SOURCE: “Troilus and Cressida: The Worst of Both Worlds,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 13, 1980, pp. 105-30.

[In the following essay, Burns suggests that the play's negative portrayal of Cressida is in fact meant to reflect critically on those characters who condemn her and, more generally, to demonstrate the corrosive effects of war upon humanity.]

One of the better-known scenes in Troilus and Cressida is IV,v, in which Cressida enters the Greek camp and is kissed in “particular” and “in general” (IV.v.20-21)¹ by the leaders of the Greek army. Given Aristotle's dictum that all knowledge comes through either generals or particulars, these parameters of knowledge which Ulysses tries punningly to manipulate may be greatly significant in the play: certainly, readers often think that they “know” Cressida through this scene. More than Cressida's character alone enters into question here, however; when Ulysses obfuscates the difference between the “general” and the “particular” in human interaction, he undermines the very possibility of that interaction. To discriminate particular individuals and identify with them among the faceless mass of humanity, on one hand, and to abstract—to learn—from individuals about general human nature, on the other, are the dual process through which people relate to each other. I believe that Troilus and Cressida dramatizes the destruction of this dual process of interaction by the forces of aggression set loose in a world at war. Human relations having become savage and distorted, the very image of man—and especially the image of woman—is shattered; neither individually nor collectively can the characters in this play sustain a viable concept of personhood. Thus the image of humanity presented by Troilus and Cressida finally disintegrates, like the action of the play, but I would argue that this disintegration is evidence of the play's thesis and not of artistic disunity.² The play does contain recognizable patterns, parallels, and principles of organization, some of which I wish to discuss.

Set in “the matter of Troy,” which evoked for the Jacobean period the same image of spiritual wreckage evoked for us today by the name of Vietnam,³Troilus and Cressida dramatizes the fundamental misdirectedness of aggression. For example, we first hear of Hector, the play's very emblem of warrior nobility, “whose patience / Is, as a virtue fixed,” that “he chid Andromache, and struck his armorer” (I.ii.4-6)—out of anger at Ajax. When a society falls into a general state of aggression, even people like Hector cease to deal fairly with others as individuals; as Ulysses advocates (for ulterior reasons), they cease to distinguish “particular” people. At least one character in this play, however, does try to distinguish among other individuals and to distinguish as an individual, in the faceless flux of aggression around her.

In so doing, Cressida surely contravenes the usual critical assessment of her character. This standard assessment probably needs little review here; resting mainly on pejorative assumptions about Cressida's sexual awareness, it amounts to little more than name-calling.⁴ I do wish to observe, however, that literary criticism of Troilus and Cressida has in some ways become a metadramatic extension of the play:⁵ the voice which pronounces the word “whore” in real-world criticism of the play testifies to the contagion of that aggression which the play portrays. To examine Cressida's character without preconception, by means of her own language and situation, changes one's view both of her character and of the whole play.

Troilus and Cressida begins by juxtaposing two parallel scenes: the first presents Pandarus in a dialogue with Troilus; the second presents Pandarus in a dialogue with Cressida. In impressive consensus, readers usually judge that the latter scene undercuts the former and that it also undercuts the character of Cressida.

In the first scene we meet the lovesick Troilus and hear him extol Cressida's charms to Pandarus in good Petrarchan fashion. In the next scene we meet the “pearl” of Troilus' eulogy capably exchanging bawdy jokes with her servant and Pandarus. … The portrayal of a Cressida who would lie on her back to defend her belly mocks Troilus' description of her as “too stubborn-chaste” to be won.⁶

The appearance of the real Cressida whom Troilus has idealized into a courtly lady, is anti-climactic in the extreme. She engages in bantering remarks, first with her page and then with Pandarus; with the latter her conversation becomes increasingly suggestive.⁷

Interestingly, while readers often remark on the “bawdy” or “suggestive” quality of Cressida's conversation with Pandarus, they seldom remark that Troilus' efforts to get Cressida into bed with him (the substance of his scene with Pandarus) might also be considered “bawdy.” Such a perspective in literary criticism seems to me swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat.

Looking at Cressida's language, furthermore, one must demur that her conversation with the serving man, at least, simply cannot be considered “bawdy.” The lines which follow constitute all but one of her speeches in the entire exchange:

Who were those that went by?
And whither go they?
What was his [Hector's] cause of anger?
Good; and what of him [Ajax]?
But how should this man, that makes me smile, make Hector angry?
Who comes here?

(I.ii.1-39)

As must be noticed, Cressida's conversation here consists of questions—about Hecuba and Helen, Hector and Ajax—questions which show that Cressida notices the people and events around her. In spite of the dehumanizing impact of her world, she still takes an interest in people as people. Indeed, in this conversation with the servant, Cressida has only one line which is not a question. When the serving man says of Ajax that “They say he is a very man per se, / And stands alone,” Cressida replies, with some apparent scorn, “So do all men, unless they are drunk, sick, or have no legs” (15-18). This reply, while perhaps “bantering,” can hardly be called “bawdy.” Chiefly, it expresses a rather reasonable skepticism about what makes “a very man per se,” in this world whose course is predetermined by the Trojan War. When Cressida points out that all men stand alone (or should do so), she is arguing against the unfair use of the word “man” as an honorific term applied only to a few men: she recognizes the human denominator in all men.⁸

Even in her first scene, Cressida shows herself able both to individualize and to abstract in the observation of people. This capacity, briefly established in her conversation with the servant, is further established in her conversation with Pandarus, chiefly by the contrast between her and Pandarus. The difference between the two characters shows immediately in the different ways they talk about Hector. On Pandarus' entrance, Cressida is saying that “Hector's a gallant man,” and throughout the scene she continues to show that she values him (as does Helen, incidentally, a few scenes later). Pandarus, in contrast, only uses Hector as a conversational means to his own objective, which is to get Cressida into bed with Troilus:

he'll lay about him to-day, I can tell them that: and there's Troilus will not come far behind him; let them take heed of Troilus, I can tell them that too.

(58-61)

When Cressida reacts to this head-and-shoulders introduction of Troilus with her ironical, “What, is he angry too?” Pandarus replies, “Who, Troilus? Troilus is the better man of the two” (62-63). As this foolish assertion shows, Pandarus is little concerned with truth, and throughout the scene his clumsy efforts at manipulation contrast unfavorably to Cressida's clearer sight and straighter language.

Cres. O Jupiter! There's no comparison.
Pan. What, not between Troilus and Hector? Do you know a man if you see him?
Cres. Ay, if I ever saw him before and knew him.

(65-69)

Again, exactly as in her dialogue with the servant, Cressida resists the use of the word “man” as an honorific term; she again applies the word to all men. This repetition of the same play on words (which can hardly be mere accident) underscores the serious weight of Cressida and Pandarus' conversation; beneath the bantering surface, their topic is the very concept of personal identity.

Pan. Well, I say Troilus is Troilus.
Cres. Then you say as I say; for, I am sure, he is not Hector.
Pan. No, nor Hector is not Troilus in some degrees.
Cres. 'Tis just to each of them; he is himself.

(70-75)

Pandarus, whose role anyway is to obliterate the differences between one man (or woman) and another—so that he can obliterate the barriers separating men and women—always comes out worse in the exchange:

Pan. You have no judgment, niece: Helen herself swore th' other day, that Troilus, for a brown favour—for so 'tis, I must confess,—not brown neither,—
Cres. No, but brown.
Pan. 'Faith, to say truth, brown and not brown.
Cres. To say the truth, true and not true.

(101-06)

The difference between Pandarus and Cressida, regarding their valuation of people, becomes further apparent as they stand on the walls of Troy, watching the soldiers passing by. While Pandarus is concerned only with Troilus, Cressida asks the same kind of questions she asked the serving man, earlier:

Who's that?
Will he give you the nod?
Be those (marks on Hector's helmet) with swords?
Can Helenus fight, uncle?

(205-41)

Cressida is almost the only character in the play who notices the efforts of other soldiers besides the legendary heroes of Troy; Pandarus, in scurrilous contrast, dismisses from consideration everyone who does not come within the limited purview of his own advantage:

Cres. Here come more.
Pan. Asses, fools, dolts! chaff and bran, chaff and bran! porridge after meat! I could live and die i' the eyes of Troilus.

(261-65)

Consistently, Cressida places more value on people than does Pandarus. It is her language which gives the scene its substance:

Pan. But there was such laughing. Queen Hecuba laughed that her eyes ran over.
Cres. With millstones.
Pan. And Cassandra laughed.
Cres. But there was more temperate fire under the pot of her eyes. Did her eyes run over too?

(156-61)

Appropriate to the tragic figures in the discussion—the “Trojan women”—Cressida's images of millstones and boiling cauldrons are tragic props. Troy, we are reminded, is doomed, and in the general destruction the helpless women will be caught up. Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra all contribute to the paradigm for destruction which also encompasses Cressida's situation.

“You are such a woman a man knows not at what ward you lie,” says Pandarus, Cressida's uncle and nominal protector, reminding Cressida that he is indeed attacking her and that she must defend herself against him as against others.

Upon my back, to defend my belly; upon my wit, to defend my wiles; upon my secrecy, to defend mine honesty; my mask, to defend my beauty; and you, to defend all these: and at all these wards I lie, at a thousand watches.
… if I cannot ward what I would not have hit, I can watch you for telling how I took the blow; unless it swell past hiding, and then it's past watching.

(282-96)

Undoubtedly, this is the speech which has caused typical assumptions about Cressida's bawdiness—rather oddly, in my view, given the context of Shakespearean drama overall, in which the lightest utterances often comprise scabrous jokes that most English professors today would hesitate to use. Leaving aside obvious examples like those in The Taming of the Shrew, or Touchstone's parody of Orlando's poetry, or the innumerable references to cuckoldry or to syphilis in the plays, we often find briefer touches of the same quality: even a character like the “honest old Councellor,” Gonzalo, in The Tempest, describes the ship as “as leaky as an unstanched wench” (I.i.46, New Arden ed.). In any case, the chief impact of Cressida's speech surely lies not in some carelessly assumed salaciousness but in its disclosure of extreme vulnerability. Obviously, a woman cannot defend her belly by lying on her back, nor can Cressida depend on Pandarus to defend her; this entire speech relates solely that, in fact, Cressida has no defenses. In order to deal with the world in which she lives, she must needs be “at a thousand watches.”

This vulnerability partly shapes her actions: although she loves Troilus, her awareness of her situation has caused her to resist him. The speech in which Cressida expresses her sense of her vulnerability, however, has aroused further negative assessments of her character.

Yet hold I off. 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 ungain'd more than it is:
That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
Achievement is command; ungain'd, beseech:
Then though my heart's content firm love doth bear,
Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.

(312-21)

While these lines can surely be read as evidence of insecurity, many readers see them as evidence of cold-blooded calculation,⁹ a view which would be more plausible if Cressida could be said to gain some material or emotional benefit from holding out against Troilus. But she does not. Unlike Richardson's Pamela, Cressida is not upping the ante; she neither aspires to nor attains to material reward. It might be noted here, incidentally, that Troilus never mentions the idea of marriage to Cressida (a lapse which seems not to dismay Shakespearean critics, since they never—as far as I know—mention it either).

The negative treatment accorded to Cressida by literary criticism can be explained only partly by reference to the play, and even less by reference to her own character. One contributing factor in this negative view, however, must be that Troilus and Cressida is the ugliest of all Shakespeare's plays in its language about women overall.¹⁰ Negative images of women, purveyed by self-interested or biased or neurotic characters, abound in the play; Thersites, the obvious example, is only the most extreme; his view is shared by—among others—Diomedes, Ulysses, Troilus, and Hector. Not one character in the play, not even Hector, is capable of speaking in women's defense. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the critical traditions surrounding the play have been infected by this climate of opinion within the play. The same point will arise again in this paper; for now, I wish to focus briefly on the character of Troilus.

Troilus' rather dubious view of women becomes manifest in his (and the play's) first scene; ironically, his view manifests itself in the guise of his love-longing for Cressida. Troilus, like the very young man he is, blames his “weakness,” meaning his unfitness for fighting, on his love.

I am weaker than a woman's tear,
Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance,
Less valiant than the virgin in the night,
And skilless as unpracticed infancy.

(I.i.9-12)

His very choice of images projects Troilus' own weakness onto the object of his desire: the speech linguistically conflates sleep, ignorance, weakness, and womanliness. Similarly, he replies to Aeneas:

Aene. How now, Prince Troilus! wherefore not afield?
Tro. Because not there. This woman's answer sorts,
For womanish it is to be from thence.

(108-10)

Even in his love scene with Cressida, even when Cressida has just confessed that she loves him, Troilus falls into the same vein:

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;
To keep her constancy in plight and youth,
Outliving beauty's outward, with a mind
That doth renew swifter than blood decays!
Or that persuasion could but thus convince me,
That my integrity and truth to you
Might be affronted with the match and weight
Of such a winnow'd purity in love;
How were I then uplifted! but, alas!
I am as true as truth's simplicity
And simpler than the infancy of truth.

(165-77)

This speech does not make much sense; moreover, what sense it has seems rather unloverlike. Not only does Troilus assert his “integrity and truth” at the expense of Cressida's, he goes so far as to say that he cannot be persuaded of Cressida's constancy (because he is too simple and “true” to be imposed on by “persuasion”—a peculiar argument). Indeed, the speech virtually forbids Cressida's constancy: first, because Troilus says he cannot believe in it, and second, because he says he will “presume” it anyway. Neither the willful distrust nor the equally willful presumption calls for—or allows for—any response from the woman herself.

The condition of women in Troilus and Cressida is an index to the condition of humanity as represented in the play; all these characters are being subjected to the pressures of a war, and such a situation does not produce fairmindedness. Troilus, for example, viewing women with distrust, almost inevitably displaces his frustrations with the war onto a woman:

Peace, you ungracious clamours! peace, rude sounds!
Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair,
When with your blood you daily paint her thus.
I cannot fight upon this argument;
It is too starved a subject for my sword.

(I.i.92-96)

Like others among the soldiers who fight with him, Troilus displaces his anger at the war onto the ostensible object of that war. In spite of the fact that he himself refers to Helen as an image—an “argument,” a “subject”—he still cannot see that, being an image, Helen is devoid of responsibility for the fighting. If Helen is an image, then Troilus and the other warriors act according to their perception of her, not according to her real nature.

Thus it is not surprising that when his perception of Helen changes (partly), Troilus becomes as willing to fight “for Helen” as he was unwilling in I.i. His change manifests itself in II.ii, which contains the famous debate with Hector about continuing the war. Troilus' persuasion scenes, by the way, form one of the unhappiest patterns in this play: when he persuades Cressida to go to bed with him and when, in two scenes, he persuades Hector to fight, he imposes his wishes on another person in spite of the manifest danger to that other.

The debate between Troilus and Hector calls for some attention. When Hector says of Helen, “Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost / The holding,” Troilus replies—as most readers tend to remember—“What is aught, but as 'tis valued?” (51-53). Herein lies the debate about real and ideal values in the play which has generated many a similar debate in criticism about the play. Troilus' argument, indeed, has persuaded others besides Hector:

A value is sufficiently objective or real if it makes demands on the prizer, imposes restraints, requires consistency of behavior, elicits noble action, and—most important—converts a world of indifferent objects into a significant field worthy of one's trouble and attention. Helen is a case in point: if women are whores, are they not accorded generous treatment in being considered pearls? If Thersites is right, do not Hector and Troilus improve Helen by making her a symbol of their own noble urges?¹¹

Among these “noble urges,” presumably, is the urge to kill Greeks. In any case, passing over the orotund tautology of the word “sufficiently,” I would respectfully say that the answers to these questions are no, and no. Helen remains Helen, whatever she is, by virtue of her own actions, not the actions of others. Individual responsibility—that crucial concept which is skirted by both Troilus and Hector in this scene—greatly disposes individual identity. Professor Berger, however, even outstrips his initial argument, just quoted:

Helen's shortcomings offer a challenge to the heroic imagination, … proof of its force lies in its ability to shape such recalcitrant material to its own higher uses.

Again, these “higher causes” presumably include the “causes” of killing Trojans and Greeks, espoused respectively by Greeks and Trojans. Professor Berger's point, of course, is that the “heroic imagination” is its own reward:

For if life is such that trial necessarily frustrates the “unbodied figure of thought,” Trojan idealism could—in the right hands—become a practical as well as a noble posture: By expecting no reward from the “universe of event …”

In other words, an imagination which is too heroic to need to believe in anything could hardly be disappointed at anything (a practicality which, in Berger's own terms, should surely diminish its heroism). For the metaphysics of true belief, we can substitute the heroic imagination of nonbelief.

To return to Troilus' language, the pungent array of images which Troilus marshals in support of his argument reveals his evaluation of Helen:

We turn not back the silks upon the merchant,
When we have soil'd them, nor the remainder viands
We do not throw in unrespective sieve,
Because we now are full.

(69-72)

Such a prize is not easily distinguishable from garbage. But in any case, as Troilus reveals when he continues, he is not really talking about Helen—the person Helen—at all:

Is she worth keeping? why, she is a pearl,
Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships,
And turn'd crowned kings to merchants.

(81-83)

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”: having taken these lines from a man who did not greatly like women, Shakespeare gives them appropriately to Troilus. Whatever their opinion of Helen, however, Marlowe and Troilus at least refer to her as a “face”; their synecdoche is polite compared to that of Diomedes:

You, like a lecher, out of whorish loins
Are pleased to breed out your inheritors.

(I.i.63-64)

“Face” from one perspective, “whorish loins” from the obverse, Helen's image is a Duessa-like compound of concealed ugliness and menace which, I would argue, comes from her explicit association with the seductions of war.¹² But Helen herself is as much a victim of this war as anyone else. The image of the “face” is the image imposed on the ugly deeds of war by misdirection and self-interest; it remains merely an image. Therefore, Marlowe's question requires a negative answer: those ships were not in fact launched by a “face,” nor were the towers burnt by it; only fighting soldiers perform such deeds. Shakespeare's alteration of the original line suggests this distinction: in changing “face” to “price,” Shakespeare places the responsibility for the war not on Helen but on the men who “desire to buy” her (IV.i.76). But while Troilus voices this distinction, he himself does not recognize it; when he describes Helen, he continually objectifies her:

She is a theme of honor and renown,
A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds,
Whose present courage may beat down our foes,
And fame in time to come canonize us.

(199-202)

A “pearl” of “price” (in neat parody of the biblical image), a “theme,” and a “spur,” Helen metamorphoses into everything but a person; she becomes by turns a series of objects whose particular form seems hardly to matter but whose function is always to allow people to shuffle the responsibility for their actions. Troilus may call her “a theme of honor and renown,” as long as he is in the mood to do so, but she more weightily embodies a question about moral responsibility.

The fundamental point about the “matter of Troy,” the red herring known as “Helen of Troy,” is this: the decision to fight the war, and therefore the responsibility for the war, rests not with the object of the war but with the fighters; Hector's question of whether to continue fighting cannot be determined, one way or the other, by reference to Helen. That the very interposition of Helen's “worth” is specious, in this context, becomes readily apparent when we try to deal with it logically. Thus, what personal attributes would make Helen “worth” fighting for? more beauty? chastity? good cooking? And how long would she continue to be “worth” fighting for? until the first ten thousand men had died? the second ten thousand? No, the real question in this scene, and in this play, is why these men are fighting for something they so clearly do not want, and the dramatist shows us that they are blind to their own responsibility.

In this blindness, Troilus and Hector both address their arguments about the war to the moot question of Helen's merits. Following the general pattern of the play, Hector displaces his frustration with his situation onto Helen (just as he displaced his earlier anger at Ajax onto Andromache and his armorer). When Hector makes his shocking about-face at the end of the debate, therefore, his essential collapse is merely becoming belatedly apparent: like Cressida in another scene, he was only “hard to seem won” (III.ii.125). Because he has been contending for a non-strategic position, his battle was actually lost from the start.

Indeed, the play establishes several points of resemblance between Hector and Cressida, and the first of these is that both Hector and Cressida must contend with Troilus. In their self-divided conflict with Troilus, moreover, both Hector and Cressida must also contend against the fixed codes of conduct—the fixed roles—which Troilus marshals against them; Troilus exhorts Hector to be a fiercer warrior and Cressida to be his mistress in analogous applications of a sexist tradition.¹³ When Hector and Cressida give in to Troilus, then, their resemblance becomes even closer; they both give in partly because they love Troilus and partly because they cannot argue against the traditions which he musters against them. One of the tragic ironies of the play is that Troilus contributes so largely to his own dual bereavement of Hector and Cressida.

Troilus' arguments thus reflect the overall action of Troilus and Cressida, for the whole play portrays the analogous manipulation of women and soldiers, always for ulterior reasons and always with disappointing results. Generally speaking, both the women and the soldiers become commodities to exploit, in an overall debasement of human values indicated by the play's ubiquitous images of commerce and merchandising.¹⁴ Troilus' language fits him into this context, too; as other readers have pointed out, Troilus uses the same terms to describe Cressida that he uses for Helen:

Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl:
Between our Ilium and where she resides,
Let it be call'd the wild and wandering flood,
Ourself the merchant, and this sailing Pandar
Our doubtful hope, our convoy and our bark.

(I.i.103-07)

Himself a “merchant” and “sailing Pandar” his “bark,” Troilus cannot see that the mercantile theme of his world does indeed reduce kings to merchants, just as it reduces an uncle to a procurer and leaders of men into manipulators of their soldiers' courage.¹⁵

If Cressida and Hector play parallel roles, so do Pandarus and Ulysses; when people like Cressida and Hector (and Ajax and Achilles) become commodities to exploit, Pandarus and Ulysses—another pair of characters who partly reflect each other—become merchants. In the convocation of the Greek generals in I.iii, Ulysses explicitly identifies himself so:

Therefore 'tis meet Achilles meet not Hector.
Let us, like merchants, show our foulest wares,
And think, perchance, they'll sell; if not,
The lustre of the better yet to show,
Shall show the better.

(358-62)

Playing a kind of pander, Ulysses tries to procure Achilles for the battle. And with Ulysses acting as go-between, it is only appropriate that Achilles should play a kind of coy mistress:

Having his ear full of his airy fame, [he]
Grows dainty of his worth.

(I.iii.144-45)

Or so Ulysses describes Achilles. Such a stance of passive resistance on Achilles' part, of course, inconveniences those about him greatly; indeed, as Patroclus warns Achilles, resistance can become intolerable in either a woman or a soldier:

A woman impudent and mannish grown
Is not more loathed than an effeminate man
In time of action.

(III.iii.217-19)

The play contains no more succinct statement of its dualistic code of conduct for men and women, the encroachment against individual identity which becomes a weapon against both women and soldiers. One of the subsidiary ironies of the tragic action in this play is that poor Patroclus goes to his doom much as the great Hector does, having belatedly subscribed to a “heroic” code of self-destruction; having decided to play the part of a man, Patroclus plays the tragic part of dying on the battlefield.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, the author of this play reveals that the deck is stacked: for Cressida, Patroclus, Hector, Ajax, and all the myriad characters, greater and lesser, who might be either useful or inconvenient to someone else, there is virtually no protection. The point is brought home when, in order to draw Ajax and Achilles into battle, Ulysses fixes a lottery. Here, undoubtedly, is Ulysses' sincere comment on the axiom that “In the reproof of chance / Lies the true proof of men” (I.ii.33-34). Consider briefly this scheme evolved by Ulysses and Nestor. The two chieftains agree, at the end of I.iii, to use Ajax and Achilles to egg each other on by emulation:

Two curs shall tame each other: pride alone
Must tarre the mastiffs on, as 'twere their bone.

(391-92)

Ulysses and Nestor's sordid travesty of leadership discloses the dynamics of aggression; much of the play's action is explicated by aggression's unworthy aims, its unworthy means, and its subsequent failure. Like the other manipulation throughout the play, it transforms persons into objects—commodities, animals, images—to be used. To render the lesson explicit, Thersites enters as the next speaker, railing at Ajax:

thou scurvy-valiant ass! thou art here but to thrash Trojans: and thou art bought and sold among those of any wit like a barbarian slave.

(II.i.49-52)

With the appropriate dramatic irony, furthermore, the scheme does not succeed in any case; while Ajax is bought and sold readily enough (within a hundred lines), the scheme goes awry in that he now, like Achilles, “grows dainty of his worth”: “now is the cur Ajax prouder than the cur Achilles, and will not arm today” (V.iv.14-15). Consequently II.ii, in which the Greek leaders bait Ajax like a pack of “curs” themselves around a bear, resembles the bungling interferences of Pandarus rather than the epic shrewdness traditionally associated with Ulysses and Nestor.

To return to Cressida: although she is in love with Troilus, Cressida has resisted the importunities of Troilus and Pandarus “for many weary months” (III.ii.124). Incidentally, in case this question of Cressida's resistance does bear greatly on her character, the play provides three indications of its length. One, the line just quoted from III.ii, receives corroboration from Troilus' reply: “Why was my Cressida then so hard to win?” (125). In I.i, furthermore, Troilus refers to Cressida as “too stubborn-chaste to be won,” in that speech which readers generally choose to discount; and a speech of Troilus' in IV.iv seems to suggest the same:

We two, that with so many thousand sighs
Did buy each other. …

(41-42)

These signals have been ignored, as a rule, by readers who wish to assume that Cressida's giving in to Troilus implies previous great experience on her part.

In any case, Cressida does give in to Troilus, in a scene whose tone is set by her many misgivings:

… if my fears have eyes …
Blind fear, that seeing reason leads, finds safer
Footing than blind reason stumbling without fear.
To fear the worst oft cures the worse.

(III.ii.72-77)

                                                                                                    See, we fools!
Why have I blabb'd? who shall be true to us,
When we are so unsecret to ourselves?

(131-33)

                    in this rapture I shall surely speak
The thing I shall repent.

(138-39)

I am ashamed. O heavens! what have I done?

(146)

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

(153-55)

This entire scene, with its ominous emphasis on Cressida's sense of herself as divided, underscores the tremendous fear which shadows Cressida's actions; and it should be borne in mind here that Shakespeare does not employ the literary tradition which makes Cressida a widow. While others may choose to see Cressida's reiterated misgivings as mere coyness, therefore, I think that she sincerely fears the outcome of her involvement with Troilus. Indeed, considering the vulnerability of her situation and the intensity of her fears, her involvement with Troilus may be a braver action than many performed in the war; even at the worst, Cressida at least is baited with love rather than with “pride.”

The action of Troilus and Cressida through Act III develops the pressures brought to bear on characters like Cressida and Hector, Ajax and Achilles; the rest of the play shows the disintegration of humane values and human affection under such pressures. Cressida having lost her battle, Patroclus enters the fray; he having been destroyed, Achilles at last joins battle—finally to kill Hector, the one warrior of either camp who possesses enough humanity to spare an enemy's life. Greek and Trojan soldiers alike, incited one after another to throw themselves into the bloody mill of battle, are destroyed, and the very possibility of nobility in war is also destroyed: “Hector is dead.”

For Cressida, the first consequence of her union with Troilus is that he hands her over to the Greeks: his desire for her has been fulfilled. The series of scenes (IV.ii, iii, and iv) which develops this action deserves careful attention. The first of these, the leavetaking between Troilus and Cressida the morning after they have slept together, presents an antiphony between Cressida's desire for reassurance and Troilus' desire to be gone:

Tro. Dear, trouble not yourself: the morn is cold.
Cres. Then, sweet my lord, I'll call mine uncle down;
He shall unbolt the gates.
Tro. Trouble him not;
To bed, to bed: sleep kill those pretty eyes. …
Cres. Good morrow, then.
Tro. I prithee now, to bed.
Cres. Are you a-weary of me?
Tro. O Cressida! but that the busy day. …
Cres. Prithee, tarry:
You men will never tarry.
O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off,
And then you would have tarried.

(1-18)

When Pandarus enters, at this point, his voyeuristic humor at Cressida's expense evidently alienates Troilus even further from Cressida. Cressida, with an understandable wish for privacy from the unknown men who are knocking roughly at her door, begs Troilus to come back into her room—and Troilus laughs at her as though she meant to seduce him (37-43).

The men at the door are the Trojan policy makers, who have just made a deal to send Cressida to the Greeks and who have arrived to tell her about it. First, however, they inform Troilus of the news: after one night together, the lovers are to be parted—to which blow Troilus responds, “Is it so concluded?” (68). While Troilus' remarkable terseness at this point could be played as the silence of deep feeling, the rest of the scene does not necessarily warrant such an interpretation. Although Cressida has only one hour to remain in Troy, for example, Troilus does not remain with her; he does not even acquaint her with the news about her fate. Instead, he goes away to join the men who have made the bargain: “How my achievements mock me! / I will go meet them” (71-72). By “achievements,” presumably, Troilus means his conquest of Cressida; in any case, he leaves her to hear the news from Pandarus or from whoever will bother to tell her, assuaging his conscience meanwhile by chivalrously protecting her reputation (or his own): “and, my Lord Aeneas, / We met by chance; you did not find me here” (72-73). Similarly, Troilus expressed his manifest desire to leave, after getting out of bed, in his ostensible concern that prolonged farewells might cause Cressida to catch cold.

In this scene, however, Troilus expresses not one word of concern for Cressida's safety or welfare in the enemy camp. More strangely yet, Troilus never expresses any direct regret over the fact that Cressida must leave. Even in his long farewell speech (IV.iv.35-50), he laments not the leavetaking itself but the haste of the leavetaking—creating the effect, once again, of his own haste:

We two, that with so many thousand sighs
Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves
With the rude brevity and discharge of one.

Remarkably, the play never acquaints us with any reason for all this hurry. Why must Cressida be delivered up “ere the first sacrifice” (IV.ii.66)? And why have readers not asked this question before? And why does Troilus not ask it? We cannot even ascertain that Cressida is permitted to pack her belongings. As in the famous “double time” of Othello, man's inhumanity to man (or to woman) creates in Troilus and Cressida an independent impetus, a spurious urgency which sweeps up human action to the detriment of human values. This hasty action in the play does, of course, contribute to the delineation of character, especially of Troilus' character. Troilus has two scenes of leavetaking with Cressida, scenes parallel in more than one respect but chiefly in that both of them present Troilus as a young man in a hurry. His youthful insensitivity in this regard may attest to more than his own character, incidentally; if, as readers contend, Troilus' faith in Cressida betrays his inexperience, then surely his actions betray her inexperience in hoping to rely on him.

I'll bring her to the Grecian presently;
And to his hand when I deliver her,
Think it an altar, and thy brother Troilus
A priest there offering to it his own heart.

(IV.iii.6-9)

A feeling of sacrifice does indeed underly these scenes, but whether Troilus understands what (or, rather, who) is actually being sacrificed remains dubious. Pandarus says, “The young prince will go mad” (IV.ii.78), and Paris says, “I know what 'tis to love” (IV.iii.10), but Troilus performs an action surely unique in a romantic lead: on the very “morning after,” he himself delivers Cressida to their common enemy.

Following this action comes that exemplary scene mentioned at the beginning of this essay, of Cressida's entrance into the Greek camp. E.M.W. Tillyard's comments instruct us as to the critical tradition regarding this scene:

… two characters are exempt from the inflation, the comedy, and the antique quaintness alike. The first is Troilus, whose dejected look causes Agamemnon to ask who he is and Ulysses to testify so splendidly to his surpassing merit and courage. …
The second is Ulysses, who towers right above the other Greeks in good sense and acute perception and he speaks in full Shakespearean idiom [sic]. He sees through Cressida instantly, while the other Greek leaders make fools of themselves.(16)

One would never guess, reading Tillyard's appraisal, that Ulysses suggests the “general” kissing in the first place:

Aga. Most dearly welcome to the Greeks, sweet lady.
Nes. Our general doth salute you with a kiss.
Uly. Yet is the kindness but particular;
'Twere better she were kissed in general.

(IV.v.18-21)

More like Pandarus than ever, Ulysses suggests the general kissing so that—of course—Cressida will kiss him in particular. As with his scheme for Achilles and Ajax, however, the readily adopted plan quickly fails.

Throughout the first half of her scene, Cressida is silent, for reasons which can only be conjectured. She breaks her silence with Menelaus, whose situation is almost as tenuous as her own and who is the first of these Greeks to ask for a kiss: “I'll have my kiss, sir. Lady, by your leave” (35). Cressida's responses are all negative:

Men. I'll give you boot, I'll give you three for one.
Cres. You're an odd man; give even, or give none.
Men. An odd man, lady! every man is odd.
Cres. No, Paris is not; for you know 'tis true,
That you are odd, and he is even with you.

(IV.v.40-44)

This exchange between the two picks up the theme of “every man” and some men from Cressida's first scene: Cressida seems to have become aware of the melancholy distinctions which set some men apart from others. Here, Ulysses breaks in, evidently frustrated by the ongoing action in which he has not taken part:

Men. You fillip me o' the head.
Cres.                                         No, I'll be sworn.
Uly. It were no match, your nail against his horn.
May I, sweet lady, beg a kiss of you?

(45-47)

While Tillyard seems to imply that Ulysses refuses to kiss Cressida, the language in their exchange indicates the reverse.

Cres. You may.
Uly.                                         I do desire it.
Cres.                                                                                 Why, beg then.

(48)

Like a Vaudeville exchange, the old joke goes, “May I ask … ?”—“You may ask. …” Whereupon Ulysses, rebuffed, tries to turn the joke away from himself: “Why then for Venus' sake, give me a kiss, / When Helen is a maid again, and his.” In the final stichomythic exchange, Cressida promises never to kiss Ulysses: “I am your debtor, claim it when 'tis due.” And Ulysses takes the point: “Never's my day, and then a kiss of you” (49-52). Hence, Ulysses bursts out with his famous verdict on Cressida (after her exit), in all the vigor of sour grapes:

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

(54-63)

Ulysses' speech reveals more about himself than about Cressida. Far from showing herself “glib of tongue,” Cressida does not speak a word until the scene is half through; far from unclasping the tables of her thoughts, she must be making some considerable effort to conceal her thoughts. Nor, of course, would the Greek officers listen to her thoughts if she did “unclasp” them. Ulysses' speech here is realistic only insofar as it displays the way a Greek captain would probably deal with a Trojan woman: aside from the motive of frustrated desire, is it likely that Ulysses would laud Cressida, thereby reflecting adversely on his own efforts to destroy her homeland? Guy de Maupassant would understand these Greek officers perfectly. Cressida is indeed the “spoils of opportunity,” her situation determined by the forces set loose in her world; naturally, her captors must seek to justify her being “spoils” by asserting her to be “sluttish” as well.

Considered realistically, however, Cressida's situation is pathetic, and in IV.v the pathos underscores a very obvious double standard: Cressida is despised for being kissed by the men who are kissing her. Surely, therefore, to stage or to teach this scene as though it vindicated Ulysses' idea of “daughters of the game” violates the play; we are not being shown images of aggression so that we can league ourselves with the aggressors. Simple theatrical concerns, furthermore, enforce the same conclusion; to take Ulysses' speeches at face value results in underplaying the part, turning Ulysses into a pasteboard “statesman” instead of a real character, less noble but more interesting. Consider Ulysses' pattern of action: he bears tales to Nestor and Agamemnon about Patroclus' ridicule, which he could not have heard without eaves-dropping (I.iii); he breaks in on Menelaus' exchange with Cressida to divert Cressida's attention to himself (IV.v), and then tries to create an image of wantonness about Cressida; he interrupts Nestor's courtesies with Hector, to predict—to Hector—the fall of Troy (IV.v.217-21). He makes a point of telling Troilus about Diomedes' interest in Cressida, while asking insinuatingly,

As gentle tell me, of what honour was
This Cressida in Troy?

(IV.v.288-89)

And finally, Ulysses escorts Troilus to spy on Cressida and prevents his doing anything but spying on her, by referring to a danger which must be exaggerated, given Ulysses' own status (V.ii). In short, Ulysses is a meddler. An attention-seeker, a flatterer, a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a contriver of plans which sound plausible but consistently fail, a man caught up in a war over someone else's wife, Ulysses exemplifies that aggressive behavior in which one surmounts one's own frustrations by making trouble for other people. Not surprisingly, therefore, Ulysses seems also to admire aggression in others: while he objects to Cressida's kissing Greeks, he highly praises Troilus' prowess in killing Greeks (IV.v.96-112)—notwithstanding that he himself is a Greek. “Masculine” aggression, even in an enemy, wins his approval, where an element of self-defensive behavior in the woman who is virtually a captive arouses his disdain.

Cressida's entrance into the Greek camp is paralleled weightily, in the same scene, by Hector's entrance into the Greek camp; Cressida's situation is reflected by Hector's. For in spite of the Greeks' sexual jollification with Cressida and their elaborate courtesies with Hector, Cressida and Hector still remain “spoils of opportunity,” alike; they are similarly handed over to the Greeks and similarly, in effect, carved up. The two characters resemble each other not only in situation but also in language. Thus Hector, like Cressida, initially tries to divide “particulars” from the “general”:

Were thy commixtion Greek and Trojan so
That thou couldst say ‘This hand is Grecian all,
And this is Trojan; 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’. …
Thou shouldst not bear from me a Greekish member
Wherein my sword had not impressure made
Of our rank feud.

(IV.v.124-32)

Unable to partition Ajax up as he wishes, however, Hector himself ends in being carved apart; refusing to kill Ajax (since his conscience prohibits killing the whole man), he falls prey to Achilles, even in anticipation:

Tell me, you heavens, in which part of his body
Shall I destroy him? whether there, or there, or there?
That I may give the local wound a name
And make distinct the very breach whereout
Great Hector's spirit flew:

(242-46)

In simpler terms, these great warriors have become so many illustrious butchers, who wish to carve each other up like cuts of meat:

Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee;
I have with exact view perused thee, Hector,
And quoted joint by joint. …
I will the second time,
As I would buy thee, view thee limb by limb.

(231-38)

Here is the culmination of the play's mercantile imagery as it applies to Hector and to Cressida (whose “every joint and motive” has already been “with exact view perused” by Ulysses).

This macabre emphasis on human “joints” in the later part of Troilus and Cressida parodies the earlier thematic distinction of “particular” from “general.” Unable to distinguish people, as people, from the fact of their enmity, these Greeks and Trojans have degenerated to the hideous travesty of distinguishing particular “joints” of people from the whole person. Inevitably, therefore, the characters become what they have been denominated; they become fragmented instead of whole. Cressida too undergoes this transformation, but rather than dividing up other people on the battlefield, she turns the process inward; in a traditional self-punishing fashion, she divides herself up:

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 sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

(V.ii.107-12)

Having been divided into “joints,” into “particular” parts, Cressida no longer acts as a whole person; V.ii fulfills the hints of self-division in III.ii. There is a tragic irony in the echoes of the earlier scene:

Tro. What offends you, lady?
Cres. Sir, mine own company.
Tro. You cannot shun yourself.

(III.ii.151-52)

Having been punished—as she evidently feels—for giving in to Troilus, Cressida sustains the self-defeating pattern by punishing herself; she turns to Diomedes, the very caricature of a “guardian” (V.ii.146). At the beginning of the play, Cressida knew the difference between “true and not true” in the world around her. When she turns to Troilus, however, she relinquishes that perception about others; when she turns to Diomedes, she relinquishes the distinction even within herself; she herself becomes “true and not true”: “This is, and is not, Cressid” (146). Where Cressida is so divided, Troilus is in some sense right in saying, “rather think this not Cressid” (133).

In the patterns of aggression which schematize this play, men are turned into objects of fear, to be cut apart physically, and women are turned into objects of scorn, to be cut apart figuratively. The spuriously heroic chivalric ideal of man as warrior and woman as mistress dissolves in a parody of itself, in which men die and women go to the proverbial fate worse than death. Thus it would be a mistake to apply only half the play's lesson: Troilus and Cressida is not the story of a valiant hero's betrayal by an unfaithful woman. The play is more balanced (so to speak) than that; people of both sexes are subjected to pressures which destroy their essential humanity. I would like to end this discussion by pointing briefly to a speech of Hector's which illustrates the position of men and women in the wartime world of Troilus and Cressida. This passage comes from Hector's chivalric challenge to the Greeks:

Hector, in view of Trojans and of Greeks,
Shall make it good, or do his best to do it,
He hath a lady, wiser, fairer, truer,
Than ever Greek did compass in his arms,
And will to-morrow with his trumpet call
Midway between your tents and walls of Troy,
To rouse a Grecian that is true in love:
If any come, Hector shall honour him;
If none, he'll say when he retires,
The Grecian dames are sunburnt and not worth
The splinter of a lance. Even so much.

(I.iii.273-83)

It is no accidental figure of speech that the projected outcome of this “chivalric” encounter is honor for the man and disgrace for the women; nor is it accidental that the disgrace will be living and the “honour” connected only with death.

Notes

1. All quotations from the text refer to the Troilus and Cressida in Hardin Craig, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1961).

2. See Richard Fly, “‘Suited in Like Conditions as Our Argument’: Imitative Form in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in English Literature, 15 (1975), 273-92, for a discussion of the play's apparent disunity as the manifestation of its “devastating and form-denying vision.”

3. Jarold W. Ramsey, “The Provenance of Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), 223-40.

4. For a good brief overview of this history of name-calling, see Grant L. Voth and Oliver H. Evans, “Cressida and the World of the Play,” Shakespeare Studies, 8 (1975), 231-39, especially the notes. This excellent article itself is one of the few exceptions to the general censorious rule, as is R.A. Yoder's “‘Sons and Daughters of the Game’: An Essay on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), 11-25. To exhaust the list of critics who hold the pejorative view would be impossible here, but it includes readers otherwise so disparate as E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), on one hand, and Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), on the other. Not even an otherwise enlightened view of the Trojan War saves Cressida from a fate worse than death: see Kott; Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951); and Emil Roy, “War and Manliness in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Comparative Drama, 7 (1973), 107-20.

5. I am using the term “metadramatic” in the sense in which I understand it from James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971). See especially the first chapter. Troilus and Cressida is a play which seems to lend itself to this approach; see Fly, n. 2 above.

6. Camille Slights, “The Parallel Structure of Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1974), 42-51.

7. Carolyn Asp, “Th' Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 345-57. This same view is also found in Tillyard's book, cited above, and in an otherwise very helpful article by Elias Schwartz, “Tonal Equivocation and the Meaning of Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in Philogy, 69 (1972), 304-19.

8. Shakespeare uses the same pun and calls attention to it elsewhere; see 1 Henry IV II.i.100-05.

9. See, for example, Asp, Schwartz, and even Voth and Evans.

10. The Concordance is instructive in this context. The word “whore” is used more in Troilus and Cressida than in any other Shakespearean play besides Othello (a fact which itself comments on the play); when women are mentioned in any context, it is almost always negatively. Not only women suffer thus, however; such language degrades the general image of humanity as well. Thus, the word “cur” is used more—applied to men—in this play than in any other play of Shakespeare's (including The Two Gentlemen from Verona, which contains a real dog). Not even “babies” are exempt: Troilus, for example, more than once uses the image of infancy, as he uses the image of womanhood, to express his own frailty. It is as though home and family are doomed to suffer in this play, even in image.

11. Harry Berger, Jr., “Troilus and Cressida: The Observer as Basilisk,” Comparative Drama, 2 (1968), 122-36.

12. This composite image, of course, is an abiding tradition. Aldous Huxley, for example, employs it in Time Must Have a Stop: “Is this the face … ?” his character asks, looking at a rear-view painting of a woman bathing. The image is one variant of the “loathly lady” motif in literature.

13. This analogy was pointed out to me by a most helpful reader of my essay, Connie M. Ericson.

14. Other readers have discussed this imagery of commerce; see, for example, Yoder.

15. I have borrowed here, almost verbatim, from an unpublished essay by a colleague, Dr. Judy Matthews Craig. Throughout this discussion, I am indebted to Dr. Craig's reading both of the play and of my writing.

16. Tillyard, p. 75. Also, consider Tillyard's remarks on the previous scenes:

    The next three scenes, IV.2, 3, and 4, are part comic, part pathetic: not tragic, because Troilus thinks he can trust Cressida and that he can visit her among the Greeks. They are scenes splendidly suited to the stage, very varied in passions, full of living characterisation. For instance when Cressida in her grief at parting calls herself “a woful Cressid 'mongst the merry Greeks,” we feel that even then the thought flashes through her that the merry Greeks may compensate for what she is losing. Troilus behaves with dignity, already an older man than the youth of the play's opening scene: a clear analogy with Hamlet.

    (p. 74)