Troilus and Cressida Read online

  Ulysses’ speech about the need for society to maintain a strict hierarchical order or “degree” is part of the same strategy. He argues that one of the causes of the untuning of degree in the Greek camp is that their exemplary warrior Achilles is sulking in his tent when he should be in the appropriate place for an exemplary warrior, namely on the battlefield. But the method he proposes by which Achilles is to be restored to his proper place is itself a disruption of degree. Hector has issued a challenge to single combat. Degree should dictate that Hector’s equal on the Greek side, Achilles, is put forward, but Ulysses proposes Ajax instead, thus snubbing Achilles and provoking him into rejoining the army. Ulysses then achieves his end by rigging an election. Even in the midst of a rhetorically powerful vision of the chaos that ensues when the moral and social order are not upheld, Ulysses lets slip his knowledge of the relativity of value. “Take but degree away,”

  And the rude son should strike his father dead:

  Force should be right, or rather, right and wrong,

  Between whose endless jar justice resides,

  Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

  Then 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.…

  In the very act of warning that “right and wrong” will “lose their names” if “degree” is not observed, Ulysses adds parenthetically that justice resides not inherently on the side of right, as one would expect it to, but rather in the “endless jar” between right and wrong. The play as a whole is a demonstration that order, moral and social, is not a predetermined value system answerable to a harmonious cosmic design, but rather a process, an endless debate and negotiation of terms, in which reason and judgment cannot be separated from appetite and will.

  So it is that two kinds of absolute statement are juxtaposed against each other. On the one hand, aspirations to truth and fixity: “True swains in love shall in the world to come / Approve their truths by Troilus … As truth’s authentic author to be cited, / ‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse.” And on the other, cynical reductions to the lowest common denominator of the body: “Here is such patchery, such juggling and such knavery! All the argument is a cuckold and a whore, a good quarrel to draw emulations, factions and bleed to death upon. Now, the dry serpigo on the subject, and war and lechery confound all!”

  “Hector is dead, there is no more to say”: that is how a tragedy ought to end. But having said that line, Troilus says “Stay yet.” Shakespeare just won’t stop arguing with himself. If there is a victor in these endless jars, it is the voice of the cynical commentators, Thersites and Pandarus. The latter gets the last word, addressing the theater audience in a broken sonnet that is a symptom of this play’s fragmented world.

  Troilus disintegrates because of the incompatibility between his mental image of Cressida and what he sees of her in the Greek camp when she has become Diomedes’ mistress: “This is and is not Cressid.” The sight causes him to believe that the whole rationality of the world has collapsed and “The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed.” He has not, however, seen Cressida brutally manhandled and kissed, treated like a piece of meat, on her arrival in the camp. Shakespeare’s point in bringing Troilus to “madness of discourse” is not to make a moral judgment about Cressida—you can’t help feeling that he admires her improvisational skills and the way in which she maintains linguistic dignity even as her body is taken by another man—but rather to strip away the illusion that bodily beauty and strength are signs of inner grace and greatness. The symbolic figure that comes closest to the rotten core of the play is that knight in sumptuous armor who is pursued by Hector. He is so fair without, but what does Hector find within? A “Most putrefied core,” a decaying human body.

  THE CRITICS DEBATE

  A play of debate, Troilus and Cressida has stimulated exceptionally lively literary critical debate in the age of professionalized Shakespeare studies.

  The sense of a collapsed moral order, a world in ruins, gave the play special force in the wake of the First World War, which was when it first truly established its place in the theatrical repertoire, and again in the Second World War. In a book called The Frontiers of Drama, its preface dated January 1945, the critic Una Ellis-Fermor wrote apropos of Troilus that “our actual experience of disintegration and disruption, so unlike that of any age between, has thrown fresh light upon the nature and foundations of what we call civilization; prospects once mercifully rare are now common and familiar, and much that has not, in the interval, been generally forced upon the imagination, now lies upon the common road.”

  It was also during the Second World War that E. M. W. Tillyard published his influential The Elizabethan World Picture (1942), in which Ulysses’ oration on “degree” was held up as the epitome of the “order” that Shakespeare advocated or at least craved. It is obvious from the perspective of historical distance that Tillyard’s belief in the Elizabethans’ nostalgia for a more settled medieval world order was his own yearning for the stability that had been destroyed by Nazi ideology and the war. Modern critics are accordingly brusque in their dismissal of Tillyard’s reading of Ulysses’ speech as a Shakespearean prescription for society:

  Ulysses’ great oration on order is no better than Agamemnon’s and Nestor’s pompous, bumbling efforts to speak as kings … the topoi in Troilus and Cressida call attention to the fundamental commonplaceness of Ulysses’ mind—this is the wily Ulysses, who spent ten years outwitting his enemies, human, divine, monstrous, and natural, here reduced to a version of Gloucester or Polonius, mouthing the unexamined platitudes of a doctrine of order which the play itself constantly subverts.3

  The word “subversion” is everywhere in modern criticism of the play. Thersites has taken center stage:

  Thersites is a malevolent force, a type of primal hatred and pride, and what Shakespeare has done is to take the conventional character of the satirist and strip away his pretensions to being a moral healer and intensify his basic loathing of all mankind. In Thersites we are very close to those basic drives and outlook which give rise to satire, and which in this case are not redirected by any extraneous moral considerations or glossed over by any pretension to justice and honesty.4

  The idea that the play subverts all prior moral certainties has meant that modern critics have been rather more sympathetic to the character of Cressida than their predecessors were. In a pioneering lecture, the Cambridge critic A. P. Rossiter suggested that

  Cressida is not simply a little harlot; and, though admittedly “designing,” is too frail to stick to her design. Her passion is quite genuine … so is her grief at her separation from Troilus. Only nothing is deep rooted in her … Thersites has the last word on her; but she is only the feminine of the rest of them. They all fancy or pretend they are being or doing one thing, whereas they are shown up as something quite different: something which egoism, or lack of moral insight, prevents their recognizing.5

  Around the same time, her strength of character was praised in Polish critic Jan Kott’s influential book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary:

  Cressida is one of the most amazing Shakespearian characters … She is cynical, or rather would-be cynical … She is bitter and ironic. She is passionate, afraid of her passion and ashamed to admit it. She is even more afraid of feelings. She distrusts herself. She is our contemporary because of this self-distrust, reserve, and need of self-analysis. She defends herself by irony.6

  The play as a whole is “our contemporary,” it has frequently been argued, because of its relentless exposure of the relativity of all values:

  The association of fame and glory and the like with the rape of Helen, and the attempt to make that rape seem more glamorous by persisting in fighting for it, is recognized by Hector to b
e pure illusion … The Trojans choose the illusion of fame and glory, knowing it to be an illusion, and knowing that Helen herself is not the real motive for fighting.7

  Masculine reputation is reduced to mere “opinion”:

  Words such as “worthy,” “glory,” “fame,” “merit,” “esteem,” “estimate,” “estimation,” “value,” “cost,” “honour” are everywhere. And “opinion” occurs ten times, far more than in any other Shakespeare play. It is commonplace … that reputation, honor, fame, and all the rest depend on opinion. Opinion is what people say. In the matter of reputation, it is what other people say about you. One cannot have fame or glory by one’s own inward knowledge; it has to come from the mouths of others, not from within.8

  With the breakdown of hierarchy that is the subject of this play, the consequences predicted by Ulysses … are exactly fulfilled: the traditional bonds that once defined human relations are replaced by “appetite … will and power” … Proper relationship is destroyed, and the ethics of the marketplace … govern men’s and women’s dealings with one another … The disturbance of the hierarchical order leaves the individual not autonomous and free, but bound to definition by relation of a different, more destructive sort. Deprived of the legitimate sanctions of hierarchy, the individual must create his or her own value, an appearance to please the beholding eye, in what is essentially a selling of the self.9

  A related aspect of the play that has especially appealed to modern criticism has been its literary self-consciousness. Not only received moral values, but also received myths, stories, and literary characterizations are called into question:

  The play also persistently calls attention to its intertextuality, its anachronicity, its dependence upon a prodigious literary and rhetorical legacy. Within Shakespeare’s dramatization of familiar legend, a vast encyclopedia of citation is embedded. The myth, the Matter of Troy, the classical topos, the set piece, the commonplace, the cliché, the name that has become a concept; references to books, texts, representations, figures of rhetoric—all these are on display as though to insist on the text’s derivative status.10

  The ironic retelling of a familiar story undermines the preconceptions created by cultural tradition. Whereas previous versions of the Troy legend turned the story to ethical account, Shakespeare declined to do so. In his thoroughgoing work of demythologizing, the classical heroes fail to live up to their literary and historic identities:

  The whole play carries an element of general parody in relation to the grand Homeric legend of the Trojan war, as the heroes of that are displayed in the fumbling and insecure postures of Shakespeare’s characters … Shakespeare also … establishes and exploits a dislocation of character from role, and a discontinuity between speech and action in, for example, the presentation of Ajax, or of Troilus, whose grand rhetoric as lover is comically exploded by the matter-of-fact practicality of Pandarus.11

  Whereas classical culture had idealized male bonds and male bodies, Shakespeare’s play diminishes and sexualizes them:

  What we see as Achilles stalks Hector, what we hear as he speaks, is a violent parody of a lover’s blazon [in which the body is itemized] … Seen in the terms that Achilles himself provides, the slaughter of Hector becomes an act of sexual consummation, a homosexual gang rape that Achilles and his Myrmidons carry out on their unarmed victim … Thersites derides this coupling of two males, not in moral terms, however, but in political terms. He sees it all as a matter of one man’s power over another. A “varlet” is primarily a social, not a moral, inferior. Patroclus deserves insults, not because he is morally wrong, but because he willingly accepts an unmanly, passive role: he is Achilles’ “masculine whore.”12

  The evolution of critical responses to the play is clearly seen in changing attitudes to the two camps. For G. Wilson Knight, writing in the 1930s,

  The Trojan party stands for human beauty and worth, the Greek party for the bestial and stupid elements of man, the barren stagnancy of intellect divorced from action, and the criticism which exposes these things with jeers. The atmospheres of the two opposing camps are thus strongly contrasted, and the handing over of Cressida to the Greeks … has thus a symbolic suggestion … Among [the Trojans] we find love and honour of parents, humour, conviviality, patriotism: all which are lacking among the Greeks. The Trojans remain firm in their mutual support. Their cause is worthy, if only because they believe in it. They speak glittering words of honour, generosity, bravery, love. Here is a strange and happy contrast with the shadowed world of the Greek camp, where all seems stagnant, decadent, paralysed. Troy is a world breathing the air of medieval, storied romance; the Greek camp exists on that of Renaissance satire and disillusion.13

  Jan Kott in the 1960s retains the neat opposition, but suggests that the idealizing, “medieval” values of the Trojans are regarded as outdated:

  The Greeks are down-to-earth, heavy and brutal. They know that the war is being fought over a cuckold and a hussy, and they do not have to make themselves believe that they die for the sake of loyalty and honour. They are part of another, new world … The Trojans insist on their ridiculous absolutes and a medieval code of combat. They are anachronistic.14

  By the 1990s, the sharp distinction has collapsed altogether. Indeed, Greek language is seen to be Trojan and Trojan to be Greek:

  The Greek camp, taking its identity from Homer, is an all-male world dominated by an ethic of honor and combat; the Trojan camp, inspired by Chaucer and other romance writers, is a courtly world devoted to an ethic of chivalric love. This geographical division, which almost suggests a gender distinction between the male/Greek and female/Trojan, effects a curious dislocation of rhetoric: imagery of battle shapes the experience of love in the Trojan camp; imagery of love and courtship colors the depiction of combat and male rivalry in the Greek camp.15

  The play works out in the Trojan scenes the arbitrariness and hollowness of the two most valued aristocratic codes of the Elizabethan court, romance and chivalry. Even Hector, who is the least satirized, most heroic character in the play, succumbs to the corrosive dynamics of the drama when, quite against his careful Aristotelian ethical argument, he advocates keeping Helen and continuing the war. The elaborate chivalry of the Trojan interactions with the Greeks seems simply ridiculous in the face of the war’s material death and destruction.16

  Wherever there is war and debate about the rights and wrongs of going to war, Troilus and Cressida will be a living play. Sadly, that means it will go on living as long as human society.

  ABOUT THE TEXT

  Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

  Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial. Troilus and Cressida comes into
the latter category. Editors accordingly have to decide whether to base their text on the Quarto, the Folio, or some combination of the two.

  If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.