Troilus and Cressida – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

*Chapman: Selections from Books I, II, VII
*Ovid: Books XII.670-696, XIII.1-187, 437-432
*Lydgate: Selections from Books II, III, IV
*Caxton: Selections from Book III.

ACT 1

Prologue (812-13, a prologue-speaker sets the scene, and tells us that the story will—like Homer’s epics—begin in medias res, i.e. in the middle of the action.)

The Prologue reminds us of the heroic Homeric backdrop to the play, but on the whole, the play intensifies the disillusionment that besets both love and war—activities that almost always begin with high ideals and unrealistic expectations, and all too often end in bitterness and frustration, even when the object is attained. The Prologue is dressed in armor, and bears himself with admirable humility—a quality notably lacking in characters such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax, among others—admitting that the audience may find the play “Now good or bad, ‘tis but the chance of war” (813, 1.0.31).

Shakespeare probably did not have extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the Homeric epics or early Greek history, but he surely gained valuable insight into the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations from their mythic and historical narratives. These myths he received in part from Ovid, and the history from Plutarch and others. Shakespeare shares with Homer and the later Greek tragedians a keen sense that swirling beneath the most heroic ideals and quests is always a strong undercurrent of contrary passions, impulses, and objectives. Troilus and Cressida’s characters often show a painful awareness of such undercurrents, which is partly what gives the play its cynical edge. [1]

Act 1, Scene 1 (812-16, Troilus won’t enter the fray as war rages between his own Trojan side and the Greeks because he is suffering the torments of his unreturned affection for Cressida; the girl’s uncle, Pandarus, complains that Troilus is too precipitate and not sufficiently thankful for Pandarus’s efforts in his service; finally, Troilus goes off with Aeneas to battle.)

Shakespeare’s play begins seven years into the Trojan War, not ten as does Homer’s Iliad, [2] and at present, Troilus reveals in conversation with his crush’s Uncle Pandarus that he is as far out of sync with the war’s imperatives as the sulking hero Achilles, who is angry with King Agamemnon for taking away his prized concubine, Briseis. Troilus asks Pandarus, “Why should I war without the walls of Troy / That find such cruel battle here within?” (813, 1.1.2-3) The young man sounds like a Petrarchan sonneteer with his sighing extremes, as in Petrarch’s famous line, “I find no peace, but have no arms for war.” [3]

By the play’s end, Troilus will be furious at both Pandarus and Diomedes, disillusionment over Cressida having given him his cause to fight, though that cause itself seems pervaded by the disillusionment that initially drives it. But by then, Achilles will have killed Hector and the Trojans will be doomed. But at this early point, Pandarus is eager to spur Troilus on as a lover, increasing his lovesickness with comparisons between the magnificent Helen and his own niece: he tells Troilus of Cressida, “Well, she looked yesternight fairer than ever I saw / her look, or any woman else” (814, 1.1.30-31).

Pandarus is not above rubbing salt into Troilus’s love wounds, but he also opines that if Cressida knew what was good for her, she would have followed her deceitful, mercenary Trojan father Calchas in joining the Greeks because he prophesied their victory over Troy: “let her to the Greeks,” says Pandarus, “and so I’ll tell / her the next time I see her” (815, 1.1.76-77). [4]

Pandarus need not worry: Troilus is in no danger of being unsmitten by the fair Cressida, and he persists in his disdain for the grand cause of the long war, Helen, whose beautiful visage was famously described as “the face that launched a thousand ships.” [5] Troilus’s gloss is, “Helen must needs be fair / When with your blood you daily paint her thus. / I cannot fight upon this argument; / It is too starved a subject for my sword” (815, 1.1.85-88).

We soon hear that Paris has been slightly wounded by Menelaus (816, 1.1.105). Troilus’s estimation of the event is, “Let Paris bleed—‘tis but a scar to scorn; / Paris is gored with Menelaus’ horn” (816, 1.1.106-07). As this reference to cuckoldry suggests, Shakespeare’s play constantly undercuts the heroic version of the Trojan War’s “great cause.” It seems as if the play sides with that thoroughly Homeric character Thersites, who puts the whole violent campaign down to stupidity, lechery, and contemptible male pride. Thersites sees from the outset that love and war are intertwined, to the honor of neither.

The scene ends with Aeneas and Troilus heading gamely for battle outside Troy’s walls.

Act 1, Scene 2 (816-22, Cressida converses with her male servant, then with Pandarus, who promotes Troilus’s qualities to her; Cressida and Pandarus observe the procession of Trojans return home from battle, and when Cressida is by herself, she must admit that she is much taken with Troilus.)

Cressida’s manservant tells her that Hector is both upset since Ajax has given him a good beating—the servant says Ajax “coped Hector in the battle and / struck him down …” (817, 1.2.30-31). Cressida herself is only moved to smile at the absurdity of the picture that the servant creates to describe Ajax, and wonders how such an individual could so affect the great Trojan. She asks, “But how should this man that makes me smile / make Hector angry?” (817, 1.2.28-29) All the same, Hector is spurred on by his shame to challenge any Greek to maintain that his lady is as good as Andromache.

Does Hector’s wounded pride make the Trojans seems more human, more worthy of respect? Throughout the play, Hector seems most concerned to preserve from the ravages and fortunes of battle his sense of honor—he lives by something very like the medieval honor code operative in the “Matter of Troy” texts that Shakespeare seems to have drawn from in crafting his play. The Greeks, in comparison to Hector, seem wilier, more mercenary. Still, this difference appears most sharply when Hector himself is the object of comparison—many of the Trojan warriors are in no essential way different from the “tricky” Greeks.

Pandarus pursues his private interest of bringing Troilus and Cressida together, and his attempt consists mainly in playing up the virtues and valor of Troilus even over Hector: according to Pandarus, “Troilus is the better man of the two” (817, 1.2.56). He even insinuates that Helen herself is quite attracted to the young fellow: “She praised his complexion above Paris” (818, 1.2.90). As for Cressida, she finds her uncle’s claims rather dubious, and the sexual nature of some of her banter with him makes her appear worldly enough in her answers, at least until she meets Troilus later on.

Soon, there follows a pageant of Trojans: Aeneas, Hector, and others file by (819-20, 1.2.164ff). Cressida seems to opine that Troilus is a “sneaking fellow” (820, 1.2.208). But what is her most pressing concern? As she explains to us after she is done bantering with Pandarus, she is determined to maintain her chastity. In soliloquy, she tells us that she fears she will be lightly prized once she is no longer chaste: “Achievement is command; ungained, beseech” (822, 1.2.271, see 260-73).

What Cressida says rings true as a matter of sexual politics, so to speak, in a patriarchal society. It doesn’t equate with wide-eyed innocence. Cressida does not “speak like a green girl,” as Polonius says in Hamlet when he accuses his daughter Ophelia of naivete about Prince Hamlet’s intentions toward her. [6]

Act 1, Scene 3 (822-30, Agamemnon, Nestor, and Ulysses talk over Achilles and Ajax’s present refusal to participate in the war; the Trojan prince Aeneas arrives and delivers Hector’s challenge of single combat; thinking Achilles too high and mighty for anyone’s good, Ulysses and Nestor plot to give the combat honors to Ajax instead.)

In council with his chief warriors, Agamemnon gives a predictable speech telling them that what they have been undergoing are the “protractive trials of great Jove / To find persistive constancy in men …” (822, 1.3.19-20). That must be why, he implies, so many years have passed with no victory. Beyond that, the joint argument from the King and Nestor is (to paraphrase) “trust us—this is wise policy beyond your devising.” Nestor seems very careful not to omit fulsome praise for the prideful, sometimes petulant Chief of Chiefs, Agamemnon.

Ulysses then tells everyone to listen to him, and Agamemnon says that given the source, they fully expect to hear wise counsel, and not the sort of nonsense that the camp clown Thersites spews. [7] Ulysses’ warning, it turns out, involves reformulating the key concept that medieval and early modern scholars call “the Great Chain of Being”: everything has its place above or below someone or something else, and this order of persons and things must be regarded as rightly established and firm. [8]

Among other things, Ulysses says the following, “The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center / Observe degree, priority, and place, / Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, / Office, and custom, in all line of order” (824, 1.3.84-87). But that celestial order, he says, is by no means evident in the Greek camp, not even to the usual poor degree we find in the corrupted sublunary world. The consequences could be dire: using another common metaphor (the harmony of the spheres, celestial music, etc.), Ulysses admonishes the King and his chiefs, “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows …” (824, 1.3.109).

If concern for rank is ignored, suggests Ulysses, the world will run to self-destruction: “And appetite, an universal wolf, / So doubly seconded with will and power, / Must make perforce an universal prey, / And last eat up himself” (825, 1.3.120-23). [9]

But why, exactly, is there a hierarchy problem among the Greeks? Ulysses explains that respect for rank is low thanks to Achilles’s prideful refusal, at this critical point many years into the fight, to do his part for the Greeks. This great warrior, he says, “Grows dainty of his worth and in his tent / Lies mocking our designs” (825, 1.3.144-45) In The Iliad, the reason given is that Agamemnon arrogantly asserted his supremacy by demanding as his share of the spoils Achilles’ favorite concubine, Briseis. [10]

By Ulysses’s logic, when Achilles and Patroclus mock Agamemnon, their clowning spurs the strong but doltish Ajax to mock the King, too, and to make Thersites his agent for this purpose. Ajax’s posturing, in turn, appeals to those who value nothing but stupid, brute force rather than shrewd policy. Ajax, says Ulysses, “is grown self-willed and bears his head / In such a rein, in full as proud a place / As broad Achilles, and keeps his tent like him …” (826, 1.3.187-89).

It is clear that in Shakespeare’s play as well as in Homer’s Iliad, there are serious rifts between the Greek commanders. In truth, it’s hard to see how Agamemnon’s “policy” amounts to anything but incompetence. He himself has shown what we may fairly call excessive pride in dealing with Achilles, even when we consider that he is a king and therefore accustomed to getting his way. [11] In such conditions, Ulysses suggests, it’s understandable that men should praise the battering ram above the ingenuity of the person who built it, or the one who expertly guides it home (826, 1.3.205-09).

And thus all things decline to stupidity, and there’s an end of wisdom and strategy—brute force takes the palm. That is the substance of what Ulysses says in his long holding-forth before Agamemnon and the assembled lords of the Achaeans.

Soon, the Trojan prince Aeneas [12] arrives and asks rather elegantly where he might find Agamemnon. That latter does not take kindly to this gesture, and retorts, “This Trojan scorns us, or the men of Troy / Are ceremonious courtiers” (827, 1.3.230-31). By this remark, the King insinuates the traditional portrayal of the Trojans as self-indulgent, over-civilized proponents of the “luxurious state”—a portrait later found blameworthy by that Athenian lover of all things Spartan, Plato. [13]

Aeneas answers chivalrously that to be sure, the Trojans are civil in time of peace, but deadly in war: “when they would seem soldiers they have galls,” he says, along with “Good arms, strong joints, true swords, and, Jove’s accord, / Nothing so full of heart” (827, 1.3.234-36). [14]

Soon thereafter, Aeneas delivers Hector’s challenge to Agamemnon and his Greeks. In essence, Hector will fight any Greek who dares claim his woman is better than Hector’s lovely, virtuous wife, Andromache. She is, says Hector, “wiser, fairer, truer / Than ever Greek did compass in his arms …” (828, 1.3.272-73). Agamemnon’s reply to Aeneas shows how inextricable love and war are in this play: all soldiers, he insists, are lovers, or plan to be such: “And may that soldier a mere recreant prove / That means not, hath not, or is not in love” (828, 1.3.284-85)

Ulysses, however, has a scheme to take Achilles down a few pegs and thereby keep prideful love-matters from impeding a Greek victory. Hector’s challenge, as Ulysses knows, is aimed straight at Achilles, but the wily King of Ithaca wants to arrange for Ajax to win a lottery for the honor of facing Hector in single combat, thereby upstaging his rival attention-seeker Achilles.

Ulysses manages without much trouble to convince Nestor that this would be the wisest course. There is also the issue that Nestor himself identifies: if Achilles were to lose such a duel, the Greeks would lose face: he is, after all, their most imposing warrior. “For here,” says the old man, “the Trojans taste our dear’st repute / With their fin’st palate” (829, 1.3.334-35). And if Achilles fights the duel and wins, adds Ulysses, just imagine how arrogant he’ll be then! (830, 1.3.365ff) So the aim will be to keep Achilles far from Hector and his challenge.

ACT 2

Act 2, Scene 1 (830-33, Ajax strikes Thersites when the latter refuses to reveal the conditions for the challenge recently issued by Hector; Achilles and Patroclus come to his assistance and Achilles himself informs Ajax about Hector’s challenge.)

The first act went far towards undercutting the Greek heroes’ claims to high honor. Throughout the play, Thersites will rail at the biggest targets among the captains for their lechery, double-dealing, stupidity, pride and enviousness, and he in turn will become the target for their sexually charged taunts of cowardice, effeminacy, and so forth.

In this scene, Thersites will sling some of the same taunts at Patroclus, the focus of Achilles’s tender regard, but not before his nemesis Ajax strikes him, demanding that he read out Hector’s “proclamation” (831, 2.1.22). Ajax is apparently unable to read it for himself. Thersites’s contempt for this thick-headed warrior is never more apparent than when he says to him, “Thou art here but to / thresh Trojans, and thou art bought and sold among those of / any wit like a barbarian slave” (831, 2.1.42-44).

Thersites gets in one last jab at Ajax: “I serve thee not” (832, 2.1.88), and then the argument shifts over to Achilles and Patroclus. Achilles himself reads out the proclamation of Hector for Ajax’s consideration, himself calling it “trash” (833, 2.1.120). Achilles wants nothing to do with the sorry affair, and ends his conversation with Ajax by pointing out that if things weren’t coming down to a lottery, Hector “knew his man” (833, 2.1.123).

Thersites and Ajax relate to each other in an interesting way. Thersites, that is, sees Ajax as merely a blunt instrument for those who actually wield power. In a phrase, Ajax is “Mars his idiot” (831, 2.1.50). Running all through Thersites’s caustic attacks is a diatribe against the principle of rank: this semi-official railer at all things supposedly heroic doesn’t believe those who stand upon their rank are ever worthy of it. “I serve thee not” (832, 2.1.88), he says to Ajax, who proceeds to beat him. [15]

Achilles is generally more “civilized” than Ajax, but nonetheless Thersites lumps him together with Ajax, and prefers Hector over the famously moody Greek demigod. As he says to Achilles, “There’s Ulysses and Nestor, whose wit was / moldy ere your grandsires had nails on their toes, yoke you / like draft-oxen and make you plow up the war” (833, 2.1.99-101).

Thersites has at least some regard for the wise counselors Ulysses and Nestor, as he prefers intelligent men who are not so full of themselves as to become objects of ridicule. Agamemnon, however, he despises as a prideful, petulant fellow who covets a reputation for honor and good counsel but possesses neither. [16]

Act 2, Scene 2 (833-38, The leaders of Troy deliberate on keeping Helen with them and thereby prolonging the war. Cassandra utters a prophecy that Troy will suffer destruction, but her prediction does not sway the Trojan chiefs.)

Priam finds that his sons Helenus and Hector would gladly agree to return Helen to the Greeks, restoring her to her husband King Menelaus of Sparta and thereby saving a lot of bloodshed on both sides. Using an economic and clan-based metaphor, that of “tithing” as the loss of life Troy has already suffered, Hector says “Let Helen go” (833, 2.2.17).

Along with Paris, however, Troilus insists that the Trojans should be willing to fight over trifles if occasion bids, asking in anguished tones, “Weigh you the worth and honor of a king / So great as our dread father in a scale / Of common ounces?” (834, 2.2.26-28) To Helenus’s favoring of acting only on the basis of “reasons,” Troilus responds scornfully, “Nay, if we talk of reason / Let’s shut our gates and sleep. Manhood and honor / Should have hare hearts would they but fat their thoughts / With this crammed reason” (834, 2.2.46-49).

Hector, however, points out that determining Helen’s value is not the province of lone individuals, for “value dwells not in particular will” (834, 2.2.53) alone—it matters what something really is worth, he insists. A further gloss yields the notion that due regard must be shown for the impact any determination may have on the entire Greek host: as Hector says, “Tis mad idolatry / To make the service greater than the god …” (834, 2.2.56-57). Is one lovely and aristocratic, even semi-divine, woman so intrinsically wonderful that she is worth the entire Greek host? Clearly, Hector does not think she is, and neither does Helenus.

It won’t do, then, to fetishize honor in this lady’s service, and war at the expense of practical consequences for thousands. Neither the Greeks nor the Trojans have any claim to absolute righteousness in their quest for honor and advantage. Paris, after all, went to Greece to make away with Helen at least in part because Hercules had absconded with Priam’s sister Hesione and then given her to Ajax’s father Telamon: as Troilus says, Paris “touched the ports desired, / And for an old aunt whom the Greeks held captive / He brought a Grecian queen” (835, 2.2.66-68). [17]

We can’t really claim, therefore, that the Trojans alone started the trouble. As always with the Greeks, “it’s complicated.” Whenever we hear about some outrage, we usually find that another one lay behind it, and another behind that. [18]

Troilus’s disillusionment is yet to come, and so at this point, he upholds chivalric idealism, and his naïve stance bids him recommend that the Trojans must hold on to Helen at all costs. He finds nothing but hypocrisy in this newfound “reasonableness,” and argues passionately that when Paris came home with Helen, “you all clapped your hands / And cried ‘Inestimable!’—why do you now / The issue of your proper wisdom rate …” (835, 2.2.87-89), meaning “berate”? Where is honor, or even sanity, Paris wants to know, in such self-contradictory behavior?

Hector, who has been doing much of the fighting, thinks otherwise. Nonetheless, his current challenge against Achilles probably owes more to personal shame than statecraft. War, in Shakespeare’s representation of it, is seldom a bringer of healthy truths; rather, it is a great distorter of people’s motives and words, and it often sunders those words from deeds, or rather widens the gap extant between them to begin with.

The unlucky prophetess Cassandra soon breaks into the debate and aligns herself with those who want to return Helen, knowing as she does that Troy is doomed. It’s worth recalling that Cassandra, Apollo’s priestess, was cursed when she refused to sleep with him—she sees the future clearly, but no one will believe her, so her gift is wasted, and we know that the Trojans will not heed her well-grounded advice. [19] That advice is bone-chillingly simple, and Trojan history, in her telling, rhymes: “Cry, Trojans, cry—a Helen and a woe! / Cry, cry! Troy burns, or else let Helen go (836, 2.2.111-12).

Cassandra’s fury and Hector’s reasons notwithstanding, Troilus sticks to his contempt for of each act / Such and no other than event doth form it …” (836, 2.2.118-20). Nearly every Trojan soldier, says Troilus, will defend the beautiful Helen, and will fight to the death for this icon and enabler of masculine valor and display. When honor’s at stake, warriors and citizens, he is certain, cannot simply judge by what they think will be the outcome of a deed.

Paris agrees, mainly because he is unwilling to give up his lover, Helen, and Priam notes it, rebuking Paris, “You have the honey still, but these the gall, / So to be valiant is no praise at all” (836, 2.2.145).

After hearing his brothers Troilus and Paris hold forth, Hector makes the strongest case he can—even quoting from a very advance copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics [20]—in favor of recognizing brute reality and simple moral uprightness, admitting that if the Trojans want to spare themselves further damage, Helen ought to be returned to Menelaus of Sparta since, after all, she is his wife.

Astonishingly, Hector’s next move is … to reverse his judgment and accede to brother Troilus’s proposition! In Hector’s words, the Trojans’ “joint and several dignities” (837, 2.2.193) demand that they hang on to this stolen woman. She is, as Troilus goes on to insist, a “theme of honor and renown, / A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds” (837, 2.2.199-200).

What should we take away from this turnabout? Perhaps it’s that while Troilus holds his position as a naïve, youthful romantic, the supreme warrior Hector takes the matter up differently. He has little personal regard for Helen, but public necessity dictates that the woman be defended and kept in Troy for her symbolic, unifying value: war needs symbols as rallying points, or the cause flounders. In the end, Hector is notwilling to lose a war once begun. He is too much the believer in the chivalric honor code to countenance such an outcome, even in the teeth of the strong reasons he himself has set before his fellow Trojans. [21]

Hector’s quick-change is indeed surprising, but in casting the views of Troilus and Hector as he does, Shakespeare captures much of the Bronze-Age Trojan and Greek addiction to valor and deeds of renown. We know that by “the afterlife,” they partly meant “what people say about you when you’re gone.” [22] This business of renown, of glory in battle, was not to be easily brushed aside. Here, where the fate of Troy hangs in the balance, even the realistic, experienced Hector can’t let it go. Troy can still win this war, he thinks, and if so, the city’s long and terrible suffering can be folded into glory.

Hector ends the scene with the claim that his chivalric challenge is strategic. As he puts it, “I have a roisting challenge sent amongst / The dull and factious nobles of the Greeks / Will strike amazement to their drowsy spirits” (838, 2.2.208-10). He knows that Achilles is sulking in his tent with Patroclus, and expresses the hope that this tactic will get the Greeks’ preeminent warrior fighting again.

Act 2, Scene 3 (838-44, Thersites abuses Ajax with all his powers of invective; when Achilles and Patroclus show up, he mocks them in person; Agamemnon and his advisers approach Achilles, but he refuses to hold conference with them; the Greek chieftains laud Ajax to the skies to get him to accept Hector’s challenge.)

In The Iliad, Thersites appears only in Book 2, though to great effect when he rebukes King Agamemnon and is beaten thoroughly by Ulysses for his insolence. [23] But in Shakespeare’s play, Thersites gets several opportunities to rail at his favorite heroic targets, which makes his aggressively anti-heroical stance far more central to the action than it is in Homer’s epic. [24] He and the leading Greek warriors are opponents, to be sure, but they need one another. Thersites’s harsh egalitarian raillery waxes strong upon the celebrated warriors’ stupidity and pretentiousness, and the warriors, in turn, partly define themselves by beating him and heaping insults upon his head.

Thus Patroclus’s entreaty, “Good Thersites, come in / and rail” (2.3.20-21) and Achilles’s description of him as “my cheese, my / digestion” (839, 2.3.35-36). Ajax, for his part, is upset at this juncture mainly because Achilles has lured this treasured-hated fool away from him.

So the cynical clown Thersites has found his proper object, and those “objects” have found the object of their scorn, too. He wishes venereal disease on the lot of these prideful men, all of them guilty in their willingness to “war for a placket” (838, 2.3.18) rather than for the high honor they claim to uphold. Such a satirical connection between war and promiscuous, unworthy sexual pursuits is common in literature and film. [25] Thersites finds that the war between the Greeks and Trojans is no better than a self-perpetuating, bloody pageant of lunatics and fools, begun by an act of whoredom and driven on by lust for wicked women and illusory honor.

To open the scene in soliloquy, Thersites suggests that the very walls of Troy will crumble to dust before the likes of Agamemnon or Ajax will ever batter them down: “If Troy be not taken till these two / undermine it, the walls will stand till they fall of them- / selves” (838, 2.3.7-9). In the grand scope of things, that turns out to be a false supposition, but it’s easy to see why Thersites makes it at this mature stage of hostilities. We need not doubt his sincerity in wishing syphilis—“the bone-ache” (838, 2.3.16-17) —on the entire Greek camp as the miserable war proceeds.

Next up for Thersites is a battle of wits with Achilles and Patroclus, both of whom we already know their opponent considers completely unarmed in that regard. The sum total of it is that while everyone else is a fool for some reason or other, Patroclus is “a fool / positive” (839, 2.3.57-58)—so much so that there’s no point in even bothering to explain why.

When Achilles spots Agamemnon and his party of lords coming his way, he slips back into his tent, and Thersites finishes his thought: “All the argument is a cuckold and a whore—a good / quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon” (839, 2.3.65-66). With his expression “war and lechery / confound all!” (839, 2.3.67-68), we are near the sentiment underlying Edwin Starr’s 1970 hit protest song “War,” as in “War … what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” [26]

This isn’t to say that Thersites is idealistic, but in his passionate “proto-shock jock” railing, we can hear genuine outrage at the terrors people visit on one another. Why else would he bother speaking out and enduring the blows that come his way? His railings suggest that he’s aware of the intractable problem confronting anyone (especially men) who opposes a violent mass confrontation: charges of cowardice, effeminacy, carping, and treachery are bound to fly at their heads. His attitude towards this hypermasculine vitriol is “bring it on”: it’s the stuff he feeds upon and turns to satirical account.

Still, for all Thersites’s needling and undermining, the war will continue to bleed both sides. If foolish people ever learn (even temporarily), they do so not by reflecting in advance upon wise instruction but rather by bitter suffering, until they become, at least for a moment in time, people “of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” [27] This sad realization, it seems, runs all through Troilus and Cressida, and justifies its present status as a “problem play,” one that is hard to place unambiguously as either comedy or tragedy.

Finally in this scene, Agamemnon and his subordinates try to draw Achilles back into the fray. Agamemnon puts his efforts into chiding his chief warrior, claiming in exasperation that the man’s virtues “Do in our eyes begin to lose their gloss …” (840, 2.3.112).

The Great King’s gambit fails greatly, and it’s time to send in the wily Ulysses, polytropos Odysseus, as Homer calls him—the man of many tricks. But that fails, too, and all Ulysses can do is return and tell everyone how hubristic Achilles was during their short meeting. “Possessed he is with greatness, / And speaks not to himself but with a pride / That quarrels at self-breath” (841, 2.3.161-63).

Nestor and Ulysses follow out their stratagem of buttering up Ajax, in part as a spur to Achilles’s pride and of course because he’s the powerful “second-stringer” they mean to put up against Hector for the challenge. Ulysses tells Agamemnon that Trojan reinforcements are coming soon, and Agamemnon calls for a council of war to consider the matter. Achilles remains in his tent.

ACT 3

Act 3, Scene 1 (844-47, Pandarus asks Paris to cover for Troilus’s skipping dinner at court tonight with King Priam; Helen gets Pandarus to sing of love.)

This is a breezy, almost silly scene, but its impact accords with the general deflation of the heroic ideal that runs through the play. Pandarus, meeting a servant of Paris, struggles to work his way through a seemingly obtuse set of misunderstandings. The Norton editors point out that there is some anachronistic difference-making over the meaning of the terms “Lord” and “grace,” with the servant treating them as Christian terms and Pandarus interpreting them in his own pagan/secular milieu. [28]

Soon, Pandarus meets the chatty, pleasantry-diffusing power couple Helen and Paris. Pandarus wants to tell Paris that his brother Troilus won’t be able to attend their father King Priam’s dinner this evening, but he can hardly get a word in. He finally manages, though, to slip in the sentence to Paris, “—And, my lord, he desires you that, if the King call for him / at supper, you will make his excuse” (845, 3.1.71-72).

It’s easy to see that throughout their conversation with Pandarus, Paris and Helen betray a dilatory, brush-away attitude toward consequentiality. Poor Pandarus is constrained to sing a little song for them called “Love, love, nothing but love,” which amounts to another instance in which the play denigrates the supposedly grand cause of all the violent action undertaken, love. The scene as a whole is probably Shakespeare’s way of making in comic mode the dark Sonnet 129’s point about the truth of love’s strong hold over humanity: something at first irresistible, then despised and trivialized, and yet again irresistible. [29]

Helen and Paris seem to live in a different world than the warriors who surround and defend them. In chivalric discourse, the erotic and the military dimensions should remain complementary and connected thanks to the conceptual glue of “honor.” Here, though, they split, and exist in isolation for the time being.

Finally, Helen may be lighthearted in this scene with Paris and Pandarus, but as in Homer’s epics, she is no fragile flower; she is a wily, worldly survivor, and the courtly Prince Paris seems a good match for her. [30]

Act 3, Scene 2 (847-51, Pandarus puts Troilus and Cressida together, and Cressida, though appearing bashful and reluctant to speak with him, confesses her love.)

At the beginning of the scene, Troilus is in a state of agonized expectation. He speaks of himself as a shade hoping to be transported to Elysian Fields, saying, “I stalk about her door / Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks, / Staying for waftage” (847, 3.2.7-9). He describes himself as near to swooning: “I am giddy; expectation whirls me round. / Th’imaginary relish is so sweet / That it enchants my sense” (847, 3.2.16-18). He is intoxicated in proximity to his beloved.

To this description Troilus adds an intimation of the confounding or loss of identity that comes with love, or at least with infatuation, comparing his feelings with that of a man who loses his sense of individual identity during the action of a great host in battle: “I do fear besides / That I shall lose distinction in my joys, / As doth a battle when they charge on heaps / The enemy flying” (847-48, 3.2.24-27). He senses that he may be overwhelmed, even annihilated, by the exquisite other he is about to meet.

When Cressida is brought in by Pandar, she seems genuinely shy at first, and Troilus declares to her, “You have bereft me of all words, lady (848, 3.2.51). But soon (after a few long kisses), the two will recover their eloquence, and Cressida even teases Troilus in a rather traditionally humorous way: “They say all lovers swear more performance than / they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never per- / form …” (849, 3.2.77-79). “Such are not we” (849, 3.2.82), Troilus responds.

Cressida is moved to declare her love boldly, saying to Troilus, “I have loved you night and day / For many weary months” (849, 3.2.104-05). But this forward proclamation leads her to think that she may have said too much, too soon: “Why have I blabbed? Who shall be true to us / When we are so unsecret to ourselves?” (849, 3.2.114-15) Cressida has admitted to loving Troilus at first sight, and she goes on to offer a broad declaration of fidelity: “I have a kind of self resides with you” (850, 3.2.135). No worries—Troilus considers her words wise.

Next comes the almost inevitable question as to why Cressida, and not Troilus, is the one who has to declare her love first? Troilus seems to insinuate that he is too “simple,” meaning too naïve and inexperienced, fully to believe his own “winnowed purity in love” (850, 3.2.154) reciprocated to the same degree. Is it too much to find in this a hint not so much of distrust as anxiety that words and deeds can never fall into such fundamental harmony as lovers wish they would. The experienced understand that love cannot quite annihilate time or the craving for variety that marks human appetites.

This anxiety leads Cressida to make an extraordinary claim about how her faith (or lack thereof) will someday prove a byword for all other maids. By her own invitation, if she should prove false, other men and maids will one day say that some deceiver has proved to be “’As false as Cressid’” (851, 3.2.183). [31]

Pandarus, too, stakes his own good name on the outcome of the love match: if things don’t go well for the couple whose match he is expediting, he says, let Troilus’s name mark “all constant men” (851, 3.2.189), and “let all pitiful goers-between be called / to the world’s end after my name: call them all panders” (851, 3.2.187-88). Of course, “pandering” is now invariably twinned with “pimping” in our lexicon of sexual disrepute. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes—Pandarus’s pledge about himself is really the only one that still holds true.

Behind this whole dialogue—especially Cressida’s part of it—is the understanding that love is a kind of game, a power exchange in which secrecy is to some extent necessary, but also fraught with peril: as Cressida has said, “Who shall be true to us / When we are so secret to ourselves?” (849, 3.2.114-15) Self-revelation establishes intimacy, but intimacy entails vulnerability, and perhaps for that very reason, it can also breed contempt and disloyalty.

Act 3, Scene 3 (851-58, Calchas requests that the Greek captains set up a prisoner swap: he will get his daughter Cressida back from the Trojans, and the Greeks will return the Trojan warrior Antenor; the Greek captains assent, and Diomedes is sent off to make it happen; the Greek captains give Achilles the cold shoulder; Ulysses and Achilles talk about the fleeting quality of fame, and the former attacks the latter for being enamored of Polyxena, daughter of Priam and Troilus’s brother; Achilles observes Thersites and Patroclus act out a mini-drama needling Ajax.)

Calchas the priest calls in a favor for his defection from the Trojans, [32] and it consists in the Trojans giving up his daughter Cressida to Diomedes in exchange for the captive Trojan Prince Antenor. Agamemnon readily agrees, and says he will send Diomedes to effect the swap.

Ulysses then counsels Agamemnon to ignore Achilles and treat him with indifference, and the vain fellow is easily gulled by this routine, or “derision medicinable” (852, 3.3.44), as the wily Ithacan calls his stratagem. Achilles doesn’t need much prompting to start worrying that Ajax is stealing his thunder with present deeds of valor.

In private conversation with Achilles, Ulysses points out to the younger man that “emulation hath a thousand sons” (855, 3.3.154), all of them ready to tread their father into the dust the moment he slows down or strays from heroic example. Heroic deeds do not last in the memories of the common people, and probably not in anyone else’s memories, either. As Ulysses says, “Oh, let not virtue seek / Remuneration for the thing it was, / For beauty, wit, / … / Love, friendship, charity are subjects all / To envious and calumniating Time” (855, 3.3.367-69, 371-72).

In this key speech, the most famous line is without doubt “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin” (3.3.173, see 143-88). What is the “touch of nature”? It’s a fault: humans share a universal desire for novelty and a strong propensity to forget the past so as to make way for thoughts of a bright future. At base, all Ulysses is saying here is that it’s natural for people to ask even of the greatest heroes, “What have you done for us lately?”

When Achilles further pleads private reasons for his attitude, Ulysses points out that everybody knows about his Trojan girlfriend Polyxena anyhow. Ulysses blurts out to the great warrior, “’Tis known … that you are in love / With one of Priam’s daughters” (855, 3.3.191-92). So much for privacy—it wasn’t much valued in ancient times, and it’s clear that the likes of Agamemnon and Ulysses have no problem inquiring into the habits and tastes of VIPs such as Achilles. The surveillance state has always been with us. Ulysses himself extols “The providence that’s in a watchful state …” (855, 3.3.195).

When Ulysses departs, Patroclus blames his own disinterest in the battle for Achilles’s current predicament. Achilles himself is alarmed, saying, “I see my reputation is at stake; / My fame is shrewdly gored” (856, 3.3.227-28). His immediate thought is to invite the great Trojan over to his tent so that he can gaze upon him face-to-face, and make a proper comparison. He would “see great Hector in his weeds of peace …” (856, 3.3.239).

Thersites enters the scene and reports to Achilles and Patroclus on the ridiculous pride of Ajax, who has been peacocking around like Hercules in anticipation of his single combat with Hector, disdaining conversation and all manner of men who rank below his own godlike status. This issue of rank and reputation links the present scene with the previous one. As always, Thersites’s view is “a plague of opinion” (857, 3.3.262), and he goes on to mock Achilles and Patroclus as viciously as he takes down Ajax. Even so, Thersites works well with Patroclus—the two put on a fine comedy skit ridiculing the pretentions of Ajax (857-58, 3.3.275-93).

Ulysses’ advice has been that military renown is fickle, but also that it’s never entirely lost. One can always create it from scratch by performing new actions in the public eye. Ever the wily operator, the Ithacan king sounds as if he could easily head up a modern public-relations firm or advise presidential candidates on how to wow the public with canny memes and boasting. To a centerless man like Achilles, that kind of counsel is appealing. Achilles stands in need of such shoring up: “My mind is troubled like a fountain stirred,” he says, “And I myself see not the bottom of it” (302-03).

How different Achilles’s attitude is from Troilus’s naïve romanticism, which supposes that honor once lost is gone forever! In truth, while Achilles has successfully courted a reputation for honor, he doesn’t seem to put much more stock in the deep-down value of it than Sir John Falstaff, whose famous “catechism” in Henry IV, Part I ends with the immortal line: “Honor is a mere scutch- / eon.” [33]

ACT 4

Act 4, Scene 1 (858-60, Priam having summoned Aeneas to the Trojan palace, the Trojan prince meets Paris and the Greek embassy conducting Antenor to the exchange for Cressida; Aeneas and Diomedes engage in martial banter; Paris sends Aeneas off to inform Troilus that the exchange will soon take place.)

On their way to carry out the exchange of Cressida for Antenor (once Paris explains to Diomedes exactly what is going on, that is), Diomedes and Aeneas get into a military-style virtue-signaling match, with each man offering up statements like the following gem from Aeneas: “Health to you, valiant sir, / during all question of the gentle truce, / But when I meet you armed, as black defiance / As heart can think or courage execute” (858, 4.1.11-14). Paris, in his droll way, sums this silliness up beautifully: “This is the most despiteful’st gentle greeting, / The noblest hateful love, that e’er I heard of” (859, 4.1.32-33).

Paris also captures the period in which all three men find themselves, calling it “The bitter disposition of the time” (859, 4.1.49). There is a kind of fatalism in much of what Paris says—a quality that accords reasonably well with the hedonistic element of his character as Shakespeare portrays it. When Paris asks Diomedes who “merits” (859, 4.1.54) Helen more, him or Menelaus, Diomedes spends quite a bit of time putting Helen down for all the trouble she has caused. Finally, he says the real question is which man is “heavier for a whore” (859, 4.1.67). In other words, who more deeply deserves her as a punishment?

That Paris takes such an insult with the degree of equanimity that he does is in itself revealing. These men are right in the middle of a huge war over Helen, the woman whose face has launched a thousand ships (in Marlowe’s memorable phrase), and Diomedes blithely calls her a whore in the presence of the man who brought her to Troy. Paris jests that Diomedes is merely behaving like a merchant: “Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do: Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy” (860, 4.1.76-77). [34] In fact, just about everyone except Paris says such things in bitter earnest, not in jest.

Act 4, Scenes 2a and 2b (860-62, in 4.2a, Troilus and Cressida spend the night together; Pandarus teases his niece about the loss of her virginity; Aeneas arrives and asks Pandarus to go get Troilus; Aeneas delivers to Troilus the unwelcome news that Cressida is soon to be exchanged for Antenor; in 4.2b, Pandarus breaks the bad news to Cressida, who swears she will refuse to leave Troy.)

In the aftermath of her lovemaking with Troilus, Cressida re-experiences her prior fear of devaluation since Troilus and she must now part with the coming of day. Troilus has obtained his prize, she thinks, and now he’s off to other things, which makes the “aubade” or dawn-song quality of the lovers’ exchange more anxious than such expressions usually are.

Troilus says in traditional real Troubadour fashion, “But that the busy day, / Waked by the lark, hath roused the ribald crows, / And dreaming night will hide our eyes no longer, / I would not from thee” (860, 4.2a.9-12). Cressida, for her part, laments that “Night hath been too brief” and complains, “you men will never tarry” (860, 4.2a.12, 17). [35]

Both lovers, however, soon find out that they are to be parted more permanently than this brief “cursing of the dawn” suggests. Aeneas breaks the matter in this way: “We must give up to Diomed’s hand / The lady Cressida” (861, 4.2a.65-66). We might have expected some real fire from the downright lover Troilus, but his reaction is strangely—jarringly—muted, even self-serving. He asks Aeneas, “Is it concluded so?” and when he hears that it certainly is, he tells Aeneas, “you did not find me here” (861, 4.2a.66, 71).

In scene 4.2a, Cressida (unlike Troilus in the previous part of the split scene) shows genuine fire of resistance when she finds out that she must be exchanged against her will, screaming “O you immortal gods, I will not go!” and vowing “Make Cressid’s name the very crown of falsehood / If ever she leave Troilus” (862, 4.2b.20, 26-27). She has not forgotten the “byword” pledge spoken in the not-so-distant past.

Act 4, Scene 3 (862-63, Paris tells Troilus to inform Cressida on how she will be delivered to the Greek warrior Diomedes; Troilus says he will think of the exchange as a sacrificial act; Paris is sympathetic, but can’t change what must be.)

Paris urges Troilus to let Cressida know the particulars of the hand-over to the Greek Diomedes, saying, “Tell you the lady what she is to do / And haste her to the purpose” (862, 4.3.4-5). Troilus does not protest, but goes through the necessary motions to get the job of exchanging the love of his life overwith. He tells Paris, “Think it [Diomedes’s hand, which will receive Cressida] an altar, and thy brother Troilus / A priest there off’ring to it his heart” (863, 4.3.8-9). Paris is sympathetic, but powerless to change the event.

Act 4, Scene 4 (863-66, Upon their parting, Troilus asks Cressida to remain faithful to him, and promises that he will come to the Greek camp to see her; when he encounters Diomedes, Troilus tells him to treat Cressida respectfully; Diomedes dismisses the gesture as unnecessary, and when Troilus outright threatens him, Diomedes says he will do as he pleases, whatever Troilus may say. Aeneas and company make ready for Hector’s challenge.)

Cressida asks Troilus whether it’s true that she must leave Troy, and his response is, yes, she must depart “From Troy and Troilus” (863, 4.4.31). Most likely Troilus means to distinguish his name from his city, but the effect of his words would seem to be more that without much resistance, he all but identifies his name with “Troy.” When Cressida still questions, Troilus offers a seemingly passionate but also strangely fatalistic affirmation that “[we] must poorly sell ourselves / With the rude brevity and discharge of one [sigh]” instead of the thousands they have already bestowed upon each other in love (863, 4.4.39-40).

Troilus must calm the overwrought Pandarus, and then he says something that Cressida understandably takes ill: “Hear me, my love: Be thou but true of heart— ” (864, 4.4.57). He doesn’t finish the sentence before Cressida blurts out, “How now, what wicked deem is this?” (864, 4.4.58) She has picked up on the conditional nature of Troilus’s words, which could be respoken, “If you’ll only be true to me ….” His language sounds almost like a reproach, as yet altogether unmerited by his hearer.

But Cressida’s anger passes, and the two exchange tokens of love and fidelity: Troilus gives her his detachable (Elizabethan) sleeve, and she gives him her glove to wear. [36] Troilus again repeats what was offensive just moments ago: “But yet be true,” and is answered with more offended words: “O heavens, ‘Be true’ again?” (864, 4.4.73) This time, though, Troilus has the presence of mind to explain why he keeps saying this: it’s that “The Grecian youths are full of quality, / Their loving well composed with gifts of nature …” (864, 4.4.75-76). He is anxious that Cressida will forget all about him when she discovers how charming those hipster-Greeks can be. [37]

This love language notwithstanding, Troilus dutifully turns Cressida over to complete the exchange, demanding several times that she remain faithful and promising to make his way across the Greek lines to visit her. All through the informing-process and the exchange, there is a marked difference in the reactions of Troilus and Cressida to almost the worst possible news that a young couple could receive. And all the while, the young man continues to insist upon his absolute purity in love-matters: when Cressida implores him, “will you be true?” he shoots right back, “I with great truth catch mere simplicity” (865, 4.4.99, 102).

It is Troilus himself who hands over the lady to Diomedes. He first asks (although somewhat imperiously) and then insists that Diomedes treat Cressida with great respect, and finally threatens him: “use her well, even for my charge, / For, by the dreadful Pluto, if thou dost not, / Though the great bulk Achilles be thy guard, / I’ll cut thy throat” (865, 4.4.124-27).

Still, the Greek warrior makes no promises on the Trojan’s account. Indeed, he treats the very notion of female honor with scorn. Diomedes will use Cressida, he says, as he sees fit, especially since Troilus has tried to command him otherwise: he replies scornfully, “when I am hence, / I’ll answer to my lust” (865, 4.4.129-30). Obviously, this exchange does not go well for Troilus.

With the exchange completed, the Trojan lords look to reassert the chivalric honor that has just taken quite a bruising. All await the great event of Hector and Ajax’s single combat.

Act 4, Scene 5a (866-69, when Cressida arrives in the camp, the Greek captains, with the exception of Ulysses and Menelaus, kiss her serially, and she exchanges witty remarks with them; Ulysses speaks scornfully of Cressida as a flirt; the terms of Hector’s challenge are worked out, and at last Ajax and Hector begin their single combat.)

Cressida is welcomed into the Greek camp with many kisses—first Agamemnon kisses her, and then Nestor, Achilles, and Patroclus (twice, once for Menelaus). Menelaus tries to kiss her, but she sassily refuses and makes him the butt of what must by now be the 57th to the umpteenth power cuckold-joke he’s had to endure since Paris made away with his queen, Helen.

Cressida’s words—the King imagines her actually tapping him on the head where she imagines his “horns” should be—are truly startling, given the becoming propriety (though not without salty wittiness that gives even Pandarus a run for his money) we have thus far heard from her lips throughout the play. Ulysses joins in the fun, cheekily reinforcing Menelaus’s status as the butt of everyone’s humor: “It were no match, your nail [i.e. fingernail] against his horn” (867, 4.5a.45), he says to Cressida in response to Menelaus’s laughing complaint.

There is no doubt a forced quality to much of what Cressida says here—she is surrounded by powerful warriors from the opposing Greek camp, and there is no Trojan champion available to defend her. Still, she rises to the occasion in a way that seems to surprise these men. As the Norton editors point out, it’s up to the play’s director and the actors to determine how to play this scene, [38] but Cressida is by no means a shrinking violet in her attempts to parry wits with such opponents. It is not hard to imagine how Troilus would take the scene, if he saw it.

Ulysses introduces a sour note into the bantering. He asks Cressida for a kiss in his turn, and just as quickly takes back his request. He would like that kiss, he says, “when Helen is a maid again and his [Menelaus’s]” (867, 4.5a.49). In other words, on the 5th of never. Ulysses goes on to condemn Cressida as a flirt, an opportunist whose attitude is all too well suited to the times: “Fie, fie upon her! / There’s a 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” (867, 4.5a.53-56).

Ulysses is doing such a great job of resisting Cressida’s evident charms that it’s hard to believe this is the same man whose future in The Odyssey includes long stints as the lover of Circe and Calypso. Here he puts Cressida on a level, trust-wise, with the supposedly faithless Helen, grand cause of the Trojan War and its long-lasting miseries.

But now Hector and Ajax are about to begin the pre-Classical equivalent of the “Thrilla in Manila, [39] so everyone looks to the event. The rules, however, are still getting worked out—is it to be a fight to the death? Well, as it turns out, “it’s complicated.” Ajax is the nephew of Priam, and—wait, what? Yes, the prideful non-prideful one himself is the nephew of the king of Troy. [40] That makes it seem inappropriate to set the match options as “to the death”: to an extent, we have a Trojan fighting another Trojan.

Agamemnon closes the scene out by noticing the “heavy”-looking Troilus, and Ulysses gives the sorrowful young man a good report based on what he has heard from Aeneas (868-69, 4.5a.95-112).

Act 4, Scene 5b (869-73, Hector and Ajax fight, but no wounds are inflicted and Hector decides one round is sufficient for honor’s sake; both men compliment each other, and Ajax invites Hector to dine with the Greeks in Agamemnon’s quarters; when Hector meets the Greek captains, Achilles vaunts that he will soon kill the brave Trojan, who returns the boast in kind; the Greeks invite Hector to a feast; speaking apart, Troilus asks Ulysses to conduct him secretly to Diomedes’s tent, where he will find Cressida, and Ulysses agree to do so.)

Hector and Ajax fight, but Hector decides that since they are cousins—he calls Ajax “my father’s sister’s son” (869, 4.5b.4), the battle should end with an embrace. Ajax tells Hector that he is “too gentle and too free a man” (869, 4.5b.23) and admits that his own intentions were not so kind: “I came to kill thee, cousin, and bear hence / A great addition earnèd in thy death” (869, 4.5b.24-25).

Even that sour a note, however, isn’t enough to spoil Hector’s magnanimous mood, and he accepts an invitation to the Greek camp to visit Agamemnon and Achilles. During the brief truce, the men all, at first, treat one another with the greatest civility. There is the usual “protesting too much” [41] with abundance of courteous, chivalrous language to go around as Hector is welcomed by Agamemnon and Nestor. A critic might opine that this kind of talk exposes the play’s undercurrent of cynical, destructive energy—the very overuse of “honor” makes us sensible of the riptide of murderous and bloody hate and envy that fuel the war.

In any case, this pleasantry is soon shattered when Achilles gazes with strange, unsettling intentness upon Hector’s body, and declares that he is trying to determine where, exactly, he might most efficaciously strike him a mortal blow. He even makes a point of telling him so, saying, “—Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee; / I have with exact view perused thee, Hector, / And quoted joint by joint” (871, 4.5b.115-17).

Hector is not amused with, or intimidated by, Achilles’s gesture, and makes his contempt known: “Think’st thou to catch my life so pleasantly / As to prenominate in nice conjecture / Where thou wilt hit me dead?” (872, 4.5b.133-35) He has a point. It’s been said many times, and in many variations from German and British generals to American fighters like Joe Louis and Mike Tyson: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” or, if you prefer, “Everyone has a plan until they get hit.” [42]

Still, Hector gets drawn into this pre-fight boasting a little ways, and taunts Achilles with, “I’ll kill thee everywhere—yea, o’er and o’er” (872, 4.5b.140). But this seems inappropriate—Hector is not a posturing Touchstone the Clown, and his opponent is not the timid rustic William, Phoebe’s admirer. [43] The play is already full of hyperbole and boasting, which are ways of “talking up” meaning and purpose where there is little or none. [44] But at least Hector invites Achilles back into the coming fray, telling him that there has been little to do since he withdrew.

Troilus has his own plans, and he gets Ulysses to promise that he will convey him to Menelaus’s tent, where Calchas is staying and Diomedes is due to attend a dinner party. Cressida will be with him.

ACT 5

Act 5, Scene 1 (873-75, Achilles receives Queen Hecuba’s communication reminding him to keep his oath to make peace with Troy; Achilles determines to keep this oath, his challenge to kill Hector in battle notwithstanding; the Greek captains and Hector make their way to Achilles’s tent, but Diomedes departs to be with Cressida; Ulysses and Troilus set out after Diomedes, with Thersites following behind them.)

It’s time for Achilles, Patroclus and Thersites to engage in a verbal battle again, and as usual the latter gets the best of his adversaries. His putdown of Achilles is classic: “Why, thou picture of what thou seem’st and idol of idiot-worshippers, here’s a letter for thee” (873, 5.1.6-7). That’s a succinct way of calling someone the ancient version of today’s posturing influencer. Indeed, this play’s Achilles as a veritable miles gloriosus, or boasting soldier like the ones to be found in Roman comedies by Plautus and Terence. [45] Patroclus, Thersites sets down as a “masculine whore” (873, 5.1.16).

Thersites gives Achilles a letter from Hecuba reminding him of his promise to her daughter Polyxena, for the sake of which vow he will yet again fail to take the field for the Greeks. Alone, Thersites offers what may be his most cutting analysis of the major Greek warriors: he mocks the absent Agamemnon as an idiot, and his royal brother as a cuckold. Thersites would rather be anything but the much-abused Menelaus: “Ask me not what I would be if I were not Thersites, for I care not to be / the louse of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus” (874, 5.1.56-58).

As Thersites sees things, it all comes down to “Nothing but lechery …” (875, 5.1.90). It comes down to absence of self-restraint in martial and erotic affairs alike In a sense, sex itself isthe cause of the Trojan War, and Thersites in particular portrays this fundamental activity as inherently scurrilous, a cause first of all of ruinous diseases like syphilis, [46] of ruined marriages like that of the contempt-drenched Menelaus, and thence of a descent into armed retribution thanks to the honor code that attaches to both pursuits.

Act 5, Scene 2 (875-80, Diomedes pesters Cressida for the sex she has promised him; the hidden Troilus is furious as he overhears this talk; Ulysses is not pleased to hear it, and Thersites reacts caustically, as one has come to expect from him; Cressida offers Diomedes Troilus’s old love token, and Troilus feels deeply betrayed; he swears he’ll have his revenge on Diomedes.)

Troilus, dogged by Thersites and accompanied by Ulysses, who is perhaps bent upon embittering Troilus, can barely restrain himself when he sees Cressida, without much of a struggle, surrender to Diomedes over the question of whether she will sleep with him soon, and, as a token of her promise, give him the sleeve Troilus had given her. Cressida temporarily takes the token back, but Troilus has witnessed the whole sordid affair, which ends with her sounding almost eager for Diomedes to “visit” her, saying, “Good night. I prithee, come” (878, 5.2.106). Diomedes, for his part, is becoming impatient with Cressida for her previous delay.

Perhaps it’s even worse for Troilus because he overhears Cressida plead to herself the tyranny of the eye, and broadly fault her own gender rather than herself individually: “Troilus, farewell. One eye yet looks on thee, / But with my heart the other eye doth see. / Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find: The error of our eye directs our mind” (878, 5.2.107-10). What Ulysses had said about the general public with regard to martial reputation, it seems, applies equally well to the realm of love: only the present counts.

Listening to all this, the embittered, incredulous Troilus says that “this is and is not Cressid” (879, 5.2.146). He simply can’t credit the change he believes has taken place in her. It may be, though, that it’s only circumstances that have changed, not Cressida herself. As it turns out, despite her initial protests against her fate, her seemingly genuine affection for Troilus, and her assertion about being guided by “the eye” instead of reason, Cressida is a realist, not a hopeless romantic.

Whatever the case may be with Cressida, Troilus, toward the end of the scene, is straining not to sound like Hamlet at his most broad-brush misogynistic worst. [47] He vows to fight Diomedes, and condemns Cressida as the byword for betrayal she herself agreed to be if found wanting in loyalty: “O Cressid! Of false Cressid—false, false, false! / Let all untruths stand by thy stainèd name, / And they’ll seem glorious” (880, 5.2.178-80).

Thersites imagines gleefully how profitable it could be for him to give to Patroclus the inside information he has just gathered about Troilus. He is more confirmed than ever that the whole Trojan War affair is “Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery …” (880, 5.2.193).

Act 5, Scene 3 (880-83, Andromache and Cassandra push Priam to assist them in keeping Hector from taking part in the upcoming battle; Priam also tries to dissuade Troilus, to no avail; Priam must give his blessing to Hector, and he and Troilus go off to fight the Greeks; Pandarus briefly stops Troilus, giving him a letter that he reads and tears to pieces—it is from Cressida.)

Hector, declaring that honor is more precious even than life, will not be persuaded to avoid fighting by Cassandra, Priam, or even Andromache. Troilus is determined to fight, too, in spite of his youth. He will have his revenge on Diomedes—a private motive Hector doesn’t seem to be aware of. Troilus, in his furious disillusionment, goes so far as to accuse Hector of being rather soft when it comes to slaying the defeated enemy, reproaching him over his compassion: “When many times the captive Grecian falls, / Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword, / You bid them rise and live” (881, 5.3.40-42).

Troilus considers this sort of gesture inappropriate, even foolish, and he says so bluntly to his famously martial elder brother, reproaching him for a softer, almost feminine, side that we may not have understood him to have. Hector, for his part, remains unapologetic about this quality—evidently, he believes as Portia does in The Merchant of Venice: “The quality of mercy is not strained,” as she says to Antonio’s harsh creditor Shylock in the Venetian court. [48]

Cassandra finishes off the complaints against Hector’s insistence on taking part in the upcoming battle. Her final prophecy about him is, “Look how thou diest, look how thy eye turns pale, / Look how thy wounds do bleed at many vents!” (882, 5.3.80-82) “Bearing witness” to dire events and to characters under stress is one of the most fundamental things that happens in Greek tragedy, and this is Cassandra’s version of that act, doomed as she is to never being believed no matter how truly she sees and reveals the future. [49]

Pandarus has his final meeting of the play with Troilus, who is rapidly disappearing into his frenzy of disillusionment with Cressida and with love in general. Pandarus has a love letter from Cressida, and complains about his health—most likely the symptoms of what was then an untreatable disease, syphilis. All he gets for his pains, though, is Troilus’s curses. The young man rips up Cressida’s letter, and musters only these words for Pandarus: “Hence, broker-lackey! Ignomy and shame / Pursue thy life, and live aye with thy name” (883, 5.3.113-14).

Act 5, Scene 4 (883-84, Thersites, up to his usual mockery and curious to see how the battle turns out, observes Troilus fighting with Diomedes; when Hector surprises Thersites in the field, the latter man is spared by dint of his own cowardice and Hector’s contempt.)

As Troilus fights Diomedes, Thersites just wants to watch the whole pageant of foolery, and hopes to see Diomedes stripped of his love token, Cressida’s sleeve, egging on the fighters with, “Hold thy whore, Grecian! Now for thy whore, Tro- / jan! Now the sleeve! Now the sleeve!” (883, 5.4.22-23) Ajax, we hear from Thersites, is refusing to fight, presumably in imitation of Achilles, and the Greek camp has been overtaken by an anarchic mood, in which “policy grows into an ill opinion” (883, 5.4.15). Thersites seems to find the repetition and the reductiveness of the whole affair delicious.

Diomedes and Troilus engage in close combat, and then a comic scene ensues in which Hector threatens Thersites, who escapes by dint of cowardice. The latter says abjectly, “I am a rascal, a scurvy railing knave, a / very filthy rogue” (884, 5.4.26-27), and his reward is Hector’s, “I do believe thee. Live” (884, 5.4.28). Safe again, Thersites looks forward to what he hopes will be the ouroboros-like fate of Diomedes and Troilus: “I think they have swallowed one / another. I would laugh at that miracle—yet, in a sort, lech- / ery eats itself” (884, 5.4.31-33).

Act 5, Scene 5 (884-85, Diomedes has won a horse from Troilus, which he sends to Cressida; Agamemnon and Nestor tell of the Greeks losing soldiers and ground to the Trojans—Patroclus is among the slain; Ulysses reports that an enraged Achilles and Ajax are readying themselves to enter the fray.)

Diomedes has won a horse from Troilus during the battle, and he sends the horse back to Cressida as a trophy. Patroclus (who in The Iliad puts on Achilles’ armor and is mistaken for him) [50] is killed by Hector, and Agamemnon is alarmed at the state of affairs. Hector is fighting like Mars himself: Nestor says of him that “Here, there, and everywhere he leaves and takes, / Dexterity so obeying appetite / That what he will he does, and does so much / That proof is called impossibility” (884, 5.5.26-29). Troilus has infuriated Ajax by killing a friend of his, so off he goes to find the Trojan.

Achilles asks rhetorically, “Where is this Hector?” (885, 5.5.44) and sets out to kill the slayer of his dearest friend, Patroclus.

Act 5, Scene 6 (885-86, Troilus fights Diomedes and Ajax; Hector outfights Achilles, who pleads rustiness as his reason for backing away from the match; Troilus vows to rescue Aeneas; Hector runs down a Greek warrior who flees from him, and takes his armor.)

As Troilus fights with Diomedes and Ajax, both of whom vie in advance for the sole right to defeat him, on comes the much-awaited match between Achilles and Hector. When Hector offers the winded Achilles a pause to gather his spirits, Achilles refuses this offer that would result in further action, saying, “Be happy that my arms are out of use; / My rest and negligence befriends thee now, / But thou anon shalt hear of me again, / Till when, go seek thy fortune” (885, 5.6.16-19). Thus the great Achilles withdraws from combat with chivalrous Hector.

Troilus has heard that Aeneas has been taken alive, and vows to rescue the prince from captivity.

Right after his fight with Achilles, Hector immediately pursues another Greek whose armor has caught his eye. He calls this Greek an animal, and seems to consider him beneath the honor code by which he, Hector, lives and dies: “Wilt thou not, beast, abide? / Why, then, fly on; I’ll hunt thee for thy hide” (886, 5.6.30-31).

Act 5, Scene 7 (886, Achilles rouses his Myrmidon fighters to help him find Hector—they, and not their chief, will put an end to the great Trojan.)

After being treated chivalrously by Hector in their recent battle-engagement, Achilles now plans a thoroughly dishonorable trick to cut the Trojan down: he gathers his Myrmidon soldier-subjects and orders them to follow him until he locates Hector, at which point they are to fence him in for the kill: “Empale him with your weapons round about” and “In fellest manner execute your arms (886, 5.7.5-6). Achilles wants his troops to surround and then slaughter the man with whom he has invited comparison and whom he has so often planned to kill on his own. [51]

If there was any doubt about who Achilles really is, there’s none now: he is a rogue who pits his own low cunning and other people’s brute force against Hector’s chivalric honor.

Act 5, Scene 8 (886, Thersites dishes on the fight between Menelaus and Paris; when Margarelon, Priam’s “natural” son, surprises him, he refuses to defend himself and escapes certain death.)

Thersites mocks Menelaus’s battle with Paris, but when the bastard Margarelon challenges him, Thersites, reveling in his own similar status, once again escapes injury. His pledge is, “I am a bastard too. I love bastards!” (886, 5.8.8). It’s a tribute to the play’s thoroughgoing smackdown of the heroic ideal that by this point, most of us probably revel in the frank cowardice of Thersites: at least the man is honest, which is worth something. He has no intention of losing his life in a contest he finds contemptible.

Act 5, Scenes 9-10 (886-87, Hector has killed a Greek warrior for his excellent armor and, satisfied, disarms on the spot to rest; Achilles promptly surprises Hector, and orders his Myrmidons to kill the Trojan without even giving him a chance to fight back. The Greek soldiers hear the Myrmidons shouting out the news that Hector has been slain.)

Hector has apparently slain the Greek warrior with the fine armor that caught his attention, and now disarms for the evening. Just then, in sweeps Achilles with his Myrmidons to ensure that the mighty Trojan will never arm himself again. The Greek’s parting words to his nemesis are poetical in tone, but dishonorable in the ugliest way: “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 life is done” (887, 5.9.5-8).

Achilles then orders his Myrmidons to hack to death the unarmed, protesting Hector, and for further insult, he bids them tie the corpse to the tail of his horse. He brags tastelessly, “Along the field I will the Trojan trail” (887, 5.9.22). This is a direct insult to the honor code by which Hector has lived. Unable to defeat the Trojan in a fair fight, the Greek does not hesitate to claim new glory by a brazen act of cowardice: his troops are all to proclaim, “Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain!” (887, 5.9.14)

Although Hector was noble and therefore naively expected Achilles to honor the laws of war, his death seems more pointless than heroic. After all, the play has already explicitly rejected the notion that the Trojan War was about honorable exploits, pure ideals, or anything of the sort. [52]

Agamemnon thinks the long war is effectively over, saying, “If in his death the gods have us befriended, / Great Troy is ours, and our sharp wars are ended” (887, 5.11.9-10). There’s more fighting to be done to “wind down the long coil of war,” but Agamemnon is not far from the truth. As for Achilles, he will die by an arrow that Paris shoots into his heel—the one part of his body that Thetis did not immerse into the River Styx, so he is not invulnerable after all. [53]

Act 5, Scene 11 (887-89, Troilus announces Hector’s death and shameful treatment after death to Aeneas and his fellow Trojans; Troilus, thoroughly disillusioned and embittered by his experience with Cressida, swears the Trojans will take their revenge; he meets Pandarus and strikes him; Pandarus, sick with what is almost certainly syphilis, gets the last word, and complains that he has been unfairly treated.)

Troilus announces to the Trojan forces the death of Hector. Spoiling for a fight, he counsels a move back towards Troy and urges revenge: “Strike a free march to Troy, with comfort go; / Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe” (888, 5.11.30-31). The sick Pandarus, struck on the pate by Troilus, retreats, whining about the unfairness visited upon him and bequeathing to us his byword-name and his inveterate diseases. It seems that in this play at least, the legacy of the foundational and glorious Trojan War is no more than the perpetual plagues of venery and violent destruction.

Chivalry, the medieval ideational structure that Shakespeare has imposed upon the ancient Trojan War and its combatants, is thoroughly undone. The Trojans have lost Hector, their greatest champion, and Troilus, although he’s found his personal cause to fight for, is deeply embittered and disillusioned. For the time being, the knavery of the image-obsessed warrior Achilles trumps all. While we might suppose Shakespeare’s version of the Trojan War is the opposite of Homer’s account in The Iliad, that would be an exaggeration: Homer is by no means unwilling to present us with the pettiness and contrariness of men such as Agamemnon and Achilles.

The ancient author gave his listeners not so much propaganda as a complex presentation of a complex event (mythical or otherwise). That, and not militarist fluff, is what we get in The Iliad.

Shakespeare’s account, by partial contrast, distinguishes itself in its thoroughgoing and successful attempt to weld together the least attractive elements of both war and erotic experience, thereby undermining the heroic status of the great events underlying the story of Troilus and Cressida. He has invented nothing entirely new, we might say, but while working mainly with medieval sources for “the matter of Troy” such as Chaucer, Lydgate, and Lefevre [54] he has instead fixed his intent on spinning a counter-narrative whose threads were already embedded in his ancient original. [55]

Those who say that Shakespeare knew next to nothing of the Greeks and Romans are mistaken: he intuited a great deal about them, and it shows in a play such as Troilus and Cressida.

Why is Troilus and Cressida a “problem” comedy? [56] Well, the grand distinction between comedy and tragedy is that while the former is about an essentially good person confronting and overcoming (or at least settling with) various limitations owing to human nature and the social order, tragedy deals with the realm of dire consequentiality that ensues when we have exhausted or squandered all of our best options. To borrow a Churchillian line, the main action of a tragedy takes place within “a period of consequences,” [57] a time when, if your mistakes outweigh your ability to make them right, you will be trapped and destroyed by the circumstances you have partly or entirely created. [58]

Troilus and Cressida traces the disillusionment of an initially idealistic young man in the face of cynicism and betrayal. The play’s action doesn’t rise to the level of high tragedy—it’s just too shot through with “dark sarcasm” [59] to allow such a definition, and there is no satisfying sense of finality at its conclusion. Although the First Folio of 1623 lists the play as a “tragedie,” Troilus and Cressida undermines the heroic code that might have validated any sense that it really is that species of drama.

As for Troilus, one of our two main protagonists, he has shifted his considerable energy into the activities of making war rather than love, but he has not regained the degree of idealism that seems to have driven him towards his short-lived match with Cressida. Plain bitterness and a desire for revenge do not constitute tragic insight.

Neither is Troilus and Cressida to be folded comfortably into the more robust versions of comedy that we find in Shakespeare. The Aristophanes-based “Old Comedy” topical scoffing of Thersites more closely captures the comic spirit of the play than anything connected to chivalric idealism or to the reconciliation, generosity, renewal, and transformation that prevail in Shakespeare’s lighter farce or in his more robust, fully romantic comedies.

All in all, Shakespeare borrows the sensibilities of Arthurian romance, of chivalry, for this play about ancient Trojan lovers and their Greek antagonists. But he is not about to build for us an aesthetic bulwark against the frailty of human nature that is so much a part of Arthurian lore. Shakespeare seems more interested in taking us back to an origin-story of faithlessness similar to Milton’s explorations later on, in Paradise Lost.

Pandarus seems like a minor figure in Troilus and Cressida, but he deftly connects his own plight as a sufferer for love with the often corrupt, diseased Elizabethan-Jacobeans themselves. Pulling down high ideals is not unique to the ancients, and here we see bright, shining chivalry brutally dragged through the mud of iniquity and betrayal. Raising hopes and formulating ideals, only to give them over, surrender them, under the pressure of a brutal reality, seems like a nearly universal pattern in human affairs. When Shakespeare is in the mood, all is matter for strife, all is compromised flesh on its way to carrion. Perhaps “rot” is the real action of Troilus and Cressida.

Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93861-6.

ENDNOTES

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[1] As Geoffrey Bullough and others inform us, Shakespeare’s source material for Troilus and Cressida consists partly of Homer’s Iliad via George Chapman’s translation, and partly of the so-called “Matter of Troy,” notably developed by Chaucer and other medieval authors. In the chivalric literature written during the Middle Ages, a strong sense of doom usually pervades the action: Arthurian longings after a second golden age are bound to fail, brought to grief by fallen humanity’s internal flaws. As for Shakespeare’s text’s sympathy for Troy, Bullough says, “The legend that the British kings were of Trojan descent had much to do with the sympathy felt in medieval and Tudor times for the Trojans” (91). See Bullough, Geoffrey, editor. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. VI. Other ‘Classical’ Plays: Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia UP, 1966. Introduction to Troilus and Cressida, 83-111.

[2] Homer’s Iliad itself begins in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War, while Shakespeare’s play tells us that it starts seven years into the War and moves on through the death of Hector in the tenth year.

[3] On Petrarch and the Petrarchan sonnet, see https://poemanalysis.com/poetic-form/petrarchan-sonnet/. Accessed 8/3/2024.

[4] The Norton footnote 9 for 815 regarding Calchas’s status as a Trojan defector doesn’t mention that this is medieval lore such as may be found in Chaucer’s retelling of the ancient story. In The Iliad, Calchas is a Greek with a long history of prophecy in the service of fellow Greeks.

[5] This description occurs in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Folger Shakespeare Library. Faustus asks Mephistopheles, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? / And burnt the topless Towers of Ilium?” Accessed 12/19/2024.

[6] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 371, 1.3.100.

[7] Thersites has no doubt provided bitter inspiration to many an antiwar character in modern art. One such is probably Corporal Klinger from the 1970s television series MASH, which was about Americans fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War. Like Thersites, Klinger takes up a cynical perspective from a standpoint very near the action, or even within it—the unit in MASH consists of busy Army medics.

[8] See E. M. W. Tillyard’s standard study, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton (Vintage, 1959, first pub. 1943), on the most common among the cultural and other assumptions made by Shakespeare’s fellow citizens during the Elizabethan Era. Arthur O. Lovejoy’s book The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Harvard UP, 1976. First published 1933) goes into great detail about the “great chain” figure by which so many people figured the boundaries and ultimate nature of the universe. See also Scala Naturae: Great Chain of Being and Great Chain of Being, R. Fludd, 1619 (Wikimedia)

[9] Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840. Albany says to Goneril, “Humanity must perforce prey on itself / Like monsters of the deep” (816, 4.2.32.19-20 Folio segment).

[10] Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1998. ISBN-13: ‎978-0140275360. See Book 1.

[11] Here and in The Iliad, Agamemnon’s competitiveness and petulance in comparing his own treatment with the favor shown to Achilles probably seems excessive to modern readers, but perhaps in its ancient context, such concern are not altogether unreasonable on the part of a chieftain or warrior-king. In many ancient societies, the giving and receiving part of gifts was a powerful part of the “symbolic” economy. See, for example, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, by Marcel Mauss. Trans. W. D. Halls. W. W. Norton, 2000 (orig. Eng. pub 1954, French 1925). ISBN-13: 978-0393320435.

[12] See Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 2008 (repr. ed.) ISBN-13:‎978-0143105138. The Trojan hero Aeneas was the eventual founder of what would become Rome.

[13] On Plato’s affinity for Sparta, see “Sparta“ at Plato-dialogues.org. Accessed 8/3/2024.

[14] Shakespeare strikes a balance in the representation of Troy by allowing this insulting opinion of the Trojans some air time, so to speak, and yet not otherwise slighting the their greatest warrior, Hector. The English, after all, considered themselves the heirs of Troy.

[15] Thersites is more than just a clever servant of the sort we might encounter in later Classical literature. He is so caustic that he might be said to call the conflict’s very purpose into question, along with its operative honor code. To an extent, perhaps this military jester reinforces the status quo with his raw insults and his malice against key participants, but his wit and observational power are so keen that they begin to seem destabilizing to those around him. It’s dangerous to have a witness so unsparing in his expressions regarding the existential absurdity that the Greeks and Trojans have created among themselves. This commentary writer remembers listening to an interview with one of the Monty Python players (probably John Cleese), and when the player was asked why the comedy troupe developed their skits, he answered simply (paraphrase), “If anybody stepped forward and said they knew anything or had any authority, we would make fun of them. It was that simple.” Anybody who claims to be an authority, then, deserves to be mocked without pity. Thersites despises the “men in charge,” too, though with an intensity that goes well beyond anything we would find in Monty Python.

[16] Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1998. ISBN-13: ‎978-0140275360. See Book 2, 245-81, where Thersites rails freely at the mighty Agamemnon.

[17] See Norton footnote 8 for pg. 235, in which the editors reference Priam’s sister Hesione.

[18] See The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Editor G. Blakemore Evans. Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ISBN-13: 978-0395754900. In her introduction to Troilus and Cressida (477-81), Anne Barton makes this point about the complexity of blame in Classical myth. One often finds that when certainty or simplicity is sought from Greek and Roman foundational legends, complicated “back stories” suggest serious ambivalence about the moral and historical claims and assumptions being addressed, thereby tending to undercut any notions of simplicity or innocence that we may try to derive from them. The historian Dares Phrygius details an earlier (and fairly recent) Trojan War, in which the Trojan king Laomedon had been defeated. See Theoi.com on Dares of Phrygia’s account.

[19] Cassandra, daughter of the Trojan king Priam, is desired by the god Apollo, but she refuses him, whereupon he grants her the powers of a prophetess. The trouble is, he also decrees that no one will believe her even though she sees clearly and truly what is to come. See Cassandra. Britannica.com. Accessed 12/20/2024.

[20] As the Norton editors point out in footnote 3 on pg. 837, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics was composed around 350 BCE, which places it some eight or nine centuries later than the Trojan War supposedly occurred.

[21] After so much talk to the contrary, it seems, Hector, like Hamlet, deems it the most glorious thing to go to one’s death “Even for an eggshell” when honor is the matter. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 420, 4.2.52.

[22] On Classical notions of the afterlife, see, for example, “The Afterlife in Ancient Greece.” World History Encyclopedia. Worldhistory.org. Accessed 12/20/2024.

[23] Homer, in Samuel Butler’s translation of The Iliad, says the following about Thersites: “Thersites still went on wagging his unbridled tongue—a man of many words, and those unseemly; a monger of sedition, a railer against all who were in authority, who cared not what he said, so that he might set the Achaeans in a laugh.” See Homer, The Iliad. Trans. Samuel Butler. (Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12/20/2024.)

[24] In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Thersites speaks in seven scenes: 2.1, 2.2, 3.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.4, and 5.8.

[25] The theme is handled hilariously in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove: Sterling Hayden’s General Ripper of Burpleson Air Force Base launches World War III against the Soviets because he’s been having a problem with erectile dysfunction, which he calls “loss of essence” and believes to be a side effect of fluoridation. See IMDB’s entry on Dr. Strangelove. Accessed 12/20/2024.

[26] Seinfeld fans will remember that this song figures hilariously in an episode of the sitcom. Elaine is working as an editor and, based on very bad information from Jerry, convinces a famous Russian author that the Edwin Starr song lyric “War … what is it good for? Absolutely nothing” was Tolstoy’s title for the working draft of War and Peace. See Season 5, Episode 14, “The Marine Biologist.” IMDB. Accessed 12/20/2024.

[27] This language from the King James Bible is part of the famous text of Isaiah 53—53.3 to be exact. See biblegateway.com. Accessed 12/13/2024. Christians usually read it as referring to the future Messiah, while Jews usually interpret its “suffering servant” figure as referring to Israel itself.

[28] See Norton footnote 1 for pg. 845.

[29] Sonnet 129’s concluding couplet is “All this the world well knows; yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” Shakespeare. The Sonnets. In The Norton Shakespeare: Romances and Poems, 3rd ed. 656-709. 700, “Sonnet 129,” lines 13-14.

[30] See Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1996. ISBN-13: 978-0140268867. Or see Samuel Butler’s translation. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12/20/2024. Homer represents Helen as a magical person, semi-divine, and a great politician in her ability to manage relations with Menelaus and the Greeks to whom she is eventually returned. There is some ambivalence in Homer’s Odyssey as to whose side Helen is on when she is still in Troy. See Book 4 in particular, wherein Telemachus visits King Menelaus and Queen Helen in Sparta. One of the most memorable portraits of Helen is as the ostensibly chastened “lady with the good drugs” in The Odyssey: when all assembled become too sad about the past, she drugs the wine and makes everyone forget their sorrows—and, perhaps, her own complicity in the war’s events.

[31] As John Donne’s speaker says in “The Canonization,” “Countries, towns, courts: beg from above / A pattern of your love!” Poetryfoundation.org. Accessed 12/20/2024.

[32] As mentioned in an earlier note, this defection happens only in later, medieval texts, not in The Iliad.

[33] Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 629-95. See 687, 5.1.138-39.

[34] The Norton editors explain in footnote 7 to pg. 860 that what Paris says about Diomedes to conclude the scene is somewhat difficult to interpret logically. Perhaps we are to understand the term “buy” in the sense of “fighting for and winning, so that what Paris says about Diomedes’s attitude makes sense, but Paris’s description of the Trojans’ comportment, “We’ll not commend what we intend to sell” (860, 4.1.79), remains murky.

[35] Milton, with his penchant for deriving all things back to their first instance, casts the yet-unfallen Adam and Eve in the role of chivalric lovers, spontaneously reciting an aubade (or “alba,” if we want to be precise since both lovers are awake) or dawn poem that begins, “Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, / With charm of earliest birds.” See Paradise Lost 4.639-52. The John Milton Reading Room. Accessed 12/20/2024. There is no sadness in their prelapsarian song, as there is yet no need for such, but that is not the case with Troilus and Cressida. The aubade (Milton aside) is a medieval form of poetry, one we associate with the French Troubadors.

[36] In footnote 4 for pg. 864, the Norton editors point out that sleeves “were often detachable in Elizabethan dress.”

[37] Still, it’s difficult to render Troilus’s fears in a way more favorable than we find in the fine line by Oscar Wilde’s character Lord Darlington, “I can resist anything but temptation.” See Lady Windermere’s Fan. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12/20/2024. Cressida surely supposes that’s what her Trojan prince thinks of her.

[38] See Norton footnote 3 for pg. 866.

[39] That is, the epic October 1, 1975 third fight between boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali in Quezon City, Philippines. Ali won by TKO late in the match.

[40] See Norton footnote 9 for pg. 868. Telamonian or Greater Ajax is the son of Telamon and Periboea. Telamon was the son of Priam’s sister Hesione, so Telamon’s son, Ajax, would be Priam’s grand-nephew.

[41] Gertrude’s line at 404, 3.2.214 runs, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447.

[42] See Quora response, “Did Mike Tyson say everybody has a plan until …?” Accessed 12/20/2024.

[43] At 722, 5.1.51-52 of As You Like It, Touchstone frightens William away from Phoebe by yelling at him, “I will kill thee a hundred and fifty / ways. / Therefore tremble and depart!” Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 673-731.

[44] Modern viewers may even see in Achilles’s behavior something of the famous scene in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver in which Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle confronts himself in his apartment mirror, repeatedly asking his image “You talkin’ to me?” and answering, “Well I’m the only one here.” The phrase “toxic masculinity” comes to mind.

[45] The term miles gloriosus comes from the title of a comedy by the Roman author Plautus. It means “braggart soldier.” See Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus. Perseus Digital Library. The name of the original braggart is Pyrgopolinices.

[46] See “Syphilis – Its early history and Treatment until Penicillin and the Debate on its Origins.” JMVH (Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health) Vol. 20 No. 4. Article by John Frith. Accessed 9/18/2024.

[47] At 366, 1.2.146, Hamlet’s “Frailty, thy name is woman” is hard to top. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447.

[48] Shakespeare, William. The Comical History of The Merchant of Venice. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 467-521. Portia’s line at 508, 4.1.182 runs, “The quality of mercy is not strained.”

[49] See Cassandra. Britannica.com. Accessed 12/20/2024.

[50] Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1998. ISBN-13: ‎978-0140275360. See Book 16. Or see The Iliad. Trans. Samuel Butler. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12/20/2024.

[51] Shakespeare is not following Homer closely with regard to this episode: Achilles does not kill Hector in the unchivalrous manner here alleged. In John Lydgate’s The hystorye, sege, and dystruccyon of Troye, however, Achilles and his Myrmidons surround Troilus so that Achilles can slay him; then Hector, too, as here in Shakespeare, is caught off guard and killed.

[52] The Trojan War was anything but “honorable and pure” in Homer. At the same time, it would be dubious to suppose that the current play represents Shakespeare’s only view of military heroism—Henry V must be considered alongside Troilus and Cressida. It is impossible to claim the status of catharsis-inducing hero when one is unceremoniously hacked to pieces at the instigation of a liar who has no more honor than Jack Falstaff, or Thersites. See Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 629-95. The passage referenced is at 5.1.131-34: “Can honor set to a leg? No. / Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? / No…. What / is honour? A word….”

[53] The story about Achilles’s weak spot, his heel, is not specifically mentioned in The Iliad. Translator Samuel Butler writes of Achilles, “For Thetis his mother had dipped him when an infant in the river Styx, which made every part of him invulnerable except the heel by which she held him.” See The Iliad. Trans. Samuel Butler. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12/20/2024.

[54] Medieval sources: see the “Of Interest” section towards the top of this commentary.

[55] This same demystificational motive seems to de-emphasize the more respectful Chaucerian version that Shakespeare also used as a source for his play.

[56] This kind of designation, “problem comedy,” may also have to do partly with the propensity of critics to choose and redefine their objects to suit certain preferences and assumptions—in this case, anti-genre sentiment, a predilection for seeing difficulty in works or genres, etc.

[57] The famous quote by Winston Churchill is, “The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.” Churchill made the remark on Nov. 12, 1936 in an attempt to get his colleagues in the British Parliament to recognize the imminent peril that Europe faced from Nazi Germany. See HC Deb 12 November 1936 vol 317 cc1081-155. The Hansard.

[58] This is surely a Christian-era inflection of tragedy in which it’s acknowledged that Providence is just. Greek tragedy thrives on the sense that the cosmos may well not be just or even comprehensible.

[59] A phrase from the hit song in Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979), “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II.” Roger Waters and David Gilmour.

Commentaries onShakespeare’s Comedies