SOURCE: “Not Saying No: Female Self-Erasure in Troilus and Cressida,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 44-56.

[In the following essay, Tiffany asserts that Cressida has been misread by most critics as either reprehensible or victimized, when in fact she is the product of a patriarchal culture still present today that misunderstands women who do not communicate forcefully.]

One half of me is yours, the other half yours,
Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours.

—Portia, The Merchant of Venice III.ii.16-18¹

Like Shakespeare's Trojans and Greeks, scholarly evaluators of Shakespeare's Cressida divide themselves into two warring camps that only seem radically opposed. In fact, both camps share a common perspective and language that produce a disturbing vision of woman as passive creation of her patriarchal culture. Cressida as wanton and Cressida as victim present two sides of the same interpretive coin: both notions result from and re-create the idea of Cressida as a creature formed by male perceptions and values; thus both notions, by privileging male determination of female identity, reinforce female subjectivity. Missing from both categories of interpretation is an acknowledgment of female responsibility for self-creation within, but in defiance of, a patriarchal interpretive system. An alternative critical paradigm would inquire not only into the ways in which male valuations oppress women in Shakespeare's texts but into the ways in which characters such as Cressida support male valuations—in effect, give up the power of self-creation. This, I would argue, is a more powerful critical conversation: one which allows the female reader to “engage in the process of dislocation of the unconscious by which she begins to affirm her own reality.”²

This paper's inquiry into Cressida's choices emerges from such a paradigm. My argument is not that Cressida is not false, nor that she is not oppressed; like others in the play, including some males, she is both.³ I want to assert, alternatively, that a female character can be false without being wanton—can, that is, be acknowledged to fail morally without our subscription to homocentric evaluations of her failure—and that holding Cressida responsible for her moral choices, which include acquiescence in her own oppression, does her, and us, a service. It affirms her authoritative personhood and thus performs a healthy resistance to the masculine ethic that still controls the interpretation of female behavior in Shakespearean texts.

Therefore, after acknowledging some of the critical studies that demonstrate Cressida's erasure from Shakespeare's text—her disappearance into a male-authored symbol, first of beauty and value and ultimately of falseness—I propose to trace some of the steps by which Cressida participates in that erasure. To recuperate Cressida is, paradoxically, to assess her self-erasure and to demonstrate her horrifying negative control over her own ontology. The key action by which Cressida relinquishes authorship of her own identity is the surrender of her voice. Cressida voices herself—reveals, that is, her fundamental desires and interests—only rarely in the first three acts, and in acts IV and V, as Janet Adelman, David Hale, and Stephen Lynch have noticed,⁴ Cressida hardly speaks at all and shares no private thoughts in soliloquy. (E. Talbot Donaldson has determined that Cressida “speaks only 117 times” in the course of the play, “and a hundred of her speeches are of less than twenty words; eighty of less than ten,” 74.)⁵ Furthermore, with the exception of her early soliloquy in I.ii.282-95,⁶ where she confesses her love for Troilus, and certain interchanges with Troilus and Pandarus in III.ii and IV.ii and iv, where she defies the male edict that she leave Troy and Troilus to join her father and the Greeks, when Cressida does speak, she adjusts her language to male discursive practices and her vision of reality to that dictated by male perception. Cressida initially hides her love for Troilus in order to conform to his Petrarchan image of her as indifferent love-goddess (I.i-ii); ultimately, she will affirm the equally limiting male-scripted role of frail, wanton woman. We see this where, after arriving in the Greek camp and arranging a tryst with Diomedes, she laments, “poor our sex! This fault in us I find, / The error of our eye directs our mind” (V.ii.109-10). In these lines, Cressida echoes Ulysses's previously stated judgment of her as fundamentally carnal, led by lust (IV.v.55-63), and thus not only accepts but actively promotes a negative male valuation of her behavior. Through this voluntary sacrifice of independent self-expression, Cressida authorizes her own displacement, affirming the erection of a male-authored “Cressida,” an image first of disdainful beauty and finally of wantonness and frailty, where an authentic self might have stood.

Cressida is, of course, powerfully encouraged by her circumstances to validate male visions and participate in male schemes; the play does not allow her a clear alternative route for physical survival, any more than dramatic convention afforded Shakespeare the freedom radically to alter the Cressida myth.⁷ Through exploiting and elaborating that myth, however, Shakespeare was able to dramatize how the human subject's ultimate valuation of physical survival might exact tragic cost. Unlike, for example, Measure for Measure's Isabella, who frankly refuses Angelo's demand for her body and ultimately insists that her complaint against him be heard (“Hear me, O hear me, here,” V.i.32),⁸ the near-silent Cressida purchases survival at the price of being. She tacitly approves her character's displacement by a male idea by suppressing her own self-constituting voice.

Because Cressida remains silent or corroborates the male view of feminine weakness and “turpitude” (V.ii.112), critics have frequently reproduced Ulysses's condemnation of her. Negative descriptions of Cressida in this century range from Robert Ornstein's “a slut” to George Wilbur Meyer's “a whore” to Una Ellis-Fermor's milder “a light woman.”⁹ As unsettling as it is (or should be) for female readers to encounter the words “slut” and “whore” used unselfconsciously to describe a character who switches love interests only once (Romeo does no less) and who is not paid for sex, it is equally disturbing to read defenses of Cressida that posit her fundamental powerlessness to do anything but inscribe herself into a masculine ethic which so (de)values her. Carol Cook, for example, ascribes creative ability to males but not to females where, demonstrating how Helen and Cressida are treated as “objects of exchange mediating the relations among men,” she argues that “the play consistently reveals the operations by which women … are produced as objects” by an “economy of masculine desire” (254, 257). Gayle Greene also privileges male agency in the creation of female identity, calling Cressida the “victim of a strategy that costs her no less than her self” (145). (Since the strategy to which Greene refers is Cressida's own—her plan to replace Troilus with Diomedes—it is misleading to describe her as a “victim” of it.) Hesitant to assign responsibility to Cressida, Greene quotes Simone de Beauvoir's assertion that “‘it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature’” (woman) and adds that women in Troilus and Cressida are “‘formed in th' applause’ (III.iii.1119) of others” (133-34). Cook's, Greene's, and de Beauvoir's passive constructions reproduce the reification of women to which they object; rather than produce herself in accordance with a masculine concept, woman, according to this view, gets produced. Carolyn Asp's similar passive voice structure likewise produces the image of a reified Cressida.¹⁰ Noting that Troilus projects an “image of courtly, romantic love” onto his and Cressida's relationship, Asp adds, “This image had allowed Cressida to perceive herself as intrinsically lovable and valuable, but unfortunately this perception is unable to manifest itself in action; it remains vizarded in a hostile environment” (417). Asp might have said, “Cressida doesn't act on the basis of this perception,” but she doesn't. Here the critic's insistence on Cressida's powerlessness creates logical and syntactical confusion, as she displaces Cressida's responsibility for action onto abstractions: an “image” that “allow[s]” and a “perception” that proves “unable to manifest itself.” Thus, to varying degrees, all these critics reproduce in interpretation the dynamic they abhor in the text of the play: the objectification of the female character.

Acknowledging the dehumanizing potential of such defenses allows us to understand both Robert Ornstein's and E. Talbot Donaldson's seemingly conflicted arguments concerning Cressida. Ornstein pities Cressida for being “a daughter of the game which men would have her play and for which they despise her,” but does not himself relinquish the term “slut” (315)¹¹ in his appraisal of her; and Donaldson, while pointing out Cressida's possible “innocence” (77), yet observes that we know she “will become a slut” (75) and that Thersites's reference to Cressida's mind having “turn'd whore” (V.ii.114) is “the appropriate last word on … Cressida … and on all the Cressid-kind” (68). These apparently divided judgments of Cressida's character are in fact reconcilable: if we straightforwardly echo Ulysses's claim that Troilus and Cressida's women are “daughters of the game” (IV.v.63)—volitionless dummies created and controlled by what Cook has called the “economy of masculine desire”—the next logical step is to see them, as Ulysses also does, as “sluttish spoils of opportunity” (IV.v.62). Both formulations invoke an identity that is not self-generated but is imposed from without on the passive, choiceless female subject.

A critical strategy more likely to empower female readers might approach the text from an alternative standpoint. It might acknowledge the oppressiveness of a patriarchal environment that treats women as counters in a war game played to determine male identity and status—a game that achieves what Eve Sedgwick calls “homosocial” bonding (1).¹² But, and most important, it might also analyze the ways in which female characters suppress their independent voices in gestures of support for this game as they reconstitute themselves in imitation of male-authored images. Adelman employs this interpretive paradigm when she accuses Cressida of forfeiting her “sense of her own intrinsic worth” by “internaliz[ing] the principle of valuation that rules this society, the principle implied by Troilus's question, ‘What's aught but as 'tis valued?’ (2.2.52)” (120). I disagree with Adelman's reading of Cressida's betrayal of Troilus as the ultimate “assertion of her status as a separate person, not simply the creation of Troilus' fantasy” (134)—instead, I regard that betrayal as the final step in Cressida's passage into silent nonbeing as she conforms both to Ulysses's assessment of her character and to Troilus's fearful prediction for her (IV.iv.94-97). But I support Adelman's willingness to grant Cressida at least partial responsibility for her own “disappearance” as character—to draw attention to Cressida's collaboration with the interpretive system that produces reductive assessments of her behavior. Cressida's psychological investment in this male system in fact produces her struggles and self-division as, internalizing her oppression, she fights against (not for) self-expression.

Cressida's self-rejection is dramatized in her first scene, where she presents herself as something fundamentally other than she knows herself to be. Pandarus's entrance at I.ii.37 provokes her subterfuge. Determined to conceal her interest in his friend Troilus, Cressida launches a decoy dialogue in which she praises Hector at Troilus's expense (“Hector's a gallant man,” I.ii.39). The wit she deploys here, seen by some as an expression of her best self,¹³ is actually a protective strategy, produced in her encounters with men and designed for self-shielding. She loses this wit in her rare moments of honesty, as when she confesses her love to Troilus and then immediately asks, “Where is my wit? I know not what I speak” (III.ii.151), and she reactivates her wit when, recoiling from that act of courageous self-revelation, she repudiates her confession: “Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love, / And fell so roundly to a large confession, / To angle for your thoughts” (III.ii.153-55). Cressida's reticence is indeed culturally approved; she complains of not having “men's privilege / Of speaking first” (III.ii.128-29). But it is worth noting that some Shakespearean heroines do assert “men's privilege” in defiance of social custom: All's Well That Ends Well's Helena, for example, speaks first when she claims Bertram as mate. Unlike Helena, Cressida suppresses the voice of choice and assumes the defensive posture she earlier outlined to Pandarus, relying “upon [her] wit” to “defend [her] wiles” (I.ii.260-61); her tactics reveal a disturbing identification of self-revelation with self-loss.

Sadder yet, Cressida's conviction that her self-disclosure will inevitably result in her rejection, evident in her early soliloquy (“Things won are done,” I.ii.287), betrays a fundamental assumption that she is intrinsically unlovable. Given the fact that Troilus does nothing to encourage this assumption, Cressida appears almost pathologically deficient in self-esteem, expressing offense at her “own company” once she has revealed herself to Troilus, as well as the desire to “shun [her]self” (III.ii.145-46). Her next words to Troilus reveal her longing to be what is actually her defense against being—her witty self—and her profound reluctance to identify herself as the lover she is:

I have a kind of self resides with you;
But an unkind self, that itself will leave
To be another's fool. I would be gone.
Where is my wit? I know not what I speak.

(III.ii.148-51)

The simple meaning of these lines is that Cressida will leave Troilus for Diomedes; the more subtle and difficult meaning, and the one she intends, is that the self that craves relationship with Troilus—the “kind of self” that resides with him—is an unkind fool. Her “firm love” for Troilus, which earlier in soliloquy she has called her “heart's content” (I.ii.294-95), she here rejects as “unkind”: not only cruel but unrelated to her. And immediately, disclaiming knowledge of that inner self, now manifest through its verbal disclosure, she calls for her subterfuge: her wit.

Having rejected herself, convinced in advance of her heart's valuelessness, any rejection by Troilus would be superfluous. Rejection is the emotional condition that Cressida brings to their tryst and out of which she chooses her next lover, Diomedes. Critics have readily attributed Cressida's wistful plea that Troilus “tarry” (IV.ii.15) after their lovemaking to Troilus's haste to leave her—have, in other words, validated Cressida's assumptions about the inevitability of her rejection, based on her notion of her own valuelessness to men. But Troilus is affectionate in this scene and displays only a reasonable interest in preserving their mutual secrecy by getting about the day's business:

O Cressida! but that the busy day,
Wak'd by the lark, hath rous'd the ribald crows,
And dreaming night will hide our joys no longer,
I would not from thee.

(IV.ii.8-11)

For Cressida, however, their love is already over by virtue of her participation in it. “O foolish Cressid!” she accuses herself, telling Troilus, “I might have still held off, / And then you would have tarried” (IV.ii.17-18). She perceives herself as having lost Troilus by having been “won”: won not only sexually but verbally. For Cressida, Troilus's affection is based on her absence—on the substitution of an image of a witty, disdainful beloved for the real Cressida who loves. He will love “her,” she believes, as long as he cannot see—or hear—her.

Her view is as self-destructive as it is self-defeating. Convinced of the essential worthlessness of her own desires, Cressida reverts to suppressing them. She forestalls their expression, choosing instead to acquiesce in others' plans for her. Although she initially defies Priam's command that she depart Troy for the Greek camp, declaring, “I will not go from Troy” (IV.ii.110), her resolve evaporates in the face of Troilus's contrary assertion. She repeatedly looks to him for an interpretation of reality, asking, “is it true that I must go from Troy? … Is't possible? … I must then to the Grecians?” (IV.iv.30, 32, 55), and immediately stops protesting once he affirms that she must. She also looks to Troilus for a map of her future behavior, responding to his fearful warning that she may be tempted to betray him with, “Do you think I will?” (92), so that her subsequent treachery seems done almost in fulfillment of a role he has fashioned for her.

Cressida's privileging of Troilus's thoughts follows naturally from her sense of the unworthiness of her own. Up to this point, Cressida has intermittently manifested her authentic self through speaking—declaring her love for Troilus to the audience at the close of I.ii. and (however hesitantly) to Troilus in III.ii and proclaiming opposition to the men's plan to send her from Troy in IV.ii. From IV.iv on, however, Cressida reveals virtually nothing of what she wants, walling herself off from others with what Arnold Stein calls a “reserve that prevents her from ever saying or doing what might register the full feeling of her presence” (157).¹⁵

Her reserve is perhaps most self-damaging in the infamous “kissing scene,” where, newly arrived in the Greek camp, Cressida participates in the sexual game initiated by the Greek commanders, tacitly enabling Ulysses's malicious assessment of her as “sluttish spoils” (IV.v.62). Cressida's participation here is not physical—Shakespeare's text, which keeps her silent throughout the men's kisses, gives us no reason to believe she is physically receptive, especially when her subsequent lines reiterate her refusal to kiss (IV.v.19-51). Yet Cressida, whatever her feelings, supports the male game through the obliqueness of her refusal. The kissing scene, in fact, dramatizes the two aspects of Cressida's reserve: her silence and the wit that, from the outset, she has used to divert attention from her real wishes. Earlier, Cressida wittily disclaimed interest in Troilus in order to mask real love; here, again using wit, she fends off Ulysses with a seeming promise of intimacy that is actually a refusal:

Ulyss. May I, sweet lady, beg a kiss of you?
Cres. You may.
Ulyss.                                         I do desire it.
Cres.                                                             Why, beg then.
Ulyss. Why then, for Venus' sake, give me a kiss
When Helen is a maid again. …
Cres. I am your debtor, claim it when 'tis due.

(IV.v.47-51)

Although Cressida, when she speaks here, says nothing but “no,” that “no” is obscured by its embedment in witty banter, an idiom that for her, as we earlier saw, is not self-expressive. Choosing, instead of straightforward refusal, the habitual verbal strategy with which she hides herself from men—echoing, in fact, the flirtatious banter with which they address her—Cressida prevents her “no” from being heard.

Surprisingly few critics, even of those most sympathetic to Cressida, have recognized what Donaldson calls the “potential for ambiguity” in this scene (81), since Cressida does not authorize the kissing and seems to be trying, however jokingly, to fend off the men's advances. Lynch argues that the fact that Cressida “is kissed five times before she says a word … makes it difficult to interpret her behavior as blatantly provocative” (“Shakespeare's Cressida,” 363), but the numerous examples of anti-Cressida criticism reveal that such an interpretation has not proved historically difficult (see Voth and Evans). In an extreme example, S. L. Bethell straightforwardly accepts Ulysses's view, expressed in this scene, that Cressida is “sluttish spoils of opportunity”: Bethell cautions us against “search[ing] the morality of [Ulysses's] own conduct,” since he is “the embodiment of wisdom in the play” (218).¹⁶ But even some female critics generally sympathetic toward Cressida seem to blame her for going along with the men in IV.v; Anne Barton says Cressida “begins to play the coquette the minute she sets foot in the Greek camp” (446),¹⁷ and Gayle Greene says she “allow[s] herself to be ‘kiss'd in general’ (IV.v.21)” (143)—a “sudden and complete violation of declared intentions” (135). Such readings of this scene come near to justifying the Greek commanders' view of Cressida as “the Troyan's trumpet” (with a pun on “strumpet”) (IV.v.64). I believe that it is the oblique manner of Cressida's refusal in this scene that gives rise to these negative assessments of her behavior by critics and characters alike and that Shakespeare, through dramatizing Cressida's obliqueness and the men's response to it, is demonstrating the destructive effects of female nonassertiveness on interpretations of female character. One could not find better proof of those destructive effects than in our own habitual critical responses to Cressida.

This is not to make the absurd claim that straightforward resistance might have altered Cressida's fortunes either in this scene or in the earlier one in which she agrees to be led from Troy. Rather, I mean to point out the simple fact that Cressida does not offer such resistance—that, at every turn, she chooses either not to speak or to acquiesce in male discursive practices that do violence to what Greene calls her “best self” (145), eventually silencing that self altogether and thus accomplishing a virtual self-erasure from Shakespeare's text. Her language to Diomedes in act V borders on incoherence as, enacting the abandonment of integrity, she struggles between the impulse to flirt and the desire to declare a prior loyalty:

Cres.: Sweet honey Greek, tempt me no more to folly.
.....Dio.: Nay then—
Cres.: I'll tell you what—
Dio.: Fo, fo, come, tell a pin. You are forsworn.
Cres.: In faith, I cannot. What would you have me do?

(V.ii.18-23)

The Cressida who loves Troilus ceases to matter, even to exist, through Cressida's refusal to speak her. She chooses to give up choice: she will do what Diomedes “would … have [her] do.” When Diomedes and Troilus clash in V.vi, they thus fight over a nonentity; significantly, Troilus omits mention of Cressida when taunting Diomedes, instead challenging him to “pay thy life thou owest me for my horse” (which Diomedes has seized for Cressida) (V.vi.7). Like the “lechery” that, in Thersites's words, “eats itself” (V.iv.35), Cressida is self-swallowed: she is author of her own disappearance.

Ironically, those who argue that Cressida is victimized, intending sensitivity toward the female subject, unwittingly reinforce her erasure. Derek Traversi, for example, exempts Cressida from “moral evaluation” because, in his view, she is not responsible for her actions. His chivalric pardon seems inseparable from his “difficult[y]” in “conceiv[ing] of Cressida as a fully realized being” (202).¹⁸ Such misfiring benevolence has also affected stage productions of Troilus and Cressida: Barbara Bowen writes of a 1965 version in which Joseph Papp, “influenced by the feminist movement,” presented Cressida as “a victim ‘of men, their wars, their desires, their double standards.’” Papp's investment in the creation of a totally controlled Cressida led to a defense of her so spirited that, in his own words, it “‘created an unfortunate conflict between me and the actor playing the role of Troilus’” (Bowen, 272).¹⁹ Significantly absent from Papp's report of this conflict is the actor playing Cressida; Papp here plays Diomedes fighting Troilus over a mere symbolic theme.

I am trying to show that sympathetic evaluations of Cressida that divest her of responsibility for choice, however well meant, are finally not helpful constructions but duplications of the objectifying principle that denies female subjectivity in the play (as where Troilus calls Helen a “theme of honor and renown,” II.ii.199). Further, the fact that Cressida herself denies agency in her (mis)fortunes need not compel our own critical reinscription of the image of the powerless female. We may, for example, benefit from Linda Charnes's perceptive diagnosis of the particular stereotypes that afflict women in Troilus and Cressida without according these stereotypes full power to determine female identities in the play. Charnes argues that characters in Troilus and Cressida vainly resist their oppression by preinscribed historical identities already known to Shakespeare's audience: that Cressida, like other characters, “act[s] out … a rebellion against a coercion and oppression of subjectivity that cannot and must not be directly confronted or openly challenged. Unable to construct alternatives, [she is] forced to be and not be ‘[herself]’” (414).²⁰ Cressida, in other words, is an unwilling victim of her own status as archetype of false womanhood—an archetype that she struggles to escape. I argue, alternatively, that Cressida's struggles are primarily produced not by historical or Greco-Trojan predefinitions of her character but by her own tacit acceptance of the principle that Charnes's words (ironically) reinscribe: the idea that her subjectivity “cannot and must not be directly confronted or openly challenged.” In fact, Cressida's complaints throughout the play repeatedly express her sense of the fundamental, inescapable reality of the archetype that oppresses her; thus these complaints constitute not rebellion but aggrieved resignation. From her early observation that “Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is” (I.ii.289), to her ironic affirmation of her future mythic status as archetype of feminine falsehood (III.ii.183-203), to her final reductive assessment of women as an error-driven “poor … sex” (V.ii.109-11), her lines validate the “Ulyssean” image of feminine frailty and relative worthlessness. The mythic “false … Cressid” archetype about which Cressida is dimly prescient, and the view of women as “sluttish spoils” suggested by the masculine ethic of her own society, in fact combine to create a powerfully seductive image of femininity for Cressida. This image, while cruelly oppressive, morally crippling, and fundamentally false, yet offers Cressida its own kind of escape—an escape from the responsibility of self-invention. Cressida's final lines in the play, which plot her future submission to Diomedes, enact her flight from decisive self-creation, as they dramatize her final surrender to a male-scripted role:

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 sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

(V.ii.109-12)

Revealing, schizophrenically, that she both perceives and is controlled by error, Cressida here enacts the destruction of her own integrity, disclosing her radical self-division and concomitant self-hatred. She thus disappears from the text. After this passage, Shakespeare allows her only the ultimate expression of acquiescent resignation to the story: silence.

Again, this is not to suggest that Shakespeare's Cressida should have displayed more strength than her mythic prototype. As I hope I have demonstrated, Shakespeare takes advantage of Cressida's prior negative symbolic value to elaborate the archetype of the dishonest person, from its origins in defensive hypocrisy to its final manifestation in nonbeing: the total disappearance of an integrated self. The Cressida myth affords Shakespeare the opportunity to dramatize the self-eradicating effects of resignation to a prescripted identity, and of choosing choicelessness. Shakespeare's play thus affords us a critical challenge, which may be met in this way. Rather than positing that female decisions are determined by a patriarchal universe, we may study the ways that universe is ratified by female consent: by silence or by acquiescence in discursive practices that discourage direct female self-expression. Troilus and Cressida demonstrates the danger of female voicelessness within an interpretive system dominated by masculine perceptions and justifies the warning of contemporary sociologist Jan Strout: “‘Because men have been socialized to hear yes when women say no, we have to scream it.’”²¹

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1974), 254-83. All references to Shakespeare's plays are to this text.

2. Madelon Gohlke, “‘I Wooed Thee with My Sword’: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms,” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Gayle Green, Carolyn Lenz, and Carol Thomas Neely (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980).

3. Gayle Greene, Janet Adelman, and Carol Cook note the way Helen and Cressida are treated as objects, the possession of which determines male status (see Greene's “Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A Kind of Self,’” in The Woman's Part; Adelman's “‘This Is and Is Not Cressid’: The Characterization of Cressida,” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Garner Nelson, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Gohlke Sprengnether [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985]; and Cook's “Unbodied Figures of Desire,” in The History of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Daniel Seltzer [New York: Signet, 1988]. Greene calls Cressida “the sum total of ‘opinions’ of men” (145) and sees the play as exploring “the effects of capitalism on woman” (137). Cook speaks of “the use of women as objects of exchange mediating the relations between men” (257), and Adelman refers to Cressida's “status as devalued object” after she passes to the Greeks, bearing out “the principle implied by Troilus' question, ‘What's aught but as 'tis valued?’ (2.2.52)” (122). Troilus's comment, however, applies to the male characters as well: Achilles loses value in Greek and Trojan eyes by resting on his laurels, and Troilus acquires value by virtue of his comparison to Paris (see Cressida's and Pandar's dialogue in I.ii.92-106), just as Cressida acquires hers through comparison with Helen (I.i.41-104). Both men and women are affected by this system of relative valuation, yet feminist criticism tends to avoid acknowledging its oppressive effect on male characters.

4. Adelman argues that Cressida's refusal to share her thoughts with the audience after IV.iv renders her “radically unknowable” and “irreducibly other” (128); I argue that Cressida's silence constitutes her total submission to the role in which men have cast her, but perhaps mine is just another way of describing the same phenomenon. David Hale argues that Cressida's voice is “overwhelmed” by other events and characters after the play's first two acts (p. 10 of “‘Madness of Discourse’: Language and Ideology in Troilus and Cressida,” paper delivered at “Seventeenth-Century Literature and Politics Conference,” Orlando, Florida, March 1991). Stephen Lynch also notes Cressida's gradual lapse into relative silence (“Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A Woman of Quick Sense,’” Philological Quarterly 63 [1984], 357-67, 363). I differ with Hale and Lynch in my interpretation of what Cressida's authentic voice actually is: both these critics see it as her witty banter (a conclusion supported by Deborah Hooker in “Coming to Cressida through Irigary,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 [1989]: 899-932; and by Grant Voth and Oliver Evans in “Cressida and the World of the Play,” Shakespeare Studies 8 [1975]: 231-40). Alternatively, I view Cressida's wit as a deceptive discursive practice, done in response to male teasing, which hides her genuine self.

5. E. Talbot Donaldson, “Cressid False, Criseyde Untrue: An Ambiguity Revisited,” in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, ed. Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

6. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans.

7. See chapter 2 of David Farley-Hills's Shakespeare and the Rival Playwright, 1600-1606 (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990) for a comprehensive discussion of the treatment of the Troilus and Cressida myth on the English Renaissance stage.

8. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans.

9. See Voth and Evans for a catalog of negative critical assessments of Cressida's character.

10. Carolyn Asp, “In Defense of Cressida,” Studies in Pathology 74 (1977): 406-17.

11. Robert Ornstein, excerpt from The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, in Modern Shakespearean Criticism: Essays on Style, Dramaturgy, and the Major Plays, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 311-17.

12. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

13. See n. 4.

14. See, for example, Stephen Lynch's “The Idealism of Shakespeare's Troilus,” South Atlantic Review 51.1 (January 1986): 19-29, 22; and René Girard's “The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker (New York: Methuen, 1985). Both studies assert that Troilus is genuinely uninterested in Cressida in IV.ii. According to Girard, Troilus's attitude demonstrates that “a man loses interest in a woman who yields too easily to his desires”; Girard sees this as one of the “implacable laws” of “masculine desire” (189).

15. Arnold Stein, “Troilus and Cressida: The Disjunctive Imagination,” ELH 36 (1969): 145-67.

16. S. L. Bethell, excerpt from Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, in The History of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Seltzer.

17. Anne Barton, introduction to Troilus and Cressida, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Evans, 443-47.

18. Derek Traversi, excerpt from An Approach to Shakespeare, in The History of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Seltzer.

19. Barbara E. Bowen, “Troilus and Cressida on the Stage,” in The History of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Seltzer.

20. Linda Charnes, “‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (Winter 1989): 413-40.

21. See p. 227 of Ellen Sweet's “Date Rape: The Story of an Epidemic and Those Who Deny It,” in Our Times: Readings from Recent Periodicals, ed. Robert Atwan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).