SOURCE: "Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida" in Representations, No. 29, Winter, 1990, pp. 145-79.

[In the excerpt below, Mallin suggests that the misogynistic and homoerotic ambiguity and violence in the play reflect England's ambivalence toward the aging, increasingly less powerful and heirless Queen Elizabeth I.]

In the state of England, anno dorn. 1600, Thomas Wilson describes a country besieged. Despite its renowned military force and well-fortified capital city, England suffered a pervasive fear of attack. Frequent skirmishes with Ireland and rumors of imminent Spanish invasion fostered a national preoccupation with war. Indeed, Wilson's description of private arsenals portrays an entire country armed and at the ready for battle: the law required every householder, "who soever he is," to have "in a readiness, such armes as is appointed by the Commisioners .. . at least a bill, sword, or dagger."¹

This late Elizabethan obsession was born of vigilance against a foreign menace, but it also had an ideological component. It manifested the monarch's personal symbology: invasion was a metaphoric threat to the inviolate Virgin Queen and her realm. Policy and ideology converged in England's national energies, which were largely directed to defensive as opposed to aggressive or interventionist ends.² Wilson notes, for instance, that the "comon souldiers that are sent out of the realme be of the basest and most unexperienced, the best being reserved to defend from invasion" (34).

England's concomitant state of siege was, oddly, a marker of success. As long as the country (like its queen) could repel attack, it would maintain power. In her famed speech to the troops at Tilbury in 1588, anticipating an incursion by the Armada, Elizabeth provocatively declaimed her credo:

I am come amongst you .. . to lay down for my God and for my Kingdom and for my people my honor and my blood even in the dust.

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms.³

The first sentence syntactically implies and withdraws eroticism ("I am come .. . to lay down .. . my honor and my blood") in its expression of Elizabeth's military intentions. Taking up arms here is wholly a protective measure, a defense against invasion framed as a sexual threat that could engender ignominy. The queen at Tilbury disclosed the psychological effect of her policy: the edgy passivity of waiting for an attack.⁴ Like Cressida in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, the country lay on its back to defend its belly, "at all these wards .. . at a thousand watches" (1.2.250).⁵

Cressida's words to Pandarus describe both a sexual and a martial strategy, one that befits a play about a war that began as a rape. Her paradoxical description of defense—she will lie upon her back to defend her belly, "upon my secrecy, to defend mine honesty; my mask, to defend my beauty" (1.2.248-49)—can also be taken as a peculiarly Elizabethan mode of behavior. The queen maintained her symbolic and literal inviolability through vigilant wards and watches, but she admitted feminine vulnerability as a defense of her (masculine) authority as well. With the heart and stomach of a king, but the body of a weak and feeble woman, Elizabeth made substantial ideological gains from a seemingly susceptible posture. Cressida's policy (unsuccessful though it is) articulates, on a minute scale, a version of Elizabeth's; the play world of Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), I shall argue, offers far more comprehensive and complicated stagings of late Elizabethan ideology, policy, and events. The neurosis of invasion made England something of a Troy, a nation ten years at war without strong hope of either victory or truce. Troy, besieged and paralyzed, imaginatively refigures the troubled last years of Tudor rule. . . .

II

The Trojan War is a battle between two sets of courtiers for possession of a queen. The story thus frames the essential social and political dynamic of the Elizabethan court, where the Cecil and Essex factions sought, in Lawrence Stone's words, "control of the Queen's purse and person."²⁹ But if Shakespeare replicates some parallels between English court affairs and the tale of Troy, he also skews others, setting the picture of contemporary politics curiously awry. The most obvious and important breach between the play and its cultural context is that neither Trojan nor Greek side has a figure much like Elizabeth in its power structure. Political force in Ilion resides solely in the doddering patriarch Priam and his boisterous boys; the Greek camp, too, is as far from a gynocracy as imaginable. The Trojans and Greeks, as combatants for a totemic sexual and material site—the body of Helen—can only emulate the crises of the Elizabethan aristocracy through fragmented outline and indirection.

The relationship of a literary work to a culture that sponsored, coerced, or prohibited it has been nicely defined by Edward Said as "the eccentric, dialectical intermingling of history with form in texts."³⁰ But if Shakespeare's interminglings are eccentric, they are also for the most part symbolic, purposeful, motivated. The example of court parties suggests just such a production of meaning. Factionalism for many years bore Elizabeth's imprimature and signature, yet the author of strife in the Grecian camp is not a ruler of either sex but a courtier (or two courtiers, inasmuch as Ulysses diagnoses and so recreates the problem that Achilles has caused). However, this canted parallel, far from signifying the text's distance from its historical moment, actually reproduces the major topical problem. Courtier control over the factions in Greece configures an impotence in royal or monarchical authority with respect to such structures. Elizabeth's regulatory mechanism takes dramatic form as a hierarchical and governmental nemesis. Dissimilar arrangements in the play and culture highlight analogical similarities—they are differences encoded to show sameness, and ultimately to insinuate deficiencies of contemporary rule. But some disjunctions are less easily decoded than others.

In associating the Grecian camp with Elizabeth's court, the play deflects the single expected correspondence between text and world. For Geoffrey of Monmouth's mythographic account of Britain's origins had long since established an identity between England and Troy. Aeneas' great grandson Brute or Brutus was said to have founded Britain after the fall of the ancient city. In Spenser's formulation, "noble Britons sprong from Trojans bold,/And Troynovant was built of old Troy's ashes cold" (Faerie Queene, 3.9.38). If London (Troynovant) is regarded as a phoenix sprung from the ashes of a great civilization, then the recognizable English problem of factionalism in Troilus and Cressida symbolically afflicts the wrong side.

What can we make of this alteration? It seems at first to confute the cherished Tudor myth of Trojan origins, a myth that was becoming increasingly unconvincing toward the end of the queen's reign.³¹ The unreliability of mythification is variously inscribed and achieved by Troilus and Cressida, most memorably in Achilles' assertion that he has killed Hector after the Myrmidons have in fact done the deed. Yet the debunking of myth cannot by itself explain specific transmogrifications such as the assignment of a characteristic English problem to the Greeks instead of to the Trojans.

What can better account for the Shakespearean alteration is the text's formal "dialectical intermingling" with its historical contexts. The play's plot formation schematizes its proximate relation to late Tudor conditions. For history is not reproduced eccentrically in Troilus and Cressida; it is disposed bilaterally. Both Greek and Trojan camps recollect contemporary political acts and structures; both sides, and their transactions, establish compelling circuits of text and world. The Trojans in the play are coextensive with the Greeks in their referentiality; they simply evoke other aspects of a specifically Elizabethan dissolution. Troy differs in the heavier ideological freight of its representations.

Throughout the drama, the sons of Priam identify themselves with the forms and conventions of chivalry. They cleave to a traditional ideal of knighthood and "honor": courage, loyalty, dedication to cause and ruler and lady. (The Trojans suffer occasional lapses when it occurs to them that cause, ruler, and lady are irremediably separate; for much of Elizabeth's reign, these were three in one.) The Trojan ideal derives its impetus from the romance epics of the middle ages; in Troilus and Cressida, the medieval heritage of the story seems to belong almost exclusively to the Trojans.³² The Greek lords are situated stylistically in the late Renaissance, surprisingly contemporary in the weary cynicism of their political maneuvers. The Trojan men, on the other hand, emerge through attitude and language as vaguely antiquated. But only vaguely—their courtly behavior in love and battle, musty-seeming enough by 1600, nonetheless recreates a crucial facet of the Elizabethan cult.

The chivalric premise lay behind virtually every late Tudor court formality: progresses, pageant entertainments, anniversary celebrations, diplomatic embassies, conferrals of dignities. The enactment of the ideal in the period was, on its surface, an expression of monarchical glory and the nobles' undying fealty. But the fashion of chivalry, enthusiastically resuscitated for Elizabeth's reign, barely managed to contain its hereditary discord and contradictions. In its medieval form, chivalry masked savage and unregenerate self-interest; deadly sins were meliorated only by their veneer of martial glory. In some cases the line between chivalry and criminality was frighteningly thin. The European Middle Ages suffered a scourge of condottieri or men-at-arms, mercenaries who sought the honor of wars "by birth and vocation" but whose greedy ravages were comparable to the effect of an epidemic.³³ Knighthood glorified bravery and martial prowess, but in so doing legitimated and rewarded rapacity. The chivalric sanctioning of greed, violence, and adultery (service to a woman was typically service and love of an already married woman) led Tudor humanists such as Roger Ascham to decry the "bold bawdry and open manslaughter" of the knightly ethos.³⁴

So chivalry came to the Elizabethans as a problematic, even tainted form. In the later Middle Ages, a strategic manipulation had helped salvage it as a code of honor. Malcolm Vale has written that in order to "secure the allegiance of the nobility and the knightly classes, princes and monarchs found it expedient to graft the powerful concept of personal honour on to that of loyalty to the sovereign."³⁵ That is, knights and nobles negotiated a new relationship to monarchy in which they sacrificed some of their autonomous power. What did they gain? The theatrical pleasures of distinction, recognition, even safety; a life, as Francis Bacon once recommended to Essex, in the light, not in the heat. Elizabethan chivalry at its apex successfully replayed this contractual relation. The chivalric mode was an agreement and commodity as much as a style of service; it had incalculable exchange value as a means to favor, priority, and place. In turn, bestowing honor and honors for opulent, ostentatious service, the queen deployed chivalric conventions to maintain the order of the court. Chivalry became a tough container of vastly different contents and discontents: it managed the gelid, bookish formalities of aristocratic homage as well as the boiling rivalries of the most ambitious nobles. It provided a stage upon which factionalism was performed. The queen's Accession Day tilts and progress entertainments used the knightly ethos to help enclose potentially disruptive bids for glory in a stabilizing theater of service.

This ambition/containment dialectic was pressured late in the reign by the problems, as Louis Montrose notes, of "gender and generation."³⁶ In the Elizabethan version of chivalry, "the essence of knighthood was service to a lady";³⁷ faithfulness to an unattainable erotic object became a condition of courtier success. But the Elizabethan redaction of courtly practice was jeopardized in the 1590s by the ruler's greater generational distance from her favorites. The problem operated on the literal and figurative levels: neither Elizabeth's age nor her long-employed maternal symbology could comfortably accommodate erotic aspects of her image. The erotic-maternal juxtaposition can never be, past a certain point, entirely comfortable.³⁸

The queen's image was always "comprehensive, diffuse, and ambiguous," but her self-fashionings became contradictory; in their contradictions, unbelievable.³⁹ The object of erotic obeisance who took no lovers was somehow the mother of her country who had no children. Despite such disjunctions, the aging queen remained a potentially bounteous maternal figure in economic terms, dispensing the milk of patents and monopolies to her youthful, needy nobility. Elizabeth's motherly persona was by far the most psychologically and chronologically forceful of her self-constructions in the last decade of her reign. The young courtiers, unruly sons more than lovers (and never spouses), found and placed themselves in a conflictual relationship with this female power. The symbolic and physical signs of Elizabeth's advanced age sorted ill with her Tilbury persona—defensive, inviolable, but enticing—and with the chivalric premise of her eternal desirability. I do not mean to say that advanced years and sexuality are incompatible, nor that attractiveness vanishes at any particular point in life, but simply that the image of eternal freshness and youth, upon which the chivalric fiction to some extent depends, is impossible to sustain once bodily corruption becomes unarguable. And in Elizabeth's case, the disintegration of the courtly mode, or at least of its efficacy, coincides with that corruption. Late Tudor chivalric performances and the poetry that recreates them tried mightily to circumvent the harsh fact of decline, but the effort fell short and sometimes backfired. For instance, George Peele's Anglorum Feriae records the Accession Day tilt of 1595 and celebrates Elizabeth's recent escape from the Lopez assassination plot. The work describes the queen in glowing, reverential language, but concludes with a curious prayer: "May she shine in beautie fresh and sheene/Hundreds of years our thrice renowned queen."⁴⁰ Surely Peele means that the mental image of Elizabeth's beauty should endure forever? But his words summon instead the specter of an anile monarch, counternaturally living on and on, enthroned, embalmed, for centuries. The chivalric gesture toward her physical beauty, in denying the fact of mortality, turns back upon itself.

Other disruptions of the chivalric were more clearly intentional. In 1598, while deliberating about whom to appoint to the lord deputyship in Ireland, Elizabeth fell into a bitter dispute with the earl of Essex. During one particularly heated argument, the earl—erstwhile flower of latter-day Tudor chivalry—was reported to have turned his back scornfully on his sovereign as he added a vicious insult: he said "her conditions were as crooked as her carcase."⁴¹ To comment upon the queen's aged and deformed body constituted an attack upon it, and Elizabeth promptly struck her former favorite. Not one to back down, Essex laid his hand upon his sword hilt. The death knell of chivalry sounded by this episode reverberates until the end of the reign. Essex repeated his disobedience on a larger scale in Ireland, and yet again in his rebellion. Elizabeth's inevitable physical deterioration was not just the subject but the enabling fact of Essex's effrontery; her physical vulnerability liberated transgressive impulses and removed a fulcrum on which the nobility once safely balanced its powers and desires. For all the strength of Elizabethan chivalry, it ran a great risk in locating ideology in the queen's body natural.

Underlying the problem of the declining chivalric image was the basic issue of gender difference: Elizabeth's political potency was a thorough cultural anomaly. Montrose reflects with admirable understatement that "the political nation—which was wholly a nation of men—sometimes found it annoying or perturbing to serve a prince who was also a woman, a woman who was unsubjected to a man."⁴² This chafing was worsened by an undercurrent of resentment about Elizabeth's manipulative intrusions in courtiers' personal lives. It was not enough to plight political troth; the queen's men were expected to maintain the appearance of sexual fidelity to her, or ever so cautiously to submit their alternate desires for her approval.⁴³ The Virgin Queen, insistent cynosure of male attention, directed the court complex of romance and sexuality—an arrangement that defines delayed gratification. Many of the queen's sharp political maneuvers were conducted within this complex, but they were frequently misread as solely gender-related phenomena. When Ambassador de Maisse sought to learn from Elizabeth whether England would actively pursue the Spanish wars, he could obtain only equivocal answers: "They labored under two things at this Court," he concluded, "delay and inconstancy, which proceeded chiefly from the sex of the Queen"(115).⁴⁴ The ambassador meant, in his exasperated androcentric way, that delay and inconstancy are female traits, but they also characterized the monarch's politic sexuality. Delay and inconstancy were as integral to maintaining stability in a male-pressured court as were the emulous rivals themselves. Through "delay," the queen wisely employed the erotic understanding that avails Cressida—until, post-delay, the Trojan woman is trapped in the Grecian world of men and "inconstancy" becomes the only option:

Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she belov'd knows naught that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is.

(1.2.291-94)

The fact that men prize the thing ungained, or desire what they do not have, was the motivational and the regulatory basis of Elizabethan factionalism and chivalry.

Yet constant striving for inadequate emolument (political, fiscal, or psychosexual) may eventually have undermined loyalties. About Elizabeth, de Maisse believed that "if by chance she should die, it is certain that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman" (11-12). Frustrated by the queen's cagey responses to his overtures for information, he can hardly be taken for a disinterested reporter of prevailing opinion. But the ambassador's irritated comment activates the possibility that deferred gratification fueled some men's hostility for female rule.

The problem with maintaining the hivalric ideal was thus not solely in upholding the fiction of Elizabeth's infinite desirability but more generally in sublimating the multiple, intensely strenuous conditions of that desirability. The court was dissilient, generationally fractured, manned (as it were) by an increasingly impatient and acquisitive nobility. The unworkability of the courtly mode in the late 1590s was in some sense its deep, gender-related insincerity: dedicated masculine self-interest took precedence over obligatory chivalric service to a woman. However, the precarious genius of Elizabethan chivalry was that it offered the courtier pleasures and rewards precisely compensatory for tensions in gender relations. Late Tudor chivalry was a forum for the visibility of masculine courtier power.

Elizabeth's Accession Day tilts provided the most public site of this power. Styled upon medieval chivalric antecedents, the tilts were annual celebrations of the queen's ascendance to the throne.⁴⁵ They featured displays of martial prowess in which gentlemen and nobles jousted across a barrier; the man who splintered the most lances won a prize from the queen. Like Troilus and Cressida, bear baiting, and public executions, the tilts translated violence into theater. Tonally at deep odds with the persistent, encroaching reality of war, such chivalric exhibitions achieved a golden world of amusing and sanitized discord. But while the tournaments served as an ideological state apparatus, cementing the symbolic association between the defense of the country and the chivalric defense of the monarch, they also publicized a critical difference between the queen and her men. The act of war—Elizabeth's Amazonian symbology notwithstanding—was the indisputable arena of male superiority, of male control, in this reign. Both warfare and the artificial chivalric theater of the tilts offered the courtier an outlet for aggression that was not controlled by the queen. Public mock warfare afforded irresistible and inspiring self-exposure. The young nobility, glory-seeking and militant, flushed with its own greatness, upstaged the monarch. In reanimating the dormant, genetic dangers of medieval chivalry, the tilts delimited a male arena that necessarily excluded the female except as observer. Such an exclusion achieved, if only momentarily, the dream of masculine power at court, but this dream was not easily shaken.⁴⁶

The functions and dysfunctions of Elizabethan chivalry take us back to Troilus and Cressida, where the Trojans manifest in single-combat challenges and tournament activity a comparable employment and diminution of the courtly enterprise. In Troy, the failure of the chivalric mode is related to profound resentment of the woman for whom the nobles fight; yet that resentment is associated not with the age or intrusive dominance of the erotic object but with its redefinition. For in Shakespeare's Troy, emulous, furious male desire is its own and only object. The realignment of the erotic impulse underlies the vexed state of Elizabethan and Trojan courtliness.

III

The first staged meeting of the Greeks and Trojans sets the divisive, conflicting tones of chivalry in Troilus and Cressida at a high pitch. Aeneas visits the Greek camp in act 1, scene 3, to deliver Hector's single-combat challenge, but the chivalric messenger cannot recognize the authority figure: "Which is that god in office, guiding men? / Which is the high and mighty Agamemnon?" (1.3.230-31). The general, to whom Aeneas has been speaking, responds with a marvelous aporia: "This Trojan scorns us, or the men of Troy / Are ceremonious courtiers." Agamemnon's perplexed gloss exposes the two poles of chivalric meaning: ceremony as service, ceremony as subversion. Once Aeneas finally delivers Hector's challenge, the sincerity of the chivalric mode becomes no less suspect.

The challenge itself is a protest against prevailing conditions. Although it is peacetime in Troy (a truce is on), Hector is "resty grown" (1.3.262) and seeks disruption. Out of the boredom and anxiety that settle upon soldiers prevented from creating their performative fame, the greatest Trojan tries to pick a courtly fight with the Greeks. He does so in terms of a defense of his lady's excellence and honor:

If there be one among the fair'st of Greece
That holds his honour higher than his ease,
That feeds his praise more than he fears his peril,
That knows his valour and knows not his fear,
That loves his mistress more than in confession
With truant vows to her own lips he loves,
And dare avow her beauty and her worth
In other arms than hers—to him this challenge:
Hector, in view of Trojans and of Greeks,
Shall make it good, or do his best to do it,

He hath a lady wiser, fairer, truer,
Than ever Greek did couple in his arms;
And will tomorrow with his trumpet call
Midway between your tents and walls of Troy
To rouse a Grecian that is true in love.
If any come, Hector shall honour him:
If none, he'll say in Troy, when he retires,
The Grecian dames are sunburnt and not worth
The splinter of a lance. Even so much.

(1.3.264-82)⁴⁷

Hector's invitation to the "sportful" combat is not motivated by either a need or desire to defend his wife, Andromache, who remains unnamed in the speech. Indeed, the woman in the challenge functions as a deeply ambivalent rhetorical construct. This pandering, mediated invitation reads Elizabethan courtly behavior and draws its substance from the fount of contemporary cultural practice. Hector's challenge employs a language of courtly love as a pretext for military activity, but the primary impulses of the speech are antifeminist and, correlatively, homoerotic.

The Trojan challenge is a calling-out—the colloquialism neatly implies the open, theatrical nature of such invitations—with no named adversary. Hector plays the role of champion against all comers that Sir Henry Lee, and later the earls of Cumberland and Essex, performed at the tilts. Queen's champion was a coveted role in the tournaments; it publicly denoted a serious honor, establishing a link between romantic and military elements at the ideological core of the Elizabethan cult.⁴⁸ There is a critical difference in the case of the proposed Trojan tournament, however. The fact that conferred order and sense upon the mock jousts in Elizabeth's time, their raison d'être, was the presence of the queen. But at Hector's challenge, and more significantly at the chivalric duel itself in act 4, no woman can validate the terms of the fight because no woman is there. The duel, in fact, excludes both women and authority figures, for neither Agamemnon nor Priam sets the battle conditions—at the fight between Hector and Ajax, Aeneas and Diomedes play the marshals of the lists to determine the extremity of the combat. The chivalric challenge and the following tousle produce a male arena of courtier rule, an Accession Day tilt for nobles only, with no queen invited. Hector's tournament-style love challenge, phrased in honor of his mistress, is like a game for schoolboys only—no girls allowed.

In the absence of women, real and representational, Hector generates a homoerotic discourse. He calls on "the fair'st of Greece," and means the men. After an insinuation that vows between warriors and women are always "truant," he appeals to any Greek who can avow his lady's "beauty and her worth/In other arms than hers." The word play depends of course on the two meanings of arms, but the "other arms" are not merely weaponry—they are, pointedly, Hector's limbs as well. His invitation is designed to make the Greek lovers unfaithful to their women. The Trojan hero in this speech becomes a surrogate object of desire.

Aeneas plainly announces that the enterprise is homoerotic: Hector will call so as "to rouse a Grecian that is true in love." If any should "come" after Hector arouses him, the Trojan will do him honor.⁴⁹ Now erotic bonding between warriors is common enough in literature, although it is generally directed toward a beloved companion, not an enemy.⁵⁰ What makes this speech particularly interesting is that it does not posit an enemy. Instead, the language deflects the expected hostility from the chivalric rival and reroutes it to the traditional putative chivalric love objects. The speech denigrates women in the guise of their defense; it exculpates the men from and implicates the women in any negative outcome of the duel.⁵¹ Should the Greek warriors fail to meet Hector, he will not blame them; rather he'll slander the Grecian dames, who, he will say, are "sunburnt and not worth/The splinter of a lance." Sunburnt connotes "infected with venereal disease" and, relatedly, the splintered lance an impaired penis; the Grecian dames, Hector will say, are not worth risking syphilis for.⁵² Chivalric style cloaks the most uncourtly, hostile sentiments in gleaming armor. At the same time, such meanings are probably not in the range of Hector's intentions. The fissures in Trojan chivalry are plastered over by habit of force.

Hector's challenge pricks dramatic tension because the Greeks conspicuously lack any women in their camp at this point. What they do have, however, is the only openly conducted homosexual relationship in the Shakespearean canon. Achilles and Patroclus are lovers, and their private bond is substantial: it is the one loyalty that manages to survive the depredations of the war.⁵³ The male-enfolded desire of the Greeks is especially compelling contextually because, as Ulysses notes, Hector's love call does have an intended object: "This challenge that the gallant Hector sends . . . /Relates in purpose only to Achilles" (1.3.321-23). The arms that Hector finally uses to rouse Achilles from his drowsy tent are battle arms that destroy Patroclus, his obstacle for Achilles' attentions. Achilles seeks horrible gratification for the loss, catching Hector "unarm'd": "This is the man I seek" (5.8.10).

Given the noncourtly, masculine-oriented, disgruntled Grecian soldiers, it is odd how quickly, albeit awkwardly, Agamemnon and Nestor respond to Hector's challenge, as if chivalry were a transcultural value. Although the chivalric style is more appropriate to the Trojans' situation, it speaks to the concerns of both camps by performing a slick, ceremonious devaluation of women and by claiming the worth of a lousy fight. Sure enough, the Greek response to Hector implicitly continues chivalric misogyny in—and beyond—the play world. Responding to Aeneas, Nestor boasts that if no young champion can be found, he will meet Hector to defend the honor of his own lady—a very old lady, who, as Nestor says, "Was fairer than his grandam, and as chaste/As may be in the world" (1.3.298-99). Along with the doubts about female chastity that infiltrate the subjunctive last line, Nestor's words conjure a dicey contemporary tableau: the uncomfortable, possibly ridiculous defense of an ancient woman's virtue. Aeneas, courtier extraordinaire, snidely answers, "Now heavens forfend such scarcity of youth" (301). Like Nestor's lady, and like the image of the aged Elizabeth buried beneath his language, chivalry itself is creaky, out of date. Nearly all the Trojans speak the language of chivalric romance as an ideological safety hatch for their criminal wife stealing and their latent misogyny. But of the Greeks, only the faintly daffy Nestor can respond in the courtly way to Hector's challenge. The idiom of knightly sincerity is nearly obsolescent slang to the Greeks, because only their older generation can apprehend what has clearly become unintelligible to the rest of them: the concept of defending a woman's honor.

The repressive misogyny in the ranks may be ascribed in part to fears of inadequacy and doubts about female constancy, both arising from the circumstances of this particular war. In Troy, when the heterosexual premise holds, the knight fights for a lady on whom "thousands of rival desires converge";⁵⁴ the female chivalric beloved therefore becomes not (like Elizabeth) a source of joy and sustenance but (like Elizabeth) the fount of doubt and paranoia. After the woman's inevitable rejection of most of those desires, she is transformed by the rejected suitors into something hateful, while the men are strangely exonerated for any hint of misconduct in the courtship game. Following the transfer of Cressida to the Greeks, Ulysses proposes the "general kissing" reception ceremony, a mock-chivalric ritual strongly evocative of a group rape. When it is Ulysses' turn to claim a kiss, Cressida cleverly denies him. He then savagely denounces her as one of the "sluttish spoils of opportunity/And daughters of the game" (4.5.62-63). This outburst is patently retributive for her neat humiliation of him before his fellows; but Hector's sennet sounds immediately after Ulysses' angry speech, and the entire Greek presence on stage cries: "The Trojan's trumpet." So despite evidence to the contrary, Cressida's wantonness is made to seem contagiously irrefutable through unanimous aural contamination—"The Trojan (s)trumpet."⁵⁵ Cressida's trumpeted transformation by group accord reveals the armies' conspiracy to privilege their own unlovely psychic arrangements.

If the courtiers' widespread misogyny arises from rejected or frustrated heterosexual desire, as it seems to do in Ulysses' and later Troilus' case, that desire is nonetheless always ratified in the company of men. The general kissing scene has a powerfully homoerotic, locker-room edge; Cressida becomes a means by which men measure their masculinity against one another. Worth noting is that both Achilles and Patroclus participate in the kissing of Cressida; it is not so much that the lines of homo- and heteroeroticism blur in Troy as that the first sexual form is the frame or container for the second.⁵⁶ Just as Hector's jaunty genital challenge eliminates women as serious contenders for male attention, the kissing of Cressida replays on a small scale the larger occasion of the war: the use of a woman as pretext and pretense for the enthusiastic display of male desires to and before other men: "Hector, in view of Trojans and of Greeks/Shall make it good, or do his best to do it." Helen is not the goal of the war, she is its local excuse. Women bring armies of men together. And like the adjective chivalrous itself, warfare definitively excludes women.

Even Troilus' one-shot affair with Cressida is a plot device to perpetuate and intensify the masculine engagement. Troilus raises no objection to her exchange for Antenor because he is conditioned to think of an exchange of a woman for a man as a good trade. Certainly, the transaction energizes both sides. At the moment of her exchange, Troilus and Diomedes indulge in a mutually arousing display of chivalric chest thumps and antichivalric taunts, all the while ignoring the silenced woman. The warriors now have a reason to excite one another as Cressida vanishes against the backdrop of their reflective interests. The mechanism of the courtiers' conflict may seem to be, as Girard would have it, mimetic desire, both men having been inspired by the other's interest in the woman, but that triangulation distorts the obvious vector of desire in this scene.⁵⁷ Everything here, and in the play as a whole, moves along the patent or submerged axis of homoeroticism, the dedication to male intercourse. The imaginative disappearance of women is a necessary consequence—possibly a goal—of the emulous, self-obsessed conflict.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has offered salutary warnings against seeing in male homosexuality a simple "epitome, a personification, an effect, or perhaps a primary cause of woman-hating." She demonstrates with respect to Shakespeare's sonnets that textual misogyny "plays off against the range of male bonds"—"homosocial," not necessarily sexual bonds—which can foster a heterosexuality that eclipses women and is "relatively unthreatened by the feminization of one man in relation to another."⁵⁸ But in Troilus and Cressida, male homosocial relations so thoroughly exclude and debase women that the unconscious misogynistic project is made to seem somehow necessary and reasonable. In fact, the bond between men in both Troy and Elizabeth's court "plays off against" (causality being unrecoverable here) the need to achieve or dislocate, retrieve or dominate, the source of female power. Hector's challenge is an invitation to eliminate by homosocially replacing the woman's social value as an object of sexual activity.

Men feminize themselves in other ways in order to appropriate other female prerogatives: Achilles and Essex both play Cressida's and Elizabeth's game of keep-away to secure their own desirability, positioning themselves homosocially—at the center of an all-male court—to decenter the woman. The two genres of homosocial behavior in the text can be seen as chivalric or antichivalric, Hectoresque or Achillean: the first is active, specular, militant, conservative, apparently (not really) heterosexually inflected; the second is listless, covert, pacifistic and passively subversive, clearly (not entirely) homosexually inclined. But no matter what the sexual direction of homophilia may be, all male relations in Troy work to the detriment of the females.⁵⁹

The certain failure, the disaster of heterosexual relations that is the Trojan War story enforces a presumptive preference for homosocial configurations in this text. After Ulysses reveals a shameful (heterosexual) reason for Achilles' withdrawal from the fighting—"'Tis known, Achilles, that you are in love/With one of Priam's daughters" (3.3.193-94)—he tries to reenlist the hero with this rich apothegm: "And better would it fit Achilles much/To throw down Hector than Polyxena" (3.3.206-7). Ulysses' homoerotic goad to manly action, a replay of Hector's to the Greeks, is quickly seconded by Patroclus:

PATROCLUS: A woman impudent and mannish grown
Is not more loath'd than an effeminate man
In time of action. . . .

Sweet, rouse yourself.

(3.3.216-21)

Sedgwick's point about a male heterosexuality that eclipses women is especially relevant to Achilles, who conducts a secret affair with Priam's invisible daughter Polyxena but a fairly public dalliance with Patroclus "upon a lazy bed the livelong day" (1.3.147). Achilles' ambivalent sexuality (addressed with the required anti-feminist injunction) completes and complements Hector's chivalric evacuation of heterosexuality in the love challenge. What is defined as "effeminate" here is passivity, but that is the very thing that marks Achilles' heterosexuality: for his female beloved, Polyxena, has made him pledge his withdrawal from the wars. Love for women is shameful and prevents fighting; love for men is glorious and demands it, as Patroclus here (and later, by his death) calls Achilles back to the battle. Whereas both Hector's and Achilles' heterosexual relationships end in separation, the two greatest warriors end with one another, in a kind of homosocial cosummation.

The desire for communion with men in a military or sexual context may have an inward-turning, self-directed valence to it. As a result of his colleagues' entreaties, Achilles expresses a physical need to see his counterplayer, but the terms of his desire suggest something disturbing about its nature and perhaps its historical formation:

ACHILLES: [ . . . ] I have a woman's longing,
An appetite that I am sick withal,
To see great Hector in his weeds of peace,
To talk with him, and to behold his visage,
Even to my full of view.

(3.3.236-40)

Achilles conceives of his desire as feminine (and thus of course debilitating) but describes it suggestively in narcissistic terms. He hungers to see Hector in his own condition, unarmed, entented; it is an essentialist and emulous desire, bent to fit a narcissistic frame. Emulation, that conflictual loss of difference, is itself narcissistic—a social model of relations that turns outward only to feed inward, a self-obsessing, self-promoting, and self-destroying infinite regression or motivational loop. The emulous desire is for the self to resemble another that it already resembles by virtue of the very desire. And while both terms, emulation and narcissism, signify a destructive imitation, they also allude to a problematic structure of love. If there is a psychological point in this play on the continuum between homosocial and heterosexual desire, an interstice where Achilles resides, it is the vortex of emulous narcissism, in which the male can conceive of himself as female (via the male other) in order to respond completely to a self-directed need. Male narcissism in the text is a cognate of homophilia that parodically depends on a heterosexual view of relations.⁶⁰

The exigencies of imitative narcissism also suggest an account of chivalry, which provides male participants with the kind of reflective self-gratification that females, by definition, cannot achieve. When Hector and Ajax finally meet for their knightly duel, Aeneas explains to Achilles that "this Ajax is half made of Hector's blood;/In love whereof, half Hector stays at home" (4.5.83-84). Achilles instantly understands the fight in erotic terms: "A maiden battle, then? O, I perceive you" (4.5.87). These warriors will draw no blood from one another, and so will remain unpenetrated, maidenly. Narcissism too is maidenly, foreclosing consummation. Hector's reluctance to fight his cousin-german Ajax a l'outrance is not an incest taboo so much as a way of preserving and enclosing the image of the self in the enemy ("Let me embrace thee, Ajax./By him that thunders, thou hast lusty arms"; 4.5.134-35). Hector's chivalric acts are fully emulous and homophilic; his meetings with Achilles, then, have the symbolic density of self-encounter about them. In Troilus and Cressida, the chivalric and the narcissistic merge when the armies come passionately together, pitched in their extremity toward a mutually glorifying violence. The warriors are mirror lovers in arms—rivals in love. . . .

Unlike English wars fought under the aegis and for the glory of the queen (the Armada, for example), Shakespeare's Trojan War—like the interminable Irish guerrilla conflict—progressively loses the ideological, erotic focus it once had, and thus the protective mantle of "cause" as well. This Troy finally discards the inspirational fiction of a central female figure, an Elizabeth, a Helen, or a Cressida. The latter two caricatural antitypes of the queen are portrayed as deeply flawed and wholly contingent upon external (strictly male) valuation and control. If this portrait sketches a courtier wish, it also expresses an orientational shift in fin de siècle politics. Just as the Trojan men of chivalry are disinclined to protect or preserve Cressida, Elizabeth's best men—Essex and Cecil—were in the late 1590s already making secret overtures to the male monarch in Scotland. The queen was vanishing. Male bonds were forming that covertly circumvented the female monarch at the end of her reign.⁷⁹ The overcoming of feminine presence, will, and influence is a prominent movement of the last act of Troilus and Cressida, and it is played on both sides. Cressida is abandoned by Troilus, who never once voices a desire to regain her; instead, he wants Diomedes to "pay the life thou ow'st me for my horse" (5.6.7).⁸⁰ Her strategy of delayed gratification fails miserably with brutish Diomedes, the new antichivalric courtier.⁸¹ Polyxena, the absent feminine principle (the woman as cipher), cannot block Achilles from battle once Patroclus dies. The Greek hero plunges back into the fray and cancels the last vestige of female influence in Troy, thus articulating Essex's deepest desires in the Irish campaign: to be engaged in warfare without being subject to the dominion of a woman. Instead, every woman in the play is herself subjected—to the whims, lusts, negligence, or fury of courtiers. Helen, reduced by Troilus to a "theme of honour and renown, / A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds" (2.2.200-201), disappears from the play entirely in the third act. She emerges only as a reference after that, and a hated one: "Name her not now, sir," Menelaus warns Hector, "she's a deadly theme" (4.5.180).

The play registers the absence of female power, mediating between the fact and the fantasy of a profound, ongoing diminution of Elizabeth's potency; but Troilus and Cressida always blames the aristocracy for the world's disasters. Courtiers' narcissism becomes endless, shared self-immolation: "No space of earth shall sunder our two hates," Troilus spits (5.10.27). The factionalized Greeks encode a critique of Elizabeth's failed political manipulations, but they more directly evoke the paralyzing self-interest of the Essex and Cecil groups. The Trojans manifest the self-deceptive vogue of revivified knighthood in the queen's reign, but the woman, the supposed object of their destructive exercises, cannot be faulted for the attention (such as it is). The text's insistence upon the determining force of homicidal homosocial relations dismantles the potentially subversive contraption of its own historical referentiality.

But Troilus and Cressida is always deconstructing its subversions. Its exiguous relation to contestation stems from the thorough redundancy of that act in a political landscape lacking a clear authority; there is nothing, or not enough, to subvert. Both Troy and England lie paralyzed in a chasm between ideologies, without effective symbolic organizations of political value.⁸² If ideology has a perceptual, even heuristic function, it bestows but also requires a focal point, a way of assimilating (possibly mystifying or subsuming) the relevant data of cultural upheaval and social disorientation.⁸³ Such a point of focus is absent not only from the Trojan War; it was also rapidly dematerializing in the last years of Queen Elizabeth's reign.

The fall of Ilion and the scattering of the Grecian lords occur sometime beyond Pandarus' infectious epilogue; those events are not far off, but neither are they staged. Troilus and Cressida holds the conclusion of this tale in abeyance because a substitute version of authority—the only hope against the epidemic of disintegration—was yet to arrive. When it did, in 1603, the worst outbreak of the bubonic plague in forty years came with it.

Notes

¹ Thomas Wilson, The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600, ed. F.J. Fisher, Camden Miscellany, vol. 16 (London, 1936), 34. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

In 1596, an envoy of the Venetian ambassador wrote of his reception in England: "I noticed that in this country they are in great alarm about the enemy; they will not allow anyone to enter who is not quite well known and who has not been thoroughly examined"; Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1592-1603 (London, 1897), 236; hereafter cited as CSPV.

² Some of England's rare attacks were conceived as preventive, defensive measures. Thomas Birch quotes a state paper (The advantages, which her majesty hath gotten by that, which hath passed at Cadiz . . . 1596) that begins: "Her majesty being threatened to be invaded, hath like a mighty and magnanimous prince sent her navy and army to offer her enemy battle at his own door"; Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols. (London, 1754; reprint ed., New York, 1970), 2:47.

³ Quoted in George P. Rice, The Public Speaking of Queen Elizabeth I (New York, 1951), 96. It is likely that the speech was not delivered in this precise form; its textual origins are rather shady. In "The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury," Susan Frye illuminates England's ideological and nostalgic investment in—and possible construction of—the Tilbury story. I thank Professor Frye for allowing me to see her essay in manuscript.

⁴ R. B. Outhwaite asserts that "almost every year after 1588 produced fears of invasion"; see "Dearth, the English Crown, and the 'Crisis of the 1590s,'" in Peter Clark, ed., The European Crisis of the 1590s (London, 1985), 23-43; 24.

⁵ All quotations from Troilus and Cressida are from the Arden edition, ed. Kenneth Palmer (London, 1982).

Cressida's defense of her "belly," like Elizabeth's, is a defense of the womb; see OED, s.v. "belly."

²⁹ Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), 255.

³⁰ Edward Said, "The Text, the World, the Critic," in Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), 161-88; 184.

³¹ No less an authority than Elizabeth's historian, William Camden, skeptically dismantled the historicity of "Brutus":

Geffrey Ap Arthur Monmouth, foure hundred yeares ago, was the first . . . that to gratifie our Britains produced unto them this Brutus, descended from the gods, by birth also a Trojane, to bee the author of the British Nation. . . . Furthermore . . . very many out of the grave Senate of great Clerks . . . agree joyntly in one verdict, and denie, that ever there was any such in the world as this Brutus: also, that learned men of our owne country, as many, acknowledge him not, but reject him as a meere counterfet.

Britain; or, a Chorographicall Description of. . . England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1637), 7.

It must be mentioned that the myth of Trojan origins dies hard. Camden's boldness is temporized by this ironic afterthought: "For mine owne part, let Brutus be taken for the father, and founder of the British nation; I will not be of a contrary mind" (8).

³² For Shakespeare, the foundations of the Troy story are medieval; his most important sources, with the exception of Chapman's Homer, are John Lydgate, Chaucer, and William Caxton. Caxton is particularly prominent in the literary history of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, given his status as the bearer of English culture—chivalric culture—into print. Indeed, an important source text for the play was also the first book printed in English: Caxton's translation of Raoul Lefevre's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1474), a compendium of knights and courts, tournaments and challenges.

³³ Maurice Hugh Keen, "Chivalry, Nobility, and the Man-at-Arms," in C. T. Allman, ed., War, Literature, and Politics in the Late Middle Ages (Liverpool, 1976), 32-45; 33, 45. Keen's convincing arguments about the chivalric ethic, which he develops more fully in Chivalry (New Haven, 1984), have helped shape my understanding of the Renaissance chivalric code and its transgressions.

³⁴ See Norman Council, "Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and the Transformation of Tudor Chivalry," English Literary History 47 (Summer 1980): 259-75; 261.

³⁵ Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry (London, 1981), 167.

³⁶ Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,'" Representations 2, (Spring 1983), 85. Montrose has skillfully charted the overlapping trajectories of politics and sexuality in the Elizabethan court, and often it is best simply to recontextualize his insights, as I do here. My reading of Troilus and Cressida is in part an attempt to extend the chronological and thematic field of his observations so as to show the increasing ineffectiveness of the sexual and political mechanisms by which the Elizabethan court maintained its dangerous balance. On the changing atmosphere of later Elizabethan chivalry, see also Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (London, 1977), 117-62; and Stephen Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," Genre 15 (Spring/Summer 1982): 41-48.

³⁷ Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," 41.

³⁸ Early in the reign, in a speech to Parliament, she said to the Commons "that, though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all"; cited in Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Eliza, Queene of shepheardes' and the Pastoral of Power," English Literary Renaissance 10 (Spring 1980): 153-82; 156. This pronouncement was both reassuring and somewhat defiant in 1563, because for several years advisers had already been urging marriage and motherhood for the sake of the succession; at the beginning of Elizabeth's career, then, the maternal metaphor was exculpatory. But when the queen was older and the nation was without hope of a direct heir, there was less stake in seeming motherly. In her last address to Parliament, she rephrased her early devotion, excising the maternal trope: "And though you have had and may have many mightier and wiser Princes sitting in this Seat, yet you never had nor shall have any that will love you better"; "Queen Elizabeth's Speech to Her Last Parliament," in Arthur Kinney, ed., Elizabethan Backgrounds (Hamden, Conn., 1975), 335.

It would seem that the only subjects who could still be receptive to the queen's erotic maternalism were generational contemporaries. In William Cecil's last letter (10 July 1598), the bed-ridden counselor writes to his son of the queen's recent solicitude: "Let her Majesty understand how her singular kindness doth overcome my power to acquit it who, though she will not be a mother, yet she showed herself by feeding me, with her own princely hand, as a careful nurse. And if I may be weaned to feed myself I shall be more ready to serve her on the earth"; quoted in Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (New York, 1960), 545. The royal distance from sexual and maternal roles is apparent, but so is the abiding power of those roles. Cecil's caution about the mode of feeding quietly betrays his own undying hopes for Elizabeth's maternality ("though she will not be a mother") even as it recognizes the need to be weaned from such intimate and unconsummated hopes back into a position of subordination and service.

³⁹ Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 112: "The strength of the Elizabethan image lay in its capacity to be read and re-read many ways and never to present a single outright statement which left no room for manoeuvre, as did its successors in the new style." Montrose also notes that "as virgin, spouse, and mother, Elizabeth gathered unto herself all the Marian attributes"; "'Eliza,'" 156. See also his incisive, comprehensive discussion of Elizabeth's mediation between erotic and maternal selfpresentations in "'Shaping Fantasies,'" 79-80.

⁴⁰ George Peele, Anglorum Feriae, in David H. Home, ed., The Life and Minor Works of George Peele, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1952), 1:265-75, lines 332-33.

⁴¹ Ralegh is given as the source of this quotation in the Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 22 vols. (New York, 1908), 5:881. Hereafter cited as DNB.

⁴² Louis Adrian Montrose, "Gifts and Reasons: The Contexts of Peele's Araygnement of Paris," English Literary History 47 (Fall 1980): 433-61; 440.

⁴³ The court included a very few other women, and Elizabeth insisted upon veto power over all of her favorites' marriages. Essex circumvented this power when he wed secretly in 1590, and temporarily fell from favor because of it; Ralegh was imprisoned in 1592 for his covert marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton. See Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies,'" 79; and Neville Williams, All the Queen's Men: Elizabeth I and Her Courtiers (New York, 1972).

⁴⁴ Lawrence Stone describes these delaying tactics as the "policy of masterly inactivity and politic temporizing [which] was a brilliant success insofar as it staved off the civil wars which were tearing apart large areas of contemporary Europe"; The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (New York, 1972), 78.

⁴⁵ For a useful introduction to some of the recurring themes and tropes of the tournament and tilt performances, see Frances Yates, "Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts," in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975; reprint ed, 1985), 88-111.

⁴⁶ Richard McCoy has argued convincingly that the earl of Essex's spectacular chivalric self-presentations at Accession Day tilt events were dangerously contentious. Essex's 1595 tilt device, an extraordinarily selfaggrandizing (and thus self-canceling) argument for his outstanding capacity for service, so upset Elizabeth that she left immediately after the performance. See "'A Dangerous Image': The Earl of Essex and Elizabethan Chivalry," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (Fall 1983): 313-29. . . .

⁴⁷ Hector's challenge, unlike its antecedents in the Troy legends, is utterly superfluous to the war. At the beginning of book 7 of the Iliad the gods impel Hector to deliver a single-combat offer so as to stop the bloodshed for one day. In William Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, ed. H. Oskar Sommer (London, 1894), 603, Hector and Achilles consent to single combat to prevent any further loss of life. The chivalric challenge and defense of the lady are Shakespeare's inventions, as Robert K. Presson notes; Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" and the Legends of Troy (Madison, Wis., 1953), 33.

⁴⁸ See Sara P. Watson, "The Queen's Champion," Western Reserve Bulletin, n.s. 3 (1931): 65-89.

⁴⁹ Eric Partridge does not cite these lines, but he does say that come suggested orgasm in Shakespeare's day. However, he confirms my sense of the passage with his definitions of sunburnt and lance; Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York, 1960), 138, 198.

⁵⁰ See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), 270-309.

⁵¹ I owe this point to M.M. Burns's fine reading in "Troilus and Cressida: The Worst of Both Worlds," Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 105-30.

⁵² Partridge, Shakepeare's Bawdy, 198

⁵³ This point is made by Neil Powell in "Hero and Human: The Problem of Achilles," Critical Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 17-28.

The lovers' relationship is reviled by the Greek council, but not for sexual reasons; the políticos are angry only that Achilles, and "with him Patroclus / Upon a lazy bed the livelong day / Breaks scurril jests" (1.3.146-48), and mocks what is left of Grecian authority. Thersites views the lovers as "preposterous," but he is scarcely a touchstone for acceptable social activity.

⁵⁴ René Girard, "The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida," in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York, 1985), 199. He is referring here to Helen.

⁵⁵ Arthur Percival Rossiter first noticed this "knavish device of aural ambiguity"; Angel with Horns, ed. Graham Storey (London, 1961), 133.

Many commentators have eloquently decried the rampant antifeminism in the play. See Katherine Stockholder, "Power and Pleasure in Troilus and Cressida; or, Rhetoric and Structure of the Anti-Tragic," College English 30, no. 7 (April 1968): 539-54: "Troilus and Pandarus equally enjoy the masculine joke which derives from the uncourtly tendency to treat women only as sex objects. . . . Their banter forms a kind of inverted Restoration Comedy; rather than mask tender feeling with worldly cynicism, it uses the tender courtly role to mask cynical detachment" (541). See also Grant Voth and Oliver Evans, "Cressida and the World of the Play," Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 231-39.

⁵⁶ For the homoerotic frame around heterosexual relations, see Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex," in Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975), 157-210.

⁵⁷ Girard seems several times on the verge of acknowledging the homoerotic as a central element if not the point of the proceedings: "Troilus needs the admiring look of other men. .. . It always takes other men to make an erotic or a military conquest truly valuable in the eyes of the conquerer himself; "Politics of Desire," 193. But he seriously underestimates the potent homoerotic nature of jealousy in this text.

⁵⁸ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), 20, 33, 36. See also Sedgwick's criticism of Girard's mimetic desire model (21-25).

⁵⁹ This fact can be dramatically startling. For instance, Troilus and Pandarus enjoy their traffic in woman, the Cressida business, as a way of honing and fulfilling their mutual desires. Cressida's tryst with her lover ends abruptly in act 4, scene 2, when her uncle arrives to mock her. Upset at his intrusion, she utters a halfknowing, haunting understatement: "I shall have such a life" (4.2.22). Troilus and Pandarus soon share a dirty joke at her expense; some thirty lines later, word comes of her exchange for Antenor.

⁶⁰ See Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in James Strachey, trans, and ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London, 1957), 14:73-102. Freud allows for a "normal" narcissism that is not a perversion but rather "the libidinal complement to . . . the instinct of self-preservation" (73-74). Elsewhere he emphasizes the homoerotic character of the disorder (if in fact it is a disorder). Denis de Rougemont explicates the entire courtly romantic ethos as a transformation of self-love, although without the homoerotic overtones: "The passion of love is at bottom narcissism, the lover's self-magnification, far more than it is a relation with the beloved. . . . Passion requires that the self shall become greater than all things"; Love in the Western World (reprint ed., New York, 1961), 260.

⁷⁹ See James McManaway, "Elizabeth, Essex, and James," in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to F.P. Wilson (Oxford, 1959), 219-30.

⁸⁰ Cressida is abandoned not only by Troilus but, more surprisingly, by Shakespeare; at the end of the play, she becomes unknown, unknowable, her last words a letter we never hear because Troilus destroys it ("no matter from the heart," he presumes for us at 5.3.108). The playwright, in this way, conspires to abscond with the captive Cressida's selfhood. It is the soldier's mode to deny the woman her motivational dimensions and sympathetic claims, but in Troilus and Cressida, it is ultimately the authorial mode to do so as well. On this point, see Janet Adelman, "'This is and is not Cressid': The Characterization of Cressida," in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner et al. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 119-41.

⁸¹ Like most assertions about individual characters in this perplexing drama, this one must be qualified: Diomedes later adopts the chivalric style. On the widespread characterological inconstancy in the play, see Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art, 317-49.

⁸² For a fine reading of the fissures in Elizabethan ideology exposed by one long-standing problem, the Irish wars, and the Shakespearean representation of those gaps, see Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, "History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V" in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London, 1985), 206-27: "The play offers a displaced, imaginary resolution of one of the state's most intractable problems" (225). By the time of Troilus and Cressida, no resolution, imaginary or otherwise, seemed possible.

⁸³ "It is . . . the attempt of ideologies to render otherwise incomprehensible social structures meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them, that accounts both for the ideologies' highly figurative nature and for the intensity with which, once accepted, they are held"; Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 193-233; 220.