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3. Cannibalism and Silence

Let him who has something to say come
forward and be silent!

Karl Kraus, "In these Great times"⁶⁵

For all its grand rhetoric—or perhaps, more accurately, as a necessary concomitant to this rhetoric—Troilus and Cressida reveals an extreme distrust of (not to say disgust with) language. If the play leaves one with a sensation of satiety with words, it is likely that this sensation was one that Shakespeare, in coming to write the play, was himself unable to avoid. Many writers of the period comment on this dilemma, several of them using a specifically oral metaphor: George Whetstone declares that "the inconstancie of Cressid is so readie in every mans mouth, as it is needlesse labour to blase at full her abuse"; Montaigne writes that "There is nothing, liveth so in mens mouthes as . . . Troy, as Helen and her Warres"; Burton describes the story's popularity...

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1. Introduction
2. 1. The Matter of Troy
3. 2. The Satirist and the Cannibal
4. 3. Cannibalism and Silence
5. Copyright