Troilus and Cressida Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Héloïse Sénéchal and Jan Sewell

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares

  Troilus and Cressida

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen

  Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Christopher Campbell and Héloïse Sénéchal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

  In Performance: Jan Sewell (RSC stagings) and Peter Kirwan (overview)

  The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):

  Michael Boyd and Trevor Nunn

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Université de Genève, Switzerland

  Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor of English, University of Oxford, UK

  2010 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2007, 2010 by The Royal Shakespeare Company

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  The version of Troilus and Cressida and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-878-2

  www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction Tragical-Comical-Historical?

  “What’s Aught but as ’Tis Valued?”

  The Critics Debate

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  Troilus and Cressida List of Parts

  Textual Notes

  Quarto Passages That Do Not Appear in the Folio

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  Troilus and Cressida in Performance: The RSC and Beyond Four Centuries of Troilus and Cressida: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Michael Boyd and Trevor Nunn

  Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King’s Man

  Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

  The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  The Modern Library

  INTRODUCTION

  TRAGICAL-COMICAL-HISTORICAL?

  Troilus and Cressida perhaps reveals more of Shakespeare’s mature mind at work than any of the other plays. It is highly intelligent, rich in rhetorical complexity and linguistic invention, mentally rigorous, morally skeptical, sexually charged, full of dangerous intellectual and political energy, markedly unpleasant. Most characteristically of all, it is impossible to characterize generically, being at once comedy, tragedy, history, and satire.

  It was written toward the end of Shakespeare’s great run of comedies. In the First Folio of his collected plays, for reasons of licensing and as a result of printing problems, Troilus and Cressida was a last-minute addition. It arrived so belatedly that it is absent from the contents list, and indeed some early copies were published without it. The editors managed to squeeze it in between the histories and the tragedies, which is a fitting place: it is a tragedy in that the Trojan War, the subject of Homer’s Iliad, was Western tragedy’s foundational theme, but it had been published independently in Quarto format in 1609 as The Famous History of Troilus and Cresseid, a title emphasizing a medieval romance accretion to the classical epic tale. A prefatory epistle in some copies of the Quarto performs a delicate balancing act, acknowledging that the play is “passing full of the palm comical,” but emphasizing its serious literary content and praising Shakespeare’s works for being “so framed to the life that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives.”

  The critical reception of the play has long been bedeviled by the difficulty of establishing its genre. The early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine remarked that it was neither comedy nor tragedy in the usual sense and that it accordingly could not be judged by received standards of criticism. At the end of the nineteenth century, a new designation provided a way out of the generic impasse: “problem play.” The term arose in response to the innovative drama that emerged at that time as part of a wider movement toward realism in the arts. It was first used with respect to plays by dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen that approached contentious social issues via debates between the characters on stage, each of whom stood for a particular point of view. Whether the subject was the confinement of women in marriage (A Doll’s House, 1879), the visitation of the sexual sins of the father upon the son (Ghosts, 1882), or the strong idealist pitched against petit bourgeois self-interest (An Enemy of the People, 1882), Ibsen was master of the drama of social problems. In the British theater, George Bernard Shaw followed in his wake. So it was that in Shakespeare and His Predecessors (1896), the critic F. S. Boas suggested that a group of Shakespeare’s middle-period works had characteristics similar to those of the Ibsenesque problem play. His prime examples were Troilus and Cressida together with the contemporaneously written bitter comedies (later sometimes called “dark” comedies), All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure: “All these dramas introduce us into highly artificial societies, whose civilization is ripe unto rottenness … throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome.”

  “In such unpopular plays as All’s Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, we find [Shakespeare] ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if only the seventeenth century would let him”: this is Shaw in the “Preface, Mainly about Myself” in his Plays Unpleasant, a collection of three of his dramas about social hypocrisy and the corrupting effect of money, first published in 1898. The best of those plays is about prostitution (Mrs Warren’s Profession), while the “problem” at the center of All’s Well and Measure for Measure turns on a “bed trick” in which a man thinks he is sleeping with one woman when it is really another. In short, then, to say that Troilus and Cressida was a “problem” play was to say—as one couldn’t spell out specifically in the late Victorian era—that it was a play about sex.

  Critics in the first half of the twentieth century remained somewhat coy about admitting this. There was much talk of how the play was filled with cynicism and loathing. Thus Mark van Doren, an urbane American critic, writing in 19
39:

  The style of Troilus and Cressida is loud, brassy, and abandoned. The world which Chaucer has left so tenderly intact explodes as if a mine had been touched off beneath it, while a host of characters, conceived partly in doubt and partly in disgust, rave at the tops of their never modulated voices. All of them are angry, all of them are distrustful and mendacious; and the tone of each is hardened to rasping by some unmotivated irritation.1

  All true, but is the “irritation” really unmotivated? After all, the Trojan War itself was motivated by the abduction (seduction? rape?) of Helen by Paris. Helen is the traditional embodiment of sex on legs. She provokes desire, pride, possessiveness, jealousy, disgust, bitterness, the sense of affronted honor: exactly the complex of emotions that runs through the play. In Romeo and Juliet the romantic lovers are pitted against the world around them. The love of Troilus and Cressida, by contrast, may have its romantic moments, but the play is utterly realistic about how their relationship does not escape the cruelty, irrationality, sordidness, selfishness, and pain that is everywhere else on the battlefield of Troy.

  Some scholars have wrongly inferred from certain phrases in the Quarto preface (which is reproduced at the beginning of our textual notes) that the play was written solely for private performance, perhaps for a sophisticated audience of student lawyers at the Inns of Court, who would have appreciated its vein of formal debate and rhetorical elaboration. But the language of Pandarus, with its direct addresses to “tongue-tied maidens,” “sisters of the door-hold trade,” and “Winchester geese” (meaning Southwark prostitutes), implies the social and sexual mix of the Globe audience, not the male exclusivity of the Inns of Court. There is no reason to doubt that the play was, in the words of the title page of other copies of the Quarto, “acted by the King’s Majesties Servants at the Globe.” The suggestion that Troilus is somehow too intellectual for the public playhouse, that it was written for elite “private” taste, is mere condescension. Plenty of other Globe plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries stretch the intellectual sinews while simultaneously appealing to the humor of the privy and the bedroom. At the same time, there is no doubt that the sensibility expressed in the play bears a resemblance to that of such lawyer-dramatists as John Marston, who were educated in the Inns of Court and came to prominence in the theater world in the first years of the seventeenth century:

  A pattern of misrule prevails—political as well as personal, parodies of authority in mock-courts and governments … Linguistic misrule, including double entendres, scatology, and scurrility, also recurs, along with paradox and mock-encomia … Mock-rhetoric … is heard … As rhetorical order seems inverted, forms of reason are stood on their head … Mock-chivalry occurs … Social manners are reflected parodically … Academic emphases recur … Law references, as well as mock-legalisms, recur.2

  Despairing of whether to call it history, comedy, or tragedy, many twentieth-century critics, with some justification, regarded Troilus and Cressida as a satire, very much in the mode of writers such as Marston. The military plot concerning Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax, Hector, and the rest is derived primarily from Homer and his descendants, most notably George Chapman’s 1598 translation of seven books of The Iliad into elevated English verse. The love plot concerning Troilus and Cressida, the efforts of Pandarus to bring them together, and the infidelity of Cressida in the Greek camp, is derived primarily from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The handling of each plot is equally cynical. In its love plot the play is an anti-romance, while in its martial plot it is an anti-epic. In his anti-heroic representation of the exemplary heroes of the Trojan War, Shakespeare undermines both the style and the attitudes of Chapman’s recent translation of Homer. The prologue speaks in high Chapmanesque style of “princes orgulous,” “crownets regal,” “strong immures,” and “warlike freightage,” but the action begins with Troilus saying “I’ll unarm again” and going on to describe himself as “weaker than a woman’s tear … Less valiant than the virgin in the night.” The admission of a “feminine” language strips all glamour from the male code of war. But then the code of love is submitted to a similar pummeling: Pandarus compares the art of love to breadmaking, with its progression from grinding to bolting to kneading to leavening to cooling. Troilus idealizes his love in courtly language, but at the same time compares his desire to a wound, speaking of “the open ulcer of my heart.”

  Scabs, pus, and running sores ooze through the play, while the foul-mouthed Thersites proves to be the truest commentator on the war. In the second scene we are given a first account of Hector, traditionally the most noble of heroes. Here, however, he is reported to be wrathful, chiding his devoted wife Andromache and striking his armorer. An honorable man should respect his wife and servants: the honor of Hector is thus questioned from the start. There is a clear progression from the reported striking of the armorer to Hector’s ignominious end, in which he is killed because of an act of vanity: he has unarmed himself in order to put on the alluring golden armor of a slain warrior. Our first image of Ajax, another magnificent hero in Homer, is yet one more debunking. “They say he is a very man per se, / And stands alone,” says Alexander: this sounds like the glorious self-sufficiency of the epic hero. “So do all men / Unless they are drunk, sick, or have no legs,” replies Cressida: “stands alone” is taken literally and thus reduced to ignobility. And, sure enough, Ajax does prove to be a singularly unheroic blockhead. As for the great Achilles, he has withdrawn from the battle and is camping around in his tent with his gay lover, Patroclus, acting out parodies of the inflated mannerisms of the other Greek generals.

  “WHAT’S AUGHT BUT AS ’TIS VALUED?”

  Again and again, Troilus and Cressida reveals the discrepancy between the polished surface that is projected by a value system, whether the heroic code of war or the idea of courtly love, and the tawdry reality beneath. At a philosophical level, the effect of this is deeply troubling: it is to question whether there can be such a thing as an absolute moral value.

  In a purposeful anachronism during the debate about whether or not the war is worth fighting, Trojan man of action Hector appeals to the Greek thinker who was regarded in Shakespeare’s time as the father of moral philosophy: having begun by commending the argumentative powers of his brothers Troilus and Paris, Hector adds that they have reasoned “superficially, not much / Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy.” To the modern ear, the language is typically dense and frustrating. Why can’t Hector say “like young men,” we wonder, instead of “not much” / brief pause for the end of the verse line / “Unlike young men”? Trust Shakespeare to prefer “not unlike” to mere “like.” The flow of argument through the play is like a serpentine river, twisting and turning with double negatives, retractions, qualifications, hypothetical cases, generalizations exploded by particular instances. The modern equivalent is the tortured language of legal opinions and government regulations, which is perhaps why the play is sometimes considered to have been a showpiece for lawyers. But we need to remember that rhetoric—the construction of elaborate edifices of argument that are expounded pro and contra with both words and sentence structures arranged in highly complex ways—was the absolute staple of each long day’s work in the Elizabethan grammar school classroom. Anyone in Shakespeare’s original audience with a few years’ formal education would have had their ears tuned to the mode of speaking that characterizes the formal debates in the respective council scenes of the Trojans and Greeks. And for some in the audience who lacked a formal education—women among them—the theater was an alternative classroom, a place to learn the art of manipulating words without the burden of having to do so in Latin.

  Motivating the expansion of the grammar school network in sixteenth-century England was the educational revolution known to scholars as “humanism.” The purpose of study was not only to achieve a command of the linguistic arts, but also to be inspired to virtue by the example of the ancient heroes: to learn integrity from
Hector, fortitude from Andromache, courage from Achilles, leadership from Agamemnon, strength from Ajax, wisdom from Ulysses, and so forth. It is this moral dimension that the play systematically strips away. The mythic heroes are resolutely anti-heroic. The idea that manliness can be proved in battle is subverted by the voice of Thersites. Thus when Menelaus and Paris, great rivals in Helen’s love, meet in single combat: “The cuckold and the cuckold-maker are at it. / Now, bull! Now, dog!” Here, “at it” suggests sexual congress as well as fighting, while “bull” and “dog” reduce the grandeur of the plain of Troy to the baying confines of the baiting ring (on London’s Bankside, theater and bearbaiting shared the same arenas). As Thersites lances martial values, so the leering Pandarus reduces love to sex: coming to Troilus and Cressida after they have spent the night together for the first time, he addresses his niece as if she were synonymous with her sexual parts, battered and chafed by the repeated assaults of Troilus’ member (“How go maidenheads? … Ah, poor chipochia! Hast not slept tonight? Would he not—a naughty man—let it sleep?”). Hector quotes Aristotle as saying that “young men” are shallow in the art of moral philosophy. The play seems to reply that young men will be young men: they will squabble and sulk, they will argue for the sake of it and swear till the air is blue, they thrive on anger and violence. And old men are no better: they are petulant and manipulative, prurient and self-interested. As for women, Andromache makes but a fleeting appearance, Cassandra is no more than the voice of doom, Helen is not so much the most beautiful woman in the world as one half of a comic double act with Pandarus, and Cressida knows that her only means of survival is to use her sexuality.

  Moral philosophy is not a fixed point of reference. It is itself interrogated and found wanting. Hector attempts to distinguish between the dangers of actions based on emotion (“the hot passion of distempered blood”) and the propriety of those based on reason (“a free determination / ’Twixt right and wrong”). But in the case of the Trojan War, right and wrong cannot be judged objectively: “What’s aught but as ’tis valued?” asks Troilus. Hector tries to maintain the case that value exists above “particular will,” but the play as a whole—with its constant counterpointing of Trojan and Greek, battlefield and bedroom, high rhetoric and low bawdyness—proposes that all moral judgments are relative. It is Ulysses who makes this point most eloquently: a man or an action can only be judged “by reflection, / As when his virtues shining upon others / Heat them and they retort that heat again / To the first giver.” This argument is articulated as part of a cunning scheme to persuade Achilles to switch back from the role of Patroclus’ effeminate lover to the Greek army’s most masculine warrior: the image of the bullish Ajax being presented as top soldier will retort on Achilles and make him strive to regain his military preeminence.