These are some questions and observations whittled down and altered from my full commentary on Troilus and Cressida. They may prove useful for participating in class discussion. If you want to view the full questions and commentary set, just follow the relevant links in the sitewide menu bar above.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida. Folio. (The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 812-89.)
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 play’s heroic Homeric backdrop, but the play intensifies the disillusionment that besets both love and war—activities that often begin with high ideals and unrealistic expectations, and end in bitterness and frustration, even when the object is attained. The Prologue is dressed in armor, and bears himself with admirable humility.” (813, 1.0.31).
Shakespeare shares with Homer a keen sense that swirling beneath heroic ideals and quests is a strong undercurrent of contrary passions, impulses, and objectives. Some of Troilus and Cressida’s characters show a painful awareness of this—an insight that gives the play a cynical edge.
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. Troilus reveals in conversation with 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: “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.
Pandarus is eager to spur Troilus on as a lover, increasing his lovesickness with comparisons between the magnificent Helen and his niece Cressida: “Well, she looked yesternight fairer than ever I saw / her look, or any woman else” (814, 1.1.30-31). Troilus is in no danger of being unsmitten by the fair Cressida: “Helen must needs be fair / When with your blood you daily paint her thus. / I cannot fight upon this argument …” (815, 1.1.85-88).
Paris has been slightly wounded by Menelaus (816, 1.1.105). Troilus’s judgment 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 undercuts the heroic version of the Trojan War’s cause. The play sides with Thersites, who sees love and war as unhappily intertwined.
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 returning home from battle, and Cressida, by herself, admits that she is taken with Troilus.)
Cressida’s manservant tells her that Hector is upset since Ajax has “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. 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? Hector seems concerned to preserve from the ravages and fortunes of battle his sense of honor—he lives by something like the medieval honor code operative in the “Matter of Troy” texts that Shakespeare drew from in crafting his play. The Greeks, in comparison to Hector, seem wilier, more mercenary.
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). Cressida finds her uncle’s claims dubious, and the sexual nature of some of her banter with him makes her appear worldly.
Soon, there follows a pageant of Trojans: Aeneas, Hector, and others (819-20, 1.2.164ff). Cressida opines that Troilus is a “sneaking fellow” (820, 1.2.208). But her most pressing concern is to maintain her chastity: “Achievement is command; ungained, beseech” (822, 1.2.271, see 260-73).
What Cressida says rings true as a matter of sexual politics in a patriarchal society. It doesn’t equate to wide-eyed innocence. Cressida does not “speak like a green girl,” as Polonius says in Hamlet when he accuses his daughter Ophelia of naivete.
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, Agamemnon says that the Greeks have been undergoing 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.”
Ulysses warns everyone not to let rank and hierarchy lapse: he reformulates the 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 is rightly established and firm: “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). Ulysses admonishes the King and his chiefs, “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows …” (824, 1.3.109).
Why is there a hierarchy problem among the Greeks? Ulysses explains that respect for rank is low thanks to Achilles’s prideful refusal late in the war to do his part.
There are serious rifts between the Greek commanders. In truth, it’s hard to see how Agamemnon’s “policy” amounts to anything but incompetence. 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 speech.
Soon, the Trojan prince Aeneas arrives and asks rather elegantly where he might find Agamemnon, and delivers Hector’s challenge: 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 shows how inextricable love and war are in this play: “may that soldier a mere recreant prove / That means not, hath not, or is not in love” (828, 1.3.284-85)
Ulysses has a scheme to keep prideful love-matters from impeding a Greek victory. Hector’s challenge is aimed at Achilles, but the wily King of Ithaca wants to arrange for Ajax to win a lottery for the honor of facing Hector. Besides, as Nestor suggests, if Achilles were to lose such a duel, the Greeks would lose face: he is, after all, their most imposing warrior.
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 undercut the Greek heroes’ claims to honor. Throughout the play, Thersites will rail at the biggest targets for their lechery, double-dealing, stupidity, pride and enviousness, and he in turn will become the target for their sexually charged taunts of cowardice and effeminacy.
In this scene, Thersites will sling some of the same taunts at Patroclus, but not before his nemesis Ajax strikes him, demanding that he read out Hector’s “proclamation” (831, 2.1.22). Ajax is illiterate. Thersites’s contempt for this warrior is apparent: “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 to Achilles and Patroclus. Achilles reads Hector’s proclamation for Ajax, calling it “trash” (833, 2.1.120). Achilles wants nothing to do with it.
Thersites and Ajax relate to each other in an interesting way. Thersites sees Ajax as a blunt instrument for those who wield power: Ajax is “Mars his idiot” (831, 2.1.50). Running through Thersites’s attacks is a diatribe against rank: this railer doesn’t believe those who stand upon their rank are ever worthy of it.
Achilles is more “civilized” than Ajax, but Thersites lumps him together with Ajax, and prefers Hector over the famously moody Greek demigod. (833, 2.1.99-101). Thersites has some regard for the counselors Ulysses and Nestor, as he prefers intelligent men who are not too full of themselves. Agamemnon, however, he despises as a prideful, petulant fellow, not much of a king.
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 as well return Helen to the Greeks, restoring her to her husband King Menelaus of Sparta and saving a lot of bloodshed. 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, asking, “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)
Hector points out that determining Helen’s value “dwells not in particular will” (834, 2.2.53) alone—it matters what something really is worth, he insists. As Hector says, “Tis mad idolatry / To make the service greater than the god …” (834, 2.2.56-57). Is one lovely woman worth the entire Greek host?
It won’t do, then, to fetishize honor in this lady’s service. Neither the Greeks nor the Trojans have any claim to absolute righteousness. Paris went to Greece to make away with Helen partly 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). See Norton footnote 8 for pg. 235.
We can’t claim, then, 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.
Troilus’s disillusionment is yet to come, and so at this point, he upholds chivalric idealism. 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.”
Hector thinks otherwise. Nonetheless, his challenge against Achilles probably owes more to personal shame than statecraft. War, in Shakespeare’s representation, seldom brings healthy truths; rather, it distorts people’s motives and words, and it often sunders those words from deeds.
The unlucky prophetess Cassandra aligns herself with those who want to return Helen, knowing 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: “Cry, Trojans, cry—a Helen and a woe! / Cry, cry! Troy burns, or else let Helen go (836, 2.2.111-12).
Troilus sticks to his contempt. Nearly every Trojan soldier, says Troilus, will defend 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 Troilus and Paris hold forth, Hector makes the strongest case he can—even quoting from a very advance copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—in favor of recognizing reality and moral uprightness: if the Trojans want to spare themselves further damage, Helen ought to be returned.
Astonishingly, Hector’s next move is … to reverse his judgment. In Hector’s words, the Trojans’ “joint and several dignities” (837, 2.2.193) demand that they hang on to this stolen woman, whom Troilus insists is a “theme of honor and renown, / A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds” (837, 2.2.199-200).
While Troilus holds his position as a romantic, Hector takes the matter up practically. He has little regard for Helen, but public necessity dictates that the woman be defended and kept in Troy for her symbolic, unifying military value.
Hector’s quick-change is 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.” This business of renown, of glory in battle, was not to be easily brushed aside.
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.
Act 2, Scene 3 (838-44, Thersites abuses Ajax with 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: “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.”
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. He and the Greek warriors need one another. Thersites’s harsh egalitarian raillery waxes strong upon the celebrated warriors’ stupidity and pretentiousness, and the warriors partly define themselves by beating him and insulting his masculinity. Thus Patroclus’s entreaty, “Good Thersites, come in / and rail” (2.3.20-21).
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, who all “war for a placket” (838, 2.3.18). Such a satirical connection between war and unworthy sexual pursuits is common in literature and film. Thersites finds that the war between the Greeks and Trojans is 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 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.
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.”
Thersites is not idealistic, but in his “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? 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 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.” (Isaiah 53.) This sad realization, it seems, runs all through Troilus and Cressida, and justifies its present status as a “problem play.”
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 as a spur to Achilles’s pride and because he’s the powerful “second-stringer” they mean to put up against Hector. Ulysses tells Agamemnon that Trojan reinforcements are coming soon, and Agamemnon calls for a council. Achilles remains in his tent.
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 slight scene accords with the general deflation of the heroic ideal. Pandarus, meeting a servant of Paris, struggles to work his way through a 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.
Soon, Pandarus meets the chatty 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.
In conversation with Pandarus, Paris and Helen betray a dilatory, brush-away attitude toward consequentiality. Pandarus is constrained to sing a song for them called “Love, love, nothing but love,” which amounts to another denigration of love, the war’s supposed cause. The scene is probably Shakespeare’s way of making in comic mode Sonnet 129’s point about love’s hold over humanity: at first irresistible, then despised and trivialized, and yet again irresistible.
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.
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.
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.)
Troilus is in a state of agonized expectation, like 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 also says, “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 in a sense intoxicated.
To this Troilus adds an intimation of the confounding of identity that comes with love, or with infatuation. He compares his feelings with that of a man who loses his sense of individual identity during a great 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.
Cressida seems shy at first, and Troilus declares, “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: “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 declares her love boldly, saying to Troilus, “I have loved you night and day / For many weary months” (849, 3.2.104-05). But this 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).
Why is Cressida the one who must declare her love first? Troilus insinuates that he is too “simple,” meaning too naïve and inexperienced, to believe his own “winnowed purity in love” (850, 3.2.154) is fully reciprocated. Is there a hint of anxiety here that words and deeds can never fall into such fundamental harmony as lovers wish? 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. If she should prove false, others will say some deceiver has proved to be “’As false as Cressid’” (851, 3.2.183).
Pandarus, too, stakes his name on the outcome of the match: if things don’t go well, 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). Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes.
Behind this dialogue—especially Cressida’s part—is the understanding that love is a 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 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, 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 counsels Agamemnon to treat Achilles 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.
In private conversation with Achilles, Ulysses points out that “emulation hath a thousand sons” (855, 3.3.154), all of them ready to tread their father into the dust. Heroic deeds do not last in people’s memories. 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 speech, the most famous line is “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 need to forget the past so as to make way for thoughts of a bright future. Ulysses is saying that it’s natural for people to ask their heroes, “What have you done for us lately?”
When Achilles 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 Agamemnon and Ulysses delve shamelessly into the habits and tastes of VIPs such as Achilles. The surveillance state has always been with us. Ulysses 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 predicament. Achilles himself is alarmed, saying, “I see my reputation is at stake; / My fame is shrewdly gored” (856, 3.3.227-28). His thought is to invite the Trojan to his tent so that he can make a proper comparison.
Thersites reports to Achilles and Patroclus on the pride of Ajax, who has been peacocking around in anticipation of his single combat with Hector, disdaining 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 Ajax (857-58, 3.3.275-93).
Ulysses’ advice has been that military renown is fickle, but also that one can recreate it from scratch by performing new actions in the public eye. Ulysses sounds as if he could lead a modern public-relations firm or advise presidential candidates on how to manipulate the public. To a centerless man like Achilles, that kind of counsel is appealing: “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 put 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.” 5.1.138-39.
Last Updated on March 2, 2025 by ajd_shxpr