[In the following essay, Adams examines Cressida's inner struggle between being in love and protecting her own identity, contending that "both poles remain simultaneously a part of her personality, intensifying the tension."]

The first scene of a Shakespeare play almost invariably introduces his audience to a central concern of the drama. Knowing this, the reader should certainly listen carefully when Shakespeare in the first scene of Troilus and Cressida has Troilus confront the audience, in appropriate epic style, with a stark demand: "Tell me, Apollo, for thy Daphne's love,/What Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we." There follows a constantly reiterated concern for the problems of identity involving almost every character of the play, but surely the most poignant is Troilus's central question: "Tell me … what Cressid is."

Upholding the family honor, Pandarus claims that his niece is a paragon of beauty and intelligence, even the famed Helen taking a second place to her, as he finds multiple occasions to proclaim. As for intelligence, Pandarus wisely shifts from Helen to Cassandra to find a fit foil for Cressida. In his view, Cressida's mental capacity soars above even that of the god-inspired seer. And indeed, displaying remarkable verbal agility, Cressida is far better at keeping up a conversation than is Cassandra. Her remarkable ability to pick up a word, remold it to her own purpose, and fling it back at her conversant invigorates the first scene in which she appears. The sensual coloring of her wit, so often noted to her detriment, shows her appreciable skill in adapting to her audience, in this case her prurient uncle. This same characteristic also marks the amorphous nature of her personality at this point in her life, as she adeptly picks up her identity clues from whatever person she is with. This internalizing of social signals is woven into the fabric of the play by Shakespeare's repeated use of images of reflection.

Mirror imagery in the plays written shortly before Troilus and Cressida, particularly Hamlet, Richard II, and Julius Caesar, shows that at this time in his career Shakespeare was fascinated by the way personal identity is formed by a person's response to others in his or her society.

Mirror imagery is used more extensively in Troilus and Cressida than in any other of Shakespeare's plays to show that identity is derived from social reflection. In Act One, Scene two, Pandarus has at some length been trying to form a favorable picture of Troilus in Cressida's mind. After he leaves, she uses a mirror image to indicate that she recognizes her uncle's attempt to manipulate her: "But more in Troilus thousandfold I see/Than in the glass of Pandar's praise may be" (289-290). Ajax's appalling lack of self-knowledge is also revealed in terms of a mirror image. After he asserts that he doesn't know what pride is, Agamemnon sarcastically reminds him: "He that is proud eats up himself. Pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle; and whatever praises itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise" (2.3.155-159).

Later in the play, Ulysses recalls this narcissistic reinforcement achieved by holding up one's own mirror, and asserts that "pride hath no other glass/To show itself but pride" (3.3.47-48). The observation suggests to Ulysses a scheme to alter Achilles' reluctance to fight by producing a new reflection in his social mirror. A man does not know his own parts, Ulysses convinces Achilles using imagery of both the echo and the mirror, until he sees them

          formed in th' applause
Where they're extended; who, like an arch,
 reverb'rate
The voice again, or, like a gate of steel
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
His figure and his heat.
                                       (119-123)

The echoing archway, of course, fragments the sound as extensively as the steel mirror distorts the visual image. Both images suggest the futility of trying to internalize a satisfactory personal identity from a war-shattered societal archetype.

The second scene of the play ends with the often-quoted soliloquy of Cressida, in which she betrays herself as a manipulator, or more exactly as a woman reluctant to be merely used in the game of courtship. "Yet hold I off," she explains: "Women are angels wooing [i.e. when being wooed]; Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing [by which, of course, she does not mean real doing, but the delightful social interchange which precedes it]. "Men prize the thing ungained more than it is" (1.2.291ff). Now this has often been given as proof of Cressida's sexual experience or her hardened outlook toward life, but it is much more likely an echo of the kind of advice mothers used to, and perhaps still do, give to their virgin daughters: "You know men never respect what comes too easily." Even Milton's Eve, whom no one that I know has accused of sexual vagaries before meeting Adam, remained "conscious of her worth/That would be woo'd, and not unsought be won,/Not obvious, not obtrusive, but retired/The more desirable,… " (PL VIII, 502-505). The diction comes from another world, but there is an amazing similarity in the attitude. There is much more genuine feeling in Cressida's declaration in some soliloquy that her "heart's content firm love doth bear," and in her reason for not communicating that love: "Achievement is common." In this statement we hear Cressida's fear that in admitting her love, she will lose more than a biological advantage over men. She knows that love renders a person, particularly a woman, vulnerable, and she fears she will lose her identity along with her will. Once a lover achieves his conquest, he is in a position to make decisions; the woman's individual will is swallowed up. As in almost every situation in this play, love is tempered with realism; Cressida stops to count the cost. Surely this is not wholly a bad idea.

It is enlightening to note that Chaucer's Criseyde experiences the same admixture of desire and reticence as she contemplates the intriguing information that Troilus is languishing for her love. She reminds herself that being a widow in medieval society (as Shakespeare's Cressida is not) gives her an enviable freedom to make her own choice: I am, she says, "Myn owene womman" (II.750) and hence she can do as she pleases-so it be with honor. But no sooner has she come to this conclusion and expressed it than there enters "a cloudy thought" (768) upon the horizon of her mind. Should she be in love indeed, there is the fear that she would no longer be her own woman; her very free choice would ironically put her freedom and her legal identity in jeopardy. There is always some mistrust in love, her experience tells her. Men are untrue, and they do enjoy talking about their conquests; love does give them a position from which to enact treason on those they love; it takes untold energy to please men, and yet no amount of energy will quiet their tongues. Women have no recompense against all this; they have only their "owen wo to drynke." In spite of this protest, the cloud passes by Chaucer's Criseyde and the sun of hope sends out a beam as she resigns herself to her inclinations with a cliche: "nothing undertaketh/No thing acheveth" (806).

What Shakespeare has done with this material is not only to condense it into a few lines of dialogue, but to make the tension an integral part of the identity of his younger heroine. The sunshine and the cloud come and go through Criseyde's mind and she goes out to the garden to play, relieved of them both until Pandare makes another visit. But Cressida does not think of the joys of being in love in one moment and the fear of losing her identity in the next; both poles remain simultaneously a part of her personality, intensifying the tension; they comprise, to a large extent, "what Cressid is" at least at this moment in the play, and she will only try to sort them out through the mirror image of her identity which she comes to see in the eyes and the love poetry later offered to her by Troilus.

Sometime before Cressida's next entrance, she has at least decided to accept the risk of a meeting with Troilus. Her next words in the play, uttered to Troilus outside Pandarus's apartment, are an invitation: "Will you walk in, my lord?" To Troilus's inappropriate meditation on his past wishes she responds: "Wished, my lord? The gods grant.…" This perhaps suggests that she has decided to grant his desires, particularly since it follows Pandarus's advice to Troilus: "give her deeds." But although this is usually taken for granted, it is by no means certain; it is part of the tone of ambiguity and ambivalence which is carefully built into the texture of the play. Ostensibly, she is merely inviting him into the house, and that in the presence of another adult. And Pandaras, after bringing her into the scene against obvious reluctance, has just as carefully built her denial into his introductory speech when he warns Troilus: "She will bereave you o' the deeds too if she call your activity in question" (3.2.55-56). Even to Pandaras her submission is not a foregone conclusion. And she no sooner makes this tentative approach than she draws back, struck by a new wave of fear. This is a much more cerebral fear than Troilus misinterprets it to be; it is an emotion that "seeing reason" has engendered. She discerns that there is something "monstrous" in the situation, whereas Troilus is either unable or unwilling to find it. He leaves her question unanswered, attempting to placate her with the general statement that there is always a discrepancy between what the will dictates and what the body is able to deliver—the fear that what untasted love desires, dreams, and images will either be disappointed or destroyed when it descends to the physical. When Cressida uneasy with this idealism, brings them back to their own situation, Troilus, perhaps playing his self-asserted role of the deserver, somewhat monstrously vows that his "truth" is truer than the truest that truth itself can speak. Although some have found this sentiment beautiful, perhaps John Vyvyan is closer to the truth in asserting its silliness (191-192). Certainly the avowal of abject humility before the awesome power of love, which is expressed by Chaucer's Troilus, is more appropriate to the situation. Far from being a deserver, he recognizes that love is a gift of "grace passed oure desertes," and that he is one "that koude leest deserve/Of hem that noumbred ben unto thi grace" (III. 1267-1269). Shakespeare's Cressida, perhaps a bit dumbfounded by her lover's Platonism, reiterates her earlier invitation: "Will you walk in, my lord?" But before the words can be translated into action, Pandarus reappears on the scene, and the conversation immediately degenerates to his level; even Troilus's pure truth is lost in a telling and strange parallelism as he offers for "hostages: your uncle's word and my firm faith." Pandarus responds by vowing not his own but his niece's faithfulness in one of the most inept of the play's host of inept images: "Our kindred … are burrs, I can tell you; they'll stick where they are thrown" (3.2.110-111). Cressida's answer cuts through all the mere talk about truth with the simple and honest declaration which the fear of losing her identity and individuality had caused her to withhold earlier: "Prince Troilus, I have loved you night and day/For many weary months." Her halting verse (like Hamlet's in soliloquy) is hardly the calculated scheming of a clever woman; it is, rather, the blurting out of a feeling, or a truth, which, like the cockney's eels in King Lear, will no longer be kept down.

But in spite of her declaration, she continues to vacillate. Her honest fears are still evident as she hesitates: "If I confess much you will play the tyrant," and she attempts to rationalize her sudden profession after months of silence by explaining that until this meeting her love was of such a low degree that she could master it. Then, realizing that this was neither true nor convincing, she confesses that her repressed desires were far from being mastered; rather they were as turbulent as "unbridled children grown/Too headstrong for their mother." Though what she hears herself saying is real, her mind would place a bridle on her tongue. But in her turbulent psychological state, the faculty of reason is no more in control of the lesser faculties of her psyche than Agamemnon is in control of the Greek army. Blurting out the honesty that intellection would have her conceal, she paradoxically and irrationally turns to the only help she has, her own lover, to stop the flow of words which are making her vulnerable: "Sweet, bid me hold my tongue,/For in this rapture I shall surely speak/The thing I shall repent." Troilus, who has virtually stopped listening after her first admission of love, completely misreads her injunction, "Stop my mouth" offers her no help in her psychological dilemma; and neither he nor Pandarus can understand her reversal when instead of repeating her invitation for Troilus to come in she announces: "I will take my leave, my lord." Her desire is not to get away from Troilus, but to get away from herself in order to understand herself, or to sort out the two dominant selves she finds within her. With an honesty that wracks many (though perhaps not so openly) on the eve of a marriage, she wrestles with her own divided psyche:

I have a kind of self resides with you;
But an unkind self, that itself will leave
To be another's fool.

This is a dilemma which she would have chosen not to reveal, and though still in a rapt state ("I know not what I speak") she gropes for the mental control which had served her as an adequate defense for so long: "Where is my wit?" Without this she is vulnerable indeed, but all her wit can offer at the moment is one feeble excuse for her confession: perhaps it was not a confession at all, but mere "craft" in order to "angle for [Troilus's] thoughts." In turmoil she realizes this won't do, and undercuts her own suggestion by adding that Troilus is too wise not to see through it, unless his being in love has invalidated that wisdom. This is hardly the speech of a wily, calculating seductress such as Cressida is often made out to be (3.2.passim).

If Shakespeare's Cressida was indeed angling for her lover's thoughts, as she suggests, she got them, but they were strangely unrelated to anything she had been saying. It is as if he had been meditating on his own thoughts during her entire outburst, for his response shows a detached philosophical concern. He seems self-righteously aware of his own faithfulness, and looking quite beyond the real, involved, half-anguished woman on the stage in front to him, he speculates on the relative ability of men and women to be true:

O that I thought it could be in a woman—
As, if it can, I will presume in you—
To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love;
To keep her constancy in plight and youth,
Outliving beauty's outward, with a mind
That doth renew swifter than the blood decays;
Or that my integrity and truth to you
Might be affronted with the match and weight
Of such a winnowed purity in love:
How were I then uplifted! But, alas,
I am as true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth.
                                    (3.2.156-169)

Cressida's short, equivocal response to his statement is simply: "In that I'll war with you." She is not replying to Troilus's avowal of immaturity, but rather to the earlier assertion that women cannot be as true as men. "I'll war with you" asserts that she will argue against this proposition, and it also affirms that she will emulate him in his faithfulness, a double meaning which comports well with the equivocal diction of the entire play. But the statement unequivocally declares that she does not accept his assertion that women in love are somehow second to men—that men have a truer sense of honor than women when it comes to adhering to a bargain. That the contention (I'll war with you) is not resolved indicates that Shakespeare is pointing us toward a future confrontation.

In the scenario which closes this scene with each participant ironically revealing his or her recognized stereotype, Cressida does not, as some commentators imply, have her own infidelity in mind. The obvious irony is effective precisely because she is so relentlessly proclaiming her everlasting faithfulness. As often noted, the scene is indeed a type of the marriage service, as must be visually as well as verbally obvious on the stage. But however much members of a congregation may foresee adultery and dissolution in a relationship, it is a rare wedding indeed when the participants pledge their troth while planning to obliterate it. But Shakespeare does exploit the tension between the reality on the stage and the stereo-type in the mind far more vividly than does Chaucer's quiet exchange of rings in bed as the evening moves toward morning (III.1352-1355 [1366-1369]). However "simple" Troilus's confession may be, and however simple Cressida's may sound, it is an act of faith on her part. She is well aware of her complex psychological make-up, and of the difficult times she has had wrestling to achieve a simplified, understandable version of herself, but in this instance she has come to a resolution of her divided self, opting decisively for that side of her which would be true, and finding the strength to achieve this in the mirror of Troilus's strong avowal of the goodness of fidelity. It is a seductive notion: Ah love, let us be true to one another.

The flaw in Troilus's vow of faithfulness is that it is never given to the perceptive, complex woman that Shakespeare has given his audience, but rather to his own subjective idea of womanhood. This is well prepared for in the Trojan council scene when he says: "Today I take a wife," etc. It is obvious that the particular identity of that wife makes no difference; it is the man's act of taking her which endows her with whatever qualities make her worth keeping, and it is the same act which necessitates his faithfulness. There is a basic narcissism here. In Troilus's mind, not Shakespeare's, Cressida and Helen are all the same as long as there is a man present to install her as the object of his own image of faithfulness and honor.

When morning ends their first night together, we are made aware of the realistic viewpoint which insistently cracks open the idealism of this play. Troilus is up, and Cressida wants to share the morning as they have shared the night. But he speaks with a tone of condescension which she must find hard to accept. Protectively (but protection is always condescension), he says to her: "Trouble not yourself," directing her to remain in bed on a cold morning, whether it is her desire or not.

Achievement has become command!

                      Sleep kill those pretty eyes,
And give as soft attachment to thy senses
As infants' empty of all thought.
                                        (4.2.4-6)

But infant Cressida is not, and "empty of all thought" might better be applied to her lover. The busy day has been "waked by the lark" just as much in Troilus and Cressida as in Romeo and Juliet (many commentators forget), and the ribald crows which take over are not so much a symbol of their love as of the context in which that love has been consummated. One of the changes Shakespeare has made in Chaucer's poem is to keep the war oppressively a part of the love story, and it has taken its toll on Cressida's character. The crow feeds on carrion, a fit symbol of the Trojan war, as anyone will recognize who has recently read the Iliad with its oversupply of human food for carrion creatures. And as Shakespeare has amply documented, war provides an environment which has turned and always will turn romance into ribaldry. Cressida now realizes that she is second to military honor in her lover's faith, and far from being a bulwark against war's destruction, her new relationship has made her more vulnerable to it. What has happened to the Troilus of the opening scene of the play, in words if not in deeds giving love the precedence, willing indeed to tarry? There is more insight than petulance in her recognition that her psychological response was truer than his declaration of truth:

You men will never tarry.
Oh foolish Cressid! I might have still held off
And then you would have tarried.
                                       (4.2.16-18)

Is Troilus as true as truth's simplicity, or is his first act as a committed lover a denial of his avowed priorities? Cressida has quickly become a secondary concern: "I cannot love thee dear that much, since I love honor more." Love, she has found, will not shelter her from the war environment half as effectively as did her wit. In the morning her attitude toward love is far healthier than that of those around her. When there is a knock at the door, it is Cressida who tries to maintain the secrecy and the dignity of their relationship by asking Troilus to disappear into her room, and it is Troilus who either misreads this (as he did her request to stop her mouth) into a sexual invitation or degrades their relationship by becoming infected (as she focusing on her new image in the mirror of Troilus's faith is not) by Pandaras's malignant sense of value.

Few readers of Troilus and Cressida fail to notice the difference in the way the two lovers respond to the news of Cressida's exchange for Antenor which greets them on this particular morning. Troilus seems unrealistically cool as he remarks: "Is it so concluded?" When he finds it is so, his mind does NOT go to Cressida and he makes no move to break the news to her with any degree of tenderness or loss, as does Chaucer's Troilus. Instead, he goes off to the delegation from the Greek camp, self-centeredly remarking, "How my achievements mock me" (4.2.68, 71). This is not the remark of a man of simple (or even complicated) truth honoring the woman he loves; "my achievements" marks him as a soldier of the game, chalking up his first conquest on the narrower field of battle; this is Troilus who indeed thinks himself "the deserver" wallowing in his first lily bed, hardly the man of ultimate faithfulness. It is only Pandaras who believes the young prince will "go mad" with his loss, which indicates that he like his niece had mistakenly taken Troilus's words at their face value.

How different is Cressida's rebellion against the news: "O you immortal gods! I will not go." The idea of breaking her vow to Troilus is totally foreign to her. She has indeed taken on the identity of her sworn troth, leaving father and uncle to cleave unto her love: "No kin, no love, no blood, no soul so near me/As the sweet Troilus." Faithfulness has become the center of her being:

                            O you gods divine,
Make Cressid's name the very crown of
  falsehood
If ever she leave Troilus! Time, force, and death,
Do to this body what extremes you can;
But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very center of the earth,
Drawing all things to it.…
                         I will not go from Troy.
                                (4.2.102-108, 112)

This is the cry of a woman with a satisfying, new-found identity as a woman of truth and faithfulness. And that identity is being threatened.

In a very brief scene we see Troilus the faithful lover accepting and preparing for his role as the new Pandaras (however he may think of himself as a new Helenus): "I'll bring her to the Grecian presently;/And to his hand when I deliver her,/Think it an altar, and thy brother Troilus/A priest there off ring to it his own heart" (4.3.6-9). And even while he is making ready to turn her over, her poetry of complaint declares the fullness of her grief and the strength of her love.

Why tell you me of moderation?
The grief is fine, full, perfect, that I taste,
And violenteth in a sense as strong
As that which causeth it. How can I moderate it?
If I could temporize with my affections,
Or brew it to a weak and colder palate,
The like allayment could I give my grief.
My love admits no qualifying dross;
No more my grief, in such a precious loss.
                                      (4.4.2-10)

Shakespeare has built the language of purity into this speech, with no temporizing and no qualifying dross. What a stark contrast is evident when Troilus enters just after this with his cool, detached, philosophic purity of words: "Cressid, I love thee in so strained a purity,/That the blest gods … Take thee from me" (23-26). These sound very like the words of a lover seeking to rationalize his way out of a relationship. And the equivocation in the word strained is surely intended. As the scene progresses and Cressida calls for love and understanding, what she gets are more explanations: chance and time are to blame and even wipe love from the present moment. Chance, he informs her, "rudely beguiles our lips of all rejoindure"; instead of a parting of sweet sorrow, time "Crams his rich thievery up" and "fumbles [many farewells] up into a loose adieu"; Troilus further employs the cheapening commercial imagery of the play to remind her that what was bought dear (with many sighs) must be sold cheap (with one); but surely the most damaging image of the speech is his clear assertion that chance now "strangles our dear vows" (4.4.36). What is she to think of this remark? Is he indeed instructing her that their vows are no longer valid?

At this point we are at the heart of Cressida's change of attitude. Sensitized by the above speech, she hears the note of distrust in Troilus's injunction: "Be thou but true of heart," and answers with an emotion which indicates how deeply the barb has stuck. Having repressed Troilus's earlier remarks denigrating faithfulness in women, she discovered her identity in the mirror of trust which Troilus held up to her, but now she finds that mirror giving back a different image. Fumbling a bit, Troilus tries to wipe the mirror clean by swearing to her that he believes "there is no maculation in thy heart." But why should he have to swear; and there is a barely suppressed accusation in his choice of the word maculation. Cressida patiently explains to him that there is a mutuality in temptations, just as there is mutuality in their love. No sooner is this settled than a second time Troilus enjoins her to be true, and again Cressida is unsettled: "O heavens! 'Be true' again!" When, a third time, he warns her against the comeliness and manners of the Greeks, he at least tries to excuse himself. But Cressida hears the reality, not the excuses, and with heart-breaking insight she charges: "O heavens, you love me not!" It should be no surprise, I suppose, that the Troilus who has asserted that the only real value is that which is attributed, should not hear the seriousness of these words. After yet another excuse, he charges her a fourth time: "Be not tempted," to which she can only ask-now knowing the answer—"Do you think I will?" (4.4.57-91).

This kind of repetition is not new in Shakespeare's plays. It is a device he often uses to show that something of central importance is going on in a play. One such instance is in King Lear when Albany finds it hard to accept that Gloucester's eyes have been put out (4.2.73, 81, 86). Even more poignant is the wrenching of Lear's consciousness to admit that Regan, the last hope on which he can pin his dream, is responsible for Kent's being in the stocks (4.2.12-24, 181-201). The pattern of delayed repetition recurs in Macbeth when Macduff is informed of the death of his wife and children (4.3.200-227) and the unfortunate messenger in Antony and Cleopatra is forced to repeat the news of Antony's marriage to Octavia no less than six times before she can digest its import (2.5.57-101). The most famous instance of delayed repetition as the enormity of a deed breaks into consciousness is in the last act of Othello in which Emilia asks, "My husband?" no less than four times before the reality of the situation can work its way from the words her ears hear to the total realization of the insidious villainy of Iago. Surely, then, when Shakespeare uses this same technique in portraying the light that Cressida finally sees in the mirror of Troilus's remarks, he is letting us know that something of central import is happening in the fashioning of Cressida's self-image.

This is the moment that makes Cressida's defection understandable, fixing the blame squarely on Troilus's duplicity. The identity which she had adopted by means of the social antennae picking up the fine speeches of her lover and leading to her heartfelt loyalty oath is suddenly in conflict with the self she now sees in the same shifting glass. Cressida does not retreat to the self which would follow any invitation to be "another's fool," but instead the divided and distinguished worlds that make up her character both reassert themselves, and she is once more in the state she was in at the beginning of the play.

At this point Diomedes enters, and Troilus (after admitting that his truth nets him "mere simplicity") offers not only to give him her hand but to inform him (as a somewhat dubious authority) "what she is." Diomedes, however, choosing not to listen, forms his own idea from "The luster in [her] eye, heaven in [her] cheek," which, he says, will win her the power to "command him wholly" (4.4.116, 118). What he offers her is a fresh start in her original situation where being pursued endows her with the power to make decisions, where achievement has not yet granted command, and where, Diomedes claims seductively, "To her own worth she shall be prized" (131-132). Here she is suddenly afforded the opportunity to decide once again what her own worth actually is—by finding a new mirror in which to try to discern it.

In her brief encounter with the Greek generals, we see Cressida's restored wit coming to her defense. Sparring with the Greek forces on their own level as she once sparred with Pandarus, she adopts the only stance open to her as a female prisoner of war vulnerable to the Greek army, wondering, perhaps, if she can manage on her own, or if she would be better off under the "protection" of Diomedes.

In the last scene in which we see Cressida, she is again her divided self. With one half of her being she is pulled to be true to Troilus despite his disbelief in her ability to be true at all, and with the other part of her being she is drawn, she admits, by her eye and heart. The eye had been considered the primary communicator of passion at least since the beginning of the courtly love tradition, and the heart, not then the symbol of true love, was the organ that pulsed the blood, the seat and symbol of passion, to the most susceptible parts of the body. In this scene there is little in the lines of Cressida herself to give any indication that she is in full control of her self, coolly manipulating Diomedes to her own ends. We can look at her in this scene through the eyes of Troilus and see her as a metaphysical problem created by his inability to understand her as a full human being. Or we can look at her through the eyes of Ulysses's cynicism and see her as a common drab, reflecting his preconceived notion of any attractive young lady approaching a group of officers. Or if we choose to accept the viewpoint of Thersites, she is an expert manipulator, Madame Whetstone, craftily sharpening Diomedes' appetite, the edge of which is already honed to perfection. Though they may reflect a fragmented segment of reality, none of these characters is an adequate chorus to direct the audience's eyes to truth. The audience must discover Cressida through her own words and actions, and she oscillates between give and take, not because she is in control of the situation, but precisely because she wants totally to do both-to give herself to the oath she made to Troilus before she left Troy, and at the same time to honor her oath to Diomedes, answering the inclination of eye and heart and securing for herself a degree of protection within an enemy camp.

Who then is Cressida? Shakespeare has unveiled a most attractive young girl just come of age, brought up by and getting her early idea of men from a lecherous uncle. She is seen as a woman seeking her identity in the various reflections offered by those around her, but with no adequate feminine role model other than a distant and vapid Helen, or Andromache, who keeps within her own house. She feels within her the double drive to gain what measure of control she can from her beauty and to find what security she can from a lasting relationship with and genuine love for a prince's son. Her attempt to define herself in the mirror of his love fails because half of what she finds there is totally unacceptable—a betrayal of the love itself. She demonstrates a sharp wit, using it for protection in a man's world. That she is seldom understood by any of the characters around her leaves her, whether shown in the arms of Troilus or Diomedes or sparring with her uncle, a painfully lonely human being, a pawn in a world which denies her the stability necessary for satisfactory self-fashioning.