SOURCE: “In Defense of Cressida: Character As Metaphor,” in Women's Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1980, pp. 1-17.

[In the following essay, Okerlund analyzes the reassessments of Troilus, Cressida, Ulysses, and Pandarus that have occurred continuously since Troilus and Cressida was first produced, and concludes that our final judgment of these characters should be that none is evil or good in his or her own right, but that all are embodiments of human nature.]

Fashions in literary criticism change. Not only do the theoretical stances shift from the new criticism to contextualism to Freudianism to historicism to formalism to Marxism to the newly-heralded reader-response criticism (to restrict examples to only a few decades of the twentieth century), but the sense of the meaning, or achievement, of an individual literary work can change just as dramatically. Perhaps no work better illustrates this critical reality than Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Until well into the twentieth century, something of a consensus of interpretation existed—particularly regarding characterizations in this drama: Cressida was a prostitute deserving only scorn for the evils she perpetrated (a character assessment corroborated by citations of her Renaissance reputation),¹ Troilus was a naive, but honorable young knight abused by that disreputable, fickle woman (corroborated by theories of courtly love),² and Ulysses was a wise and respected philosopher expounding ideals of order and degree necessary for society's survival and prosperity (corroborated by quotations from E.M.W. Tillyard).³ That is not to say there were no problems. The critical spirit was kept sprightly by confusion about genre (the title page calls it a history, the Quarto's preface a comedy, and Heminges and Condell a tragedy). And there were problems of authorship: not so much who wrote it, but how could he? The bitter, unmitigated, diseased images of Troilus and Cressida do not complement the idealized vision we would like to fantasize about Shakespeare.

Nevertheless, in discussing these puzzlements and despite sometimes dissenting voices, a consensus of the play's conceptual achievement gradually emerged: Shakespeare was opposed to both war and lechery. And the play reflected “a world of value and vision ruled by murderous and senseless time, who, ignorant and inexorable, pursues his endless course of destruction and slavery, cramming up his rich thievery, ‘he knows not how’. The less noble and beautiful seem to win. Time slays the love of Cressid. Hector, symbol of knighthood and generosity, is slain by Achilles, lumbering giant of egotism, lasciviousness, and pride: but all the fires of human nobility and romance yet light Troilus to the last.”⁴

With O.J. Campbell's Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's “Troilus and Cressida,” however, critics were forced to reassess their understanding of this drama.⁵ In pointing out that Troilus did, after all, share the same sensual bed with Cressida, Campbell raised questions about the integrity of the young knight's character and compelled a reevaluation of the play's achievement. And ever since, the journals have been filled with elaborations of the controversey. J.C. Oates agrees with Campbell that Troilus and Cressida constitute a well-matched couple in which “the woman is not inferior.”⁶ Katherine Stockholder further claims that Cressida is a “sex object” cynically used by Troilus to gratify his lust.⁷ In a psycho-sexual analysis typical of much twentieth century criticism, Jan Kott notes that Cressida was “eight, ten or twelve years old when the war started,” that she and Troilus were “wartime lovers … given just one night,” and that the events of Cressida's life require her “to destroy everything, so that not even memory remains.”⁸ R.A. Yoder reminds us that Cressida's “playful bawdry and sharp passion are commonly found in the speeches of Shakespeare's virginal heroines, Rosalind or Juliet, for example” and her witty quips should not indict her alone of Shakespeare's heroines.⁹ Such sentiments contrast sharply with the earlier condemnations of Cressida which began with John Dryden, the first critic to sniff that not only is this woman left alive, but she is “false, and is not punished.”¹⁰

Troilus has enjoyed a similar reversal of reputation—except that his has moved in the opposite direction. For more than three centuries. Troilus basked in his accolades: G. Wilson Knight praised him for fidelity¹¹ and Frederick Boas for heroism.¹² W.W. Lawrence commended the “ardent, high-spirited boy who gives all the fervour of his idealistic young love to a false and shallow woman, and tastes the bitterest dregs in the cup of disillusion.”¹³ But as the above remarks about Cressida indicate, recent critics have permitted Troilus to share the ignominy, as well as the action, with Cressida.

So, too, critics have composed all possible variations on the Ulysses theme. From Tillyard's canonization to H.C. Goddard's disapprobation,¹⁴ Ulysses has shifted back and forth from saint to villain. Karl F. Thompson sensibly analyzed Ulysses' character as representative of Shakespeare's “insights into the true nature of men engaged in statecraft,”¹⁵ but subsequent articles have reverted to generally one-sided visions—with the majority viewing Ulysses as the philosophical hero representing order and restraint in a world berserk with ego and sex and death.¹⁶

Where do such contradictory interpretations lead us in our understanding of this play? Do they reflect only the relative historical-cultural milieu or the moralistic idiosyncrasies of the individual critic who is interpreting a text? Is the recent defense of Cressida, for instance, related to the changing sexual standards of the twentieth-century—exacerbated, perhaps, by the increasing participation of women in the activities of the world and in the practice of literary criticism (from Dryden on, after all, most critics who have praised Troilus and condemned Cressida have been fairly exclusively male).

Or perhaps Shakespeare's achievement is more complex than we have hitherto perceived. As the preceding summaries have indicated, critics frequently assign Shakespeare's characters to stereotypical categories: Cressida is either a deceitful prostitute or sex object, Troilus an ideal lover or passionate playboy, Ulysses a wise philosopher or pragmatic politician. But such assessments overlook the complexity of the play's structure in which the characters interact with each other within the dynamic, shifting social setting created by the war. In following Cressida through the play's action, for instance, we discover that she undergoes a significant change in character—evolving from an innocent young woman with all the intelligence and energy of Shakespeare's comic heroines into a faithless, capricious dissembler. Initially, Cressida possesses the wit, charm, vitality and passion of Rosalind or Portia. But the society in which Cressida lives is immoral and corrupt, and as the action develops, Cressida becomes caught up by the evil that surrounds her. To survive, she not only adopts the evil ways of the world, but ultimately perpetuates corruption herself.

Cressida, in fact, is the central metaphor of the play—reflecting what happens to people who live in this universe of Greeks and Trojans. Beginning with her quite sincere love for Troilus, Cressida is victimized by misfortunes over which she has no control: the war and its attendant malignancies make her its hostage. But once involved in its politics, she no longer suffers as innocent victim but turns into the feminine analogue of Ulysses and Troilus and their compatriots: “What error leads must err” (V, ii, 111).¹⁷ Cressida's role thus incarnates the process of evil in the world, reflecting the method through which perversion extends itself throughout human experience. It is a process that reaches out in ever-widening circles to engulf the formerly innocent. And its progress is continuous with no perceptible beginning and no apparent ending.

The play's structure simulates this process with its beginning in medias res, in the midst of the war caused by Cressida's predecessor Helen, another innocent victim in an on-going quarrel among goddesses. That quarrel, too, produced its ever-widening circles of evil, first engulfing Helen and Paris, then extending to the larger societies of Greece and Troy. Thus, the setting in which Troilus and Cressida find themselves creates irresolvable problems for them. Shakespeare emphasizes that setting with the Prologue, who appears in armor to tell us that the play is beginning in the middle of the war being fought over the “ravished Helen” and the “wanton Paris.” Indeed, the Prologue's unpleasant, negative adjectives establish the atmosphere that will prevail to the end of the play: “orgulous,” “chafed,” “cruel,” “ravished,” “wanton,” “warlike.” His verbs are equally ugly and threatening: “ransack,” “disgorge.”

Another part of the problem is Pandarus, the older uncle who urges his protégés on to sensuality and license. Pandarus ought to protect and preserve his abandoned niece from the dangers of the surrounding war. The kinship is emphasized—pronounced three times by Pandarus himself (I, i, 44; 76; 77) and three times by Cressida and Alexander, who address him as “uncle” (I, ii, 39; 43; 47). But as we all know, Pandarus uses his position to subvert Cressida's honor, and that irony forever underscores Cressida's vulnerability. Both Troilus and Cressida know Pandarus for what he is and denounce his manipulative talents with a directness that contributes to the uneasy tenor of the opening scenes. Troilus complains:

                                         … instead of oil and balm,
Thou lay'st in every gash that love hath given me
The knife that made it.

(I, i, 61-63)

Cressida, too, recognizes her Uncle's vulgarity, but rather than suffer his outrageous and lewd insinuations with traditional feminine submission, she gives as good as she takes. It is Pandarus, however, who always initiates the badinage: when Cressida speaks of Hector, Pandarus interjects, “And there's Troilus will not come far behind him. Let them take heed of Troilus, I can tell them that too … Troilus is the better man of the two” (I, ii, 59-64). Cressida will have none of such nonsense and scoffingly rejects Pandarus' claims, prefacing her remarks, it must be admitted, with an unladylike oath: “Oh Jupiter! There's no comparison” (I, ii, 65). William Hazlitt is quite right about the woman: unlike Chaucer's earlier heroine, Shakespeare's Cressida is not “grave, sober, and considerate.”¹⁸ And the absence of those qualities has caused innumerable critics to ignore her good attributes—her wit, her spiritedness, and her common sense. Her soliloquy at the end of this scene, for instance, reveals a knowledge of human nature that is keen and discerning:

                     … Women are angels, wooing.
Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she beloved knows naught that knows not this—
Men prize the thing ungained 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; ungained, beseech.

(I, ii, 312-19)

Even fairly limited experience with life informs us that Cressida is not far wrong about man's nature. But her insistence on viewing the world as it is, rather than as it ought to be, has ruined her reputation with some critics. Boas, for instance, quotes the above lines as proof that Cressida is a “scheming, cold-blooded profligate.”¹⁹ Yet, her analysis of human relationships hardly differs from the Friar's in Much Ado, who remarks as he plots to reunite Hero and Claudio: “That what we have we prize not to the worth / Whiles we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost, / Why, then we rack the value, then we find / The virtue that possession would not show us / Whiles it was ours” (IV, i, 220-24). Why such insights as the Friar's represent “wisdom” and Cressida's “profligacy” constitutes one of the unexplained mysteries of literary criticism. Perhaps we should evaluate the accuracy of Cressida's analysis in terms of the actions which follow.

Central to those actions, of course, are the deeds of Troilus, who next appears in the Trojan Council arguing for the war. Enough has already been written about honor and reason, as represented by Troilus and Hector, but little has been written about the developing character of Troilus in this scene. Perhaps that is because he is hardly admirable here. His arguments in the Council must be viewed in the context of his earlier actions in the war—actions that were few, indeed. Troilus, we must remember from Act I, Scene i, stayed home while his brothers fought and lamented his frustrations while they shed blood (behavior he shall repeat in Act III, Scene i). During the Council discussion, however, Troilus suddenly becomes the vigorous advocate of pursuing the fight. He turns on Helenus with sarcasm: “You are for dreams and slumbers, brother priest” (II, ii, 37). Yet, we know who has been dreaming. He rejects his brother's deference to reason with contempt:

                     … Nay, if we talk of reason,
Let's shut our gates, and sleep. Manhood and honor
Should have hare hearts, would they but fat their thoughts
With this crammed reason. Reason and respect
Make livers pale and lustihood deject.

(II, ii, 46-50)

Troilus' contempt of reason in a philosophical system that believed the intellect controlled man's physical nature (and reflected man's correspondence with God) should certainly raise questions about the young knight's character. Troilus relies on passion to effect Hector's concession, a passion that fast becomes his identifying characteristic.

When he next appears in the orchard, for instance, his diction reveals a passionate nature that borders on the bestial: “I stalk about her door … give me swift transportance to those fields / Where I may wallow in the lily beds” (III, ii, 9-13, italics mine). Or as his oft-quoted description of love reveals: “This is the monstrosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (III, ii, 88-90). Troilus apparently finds the “expense of spirit” to constitute the totality of possible relationships between men and women. Never does he indicate any perception of a soul or spirit within Cressida's lovely body; indeed, as soon as Cressida admits her love for him, he belittles and distrusts her with doubts about her integrity:

Oh, that I thought it could be in a woman—
As, if it can, I will presume in you—
To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love,
To keep her constancy in plight and youth,
Outliving beauty's outward, with a mind
That doth renew swifter than blood decays!
Or that persuasion could but thus convince me
That my integrity and truth to you
Might be affronted with the match and weight
Of such a winnowed purity in love.
How were I then uplifted!

(III, ii, 165-75, italics mine)

The subjunctive neatly undercuts the possibility of such “uplifting.” Yet at this point in the action, Troilus has no basis for such suspicions, no reasons for his cynicism about Cressida's ability to love. Perhaps his doubts about her sincerity originate in the debauched atmosphere that defines Troy: the leering carnality of Pandarus, the lewd jokes of Helen and Paris. Whatever the source, Troilus' distrust of women certainly causes him to act dishonorably in the succeeding actions. Immediately following his assignation with Cressida, for instance, Troilus reveals embarrassment—or more accurately, shame—at being discovered at her home:

                     … And, my Lord Aeneas,
We met by chance, you did not find me here.

(IV, ii, 72-73)

Paraphrase is always redundant, but past reverences of Troilus as a courtly lover require that we emphasize the meaning of this line: “Hey, fellows, don't tell Daddy where I spent last night.” If he is concerned with propriety, such concern would be unique in this society, a society that accepts Paris and Helen and Margarelon rather uncritically. Troilus does not need to skulk around at night, to hide behind bedroom doors, among these men who proclaim their loves to the world. His conduct toward Cressida, in fact, pointedly contrasts with Hector's love for Andromache, which is boldly announced to the Greek camp in a challenge to combat:

He hath a lady, wiser, fairer, truer,
Than ever Greek did compass 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.

(I, iii, 275-79)

Never does Troilus indicate such pride in the woman he loves. Instead, when Cressida is ordered to the enemy camp, Troilus effectively abandons her. The persuasive Troilus, who earlier had single-handedly argued the entire Trojan Council into submission about retaining Helen, utters not one word in defense of Cressida, but sacrifices her to the expediency of the war effort without protest. Further, at this moment when Cressida surely needs comfort and sympathy, he again insults her integrity with a series of imperatives: “Hear me, my love. Be thou but true of heart” (IV, iv, 60). Eight lines later: “Be thou true, / And I will see thee.” Seven lines later: “But yet, be true.” And later: “But be not tempted.” Cressida is offended, for Troilus' passion is conditional—hinging on “if's” and “but's.” Its imperatives surely recall Cressida's soliloquy: “Achievement is command …” Its sentiments are rather far removed from a love that alters not when it alteration finds.

After such experiences, we can hardly blame Cressida for her subsequent acts in the Greek camp. Abandoned by her father, pimped by her uncle, delivered to the enemy by her lover, dare we censure her for developing strategies to survive in the hostile world? With father, uncle, and lover proven untrustworthy, only the self is left; thus, Cressida turns to her only assets—her wit and personality and sex—to survive among the enemy commanders. Her kissing of the Greek lords provokes Ulysses' contempt (and the subsequent disdain of many latter day critics), but such action simply does not merit Ulysses' conclusion that Cressida is a “daughter of the game.” Desdemona's kissing of Cassio, for instance, never receives comparable criticism. In fact, when Iago objects to such conviviality, we brand him as the malcontent well on the way to villainy. And if we admit some extrinsic evidence from Desiderius Erasmus—not exactly a wanton profligate, himself—Cressida's manner of greeting the commanders would have been viewed by Shakespeare's contemporaries as the usual social custom. In Epistle 98, Erasmus writes to Faustus Andrelinus about his experiences in England:

There is a fashion which cannot be commended enough. Wherever you go, you are received on all hands with kisses; when you take leave, you are dismissed with kisses. If you go back, your salutes are returned to you. When a visit is paid, the first act of hospitality is a kiss, and when guests depart, the same entertainment is repeated; wherever a meeting takes place there is kissing in abundance; in fact whatever way you turn, you are never without it. Oh Faustus, if you had once tasted how sweet and fragrant those kisses are, you would indeed wish to be a traveller, not for ten years, like Solon, but for your whole life, in England.²⁰

Yet Ulysses' claims have been widely accepted as an accurate assessment of Cressida's character. No one notices that Ulysses is the one who urged the kissing in the first place: “Yet is the kindness but particular, / 'Twere better she were kissed in general” (IV, v, 20-21). No one observes that Ulysses asks to participate himself. No one notes that his words as opposed to his actions merely prove that the Greeks subscribed to the double standard, too.

Ulysses' interpretation ought to be questioned—especially since he is not exactly a disinterested observer of this scene. As a Greek commander, he must surely resent the exchange of Antenor for this woman, since the warrior's return to Troy can only strengthen the enemy cause. And considering the trouble Polyxena has been causing, the introduction of Cressida into his camp must seem a terribly poor bargain to the wily commander. Or perhaps Ulysses is merely angered by Cressida's denial of a kiss to him alone of the Greek leaders. Such speculation extends beyond the facts of the text, which never adequately explain the motivation behind Ulysses' hostility toward Cressida, but whatever the motivation, the casual social greeting Cressida bestows on Agamemnon, Nestor, and the others does not warrant the conclusion that

                                         … her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
Oh, these encounters, so glib of tongue,
That give accosting 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.

(IV, v, 56-63)

Too often, I fear, past critics have permitted Ulysses' sharp mind and eloquent rhetoric to seduce them into accepting his words at face value without evaluating their larger context—in this case, the discrepancy between Cressida's actions and Ulysses' interpretation of them.

Swayed by the rhetoric, we have failed to perceive the inconsistencies in Ulysses' logic and the blatant political opportunism that motivates his every action. If his oft-quoted speech on order and degree expresses a philosophical ideal, it also includes exactly the right details to goad Nester and Agamemnon into action:

The large Achilles, on his pressed bed lolling,
From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause,
Cries “Excellent! 'Tis Agamemnon just.
Now play me Nestor, hem, and stroke thy beard,
As he being dressed to some oration.’

(I, iii, 162-66)

A master psychologist, Ulysses manipulates all his victims to achieve his desired ends. He flatters Ajax until the warrior turns into a swaggering, prideful fool, then joins the other Greeks in making fun of the “blockish” dolt—duplicitous behavior that characterizes Ulysses' every deed. His rigging of the lottery whereby Ajax is chosen to meet Hector is another instance demonstrating that honesty does not necessarily pertain to Ulysses' policy.

Such dishonesty characterizes Ulysses' philosophical positions also. When he shifts his attention to Achilles, he taunts the sulking hero with details of Ajax's new-found fame and expounds a facile philosophy about honor:

                     … Good deeds past … are devoured
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done.

(III, iii, 148-50)

This individual who earlier had preached to Agamemnon and Nestor about the immutable certainties that govern man's society on earth now insists that no absolute values exist in this shifting, changing world. Man's worth, Ulysses claims, depends upon “reflection, / As when his virtues shining upon others / Heat them, and they retort that heat again / To the first giver” (III, iii, 99-102).²¹ He convinces the prideful Achilles of this “truth,” but one wonders how readers and critics who are familiar with such antithetical propositions as “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets” (Luke 6:26), can agree with Ulysses so readily. For the wily commander, philosophy is an expediency, a bludgeon to force others into compliance with his will. Philosophical verities—always self-serving—shift with the listener.

Equally self-serving is the over-blown flattery of Ulysses' address to the Greek leaders. He prefaces the order and degree speech with a greeting to Agamemnon as the “great commander, nerve and bone of Greece … most mighty for thy place and sway” (I, iii, 55-60). Those titles should surprise us a bit, since they follow immediately upon Agamemnon's own admission of ineptitude in leading the troops. When Aeneas later enters, Ulysses' flattery creates one of the few genuinely comic moments in this drama, for Aeneas looks directly at the nerve and bone of Greece, asks for the “great Agamemnon” five times, and participates in forty lines of dialogue before he discovers he has been speaking to him all along. The delayed recognition should caution us to be somewhat wary of Ulysses' introductions, at least.

These several examples of linguistic and philosophic agility should raise our suspicions about everything Ulysses says and does. He offers to escort Troilus to Calchas' tent only after he has appraised Troilus as

                                                                       … A true knight,
Not yet mature, yet matchless, firm of word,
Speaking in deeds and deedless in his tongue,
Not soon provoked nor being provoked soon calmed.

(IV, v, 96-99)

“Provocation” is exactly what will result if Troilus observes the meeting between Cressida and Diomedes. Ulysses already knows about Cressida's lover in Troy (IV, v, 289-92), and Troilus' insistence on visiting her tent certainly makes him a likely candidate for that role. But Ulysses is intent on instigating action between the two armies. Thus, he leads Troilus to an ideal vantage point and guides the young man's responses with judicious prompting: first a contemptuous taunt, “She will sing any man at first sight” (V, ii, 10); then some condescending solicitude, “This place is dangerous, / The time right deadly. I beseech you, go.”—advice not likely to be followed by a “true knight / Not yet mature.” When Troilus questions whether this woman was really his Cressida, Ulysses' response is quick, “Most sure she was” (V, ii, 126). The immature knight is no match for the wily commander, and as the ensuing slaughter indicates, Ulysses succeeds in his goal. But success does not necessarily constitute a moral and philosophical ideal. Ulysses, the pragmatic psychologist, should never be mistaken for the philosopher who seeks truth and preaches virtue. In his efforts for the Greek cause, Ulysses panders for war as surely as Pandarus conspires for lechery, and the policy of the crafty swearing rascal, “… that same dog fox Ulysses, is not proved worth a blackberry” (V, iv, 11-12).

Yet it is Ulysses' commentary that has largely created Cressida's reputation. He tells us she is a whore and we believe him. Thus, Cressida reaps all the blame for the Diomedes scene, even though Diomedes is the calculating master of the game the two play. Like a child who threatens to run home if he cannot have his way, Diomedes turns to leave every time Cressida hesitates in fulfilling his demands. Yes, Cressida should reject his advances, but her vulnerable position among enemies makes that expectation rather unrealistic. Throughout this scene, she is obviously torn between Diomedes' ultimata and her memories of Troilus, and even as she hands over the sleeve, she regrets her action (a point usually overlooked in charges against her). Her obvious distress deserves pity more than blame, for she recognizes her iniquity and chastizes herself even before Thersites begins calling her names:

Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind.
What error leads must err. Oh, then conclude
Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude.

(V, ii, 109-12)

Self-knowledge never excuses misdeeds, of course, but it does avoid the hypocrisy of Troilus' egoistic perfidy. Moreover, when Cressida finally acquiesces, she agrees only to meet Diomedes—and that after much vacillation and embarrassing servility: “I prithee do not hold me to mine oath. / Bid me do anything but that, sweet Greek” (V, ii, 26-27). The play ends before the situation resolves itself, but the absence of a conclusion has not prevented Thersites, that most lubricious of voyeurs, and Cressida's other critics from believing the worst. Absolutely, Cressida is fickle and weak in allowing Diomedes to manipulate her, but the action of the text does not justify the collective denunciation she has reaped.

In short, Cressida is no worse (although she is certainly no better) than the other characters of this play. Among the “heroes,” as we well know, are the prideful Achilles, the envious Ajax, the slothful Patroclus, the scurrilous Thersites, the impotent Menelaus, the playboy Paris, the egoistic Troilus, and the wily Ulysses. Everyone in this universe except Hector is corrupt. And Hector is murdered for his virtue. Further, everyone shares in Hector's murder—Troilus who argues him into submission, Ulysses who sets up the combat, Achilles who gives the order, and the Myrmidons who slay him. As Troilus forewarns us, men like Hector must necessarily die in such a society:

When many times the captive Grecian falls,
Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword,
You bid them rise and live.
Hect. Oh, 'tis fair play.
Tro.                                                             Fool's play, by Heaven, Hector.

(V, iii, 40-43)

Fair play produces ugly corpses. That is the fact Cressida faces as she strides into the Greek camp to play the social game according to the rules she has learned from friend and foe. Like Shakespeare's comic heroines, she looks fortune in the eye and faces it down, refusing to give in to the exigencies of a world that is hostile. The problem is that the Greek and Trojan universe contains no green world where man's debilitated life can renew itself. Cressida leaves Troy not to enter the forest of Arden, but a forest of Greek tents filled with debauched, demoralized, manipulative inhabitants. To survive, she resorts to their self-serving, duplicitous, expedient actions.

Thus, the cycle of evil perpetuates itself: “What error leads must err.” And thus, this play which begins in medias res never ends, for Pandarus' final action extends the cycle to the audience, accusing it of the self-same deeds just enacted on the stage. Contemporary Winchester geese merge the fictional world of Helen and Cressida with the real world of seventeenth-century London, reiterating the cyclic history of man wherein each era replicates within its brief moment the recorded tragedies of past human experiences. Nor is there any promise that the cycles will end. Unlike Shakespeare's tragedies, no rational force restores order to the chaotic world. No Fortinbras strides on stage to assume command, no Cassio survives to govern the state. Nor is there an Albany, a Malcolm, or even an Octavius Caesar. Only the self-serving, the self-indulgent, the murderers of Hector remain. And if the audience hisses that fact, its members find Pandarus' rude finger pointing at them.

And that, of course, is Shakespeare's point. For even now—thirty centuries after Troy—self-indulgent men still assert their power by waging wars and annihilating other men. Politicians still manipulate the destiny of their societies—mindless of the deaths of the individuals who comprise those societies. “Honor” still remains synonymous with military victory and worldly fame and narcissistic pride. “Love” still masks sexual gormandizing. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare points out the perversion of such traditional and unexamined attitudes by turning art into a literal mirror of life—a mirror reflecting images of the vices that pass for virtue in society. And if we miss that point, the epilogue explicitly tells us that all the time we have been watching Troilus and Ulysses and Cressida and Pandarus, we have been looking at ourselves:

           … If you cannot weep, yet give some groans,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,
Some two months hence my will shall here be made.
It shold be now, but that my fear is this—
Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.
Till then I'll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeath you my diseases.

(V, x, 50-57)

Small wonder this play has seldom been staged and is read only in college classrooms, for it compels a reassessment of social and personal morality that most of us prefer to avoid. As victims of the satire, we want to escape its accusations or, at least, ignore them in hopes that they will go away. Certainly, literary criticism has reflected exactly this impulse. In villainizing Cressida, it has offered a scapegoat to excuse the continuing evils of society—without bothering to search out the causes of such evils. In adopting Ulysses as philosophical spokesman, it has embraced his techniques without challenging the duplicities of his rhetoric and logic. My own neglect of Thersites in this discussion, in fact, may derive not so much from the necessity to keep the manuscript to a reasonable length as from the greater necessity to avoid admitting that he is one of us—perhaps is us. But perhaps we have also reached a point in history where we can look at the characters and actions of Troilus and Cressida head-on. Perhaps we have caught up to Shakespeare's vision in 1600 and can examine the evils of society as they actually exist. If we can face those truths honestly, we may begin to correct our human imperfections. Some day, we might even be able to contemplate the play's ending without hissing.

Notes

1. Hyder Rollins in “The Troilus-Cressida Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare,” PMLA 32 (1917), 382-429, summarizes the few positive and many negative references to Cressida in Renaissance literature.

2. See, for instance, Mary Ellen Rickey, “'Twixt the Dangerous Shores: Troilus and Cressida Again,” SQ 15 (1964), 4, an article which commends Troilus as “traditionally the near-perfect lover, [who] chooses an object unworthy of his affections and so loses reason and happiness.”

3. The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Random House, n.d.) uses the order and degree speech of Ulysses as the quintessential summary of Renaissance philosophy.

4. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays (1930; rpt. London: Methuen, 1956), p. 71.

5. Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, CA.: Huntington Library, 1938).

6. “The Ambiguity of Troilus and Cressida,” SQ 17 (1966), 149.

7. “Power and Pleasure in Troilus and Cressida, or Rhetoric and Structure of the Anti-Tragic,” CE 30 (1969), 541.

8. Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Boleslaw Taborski, trans. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 71-73.

9. “‘Sons and Daughters of the Game’: An Essay on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Sh S 25 (1972), 22.

10. “Troilus and Cressida, ‘Preface: Containing the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy’,” quoted from Essays of John Dryden, W. P. Ker, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), I, p. 203.

11. The Wheel of Fire, p. 62.

12. Shakspere and His Predecessors (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896), p. 373.

13. Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (Baltimore: Penguin, 1960), pp. 130-31.

14. The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 397-408.

15. “The Unknown Ulysses,” SQ 19 (1968), 128.

16. In a recent article, Hawley C. Taylor elevated Ulysses into a Stoic “model of ideal behavior, the complete homo viator.” “The Stoic Philosophy and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” San Jose Studies 4 (February 1978), 90.

17. All quotations are from Shakespeare: The Complete Works, G. B. Harrison, ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).

18. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, P.P. Howe, ed. (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930), IV, 224.

19. Shakspere and His Predecessors, p. 375.

20. The Epistles of Erasmus from His Earliest Letters to His Fifty-first Year Arranged in Order of Time, Francis Morgan Nichols, trans. (1901; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), I, 203.

21. G. B. Harrison cites this speech (III, iii, 95-215) as “the best possible advice to Achilles, reminding him of the universal truth—the touch of nature that makes the whole world kin—that men always follow the newest fashion and soon forget the old,” Shakespeare: The Complete Works, p. 976.