[In the following essay, Nass describes Troilus and Cressida as a play which focuses on the search for authentic, individual identity as well as for loyalty and love within the chaos of war.]

Critics of Troilus and Cressida often regard the combat between Hector and Ajax (IV.v.) as a dramatic failure or as yet one more jarring episode in Shakespeare's satiric and unsettling portrayal of the Trojan War. Reuben A. Brower speaks for the majority when he observes, with disappointment, that ‘the effect of the scene is lamely anti-climactic’. Daniel Seltzer confirms this judgment from a theatrical perspective, describing the duel as ‘a red-herring for the director, … dramatically uninteresting compared to other portions of the scene … [and] especially pale compared to the byplay between Achilles and Hector’. T. McAlindon, on the contrary, declares the aborted combat to be an artful ploy and asserts that ‘the anticlimax was part of Shakespeare's whole conception of the play’. The neologisms, Latinate diction, and elaborate conceits so prominent in Hector's speeches are, McAlindon states, deliberate stylistic effects ‘debasing Hector's inherently respectable motive for withdrawal’.¹

On its surface this long-anticipated confrontation indeed seems to come to nothing: Hector's ‘roisting challenge’² and Ulysses' elaborate scheme to lure Achilles back into battle collapse ingloriously in a halfhearted exchange of blows followed by a lusty embrace between the two champions. The combat immediately gains stature, however, if we consider the reasons why Hector refuses to fight Ajax and the implications of his refusal with respect to a problem that afflicts all the characters in this play—the task of satisfactorily establishing identities and loyalties in the confused and confusing world of Troy.³ From beginning to end the combat consistently emphasizes this dilemma by raising it within the framework of the military plot. Then only moments after the duel is over, the love plot depicts perhaps the drama's most striking example of the difficulty characters face in trying to determine identities and loyalties. Led through the Greek camp by Ulysses, Troilus discovers Cressida's liaison with Diomedes and struggles to absolve his beloved of infidelity by postulating, against all logic, the existence of two Cressidas (V.ii. 137-60). The significance of Troilus' metaphysical labors cannot be fully understood, however, without taking the conclusion of the combat into account. There Hector's refusal to divide Ajax into Greek and Trojan parts so that he might kill the Greek half (IV.v. 119-38) provides an ironic—and subversive—contrast to Troilus' futile attempt at dividing Cressida into two different women. Moreover, just before Troilus' speech Cressida resorts to the same device, explaining her own penchant for faithlessness in terms of a divided self that contains two Cressidas (V.ii. 107-12). In many ways, then, the combat is not a dramatic flaw, nor does its only virtue lie in once again defeating audience expectations, although much more needs to be said about precisely what desires are frustrated in this scene. Carefully integrated with the whole of the play, the combat in fact occupies a most unusual status in Troilus and Cressida: it begins by reiterating the impulses and attitudes at the heart of the Trojan conflict, and it ends by challenging them.

The irreverent depiction of the Trojan War in Troilus and Cressida owes much, as is well known, to the medieval and Renaissance texts which denounced its folly and condemned its participants for sacrificing their lives on behalf of a cuckold and his queen.⁴ Rosalie L. Colie has shown that Shakespeare translates this loss of nobility and moral direction into dramatic action by portraying characters who are continually straining to identify friends, enemies, or even lovers. Their persistent questioning of the names and identities of people they ought to know well contributes markedly to the satiric atmosphere of the play by draining actions, people, and epic conventions associated with naming of their once-heroic value and meaning. It is extraordinarily difficult for Greeks and Trojans alike to get their bearings in this war, to act purposefully, or to preserve their sense of who and what they are. Chaos, not glory, reigns in Shakespeare's Troy.⁵

From its first mention in I.iii., the combat involves these problems in ascertaining identities and loyalties. Aeneas delivers Hector's challenge that the Greeks choose—or identify—a champion. But Aeneas does not recognize Agamemnon on seeing him and asks, much to majesty's chagrin: ‘How may / A stranger to those most imperial looks / Know them from eyes of other mortals?’ (I.iii. 223-25). Surprising and comic after seven years of fighting, Aeneas' query is a parody of the highly formal salutation an emissary may be expected to render.⁶ It undermines as well the ancient supposition, both literary and social, that men can readily identify a king or hero by his superior visage. Finally, this inability to discern ‘those most imperial looks’ also undercuts the series of speeches Ulysses and Nestor have just given on the dire consequences of failing to identify and obey one's rightful king and leader. Indeed, when Aeneas cannot single out the king, he strengthens Achilles' contention that Agamemnon has no unique or godlike privilege to command. And the threat Ulysses so vividly describes in his oration on degree—the disorder that erupts when ‘The specialty of rule hath been neglected’ (I.iii. 78) appears one step closer as a result of Aeneas' neglect in identifying Agamemnon.

The basis for Hector's challenge suggests still more about the world of Troilus and Cressida and its values. Focusing on individuals rather than armies, the invitation to single combat reiterates on a personal scale the origins of the Trojan conflict.⁷ Hector presses the enemy to select a champion who will fight for the reputation of his mistress and, by extension, the glory of the Greek camp. Trojan and Greek are therefore to do battle for the same reasons they have been doing battle over Helen: to preserve a lady's honor and that of a nation. In fact, the duel is particularly symbolic of the war because its antagonists are especially representative of both armies. In reprisal for the rape of Hesione, Hector's aunt and Ajax's mother, the Trojans stole away Helen. As Troilus puts the matter when addressing the issue of the war itself: ‘Why keep we her [Helen]? The Grecians keep our aunt’ (II.ii. 80).⁸

During the Trojan debate, from which Troilus' statement comes, the connection between the war and the combat is made explicit. At the outset of the scene Hector proposes that Helen be returned to the Greeks, condemning Paris and Troilus as men led by passion not reason in their desire to continue the bloodshed. But after invoking Aristotle and ‘these moral laws / Of nature and of nations’ (II.ii. 184-85) in support of his position, Hector suddenly withdraws his objections and joins his brothers

In resolution to keep Helen still,
For 'tis a cause that hath no mean dependance
Upon our joint and several dignities.

(II.ii. 191-93)

When Troilus celebrates this decision, calling Helen ‘a theme of honor and renown’ (II.ii. 199), Hector again pledges his loyalty to the Trojans. For several reasons he then alludes to the combat. It is ‘a theme of honor and renown’. It allows him to associate the public cause with the private, the nation's defense of Helen's honor with his own defense of Andromache's. And it provides an opportunity for contrasting the renewed solidarity of the Trojans with the reputed disunity of the Greeks:⁹

                                                                                                    I am yours,
You valiant offspring of great Priamus.
I have a roisting challenge sent amongst
The dull and factious nobles of the Greeks
Will [strike] amazement to their drowsy spirits.
I was advertis'd their great general slept,
Whilst emulation in the army crept:
This I presume will wake him.

(II.ii. 206-13)

‘Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor’. Indefensible by any rational standard, this surprising turnabout necessarily colors responses to Hector, the war, and the combat. As Alice Walker observes: ‘Hector is, indeed, more culpable than Troilus, for he abandons what he knows to be prudent and right to satisfy his own obsession—love of honour’.¹⁰ In repudiating his own appeal to the precepts of natural and civil law, Hector openly deserts the reasonable and just course of action in favor of communal and individual honor, ‘our joint and several dignities’. But his approval of further carnage on behalf of Helen—or the idea of a Helen—cannot blot out his earlier contention that ‘she is not worth what she doth cost / The keeping’ (II.ii. 51-52). As a consequence of the debate, the prestige of the war and its participants is dulled still more. Tarnished as well is the combat, which Hector holds up while committing himself anew to a conflict whose validity he has so severely challenged. As Hector's final pronouncement and the last issue mentioned in the debate, the duel therefore becomes a conspicuous emblem of Troy's morally suspect allegiance to chivalry and honor.

One can, of course, understand Hector's love of fame. One can also sympathize with his change of heart by recognizing, as does R.J. Kaufmann, that ‘people are self-destructive, people are flawed and noble’.¹¹ Indeed, the endorsement of Hector's volte-face by so many readers indicates that in scenes like this Troilus and Cressida is tapping an audience's potential for condoning actions that cannot be justified rationally but nonetheless appeal to powerful emotions such as honor, pride, or nationalism. With Hector again at the center, these ambiguous responses to the war will come directly into play during the combat because its outcome also raises a series of questions about the audience's distance from the passions lying behind the Trojan War.

Up to this point the combat has reflected the preoccupations with love and honor that sustain the war. The duel also brings the problems of ascertaining identities and loyalties into high relief, but it does so by eliminating the confusion these difficulties effect elsewhere in the play. Consequently, the supposed ‘anticlimax’ of this scene, the reconciliation between Hector and Ajax, is in fact a victory over the chaos that efforts at naming and identification usually wreak in Troy. It is a victory as well over the hostility that separates two weary armies in their seven years' conflict over Helen.

This shift in perspective becomes apparent before the two opponents meet. In a distinct departure from the muddle over identities and origins that prevails among Greek and Trojan, all those present at the duel know Hector and Ajax are cousins (IV.v. 83ff.). Given this knowledge, the combatants themselves must weigh family loyalty against national loyalty, and honor gained in a duel against honor lost by failing to respect a blood-relationship. For the moment the ties of kinship prove stronger than the temptation to cross swords. When Hector declares his relationship with Ajax to be of greater consequence than the contest that is a microcosm of the war, he reveals that men may find other principles more compelling than the desire to perpetuate bloodshed. He also shows that by affirming bonds rather than differences, men may discover significant alternatives to battle and slaughter.¹²

Since Diomedes and Aeneas halt the combat before either man is injured, it seems proper to ask just how admirable Hector's decision to cease fighting really is. An emphasis on the degree of violence the duel entails should not detract, however, from its symbolic importance or from Hector's role in stopping it. After hearing Aeneas deliver Hector's challenge, Nestor remarks: ‘Though't be a sportful combat, / Yet in the trial much opinion dwells’ (I.iii. 335-36). In war, he is well aware, any test of prowess speaks loudly. Concern that the reputation of the Greeks would be badly damaged should Achilles lose even this ‘sportful’ contest therefore prompts Nestor and Ulysses to rig the lottery in Ajax's favor. At the duel itself Achilles learns the antagonists are cousins and predicts ‘a maiden battle’ (IV.v. 87); that is, one in which the opponents are not expected to draw blood. Matters threaten to turn out differently, however. The spectators' shouts, from which we must infer what happens, indicate that Hector does fight sluggishly. Not surprisingly, Troilus is more concerned with honor than harmony, and for appearance's sake urges his brother on: ‘Hector, thou sleep'st, / Awake thee!’ (IV.v. 114-15). Missing, as it were, the cues for a milder confrontation is Ajax. His ‘well-disposed’ blows, praised by Agamemnon (IV.v. 116), suggest that he battles vigorously. Perhaps seeing the danger this zeal poses, Diomedes and Aeneas interrupt the duel and call for its end. The responsibility for terminating the combat nevertheless rests fully with Hector, particularly since Ajax protests, ‘I am not warm yet, let us fight again’ (IV.v. 118). Hector rejects this proposal, however, and therefore rejects the symbolic implications of the duel he himself initiated.

When Achilles, Aeneas, and Agamemnon anticipate a peaceful conclusion to the combat, the word ‘half’ appears eight times in the space of just eleven lines:

Aeneas. This Ajax is half made of Hector's blood,
In love whereof, half Hector stays at home;
Half heart, half hand, half Hector comes to seek
This blended knight, half Troyan and half Greek …
Agamemnon.                                         The combatants being kin
Half stints their strife before their strokes begin.

(IV.v. 83-93. Italics mine)

With respect to Troilus' speech on the two Cressidas, which very shortly follows in V.ii., this repeated emphasis on division into two parts holds the utmost importance. Hector strikes no blows in earnest because he is unable, through any ‘madness of discourse’ (V.ii. 142) such as Troilus later practises, to invent two separate Ajaxes, one his enemy and the other his cousin. Hector cannot say, ‘This is, and is not, Ajax,’ and then cut down the supposedly Grecian half of his antagonist. ‘This blended knight, half Troyan and half Greek’ thwarts efforts to divide him because Hector recognizes that one cannot distinguish the Greek from the Trojan in a man's flesh or blood. To divide the indivisible violates the laws of logic and, in the case of the duel, a familial obligation sacred to the gods:

Were thy commixtion Greek and Troyan so
That thou couldst say, ‘This hand is Grecian all,
And this is Troyan; the sinews of this leg
All Greek, and this all Troy; my mother's blood
Runs on the dexter cheek, and this sinister
Bounds in my father's,’: by Jove multipotent,
Thou shouldst not bear from me a Greekish member
Wherein my sword had not impressure made
[Of our rank feud]; but the just gods gainsay
That any [drop] thou borrow'dst from thy mother,
My sacred aunt, should by my mortal sword
Be drained! Let me embrace thee, Ajax.

(IV.v. 124-35)

The effect of prematurely concluding the combat is disconcerting: we expect a fierce duel to take place and are disappointed when it does not. But this sense of dissatisfaction, which the critical views cited earlier indicate is widespread, invites further scrutiny. Rather than assume Shakespeare has let a scene fall flat or has introduced merely another anticlimax into a play riddled with anticlimaxes, we might more productively inquire why the audience has been induced to feel such discontent. That is, we might ask whether an audience expressing its displeasure at the duel's peaceful outcome should instead be surprised by its own sins in feeling cheated of a bloody encounter? Far from being bathetic or a dramatic failure, the combat is in fact a remarkable theatrical device that draws the audience into a desire for violence which it would immediately condemn outside the playhouse. In the Trojan debate, as we have seen, Hector's sudden and suspect resolution to support the fighting garners approval. In the same way the long-awaited combat lures the audience far enough into the universe of the war that it accepts the premise of doing battle over a lady and finds the refusal to maim another person on behalf of such a cause not admirable but anticlimactic.¹³

Although Hector proposes creating two Ajaxes, he quickly dismisses that notion, leaving his antagonist a whole man and pledging his loyalty to a cousin whose blood is incontestably a mixture of Greek and Trojan. In the scenes that follow, Hector's decision contrasts markedly with Troilus' extensive attempt at making two Cressidas from one and also with Cressida's use of the same ploy in justifying her own infidelity. By focusing in several different ways on the desire to generate two persons from one, Act IV, Scene v and Act V, Scene ii therefore become dramatic pendants that gain deeper significance and irony through their interaction with each other.

When Troilus sees Cressida give herself to Diomedes, the idealized world he has built around her constancy and love collapses. To escape the consequences of her betrayal, he creates two Cressidas, an idea which takes shape with another of the play's ubiquitous questions about identity: ‘Was Cressid here?’ (V.ii. 124). This query is followed by a series of assertions to a bewildered Ulysses that, despite appearances, she was not. For the distraught Troilus it is imperative to ‘think this not Cressid’ (V.ii. 133). By insisting on the existence of two Cressidas, Troilus allows his beloved to remain true to him, while the other Cressida, a woman he has never known, can yield to Diomedes:¹⁴

This she? no, this is Diomed's Cressida …
If there be rule in unity itself,
This was not she. O madness of discourse
That cause sets up with and against itself!
Bi-fold authority, where reason can revolt
Without perdition, and loss assume all reason
Without revolt. This is, and is not, Cressid!

(V.ii. 137-46)

In effect, Hector and Troilus are united by the same dilemma. Each must reevaluate his loyalty to a person associated with the enemy; and each at first tries to resolve this quandary by generating two persons from one. The martial vocabulary prominent in Troilus' speech underscores the fact that, in literal and metaphorical ways, he too is engaged in a combat. While Hector's battle is public, Troilus' is private and internal. It is a psychomachia whose adversaries are reason and the senses, and whose battleground is the soul, where ‘there doth conduce a fight / Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate / Divides more wider than the sky and earth’ (V.ii. 147-49). Moreover, Troilus is in the enemy camp to observe the result of a challenge that asserts Hector ‘hath a lady wiser, fairer, truer, / Than ever Greek did couple in his arms’ (I.iii. 275-76). In seeking out Cressida, Troilus wants to assure himself that his lady also is true. But he learns to his dismay that she is not. The tightly knit sequence of the duel and Troilus' unhappy discovery therefore evokes a number of ironic parallels between the war plot and the love plot, parallels deriving special force from long-established literary conventions which interchange the language of warfare and love.

Given Hector's speech on the impossibility of dividing Ajax into two persons, Troilus' agonized attempt to invent two Cressidas stands out sharply as an exercise in the denial of truth and logic. Indeed, since he surely hears Hector's words of reconciliation with Ajax during the duel, his efforts to resurrect the same ploy in defense of Cressida appear all the more desperate and pitiable. The strain in reviving this flawed argument becomes clearer still because Troilus is unable so to ‘invert th' attest of eyes and ears’ (V.ii. 122) that he can bring himself to believe fully in the fiction Hector has just discounted. Much more slowly than in Hector's case, the desire to create two persons from one yields to the reality of accepting the many—and even contradictory—attributes embodied in an individual. But Troilus' emotional responses are always extreme. Cressida is either faithful forever (III.ii. 158ff.) or so much a traitor to his affections that she can never be redeemed:¹⁵

O Cressid! O false Cressid! false, false, false!
Let all untruths stand by thy stained name,
And they'll seem glorious.

(V.ii. 178-80)

In the light of the combat and Troilus' speech, it is noteworthy that Cressida also uses the image of the divided self when she must confront demands on her loyalties. Conscious of her own failings, she regretfully identifies in herself two selves; and in this way she warns Troilus that she cannot be the ideal of constancy and womanhood for which he longs. She describes these two selves by playing on the word kind as the noun meaning ‘type’ and as the adjective meaning ‘in accordance with nature or the usual course of things’, ‘sympathetic’, ‘loving’, or ‘grateful’.¹⁶ Since she claims to exercise no control over this cruel and unnatural self, both she and Troilus are susceptible to its whims:

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

(III.ii. 148-50)

Her prophecy becomes fact in the Greek camp. Thinking she is alone after her rendezvous with Diomedes, Cressida again admits to having two selves which assure her lapses from fidelity. In her confession the puns on ‘eye/I’ point once more to the play's focus on the problem of establishing identities and loyalties:¹⁷

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 eye directs our mind.
What error leads must err; O then conclude,
Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude.

(V.ii. 107-12)

As in the preceding statement Cressida here projects a sense of passivity, picturing her better self at the mercy of a tyrannical second self. But the speeches of Hector and Troilus both emphasize how much this second self can be an evasion, a refuge from the obligation to make troubling choices or resolve conflicting allegiances. Recourse to this second self can also be a means of avoiding the fact that vice and virtue coexist in the same person. ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together’, comments a lord in All's Well That Ends Well (IV.iii. 71-72), and touches the heart of the matter. There is only one Ajax and only one Cressida. Hector accepts the good and ill bound together in Ajax by acknowledging that he is simultaneously Trojan and Greek. Troilus, by contrast, sees only good or ill in his beloved; for him Cressida is either true or false. And while Cressida isolates virtuous and base characteristics in herself, she gives these separate existences so that she need never take responsibility for her own actions and desires.

In each of these instances the act of dividing one person into antithetical selves highlights in different ways the problem of ascertaining identities and loyalties which besets all the characters in Troilus and Cressida. With respect to this dilemma, Troilus' speech on the two Cressidas most vividly illuminates the epistemological and moral confusion of this process and of the war itself. As Rosalie L. Colie has remarked, Troilus' assertion ‘This is, and is not, Cressid!’ (V.ii. 146) exemplifies a rhetorical formula present throughout the play, a formula cast in ‘the language of is-and-is-not, the terms of the familiar Liar-paradox’.¹⁸ Simultaneously affirming and denying the same proposition, the equivocal language of the Liar-paradox reflects a world of instability and uncertainty. Nothing is fixed. Names, identities, and the choices people make shift constantly between the poles of what-is-and-is-not. In the case of Troilus' speech the Liar-paradox also promotes instability: by stating ‘This is, and is not, Cressid!’, Troilus attempts to avoid the need, which living in any society imposes, of dealing with people as they are, not as he might wish them to be. And by inventing two selves over which she claims to have no control, Cressida evades the responsibility, which being part of any society also demands, of acting with some degree of consistency and constancy.

At first glance the combat between Hector and Ajax appears to be another example of this disorder. But the ‘anticlimactic’ outcome of this duel in fact renounces the chaos and destructiveness of the Trojan War. The reconciliation of Hector and Ajax emphasizes, in familial and symbolic terms, the bonds that unite rather than divide members of the human community. Declaring that their blood-relationship forbids them to fight, Hector also resists the impulse to condone through the duel the sacrifice of yet more lives in the pursuit of honor and renown. Moreover, in halting the combat because they are cousins, Hector and Ajax successfully define their identities and loyalties in a universe where the sense of self is always elusive, ever-changing, and subject to the opinion of others rather than one's own perceptions and actions. As we have seen in the speeches of Troilus and Cressida, the problem of establishing identities and loyalties is epitomized by the process of generating two persons from one. When Hector raises and then quickly rejects the possibility of creating two Ajaxes during a duel that mirrors the issues at stake in the war itself, he shrugs off for a moment the confusion so pervasive in Troy. And that is no small thing.

Notes

1. Brower, Hero and Saint (New York and Oxford, 1971), p. 267; Seltzer, Introd., Troilus and Cressida, in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet et al. (New York, 1972), p. 1001; and McAlindon, ‘Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida’, PMLA, 84 (1969), 29. For a study of Shakespeare's debts to and departures from previous literary accounts of Hector's challenge and the combat, see Robert K. Presson, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and the Legends of Troy (Madison, 1953), pp. 28-35 and pp. 43-57. Further commentary on the combat includes E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto, 1949), pp. 78-9; Brian Morris, ‘The Tragic Structure of Troilus and Cressida’, SQ, 10 (1959), 484; Robert Kimbrough, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Its Setting (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 58-9 and pp. 134-5; Alice Shalvi, ‘Honor in Troilus and Cressida’, SEL, 5 (1965), 288-91; Patricia Thomson, ‘Rant and Cant in Troilus and Cressida’, Essays and Studies, 22 (1969), 37; Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London, 1971), pp. 160-8; Lawrence Danson, Tragic Alphabet (New Haven and London, 1974), pp. 84-6; and Susan Snyder, ‘Ourselves Alone: The Challenge to Single Combat in Shakespeare’, SEL, 20 (1980), 208-13.

2. II.ii. 208. All citations of Shakespeare's plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

3. See especially, Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton, 1974), pp. 333-49. Other studies on the problem of identity in Troilus are R.J. Smith, ‘Personal Identity in Troylus and Cressida’, English Studies in Africa, 6 (1963), 7-26; Charles Lyons, ‘Cressida, Achilles and the Finite Deed’, Etudes Anglaises, 20 (1967), 233-42; and Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967), pp. 31-48 and p. 130.

4. See J.S.P. Tatlock, ‘The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, Especially in Shakespeare and Heywood’, PMLA, 30 (1915), 673-770; Hyder E. Rollins, ‘The Troilus-Cressida Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare’, PMLA, 32 (1917), 383-429; Presson, passim; Alice Walker, ed. Troilus and Cressida, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, England, 1957), x-xlvi; and Kimbrough, pp. 25-46.

5. Colie, pp. 333-6. The problems of disorder and value in Troilus are also analyzed by Una Ellis-Fermor, ‘Discord in the Spheres’, in The Frontiers of Drama, 2nd ed. (London, 1946), pp. 56-76; Winifred M.T. Nowottny, “‘Opinion” and “Value” in Troilus and Cressida’, EIC, 4 (1954), 282-96; Frank Kermode, ‘Opinion, Truth and Value’, EIC, 5 (1955), 181-7; W.R. Elton, ‘Shakespeare's Ulysses and the Problem of Value’, Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), pp. 95-111; Harry Berger, Jr., ‘Troilus and Cressida: The Observer as Basilisk’, Comparative Drama, 2 (Summer 1968), 122-36; Arnold Stein, ‘Troilus and Cressida: The Disjunctive Imagination’, ELH, 36 (1969), 145-67; Danson, pp. 68-96; Richard D. Fly, “‘Suited in Like Conditions as our Argument”: Imitative Form in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida’, SEL, 15 (1975), 273-92; and Gayle Greene, ‘Language and Value in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida’, SEL, 21 (1981), 271-84.

6. See R.A. Foakes, ‘Troilus and Cressida Reconsidered’, Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, 32 (1963), 145; McAlindon, pp. 36-7; Elias Schwartz, ‘Tonal Equivocation and the Meaning of Troilus and Cressida’, SP, 69 (1972), 309; and Colie, pp. 334-5.

7. Observing that no precedent exists in the accounts of the Troy legend for the chivalric motive behind Hector's challenge, Presson (pp. 33-4) remarks that the motive is ‘an example of that continual association of war and women, which, though traditional, is so conspicuous in Troilus and Cressida’. See also Levin, pp. 161-5. Snyder discusses the single combat in Shakespeare ‘as a personal response to a public situation’ (p. 201).

8. William Empson (Some Versions of Pastoral [London, 1935], pp. 34-5) remarks that the political concerns in Troilus are ‘chiefly about loyalty whether to a mistress or the state … The breaking of Cressida's vow is symbolical of, the breaking of Helen's vow is cause of, what the play shows (chiefly by the combat between Hector and his first cousin Ajax) to be a civil war’.

9. Mark Sacharoff, ‘Tragic vs. Satiric: Hector's Conduct in II.ii of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida’, SP, 67 (1970), 523-5.

10. Walker, xiii. See also Oscar James Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1938; rpt. San Marino, Calif., 1965), pp. 205-7; Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 2nd ed. (New York, 1949), pp. 112-3; Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare's Use of Learning (San Marino, Calif., 1953), pp. 199-211; Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison, 1960), pp. 242-5; Kimbrough, pp. 113-9; and Rolf Soellner, ‘Prudence and the Price of Helen: The Debate of the Trojans in Troilus and Cressida’, SQ, 20 (1969), 255-63.

11. Kaufmann, ‘Ceremonies for Chaos: The Status of Troilus and Cressida’, ELH, 32 (1965), 141. Kaufmann also notes that Hector ‘defers civilly to the ceremonial sense of identity he shares with his brothers in Helen's captivity’ (p. 148). As we shall see, Hector locates his identity elsewhere during the combat.

    Approving and even laudatory views of Hector's decision are to be found in William R. Bowden, ‘The Human Shakespeare and Troilus and Cressida’, SQ, 8 (1957), 174; Willard Farnham, ‘Troilus in Shapes of Infinite Desire’, SQ, 15 (Spring, 1964), 262-3; and Jean Gagen, ‘Hector's Honor’, SQ, 19 (1968), 129-37.

12. The confusion regarding names and identities continues outside the confines of the combat proper: Agamemnon does not know Troilus (IV.v. 94), nor Hector Achilles (233). Their lack of knowledge sets off the unique status of the duel all the more sharply.

13. Obvious here is my debt to the methodology of Stanley E. Fish in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; rpt. Berkeley, 1971). In his essay ‘On the Value of Hamlet’ (in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin [New York, 1969], pp. 137-76), Stephen Booth uses a similar critical approach to examine ‘the problems of Hamlet [which] arise at points where an audience's contrary responses come to consciousness’ (p. 156).

14. The literature on this speech is vast, but to my knowledge no critic has linked its emphasis on identity and division to the combat. An early survey of critical responses to the speech appears in L.L. Schucking, Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays (1922; rep. Gloucester, Mass., 1959), pp. 52-9. See also O.J. Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (New York, 1943), p. 116; Spencer, pp. 119-21; G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 4th rev. and enl. ed. (London, 1949), p. 69; Tillyard, pp. 81-5; Kenneth Muir, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955), pp. 36-7; Richard C. Harrier, ‘Troilus Divided’ in Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, ed. Josephine W. Bennett et al. (New York, 1959), pp. 151-3; and Colie, pp. 341-3.

15. A penchant for hyperbole is common to Shakespeare's tragic heroes, as Maynard Mack observes in ‘The Jacobean Shakespeare’, in Jacobean Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 1, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (New York, 1960), pp. 13-15. But Troilus' praise of Cressida or Helen is so much in excess of the devotion these women merit that tragedy drifts into satire.

16. OED: kind, sb., 14; and adj., 1, 5, 6, 8. For a more kindly view of Cressida's being ‘fearful of this new identity Troilus creates for her’, see Carolyn Asp, ‘In Defense of Cressida’, SP, 74 (1977), pp. 410-1.

17. The motif of division in these scenes is noted by John Bayley in The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (New York, 1976), pp. 207-8. It is discussed in greater detail, but with conclusions different from those reached here, by M. M. Burns, ‘Troilus and Cressida: The Worst of Both Worlds’, Shakespeare Studies, 13 (1980), pp. 126-7.

18. Colie, pp. 336-7.