SOURCE: "'Still Wars and Lechery': Shakespeare and the Last Trojan Woman," in Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, edited by Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich and Susan Merrill Squier, The University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 25-42.

[In the following essay, Helms compares earlier versions of the fall of Troy including the Iliad, the Trojan Women, and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde to Shakespeare 's Troilus and Cressida and examines the eroticization of violence and the militarization of Cressida's sexuality in Shakespeare's play.]

Concidit virgo ac puer.
Bellum peractum est.—Seneca, Troades

Throughout Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Thersites' bitter cry echoes and reechoes: "Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion" (5.2.194-95). It is a cry from which Shakespeare scholars long turned in disgust, dismissing Troilus and Cressida as vicious and cynical, a cruel misrepresentation of both Homer's heroic warriors and Chaucer's courtly lovers. For commentators who have turned to Troilus and Cressida in the aftermath of twentieth-century wars, the play has become a "great dispute about the sense and cost of war, about the existence and cost of love"; its action seems "all part of the game of war" and its arguments "all ceremonies of rededication to the code that maintains the war." On the eroticized battle-fields and in the militarized bedchambers of Troilus and Cressida, we have come to see the bleak and violent sexuality our world has bred from martial pomp and circumstance.¹

Yet Shakespeare's "great dispute about the sense and cost of war, about the existence and cost of love" rises from the traditional discourse of the Trojan War. Even in its earliest literary formulations, the "matter of Troy" was distant and mythical, without fixed ideological content. When, in the later tradition, Rome and London fancifully traced their ancestry to the vanquished Trojans rather than the victorious Greeks, they could celebrate neither the rape of Helen nor the fall of Troy as a nationalistic exploit of martial prowess. Nor had the legends ever fully silenced the voices of the Trojan women. Even through the mediated texts of Homer, Euripides, Virgil, and Chaucer, the Trojan women speak of contradictions in the narrative and dramatic representation of war. This "matter of Troy" is the prehistory of Troilus and Cressida. It is not by devaluing but by assimilating it that Shakespeare arrives at his bitter appraisal of "wars and lechery."

The Iliad has served men as a monument to martial glory. It represents a masculinist world in which women are at best the mothers of heroes; at worst, slaves and war prizes.² The separate spheres of men and women are divided by the gates through which Troy's warriors go to confront the Greek invaders.³ But the violence of war cannot be cordoned off; it threatens to spill from the field to the polis and from the polis to the oikos where the Trojan women wait. In Book 6, Hector returns from the battlefield to find Andromache mourning at the city wall. She offers advice to resolve "the pain of the warrior's role, of the man who, on behalf of his family must leave his family, so that his very defense of them becomes a betrayal":⁴

Please take pity upon me then, stay here upon the rampart,
that you may not leave your child an orphan, your wife a widow,
but draw your people up by the fig tree, there where the city
is openest to attack, and where the wall may be mounted.

[6.431-34]

Andromache's strategy would not keep Hector from battle, but from the forefront of battle where personal danger and hence personal glory are greatest.⁵ She asks him to fight defensively, to shore up the weakness of the ramparts and protect the citadel. Hector rejects her plan: he must "fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans / winning for my own self great glory, and for my father" (6.445-46).

With the Greek army camped before Troy, Andromache does not challenge the war's necessity. Yet her intervention exposes the disjunction between the motive and the pretext for war. For Andromache, dominance and submission are not sources of glory and shame, but the terms of destruction or survival. Her advice to Hector initiates a challenge the Trojan women will repeatedly offer to the Homeric warriors. They do not counsel pacifism, but defense. Their fugitive and cloistered warfare does not sally forth to meet its adversaries. But neither does it respect chivalric rules of combat. Unlike the ritualized combat through which the Homeric warrior establishes hierarchy, its object is survival, not glory. Andromache fights a woman's war, a guerre à outrance to defend her home and children.⁶

In Homer's narrative, women's voices are audible only in occasional notes of warning and supplication. They are absent from the battlefield and silent in the councils of war. In Euripides' The Trojan Women, however, women's voices resound in the stillness that follows the noise of battle. Euripides transfers the focus from the epic siege of Troy to the tragedy of its sack. He transforms a narrative of the violence that accompanies war into a theatrical representation of the violence that follows it, acknowledging that the oikos has claims as great as the polis on à tragic dramatist's attention. A woman's wartime experience of rape, deracination, and concubinage can, like a man's death in battle, provide a locus of articulate suffering.

For the chorus of The Trojan Women, the aftermath of war is an interstice between marriage and concubinage. No longer the wives of Trojans, they are not yet the concubines of Greeks. As they cross the threshold of the oikos, they respond to the violence in this postwar exchange of women. For Cassandra, in whose own fate marriage, concubinage, rape, and death are interwoven, violence begins to obscure distinctions between male and female experience:⁷

The Achaeans came beside Scamander's
banks, and died day after day, though
none oughtto wrench their land from
them nor their own towering cities.

The Trojans have that glory which is loveliest:
They died for their own country. So the bodies of all
who took the spears were carried home in loving hands,
brought, in the land of their fathers, to the embrace of earth
and buried becomingly as the rite fell due.

[374-76, 386-90]

Through Euripides' metaphors of the embracing earth, the slaughtered Trojan warriors begin to merge with the women who survived them. They participate in the private world of the oikos, emerging from its protective walls only because they must, in self-defense. Their fates are intertwined with their city's; their bodies are bound to the earth that outlasts the battlefield the invaders have erected upon it. In defeat, the Trojans' military stance comes to resemble Andromache's strategy. It is the feminized stance of those for whom defeat means not only dishonor but destruction.

Euripides takes the Trojans' perspective to challenge the xenophobia and androcentrism he locates at the heart of war. When Virgil tells the story of Troy's fall, in Book 2 of the Aeneid, he too takes the Trojans' perspective. The Aeneid is a national epic that serves to create a patriotic prologue for Roman imperialism, and yet the metaphors of Virgil's narrative resonate with Euripides' tragedy. In The Trojan Women, the destruction of the city and its ruler's death are the prelude to rape; in the Aeneid, they are indissolubly twined in a language of sexual violation:

And then, before the very porch, along
the outer portal Pyrrhus leaps with pride;
his armor glitters with a brazen brilliance
he is like a snake that, fed on poisonous plants
and swollen underground all winter, now
his slough cast off, made new and bright with youth,
uncoils his slippery body to the light;
his breast erect, he towers toward the sun;
he flickers from his mouth a three-forked tongue.

 [Pyrrhus] takes up
a two-edged ax and cracks the stubborn gates.
He rips the bronze-bound portals off the hie breach
is vast, a gaping mouth. The inner house
is naked now, the long halls, open; naked,
the private rooms of Priam and the ancient kings.

[2.627-35, 640-48]

As the serpentine Pyrrhus penetrates first Priam's chamber and then his flesh, the king merges symbolically with the feminine citadel. By placing war's cruelest violence in Troy's most private chambers, the Aeneid identifies erotic and military domination, representing the breached walls and the mutilated body as a unified locus of violence.

The eroticized violence of Virgil's description reemerges in recurring analogies between the rape of women's bodies and the conquest of walled cities, analogies from which Renaissance literature creates its "patriarchal territories."⁸ For Shakespeare, the metaphor of Troy's rape serves as an image and archetype of sexual violence. In The Rape of Lucrece, Lucrece stands before a tapestry of Troy's fall after Tarquin has raped her, finding in the images of Troy's ruin the horror of her own. As Sinon came to Priam and betrayed him, so Tarquin came to her: "As Priam him did cherish, / So did I Tarquin; so my Troy did perish" (1541-47). Shakespeare, like Virgil, identifies the citadel with its ruler; he associates the penetration of Troy's defenses with violent sexual penetration. Whatever is besieged, whatever is penetrated, becomes by analogy female. Defensive warfare becomes a feminine enterprise.⁹

Like The Rape of Lucrece, Troilus and Cressida draws on the legends of classical Troy, but the play also explores medieval traditions derived from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer's romance, like Euripides' tragedy, explores women's wartime struggle against rape and concubil nage. In the romance, however, the protocols of courtly love and honor obscure, though they cannot obliterate, the force that drives the Trojan women from the citadel. The violence of war is represented as a symbolic violence for which the Trojan women, with Criseyde as their surrogate, can themselves be blamed.

Criseyde is a composite of two Homeric characters: Chryseis, whom Agamemnon returned to her father, the Trojan priest Chryses, and Briseis, whom Agamemnon took from Achilles after relinquishing Chryseis. For medieval chroniclers, there was "no essential difference between Homeric slave-girls . . . and a medieval lady who could be used as a slave-girl if it seemed militarily desirable";¹⁰ thus Criseyde became a lady of the Trojan court infamous for betraying her lover. Yet the chroniclers do distinguish between slave-girl and lady when they claim that Criseyde freely chose Diomedes for her lover. In condemning Criseyde, they deny the violence of deracination and concubinage.

For Criseyde, unlike earlier Trojan women, it is not the destruction of the citadel that exposes her to the Greeks' rough pleasures. The Trojans themselves trade her to regain Antenor, a valuable prisoner of war. Only Hector challenges this ancient ceremony of war:

"Syres, she nys no prisonere," he seyde;
"I not on yow who that this charge leyde,
But, on my part, ye may eftsone hem telle,
We usen here no wommen for to selle."

[4.179-82]

Hector is shouted down, and the exchange goes forward:

"Ector," quod they, "what goost may yow enspyre,
This womman thus to shilde, and don us leese
Daun Antenor—a wrong wey now ye chese."

[4.187-89]

Although Troy still remains standing at the close of Troilus and Criseyde, violence nevertheless penetrates the citadel at this moment. Criseyde's exchange brings the war into the daily life of the besieged city. The demands of the battlefield determine the values of the marketplace: Criseyde can be bartered as a slave, since she has no other military value. Her expulsion confirms her marginal status. But in exchanging Criseyde for Antenor, the Trojans have forced Criseyde to exchange Trojans for Greeks. From Criseyde's perspective, the exchange exposes the interchangeable roles of her protectors and her assailants. As Criseyde rides to the Greek camp in Diomedes' custody, her Troy, like Lucrece's, perishes.

The exchange of Criseyde anticipates the fate of the other Trojan women, who will pass from the conquered city into the possession of the victorious Greeks. Like the other Trojan women, Criseyde is a victim of the war. But since the force that imposes her fate has been obscured, her strategy for survival can be equated with Helen's ambiguous complicity in violation. Helen can manipulate the patriarchal exchange of women at her pleasure. Criseyde is Helen tamed and conquered, Helen rendered vulnerable to men who may trade and barter her, Helen expelled from the citadel and punished at last for her lawless sexual choices. As a surrogate for the Trojan women, Criseyde obscures the violence of concubinage; as a surrogate for Helen, she invalidates women's power to take the offensive in their own survival. Her vulnerability transforms Helen's aggressive sexual posture into the defensive stance of the Trojan women.

Like Chaucer's romance, Shakespeare's play inserts a Euripidean focus on women's wartime experience into the framework of the Homeric siege. In a theatrical representation, however, Cressida's response first to Troilus's militarized courtship and then to the Greeks' violent eroticism is mediated through an actor's voice and body, not through a Chaucerian narrator who, taking her guilt for granted, explains that she "sory was for hire untrouthe" (5.1098) and excuses "hire yet for routhe" (5.1099). Shakespeare's "Arm'd Prologue" explicitly disavows responsibility for such mediation, noting that the interpretation of a play emerges from the dynamic relation between actors and audience: "Like of find fault, do as your pleasures are, / Now good or bad, 'tis but the chance of war" (Prologue, 22-31).¹¹

The Prologue does not refer to the romance from which the play takes its title. The story of Troilus and Cressida is merely an episode of a war in which the casus belli, "the chance of war," dominates eros. For the chance of war gives time and circumstance their keenest weapons against humanity. Time and circumstance, empowered by violence, turn occasions for love and bravery into furtive moments of pleasure and ignominious rites of domination. Wars and lechery hold fashion, and make battlefields of public and private life.

This world of wars and lechery transforms the traditional contrast between the aggressive masculinity of the Greek camp and the feminized world within the citadel. Shakespeare's Troy takes the political form of a chivalric fraternity that contrasts with the patriarchal hierarchy of the Greek army.¹² But the Trojans too are warmongers. Troilus and Cressida reexamines the tradition that feminizes the Trojans, making Troy participate actively in its own victimization. The Trojans keep Helen, for the Greeks keep Priam's sister Hesione (2.2.80). Greek retaliations follow Trojan raids; Trojan retaliations follow Greek raids. The Trojans' defensive stance merely logs their current military position in a long conflict during which the exchange of women has repeatedly served as a pretext for the circulation of violence.

Violence underwrites the power of every cultural rite and representation in both the Trojan citadel and the Greek camp. The Greeks speak of ending the stalemate; the Trojans speak of ending the siege. Neither can end the interminable agon from which the stalemate and the siege result. Their councils are merely the war's epiphenomena. They display the forms of power that Michel Foucault describes when he inverts Clausewitz's aphorism: "Politics is a continuation of war by other means. . . . The role of political power .. . is perpetually to inscribe [the disequilibrium of war] in social institutions, in economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves of each and every one of us."¹³

In Troilus and Cressida, the political continuation of war assimilates a Machiavellianism that anticipates Foucault's remarks. In the Proheme to The Arte of Warre, translated into English in 1560, Machiavelli argues that war is the foundation of public life and military structure society's best model. Whatever diligence has been employed in civil life "to maintain men faithful, peaceable, and full of the fear of God, in the service of war, it was doubled." In the interests of civic order, military life should be "with all study followed and imitated."¹⁴ Machiavelli's statecraft enables rulers to direct violence with a technician's skill. Yet they can only create order sufficient to continue war by the "other means" of political discourse.

In Troilus and Cressida, the creation of this Machiavellian order is Ulysses' task. His degree speech, sometimes celebrated as Shakespeare's most eloquent statement of "the Elizabethan world picture" of a divinely instituted hierarchy,¹⁵ seems, in its dramatic context, rather to expose the fragility of an arbitrary social structure of power and privilege:¹⁶

 O, when degree is shak'd,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows.

[1.3.101-10]

For Ulysses, "it is not the differences, but the loss of them that gives rise to violence and chaos."¹⁷ He pits the forms of power against the chaos of violence; he creates authority by molding force into shapes that will serve the state. Social structure depends, not on cosmic harmony, but on political power, and political power, as Tudor statesmen recognized, consists of monopolizing violence.¹⁸ Like Machiavelli, Ulysses predicates his statecraft on the art of war. His hierarchical society, with its "specialty of rule," its "primogenity and due of birth," and its "prerogative of age," is a well-organized army.

In the degree speech, Ulysses addresses the leaders of a military expedition. While his subject ostensibly encompasses all arts and sciences, all products and processes of peace, Ulysses' vision, like Machiavelli's, makes military subordination the foundation for social relations. He describes academic communities, civic associations, commercial trade, and, as his instance of familial order, the obedience a son owes his father. These homosocial relationships are all analogues to the military hierarchy that is his real concern. But he ignores entirely one cornerstone of "the Elizabethan world view," the subordination of wife to husband. He silently suppresses the military significance of the hierarchy of gender. A subsequent speech, however, reveals the patriarchal foundation for his militarization of peacetime institutions:

[Achilles and Patroclus] tax our policy, and call it cowardice,
Count wisdom as no member of the war,
Forestall prescience, and esteem no act
But that of hand. The still and mental parts,

That do contrive how many hands shall strike
When fitness calls them on, and know by measure
Of their observant toil the enemies' weight—
Why, this hath not a finger's dignity.
They call this bed-work, mapp'ry, closet-war;
So that the ram that batters down the wall,
For the great swinge and rudeness of his poise,
They place before his hand that made the engine,
Or those that with the fineness of their souls
By reason guide his execution.

[1.3.197-210]

With the petulance of neglected age, Ulysses advocates a gerontocracy. Young men become instruments of violence in the hands of the old, the means by which the power of the elders is maintained. By giving old men the political power to send the young to war, gerontocracy controls violence; by giving them the domestic power to silence and sequester women, it controls eros. Ulysses' hierarchy requires the isolation of the field from the polis and the polis from the oikos. To maintain it, he must keep Achilles in combat; and he must keep Cressida silent, for in her eye, cheek, and lip there is a speech "so glib" (4.5.58) that it seems to challenge his power.

Achilles is Greece's greatest warrior. He is also bisexual, and, when Troilus and Cressida opens, has withdrawn to his tent with his lover Patroclus, mingling military comraderie with sexual companionship. In rejecting the agonistic activity that defines masculinity, Achilles has become as vulnerable to men's judgments as the Trojan women. Unlike the women, Achilles withdraws from the public world voluntarily and temporarily, but in his privacy he too becomes subject to incursions from the public discourse of violence:

Ulysses:  But 'gainst your privacy
The reasons are more potent and heroical.
'Tis known, Achilles, that you are in love
With one of Priam's daughters.
Achilles:  Ha? known?
Ulysses: Is that a wonder?

There is a mystery (with whom relation
Durst never meddle) in the soul of state,
Which hath an operation more divine
Than breath or pen can give expressure to.
All the commerce that you have had with Troy
As perfectly is ours as yours, my lord,
And better would it fit Achilles much
To throw down Hector than Polyxena.

[3.3.191-95, 201-8]

The rationally apprehensible cosmos of the degree speech gives way to a fideistic resolution that further mystifies the power of the state. In capitulating to it, Achilles does "throw down" Hector rather than Polyxena, in a combat more eroticized than his courtship had been. In his desire for battle, Achilles suffers

 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.

[3.3.237-41]

When, during a truce, Hector comes to the Greek camp, Achilles watches him with a still keener passion:

Now Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee;
I have with exact view perus'd thee, Hector,
And quoted joint by joint.

[4.5.231-33]

Achilles' ambiguous sexuality becomes an element in his military power, since his "woman's longing" arms him with intimate knowledge of his adversary's body. Combat is a form of intimacy, for it demands empathy to foresee and forestall the enemies' maneuvers. But the erotic valence of combat becomes particularly lethal in Achilles because he is an androgynous warrior who exploits both masculine strategies for dominance and feminine tactics for survival. Achilles wages a guerre à outrance, killing Hector in an ambush, not in the face-to-face combat to which Hector's chivalric credo restricts him.

Thus concludes the representation of war's eroticized violence. In the parallel representation of lechery's militarized sexuality, the art of war is adapted for the battle of the sexes. There is a Machiavellianism for the citadel as well as the camp. For Machiavelli, only sexual violence can control the feminine power that would otherwise disrupt the state. "Fortune," Machiavelli warns the ruler, "is a woman, and it is necessary, if one wishes to hold her down, to beat her and fight with her" (The Prince, 25). The goddess Fortuna, thus tamed by the man of virtù, grants him power and prestige. Machiavelli's imagery eroticizes political power and military conquest, while sexuality becomes a campaign of conquest, with advances, retreats, feints, strategic and tactical failures and successes.¹⁹ To control Fortuna, the Machiavellian must control the sexuality of those he would govern, weaving and reweaving patterns of eros and domination. When a woman triumphs in the battle of the sexes, Fortuna conquers virtù, to universal disaster. When Helen transforms abduction into conquest, she destroys the Machiavellian structures of erotic domination on which patriarchal hierarchy depends: "This love will undo us all. O Cupid, Cupid, Cupid!" (3.1.110).

Shakespeare's Trojan women retain the defensive roles the literary tradition has given them. Andromache exposes the "bloody .. . intent" (5.3.8) of Hector's martial credo; Cassandra mourns the common ruin of "virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled [eld]" (2.2.104); Cressida, the last Trojan woman, defends herself against the violence of deracination and concubinage. Like the warriors and politicians, she too pits virtù against fortuna. But fortune and virtue operate rather differently for women than they do for men. In women's lives, the acts of Machiavelli's capricious goddess are mediated by her equally capricious worshippers among the warriors and politicians. Virtù, an offensive weapon for Machiavelli's statesmen, devolves into the defensive virtue of female chastity.

Troilus and Cressida's two plots open with this distinction between masculine and feminine virtù. Initiating the war plot, Agamemnon insists that the army must, despite the apparent futility of their seven years' siege, continue actively to pit valor against fortune (1.3.1-30). In his first scene, Troilus also describes a long and wearing siege: "Why should I war without the walls of Troy / That find such cruel battle here within?" (1.1.2-3). Troilus has laid siege to Cressida, as the Greek army has laid siege to Troy, and he too complains of the time involved: "Still have I tarried" (1.1.22). Where wars and lechery hold fashion, cities and women are on the defensive:

Pandarus: You are such a woman, a man
knows not at what ward you lie.
Cressida: Upon my back, to defend my belly,
upon my wit, to defend my wiles, upon my
secrecy, to defend mine honesty, my mask,
to defend my beauty, and you, to defend all
these; and at all these wards I lie, at a
thousand watches.

[1.2.258-64]

Besieged by Troilus, Cressida tries to defend herself by taking the position of abject surrender. She cannot take the offensive in this martial courtship:

 I wish'd myself a man,
Or that we women had men's privilege
Of speaking first.

[3.2.127-29]

Cressida's defensive tactics do not permit a frontal attack. Yet she practices a martial art of love to escape erotic domination, to transform her sexual surrender into a strategic triumph:

Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love,
And fell so roundly to a large confession,
To angle for your thoughts.

[3.2.153-55]

At best, these tactics can camouflage her weakness for a little while, during which the besieged Cressida is, if not "hard to win," at least "hard to seem won" (3.2.116-17). In playing the role of the coquette, Cressida is imitating Helen, the femme fatale who is so "hard to seem won" that she alone, of all the women in Troy, is not vulnerable to the inconsistency of male desire.²⁰

In practicing the martial art of love, Cressida encounters the dangers with which the Machiavellian strategist must contend. If, Machiavelli advises, the statesman remains flexible, he can perfect his control over destiny: "If one could change one's nature with time and circumstance, fortune would never change" (The Prince, 25). But time and circumstance are even more problematic in the wars of love than in the wars of state:

Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she belov'd knows nought that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is.
That she was never yet, that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
Achievement is command, ungain'd, bessech;
Then, though my heart's content firm love doth bear,
Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.

[1.2.286-95]

There is a biological and psychological disparity between men and women that makes Cressida's love for Troilus a source of despair. Cressida, like the warriors and politicians, must move through a wartime world, a universe in continual flux. But men and women experience that flux at different rates. Troilus's desire will be satisfied only too quickly. Cressida can anticipate but cannot alter the course of war or lechery:

 Prithee tarry,
You men will never tarry.
O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off,
And then you would have tarried.

[4.2.15-18]

Cressida's complaint illuminates the course of courtly love: if she wishes Troilus to believe that "Her bed is India" and "there she lies a pearl" (1.1.100), she must lie in it alone.

The chance of war forbids such refinements of thwarted sexuality. Cressida will be sent to the Greek camp, bearing the memory of Troilus's eager return to the homosocial world of war. Ulysses will construct a ceremonial welcome in which the Greek generals, begging kisses from their prisoner, give a courtly color to their sexual demands: "Despite the elaborate courtesy of begging kisses, the Greek generals are taking what Cressida, essentially a captive, has no real power to refuse."²¹ Yet Cressida uses her wit, as she had told Pandarus, to defend her wiles; she eludes the full humiliation Ulysses requires:

 Fie, fie upon her!
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
O, these encounters, so glib of tongue,
That give a coasting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader! set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity,
And daughters of the game.

[4.5.54-63]

Ulysses' ceremony has not silenced the language of Cressida's sexuality. But her initiation into concubinage continues, and she surrenders to Diomedes' sexual blackmail. As surrender becomes her last line of defense, the rest of her banter is realized: she will lie on her back to defend her belly. She will accept concubinage to avoid rape.

Yet concubinage is no defense against the symbolic violence of war. For the victims of power, resistance and collusion may often merge "in the very condition of their survival."²² So, for Cressida, survival demands surrender, and surrender entails collusion. The terms of surrender are to internalize the patriarchal vision of female sexuality:

Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee,
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah, poor our sex! this fault in us I find,
The error of our eyes directs our mind.
What error leads must err; O, then conclude,
Minds sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

[5.2.107-12]

Cressida's capitulation is one of the rare Shakespearean soliloquies for a female character. Her earlier speech, "Women are angels, wooing," fulfills the conventional expectation that a soliloquy represents the character's own interpretation of events. But in this speech, the eye, tongue, and cheek that Ulysses found so "glib" seem silent. Cressida seems instead to speak "the language of the victim," the language in which women join men in blaming women.²³ The eavesdropper Thersites underscores her alienation, ending the scene with a contemptuous commentary: "A proof of strength she could not publish more / Unless she said, 'My mind is now turn'd whore'" (5.2.113-14).

Yet even in speaking the language of submission, Cressida still articulates a subtext of defense.²⁴ She still imitates Helen and tries to "show more craft than love." When Cressida claims Diomedes, as Helen claimed Paris, for her own erotic choice, she is trying to disguise the stance of the victim in the posture of a whore. In this militarized world, where the oikos has become a besieged citadel and the polis an armed camp, where combat is eroticized and eros a struggle for dominance, Cressida pits the art of love against the chance of war. She does not, like Homer's Andromache, offer defensive military strategies nor, like Euripides' Cassandra, distinguish invasion from protection. But, like other Trojan women, Cressida wages a defensive guerre à outrance. From deracination and concubinage, she constructs a strategy for survival, negotiating her way between the patriarchal categories of victim and whore. Yet while the war continues, Cressida will not elude the militarization of her sexuality. It is time to declare a truce for the last Trojan woman.

Notes

¹ Isingle out these quotations from Kott (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 77) and Yoder ("'Sons and Daughters,'" 19), who explicitly identify their responses to Troilus and Cressida with their reactions to twentieth-century wars, but one can trace the rise of the play's critical fortunes in the history of twentieth-century warfare. Burns, "The Worst of Both Worlds," and Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, could also be cited. Feminist critics, including Greene, "Shakespeare's Cressida"; Adelman, "This Is and Is Not Cressid"; and Okerlund, "In Defense of Cressida," have contributed substantially to this reappraisal, though without treating the war theme in detail.

² Redfield, Nature and Culture, 119-27; Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power, 186-90.

³ Arthur, "The Divided World," 20.

⁴ Redfield, Nature and Culture, 123.

⁵ Arthur, "The Divided World," 32.

⁶ Judith Stiehm notes that "Margaret Mead has said there is no society that places women in offensive warfare. She argues that women may be too vicious and too violent for combat because they have traditionally wielded weapons only in immediate defense of the home" (Bring Me Men and Women, 293). See also Huston, "The Matrix of War," and, on Renaissance views of women and war, Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance.

⁷ I am here and throughout this essay indebted to Joplin's analysis of violence in mythical and literary representations of the exchange of women in "The Voice of the Shuttle."

⁸ Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories," 123-47.

⁹ For important discussions of The Rape of Lucrece, see Kahn, "The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece," and Vickers, "This Heraldry" and "'The Blazon.'"

¹⁰ Donaldson, "The Progress of a Heroine," 10-11.

¹¹ While theatrical representation, unlike narrative, provides each character with an advocate, directors have, no less than literary scholars, imposed patriarchal evaluations of Cressida for which Shakespeare's text provides no warrant. For a comparison of Shakespeare's textual cues and twentieth-century directorial choices, see LaBranche, "The Theatrical Dimension."

¹² Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 47; Roy, "War and Manliness," 108-10.

¹³ Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 90.

¹⁴ Machiavelli, The Arte of Warre. I have modernized the spelling and punctuation of this 1560 translation by Peter Whitehorne.

¹⁵ Tiilyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, 7-15.

¹⁶ Elton, "Shakespeare's Ulysses," 98-100; Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 42-43.

¹⁷ Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 51.

¹⁸ Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 96-113.

¹⁹ Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 25; Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman, 94.

²⁰ In "The Politics of Desire," Girard suggests that Pandarus exploits Helen's "erotic prestige" to promote the affair between Troilus and a "bovaryesque" Cressida whom Pandarus manipulates into desiring what she believes Helen desires. In focusing on the "mimetic rivalry" of the male characters, Girard neglects the possibility I wish to bring out here: that Helen is Cressida's model for a role in which she would be less vulnerable to the inconsistency of male desire.

²¹ Yoder, "'Sons and Daughters,'" 20.

²² Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, 82.

²³ Joplin, "The Voice of the Shuttle," 40.

²⁴ The recovery of the subtext is problematic, and this speech has often been interpreted as capitulation tout court. Still, the speech is hardly comprehensible, much less performable, without uncovering some sort of subtext, the most plausible of which, I believe, denies the patriarchal text its traditional hegemony.

Works Cited

Adelman, Janet. "This Is and Is Not Cressid." In The (Another Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Spregnether, 119-41. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Arthur, Marilyn B. "The Divided World of Iliad VI" In Reflections of Women in Antiquity, edited by Helene P. Foley, 19-44. New York: Gordon & Breach, 1981.

Burns, M. M. "Troilus and Cressida: The Worst of Both Worlds." Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 105-30.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by F. N. Robinson. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957.

Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Donaldson, E. Talbot. "Briseis, Briseida, Criseyde, Cresseid, Cressid: Progress of a Heroine." In Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives, edited by Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy, 3-12. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.

Eagleton, Terry. The Rape of Clarissa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Elton, W. R. "Shakespeare's Ulysses and the Problem of Value." Shakespeare Studies 2 (1966): 95-111.

Euripides. The Trojan Women. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York: Random House, 1958. In Vol. 6 of The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. 8 vols. 1956-58.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Girard, René. "The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida. " In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 188-209. New York: Methuen, 1985.

——. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Greene, Gayle. "Shakespeare's Cressida: 'A kind of self.'" In The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 133-49. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

Hartsock, Nancy C. Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985.

Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

Huston, Nancy. "The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes." In The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman, 120-36. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Joplin, Patricia Klindienst. "The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours." Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984): 25-53.

Kahn, Coppe'lla. "The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece." Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45-72.

Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930.

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Translated by Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Doubleday, 1966.

LaBranche, Linda Berning. "The Theatrical Dimension of Troilus and Cressida" Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1984.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Arte of Warre. Translated by Peter Whitehorne. 1560. Reprint. New York: Da Capo, 1969.

——. The Prince. Translated by Mark Musa. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964.

Okerlund, Arlene N. "In Defense of Cressida: Character as Metaphor." Women's Studies 7 (1980): 1-17.

Pitkin, Hannah. Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Redfield, James. Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Roy, Emil. "War and Manliness in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida" Comparative Drama 1 (1973): 107-20.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Stallybrass, Peter. "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed." In Rewriting the Renassance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, 123-42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Stiehm, Judith Hicks. Bring Me Men and Women: Mandated Change at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. 1943. Reprint. New York: Random House, n.d.

Vickers, Nancy. "'The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best': Shakespeare's Lucrece." In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 95-115. New York: Methuen, 1985.

——. "This Heraldry in Lucrece's Face." In The Female Body in Western Culture, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman, 209-22. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Allan Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Yoder, R. A. "'Sons and Daughters of the Game': An Essay on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida." Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 11-25.