Why did Shakespeare write Troilus and Cressida? Why, that is, did he turn his attention to a story that was so overdetermined as to have become, by the end of the sixteenth century, little more than a compilation of clichés? The Trojan story was enormously popular during the decades preceding composition of the play, and the most obvious motive suggested by this popularity is the play's commercial potential (written by an already-famous playwright, reworking material that was all the rage in contemporary London). While this motive is called into question by the Epistle attached to the play's Quarto in the second state,³ the pervasiveness and mass appeal of the matter of Troy was, I believe, nevertheless a decisive factor in Shakespeare's choice of this subject. For in placing these endlessly reiterated, rhetoricized, and textualized heroes onstage, he could not help but embody them;⁴ and the limning of these "unbodied figure[s]" (1.3.16) in flesh and blood presented a perfect opportunity to wrestle with the issue that, I will argue, lies at the very heart of the play: the relation between language and the body out of which it emanates. Both within the play and in the cultural milieu that produced it, Troilus and Cressida enacts a restoration of words, and of the ideals created out of them, to their sources inside the body.

The play thrusts both its protagonists and the audience back into the body, recorporealizing the epic of the Trojan War. The story's unparalleled canonicity created heroes of a deeply textual nature, protagonists who by Shakespeare's time had become little more than, in Rosalie Colie's words, "rhetorical and proverbial figure[s]."⁵ The play's "dependence on a prodigious literary and rhetorical legacy" entangles it (as most critics of the play agree) with issues of citationality and originality.⁶ When Shakespeare turns to the legend, he places the relationship between origins and citations at the core of his play. He does this by reintroducing, as it were, the substance or "matter" of the body to the "Matter of Troy." Indeed, the very word matter, often associated in Shakespeare with the interior of the body, recurs no fewer than twenty-four times in the play.⁷ The missing "matter" that Shakespeare reintroduces into the story is that of the truth of the body, which has been displaced over countless reiterations by something like pure citationality. "[T]ir'd with iteration" (3.2.174), the heroes' identities have become ever further removed from their material sources: the pun on tir'd (attired/tired) implies the increasing distance from the body, as if each retelling adds a layer of covering—a cover story—to the protagonists' flesh, with the overdetermined citationality that constitutes the "starv'd . . . subject" (1.1.93) of Troy rendering it disembodied, "pale and bloodless" (1.3.134). ("Troy" apostrophizes Spenser's Paridell, "[thou] art now nought, but an idle name."⁸). By the time Shakespeare comes to write the play, these post-Homeric heroes have all become "Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart" (5.3.108).

Troilus and Cressida has often been described as being "consciously philosophical," as coming "closer than any other of the plays to being a philosophical debate."⁹ There is little physical action in the play; mostly there are rhetorical arguments about degree, about honor, about time and value. Yet the play is compulsively body-bound; from start to finish, its language is replete with imagery of the body's interior, the ebb and flow of its humors looking out at every joint and motive of the text. There is, I think, a powerful connection between the play's intellectuality and its unyielding corporeality, a link that can perhaps be best elucidated by glancing briefly at what Friedrich Nietzsche says about the relations between philosophy and physiology. Entrails, for Nietzsche, are inherently anti-idealizing, undercutting metaphysics and transcendent aspirations of any kind: going into the body lies at the opposite pole from going beyond it. As Eric Blondel writes, "it is in order to contrast an abominable truth to the surface of the ideal that Nietzsche speaks of entrails."¹⁰ Idealization usually involves a turning away from or repression of the messy truth of the body—toward what Agamemnon calls, in Troilus and Cressida, "that unbodied figure of the thought" (1.3.16)—or, alternatively, a conception of the body as a perfect, finished surface.¹¹ But while the exterior of the body is easy enough to idealize, its interior has a rather more offensive, unsavory reality, as Nietzsche repeatedly points out: "What offends aesthetic meaning in inner man—beneath the skin: bloody masses, full intestines, viscera, all those sucking, pumping monsters—formless or ugly or grotesque, and unpleasant to smell on top of that!"¹²

Reminding us of the existence of this monstrous "inner man" is, throughout Nietzsche's work, a way of revealing the reality beneath thoughts, systems, ideals. In "On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense," for instance, Nietzsche points out the irony involved in the fact that "the urge for truth" is so often a product of our "proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers. . . ."¹³ Excavating the body is thus for Neitzsche—the "physiologist of morals"¹⁴—a foundational act of skepticism; in his view any hermeneutic undertaking must begin from the body—and, moreover, from its interior, which is why he speaks of the "hard, unwanted, inescapable task" of philosophy as a kind of vivisection; Socrates, for example, is "the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the 'noble.'"¹⁵ This, too, is what Nietzsche means when he speaks of "philosophizing with a hammer": "sounding out idols. . . . For once to pose questions here with a hammer, and, perhaps, to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound which speaks of bloated entrails—what a delight. . . ,"¹⁶ The hammer here is one that can both "sound out" the interior (like a tuning-fork) and, if necessary, smash through to this interior (like a sledgehammer).

I offer this brief reading of Nietzsche's conceptualization of entrails as a potentially instructive analogue to my reading of Troilus and Cressida, for both are uncompromising when it comes to revealing the distance between our proudly deployed language and the body's internal reality. Bloated entrails are a dominant image in the play; as Patricia Parker has recently argued, "the inflation or bloating that affects both bodies and words in Troilus also affects its presentation of its epic theme, matter, or argument, repeatedly said to represent an overheld or inflated value."¹⁷ In foregrounding the physiological processes taking place within its protagonists' tumid bodies, the play "sounds out" the Homeric idols, the epic heroes at the very source of European culture; it finds at the center of their beings little more than disease and raw appetite, representing them all, more or less, as "idol[s] of idiotworshippers" (5.1.7). "[M]ad idolatry" (2.2.57) is a subject repeatedly addressed by the play, which, we could say, depicts a kind of "Twilight of the Idols"—ending, as it does, as "the sun begins to set, / . . . [And] ugly night comes breathing at his heels" (5.8.5-6). The play uses a turn to the interior of the body to debunk timehonored ideals—to reveal the "Most putrefied core" (5.8.1) of the heroic ethos.¹⁸ It depicts "the veins of actions highest rear'd" (1.3.6) in the most literal sense of "veins"; even Hector's honorable soldiership is—in his own words—no more than "th'vein of chivalry" (5.3.32) on a good day. In Troilus and Cressida the twin ideals of heroism-in-war and idolism-in-love are exploded, in no small part through the attention directed to the "polluted" insides of the body, "more abhorr'd / Than spotted livers in the sacrifice" (5.3.17-18).

The idea that the play evinces a general disgust with corporeality was for many years practically undisputed; and indeed the vast majority of the play's references to the body insist on its internally diseased and utterly corruptible state. My argument here runs not so much "against the hair" (1.2.27) of these interpretations as under it; for to take this as a rejection of corporeality as such does little more than reproduce Thersites's bitter invective against the body—echoing his perspective rather than interpreting it. The main thrust in Troilus and Cressida is a turn not against but back toward the body, in the same way that Nietzsche's philosophy embraces corporeality with all its "formless or ugly or grotesque" aspects.

Shakespeare's response to the endless reiteration of the legend of Troy is simultaneously a response to the major genealogical project of Tudor mythographers—the tracing of the ancestry of the British nation to the Trojan War, a teleology culminating in the glories of the Elizabethan nation. But, as I am describing it, it was not so much this genealogy that Shakespeare was interested in as in a kind of Nietzschean genealogy, an enterprise of (re) linking words, and the values and ideals constructed out of them, to their bodily origins, to "the basic text of homo natura."¹⁹ Shakespeare's attempt to restore materia to the Matter of Troy constitutes a powerful countermovement to this founding narrative of English nationalism—as if to say that this narrative does not delve far enough.²⁰ That is: while Tudor mythographers sought a heroic site of origin in the Trojan epic, Shakespeare's skeptical satire seeks the origins of the legend of Troy in the bodies of its heroes.²¹

The implied repudiation of the idealizing narrative of Elizabethan nationalism simultaneously suggests a radical rereading of the progress-bound idea of time on which this history relies. Troilus and Cressida comes closer to a view of history as reiterative or circular in its perpetual return to human physiology as the source of action. The play, in fact, thematizes the question of what the perspective of time does to historical events. Time here is repeatedly personified—an all-consuming scavenger, a thief snatching at scraps of history with which to cram up his thievery, a vulture pouncing on the leftovers of every human deed. And as "raging appetite" is imagined as the origin of both the love plot and the war plot, this same appetite is figured as the terminus of all action, the universal wolf which last eats up itself.

Shakespeare's anti-mythologizing return to the body could be described as nostalgic, though it is anything but idealizing. It is in a sense a turning away from his medieval and early modern sources and back toward Homer, whose epic never for a moment flinches from describing the horror of the human body's utter destructibility. Both the Iliad and Troilus and Cressida—to quite different ends, to be sure—present the human being as "a bundle of muscles, nerves, and flesh" subjected relentlessly to "force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter."²² It is this restoration of the body—a restoration of the heroically repressed, or the unveiling of what we might call the entrails of epic—which produces the play's ubiquity of corporeal images.

The return, as it happens, is simultaneously an etymological return, since the very name Ilium means, in Latin (in the plural form of ile), "intestines, guts." The play can thus be described as not only a genealogical excavation but also, in true Nietzschean fashion, a philological one. And (in case Shakespeare's "small Latine" did not extend this far) we might note that Ilium and Ilion (the two forms of the Homeric designation for Troy used alternately in the play) are—and were in the sixteenth century—alternative anatomical names for the largest part of the intestinal tract, the part affected in the apparently then-common disease called "iliac passion": bloating of the intestines.²³ If Tudor historiography traced the birth of the British nation to Ilium, Shakespeare traces "Ilium" back to the body. In this sense—and speaking hyperbolically—the entire play can be said to take place within one large, bloated intestine.