior, and Paris, lover of Helen. He appears only briefly in The Iliad when Homer reports Priam lamenting Troilus’ death (Iliad Book 24, line 257). Later accounts (especially Proclus’s prose summary of the non-extant Cypria) report that he was killed by the Greek hero, Achilles. Archaic art from the 6th century B.C. onwards adds to our knowledge of the story. It portrays Achilles’ ambush of Troilus, his pursuit and slaughter on the altar of Apollo and the battle over the Trojan’s body. In Book I of Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas, having travelled to Carthage, gazes in wonder at the representation of scenes from the Trojan War. Later Virgil describes Troilus, ill-matched in conflict with Achilles, carried along by his horses, fallen backwards but clinging to the empty car, clasping the reins, his neck and hair dragged over the ground and the dust scored by his reversed spear. This part of the story is not found in Shakespeare’s play, which ends with Troilus crying vengeance on Achilles for killing and dragging Hector round Troy at his horses’ tail. The love story of Troilus and Cressida, which counterpoints Shakespeare’s account of the war, does not appear in The Iliad. It is a purely mediaeval invention which derives from Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s collection of legends in his Roman de

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Troie (c.1165). Benoît inspired a Latin translation by Guido delle Colonne, on which Boccaccio (1313–1375) worked freely in a poem in nine cantos entitled Il Filostrato, composed in Naples in 1337–9. It begins in the middle of the Trojan War at the moment when Calchas, the Trojan High Priest, takes refuge in the Greek camp. His daughter Cressida remains in Troy and inspires a violent passion in Troilus, the last of Priam’s sons. Troilus communicates with her through a clever go-between, Pandarus, Cressida’s cousin. Cressida is delighted without appearing to seem so but finally Boccaccio voluptuously celebrates the lovers drinking together the cup of love. Their happiness is brief. In the course of a new battle, famous warriors are killed or taken prisoner. The two camps exchange captives and in this way Calchas obtains his daughter Cressida. Cressida departs from Troy in desperation, swearing her eternal love of Troilus, but soon forgets her vow. Troilus learns of this from his brother Deiphobus, who brings him a piece of the Greek warrior Diomedes’ clothing on which is pinned a clasp which Troilus had given to Cressida. In despair Troilus throws himself into the battle in order to meet his rival and kill many Greeks but succumbs to the invulnerable Achilles. This is the basic story which Chaucer would reshape and which Shakespeare in turn altered. Il Filostrato has all the feel of Boccaccio’s early and easy loves in Naples, with his Fiammetta among others, which he also uses in the stories of his Decameron (1350–55). It probably became known to the first major English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (1340–1400), during his journey to Genoa and Florence as envoy of the English king in 1372 when Boccaccio was still alive in Florence. On the basis of Il Filostrato, Chaucer wrote his famous Troylus and Criseyde (c.1383–5). The English poet developed the characterization and where Boccaccio had concentrated on the story, Chaucer brings humour, especially to the completely reworked representation of Pandarus, and keen psychological insight to the passion of the lovers. Where the Italian story had emphasized the sorrow of Troilus, deriving this, so some critics conjecture, from Boccaccio’s abandonment by Fiammetta, Chaucer, or rather his narrator, adds a more deeply sympathetic treatment of Cressida’s conduct. In the fifteenth century the story was taken up by several writers. In France the elegant French prose version of Loys de Beauvau (c.1410–1462) is important for its style. A little later Robert Henryson (c.1425–1500) wrote in Chaucer’s rime royal the famous Testament of Cresseid, (printed as Book 6 of Troilus by Thynne in his complete edition of Chaucer in 1532) in which Diomedes tires of Cressida and abandons her. She takes refuge with her father and complains to Venus and Cupid of her fate. The gods gather in council to decide what punishment her blasphemies deserve. Saturn takes away her beauty and joy in life; Diana infects her with leprosy. Henceforth she

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waits at the side of the road with her leper’s bowl. One day Troilus, who has survived, passes her with a company of knights and gives her alms. Cressida, discovering who he is from the conversation of his companions, is filled with terror, repents, makes her will, and dies. Then a leper reveals her identity to Troilus by showing the ring which he had given her. Henryson’s ending obviously passes severer moral judgment on Cressida than does Chaucer. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida does not use the Henryson story of the later Cressida, although some of the atmosphere remains and images of sickness pervade his play. For his material in the love scenes he goes to Chaucer. The romance elements are also mixed with the more sensual and cynical tones of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. Directly or indirectly Shakespeare uses other sources, too: The Troy Book of John Lydgate (1373–1451); the Recuyell of the Histories of Troye by William Caxton (1427?–1491) as well as George Chapman’s translation of The Seven Books of the Iliad of Homer (1598) for the war scenes. Shakespeare’s difference from Chaucer is evident when one compares their treatment of Pandarus’s final exit. Chaucer’s Pandarus says: If I did aught that myghte liken the, It is me life; and of this tresoun now, God woot that it a sorwe is unto me! And dredeles, for hertes ese of yow, Right fayn I wolde amende it, wiste I how, And from this world, almighty God I preye Delivere hire soon! I kan namore seye. Shakespeare’s Pandarus, however, does not close the play on a note of repentance. He addresses the audience as ‘traders in the flesh’ and asks them to weep, if not for him, yet for their own aching bones. ‘Some two months hence’ he will make his will: Till then I’ll sweat, and seek about for eases; And at that time bequeath you my diseases. His final words revile the audience. Further discussion of the play’s tone will be made in Section III which treats Troilus scene by scene. But first we should consider the date and position of the play in the canon; the nature of the theatre space for which Shakespeare wrote his plays; problems relating to the text and the cultural and political circumstances of Shakespeare’s day.

3. Elizabethan Background 3.1. Date and position in the canon Troilus and Cressida was registered with the Stationers’ Company by James Roberts in February 1603, probably to prevent the piracy of the text, but not published until the 1609 Quarto edition. If Troilus was ‘a new play, never staled with the stage’ as the publicity announced, it would suggest that Shakespeare wrote it in 1602, which would fit the evidence that it is stylistically related in tone, sombre atmosphere and language to the ‘problem plays’: Alls Well That Ends Well (1603–4), Measure for Measure (1604), and Hamlet, usually dated 1600 or 1601. It is also a play poised between two other plays with which it shares a dominant characteristic: the idea of fooling and foolishness. ‘Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair / When with your blood you daily paint her thus’, says Troilus (1.1.86–7). The word ‘fool’ echoes throughout the dialogue as it does in the earlier pastoral (or anti-pastoral) As You Like It (1599–1600) and the later tragedy King Lear (1603–6). Very different in pattern from one another and from Troilus, these two plays nevertheless share a strong concern with the ways in which the great mediaeval foolers, Time, Death, Pride and Love, fool men and women, and cause them to fool themselves and each other. It is tempting to see in this sequence a shift in the dramatist’s mood, paralleling a more general cultural change of tone in the drama of the period, from comedy to satire and tragic-comedy, to tragedy. This, of course, is no proof of a precise date but with some caution we may take 1602 as likely. 3.2. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men Shakespeare’s company was founded in 1594 under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon. He took over the nucleus of the company of Strange’s Men, which in that year had been driven from London into the provinces by a virulent outbreak of the plague. Its patron, the Earl of Derby, had died in the previous year. Shakespeare’s name is not among the actors on the cast list of a lost play by Tarleton, The Seven Deadly Sins, performed by Strange’s Men. The company, however, formed

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the nucleus of the one he wrote for and became The Lord Chamberlain’s Men in Elizabeth’s reign and then The King’s Men when James I came to the throne. It continued until the closure of the London theatres in 1642 and was probably the most successful acting company in British history. Before 1603 The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had united actors who agreed to share the risks and profits as shareholders. These included principal actor Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, Shakespeare, the clown William Kempe, and John Heminges who shared the editing of Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623 with Henry Condell, another company member. The troupe received thirteen Royal Commands between 1594 and 1597, whereas their principal rivals, the Lord Admiral’s Men, received seven. They were exempted from closure of the theatre after Jonson and Nashe’s satirical play Isle of Dogs (seditious and heretical according to the Lord Mayor) threatened a general closure in 1597. They moved temporarily to the Curtain theatre when the lease of James Burbage’s Theatre ran out, purchased land south of the river close to Alleyn’s Rose theatre and transported the timbers of the old Theatre across the Thames to form the Globe which opened in 1599. Shakespeare, as actor and principal writer must also have performed some of the functions of a director. For a splendid description of the way Shakespeare’s company worked over this period see Peter Thomson: Shakespeare’s Professional Career, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 3.3. The Theatre and the Globe Theatre. The open air stage Shakespeare worked with has now been closely reconstructed near the Globe’s original position on London’s South Bank. Its brilliant flexibility as an acting space may be summarized as follows. It is large—43 feet or so wide and about 28 feet deep. This allows for groupings of actors, some aware, some unaware of each other’s presence and makes for drama because the audience knows which characters know certain things and which do not. On a large stage the spectator can watch characters manipulating others and being manipulated by them. This creates suspense. At its most complex, as in Act 3 scene 3 of Hamlet, the audience watches Ophelia watching Hamlet as he watches Claudius and Gertrude. The latter, of course, are watching the Player King and Queen perform a playlet about a murder which Hamlet suspects Claudius has committed, but of which Gertrude and Ophelia are ignorant. It also watches Horatio separately watching the king and queen watching the enactment of Claudius’s crime. The audience knows which characters know of the murder, which

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suspect the murderer and which do not. Suspense increases in anticipation of future action. This is complex dramatic irony which always has two or more audiences who are in the secret, or suspect a secret, or remain ignorant. This involves part identification with, and repudiation of, certain characters and leads from anticipation or fear of an event to the surprise or shock of its happening. Thus in Act 5 scene 2 of Troilus we watch Ulysses watching Troilus watching the unaware Cressida and Diomedes while Thersites watches and comments on all of them. One great advantage of Shakespeare’s large stage thus lay in its simultaneous revelation of many differing group and individual responses. The large projecting Elizabethan stage and circular auditorium had an upper stage and a balcony behind it, under the star-strewn ‘heavens’ or overhead canopy. Its depth allowed an actor to alternate between the naturalistic interchange with other characters ignoring the audience’s presence and the move downstage to address the audience directly. We have become accustomed, since Ibsen and Chekhov, to the stagelit, curtained spaces of the 19th century box-set—the ‘fourth wall’ stage. But at The Globe Shakespeare’s plays were performed in the afternoon, outdoors. There was no curtain, and the projecting forestage encouraged soliloquy, aside and monologue, making spectators more fully aware of a character’s thoughts and intentions. Thus Edmund in King Lear comes downstage to acquaint the audience with his villainy whilst his innocent brother Edgar remains trusting and unaware. Similarly Hamlet and Iago confide in the audience. Villains in particular oscillate between the fore and upper stage so that the audience can watch them pretend to be honest when relating to others. This raises another point. The Globe was reputed to contain some 3000 spectators. In a circular auditorium they were almost equidistant and always close enough to watch the actors not only act in character but also pretend to be other than their character. Treachery and pretence may be communicated by facial expressions which belie ‘sincere’ words. Audience proximity gives a close-up view of minute facial changes. For a distanced audience in a large modern auditorium facial communication is more blurred but on apron stages the actor can stand in the very centre of the ‘wooden O’ and initiate the audience (or think he is initiating it) into a secret. Secrets create suspense because the actor becomes a ‘player’, and playing, as Shakespeare must have known from watching courtiers perform at court, is an aspect of human behaviour. To achieve their ends, political, sexual or other, human beings do not always behave with honesty, and dishonesty intensifies the drama.

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The fact that spectators watched the action and heard the words from a number of different angles might be seen as a disadvantage. Some would not see certain actors’ faces, and voices would be projected in different directions. And indeed people usually talk at this time of ‘hearing’, not ‘seeing’, a play. Another possible objection was that only the section of the audience directly in front could clearly see any visual scenery. But there was hardly any of this. The centrality and proximity of the actor on the forestage also made for good acoustics and the Elizabethan theatres, in which spectators at the side saw actors against a backdrop of the audience opposite, stimulated the imagination of those watching to participate in the fun of a common game. ‘So this is the Forest of Arden’, the actor could say, or when playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, could pretend that the bare stage (which the actors are pretending is a clearing in a wood) is exactly what it already is. There would be no naturalistic scenery. The emphasis on visual display came in rather later from Italy and appeared in the court masques created by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. These encouraged the construction of rectangular theatres in which the whole audience could watch scene settings from the front. This shifted the focus from the actors to visual display, whereas the centrality of an actor communicating by subtle changes of voice, face, posture, gesture and grouping was one of the great advantages of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres. An important disadvantage, unrelated to the theatre space, was the law against the use of female actors. This affected the form of Shakespeare’s plays by limiting the number of female parts. Women were not allowed on stage until 1656 (in an opera, The Siege of Rhodes). But boys’ companies existed at the time and contained startling talent, to judge by the female parts Shakespeare wrote, such as Rosalind in As You Like It or Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. And Shakespeare turned the law’s restriction to advantage. In the comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice and Cymbeline, boy actors dressed as women who dressed as men. Their performances, in splendid male and female costume, invited audiences to consider complex questions of gender and social and individual identity. The bare Elizabethan stage placed great emphasis on dialogue. When stage effects were needed, even though today they might seem naïve, their novelty and rarity would have had a strong impact. Settings and effect became more sophisticated with the industrial revolution, but slowed down the action. Nowadays scenes can change at a speed undreamed of by stage hands working the heavy machinery of the nineteenth century theatre but Elizabethan plays were perhaps faster still, since scene and atmosphere were mainly evoked by words and scene changes were immediate. Pace, and

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variation of pace, is, of course, crucial in performance. A further word is needed concerning the symbolism of the Elizabethan stage. The name of the canopy over the upper stage was ‘the heavens’. Equally the cellarage, from which Hamlet’s father’s Ghost enunciates ‘Swear’ in sepulchral tones, was called ‘hell’. The new permanent professional stages inherited the pattern of the mediaeval plays in which a central Everyman figure oscillated between angels and devils. (On mediaeval stages hell mouth was stage left—on the sinister side of the central figure and angels blew trumpets stage right.) Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, of course, is accompanied by Good and Bad Angels, no doubt staged on the right hand and left of the protagonist as in frescos facing the population on mediaeval church crossings. The permanent Elizabethan buildings enabled heaven and hell to be placed above and below, rather than left and right, reinforcing the idea of central figures caught between good and evil, paradise or damnation. Elizabethan plays were palimpsests: a complex individual psychology was superimposed on the old mediaeval pattern. This is clearer in a play such as Othello than in Troilus. A moral clarity distinguishes Desdemona from Iago, who stand on either side of the central figure, Othello. In Troilus there is less ground for morally distinguishing between Trojans and Greeks, or between Troilus and Cressida. The audience may incline to identify more with the Trojans for reasons we will discuss, but strong moral positives are blurred. This is one central reason for calling it ‘a problem play’. To conclude: the Elizabethan theatre had more flexibility than the rigidly symbolic mediaeval stages or than subsequent pictorial stages, brought in by Inigo Jones from Italy. It did not have the ceremonial and operatic nature of the huge Greek auditoriums, with projected voices, stylized masks, choral dance and actors wearing cothurnae or buskins to heighten stature. But it used music and song to alternate with a rapid, very articulate, naturalism (or something the audience could be induced to believe was natural) which it set against heightened, passionate and ‘unnatural’ behaviour. Its effect was also human, dangerous, and thus all the more dramatic. Its rapidity enabled variations of tempo, alternations between big ritualistic scenes and private conversations. Contrasts of atmosphere: night and day, storm and calm, darkness and light, heat and cold, could be created by the actors’ performance, by appropriate grouping, posture, facial expression, variations in the voice and so on. It could project the variety, excitement, danger, brutality and artificiality of the period in plays with a contemporary or historical setting. The 16th century was experiencing the disintegration of feudal structures; the rise of a new merchant class; outbreaks of plague; the collapse of romance ideals (induced at least partly by the spread of

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syphilis brought back, it is said, from the Americas) and the destruction of traditional concepts of a hierarchical, geocentric, man-centred universe in which God had given man the attributes of both angels and beasts. It was the animality of man which began to dominate the minds of the age. A new scepticism arose concerning the use of power by princes of church and state which Machiavelli’s Discourses (1513–19) and The Prince (1532) had analysed. All this provoked an explosion of sombre, satirical, comical, tragical, historical (and pastoral) dramatic writing which Polonius in Hamlet says the Players were famous for and which Troilus and Cressida, as a ‘problem play’, seems to represent. 3.4. The Social and Cultural Background If Troilus and Cressida was written in 1601–2, shortly after Hamlet according to the standard dating, it participated in a cultural change of mood between ‘Elizabethan’ and ‘Jacobean’ writing. The more precise causes of the shift, apart from the general tensions specified above, have been attributed in part to the ‘War of the Theatres’ which raged, some critics claim, between the years 1597–1603. Alfred Harbage wrote his book, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (1952), on the quarrels between Jonson, Dekker, Marston and others about the merits of their acting companies and the quality of their work. David Bevington’s introduction to the Arden Edition of the play argues that the ‘war’ has been exaggerated. Jonson may have made satirical reference to Shakespeare, who may have replied by guying Jonson as Ajax in Troilus. The exchanges within the play between Ajax and his fool Thersites may also have been a parody of exchanges between Jonson and Marston. Kempe, the comic actor, in The Return from Parnassus (Part 2) (1603) recounts that Shakespeare has ‘given Jonson a purge’, perhaps because Jonson had mocked Shakespeare in Everyman Out of His Humour in his portrayal of the upstart Soliardo who seeks a motto: ‘Not Without Mustard’ for his coat of arms. Shakespeare’s was Non Sans Droit. There were, of course, bitter exchanges, but how far it involved the ‘gentle’ nature of Shakespeare, as Jonson describes it, remains speculative. The general change of mood in Shakespeare’s work at the turn of the century may partly be attributed to cultural causes summarized at the end of the last paragraph and to anxiety concerning the royal succession. The ageing Elizabeth was to die in 1603. The failure of the charismatic Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, to overcome Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland and his challenge to the Queen’s throne involved Shakespeare’s company in dangerous ways. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had been invited to per-

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form a play called Richard II (possibly Shakespeare’s) on the eve of the attempted coup d’état on the 7th February 1601 to prepare the way, so it is argued, for the overthrow of the Queen. ‘Know ye not I am Richard II’, Elizabeth is claimed to have said. The acting company avowed its innocence of any political purpose and were only reprimanded. The relation of Troilus to this resides in the representation of the character of Achilles, a great hero in Chapman’s Seven Books of the Iliades (1598), which Shakespeare must have read. Chapman, in his dedication of the book to Essex, readily identified him as a heroic modern Achilles. Shakespeare, however, presents Achilles, not as a hero, but as a braggart and fool, sulking in his tent—a good way, suggests Jonathan Bate, of dissociating the company from any sympathy for the disgraced Earl. Such events must have played a part in the shift of mood strongly identifiable between Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599) and Measure for Measure (1604), within the more general change which obviously exists between the pastoral work of Spenser and the satires of John Donne, or between the plays of Marlowe who died in 1593, and the sardonic Jacobean comedies and tragic-comedies of Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Rowley and company in the first twenty years or so of the new century. Troilus and Cressida is, among other things, about political behaviour and it contains two long scenes of public debate. In the first of these (Act 1 scene 3) is to be found the famous speech on the nature of political order and the reasons for its breakdown. Ulysses defines why there is disunity in the Greek ranks. He refers to the Ptolemaic hierarchical world order which places God in heaven; beneath him nine orders of angels; beneath these the human (and military) hierarchies; then the beasts; below these the orders of natural vegetation; finally the minerals. Each level has qualities the level beneath does not possess. Thus angels have a higher power of reason than man; man has a power of reason which the beasts lack; beasts have the power of movement; vegetation has the power of growth; minerals lie inert in the earth. Each level has within it categories of value, angels as well as men, beasts, vegetation and minerals. Seraphim, eagles, lions, oaks, diamonds, like kings (and fathers within the family) rank high. Reptiles, sparrows, weeds etc. rank low—as do common soldiers and the peasantry. These levels correspond to, and lie within, a general pattern of the Four Elements: Earth, Water Air and Fire, which range from low to high value, and correspond to the Four Humours which constitute the physiology of man: Melancholy, Phlegm, Blood and Choler, cold and dry, cold and moist, hot and moist and hot and dry successively. Man needs to keep a balance among them, which

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the hot-headed Hotspur, for instance, in Henry IV Part I, does not. Judgement should control his choleric humour. Man was seen as a charioteer whose ‘Reason’ should grip the reins of the two wild horses of Will and Appetite, which were seen as inferior qualities of the human mind. This ‘Elizabethan World Picture’, described in the well-known book of that name by E. M. W. Tillyard, has been taken to be the view of Shakespeare. Spoken, however, by Ulysses, the ideal of political order which he advocates sorts ill with his Machiavellian behaviour. Jonathan Bate in his applauded The Genius of Shakespeare (p.188) acutely notes how a conservative politician, Michael Portillo, quotes Ulysses’ speech selectively to support a form of Toryism, missing out lines which do not support his case. The speech’s general effect is sombre. Will and Appetite ‘an universal wolf’ threaten the world Ulysses describes. This will be discussed at greater length when we run through the play scene by scene. It is important to understand, however, that the hierarchical world which the speech brilliantly summarizes provides Shakespeare with a shared myth which enriches his patterns of symbolism and metaphor. (When such a pattern is not shared, as in, say, William Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas, 1797–1804, problems of communication arise.) In Troilus and Cressida the audience would be familiar with Ulysses’ world picture, as they would with the traditional Greek stories, but Shakespeare treats the picture ironically, questioning in particular the relation of Reason to Will and disturbing conventional attitudes to traditional heroes. 3.5. Publication and Performance The political background may be relevant to the particular problems of publication of Troilus. It was entered in the Stationer’s Register in February 1603 but not published in quarto until 1609 and there were further delays in printing the Folio edition in 1623 between which and the quarto there are considerable discrepancies. (For a full discussion of the complex textual problems see David Bevington’s Arden edition, Third Series (pages 398–429). The quarto appeared with two different title pages and a preface to the reader. The first title page claims the play ‘was acted by the King’s Majesty’s Servants at the Globe’. The second asserts it was ‘never staled with the stage’ and removes all mention of performance. If the ‘possessers’ of the play were reluctant to see the play in print, as the 1609 publisher’s preface suggests, then a further explanation may lie in the identification of characters in the play with powerful public figures. Apart from the possible desire of the company to distance itself from

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the disgraced Earl of Essex by representing him as Achilles, the powerful Robert Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, might not have liked to see himself parodied as Ulysses. Whatever the case, the political discussions in the play, which seem to address an educated audience, were dangerous material, and this, together with its possibly reduced marketability, may have been reasons for suspending production.

4. Dramatic Structure 4.1. Prologue At the start of any play a writer must ask what the audience needs to know, set the scene and create excitement. Shakespeare begins his plays in many ways. In Hamlet, he starts with a Ghost and feeds information through a character, Horatio, who speaks of events which may have caused the ghost to walk. This provides background and creates anxiety in audience and characters alike. Immediate suspense is likewise strongly established by the three witches in Macbeth. In The Comedy of Errors a simple explanatory prologue is used, which can lose the audience’s interest unless very well delivered. In Troilus, this device is employed in a much subtler way. The Prologue appears, dressed in armour, to set the scene and speaks in magniloquent terms of the gates and walls of Troy within which the Trojans are ‘immured’. But it seems he is not an omniscient figure ‘in confidence of author’s pen’ (lines 23–4). (Some have thought this a sly sideways comment on the practice of Ben Jonson and a later interpolation, but its ambiguity is dramatically integral to the play which would be worse without it.) The Prologue is a warrior from within the story, ignorant of the outcome of the war, and his early high-sounding rhetoric slackens towards the end with an invitation to spectators to view ‘what may be digested in a play, / Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are (lines 29–30)’. At this point he seems to speak for Shakespeare. The story may not prove easily digestible since, though it begins in the middle, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the play also ends in the middle of the war, frustrating the audience’s expectation of the traditional endings of tragic death or comedic marriage. Aristotle’s requirements in The Poetics that a play should have unity—a beginning, a middle and an end, are already half disregarded. Not to begin at the beginning is more forgivable. A play cannot represent in full a nine-year war. The author, like Homer, starts close to the climax of a story sufficiently well-known to need little reference to previous events. The Prologue quickly sets the scene and stirs up excitement. The Greeks and Trojans are at war. The Prologue tells us why in high-sounding terms, though at line ten the words ‘And that’s the quarrel’

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(i.e. the stealing of Helen by the ‘wanton Paris’) could be spoken sarcastically. This, however, does not easily square with the rhetoric of ‘deep-drawing barges’, disgorging ‘war-like fraughtage’ (line 13) which follows. The word combines the ‘fraught’ atmosphere with the heavy military freight carried by the Greek ships. To describe warriors as freight, however, is less than complimentary and the word ‘skittish’ in line twenty: ‘Expectation, tickling skittish spirits’ might also give us pause. The speech could begin to slacken at this point. The line creates a picture of nervous horses before the battle, but at the same time hints at the later pejorative references to the traditional heroes as horses out of control. For a listener not knowing the play, the insinuation may still be drowned by the sonorous vowels and Greek names which conjure up the war waging around the six gates of Troy within which the Trojans are ‘sparred’ with ‘co-responsive and fulfilling bolts’ (line 18). The speech serves to create excitement, but contains unease at its own rhetoric. 4.2. Act I Act 1 Scene 1 If the Prologue, clad in armour, began with a high sounding, if slightly hollow, promise of battle, the first scene in the play, set in Troy (also named Ilium) undercuts the expectations of the audience immediately. Troilus is dispirited and will unarm because he ‘finds cruel battle here within’ (line 3). Shortly we see that he shares in a general mental disorder. The brain and hand, Will, Reason and Judgment are at odds in many characters. In Troilus’s case, love for Cressida undermines his desire to fight. The Greeks are besieging Troy but he prefers to besiege Cressida, rather than engage in battle. The ironic parallel runs through the play. Troilus’s wooing, like the war, drags on. Pandarus the go-between encourages Troilus not to despair in his suit. This echoes the theme but not the tone of Agamemnon’s and Nestor’s speeches in Act 1 scene 3. They employ grandiloquent language to spur on the flagging Greeks. Pandarus, however, encourages Troilus by developing a prosaic metaphor about baking a cake: ‘He that would have a cake out of the wheat must tarry the grinding’ (line 15). The language is colloquial and suggests indirectly that Troilus’s idealized love for Cressida depends on physical appetite. Sexuality and eating are constantly connected. Cressida is always in Troilus’s mind when he sits at table. Food images abound as the play develops and Pandarus’s reference to the cooling of the cake before it can be eaten refers forward to the cooling of Cressida’s love when she is transferred against her wishes to the Greek camp.

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Sickness images, too, are associated with Troilus’s passion. Pandarus pours ‘in the open ulcer’ of Troilus heart and into ‘every gash that love hath given’ (line 59) his description of Cressida’s beauty. The emotion is evidently physical, based on touch, on the ‘soft seizure’ of her hand, and it leaves wounds, as do the weapons of war. Pandarus is also placed in parallel. As the main go-between he echoes the many gobetweens who shuttle back and forth in the play between the warring camps: Helen is a Greek queen who has switched sides; Cressida will switch in the opposite direction; the envoys, the Trojan Aeneas and the Greek Diomedes, operate between the camps, and Calchas, Cressida’s father, has already moved from the Trojan to the Greek side and will demand his daughter in exchange for the captured Trojan warrior Antenor. In addition, the Greek warrior Ajax is related to the Trojan hero, Hector; Achilles is in love with a Trojan, Polyxena, daughter to King Priam. With these crossed allegiances it is not surprising that Troilus questions the motive for the war, though shortly, in Act 2 scene 2, he will argue for its continuance. Pandarus, in this first scene, is ‘tetchy to be wooed to woo’ (line 92). This echoes Achilles who, like Troilus, is reluctant to fight but, like Pandarus, wishes to be cajoled into action. The Greeks pretend in Act 3 scene 3 that they will woo their strongest fighter no more. Similarly Pandarus declares he will no longer act the bawd and exits in high dudgeon. Troilus, left to soliloquize, finds the war ‘too starved a subject’ (line 89) for his sword. The appetite for love destroys an appetite for war whose ‘subject’ is the theft of Helen. His soliloquy develops a further dominant image. He and Pandarus are merchants and Cressida’s bed is India: ‘There she lies a pearl’ (line 96), a costly merchandise therefore. Enter Aeneas who announces news of the battle in terms of sport, another leitmotif. War is a game like the sport of love. And they exit together, both clad in armour, to join the fray. By ironic parallels and subtle use of metaphor this scene acts as a further prologue to a play of action and inaction. Act I Scene 2 In the second scene, Cressida’s man, Alexander, supplies us and Cressida with necessary plot information and gives us a description of a disordered Ajax. He presumably remains throughout the scene, since Shakespeare provides him with no exit, but directors often send him out early to limit any masking of the procession of warriors who enter later. (This would have applied less in the Elizabethan theatres where spectators, especially those of rank, looked down from above). The opening conversation tells us a battle is about to begin. It seems, like all the

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battle scenes in the play, to consist of a series of armed single combats of a mediaeval nature in which high ranking warriors in full body armour live to fight another day. Hector, the Trojans’ best man, is up early because he is angry and must salvage his honour (an important word in the play). He has been ‘coped in battle’ the previous day by his Greek relative, Ajax, whom Alexander describes to Cressida as a mixture of qualities ‘sauced with discretion’ (line 28). The phrase recalls the food references of the previous scene. Cressida adds others in the combat of wit which ensues when Pandarus enters to commend Troilus as a better man than his elder brother Hector. Cressida mocks both Troilus and Pandarus, using metaphors of fencing and food: ‘Ay a minced man ; and then to be baked with no date in the pie’ (line 247–8) following with: ‘at all these wards I lie, at a thousand watches’ (line 254–5). She plays the game of love employing images of combat and appetite, but confesses in soliloquy as the scene ends that ‘More in Troilus thousandfold I see / Than in the glass of Pandar’s praise may be’ (line 275–6). The way in which Cressida conducts herself in this scene prepares us for the way she later behaves when she is led to the Greek camp. It also sets up the shock of her very different behaviour when Pandarus brings in Troilus. This apparent split in her dramatic character, which is a problem for the actress, we will discuss later in Act 3 scene 2. The duel of wit between uncle and niece is broken by the return of the warriors from the field. How they pass over the stage presents the director with a problem. Presumably on the Elizabethan stage the entry would be from one upstage door to another, probably ringing the edge of the apron stage with Pandarus, Alexander and Cressida commenting in the centre. Alternatively the watching characters move to one of the exterior corners of the forestage when Pandarus suggests they move position: ‘Here, here’s an excellent place’ (line 176). There seems little time for the actors to retreat to a balcony and a position on the forestage need not cause problems of masking since the soldiers move, Alexander could exit and Cressida might kneel. The dialogue also allows only five or six lines of commentary before the passing of each returning warrior. To walk seventy or eighty feet around the stage takes more time than the dialogue allows but actors can use a silent walk to project their characters effectively. A modern director, depending on the size and shape of his stage, may allow his actors that opportunity, as it is likely the Elizabethans did. The final entry of the common soldiers invites satire as does the deportment of the so-called heroic warriors who precede them.

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Act I Scene 3 After private conversations, and a jesting commentary on a straggling procession of tired warriors in the previous scene, we switch to a fuller stage and an introduction to the Greek camp. This is the first of the two contrasting public debate scenes, which reveal differences of tone and attitude between the Greek generals and the Trojans. Agamemnon the Greek General in Chief, makes a slow, complex, rhetorical speech, rallying the troops. The Greeks’ long years of siege are ‘But the protractive trials of great Jove / To find persistive constancy in men’ (lines 20–21). The language is abstract and the sense of disorder in the camp is emphasized by images of infection and warped natural growth. Disasters are like knots in a sound pine tree. Their actions like a badly aimed arrow ‘draw / Bias and thwart’ (lines 14–15). These are only Jove’s tests of our constancy which will reveal the difference between men of value and those who are ‘light’ and winnowed by the wind of fortune. Nestor follows in the same vein, repeating the idea in different metaphors. The wind separates the ‘shallow bauble boats’ (line 35) from those which are weighty enough to weather the storm. The ‘thing of courage’ answers the storm’s rage with equal courage. Ulysses, who speaks next, compliments his leaders on their rhetoric, but their speeches, he implies, do not answer the question fully. The Greeks themselves bear responsibility for their failure and he describes the ‘neglect of rule’, and the individualism of the Greek soldiers, in the most famous speech on the nature of ‘degree’ in the whole Shakespeare canon. The ordered hierarchy has collapsed. Justice does not reign: ‘Everything includes itself in power, / Power into will, will into appetite; / And appetite an universal wolf, / So doubly seconded with will and power, / Must make perforce an universal prey / And last eat up himself’ (lines 119–24). Eating and feeding dominate reason and judgment. It is a long speech, which can try the patience of spectators as well as the characters on stage, but its dramatic effectiveness resides in the way it creates the feeling of paralysis and the ‘envious fever of pale and bloodless emulation’ (133–4) which has settled on this war, already seven years old. Ulysses blames this, we soon find, on Achilles, their greatest warrior, who keeps his tent and will not fight. ‘The nature of the sickness found’, says Agamemnon (sarcastically if the actor so decides), ‘what is the remedy?’ (lines 140–1). Ulysses does not immediately answer, but describes in detail the way in which Achilles and Patroclus, whom we have yet to see, parody their fellow commanders. Their example infects others and kills respect for those who ‘by reason guide’ the execution of the war. (How far Agamemnon and Nestor are guided by reason is questionable as is Ulysses’ application of reason to the

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situation). But before Ulysses can suggest a solution to the chaos, a brassy trumpet announces the entry of Aeneas from Troy. He wishes to speak to ‘great Agamemnon’ but does not, or affects not at first, to recognize him. Aeneas is ‘a stranger to those imperial looks’ (line 224) but if the looks are imperial he should recognize that Agamemnon stands before him: ‘Which is that god in office guiding men?’ (line 231), he repeats. This deliberate down-sizing of traditional heroes recalls Pandarus’s unfortunate failure to recognize Troilus (line 220) in the previous scene. It will be echoed in Act 4 scene 5, when Hector, unarmed during the truce asks: ‘Is this Achilles?’. Aeneas’s entry also marks a distinction between Greeks and Trojans. He speaks in an energetic language which contrasts with the slower rhythms of Greek dialogue: ‘Courtiers as free, as debonair, unarmed, / As bending angels—that’s their fame in peace’ (lines 235–6). The language is overblown, as is probably the announcing trumpet, which has roused Agamemnon to proclaim that the Greeks, ‘with one voice / Call Agamemnon head and general’ (lines 221–2). The untruth of this has just been shown. Aeneas has brought a challenge from Hector to any Greek who is prepared to oppose his claim to possess ‘a lady, wiser, truer, fairer / Than ever Greek did compass in his arms’ (lines 275–6). Such a basis for mortal combat is reminiscent of mediaeval courtly love traditions and when he later hears of it Achilles calls it trash. This is a good description. Achilles is in love with Hector’s sister, Polyxena. Hector wishes unknowingly to prove his own wife Andromache (or another ‘lady’) is wiser than his own sister. It is another example of the way this play crosses lines and barriers. Only now, after the challenge has been issued, does Ulysses begin to answer Agamemnon’s question: What is the solution to this Greek fever of emulation? When Agamemnon exits with Aeneas and others, Ulysses remains behind with the old Nestor and outlines a plot to encourage Ajax to fight Hector rather than Achilles at whom the challenge is evidently aimed. Ulysses determines to prick Achilles’ pride and bring him round to a sense of common purpose. In so doing, Ulysses is flouting the hierarchical system of degree he has described as ideal and according to which the superior soldier should meet Hector. This is a further sardonic undermining of the heroic traditional image of the so-called heroes in this ironic play. Ulysses, with ‘wise’ Nestor’s approval, is encouraging pride, rather than allaying it: ‘Two curs shall tame each other; pride alone / Must tar the mastiffs on, as ’twere their bone’ (lines 391–2). The metaphor brackets heroes and dogs together.

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4.3. Act 2 Act 2 Scene 1 The next act changes the inflated tone. It is entirely in prose and brings in the most scurrilous character in Shakespeare. Thersites appears in the mediaeval role of fool to his master, Ajax. But he enters refusing to do Ajax’s bidding, which is to read Hector’s proclamation. Pretending not to hear Ajax’s command, he intensifies the impression of a camp not only in disorder but diseased. What if Agamemnon were full of boils?: ‘And those boils did run (say so), did not the general run then? Were not that a botchy core?’ (lines 5–6). Thersites openly describes the Greek leaders as fools. He is clever, and defeats his superiors in duels of railing. It is a fool’s vocation to entertain by wit and to tell truths, even unpleasant ones. Ajax, however, does not wish to be entertained. When he becomes the object of verbal attack he can in return only swear in comparative commonplaces. Thersites is inventive: ‘I think thy horse will sooner con an oration than thou learn a prayer without book’ (lines 16–7). He employs the contemptuous ‘thou’: ‘thou mongrel beef-witted lord’ (line 12). The horse image, i.e. an animal that needs to be reined in, recurs. Like the horses in Macbeth, which eat each other, the animal natures of the Greeks are out of control. The play again evokes the Platonic image of the horses of will and appetite, which drag the reins from the hands of the rational charioteer. In this fictional world, and Shakespeare may well imply that this is the condition of the real world, it is not the divine Reason which rules, but the Will of an animal low in the scale of values. Ajax begins to beat Thersites and Achilles and Patroclus enter. Thersites continues to insult Ajax, then lets fly at Achilles with: ‘A great deal of your wit, too, lies in your sinews, or else there be liars’ (lines 96–7). And when Patroclus bids him be silent Thersites turns on him: ‘I shall hold my tongue when Achilles’ brach bids me, shall I?’ (lines 111–2). The ugliness intensifies. Patroclus is openly called a bitch (brach) and catamite. Thersites exits and it is left to Achilles to tell Ajax the substance of Hector’s challenge. Achilles half informs him then exits on ‘’tis trash’. Ajax leaves to find out more. The undercutting of the previous scene is complete. Act 2 Scene 2 After the unpleasant scene with Thersites, Ajax, Achilles and Patroclus, Shakespeare changes dramatic key when the Trojans enter to debate the Greek offer to abandon

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the siege in exchange for the return of Helen. Interestingly they do not offer to return Hesione, Priam’s sister, whom they have stolen and who is briefly referred to by Troilus (line 80) as ‘our aunt’. She is obviously not of high marketable value. Instead, the Greeks only offer to ‘strike off’ the time spent in keeping the stolen queen, together with whatever else may have been ‘consumed / In hot digestion of this cormorant war’ (lines 5–6). The business language of writing off a debt suggests that the Greeks calculate Helen’s worth in material terms, whereas the Trojans are divided as we shall see, over the kind of value she represents. At the same time the language of feeding continues to impugn the motives of those who engage in war. Hector argues for letting Helen go. The war has cost too many lives; Helen is not Trojan; nor is she their lawful possession. Troilus opposes his brother, suggesting that honour is what they should be governed by. Reason is subject to fear. It ‘flies the object of all harm’ (line 42). ‘Manhood and honour / Should have hare hearts, would they but fat their thoughts with this crammed reason’ (lines 47–9). In other words, reason seeks to justify fear instead of controlling it. Hector replies that Helen is not worth enough in herself to warrant keeping her. Troilus responds that value lies in the subjective estimate of the purchaser: ‘What is aught but as ‘tis valued?’ (line 52). Hector rejects the argument. Value is not subjective. It resides in the object itself. But Troilus retorts that Helen must be kept because honour demands they abide by the value they have placed on her in the past. Reason must serve national pride. The war must therefore continue. This intellectually demanding debate requires a further change of dramatic key to sustain audience attention. Cassandra enters with high pitched cries to prophesy defeat: ‘Troy burns, or else let Helen go’ (line 112), She is fated according the ancient myth not to be believed. Troilus dismisses the prophecy and Paris adds his voice to Troilus’s: ‘Paris should ne’er retract what he hath done’ (line 141). Priam, the king who ought to have the dominant role in this debate, reproves him with his only intervention: ‘You have the honey still, but these the gall’ (line 144). Paris replies that it is honour he fights for and the shamefulness of handing Helen back is not to be borne. Hector then verbally chastises both his brothers. They are superficial, unfit to hear moral philosophy. Their arguments arise from disordered blood, from pleasure and revenge, in short from will and appetite. ‘Hector’s opinion is this by way of truth’, he says: ‘Thus to persist / In doing wrong extenuates not wrong’ (lines 186–7). Then, to the joy of Troilus and the puzzlement of the spectator, he changes tack completely, accepts the argument that the return of Helen would be an offence to Trojan honour and declares: ‘I propend to you / In resolution to keep Helen still; / For ‘tis a cause

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that hath no mean dependence / Upon our joint and several dignities’ (lines 190–3). Honour and disordered blood, it seems, control his actions too. As the scene draws to an end, Troilus develops his honour theme. The Trojans are fighting to create the image future generations will have of them. They cannot be remembered as cowards ‘Fame in time to come’ must ‘canonize us’ (line 202). (Time is another word which echoes through the play.) Hector now astonishingly reveals he has already sent his challenge among the Greeks and had therefore decided to continue the war before the debate began. The only purpose of the council scene has been to allow Priam’s sons to air their opinions. Hector has spoken as reason’s advocate but acts against his own arguments. It seems his only wish was to establish his intellectual superiority. Honour is what they are all governed by. Priam, the king, who ought to overrule them, has nothing else to say. Act 2 Scene 3 The scene now changes to the Greek camp. Thersites returns alone and comments bitterly on events and on the characters he serves, but he has no power to change what is happening. It is a failure of effect he shares with the leaders in both camps. Hector’s challenge, Ulysses’ plan and Achilles’ withdrawal all fail in their intent. Thersites’ ugly appearance, words and actions, (reinforced by one famous actor who dropped a gob of saliva into Ajax’s plate before he ate) weigh against the high tone of the previous scene yet render more attractive the Trojan values of courage and honour which, however self-centred, invite human sympathy. On the other hand, Thersites is intelligent and his bitter view of the general scene is plausible enough to provoke uncomfortable laughter. He has attributes of the witty mediaeval fool figure and he serves men more foolish than himself, first the ‘elephant’ Ajax, now the ‘rare enginer’, Achilles, who welcomes him with the question: ‘Why hast thou not served thyself to my table (for) so many meals?’ (lines 39–40). (Shakespeare here employs the technique of ‘double time’, giving the impression in one line of dialogue that a long period has passed in the story, when the time between stage appearances has been brief.) Thersites, the fool figure, has changed camps. But when Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice leaves Shylock for Bassanio, or when Touchstone in As You Like It accompanies Celia and Rosalind into the forest of Arden, they are shown as bringing good fortune to the group they join. Thersites, in contrast, rails too bitterly for that. He amuses Patroclus and Achilles with his attacks on those they despise and in doing so becomes confederate with them. In soliloquy he curses the whole camp

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with the ‘Neapolitan bone-ache’ and goes on to mock his listeners: ‘Agamemnon is a fool, Achilles is a fool, Thersites is a fool and, as aforesaid, Patroclus is a fool’ (lines 56–7). Why? All are fools, says Thersites, to be commanded of the others, except for Patroclus who is a ‘fool positive’. It makes for abrasive entertainment for his new masters and underlines again the collapse of hierarchy and the individualism in the Greek camp. At least the Trojans still act together. As for the supposed entertainer Thersites, his uncomfortable character invites an audience to consider why they or anyone should laugh at what he says, as well as to wonder what kind of entertainment the whole play is providing. In the midst of Thersites’s railing, the Greek generals enter, led by Agamemnon. Achilles contemptuously refuses to speak with them and exits. Patroclus stays to mock their visit and hopes it is ‘but for your health and your digestion’s sake, / An after-dinner’s breath’ (lines 109–10) to which Agamemnon replies that Achilles’ virtues ‘like fair fruit in an unwholesome dish / Are like to rot untasted’ (lines 118–9). Patroclus and Ulysses exit to tell Achilles so. Meanwhile Agamemnon plays on Ajax’s vanity and Ulysses returns to report Achilles’ refusal to acknowledge their visit: ‘Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages / And batters down himself (lines 172–3). The battering ram which should be used against the enemy is demolishing Achilles’ selfhood. The war is within as well as between men. Ulysses joins Agamemnon in inflating Ajax’s already high self-esteem at the expense of Achilles. If they can make Achilles resent their choice of Ajax to fight Hector, they may shame him into fighting again. Nestor enters the game. Ajax stands, effectively centre stage, with the others on each side, ridiculing him with knowing looks at each other and no doubt at the audience, while he absorbs the flattery as deserved praise. The mocking Greeks may flatter themselves they are cleverer than Ajax but their reputation for wisdom will soon be tarnished. These foolers also prove to be foolish. The scene closes with Ulysses’ announcement that fresh Greek reinforcements have disembarked. The implication is that war is won by numerical, not moral superiority. Achilles is left to sleep. Ajax is now the Greek’s main man. 4.4 Act 3 Act 3 Scene 1 There follows the only scene in which Helen, the reason for the war, appears. The story demands that the actress be beautiful and she is generally strikingly so in modern pro-

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ductions. But played by a boy at the Globe his/her appearance must have reinforced the note of artifice which runs so strongly through the scene. The musicians who are playing, no doubt in the gallery above, should also strike an artificial note When Pandarus asks a servant of Paris for whom they play the servant affects not to understand and puns on the words ‘grace’ and ‘honour’, which are Pandarus’s titles but scarcely his moral qualities. The title of ‘Queen’ ( a pun on ‘quean’) Helen, also leaves room for ironic suggestion. The servant, like Achilles in the previous scene, is reluctant to answer his superiors but finally replies that Paris has commanded it and describes Helen, to the detriment of Cressida, as: ‘the mortal Venus, the heart blood of beauty’ (line 31). When Pandarus says his business with Paris ‘seethes’, the servant’s aside to the audience— ‘there’s a stewed phrase indeed’ (line 41)—reinforces the impression that old loyalties between master and servant are breaking down. In Troilus the Greek servants are insolent. There are no examples of faithful service, such as that of Kent in King Lear. Paris and Helen then enter. (The musicians may remain above, pace modern editors.) Pandarus is anxious to speak with Paris alone. He fears King Priam may call Troilus to supper, but since Troilus intends to ‘sup’ with Cressida, Paris must convey his excuses. Helen blocks his intentions (as intentions in this play are consistently blocked) by insisting on getting Pandarus to sing a song full of sexual innuendo, followed by sexual banter in which Paris defines love as bred by hot blood, hot thoughts and hot deeds. ‘Is love a generation of vipers?’ (line 127–8) asks Pandarus. The rest of the scene suggests the answer is yes. Paris agrees to make excuse for Troilus. Pandarus exits and Paris and Helen go to greet the returning warriors. Helen is to undo Hector’s buckles with her ‘white enchanting fingers’ (line 145), to which, says Paris, the buckles will yield more easily than to an enemy’s sword. Soft hands and hard steel are set alongside each other to remind us of the play’s consistent parallelism between love and war. Love and reason, however, seldom go together as the comedies often mockingly, but more humorously, remind us. ‘Sweet, above thought I love thee’ (line 153) says Paris revealingly, as the lovers exit together. The words define the atmosphere of a central scene whose suggestive love song and dialogue afford a great stage opportunity which may tempt a director to end it with an orgiastic collapse. This would seem appropriate to the general atmosphere but on the open Elizabethan stage the lack of a curtain would have made exits very difficult.

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Act 3 Scene 2 The next scene shifts to Troilus’s orchard where Troilus’s Boy tells Pandarus, his master is waiting to be conducted to Cressida. Troilus enters and Pandarus goes to fetch his niece. This allows Troilus time for a revealing soliloquy in which he compares Pandarus to Charon and himself to someone waiting to cross the Styx. He wishes to ‘wallow in the lily beds’ (line 11) and suspects that the intensity of his desires will destroy him: ‘What will it be / When that the watery palates taste indeed / Love’s thrice-repured nectar? Death I fear me, / Swooning destruction’ (lines 18–21). His love is then expressed in images of war. Just as warriors in battle fall in heaps when the enemy charges, so his desires will lose ‘distinction’ i.e. qualitative difference. The image undermines the idea of a refined love expressed in the previous lines. A general collapse in the heat of war replaces the watery palate. Pandarus brings in a veiled Cressida. The lovers are hesitant, then they kiss and Pandarus goes out leaving them conveniently together, his relevant excuse being to get a fire, needed perhaps to warm Cressida. But Troilus is already feverish. Emotion deprives him of language, but deeds, says Pandarus are what are called for, not words. Troilus only finds his tongue when Cressida expresses fear and seems to find in their mutual feeling: ‘more dregs than water, if my fears have eyes’ (line 65). This prompts another of the intellectual exchanges which mark the play. Troilus replies: ‘Fears make devils of cherubims; they never see truly’ (line 66). We recall how in the Trojan council scene, Troilus says fear and cowardice supply reasons for running away, whereas ‘honour’ bids you stand. Cressida counters that fear is valuable. Not to fear is dangerous: ‘Blind fear, that seeing reason leads, finds safer footing than blind reason, stumbling without fear’ (lines 68–9). Reason warns you to be afraid and is unreliable when it ignores what one ought to fear. She supports Hector’s argument that reason, or judgement should control the mind, but like him, her deeds belie her words. Reason engenders legitimate fears which make her hesitate, but love, or desire, finally conquers reason, just as self-regarding honour (but not self-preservation) controls Troilus and Hector The play continues to raise questions about the relation between reason (or selfawareness) and basic impulses, such as fear and ‘appetite’. Fear is a protective mechanism and may, according to Cressida, guide reason for the good. Appetites (desires for food, honour, status, sex etc.) are dynamic mechanisms which operate in this play mainly for ill. Shakespeare, however, seems very modern in his awareness that the traditional moralistic pattern insisting on the subservience of will to reason is dangerously simple. The two horses of will and appetite may not only pull against the

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rational charioteer but against each other. Instinct can pull away from a quasi-religious ideal, for example. The self awareness and rational capacity needed to resolve such a conflict is rare in this play. The ensuing dialogue, however, discusses this conflict as one between words and deeds. Lovers’ language expresses a desire which appetite cannot fulfil. Is there something monstrous in love, asks Cressida. Troilus replies: ‘Nothing but our undertakings when we vow to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks’ (lines 73–4.) Lovers’ language is hyperbolical, swears more than it can perform. Is that not monstrous, asks Cressida. No, says Troilus: let us be judged by our deeds, not our vows. His words will return to haunt him, for Cressida will be judged by her deeds: ‘Praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove’ (lines 87–8) and Troilus will have to swear himself out of his own eyes to retain the image of Cressida that he has earlier expressed. The dregs in their love will later become clear. Pandarus re-enters to chide the lovers for hanging back. His words are full of unconscious irony for they suggest Cressida’s future actions. His kindred ‘are constant being won. They are burs, I can tell you; they’ll stick where they are thrown’ (lines 107–8). The audience will know by reputation that Cressida will not be constant. She will shortly be thrown into the Greek camp and like a bur will stick to Diomedes. Dramatic tension, as ever, is subtly strengthened by such ironic hints. How far an audience sympathizes or blames Cressida for what later happens depends very much on the way the actress performs her next speeches. Cressida’s behaviour and language in this scene is markedly different from that in Act 1 scene 2, where she is alone with Pandarus, and from the two later scenes where she is handed over to the Greeks in Act 4 scene 5, and when Ulysses, Troilus and Thersites watch her with Diomedes in Act 5 scene 2. An actress in this courtship scene will need to suggest that her character has a single but complex identity. Two different Cressidas would bewilder an audience to the detriment of the play’s general effect. The audience should be aware that it is in her character to be an actress. She reacts like a chameleon to the different ways in which she is seen by Troilus, Pandarus, and later Ulysses and Diomedes. In the next speeches, Cressida admits her love for Troilus, then wishes to withdraw her words because her admission of feeling risks delivering her into his hands. Cressida’s identity, therefore, resides in her consciousness of the need for silence or the need to use deceptive words to mask her ‘real’ self. Her capacity to pretend was evident in Act 1 scene 2 where she fences verbally with her uncle. It will be obvious in Act 4 scene 5 when the Greeks welcome her and the audience (often) gasps as she

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is kissed in general. There, Cressida assumes a mask to regain control. How far is she acting here in Act 3 scene 2? Has her guard dropped when she asks Troilus to stop her mouth? Was it her purpose indirectly to beg a kiss? She denies it and seems without pretence when she says: ‘I have a kind of self resides with you, / But an unkind self that itself will leave / To be another’s fool’ (lines 143–5). Love induces a transformation of behaviour and character. The unkind self, in the old sense of ‘kind’ implies that the self that resides with Troilus is not kin to her, that she is not behaving as ‘herself’. This thought prompts her to ask Troilus to consider whether she was in fact only pretending to be sincere: ‘Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love / And fell so roundly to a large confession / To angle for your thought’ (lines 148–50). After her confession of love she seems to want to head off a possible suspicion in Troilus’s mind that she is play-acting. And perhaps she is, though not in the sense of conscious flirtation. She may well wish to act up to Troilus’s idealized vision of her, to become a partner in this game of high mutual estimation called lovemaking, which is not, for Troilus, a game, and which she herself perhaps half hopes it is not. The problem of interpretation is complex and the actress will resolve it by tone of voice, posture, facial expression and the use of eye movement to communicate more to the spectator than to the characters who take her words at face value. The dramatic irony which occurs when the audience suspects that a character is playacting is intensified in the plighting of troth which follows. The characters are already symbols in the minds of those who are aware of the mediaeval story. Troilus is true, Cressida is false, Pandarus is a bawd. But such simple definitions the play itself queries, as it will query the truth of the Trojan War story. What is taken for historical fact may be misrepresentation. This play complicates the simple traditional images of the characters in the old story and confers on them a human and complex dimension, especially on Cressida, who as a woman needs to wear a mask. The characters may speak in conventional phrases as if to corroborate the conventional view. Troilus asks future generations to see him as a symbol: ‘as true as steel’ etc. Cressida similarly asks the future to speak of her as ‘false as water’ if she betray Troilus. ‘As true as Troilus; As false as Cressid’ had become a conventional view but the play implies it is an inaccurate and simplistic representation of their reality. The scene ends with the lovers saying a blasphemous ‘Amen’ over a bargain made and Pandarus invites the lovers to a chamber with a bed and prays to Cupid (another blasphemy?) to provide all tongue-tied maidens with a pandar to supply the gear.

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Act 3 Scene 3 The flourish of a trumpet signals a change of key and a sudden plot reversal. The stage is now public. Cressida’s father, Calchas, is asking the Greeks to trade a captured Trojan general, Antenor, for his daughter. The Trojans will surely make the exchange, he says, because Antenor ‘is such a wrest in their affairs / That their negotiations all must slack, / Wanting his manage’ (lines 23–5). One would have thought the Trojan need of Antenor would be an argument for the Greeks to keep him, but Calchas appeals for payment for his previous services, and Cressida is to be the merchandise which will ‘strike off all service I have done’ (line 29). (The language of accountancy is used for Cressida, as it was for Helen in the Trojan Council scene.) The Greeks agree, and in restoring Antenor will no doubt prolong the war—for Cressida can only be of service by serving as mistress to one of their warriors. This will be Diomedes who is sent, with Calchas, to fetch her. Achilles and Patroclus then appear at the entrance to their ‘tent’ (either one of the upstage doors or a curtain of some kind arranged round a recess). The generals agree with Ulysses’ plan to shock Achilles into compliance with their aims. Agamemnon, Nestor, Menelaus and Ajax pass by with feigned indifference. Ulysses remains to speak with Achilles, who is surprised by their behaviour into reflecting on the way men lose ‘honour’. But he has lost nothing, he says to Patroclus, ‘save these men’s looks’ (line 90). Ulysses will now speak to him about the importance of those looks and how identity is formed in the estimate of others. The dialogue between them raises the question of subjective and objective value already debated by the Trojans. A man owns nothing, says Ulysses, unless others recognize it. Achilles agrees. A man’s virtues must be reflected in the eyes and applause of other men. Only thus does a man know his worth. Ulysses develops the earlier Trojan discussion. There Hector argued that value lay in the object itself or in the person (hinting that Helen was of low value). Troilus replied that it lay only in men’s subjective estimates of the person. Ulysses argues a more complex view. Men may be valuable in themselves but not esteemed, whereas others may be esteemed but not valuable. Ajax, he says, is now highly esteemed. Achilles, the implied object of worth, is not so esteemed: ‘Some men creep in skittish Fortune’s hall, / While others play the idiots in her eyes!’ (lines 135–6). Are my deeds forgot? asks Achilles. Ulysses’ reply is famous. Time swallows all good deeds. Achilles’ past is like a large mediaeval hall, hung with rusty and tarnished mail. Honour, i.e. men’s good opinion, is quickly lost. He then compares Achilles to a horse that stumbles in the forefront of the battle, to be trampled by the ranks that

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come behind. ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin’ (line 176) meaning, not as it is sometimes carelessly taken, that all men are brothers, but that ‘all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds (line 177). That is, Ulysses adds: ‘the present eye praises the present object’ (line 181). Achilles is in danger of losing respect and ‘honour’, because in the present he is doing nothing. Ulysses then informs Achilles that his relations with Polyxena, Priam’s daughter, are known: ‘And better would it fit Achilles much / To throw down Hector than Polyxena’ (line 209–10). It appears that the ‘soul of state’ has spies (it is another example of the ways boundaries are crossed between the camps) and Ulysses hints that Achilles could be shamed if Ajax wins. Men might say: ‘Great Hector’s sister did Achilles win,/ But our great Ajax bravely beat down him’ (lines 214–5). It is a form of political blackmail which sorts ill with Ulysses’ earlier ideal view of how societies ought to work. Beware public opinion, he is saying. It is powerful in the creation, castigation and destruction of public images and does not care whether those images are true or false. This whole play, indeed, is a commentary on the creation and falsity of the public image. Patroclus, whom Thersites regards as Achilles’ catamite or ‘masculine whore’, joins the discussion and takes the blame because he feels it is Achilles’ love for him which causes his inaction and loss of reputation. Achilles decides to ask Thersites to invite the Trojan lords to visit him after the combat between Ajax and Hector. He has ‘an appetite that I am sick withal, / To see great Hector in his weeds of peace’ (lines 240–1). The metaphor suggests Achilles is not yet cured. Thersites enters at his point to describe how Ajax has reacted to the flattery of Ulysses, Agamemnon and Nestor. He is mute, mistakes Thersites for the general and is ‘prophetically proud of an heroical cudgeling’ (line 250). The description ends with a curious statement: ‘A plague of opinion! A man may wear it on both sides like a leather jerkin’ (lines 265–6). ‘Opinion’ (see Frank Kermode’s discussion in his book Shakespeare’s Language) is one of the key words. Here it implies that Ajax must act up to men’s apparent regard and conceal his fear that he does not deserve it. Thersites then pantomimes Ajax’s behaviour saying he will carry a letter to Ajax’s horse ‘for that’s the more capable creature’ (lines 307–8). Horses are fit only for use. They are, like Ajax, instruments, not thinkers. Achilles may applaud the pantomime but it does not prevent his mind being ‘troubled like a fountain stirred, / And I myself see not the bottom of it’ (lines 309–10). Thersites as usual has the final word. His aside: ‘Would the fountain of your mind were clear / That I might water an ass at it! I had rather be a tick in a sheep than such .

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a valiant ignorance’ (line 311–3), reinforces the sense that the fool in this play is not the most foolish character, though his wit may serve little purpose beyond voiding his own venom. 4.5 Act 4 Act 4 Scene 1 A torchbearer enters to signify that it is dark, just before daylight. We are still in Troy. On Shakespeare’s stage a group of Greeks would have poured in from one upstage door and Trojans from the other. Each group purposes to take Cressida to her traitorous Trojan father among the Greeks. By their movements and mutual proximity, Elizabethan actors would create the illusion of darkness, as in the opening scenes of Hamlet and Macbeth, by pitching their voices differently, standing close, so as to suggest the difficulty of seeing each other’s faces, or moving with caution to avoid any unseen obstacles. On a Globe stage flooded with afternoon daylight, such acting, reinforced by a symbolic torch, would have communicated the uncertainty that darkness brings. ‘See, ho! Who is there?’ (line 1) asks Paris, as the groups move closer to identify each other. Paris introduces Aeneas to Diomedes. In a time of truce, courtly conventions of hospitality operate. Were it wartime they would seek to kill each other. Now the truce must be obeyed and they exchange, says Paris: ‘the noblest hateful love, that ere I heard of’ (line 35). Soon there will be only hatred, especially in Troilus where it takes the form of a desire for general destruction along with a thirst to kill one man, Diomedes. Of this, more will be said in Act 5. In Act 4 the lovers are not yet parted. Aeneas exits to fetch Cressida. Diomedes and Paris remain to discuss Helen, the subject of the war. ‘Who merits most to keep her?’ asks Paris. Diomedes’ reply is bitter. Helen is only merchandise—worth what it weighs and the merit is slight. Moreover, the husband Menelaus no more deserves to keep her than Paris: ‘Both merits poised, each weighs no less nor more, / But he as he. Which heavier for a whore?’ (lines 67–8). Diomedes continues in an even bitterer tone: ‘For every scruple / Of her contaminated carrion weight / A Trojan hath been slain’. Paris in reply pretends that Diomedes is like a merchant, deliberately dispraising the object desired in order to lower the price. Paris finds a reason to avoid an uncomfortable truth. He needs to believe Helen is valuable (as later Troilus needs so to think of Cressida). Therefore Diomedes must be pretending not to esteem her. The fact that he wants to ‘buy’ her prove she values her.

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The language of bartering and the implication that value can only to be estimated in commercial terms remains a dominant leitmotif. An audience’s normal need to identify with heroes and repudiate villains is sorely tested by this play’s ironies. One may suggest, however, that the Trojans, even Paris here, attract more sympathy because they insist on high values and work as a community, whereas the individualistic Greeks place a low value on each other. Act 4 Scene 2 The play speeds up. Exeunt Paris and Aeneas, enter Troilus and Cressida by the other door. It is now an inside scene, daylight but still cold as Cressida’s shivering must indicate. Shakespeare skilfully alternates between cold and warm, light and darkness, public and private occasions to vary dramatic interest. The opening lines act as stage directions, briefly establishing light and temperature: ‘Dear, trouble not yourself. The morn is cold’ (line 1). The words carry a new intimacy, indicating a change of tone and relationship. That they are indoors is spelt out by Cressida, also in new tones of intimacy: ‘Then, sweet my lord, I’ll call my uncle down. / He shall unbolt the gates’ (lines 2–3). Regrets and anxieties immediately appear. Is Troilus already weary of her? The night has been too short; and when the lubricious Pandarus enters he will mock her. Why did Cressida not still ‘hold off’? Then Aeneas knocks at the door and the lovers hurriedly return to their chamber, unaware that others know of their meeting and ignorant of what the audience knows: that their night will indeed have been too short and will not easily be renewed. Pandarus denies Troilus’s presence, but embarrassingly for Pandarus, Troilus reenters to hear Aeneas say that Cressida must be delivered over to the Greeks. His strangely subdued response; ‘Is it concluded so?’ and: ‘How my achievements mock me’ (lines 71–2) is explicable, perhaps, by some premonition or by his habitual loyalty to the group decision. Pandarus and Cressida react more violently, even histrionically, and certainly not thinking of the Trojan cause. Pandarus wishes Antenor’s neck had been broken. Cressida denies any sense of community. For her, only Troilus counts: ‘No kin, no love, no blood, no soul so near me/ As the sweet Troilus’ (lines 99–100). She refuses to leave Troy, but her fate does not lie in her own will, however much she protests that ‘the strong base and building of my love / Is as the very centre of the earth, drawing all things to it’ (lines 104–6). Unfortunately, only Troilus is drawn to it, and he accepts the exigencies of war.

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Act 4 Scene 3 A brief scene ensues in which Paris asks Troilus to prepare Cressida. He will be, says Troilus, like a priest, offering up his own heart. But both brothers are helpless: ‘I would, as I shall pity, I could help!’ says Paris. Act 4 Scene 4 Pandarus re-enters with his niece, wringing his hands mentally (but not, one hopes, too stagily). Cressida protests the extremity of her grief and the purity of her love in metaphors of taste. Nothing can ‘temporize’ with her affection ‘or brew it to a weak and colder palate’ (line 7). ‘Brew’ usually implies boiling and fermentation. Here it seems to mean ‘change’. That, of course, is what will occur despite her vows. It is in different terms that Troilus declares his feelings: ‘I love thee in so strained a purity / That the blest gods, as angry with my fancy—/ More bright in zeal than the devotion which / Cold lips blow to their deities—take thee from me’ (lines 23–6). The contrast is interesting. Troilus develops his previous image of himself as a priest of love. His feelings now are described as pure and bright in zeal. They seem to have hardened into a form of ideal worship, whereas Cressida maintains the sensuous images which had previously dominated their discourse. Behind and around the lovers, the actor playing Pandarus may either heighten or weaken the pathos of the scene with his histrionic self-indulgence. But there is nothing for it. Cressida must depart. Troilus poeticizes to retain his balance: ‘Time now with a robber’s haste / Crams his rich thievery up’ (lines 41–2). Human beings are in the hands of Time. (He picks up Ulysses’ personification of Time in his conversation with Achilles in Act 4 Scene 3: ‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back’). Farewells between the lovers are briefly packed away. This is immediately confirmed by Aeneas’s impatient inquiry as to whether the lady is ready. The dialogue continues. Will they remain true to each other? Troilus is not unsure of his own love but seems unsure of his capacity to keep Cressida’s affection. The Greeks, he feels, have greater social graces. But he promises to visit Cressida at night by bribing the Greek sentinels. Greeks and Trojans enter to make the exchange. Cressida is handed to Diomedes who praises her beauty and ignores Troilus’s courteous speech. In the subsequent interchange the question of the value of exchanged goods is again raised. To Troilus’s assertion that Cressida soars high above Diomedes’ praises, the Greek replies: ‘To her own worth / She shall be prized’. It seems there is some discrepancy between Troilus’s

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subjective estimate of the lady and her ‘real’ objective worth. Hector’s trumpet then sounds (with perhaps a less bombastic note than that of Ajax) and the warriors revert to the language of mediaeval chivalry: ‘The glory of our Troy doth this day lie / On his (Hector’s) fair worth and chivalry’. Hector, of course, is to fight Ajax in single armed combat. Act 4 Scene 5 The last scene in Act 4 begins with Ajax’s trumpet and correspondingly inflated language. The trumpet sounds to ‘appal the air’ and haul Hector to the combat. Hyperbole piles on hyperbole, building the spectator’s expectations, though by this time the audience may expect the anticlimax which follows – for no one answers. In come Diomedes and Cressida, not the great Hector. The dialogue indicates how the entry should be made. Diomedes ‘rises on the toe’ in aspiration. Cressida, if Ulysses’ description is followed, walks like a ‘daughter of the game’. Their entry should draw gasps from the audience. Cressida is kissed by all in turn—Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles and Patroclus, but not by the cuckold Menelaus, whom Cressida refuses, or by Ulysses who refuses Cressida after describing her whorish demeanour. Cressida has become again the jesting, flirtatious Cressida who appeared in Act 1 Scene 2. Ulysses then takes centre stage as Diomedes and Cressida move aside. What they discuss we are not told, but actors and audience may well imagine they are negotiating the terms of their relations, service in reward for protection perhaps. ‘Her wanton spirits look out / At every joint and motive of her body. / O these encounterers, so glib of tongue’ (lines 57–9), says Ulysses, providing stage directions for the actor. It would be a difficult, but perhaps not impossible task for her to work against these lines to suggest fear beneath the brave flirtatious dialogue. All have, in the meantime, forgotten Hector’s expected trumpet. Now it announces Aeneas, leading in the Trojans who come to discuss with Agamemnon the ground rules of the duel. Hector accepts the rules casually and is accused of pride by Achilles. Aeneas, in a speech which contrasts with the previous bombast of Agamemnon’s praise of Ajax, tells Achilles of Hector’s worth in words which carry conviction: ‘Weigh him well, / And that which looks like pride is courtesy’ (lines 82–3). The language of courtliness conveys an impression of Hector’s central worth and invites the audience to appreciate at least one character of high value. This is dramatically important, for it prepares us for the anger and pathos of Hector’s betrayal and defeat by Achilles’ myrmidons in Act 5. If previously the tone of the public warrior scenes has mainly been one of bitter

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and satirical comedy, a hero is here defined who can approach tragedy. In almost similar complimentary terms, Ulysses then describes Troilus: ‘his heart and hand both open and free / For what he has he gives, what thinks, he shows’ (lines 101–2) and ‘Manly as Hector but more dangerous’ (line 105). Shakespeare seems to be satisfying the audience’s understandable desire to find characters one can admire and identify with. The duel then takes place, not before warnings that Hector’s heart is not in it since he and his opponent are kin. Expectations, as usual, are undercut. The duel is broken off (as are almost all the combats which take place in Act 5). The expectation of heroic battle and high tragedy is further undermined. The effect, however, is not here one of bathos. The tone is quieter, though there is some boasting, quickly withdrawn. Even Ajax takes on a finer semblance, praising Hector as free and gentle. And Agamemnon reminds us of the situation: ‘What’s past and what’s to come is strewed with husks / And formless ruin of oblivion’ (lines 167–8). Time rules the play. In the meantime there is a moment of peace when the enemy can be made sincerely welcome. Nestor and Hector exchange admiration. Ulysses predicts the destruction of Troy which Hector declares he must not believe. Courteously Ulysses assigns judgment to ‘that old common arbitrator Time’. Time is responsible, not human beings. This is at least partly an evasion of personal responsibility. History is not in their hands. The scene has built up, however, to a confrontation between Hector and Achilles, who see each other for the first time without armour. Hector looks at Achilles, but suggests a brief glance is enough to take him in. Achilles needs longer and boasts that he will choose in which part of his body he will kill him. Ajax, sensibly for once, cuts short the confrontation. The two warriors agree to meet on the battlefield next day and the scene ends with Troilus asking Ulysses to show him Cressida’s tent. 4.6. Act 5 Act 5 Scene 1 We move into the final movement of the play, again changing key with a short scene between Patroclus, Achilles and the scurrilous Thersites who spits his venom, first at Patroclus, then, after Achilles has changed his mind about fighting Hector, at Agamemnon, who ‘has not so much brain as ear-wax’ (lines 51–2) and at Menelaus: ‘I care not to be the louse of a lazar so were I not Menelaus’ (lines 63–4). Achilles’ reason for not fighting is not his love for Patroclus, but an oath sworn to the Trojan Polyxena, the sister of Hector. This counts for more than his loyalty to the Greeks:

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‘Fall, Greeks; fail, fame; honour or go or stay; / My major vow lies here; this I’ll obey’ (lines 42–3). Affection for women in this play plays a complex role, love of a woman discourages two of the warriors from fighting—Troilus, as the play begins, now Achilles. The women fail, however, when they try actively to dissuade the warriors from fighting. To listen to a woman is not manly. Cassandra in the Trojan Council scene, Act 2 scene 2, fails always to persuade. Hector’s wife, Andromache, fails too. Female power lies in being rather than doing. It is passive, sexual and symbolic. The whole war is being fought over a woman captive, Helen (and over the Trojan Hesione, mentioned briefly in Act 2 scene 2, in revenge for whose seizure the Trojans have taken Helen). As possessions they wield power and their loss is a matter of national honour, or, in the case of Cressida, private honour. Desire undermines male action but actual or potential loss of the love object stimulates violence. In Achilles’ case, of course, the loss of the male love object proves stronger than his oath to Polyxena. Meanwhile, in this temporary truce, Achilles exits and re-enters to conduct the soldiers to his tent. They part in a series of courteous ‘sweet’ good nights, mocked by Thersites. Diomedes declines Achilles’ invitation. He has business elsewhere (his assignation with Cressida). Ulysses and Troilus exit. Thersites follows: ‘They say he keeps a Trojan drab, and uses the traitor Calchas his tent. I’ll after. Nothing but lechery! All incontinent varlets!’ (lines 94–6). Act 5 Scene 2 This is perhaps the most intriguing and dramatically complex scene in the whole play. Diomedes enters, followed by Ulysses and Troilus, with Thersites behind. The watchers take up their positions downstage where they can see the exchange between Diomedes and Cressida who enters from Calchas’s tent. The audience watches the reactions of Troilus and the puzzlement of Ulysses whilst weighing Thersites’ comments from where he stands at some distance from both groups. It watches Thersites watching Troilus watching Cressida and Diomedes. The large, projecting Elizabethan apron stage is ideal for such staging since its shape and size allows the audience to take in everything as the focus shifts from character to character and group to group. Only one character turns to the audience. That, of course, is Thersites in one of the downstage positions. The dialogue indicates that it is dark: ‘Stand where the torch may not discover us’, says Ulysses. Cressida emerges to speak with Diomedes. She has already betrayed Troilus, it appears: ‘Sweet honey Greek, tempt me no more to folly’ (line 20).

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Diomedes is impatient and contemptuous. To calm him Cressida gives him Troilus’s love token. Troilus struggles to contain his anger and pain. Ulysses adjures patience. Thersites calls the audience to witness: ‘How the devil luxury, with his fat rump and potato finger, tickles these together! Fry, lechery, fry.’ (lines 57–9). Cressida continues to prevaricate, but calls Diomedes back when he threatens to leave. ‘I do not like this fooling’ (line 108), says Diomedes. ‘Nor I, by Pluto; but that that likes not you / Pleases me best’ (lines 109–10), says Thersites (according to the Q and F text) in an aside which editors including the recent Arden editor, David Bevington, give to Troilus. But for Troilus to speak of ‘pleasing’ seems quite inappropriate. Bevington argues that the blank verse suggests a high ranked character and points out that the fool figure, Thersites speaks in prose. But a blank verse speech is given to Thersites nine lines later: ‘A proof of strength she could not publish more, / Unless she said “my mind is now turned whore”’ (lines 119–20). Shakespeare, it seems, fits Thersites into the rhythm of the scene. To give him both blank verse interjections makes dramatic sense because it allows him to inject his habitual poison and prevents him remaining a mute watcher for too long. Not to use Thersites’ comments at this moment is counter dramatic. Before exiting for the last time, Cressida leaves the audience with an epitaph: Troilus farewell! One eye yet looks on thee, But with my heart the other eye doth see Ah, poor our sex1This 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’ (lines 113–8) If her mind has turned whore, as Thersites says, judgement and reason no longer reign. Cressida asserts she has two eyes (i.e. two ‘I’s) looking in different directions. The pun on ‘eye’ and the splitting of identity will anticipate Troilus’s extraordinary reaction to his betrayal: ‘If I tell how these two did co-act, / Shall I not lie in publishing a truth?’ (lines 124–5). Troilus is forced to query what he has seen. This was not Cressida, ‘Let it not be believed for womanhood!’ (line 135). If this was she then the whole sex is not to be trusted. It is a state of mind similar to Hamlet’s after his mother weds Claudius: ‘Frailty thy name is woman’ and it helps to explain Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia. But Hamlet does not ‘swagger himself out on’s own eyes’ (line 142), as Thersites, still present, suggests that Troilus is doing. Troilus wants desperately to hold on to the idealized vision of Cressida which arose out of his love and

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desire. To reject that emotion would be to self-destruct. This state of mind resembles that of a convinced devotee who loses his god. As a 20th century phenomenon it may be compared to that of a devout communist when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler, or to a 19th century Christian fundamentalist, who is also a scientist, compelled to choose between Genesis and the evidence of Darwin. The temptation in such cases is to swear oneself out of one’s own eyes in order to retain a sanity founded on a fallacious belief. Arthur Koestler (see The God that Failed (pages 11–16) described his own similar emotional state when he broke with communism as ‘committing emotional suicide in the name of truth’. Shakespeare’s analysis of this form of schizophrenia is very modern. Reason argues one thing and the emotions require another. The ugly and ideal confront one another. It is possible that Shakespeare knew of similar states from personal experience: ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her though I know she lies’ (Sonnet 138). Troilus’ expression is stronger: The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved and loosed, And with another knot, five-finger tied, The fractions of her faith, orts of her love, The fragments, scraps and greasy relics Of her o’ereaten faith, are bound to Diomed’ (lines 163–7). The imagery of appetite, hinted at in the earlier scenes, surfaces to replace a disintegrating religious ideal suggested by the words ‘heaven’, ‘faith’, and, with double meaning: ‘relics’. Troilus’s love turns to hatred, not of Cressida, but of Diomedes: ‘as much as I do Cressid love / So much by weight hate I her Diomed’ (lines 174–5). The metaphor of balanced weight reminds us of Diomedes’ comment on Helen’s worth (4.1.73). The value of Troilus’s love is the equivalent of his hatred. Perhaps neither love nor hatred is worth his subjective estimate. Certainly the inflated rhetoric which Troilus next uses reminds one of the boasts of Ajax: ‘Not the dreadful spout Which shipmen do the hurricano call, Constringed in mass by the almighty sun, Shall dizzy with more clamour Neptune’s ear In his descent than shall my prompted sword Falling on Diomed. (lines 178–83).

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The future combat between Troilus and Diomedes will ironically undercut this boast, as do the final lines, given to Thersites: ‘Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion. A burning devil take them’ (lines 201–3). Act 5 Scene 3 Battle is about to begin, but the womenfolk, first Andromache, Hector’s wife, who makes her first appearance, then Cassandra, try to persuade Hector not to fight. Neither succeeds. The ‘dear man’ i.e. the man of value, holds honour more dear than life, says Hector. So he and Troilus prepare to fight. Their aims, however, are different. Hector fights by chivalric rules which allow mercy for a fallen foe. For Troilus mercy is a vice. Fair play is fools’ play (and to trust in the fair play of others will soon be shown to be foolish—surely Shakespeare knows the teachings of Machiavelli). Hector’s honour is engaged in his agreement to meet Achilles on the field of battle. But Achilles, we know, has already withdrawn, avowing that his love for Polyxena counts for more than honour. Troilus, like Achilles shortly, but unlike Hector, fights out of hatred. Priam and Queen Hecuba cannot prevent him, nor even Hector. The alarum sounds. Just before battle begins, Pandarus brings in a letter from Cressida. While Troilus reads, Pandarus complains of his age and sickness. Troilus tears up the letter and exits to fight. Cressida’s words do not square with her deeds, like those of many in this play. It has been suggested that the epilogue could have been inserted at this point to end the play on a more conventional note as tragedy. But expectations of battle have been set up and the scenes which follow indicate an intention to write tragi-comedy, or preferably comi-tragedy, rather than follow a convention. The whole tone and form of the play seems anti-conventional. Act 5 Scene 4 An off-stage battle ensues. Warriors enter and exit in a series of very short combats, semi-comic and without issue. Thersites acts as narrator and commentator. Troilus is an ass; Diomedes a whoremasterly villain; Cressida a dissembling luxurious drab; Nestor a dry cheese. Moreover, the scheme of the dog-fox Ulysses to bring Achilles back to the fray ‘is proved not worth a blackberry’ (line 11) for ‘now is the cur Ajax prouder than the cur Achilles’ (line 13–4). The fools on both sides, to repeat Troilus’s description in Act 1 scene 1, include Ulysses. Troilus and Diomedes enter and exit fighting. Hector challenges Thersites: ‘Art

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thou of blood and honour?’ (line 26). Thersites replies: ‘No, no, I am a rascal, a scurvy railing knave, a very filthy rogue’. Hector: ‘I do believe thee. Live’ (lines 27–9). The implication is that heroes such as Hector, die, leaving behind the filthy rogues, of whom Achilles as well as Thersites will be one. Thersites goes off to seek ‘the wenching rogues’. Act 5 Scene 5 Diomedes comes in at another door. It appears he has taken (stolen we later learn) Troilus’s horse. A desperate Agamemnon announces that the Greeks have lost many warriors. Patroclus has been killed. Nestor enters with the body, bidding Achilles and Ajax ‘arm for shame, / There is a thousand Hectors in the field’ (lines 18–9). Ulysses then shouts that Achilles and Ajax have joined the fray. The two latter enter and exit separately, the one seeking Hector, the other shouting for Troilus. Military excitement mingles with bombast. Act 5 Scene 6 Ajax appears again, then Diomedes, and they quarrel over who should fight Troilus. The tone becomes semi-comic as Troilus enters and challenges them both. They exit fighting by one door as Hector comes in by the other, followed by Achilles. Hector has the better of the duel, and Achilles exits complaining his ‘arms are out of use’ (line 17). Hector shows up Achilles’ excuse, by reminding us that he himself is not fresh. Troilus enters again to say that Aeneas has been taken and exits abruptly. Then a Greek in splendid armour comes in and Hector pursues him off stage to ‘frush him’—a scarcely honourable intention —for his armour. Act 5 Scene 7 Shakespeare now cleverly slows the action a moment. Achilles enters with his Myrmidons and instructs them to ‘keep themselves in breath’ (line 3) so as to encircle Hector and kill him. Act 5 Scene 8 Thersites now mocks Paris and Menelaus: ‘The cuckold and the cuckold maker are at it’ (line 1). As they exit fighting, the bastard Margarelon challenges Thersites and meets with a similar response to the one that Hector received: ‘Turn slave and fight’.

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Thersites: ‘What art thou?’ Margarelon; ‘A bastard son of Priam’s’. Thersites: ‘I am a bastard too; I love bastards. I am bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate. One bear will not bite another, and wherefore should one bastard?’ (lines 5–12). We are both animals, suggests Thersites. The bitter humour continues as he hurries offstage. Act 5 Scene 9 The semi-comic effect of so many exits and entrances, enhanced by such scurrilous comments, ceases at this point. Hector drags in the Greek whom he has hunted for his shining armour: ‘Most putrefied core, so fair without, / Thy goodly armour thus hath cost thy life’ (lines 1–2). The episode is symbolic of the whole situation. Beauty and gallantry lie on the surface and corruption lies within. It would seem that Hector has killed a knight suffering from syphilis (which attacks the nose). Sometimes in production the face exhibited inside the helmet is a skull. Hector lays aside his sword and is murdered by Achilles and his Myrmidons. In a moment of lyricism Achilles celebrates Hector’s death: Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set, How ugly night comes breathing at his heels Even with the vail and dark’ning of the sun To close the day up, Hector’s day is done’ (lines 5–8). Shakespeare generally creates such moments just before the climax of his tragedies, where a song occurs—Desdemona’s in Othello—or a lyrical speech as in King Lear’s ‘We’ll sing together like birds in a cage’ and even in Macbeth there is Macbeth’s epitaph for his wife: ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’. These change the dramatic key and anticipate the ending. Here the speech is given to Achilles—an Achilles who is a coward and who will send forth to posterity a false image of heroism by having his men proclaim his valour. This play demonstrates how images may be created and the past distorted by false report. The obedient Myrmidons act as propagandists: ‘Cry you all amain, / Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain’ (lines 113–4). ‘What are the psychological and political realities behind this myth-making?’ Shakespeare seems to ask. It is another sign of the play’s modernity. From Achilles’ momentary lyricism his language reverts to the dominant images of food and appetite: ‘My half-supped sword, that frankly would have fed, / Pleased with this dainty bait, thus goes to bed’ (lines 19–20). He sheathes his weapon before dragging Hector’s body along the battlefield, breaking again the rules of chivalry.

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Act 5 Scene 10 A retreat is sounded. The news of Achilles’ killing of Hector is proclaimed to the Greeks. The war is over says Agamemnon. Act 5 Scene 11 Not quite, says Aeneas, who, it appears, has either not been captured or been retaken. Troilus pronounces Hector’s epitaph and vows to fight on in hatred: ‘Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe’ (line 31). All troop out as Pandarus enters to pronounce the play’s epilogue. He is sick. Weep for me, he says, completing the double plot and addressing the audience as ‘brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade’ (line 51) i.e. brothel keepers. In two months’ time he will make his will. ‘Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases’ (lines 55–6). The play’s ending is scarcely one of Aristotelian katharsis. It is, however, entirely dramatically appropriate, whether it was added later or not. To cut it would diminish the play.

5. Problems and Questions 5.1. Is Troilus a ‘Problem Play’? Troilus, along with Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well (and Hamlet occasionally) have all been defined as ‘problem plays’. They share a sombre atmosphere but it would be hard to assign them all to the same genre since the formal differences between them are great. ‘Problem play’ therefore, should not be defined as a genre but as a category containing plays with different kinds of problem. What are those particular to Troilus? During the discussion of the text a number of questions have been noted and will be summarized and expanded in the next chapters. The principal ones seem to be: 1. Why does the play have this dramatic form? Is it a tragedy? 2. How can we explain the nature of the characterization, the treatment of the Trojan and Greek heroes, the function of the commentators, Thersites and Pandarus, and perhaps especially the psychology of Troilus and Cressida over which critics are divided. 3. What are the dominant themes? 4. Do the dominant themes, the tone of the language and the play’s position in the canon indicate anything of Shakespeare’s personal development? Does the play take an ethical position? 5. Why has Troilus only become popular in the 20th century? (This will involve a discussion of the performance history). The questions overlap, but we shall deal with them in turn. 5.2. The Play’s Dramatic Form What is the nature and function of the play’s dramatic form? One of the most informed and convincing essays on the subject is by Una Ellis-Fermor in her book The Frontiers of Drama. She sees the play as ‘an attempt so bold as almost to confound all categories’. It is a ‘triumphant revelation of disjunction, of the negation of all order, within

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the ordered concentration of dramatic shape’. She points out that the play enforces contrasts between men’s endeavours and their destinies, between ideal love and betrayal, between a personal sense of honour and dishonourable action, between the ‘feverish frivolity’ of the background and the scenes of battle, between high-minded debate and petty feuding. ‘Passions, ideas and achievements annihilate each other. We fall into agreement with Thersites the showman who is ever at hand to point the futility (of the action).’ ‘Given that discord is the central theme’, she says, ‘it is hard to imagine how else it might be reflected but in a deliberately intended discord of form also.’ She goes on to suggest that many of the characters are either involved in a bitter fight to harmonize the evidence of their universe, or ‘are gradually subsiding into a no less bitter equilibrium of disillusionment and loathing’. This play therefore cannot be a tragedy, because order is implicit in tragedy. In Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and even in Coriolanus, a moral balance is finally recovered. In Troilus there is no balance between good and evil. ‘There is no escape from the torment of evil. The principle of cause and order […] vanishes, revealing destruction as the principle underlying all life.’ One can agree with most of this whilst qualifying one or two of the above assertions. There is indeed a disjunction between endeavour and destiny. The Trojans endeavour to save Troy and fail to do so. Cressida endeavours to love Troilus and also fails. Troilus endeavours to kill Diomedes and fails, indeed all the skirmishes are broken off. One might, however, say of Troilus that he is striving to create an image of himself, as warrior and ideal lover, for future generations, and in this he succeeds, despite his failure to keep Cressida or to kill his opponent. One might also qualify Ellis-Fermor’s suggestion that ideal love exists in the play. The characters may aspire to a high conception of love—‘a winnowed purity’ (3.3.162)—but the language hints that the love is scarcely ideal. ‘Winnowed’ recalls Pandarus’s early image that love is like the process of baking a cake and, more obviously, Troilus wishes to go where he may ‘wallow in the lily beds’ (3.2.11). The high debates and scenes of battle are similarly undercut by irony. Idealism and betrayal, therefore, do not afford quite so strong a contrast as Ellis-Fermor implies. Nevertheless, the undercutting of all high values and aspirations, the questioning of the conventional images of these heroes, and the important position given to the commentators, Thersites and Pandarus, at the end of scenes, supports the critic’s view of the play. It is a deliberate orchestration of disorder in which the refusal to end with a proper tragic climax, and to leave the play in the middle, as it began in the middle, challenges the Aristotelian requirement of unity in a play.

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Aristotle believed that life developed organically—the flower begins as a seed, rises to moments of beauty (stigmi in Greek) and declines. Tragedy, in its imitation (mimesis) of life should also therefore have unity, a clear beginning, middle and end. The ending, Aristotle asserts, should communicate a katharsis or purgation of the spectator’s emotions, through pity and fear, leaving the audience (some later critics insist) with a sense of balance and reconciliation. (For a summary of different interpretations of the word see T. R. Henn’s Harvest of Tragedy.) But Troilus and Cressida does not create a katharsis. If tragedy ends in death, as comedy ends in marriage and celebration, the nearest this play reaches to tragedy is in the pity we feel for Hector when betrayed by the realpolitik of Achilles. But the play distances the audience too much for it to feel fear. It communicates anger and a distancing contempt for Achilles, rather than fear and a sense of fatality, deriving from some flaw in a noble hero’s character (hamartia). The audience is not enmeshed in the fate of Hector, who is not in any case the central character. We may admire Hector for his courage as a warrior, but he is arguably killed as a result, not of an honourable action, but of an ignoble and unchivalrous one. He dies as a result of greed—his desire to have the unknown Greek’s shining armour. Moreover this appears as an untypical action, not a character flaw. The play’s ironies question our degree of tragic involvement with Hector. His death serves to switch the dramatic focus to Achilles, a villain who succeeds through cowardice in having himself proclaimed a hero. This does not satisfy the standard requirement of tragedy that good and evil die together. Nor do the more central characters, Cressida and Troilus, die tragic deaths. Achilles’ amoral individualism flourishes. If tragedy, as John Arden once defined it, involves ‘the inevitable destruction of the great’ while comedy is about ‘the indestructibility of the little man’, then Troilus is not a tragedy. Shakespeare deliberately selects a section of the story in which the Trojans linger on and the Greeks survive. Is it a comedy? Thersites seems to be indestructible, but he attracts little comic sympathy and there is no comedic marriage ending. A bitter tragic-comic satire is perhaps the nearest description of a play which defies categories. It is, in concept, in language and design, a deliberate middle, not the complete action which Aristotle recommended, but nevertheless it has a thematic and poetic unity. The problem has been to come to terms with this and to realize that Troilus continually discourages and even mocks identification with the values a spectator naturally looks for in the theatre. In this regard the play has much in common with Samuel Beckett’s theatre which rejects traditional endings and mocks the spectator’s refusal to accept the impossibil-

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ity of finding one. It is not surprising that only in the twentieth century has this play come to be performed and appreciated for its sardonic view of war and its scrutiny of the roots of idealism. Unity resides in the dark clarity of its statement.

6. Characterization Psychological commentary is generally more valuable when it concerns the central characters, since they consciously or unconsciously reveal more about themselves, and they are frequently the subject of more comments upon them by others. With minor characters it is usually more valuable to discuss their role in the whole pattern of a play since less stage time can be given to an exploration of their minds. Characterization therefore means not only the psychological representation of individual characters, and of the relations between them, but also their organization into a general dramatic pattern. One should bear in mind that ‘characters’ consist of a series of intermittent appearances on stage. They are constructed in the spectator’s mind by the actor’s physical appearance and voice as well as by the character’s immediate verbal and physical responses to other characters (and from comments these make upon them when they are not present). Spectators may also have pre-formed conceptions of historical or mythical characters, such as exist in Troilus, from reading previous literature, or seeing them on stage or screen. A ‘character’ is a composite of all these things and no spectator will respond to any complex dramatic figure in exactly the same way. This is not to say that a common valid core of agreement about a character cannot be established. The language and action of the play provides basic evidence which actors and critics should not ignore. Let us engage first in the more conventional approach to the central characters of the title, treating them as human beings. Shakespeare had the supreme writer’s gift of creating living dialogue on the page which actors could embody through theatrical means: gesture, posture, demeanour, facial expression, vocal timbre, tricks of speech, stress, intonation, and so on.. How do we interpret the signs embedded in the dialogue and theatre language? These are not always straight forward because discrepancies arise between a character’s self-view and the various angles others see them from. Cressida is markedly different from the way Troilus sees her. She becomes a creature of his fevered imagination, created from sexual desire, or in the play’s terms, from will and appetite. He presumes in her a woman who can ‘feed for aye her lamp and flames of love, / To

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keep her constancy in plight and youth, / Outliving beauty’s outward, with a mind / That doth renew swifter than blood decays’ (3.2.155–8). Cressida, arguably, attempts to act up to Troilus’s image of her, but fails to do so and recognizes her incapacity: ‘Poor our sex! / This fault in us I find: / The error of our eye directs our mind’ (5.2.115–6). In a simpler way, Achilles’ and Ajax’s self image, and the view nearly all the characters in the play have of themselves, is notably different from the one Thersites has of them. Such discrepancies intrigue and trouble the audience and from this a play derives power. Characters, of course, can develop and examine their own self-image, becoming more human and dramatic as they do so. Thus Achilles starts to question himself when the Greeks fail to salute him. Troilus, more subtly, interrogates his own beliefs, hedging his uncertain view of Cressida with an ‘if’. Can constancy in love exist in a woman? His view of his own constancy is reminiscent of the famous line in the Sonnets: ‘Love is not love that alters / When it alteration finds’ (Sonnet 116). He does not doubt his own love, although Cressida does, and the audience may query its quality when it transforms into a desire to destroy Diomedes and the Greeks. He has perhaps an ideal view of his own power to love which rejects the possibility of alteration when Cressida alters. Therefore there must be two Cressidas, one faithful, the other inconstant. His thirst for destruction derives from the personal necessity to hold on to an illusion. Troilus’s feelings may also be compared with Diomedes’ simple desire for sexual possession. Diomedes is what Henry James called a repoussoir, a character who sets off another, like a colour in a painting. In comparison, Troilus is an attractive figure. But key ironies prevent us from seeing him in the terms in which he seems to see himself: ‘I am as true as truth’s simplicity / And simpler than the infancy of truth’. ‘In that I’ll war with you’ replies Cressida (3.2.164–6). But Troilus is less simple than he thinks. Simplicity and purity are aspirations for which he will fight, not against Cressida, but against the Greeks and Diomedes. Language, however, such as ‘wallow in the lily beds’ suggests the animality behind his feelings and links him in a way he would not want to recognize with his hated and cruder competitor. Troilus is more complex than his self-image. When the play opens he is ‘not himself’: Tell me Apollo, for thy Daphne’s love, What Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we? Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl. Between our Ilium and where she resides,

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Let it be called the wild and wandering flood, Ourself the merchant (1.1.94–9). Cressida may be seen as a pearl (a Christian image of perfection). She is nevertheless merchandise to be bartered and sold. Unconscious irony again suggests the dual nature of Troilus’ love and queries the relation between desire and the poetic imagination it seems to prompt. W. B. Yeats’s famous lines from The Circus Animals’ Desertion: ‘I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’, seem relevant here. Troilus begins as a warrior undermined by love, attractive in comparison with Diomedes and juxtaposed at the end against another repoussoir, Achilles. The latter also feels no wish to fight and attributes this to love for the absent Trojan princess Polyxena. We rather believe it is his envy, vanity and contempt for Agamemnon which weaken his desire to fight. Achilles changes, as does Troilus. When he rages onto the battlefield after Patroclus is killed he resembles a Troilus who rejects the chivalric code. But his forgetting his oath to Polyxena reveals the difference between them. Achilles sets off Troilus’s capacity for strong feeling. The Trojan’s rage is more attractive than the Greek hero’s cynical responses. Troilus does not forget an oath and unlike Achilles, does not sheath his sword ‘as pleased with this dainty bait’ (5.9.19– 20). He fails to kill his target and fights on without pity, mercy or chivalry. Hector affords us with another contrast in the dramatic pattern. He chides Troilus for his rejection of ‘fair play’ (though he himself will not always act chivalrously). The play is full of such complex cross-referencing, inviting the audience’s partial rejections and identifications. That Shakespeare wishes us at least to part-identify with Troilus becomes evident in Ulysses’ speech during the truce, when the Trojans enter the Greek camp. Agamemnon asks him: ‘What Trojan is that same that looks so heavy?’ Ulysses replies; The youngest son of Priam, a true knight, Not yet mature, yet matchless firm if word, Speaking in deeds and deedless in his tongue, Not soon provoked, nor being provoked soon calmed, His heart and hand both open and both free. For what he has he gives; what thinks he shows, Yet gives he not till judgment guide his bounty, Nor dignifies an impair thought with breath. Manly as Hector, but more dangerous,

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For Hector in his blaze of wrath subscribes To tender objects, but he in heat of action Is more vindicative than jealous love’ (4.5.96–108). In the play Troilus’s words and actions confirm what Ulysses says. His immaturity is seen in the Trojan council scene (Act 2 scene 2) when he is accused by Hector of ‘glozing superficially’ and of being ‘unfit to hear moral philosophy’ (line 167). His open heart Troilus himself admits when Cressida asks him if he will be true to her: Who I? Alas it is my vice, my fault. While others fish with craft for great opinion, I with great truth catch mere simplicity; Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns, With truth and plainness do I wear mine bare’ (4.4.101–5). As for vindictiveness and jealous love, this becomes apparent at the end. Ulysses was saying more than he knew, as happens frequently with characters in this play. Shakespeare, therefore, sets up his characters against ideals and images of heroic behaviour derived from ancient and mediaeval warrior and love codes. Hector before the battle feels ‘in the vein of chivalry’ (5.3.32) but the Greeks are not chivalrous. Ulysses is a manipulator and Thersites a scurrilous mocker. Achilles kills by proxy an unarmed Hector, ignoring the warrior code which Hector vainly appeals to: ‘Forgo this vantage Greek’ (5.9.9). (He has himself, of course, just broken it by killing the unknown Greek for his armour). Troilus, too, after Cressida betrays him, calls Hector’s knightly fair play ‘fool’s play’ (5.3.43) and the chivalric love code is obviously broken by Cressida and the Greek Helen. Almost all the Greeks act as repoussoirs. They are individualists, whereas the Trojans form a corporate group. This in performance should in some way be indicated by costume and colour, as well as by posture, movement and stage grouping. Greek individualism may be marked by greater distances set between actors and Trojan solidarity by closeness and mutual respect. For the Greeks, social codes are for show and are abandoned when deemed necessary. Thus the cunning Ulysses manipulates the code that demands Achilles should meet Hector in single combat. This covert action contrasts with Troilus’s openness, as does Ajax’s bombast with Troilus’s courtesy, and Diomedes’ flattery of Cressida (4.4.115–9) with Troilus’s expressions of powerful feeling for her. Occasionally Troilus seems to share the strained rhetoric and hyperbole of Agamemnon and Ajax, as when he says that the hurricane will not make a louder noise than his sword falling on Diomed (5.2.178–183). His rhetoric, how-

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ever, unlike theirs, issues from a strong emotion we can accept. Troilus is a flawed centre of sympathy in the play, a character of whose mind we are more aware than the character himself. The nature of Troilus’s mind we see most clearly in Act 5 scene 2, in the famous speech where he declares, on seeing Diomedes and Cressida together: ‘there is a credence in my heart, / An esperance so obstinately strong, / That doth invert th’attest of eyes and ears’ (5.2.126–8). Two Cressidas inhabit his mind: the real and the idealized. To keep his sanity Troilus must seem to deny the real. His claim in Act 2 scene 2 that value lies in subjective appreciation he does not seem to have applied to Cressida. He has assumed her objective value is the same as his subjective view of her. Now he discovers the weakness of his argument. He must believe the loved one has value in herself and when the behaviour of the real Cressida clashes with this valuation, Troilus seeks to maintain his subjective ‘credence’ which is ‘so obstinately strong’ (line 127). Recognition of the discrepancy drives him to wreak destruction. The ideal is not to be found in womanhood, or the world. Therefore the world, and especially the Greeks, must be destroyed, even though Troy collapses with them. To recognize the actions of Cressida is to commit emotional suicide. The need to hold on to his ideal impels him to obliterate what contradicts it. A loss of faith in the world does not, as in Hamlet, create a passive melancholy. It creates rage and hatred. What now of Cressida? If she splits in two in Troilus’ mind, she certainly seems to have a double character in the play. But she may only be double in the sense that everyone who accepts that life requires the playing of roles has a double character. Power situations require pretence by those who possess it. Those without it ‘act’ to defend themselves or play a part in order to supplant the powerful. Shakespeare had only to observe behaviour at court to recognize that acting was not only limited to members of his profession. Cressida is an actress. So much is evident in Act 1 scene 2 where she jests with Pandarus; also in Act 4 scene 5, where the Greeks kiss her on her arrival, and again in Act 5 scene 2 where she flirts with Diomedes. These scenes seem to justify Ulysses’ description of her as ‘a daughter of the game’: ‘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, That give accosting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts

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To every tickling reader! Set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity’ (4.5.56–63). The actress who plays Cressida often acts according to this description of her body language. Not to do so would make the audience query Ulysses’ intelligence. His character sketch of Troilus, however, was accurate and his denunciation of Cressida would also seem in accord with Cressida’s behaviour in the three scenes mentioned above. If these were the only scenes she appears in, Ulysses’ depiction might be totally acceptable. But Cressida is seen from other angles. She is more complex than Helen, to whom Ulysses’ description might also apply, since all we have of her is the flirtation with Pandarus in Act 3 scene 1. But Helen, is another repoussoir. In Cressida’s scenes with Troilus, Act 3 scene 2 and Act 4 scene 4, she behaves markedly differently and this has provoked critical debate about whether she is a unified character. She seems less of an actress in the two scenes with Troilus and her language has the ring of sincerity: ‘Hard to seem won; but I was won, my lord, With the first glance that ever – pardon me; If I confess much, you will play the tyrant. I love you now, but till now not so much But I might master it. In faith I lie; My thoughts were like unbridled children, grown Too headstrong for their mother. See, we fools! Why have I blabbed?’ (3.2.113–20) Sincerity is a dangerous word. Here it seems to reside in a flow of thought which is spontaneous, but continually catching itself up to question whether she is speaking sincerely or not. She even asks Troilus to judge whether she was playing a game to find out what Troilus really thinks. ‘Perchance my lord, I show more craft than love / And fell so roundly to a large confession / To angle for your thoughts’ (3.2.148–50). Is she playing games even now by asking Troilus to judge her sincerity by a confession that she might be pretending? If she remains an actress, her pretence can be justified by a natural suspicion of other people, especially men. The games they play have taught her to play in turn. An anxiety lies beneath her speech. Should she abandon her defences? Can Troilus really be honest? He asserts his integrity in the next long speech (3.3.154–65) and this encourages Cressida to assert a loyalty she will not be able to maintain. The situation will change and she will have to change with it.

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There is pathos in her aspiration to loyalty. Perhaps she is not conscious that she is acting up to Troilus’s image of her constancy. The situation she is caught within, and her degree of self-awareness, should create in the spectator a more complex response to her than Ulysses invites in his character assassination. Even the convincing descriptions of the intelligent Ulysses need to be taken with caution. If Troilus and Cressida are both in their own way split characters, then so is Hector. He argues in the Trojan Council scene for the discontinuance of the war in the name of Truth and Reason, yet he has already sent a challenge to the Greeks which will prolong the war: ‘These moral laws of nature and of nations speak aloud To have her back returned. Thus to persist In doing wrong extenuates not wrong, But makes it much more heavy. Hector’s opinion Is this in way of truth; yet ne’ertheless My sprightly brethren, I propend to you In resolution to keep Helen still; For ‘tis a cause that hath no mean dependence Upon our joint and several dignities’. (2.2.184–193). There is no hesitation in his inconsistency. He has known all through the debate that he is playing God’s disciple, but will act as the Devil’s. ‘Thou dost thyself and all our Troy deceive’ (5.3.90) says Cassandra when he refuses to listen to her prophecies. His actions are dominated by the impression he seeks to make on others. He must win the debate, even though his actions belie his words, in order to maintain his public image of honour and courage. Thus he cannot listen to Cassandra, Andromache and Priam in Act 5 scene 3. The audience sees a less chivalric Hector when he kills the anonymous knight for his ‘hide’ (5.6.32). In comparison with Hector and Troilus the Greek warriors are less savoury. Thersites’ choral comments on these ‘fools and lechers’ are mainly justified. ‘My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirred, / And I myself see not the bottom of it’ ((3.3.309–10) says Achilles. ‘Would the fountain of your mind were clear again, that I might water an ass at it! I had rather be a tick in a sheep than such a valiant ignorance’ (line 311–13) says Thersites aside. Achilles is resentful, a mocker of authority, a coward, with no respect for any but himself (and Ulysses). True he is a lover and he says the oath sworn to Polyxena prevents him fighting—an oath which counts for nothing when Patroclus is killed. The hate which this engenders, however, is

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assuaged by Hector’s death and both Polyxena and Patroclus seem quickly wiped from his mind. Achilles falls within the general pattern of characters who have a foot in both camps. The crossing of battle lines is constant. Aeneas and Diomedes act as envoys; during the truce the Trojans visit the Greek tents; the vain Ajax is Hector’s cousin; the traitor Calchas has switched sides; his daughter Cressida is exchanged for Antenor; Helen, the fundamental cause of conflict, has left Greece for Troy. Crossed boundaries are both external and internal. The civil war reflects splits inside the character’s minds. The complex internal processes of the main protagonists places them against the background of simpler minor parts where honour confronts reason and blood defeats brain. As for the characters who act as choruses, Thersites switches from Ajax to Achilles. His comment ‘With too much blood and too little brain, these two may run mad; but if with too much brain and too little blood they do, I’ll be the curer of madmen’ (5.1.47–9) recalls mental divisions in Trojans as well as Greeks. The other choral figure, Pandarus, confirms, of course, the general pattern of go-between.

7. Main Themes Troilus, abandoned by Cressida, has cast Pandarus off. The bawd’s epilogue gathers together dominant themes: boundary crossing, split identity, time, death, love, lust, disease, public opinion and reputation. He speaks to the audience as if they were go-betweens: ‘O traitors and bawds, how earnestly are you set to work and how ill requited’. He questions his reputation: ‘Why should our endeavour be so loved and the performance so loathed?’ (5.11.37–9) and speaks of the effects of lust, bequeathing the audience his diseases and telling it his death is near. Time is referred to throughout and especially in Act 3 scene 3 where Ulysses reminds Achilles that it swallows reputations. It is the main concern of Troilus in Act 2 scene 2 where he states he is fighting so that future generations ‘will in time to come canonize us’ (line 202). In Act 4 scene 5, Hector declares that ‘that old common arbitrator Time’ will end the war. ‘So to him we leave it’ replies Ulysses (lines 225–6). Time is personalized and all are in its grip. But stoical acceptance is a form of irresponsibility and Ulysses for one fights to control it. The theme, however, is universal. It recalls the modern popularity of this play and Samuel Beckett’s rendering of waiting and blockage. In Beckett, the theme of time invokes the idea of ‘pastime’. In Shakespeare, characters paralysed by the situation fill in time by playing love and war games. Beckett has his tramps pass the time by joking. Shakespeare has the fool Thersites entertaining the idle Achilles and Patroclus by imitating Agamemnon and Ajax. Cressida plays games with her uncle as does Paris’s servant in Act 3 scene 1. Both council scenes serve to pass the time, and playing games, as we know from Hamlet, raises questions about action and inaction, and comic pastimes in the face of death. Drama deals in different ways with the central theme of time and death. Comedy celebrates living not dying and endeavours to hide death and physical hurt behind laughter and happy endings. A play about war which has at its climax the death of a Trojan hero and ends with Pandarus close to death, can scarcely be said to be a comedy. Nor is it a tragedy, as we have argued, or a romance, like Shakespeare’s late plays, in which the many dead are (mostly) restored to life. But in Troilus death is a constant threat, not only death in battle, but death by disease, mainly the ‘Neapolitan

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bone ache’ (syphilis) from which Pandarus seems to suffer and which probably marks the visage of the unknown knight that Hector slays. The themes dominate plays written at the end of, and after Queen Elizabeth’s reign. This play, along with Hamlet, anticipates the dark atmosphere of Jacobean drama in which death and love are conjoined. The love disease was supposedly brought back by adventurers from the New World. ‘Is love a generation of vipers?’ asks Pandarus in the interlude with Paris and Helen (3.1.127). It would seem so. The play has many references to a disease which undermines the old mediaeval love ideal. The semi-chivalric behaviour of the Trojan warriors in love and war is demonstrably outdated by the play’s ending. Fragments of chivalry remain, including the lady’s conventional cruelty when Cressida keeps Troilus at a distance. Mediaeval lovers, Lancelot and Guinevere, Paolo and Francesca, make love outside marriage and betrayal in love and war figures in the mediaeval romance cycles which the play from time to time invokes: ‘I am today i’the vein of chivalry’ (5.3.32), says Hector. His phrasing: ‘forego this vantage, Greek’ is chivalric. ‘Here is Sir Diomed. Go gentle knight’ (4.5.89), says Agamemnon. Knights, armour, gloves, spurs, steeds and bright crests are frequently mentioned. Diomedes, of course, though no ‘parfit gentil knight’, wears the Trojan knight’s sleeve on his helm. As regards further themes, we have mentioned the representation of reason and honour as opposite principles. Reason is the capacity to judge a situation objectively; honour seeks to enhance personal or group prestige. In the Trojan debate in Act 2 scene 2, reason is against continuance of the war and honour is for it. The Greek debate in Act 1 scene 3 focuses not on the principle of whether but on the practice of how to continue the war. Can Achilles’ individual pride be controlled within the common purpose? He is ‘a man distilled / out of our virtues’ (1.3.351–2). The Greeks are concerned with how to re-establish a sense of community. The Trojans, on the other hand, apparently divided in opinion, do not question their common cause. Achilles’ pride raises the further question, one of the most important in the play— that of the nature of individual identity. In the twentieth century Pirandello posited that the individual is a composite of what others take one to be. This, Jean-Paul Sartre would add, is only changed by the actions one performs. ‘Hell is other people’, he famously said (see his play In Camera). Shakespeare’s play does not suggest that identity is entirely constructed by others. But certainly characters have a concern for their projected identity and suffer when others judge them. This is what Ulysses plays on with Achilles—does he want to hang ‘like a rusty mail / In monumental mockery’ (3.3.153–4) or to be admired as a hero?

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A projected identity is also what Troilus aims to create by his actions – an identity and image of the self, not only in the present, but as seen by generations to come. This is where for him the value of life resides. But what is that value, the play asks, when an image can be distorted as when Achilles asks his Myrmidons to proclaim he has courageously defeated Hector in single combat. Is value objective or does it reside in others’ opinions? The play is particularly modern when it shows propaganda promulgating false images. It suggests that Achilles is not what the future has made him out to be. His real value is other than a composite of subjective estimates. Characters, in fact, are frequently not recognized by their supposed attributes. Cressida fails, or pretends to fail, to recognize Troilus: ‘What sneaking fellow comes yonder?’ (1.2.218) and Pandarus, too, fails momentarily to recognize Troilus. Aeneas in the Greek camp does not recognize Agamemnon: ‘Which is that god in office, guiding men?’ (1.3.231). Ajax even takes Thersites for the general (3.3.264). The whole process of assigning identities is called in question by discrepancies between description and actuality. Indeed descriptions themselves compete. Consider Thersites’ view of Agamemnon as having: ‘not so much brain as ear–wax’ and Aeneas looking for, or pretending to look for, a ‘god in office’. Consider, too, Troilus’ early question: ‘Tell me Apollo, for thy Daphne’s love, / What Cressida is, what Pandar and what we?’ (I.1.95). Are people bodies, souls, essences, or physical processes? Are the oaths Troilus, Cressida and Pandarus swear in Act 3 doomed attempts to fix identity in language? The characters may seek to become emblems, may indeed harden into hatred like Troilus, or cynicism like Thersites, but the play reveals the fluid reality beneath. Troilus the fixed lover fears to ‘lose distinction in my joy’ (3.2.25). Cressida has: ‘a kind of self resides with you, / But an unkind self, that itself will leave / to be another’s fool’ (3.2.143–5). So, too, ‘kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages / And batters down himself’ (2.3.172). The image is of a battering ram turned against its carriers. Even the boastful Ajax is divided: ‘This blended knight, half Troyan and half Greek’ (4.5.87), says Aeneas. He is anticipated by Alexander’s description; ‘No man hath a virtue that he hath not a glimpse of, nor any man an attaint but he carries some stain of it (1.2.24–5). Their identity, like the outer world, is in a state of civil war. We have already discussed the related idea of dramatic disunity under the heading of dramatic form. This play is unified by its cogent analysis of the disunity of the dramatic situation it reveals. This justifies its implicit critique of traditional dramatic form and its more explicit critique of the values which predicate an ordered world. Disunity of dramatic structure relates to social and individual disunity. This general theme is clearly there in the divisions of love and war and in Ulysses’ famous speech

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in Act I scene 3 defining an ordered state. The policy recommended, however, by this ‘old dog fox’ (Thersites’ term) does not achieve unity. It ‘is proved not worth a blackberry: ‘for now is the cur Ajax prouder than the cur Achilles’ (5.4.11–14). Political manoeuvring cannot anticipate the accidents of fortune and circumstance. These make a fool even of the crafty Ulysses. Perhaps in conclusion we can repeat that the idea of fooling and foolishness dominates this play as it does As You Like It and King Lear. The wise man / fool opposition is everywhere in mediaeval iconography. The great jesters and foolers are time, death, love, fortune, pride and ignorance and the last two combine in the human tendency to place itself in the centre of life, forgetting events that occur outside its own orbit. Everyman in some way or other is a fool and is wise to admit it. This was the great mediaeval commonplace and the word ‘fool’ echoes through the dialogue of Troilus. It is a keyword in this cerebral play and brings us to consider Shakespeare’s extraordinary mastery of language.

8. The Play’s Language Characterization and theme cannot, of course, be satisfactorily separated from use of language. One way of holding on to a sense of personal identity is by naming things, placing them, and people, in categories so as to feel at home in the world. Shakespeare shakes his main characters out of their confidence, making them unstable, thus giving them greater theatrical life and adding to the dramatic tension as we watch them try to control life by imposing linguistic categories upon it. This happens in Othello, Lear, Macbeth and very obviously to Hamlet, whose volatile quality creates anxiety and uncertainty because other characters cannot fix their image of him, as they can, say, of Horatio. In other plays characters use an accepted reputation to deceive others. Othello clings on to Iago’s ‘honesty’. Or they defend their simple moral sense of the world by calling Macbeth a devil when we have been given early evidence that he is not. In Troilus, Cressida is not fully defined by the language of others. She is more than ‘a daughter of the game’ and Troilus’s ‘simplicity’ is not so simple. Nor is Ulysses entirely ‘an old dog fox’ for his plan goes wrong; Ajax and Achilles are not entirely the fools that Thersites says they are, and so on. Even the more foolish characters are not fully classifiable. One of the cruder distinctions between comedy and tragedy is that comic characters are flat and fixed whereas tragic characters are fluid. Shakespeare mixes the genres and examines the psychology of his characters’ desire for fixity in themselves and others. Shakespeare’s clever jesters, like Touchstone and Feste, seek to pin the name of fool on characters who deem themselves wise, as do witty characters like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado, when they abuse each other and try to establish dominance by demeaning comparisons, often with animals. Language is thus a weapon and ‘fool’ a major category. In Troilus the fool figure, Thersites, uses animal references along with images of sickness and disease, to demean the Greeks, to malign the motives for the war and generally create an atmosphere of sickness. This is defined by Ulysses as an individualism which does not respect the social order: ‘O when degree is shaked / Which is the ladder to all high designs, / The enterprise is sick’ (1.3.101–3). Characters who do not respect the hierarchy are seen as animals, especially Ajax and Achilles,

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whose bodies are strong but whose minds are weak. Ulysses describes Achilles as an elephant which cannot bend its knees. Characters are called dogs, bitch wolves, mongrels, jades, asses. Thersites, the abuser, calls Ajax ‘a very horse’. (Horses are supposed to serve the controlling rider, but at times of social disorder they run out of control. In Macbeth, ‘’Tis said they eat each other’). Thersites constantly condemns the general lack of intelligence in such terms: ‘A horse will sooner con an oration than thou (Ajax) learn a prayer without book’ (2.1.16–7). Behind Shakespeare’s fluid psychology lies the traditional typological characterization of comedy in which characters acquire labels. He goes back to the simple mediaeval types of Fool, Wise Man, and Blind Man to which one can add the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth and the Seven Virtues: Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. All these, especially the vices, hover mockingly behind the characters as in a palimpsest, or hold up a mirror in which the viewer sees or fails to see himself. Do the characters see themselves and others as wise men, gods or fools, envious or charitable, animals or souls? The tendency, of course, is to think as highly of oneself as possible, which easily makes a fool of one. Contrasting with the many references to disease, animality, division and foolishness are many to the gods. Aeneas names Agamemnon ironically as a ‘god in office’ (1.3.231). The appellation clashes with other names he could be given and the phrase invites us to wonder whether Agamemnon is he so foolish as to believe he has the powers of a god. On the other hand the supernatural references widen the play. ‘The gods are above’ (1.2.75) Pandarus declares. They are many times invoked and they hang behind the action, described as blessed but ready to punish. Troilus imagines, when Cressida is taken away from him, that ‘the blest gods as angry with my fancy / More bright in zeal than the devotion which / Cold lips blow to their deities—take thee from me’ (4.4.24–6). Troilus finds an explanation for unpredictable events in order to hold his world together. The Gods, he feels, must prefer cold prayers to the heat of his love. The function of language here is to find a stable belief in a shifting world. How far Troilus fools himself by seeking stability in gods, Shakespeare does not explicitly say. There are clear human explanations for his situation and though the gods are often invoked it is not clear that in this play they have any role in human affairs at all. When Achilles asks the heavens in what part of the body he will destroy Hector, Hector replies that he will kill him everywhere, then at once humbly asks forgiveness. Unlike Achilles, who does not acknowledge any power beyond himself, Hector

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believes in the gods: ‘It would discredit the blessed gods, proud man, / To answer such a question’ (4.5.247–8). This ironic play, however, calls the gods in question. If they exist, they take Achilles’ side when they allow him to find Hector defenceless and permit Achilles to carry out his own boast. The Myrmidons can choose where to kill the Trojan. They also turn Hector’s boast to kill Achilles everywhere against himself since this is what the Myrmidons do to him. Chance and Achilles make the decisions. The gods seem to have no say in the matter, unlike their power in the Greek legend. This is implied throughout as when Troilus invokes the gods after Cressida betrays him: ‘If sanctimony be the gods’ delight / If there be rule in unity itself / This is not she’ (5.2.147–9). But this is she. This play sardonically suggests that sanctimony is not the gods’ delight and there is no rule in unity. The implication is that gods are imaginative inventions to serve human purposes. At the climax of Macbeth (1606) the hero famously states that life is ‘a tale told by an idiot’ (5.5.27). In King Lear (1605) Gloucester equally famously declared: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport’ (4.1.38–9). For Gloucester the gods were sadistic. For Macbeth they either did not exist or did not control life. For Troilus at the play’s ending they punish: ‘Sit gods upon your thrones, and smile at Troy. / I say at once let your brief plagues be mercy / And linger not our sure destructions on’ (5.11.8–9). Troilus links the gods with the plagues they send. It recalls the dominant image strain of sickness which is noticeable in Troilus’s fevered description of his love, and evident in Pandarus’ final bequeathing of his diseases to the theatre audience. But the gods may exist only in Troilus’s imagination. If so, a further kind of sickness in the play lies in not admitting the diseases are of human making. Pandarus and Thersites, of course, combine to create the atmosphere of sickness, and the sickness is defined by Ulysses in Act I scene 3 as an individualism which does not respect the social order. The characters may be described as fools and animals but they are, as we have seen, more complex—divided between their mental and their animal parts. This is reinforced by the images of division which inevitably echo in the play. Ulysses refers to Ajax in ironic flattery: ‘Let Mars divide eternity in twain / And give him half’ (2.3.239–40). The words ‘half’ and ‘twain’ carry strong emphasis as do references to the split self and the split in relations between Helen and Menelaus, or Achilles and the Greeks. The split between mental and animal is continual, especially in the central contrast in Troilus between ideal and sexual love. Abstract words combine and conflict with images of appetite, eating and food: ‘Remainder viands / We do not throw in

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unrespective sieve / Because we now are full’ says Troilus (2.2.70–2), arguing for the retention of Helen. Hector asks the law ‘to curb those raging appetites that are / Most disobedient and refractory’ (2.2.181–2). Here the author’s language works through the words ‘curb’ and ‘refractory’ to communicate, beyond any conscious intention of the characters, the link between the food images and the dominant horse references which recall the Greek mythological and philosophical images of man as a charioteer who must control the two horses of will and appetite. The link between the love and war themes is also picked up in subliminal language. Helmets, steel, Nestor ‘hatched in silver’, massy irons, copper crowns, brass voices and battering rams are set against the ‘white enchanting fingers’ (3.2.145) of Helen which buckle Hector’s stubborn armour. Images of trade and weight, of merchants and ‘the wild and wandering flood’ underline the theme of subjective and objective value, the buying and selling of love by ‘traders in the flesh’ which refers to all who estimate Helen’s or Cressida’s flesh at a high or lesser value. A play which has such masterly control of poetic language and colloquial speech makes it one of the sequence of great and dark plays written in the early years of the 17th century. Lacking any character as intelligent as Hamlet, it yet has the intellectual abstractness of much of that play (which may immediately precede it). It has the sardonic darkness of the language of Alls Well and Measure for Measure, the plays which probably follow. Like them it calls in question the operation of degree and the power of the gods. Troilus is not the most powerful play in the canon, since it is difficult to identify deeply with any of the characters and the sense of disgust at human behaviour pervades the whole. It takes a deeply pessimistic view of humankind and seems to express a point in Shakespeare’s development when any positive belief appears impossible. The tragedies which follow—Othello, Lear, Coriolanus, certainly Antony and Cleopatra, though probably not Timon—convey an upward movement towards the late romances especially in their capacity to convey forms of goodness in the female characters. Troilus in this regard seems to be the modal nadir in the development of a writer at the very height of his incomparable powers.

9. Performance History. Given the quality of the play, it is amazing that no evidence exists of a performance of Troilus in Shakespeare’s life-time, and not again until 1898, if one makes exception of a Dublin production during the Restoration and Dryden’s adaptation, which had ten revivals between 1679 and 1734. Dryden considerably rewrote Shakespeare’s play, giving it the title: Truth Found Too Late. It contains a Cressida who is faithful to Troilus and only pretends to be Diomedes’ mistress. Diomedes lies about their relationship and when Troilus believes him Cressida commits suicide. Troilus then realizes she has been true, kills Diomedes and is himself killed by the Myrmidons. Dryden’s aim was to transform the play into a tragedy with a credible moral. Thus he cuts out the amoral Pandarus and makes Thersites comic rather than a sardonic and truthful commentator. Kemble’s production of Dryden’s play also eliminated the dubious Helen. Revivals after 1898 were not immediately English. There were several pre-World War I productions in Germany, Austria and Hungary, then a Paris production in 1910. Not until Charles Fry directed Troilus in London (and played Thersites) in 1907 did the play appear on an English stage. He was followed by William Poel in 1912, with a revival in Stratford in 1913. Central European productions well outnumbered English and American revivals until 1932. There were four German productions and one Swiss in the single year 1925 and nine others, German and Austrian, between 1927 and 1932. Between Poel’s first adventurous and severely cut pre-war work and the accession of Hitler to power in 1933, the only notable English revivals were given by the Marlowe Society in 1922, followed by Robert Atkins at the Old Vic in 1923 and Nugent Monck in Norwich in 1928. Since 1933 and especially since World War II, however, prestigious professional English and American productions and festival performances and revivals by Cambridge and Oxford University companies, have been many. In 1955, Peter Hall’s English première of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) and the Berliner Ensemble visit soon after Brecht’s death in the same year stimulated a very powerful English theatrical resurgence. There was a heady mix of Tennessee Williams, absurdist plays from France, ‘kitchen sink’ naturalism and polit-

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ical drama. This was also the year of the Suez crisis and the Hungarian resistance to the Soviet invasion. A sardonic play about war, such as Troilus, already seemed very contemporary. Glen Byam Shaw had directed it in 1954 and the first TV production was by Dadie Rylands in the same year. Tyrone Guthrie’s notable production at the Old Vic came in 1956. There was another in America at the New York Winter Garden. Then the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre became the Royal Shakespeare Company under the young Peter Hall in 1960 and it has staged, together with the more recently established Royal National Theatre, a dozen Troilus and Cressidas since. These include Peter Hall’s RSC Troilus on sand in 1960 which had a powerful impact. Moshinski’s RNT and John Barton’s and Barry Kyle’s RSC productions both took place in 1976, in which year there were also four in America. Terry Hands staged his ‘black leather’ revival at the RSC in 1981, followed by Jonathan Miller’s TV version in 1981 as part of the BBC enterprise to film the whole Shakespeare canon. Howard Davies directed it at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1985 and Sam Mendes on the more appropriate RSC thrust stage, the Swan, in 1990. Ian Judge put on a lubricious RSC Troilus in 1996 and Trevor Nunn an applauded RNT production in 1999. During all this time foreign productions have become rarer. There was an Italian Troilus in Florence in 1949, and a Munich revival after an understandably long gap in 1955. The left-wing Roger Planchon staged the play at the Paris Odéon in 1964 and one in Warsaw in 1978. To describe in detail the theatrical nature of all these performances, or even one, would be impossible within the limits of this Ebook. Robert Speight’s Shakespeare on the Stage (1973) provides illustrations of performance. J. C. Trewin adds detailed comments and David Bevington’s introduction to the recent Arden Edition of the play has culled descriptions from contemporary reviewers. The rest of this section will attempt to give a briefer impression of the problems and changing interpretations of Troilus in performance, commenting especially on the use of allegorical and contemporary reference. It will also briefly expand previous comments on the dramatic use by directors, designers and actors of ‘theatre language’, the handling of space and time, costume, colour, set and so on. This should help to convey that vital transaction between the play, the people who perform it, and the audience of the period when it is performed, which gives the play its continued life. To return, therefore to the beginning of the century, William Poel’s 1912 production was played in Elizabethan costume and recalled the unhappy wars of the Earl of Essex in Ireland (1599–1600). It was decked with black and purple drapery

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and established Edith Evans as a major actress who played Cressida as an experienced woman who tires of Troilus. Poel’s contribution, along with Harley Granville Barker, to Shakespeare in performance, was to clear the stage of the heavy rumbling of Victorian scenery and to recover pace and tempo. They both effected the quick scene shifts from camp to camp and indoor to outdoor etc. which Shakespeare’s work demands and to which the bare boards of the large Elizabethan stage were adapted. Nugent Monck, in productions starting in 1914, seems rather inflexibly to have apportioned different areas of the stage to the mainly indoor Trojan scenes and the outdoor Greek camp. The balcony was Cressida’s room; beneath was Priam’s court and downstage generally belonged to the Greeks. Monck, however, could not adhere too rigidly to this plan since both the Greeks and Troy have characters (Thersites and Pandarus) who seem naturally to occupy the downstage position. To place the more dramatically attractive Pandarus permanently upstage of Thersites would seem to give the scurrilous Greek a theatrical advantage. Placing the Greeks downstage, however, could be more appropriate for besiegers outside the walls. Widely spaced forestage grouping could be used to emphasize the Greeks’ individualism whereas closer upstage grouping of the Trojans could accentuate their greater sense of community. Placing them upstage might also suggest they belonged to an earlier epoch than the Greeks, especially if this was reinforced by their style of costume. The problem, however, with too great a rigidity in apportioning stage space is that it can inhibit actors and damage the vitality of dramatic performance necessary to maintain audience attention. This would be crucial in the action scenes and even in the long council scenes and the discussion between Ulysses and Achilles in Act 3. Monck’s general approach, however, encourages directors to examine the work of Robert Weimann (Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, [1978]) on the use if locus and platea in the placing and distancing of characters on the Elizabethan up- and downstage areas. In the year of Munich, 1938, Michael MacOwan treated the play as political allegory and staged a very topical modern dress Troilus and Cressida which hinged on the relation between war and diplomacy. Ulysses was the diplomatist with gold eyeglasses; Thersites became a journalist in a mackintosh wearing a red tie; Pandarus was an elderly roué and the Trojans dressed in khaki. With the Greeks in a civilian pale blue (and not field grey), khaki identified the Trojans with the British Army uniform and with a greater militancy. This confused attempts to see the play as contemporary allegory since the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, whatever his faults, could scarcely be accused in 1938 of war-mongering. Nor could Hitler’s realpolitik

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be easily associated with pale blue costuming. The intention may have been to avoid too direct a political allegory for fear of official displeasure. One can imagine what Brecht would have done in 1938. Contemporary reference would have been underlined, no doubt to the detriment of the subtlety of Shakespeare’s play, though if ever there was a time in which such clear allegory could be justified, 1938 was the year. After 1945, television’s growing power to command and influence mass audiences gradually came to be seen by governments as more of a threat than the theatre. That did not prevent a war play such as Troilus and Cressida from making political statements. In 1956 the Suez invasion and the Soviet invasion of Hungary invited a contemporary allegory but Tyrone Guthrie had decided to set the play in about 1913 and stage it as a conflict between a fictional Ruritania and some Coalition of the Central European Powers. Cressida wore a riding habit, a blond Helen played waltzes at the piano while the soldiers bristled in spiked helmets and the Trojans belonged to musical comedy. Ajax reminded one of Sassoon’s ‘scarlet majors at the base’; Ulysses was an admiral; Thersites, borrowing from MacOwan, was a war reporter with camera and sketch book. This seemed a civilian production, distancing in sardonic comedy, rather than in vicious satire, the war years. The danger, of course, lay in encouraging a superficial sense of fun at the expense of a serious subject. Allegorical settings depend on the spectator’s desire, or competence, to make connections between two historical periods. Simplistic comparisons can do less than justice to the complexity both of the play and of the current political situation. Brecht, of course, in his major plays, and his rewriting of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, retreats in his post-war productions a good deal further into the past, finding more universal human parallels in the ever-contemporary problems of choice which face Mother Courage and Galileo in parable plays set in the 17th century. Other writers preferred direct attack. In his notorious US (1966), Peter Brook allegorized contemporary American napalm bombing during the Vietnam War by burning a butterfly. It provoked public outrage, but even here seemed to miss the mark amid disapproval more of the (apparent) burning of an insect rather than of Vietnam villages. Guthrie mocked a past dynasty rather than attacked a current political abomination for which he had no real time to prepare. His production raises questions about the function of theatrical allegory and the kind of enjoyment it encourages. Should directors focus on the enjoyment of a distant story; or on general truths concerning what Trojans and Greeks psychologically stand for? Should they search for transient current comparisons or, like Brecht’s epic theatre, make an old story contemporary by presenting situations in which characters from the past make or fail to make choices

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which the spectator finds relevant to himself? In that case the situations must be of the general kind which retain relevance. One such was attempted by Alf Sjöberg, the famous Swedish director, in a 1967 production presenting the Trojans as colonialized and dark-skinned. The danger here lay in loading the play’s sympathies too heavily in the Trojans’ favour. The problem with literary allegory is that as time passes an audience begins to enjoy the fictional vehicle of the satire at the expense of contemporary reference. The story of Gulliver’s Travels becomes more interesting than the actions of Robert Walpole. Political reference dates quickly. Shakespeare, unlike many of his Jacobean fellows, avoided it. In its place he gave us in Troilus an astringent and uncomfortable fiction which could be applied generally and its effect on attitudes to war has been gradual. Drama and literature cannot claim to have the immediate and particular effect of newspapers or television targeting a particular scandal. In the light of this, directors may choose to avoid specific parallels altogether. Glen Byam Shaw in 1954 preferred a period setting, evoking the long ships of the Greeks under the long walls of Troy. As has been mentioned, Peter Hall, in 1962, placed his production on sand, hanging a huge bronze backdrop over it, thereby creating a warm Mediterranean feel to the play. This created powerful changes of light and changed the acoustics as also did the sand which slowed the movement of the actors, adding to the sense of blockage and paralysis. This production produced a rich awareness of the characters’ complex human problems, and made more general reference to historical parallels the audience could imagine for itself. Nearly twenty years later in 1981 Terry Hands attempted a compromise between traditional costuming and more recent historical parallels. The costumes evoked different periods. The Trojans were a mixture of Greek and mediaeval; the Greeks, who were more reminiscent of World War 1, mostly wore black. (Pandarus also evoked World War 1 when he ended his sick epitaph hanging on barbed wire stretching across the stage.) Some of the Greeks looked like insects. The Myrmidons resembled lizards and Nestor carried a shield like a scarab. Menelaus had enormous feet and Ajax smashed ammunition crates. Achilles was more sinister as a feline, bisexual magician. Helen was a sexy night-club hostess who subsided in an orgiastic tableau in her single scene. At the end “you come out feeling you have eaten a masterpiece”, said Robert Cushman in the Observer. A different kind of political interpretation came with John Barton’s 1968 RSC production which emphasized the male body and erotic male excitement generated by war. Women were side-lined and the homoerotic relations between Patroclus and

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Achilles came to the fore. Eight years later in 1976 Barton shifted the emphasis to the position of women in a male world in which sexuality meant possession. Cressida wore a courtesan’s mask on the back of her head and Helen was chained on a golden leash. Since 1985 the play has been increasingly seen in gender terms. In 1986, Howard Davies (RSC) stressed Cressida’s vulnerability. She appeared in a nightdress and was sympathetically interpreted by Juliet Stevenson as a woman in love. Sam Mendes, at the RSC Swan Theatre, gave us a damaged but less sympathetic Cressida (Amanda Root) and Sally Dexter, on the forestage in red, gave us a darkly beautiful, brooding and rather sinister Helen, in love with Paris and wanting Troilus too. Simon Russell Beale as Thersites, however, presided over this anarchistic production. One squalid incident (to which we referred earlier) is of his dropping saliva into Ajax’s plate before the entrance of his resented master. The actor no doubt very carefully, but the character appallingly, began to eat. This certainly reinforced the theme of bodily appetite implicit in a dominant strand of imagery. The emphasis shifted again in the next RSC production in 1996. ‘Ian Judge created a homoerotic playground’ wrote Steve Grant in Time Out. Cressida ended as a casualty of war but sympathy, even for the women, was difficult to find in recent renderings. The problems of production can clearly be seen from this brief outline. What kind of audience should a director aim at? How can one deal with the long discussion scenes? Should one give preferential emphasis to one side over the other? Should the emphasis be on human and psychological subtleties at the expense of social commentary and political parallels? Can the two be done together? How far should a director impose his general sense of the play on an actor whose instinct works against it (as Juliet Stevenson seemed to work against Howard Davies)? What emphasis should be placed on gender? And which gender? Should one rewrite the play as Dryden did and as Brecht would have been tempted to do? That requires arrogance and genius.

10. Critical Views Shakespeare has been discussed by major writers and critics from the seventeenth century onwards and their critical responses over the years have tended to reveal as much about the time they were written as about the plays they discuss. The classical view in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries that plays should convey a moral, and the difficulty of finding one in Troilus, may well have been responsible for the small amount of critical and dramatic attention it received. John Dryden moralised his rewrite of the play. Coleridge found the play puzzling and the term ‘problem play’ was first applied to it by Frederick Boas in his book Shakspere [sic] and his Predecessors, reprint (New York, 1968). In the twentieth century the play has had increasing literary and dramatic attention and some schools of criticism have influenced modes of production more than others. A. C. Bradley’s seminal and still valuable Shakespearean Tragedy reprint (London: Macmillan, 1961), with Hegel and the new science of psychology behind him, studied dramatic structure and encouraged subtle character analysis. His approach is still rewarding but he referred only briefly in his book to Troilus, observing that he was ‘painfully conscious’ of the suppression in the play of ‘that element in Shakespeare’s mind which links him with the great musicians and philosophers’. In The Tempest, on the other hand, as in the tragedies, he was very conscious of this power. A desire to celebrate the nobility of Shakespeare’s mind did not square easily with a discussion of Troilus. With the development of English as a university subject the Scrutiny school, under the careful eye of F. R. Leavis, together with American ‘new critics’ such as Cleanth Brooks, encouraged close scrutiny of metaphor and image patterns in poetry and poetic drama. See Derek Traversi’s An Approach to Shakespeare, pages 26–42, 3rd edition (London: Hollis and Carter, 1969). Analysis of language was not, of course, entirely new. The brilliant romantic critic William Hazlitt had commented on Shakespeare’s ‘magic power over words’, briefly quoting in Lectures on the English Poets (1818) metaphors from Troilus ‘not much known’ and observing how Shakespeare’s thought is ‘hieroglyphical’ in that it translates thoughts into visible images. See D. Nichol Smith, Shakespeare Criticism, pages 316–7, reprint 1953 (Oxford: World’s Classics,

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Oxford University Press, 1916 ). What was new in the 1930s and 40s was an industrious attempt to classify image patterns, such as in Caroline Spurgeon’s rather rigid Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935) and the much subtler work of George Wilson Knight in a series of books in which he discusses the plays as dramatic poems containing leitmotifs. See the influential The Wheel of Fire 2nd edition revised (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949) in which he argues that the character of Troilus exhibits a nobility which allows the play to stand among the tragedies, a view few now agree with. Anne Righter’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962) stands in this tradition and prompts another approach by pointing to Shakespeare’s continual use of images of acting, play and the theatre. In Troilus and Cressida, she says, theatrical images are all for the first time ‘of a kind most unflattering to the stage’. She quotes: ‘the strutting player whose conceit / Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich / To hear the wooden dialogue and sound / ’twixt his stretched footing and the scaffoldage’ (1.3.153–6). A book analysing theatrical imagery helped to prompt a rebellion against too strong an emphasis on verbal poetry. Harley Granville Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare, reprint, 5 volumes (London: Heinemann, 1995) had long before discussed plays as drama rather than poetry. Now other critics with theatrical experience insisted that drama possessed variations of pace and rhythm and many forms of ‘theatre language’ which communicated within dramatic structures to create an ever-changing context for the words. John Russell Brown in Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance (London, Edward Arnold, 1966) and J. L. Styan in Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) were among those who encouraged the study of the plays as theatre. More recent Marxist critics focused on historical context and picked up on the impact of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble London visit of 1956 and on the Marxist Georg Lukacs’s book, The Historical Novel, (London: Merlin Press, 1962) which contained in chapter 2 a long discussion of the nature of Shakespeare’s ‘dramatic historicism’ (see especially page 137). This was reinforced by such writings as those of Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist philosopher and dramatist turned Marxist, and of the English critic Raymond Williams, which culminate with Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: New Left Books, 1980). The effect was to consider Shakespeare’s plays as a product of their time, rather than, as Ben Jonson asserted, ‘for all time’. ‘Universality’ became a challenged concept and Troilus and Cressida came to be treated as a modern play conveying truths of a relativist and anti-providential nature. Jonathan Dollimore,

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in Radical Tragedy, chapter 2, (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984) argues that the play is not only about disunity within a character (Troilus) but within a society. And the Greek situation parallels an Elizabethan situation (as various directors have seen it paralleling more modern situations). Dollimore’s ‘cultural materialism’ attacks critics who see Shakespeare as advocating a settled ideal world. In a similar way feminist critics saw interpretations of Cressida as male and prejudiced. Janet Adelman, in The (M)other [sic] Tongue, Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) sees Cressida (page 122) as ceasing to be a full character in order to suit, if not Shakespeare’s, the characters’ patriarchal views of her (a point which relates to previous discussion of her role-playing). Nationalist and religious assumptions were also challenged in the cultural materialist and ‘new historicist’ schools. A foremost proponent of the latter was the American critic Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). The book makes no mention of Troilus and Cressida but places literature in a historical context and encouraged much writing which strove to place Shakespeare in a climate of historical transition when (to use Raymond Williams’s terms) various ‘residual, dominant and emergent’ attitudes and beliefs conflict with one another. These new schools therefore examine the cultural bases for the conflicts within and between characters. They combine to attack previous critics who try to impose a simple doctrinal pattern on the plays. E. M. W. Tillyard’s still useful Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943) is a common target because in it he shapes a vivid but too rigid framework of belief. Troilus and Cressida would seem an ideal play to illustrate the danger of adherence to absolutes. Ulysses’ speech on order, taken by previous writers as a standard, is now seen as ironic. Trojan idealism, too, can scarcely be held as a value, sadly contradicted as it is by Trojan actions and by Greek realism. One should not finish this section without a reference to the structuralist and poststructuralist schools, which might well be represented by the early Keir Elam book: The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980). The contribution made by a school of criticism which derives from linguistics is to focus on the process of communication between writer, text, director, designer, audience and reader/critic. It is evident that this process is highly complex, varies with theatre spaces and with the beliefs, formed or half-formed, of competing creative individuals. It is also affected by the expectations of audiences at different times and in different towns, and in Shakespeare’s case foreign countries and continents. The structuralist approach is instructive but the language and ideas are too abstract to help actors or directors in practical performance.

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It is hardly surprising that recent very accessible works, such as Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1997) and Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin, 2000) have been highly praised by practising writers such as Peter Ackroyd for ‘breathing fresh air into Shakespeare’s work’ and by powerful members of the theatre profession, such as Peter Hall, for creating (he says of Bate) ‘an extraordinary monument of common sense in a sea of nonsense’. What directors and actors ask for is commentary which helps them ‘get it on up there’.

Selected Bibliography Students for whom this selected bibliography is too brief should examine the indexes of The Shakespeare Survey, which has appeared since 1948, and the Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Studies, the annual publications of all of which are to be found in university libraries. The recent Arden edition of the play from which all line references are taken, has a very full bibliography. The previous section has details of books not specifically much concerned with Troilus, but which are important in the development of critical approaches. Adamson, J., Troilus and Cressida, (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). This gives a detailed description of the play, reviews previous criticism and comments on stage devices. Bethell, S. L., Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1944). Discusses, among other things, the representation of Greeks and Trojans. Bevington, D., ed. Troilus and Cressida, The Arden Shakespeare (Walton on Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998). Has a detailed description of sources, text and recent productions and a very full bibliography. All line references in this eBook are to this standard edition. Berry, R., Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience, Chapter 8 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985). Discusses the question of ironic chivalric discourse in the play. Boitani, The European Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Traces the development of the play from mediaeval sources. Campbell, O. J., Shakespeare’s Satire (London: Oxford University Press, 1943). Sees the characters of Troilus and Cressida in an extremely negative light. To be contrasted with Wilson Knight’s view. Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy, Chapter 2 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984). A stimulating ‘cultural materialist’ account of the play’s ironic attack on ideas of providence.

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Ellis-Fermor, Una, The Frontiers of Drama (London: Methuen, 1945). This seminal account argues that the play is unified by the idea of disunity. Kermode, F., Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin Books, 2000). This is an important and highly praised recent book of a more traditional kind which focuses in particular on the importance of ‘opinion’ in the play. Kimbrough, R., Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and its Setting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). He provides a history of the staging of the play to be added to Bevington’s introduction to the most recent Arden edition. Knights, L.C., Some Shakespearean Themes (London, Chatto and Windus, 1959). Contains a reprint from Scrutiny 18 which discusses the theme of appearance and reality in the play. Kott, J., Shakespeare Our Contemporary, pages 75–83 (London: Methuen, 1964). Kott was famously controversial and encouraged directors to find modern political parallels in Shakespearean production. He argues for the universality of the plays in political terms. Martin, P., ed. Troilus and Cressida: A Casebook  (London: Macmillan, 1976). Contains a number of important essays which reveal the development of critical attitudes to the play up to the 1960s. These include: Heinrich Heine on the satire of heroic figures; G. Brandes and Mark van Doren who both express disgust at the play; Una Ellis-Fermor’s influential comments on disunity; W. Fahrman on the conflict between idealism and sensuality; Jan Kott on Shakespeare’s political and topical relevance; J. Oates Smith on existential and essentialist values as revealed in the debate scenes and T. McAlindon on words and deeds in the play. Styan, J. L., Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Contains useful comments on the staging and especially the grouping of the play. Tillyard, E. M. W., Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950). ——The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943). Tillyard is considered old fashioned but both the above are valuable, the second for its detailed expansion of the famous Ulysses speech on ‘degree’. See, however, Dollimore’s comments in the introduction to Political Shakespeare, edited by himself and Alan Sinfield, which criticize Tillyard for representing the ‘picture’ as the view of a whole culture. Wilson Knight, G., The Wheel of Fire, reprint  (London, Routledge Paperback, 2001). A vigorous and controversial account which treats the play as a heroic and tragic

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struggle against Time. Few now agree but the essay stimulates the formulation of counter arguments.

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