SOURCE: “Moral Order in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: The Case of the Trojans,” in Anglia, Vol. 104, Nos. 1-2, 1986, pp. 33-44.

[In the following essay, Eldridge examines the characters of Hector, Cressida, and Troilus, asserting that their common heritage as Trojans has more to do with their behavior than do the play's themes of love and war.]

An established critical doctrine claims there is no discernible moral order within Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida¹. To say that is to say that the characters do wrong without punishment or suffer without cause. I would like to suggest a way of looking at the play that will show it less morally chaotic than so many readers have found it. The first step in this process—observing Cressida is a Trojan—is small but crucial. Critics have traditionally divided Troilus and Cressida into the Greeks and the Trojans or the love story and the war story, either ignoring Cressida or dismissing her as a slut². While it is true that Cressida is tangential to the war story, that fact by no means relegates her to an inconsequential role in the love story. As Empson points out, “her case has to be taken as seriously as the whole war because it involves the same sanctions and occupies an equal position in the play”³. Yet too often Cressida is described as “a chatty, vulgar little piece”, “a wanton”, a character “without intrinsic merit”⁴. And as often as she is described this way, her case—her significance to the play—is not taken seriously. The argument seems to be that sluts and prostitutes are not worthy of dignified notice, and therefore Cressida isn't, either.

But it is axiomatic to say that social acceptability does not prescribe dramatic significance for Shakespeare—in this play, for example, consider how seriously Thersites has been read. By taking Cressida “seriously”—by accepting her as a Trojan—we can recombine the traditional divisions of the double plot (love story/war story and Greeks/Trojans) and place Cressida where she belongs, alongside the other major Trojans, Hector and Troilus. Such a recombination lets us look at Shakespeare's complex arrangement from a new angle. A shaping moral force will never strike us straight off as a significant characteristic of this play, but seeing how each of these three Trojans commits a wrongdoing and suffers for that wrongdoing should dispel, if not obliterate, the sense that there is no moral force or vision in Troilus and Cressida. Hector's and Cressida's cases are parallel with respect to Troilus: both characters clearly state their positions, know what actions are in their best interests, and willfully go against those actions in agreeing to agree with Troilus. Each violates a major virtue (for Hector, honor; for Cressida, love) and each suffers an appropriate punishment. Troilus, the central figure in this headstrong trio, has the unhappy distinction of violating both virtues and hence suffering doubly.

I. HECTOR ON HONOR

In Act II.2, the Trojans, most notably Hector, gather deliberately to follow a destructive course of action. Like Ulysses in the Greek council (Act I.3), the Trojans want to continue business as usual, but they are far more emphatic than the Greeks in their resistance to change. The Trojans contemplate a change of policy that could save Troy, then decisively reject it, while the Greeks, having already experienced an undermining change in hierarchy, peevishly want their chain of command restored. Hector is smugly amused, in fact, that Agamemnon and the “dull and factious nobles of the Greeks” (II.2.209) have allowed their power to be corrupted. But he cannot afford a similar corruption. It is essential that by the end of the meeting the brothers agree, willingly or not, whether to keep Helen. Hector is quietly reasonable: indisputably, too many Trojans have died “To guard a thing not ours nor worth to us” (II.2.22). He concludes his opening argument by asking:

What merit's in that reason which denies
The yielding of her up?

(II.2.24-25)⁵

A second time he insists that Helen “is not worth what she doth cost / The keeping” (II.2.51), and argues against Troilus' claim that value is not inherent, but attributed only by the observer. Finally, Hector argues, Helen is undeniably “wife to Sparta's king” (II.2.183), and the

                                                                                                    moral laws
Of nature and of nations speak aloud
To have her back returned. Thus to persist
In doing wrong extenuates not wrong,
But makes it much more heavy. Hector's opinion
Is this in way of truth. Yet ne'ertheless,
My spritely brethren, I propend to you
In resolution to keep Helen still;
For 'tis a cause that hath no mean dependence
Upon our joint and several dignities.

(II.2.184-93)

Hector uses reason to argue for moral action: the pragmatic putting of one's house in order assumes moral force. If “the specialty of rule hath been neglected” (I.3.78) in the Greek camp, then neither is Troy a “well-order'd nation” (II.2.180) as Hector describes one. The voices of reason, pragmatism, and morality call out for the Trojans to reconsider their “bad cause”. Yet in the concluding lines of this famous speech Hector might as well stand up and announce, “I am going to make the false, foolish, and immoral choice”. Hector does not merely “change his mind” as part of a bungled characterization. By having him so abruptly abandon his argument, Shakespeare unmistakably directs our attention to his wrongdoing. By giving in to family and personal pride, Hector ignores his “opinion […] in way of truth” (II.2.188-89). For it is pride, rather than genuine honor, that is at stake here⁶. Hector has not for a moment stopped believing that Helen is not of them nor worth to them. But because he is powerful, he can defy his own belief, as well as his sister Cassandra's divinely inspired warning, that Helen should be returned. In agreeing to agree with Troilus, then, Hector deliberately, knowingly abandons the moral and pragmatic course of action, and so irreparably damages his own honor, which he claims to hold so dear, and the welfare of Troy, which he is bound in honor to defend.

A brief exchange in Act IV between Hector and Ulysses shows that Hector willfully continues to ignore the moral imperative of ending the war. Like Cassandra, Ulysses has prophesied the fall of Troy:

Ulysses: My prophecy is but half his journey yet;
For yonder walls, that pertly front your town,
Yon towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds,
Must kiss their own feet.
Hector:                                                             I must not believe you.

(IV.5.218-21)

“I must not believe you” is a willed declaration of belief in the face of contrary knowledge, the same sort of declaration Hector makes in the Trojan council when he rejects Cassandra's warning and turns his back on his “opinion […] in way of truth”. Having deserted that truthful “opinion” for his honor—that is, having vowed to keep the stolen Helen rather than yield her to the Greeks' legitimate claim—in Act V.3 Hector again rejects a moral argument in the name of honor. He has sworn to fight, and will not listen to the objections of his wife and sister. Cassandra argues that “the gods are deaf to hot and peevish vows” (V.3.16); Andromache tries to persuade her husband that it is not “holy / To hurt by being just” (V.3.19-20). But he is insistent:

                                                            Hold you still, I say.
Mine honor keeps the weather of my fate.
Life every man holds dear; but the dear man
Holds honor far more precious-dear than life.

(V.3.25-28)

In the remainder of this scene he ignores further pleas from Andromache and his parents to stay home. Having sworn to fight, he goes out to face Achilles protected only by his prideful honor.

In short, in almost all his appearances Hector rejects a moral or logical argument in favor of honor. His murder by Achilles' Myrmidons is fitting: he dies asking for the “fair play” which he has, in his refusal to return Helen, already denied the Greeks.

II. CRESSIDA ON LOVE

Cressida's actions in love parallel Hector's on honor: she states her position, reverses herself, violates the love she embraces, and is subsequently punished. The soliloquy which ends her first appearance bears close attention because it explains her later behavior: her toying with Troilus' affections, her attempt to recall her declaration of love for him, her betrayal. From the outset Shakespeare shows Cressida as deeply mistrustful of love:

                                                            Women are angels, wooing;
Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she beloved knows nought 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.
Then, though my heart's content firm love doth bear,
Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.

(I.2.286-95)

These lines reveal Cressida's fixed hopelessness and devaluation of love. The repetition of the “maxim out of love” emphasizes her belief in love as an organized sport in which love and lovers are won as prizes. Women are things to be gained and done. After a woman is “won” the arbitrary value placed on her will fall.

Yet in practice the maxim proves false. Troilus values her until she deprives him of his good opinion; Diomedes commands before he “wins” her. But because Cressida believes she can maintain her slight edge only as long as she keeps her relationship with Troilus static, she tries to protect herself by teasing him. Confusing power and stability, she cannot imagine a love more stable than when desire sues; she cannot imagine that Troilus might love her; she cannot imagine herself but as something to be won or lost in the game: she is only, as yet, “the thing ungained”. Unable to see herself as possessing any inherent worth and lacking any goodness around her, Cressida fails to discover anything better than holding off a little longer. Her position is clear: she loves Troilus, but lovers are not to be trusted with power. From the beginning, then, Cressida undervalues both love and Troilus' potential fidelity.

Act III.2, in which Cressida reverses her position to say she loves Troilus, is parallel in action and function to the Trojan council (Act II.2), in which Hector reverses himself to agree with Troilus. A comparison of these scenes shows how the two stories of the double plot are related. The comparison is worth making because it draws our attention away from the sometimes jarring surface differences between the love story and the war story and directs it to their underlying similarities. In fact, Act III.2 is as much a companion scene to the Trojan council as is the Greek council (Act I.3).

The lovers' meeting reflects Cressida's assumption that Troilus will quickly tire of her and be false. She is genuinely surprised that he has been constant in his desire:

Troilus: O Cressid, how often have I wished me thus!
Cressida: Wished, my lord? The gods grant—O my lord!

(III.2.61-62)

What should the gods grant? That Cressida be wrong. But she can imagine she may be wrong only fleetingly. Next moment her pessimistic, fearful thoughts are again “more dregs than water” (III.2.67).

But for a moment the seesawing between love and mistrust is quelled:

Boldness comes to me now and brings me heart.
Prince Troilus, I have loved you night and day
For many weary months.

(III.2.113-15)

Cressida's announcement of her love exactly parallels Hector's announcement “in resolution to keep Helen still”. Both characters willfully sacrifice their safety for something they want, running headlong against their stated beliefs. But Cressida's resolution, unlike Hector's, is brief. Immediately following her statement of love she repents her weakness and tries to regain her former position:

                                        I was won, my lord
With the first glance that ever—pardon me;
If I confess much you will play the tyrant.

(III.2.117-19)

“If I confess much you will play the tyrant” is a variation of the earlier “Achievement is command”. Yet speaking modifies the true statement of fear and mistrust to a flattering appeal to Troilus' power, as the “pardon me” appeals to his curiosity. Her entire speech follows this halting pattern, offering a series of lover's confessions that she then tries to retract. Cressida wants to say and unsay simultaneously, to express private thoughts with no fear of the consequences of being unsecret. In the same way, in the Trojan council Hector wants to enhance his honor by both returning and defending Helen. In both cases the characters will their situations to be as they wish and turn away from the dangers of doing so.

Cressida's capitulation to Diomedes in Act V.2 follows unavoidably from her arguments about the untrustworthiness of lovers. She assumes, incorrectly, that Troilus will desert her. And she assumes, correctly, that she is without protection in the enemy camp. Readers who describe Cressida as the smoothly practiced “wanton” expected by Elizabethan audiences overlook her abject and unsteady wooing of Diomedes. She was able to tease and manipulate the young, infatuated Troilus, but is no match for the older, more experienced man. Diomedes is in charge; he keeps straight to business until he gains his bargain, at his price.

Shakespeare's treatment of Cressida is awful in its precise balance. She has reasons—sound ones—for her fearfulness. She must do what she can to defend herself in a world that has left her less than defenseless: in Troy, her uncle panders for her; in the Greek camp, her father assumes the duty. Neither the Greeks nor the Trojans value her. But her betrayal of Troilus' trust is unmitigated and ultimately unjustified; the surrender of his sleeve to Diomedes, unnecessarily cruel. Dryden objected that Cressida was “false, and […] not punish'd”⁷. But Shakespeare devised the exactly appropriate punishment for Cressida's transgression against love. In betraying Troilus, she simultaneously punishes herself, for what could be worse than falling into the hands of the “Greekish whoremasterly villain” (V.4.7), “a false-hearted rogue, a most injust knave” (V.1.88-89)?

Shakespeare satisfies not only our expectations from the Troy legends (Cressida will be false, Achilles will kill Hector), but does so by making the characters accomplices in their downfalls—they help set up the conditions for their own punishments. Cressida could not forestall her trade for Antenor; but her deliberate pessimism leads her to believe that Troilus will forget her, and that leads her straight to Diomedes. Similarly, Hector is partially responsible for his death. He receives repeated warnings to turn back, and does not. Even Troilus warns him that it is dangerous and foolish to be merciful to fallen enemy soldiers. Still Hector insists that the demands of his honor must be met. Within minutes (of stage time) he allows Achilles to live when he is winded, and then is naively surprised that Achilles will, indeed, kill him at a disadvantage. Achilles has more than the help of the Myrmidons to murder Hector.

III. TROILUS ON HONOR AND LOVE

Troilus also sets up the conditions for his downfall in love and war, both by acting against his stated beliefs and by not fulfilling the demands of the virtues he claims to value. He is brave and faithful, but neither honorable nor loving.

In the first instance, his treatment of honor is like Hector's: Troilus abandons reason and substitutes pride and glory for honor:

                                        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.

(II.2.46-49)

Troilus' argument for keeping Helen is bulletproof. If something—a woman, for example, as the war supposedly concerns possession of a woman—is chosen by a man, he cannot honorably change his mind about her. “I take to-day a wife” (II.2.61), he proposes:

                                                            How may I avoid,
Although my will distaste what it elected,
The wife I chose? There can be no evasion
To blench from this and to stand firm by honor.

(II.2.65-68)

Further, he argues, Helen's theft was just retaliation for an earlier injury. Although he briefly argues that Helen is herself valuable (“Is she worth keeping? Why, she is a pearl / Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships / And turned crowned kings to merchants” (II.2.81-83)), Troilus' main argument insists that fighting to keep Helen is honorable because the Trojan brothers say it is honorable. To Cassandra's warning that “Troy must not be” (II.2.109), Troilus responds:

                                                            Her brainsick raptures
Cannot distaste the goodness of a quarrel
Which hath our several honors all engaged
To make it gracious.

(II.2.122-25)

Later, he refers to Helen as “a theme of honor and renown / A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds” (II.2.199-200). The point ignored in all his argument, of course, is that Helen is a false symbol of honor. Her own virtues are not worth defending. Earlier Troilus himself recognizes that she is “too starved a subject for my sword” (I.1.96), and Shakespeare pointedly shows her as mindless, careless of the death and suffering perpetrated in her name. She honorably and rightfully should be returned to the Greeks, as Hector first argues. Finally, she is a theme not of honor but of a military pride and glory that kills Greek and Trojan soldiers alike.

Troilus' actions in the council and his meeting with Cressida are the same: in both cases he decides what he wants and aggressively pursues it, heedless of the cost to others or the warnings against his desires. As he substitutes pride and glory for honor, Troilus substitutes sex and self-regard for love. Readers have long noted that Troilus is more in love with sex than with Cressida⁸. He longs to wallow in Cressida's lily beds:

I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
Th' imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense.

(III.2.18-20)

I hope I'm never so old as to find anything wrong with such expectation, but calling fervid anticipation love stretches that term beyond endurance. It is not the act in which Troilus errs, but—as with honor—the misnaming.

Nor is there anything wrong or unusual about interest in one's own happiness. But Troilus' singleminded pursuit of his own interests in the name of “love” shows that he reserves his true love for himself. As he ignores Cassandra's warning of Troy's fall to argue for honor, he ignores Cressida's warning of her potential fall to argue for his own virtue:

O that I thought it could be in a woman—
As, if it can, I will presume in you—
To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love;
[…]
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.2.158-60; 164-68)

That such a marvel of truth and integrity could be uplifted is hard to imagine. What we hear in Troilus' speech is not, as Cressida fears, someone in love with power or the abuse of the lover, but a man wholeheartedly in love with himself.

Troilus continues to show himself more concerned with Troilus than with Cressida when Aeneas brings the news of her exchange for Antenor. He thinks first of his own happiness (“How my achievements mock me!” IV.2.69) and second of his reputation (“and, my Lord Aeneas, / We met by chance; you did not find me here”, IV.2.70-71). The last instance of Troilus' self-regard occurs as he watches Cressida's betrayal. One night with her hardly justifies the claim that the “bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed” (V.3.152), yet Troilus shakes in piercing disbelief as he watches her surrender to Diomedes. Given that he began the play describing himself as a “merchant” longing to possess Cressida (“Her bed is India, there she lies, a pearl”, I.1.100), his jealous pain is apt reward for his lust and unwarranted possessiveness. This does not deny his pain or his fidelity: the point is that the betrayal is the only fitting punishment for a love which was based on sex and preoccupation with self.

I began by suggesting that Troilus and Cressida is more morally coherent than many readers have found it, and I have tried to show how that coherence can be observed by tracing the actions of the three—not two—major Trojans. My suggestion rests not on rejecting the traditional divisions of the double plot (war story/love story and Greeks/Trojans), but by realigning the characters within them. Shifting Cressida's emphasis from the love story to the Trojans helps us refocus our attention on Shakespeare's deliberate repetition of wrongdoing and punishment among Cressida, Hector, and Troilus, a pattern quite different from the moral jumble readers have often seen.

And the Greeks? Unappealing as they are, they cannot be said to have done anything undeniably wrong. They do nothing right, certainly, and not one among them represents or affirms any virtue. But they can always claim to have suffered the first wrong.

Notes

1. Dryden was the first critic to complain that Troilus and Cressida lacked an obvious moral. See John Dryden, Preface to ‘Troilus and Cressida’. Containing the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), rpt. Literary Criticism of John Dryden, ed. A.C. Kirsch (Lincoln, 1966), p. 125.

   Later critics who find the play morally unsatisfying include F.B. Dyer, Jr., “The Destruction of Pandare”, Shakespeare Enconium, ed. A. Paolucci (New York, 1964), p. 125, p. 129. P.M. Kendall, “Inaction and Ambivalence in Troilus and Cressida”, English Studies in Honor of James Southall Wilson, ed. F. Bowers (Charlottesville, 1951), p. 135, pp. 143-144. D.R.C. Marsh, “Interpretation and Misinterpretation: the Problem of Troilus and Cressida”, Shakespeare Studies, 1, ed. J. Leeds Barroll (Cincinnati, 1965), 184, 196-197. R. Ornstein, “Troilus and Cressida”, Modern Shakespearean Criticism: Essays on Style, Dramaturgy, and the Major Plays, ed. A.B. Kernan (New York, 1970), p. 311. F. Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time: Moral and Philosophical Themes in Some Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1971), p. 108, p. 113.

2. Critics who emphasize the Greek/Trojan aspect of the double plot include N. Coghill, “Morte Hector: A Map of Honour”, Shakespeare's Professional Skills (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 108-109. N. Council, When Honour's At the Stake: Ideas of Honour in Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1973), p. 75. L.C. Sears, Shakespeare's Philosophy of Evil (North Quincy, Mass., 1974), p. 107.

   Critics who have placed greater importance on the love story/war story include W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; rpt. New York, 1974), p. 34. Kendall (see note 1), p. 136. N. Rabkin, “The Uses of the Double Plot”, Shakespeare Studies, 1, ed. J. Leeds Barroll (Cincinnati, 1965), 272. W.B. Toole, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (The Hague, 1966), p. 209.

3. Empson (see note 2), p. 36.

4. In order, these quotations are from A.P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. G. Storey (New York, 1961), p. 132. Kendall (see note 1), p. 136. W.B. Drayton Henderson, “Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Yet Deeper in Its Tradition”, Essays in Dramatic Literature: The Parrot Presentation Volume, ed. H. Craig (Princeton, 1935), p. 138.

5. All references are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.B. Evans (Boston, 1974).

6. For a general discussion of honor in the Renaissance, see C.B. Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton, 1960). For a discussion specific to Troilus and Cressida, see Council (see note 2), ch. 4. P.A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare's Military World (Berkeley, 1956), also offers helpful information on military conceptions of honor.

7. Dryden (see note 1), p. 125.

8. O.J. Campbell, who found Troilus “an expert in sensuality”, a “sexual gourmet”, was the earliest influential critic to notice that Troilus is not a faultless chivalric hero. See his Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's ‘Troilus and Cressida’ (San Marino, Calif., 1938), pp. 211-212.