SOURCE: “Legitimacy in Interpretation: The Bastard Voice in Troilus and Cressida,” in Mosaic, Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 1-13.

[In the following essay, Hyland contends that the bastard, Thersites—though not always fair in his assessment of what is occurring around him—is nevertheless an important antidote to authoritarianism in the play by virtue of his apparent insignificance.]

One of the most significant aspects of radical academic activity over the past few years has been the liberation of previously suppressed voices into a new pluralism. In the field of literary interpretation these voices have brought issues of gender, race and class into the reading of texts, problematizing anew the question of authority or legitimacy in interpretation, and suggesting the possibility of a new openness in reading. At the same time there has been a growing recognition that there are no ideologically pure readings, and that the reader has to be aware of his/her own biases. This has, however, also resulted in acute attention to the biases of other readers. Literary studies have become more politicized than ever before, and there is the risk that they will turn into a site of contestation on which the urge to silence or exclude opposing voices is pursued with increasing vigor.

This struggle over the liberation or exclusion of voices in contemporary culture is inevitably reflected in current readings of earlier cultures. A very influential strain of new historicist criticism operating within the field of Renaissance studies argues that Renaissance drama always contains and silences the subversive, populist voices that it allows to speak. In an essay entitled “Invisible Bullets,” the leading new historicist, Stephen Greenblatt, concludes that “the form [of drama] itself, as a primary expression of Renaissance power, helps to contain the radical doubts it continually provokes” (65). Leonard Tennenhouse, in his Power on Display, re-reads Shakespearean genres from a position similar to Greenblatt's. Shakespeare's theater, he argues, was allowed to exist only as long as it served court ideology; we cannot, he feels, conclude that Shakespeare and his company were capable of envisioning any different “political reality—one where the community of blood was not separated by an immutable principle from the people, or even one in which the power relations of the two social bodies were inverted” (38). This insistence on the absolute nature of official containment of the theater leaves us with a concept of Shakespeare's imagination as severely limited, and to a degree that seems to strain credibility. Annabel Patterson has recently described such totalitarian theories as “condescending to Shakespeare” (25), and has offered in their place a version of the dramatist as an author “unlikely to have unquestioningly adopted an anti-popular myth as his own” (1).

I want to consider in this essay the role of Thersites in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in relation to the problem of containment. In a play that throws a harsh light on military and political idealism on the one hand and romantic idealism on the other, Thersites provides the most corrosive and anti-authoritarian condemnation of “wars and lechery.” Within the play there are attempts to silence his voice, and in the critical history of the play the general tendency has also been to silence him. I shall argue that a strong case can be made for restoring authority to this “illegitimate” voice.

Much recent commentary on the play has indeed focused on silenced voices, but its concern has been with feminist issues, and it has made Cressida the center of its attention. Critics like Gayle Greene, Janet Adelman, Carol Cook and Linda Charnes, as well as males reading from a feminist perspective like Stephen J. Lynch and Paul Gaudet, have attempted to rescue Cressida from the condemnation of history and the play's masculine voices by revealing her as constructed by patriarchal discourses which suppress her own voice.

Some very recent critics such as Eric Mallin, James O'Rourke and Valerie Traub have extended analysis of what René Girard called “the politics of desire” beyond the heterosexual erotic into consideration of homosexual desire in the play; Traub, indeed, brilliantly brings the politics of AIDS into her reading. As one would expect, such critics have had more to say about Thersites than have the play's feminist readers; O'Rourke particularly, in his location of “Mistress Thersites” within a discussion of the homosexual and heterosexual implications of master-slave relationships, has some instructive comments on Thersites's place in relation to the Lacanian Symbolic Order, or Law of the Father. Thersites, according to this reading, takes the role of a woman, and is thus denied an identity within the Symbolic Order; as a result, however, he is also able to stand outside the mystifications of that Symbolic Order (155-56). Although this situation makes him a politically subversive voice, O'Rourke's concern is not to pursue this dimension, just as despite the increasing attention given to sexual politics and transgression in the play, little interest has been shown in the role played by Thersites's bastardy.

It is, of course, not until near the end of Troilus and Cressida, when he responds to the challenge by Margarelon, the bastard son of the Trojan King Priam, that Thersites first informs us, but then most insistently, about his illegitimacy:

I am a bastard too; I love bastards. I am a bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate. One bear will not bite another, and wherefore should one bastard? Take heed, the quarrel's most ominous for us—if the son of a whore fight for a whore, he tempts judgement. Farewell, bastard.

(5.7.16-22)¹

In revealing his illegitimacy Thersites identifies himself as a version of the “other,” and in doing so he also reveals his connection to issues of marginalization, subversion, sexual politics, and the social construction of identity. He becomes, in effect, a voice representing all those who are deprived of social identity, who are excluded and abused by the established hierarchy. To understand the significance of his bastardy, we need to consider the problem both in its theatrical context and in the historical context of the preoccupations of Tudor authority.

.....

Commentators who have considered Thersites's bastardy have tended to take a moralist position, seeing it as just one more aspect of his detestable character. According to Robert Kimbrough's reading of his final speech, Thersites is dismissed “in a most ignominious way. He is made to confess to bastardy and cowardice” (148). In a more recent study Graham Bradshaw responds to the character with an outrage hardly less intemperate than Thersites's own: “His rancour is that of a ‘ranke’, despised bastard who is ‘placed’, within the play, as a physical and an emotional cripple.” His judgments, therefore, are to be dismissed as the “filth” of a “puny performing freak” (141). This desire to silence Thersites's voice is handily epitomized by Kenneth Muir in the introduction to his edition of Troilus and Cressida. In discussing the play's two different endings in relation to the controversial question of its genre, he suggests that a modern director would be at liberty to follow either the relatively comic or the relatively tragic version, and to choose how sympathetic he wishes to make the Trojans, including Cressida. At the same time, however, Muir concludes: “It would not … be legitimate, in the interests of contemporary ‘relevance’, to offer Thersites as the fount of truth and wisdom” (38).

Well, fine word, “legitimate”! Muir's expression here is most interesting. He implies two things: that Thersites's reading of the events in which he is involved is not a legitimate reading, and that a reading of the play that would give power to Thersites's perspective is not a legitimate reading. That is, he is not only dismissing Thersites, but also denying space to a range of potential approaches to the play. On what authority, however, does Muir close down these ways of reading? I say authority, because this is an authoritarian position: to deny legitimacy to another is a means of asserting one's own legitimacy, for what is illegitimate cannot define itself or exist of itself, since it is defined by and in relation to what is legitimate. Further, the legitimate needs the illegitimate to authenticate or legitimate itself. Put more crudely (for Muir's chosen word provides a nexus of meaning nicely appropriate for my discussion), bastards do not make themselves.

Troilus and Cressida is a play whose critical history is grounded in a discussion of questions of absolute truth and legitimacy, the locus classicus of which is E.M.W. Tillyard's argument that the conception of order articulated in Ulysses's celebrated speech on degree was so much a part of the Elizabethan collective mind that it hardly needed to be expressed (18). Tillyard understood Ulysses as being “the fount of truth and wisdom.” While there are few today who would wish to go along with the Tillyard view of the play (Muir does not; he sees Ulysses's speech as “a cunning piece of persuasion rather than a solid philosophical statement” [27]), it is rather disquieting to see that the play still encourages critics to make authoritarian statements about how it should (or in this case should not) be understood.

I would contend that the play does indeed present Thersites as a source of “truth,” though truth must be understood as neither simple nor single. The ubiquity and insistence of his commentary on the action and other characters make it difficult to deny his voice a central place in the play, and his undiluted nastiness does not undercut its truth. After all, the fact that Ulysses is a cynical manipulator who uses noble-sounding ideas for narrowly pragmatic ends has not prevented critics from finding much “truth” in what he says, and some have found him to be the one true “reader” within the text of the play, presumably because what he says does not disturb them.

Thersites's voice constantly demands our attention, and the perspective that it embodies represents authentic experience and is potentially powerful. According to Robert Weimann: “his debunking and skeptical commentary serves to offer viable alternatives to the main or state view of things. In this sense characters like … Thersites help point out that the ideas and values held by the main characters are relative to their particular position in the play …” (228). Thersites, I would say, is indeed an illegitimate voice; he stands up for bastards, and he recognizes the precarious basis upon which the “legitimate” stands. As such he is a genuinely subversive figure, one whose voice is not finally silenced by the play, and one, I will argue, whose voice should not be silenced by theories of containment (it is perhaps noteworthy that Tennenhouse, who denies that Shakespeare could have imagined just such inversions as are imagined by Thersites, does not deal with Troilus and Cressida).

I shall begin by returning to Kimbrough's account of Thersites's final moment on the stage in which, according to Kimbrough, he is ignominiously “made to confess to bastardy and cowardice.” The less interesting question is whether Thersites's refusal to fight Margarelon is the act of a coward, and we might wish simply to note that his early insistence on mocking Ajax with the “truth,” in spite of the beatings he receives for it, hardly suggests that he is a coward. Further (though this is a matter of interpretation), the tone of his reply to Margarelon's challenge can surely be taken as ironically defiant rather than craven. The more interesting question is whether Thersites's “confession” of his bastardy is ignominious. Before the confrontation between Margarelon and Thersites, bastardy is mentioned only once in the play: when Agamemnon refers to the “bastard Margarelon,” which he does with admiration for his colossal heroism (5.5.7-10). Margarelon himself, when challenged by Thersites, apparently sees no shame in proclaiming himself “A bastard son of Priam's” (5.7.15). So why should Thersites's response to Margarelon's confession of bastardy be ignominious if Margarelon's confession itself is not? Why, indeed, should Thersites's revelation of his illegitimacy even be seen as a confession, when for Margarelon it is no more than a way of identifying—and possibly a way of distinguishing—himself? One answer might well be that there is a difference between a royal bastard and other kinds, but that begs the question of what sort of judgment it is that would make such a distinction, a question that will take on ironic overtones in the course of the present discussion.

This whole brief scene between Margarelon and Thersites is distinctly odd. Why is it there? Agamemnon's reference to Margarelon is the only time we have previously heard of him, and he makes an appearance in no other scene. His sole function, therefore, seems to be to give Thersites a pretext for proclaiming his illegitimacy. As we have seen, the purpose of this cannot be to dismiss Thersites in a climactic humiliation. Furthermore, it equally cannot be simply a means of explaining his “villainy.” In her study of illegitimacy, Jenny Teichman considers the conventions that have developed around the figure of the illegitimate in literature: “The bastard as usurper and murderer is an archetype. … Faulconbridge in Shakespeare's King John and Edmund of King Lear are striking examples—characteristic bastards” (127). If, however, we are to see Thersites as an archetypal bastard, his malice explained by his illegitimacy, we have to ask why Shakespeare left this crucial piece of information about his motivation to the end?

In both King John and King Lear the bastardy is made clear from the beginning, and in Much Ado about Nothing the bastardy of Don John, while not explicitly stated at the outset, is clearly enough implied as a cause of his sad and spiteful humor: “it better fits my blood to be disdained of all” (1.3.24). In The Tempest, too, the fact of Caliban's bastardy is early imparted to us (1.2.266-70). In each case the information sets up expectations, which are gratified by ensuing events, about the character's behavior. From this point of view Thersites's revelation of his bastardy seems to be gratuitous. Yet we cannot ignore it; it is peculiarly insistent (in a brief speech of some fifty words “bastard” is used eight times, “son of a whore” once, and “illegitimate” once) and, being his final speech, it draws particular attention to itself.

The function of this speech, I would suggest, is not to deepen the degradation of Thersites's character, but to proclaim him the “illegitimate voice,” the spokesman for a whole constituency of those who have been marginalized and disaffected by the tyranny of “legitimate” power. After all, although this play is deeply concerned with the enforcement of hierarchical structure, we see very little hierarchy within the play itself (setting aside that of gender), because the Greeks are all kings and the Trojans are all members of the royal family. Of the mass of humble humanity there is almost nothing at all; it is Thersites, it appears, who lies at its social bottom. Further, this illegitimate voice is not silenced in the play when Thersites is “dismissed” by Margarelon, for, as many have noted, it re-emerges in the epilogue. The play's final speech belongs to Pandarus, and its first half is fully characteristic of him as he obtusely wonders at the meaning of a world that has so signally failed to reward his good offices, and, as he has done on other occasions, tries to give meaning to his experience through a fragment of a popular song. This closing voice, however, suddenly changes into that of Thersites, as he mocks the audience, accusing them of being pandars and whores, and laying his curse on them: “Till then I'll sweat and seek about for eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases” (5.10.54-55). The voice that rings in our ears as, picking at our dry serpigo, we leave the theater is the finally uncontrollable illegitimate voice.

.....

In order to understand what this illegitimate voice can imply we need to know what bastardy meant in England in 1602 or 1603. The idea of legitimacy cannot be separated from the idea of authority. The first definition of “illegitimate” given by the OED is “not legitimate, not in accordance with or authorized by law,” while “bastard” is defined as “illegitimate, unrecognized, unauthorized.” Illegitimacy is, therefore, defined by authority and is, furthermore, a category which authority needs to legitimate itself; it is a form of the “other.” When in his speech on order and degree Ulysses catalogs the horrifying effects of disorder he is, in fact, defining illegitimacy, for he expresses the result of a revolt against patriarchy through the metaphor of an act against husband and father that destroys the “unity and married calm of states” (1.3.99) and militates against the “primogeniture and due of birth” (1.3.105). In the light of this terror of the explosive force of illegitimacy we can understand the great glee that Thersites expresses over all the lechery he sees about him: it gives him a stake in the future by increasing the population of bastards in the world (much as Caliban's attempted violation of Miranda was prompted, or so he tells us, not by lust but by a desire to people his island with Calibans).

As is well known, the idea of patriarchal authority, and of the legitimate right of the ruling classes to rule and to engross wealth and property, was fundamental to the Tudor concept of social order, but it came under increasing pressure by the end of the sixteenth century. The center of power within the state, as within the family, depended upon what Michel Foucault calls a “symbolics of blood” (148). It maintained itself through primogeniture and due right of birth, the acknowledged community of blood between father and legitimate first-born son. Yet the fragility of a claim on power that is justified by a metaphor involving sexual fidelity is poignantly indicated by Prospero in his account of the birth of Miranda: “Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter” (1.2.56-57). Prospero has only his wife's word that Miranda is his legitimate daughter, a word that he knows may be nothing more than a word but that he must accept if he is to heal the rift between himself and the future. The tragedy for Leontes in The Winter's Tale is that he cannot accept the word of his “piece of virtue,” and can find ironic comfort only in the idea that he is one of many thousands of men whose wives have been sluiced by their neighbors; the horrors of illegitimacy flood in on him.

The infidelity of the husband creates bastards who, like Edmund or Margarelon, can be tolerated but have no rights: from the thirteenth century onward bastards were legally excluded from the right to inherit property (Stone 30). The infidelity of the wife creates bastards who break the continuity of the bloodline, so threatening the stability of authority and the right to property (note that the central issue of the Trojan War is the restoration to Menelaus of his property rights by restoring to him control over his wife's body). Insofar as the bastard represented a threat to the clarity of blood connections and the safe transmission of power and property, he became in a sense a symbolic figure, diseased himself because he represented disease within the system.

The literary archetype of the characteristic bastard arises from this political dimension: the bastard is the pariah or malevolent outsider dedicated, like Edmund, to the destruction of the values represented by the “legitimate” authority of which he is the perverted product. This threat of disease is also the reason why established authority had to present bastardy as a moral problem, as reflected in the Church's homily “Against Whoredom, and Adultery.” This homily, one of a number read out in churches at regular intervals throughout the reign of Elizabeth I, stated bluntly that sexual activity outside marriage was a sin which produced “so many bastardes and misbegotten children, to the hyghe displeasure of God” (Bond 180). The bastard, in effect, was the wages of sin.

We should not, however, allow the official insistence on bastardy as a moral problem to obscure the fact that it was much more extensively a social problem. What we have been observing up to now is the concern of the ruling classes with the impact of their own illegitimate offspring upon their own class interests. During the later years of Elizabeth's reign, however, bastardy in the lower classes offered a far greater threat to the system. Between about 1565 and 1604 the illegitimacy ratio almost trebled, from 1.31٪ to 3.36٪ (Laslett, “Introduction” 14); in some areas the proportion of bastard births reached as high as 10٪ (Laslett, Family Life 104). A number of reasons have been suggested for this increase; Richard L. Greaves notes the possibility that it was a result of the unrestrained sexuality associated with festivity (214). David Levine and Keith Wrightson suggest that growing economic problems associated with a series of disastrous harvests, especially after 1594, decreased the opportunity for establishing marriage, particularly amongst the laboring poor, while failing to decrease the amount of sexual activity (171).

Whatever the cause, the effect was official fear of a drain on public financial resources and a consequent increase in the severity of penalties for producing bastard children (Stone 325; Youings 364). An Act of Parliament of 1576 gave Justices of the Peace the power to make fathers and mothers support their bastards, but it was, inevitably, the woman who usually became the victim of these penalties, with mother and child often adding to the numbers of vagrants and so-called “masterless men,” as A.L. Beier has shown (54). Beier has analyzed in some detail the vagrancy problem of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the threat to social discipline that masterless men were considered to constitute. As he demonstrates, the magnitude of the threat to order posed by vagrants was much exaggerated by a fearful ruling class in order to justify cruel penalties.

The official attitude toward the social problem is displayed to chilling effect in the words of magistrate William Lambarde, in a case at Maidstone in April 1582: “For, if you would find out the disorders of alehouses, which for the most part be but nurseries of naughtiness, then neither should idle rogues and vagabonds find such relief and harborow as they have, neither should wanton youths have so ready means to feed their pleasures and fulfill their lusts, whereby, besides infinite other mischiefs, they nowadays do burden all the country with their misbegotten bastards” (qtd. in Greaves 486). Given the congruency between illegitimacy and rootlessness as states of “other-ness” that evade or deny paternalist control, it is not surprising that the authorities came more and more “to regard bastardy as a symptom of disorder” (Youings 364).

The bastard had a grimly complex social reality because of the social need to keep people within rigid boundaries; the idea of the “archetypal bastard” arose from the a priori definition of the bastard as a bad character, as if the mere fact of illegitimacy made villainy inevitable. Consequently the bastard was made to fulfill the requirements of a social myth. Defined as a criminal, though he had committed no crime, he was the quintessential victim, punished for the actions of his parents by being marginalized, deprived of property rights and consequently of social identity. We can see, therefore, that the idea of the bastard had a less simple meaning than critics like Kimbrough and Bradshaw would appear to allow. In King John for example the injustice that underlies the stigma is acknowledged: “Your father's wife did after wedlock bear him, / And if she did play false, the fault was hers …” (1.1.117-18). In King Lear Edmund is allowed to articulate this same sense of injustice with greater eloquence:

                                        Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?

(1.2.6-10)

The fact that Edmund is a villain and uses his illegitimacy as an excuse for his villainy in no way undercuts our sympathetic response to his words: what, apart from an act that was not his, makes the bastard automatically an object to be despised?

The bastard may also represent something larger than himself. Let us return for a moment to Thersites's revelation of his bastardy. He says to Margarelon that “the quarrel's most ominous for us,” implying a community of interest between the two that is different from the interests of those running the war. Further, if it is true that they are fighting for a whore, then the whole basis of the war is brought into question, because a whore is no more “legitimate” than the son of a whore. Thersites's speech, far from being a base and cowardly confession, is an ideologically subversive gesture that creates a community of the “illegitimate” while at the same time bringing into question the validity of the claims of “legitimate” authority and the order for which the illegitimate are being asked to fight.

The play frequently expresses disruptions of order in terms of emulation and envy, and indeed Thersites himself locates the source of his own railing in “the devil Envy.” Yet the disruptive envy of Achilles and Ajax is different from that of Thersites, for theirs is simply self-serving. They do not want to subvert the hierarchy, but to be at its head. Thersites's envy is something more; it is the rage of all those defined as “other” by established authority, all those whom the notion of hierarchy is intended to control; it is the rage of the dispossessed and disempowered, of bastards, but also of women, of the vagrant masterless, of the common soldiers who give their lives for the privileged likes of Pandarus and, who for their pains, are dismissed as “Asses, fools, dolts! Chaff and bran, chaff and bran!” (1.2.229-30)

Thersites is deliberately presented as the antithesis of Ulysses, who speaks on behalf of a ruling elite and articulates what is legitimate. Ulysses's speech on degree is such a fine piece of rhetoric that it became the foundation of the whole critical tradition represented by Tillyard, and summed up by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “that Shakespeare believed in and expresses a political hierarchy whose rightness is guaranteed by its reflection of a divine hierarchy” (207). It is doubtful whether many critics today would insist on claiming that Ulysses's views are identical with Shakespeare's, but this speech nevertheless reflects official Elizabethan policy. It is no accident that the first mention of Thersites in the play comes in the lines that introduce Ulysses's speech:

Speak, Prince of Ithaca; and be't of less expect
That matter needless, of importless burden,
Divide thy lips than we are confident,
When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws,
We shall hear music, wit, and oracle.

(1.3.69-73)

Muir, in his footnote to these lines, explains that they “forewarn the audience of Thersites' unsavory character” (71). Certainly, the evaluation of Ulysses and Thersites implied by Agamemnon sets them up as intellectual, esthetic, social and moral opposites, but this must be weighed in the light of Agamemnon's own intellectual deficiencies, amply demonstrated in his analysis of the Greek military position, and in the light of the fact that his own interests coincide with those of Ulysses.

The speech on degree is an ideological statement, intended to reassert the legitimacy of the class that Ulysses and those whom he is addressing represent. As Dollimore and Sinfield have it: “Ideology is composed of those beliefs, practices and institutions which work to legitimate the social order—especially by the process of representing sectional or class interests as universal ones. This process presupposes that there are other, subordinate classes, who far from sharing the interests of the dominant class are in fact being exploited by that class” (210-11). This exploitation may be achieved through an overt or a latent terrorism. The dominant class presents its interests through a set of norms, which are represented as being observed by all classes (cf. Tillyard's view that the concept of order was a part of the Elizabethan collective mind), though as Jurgen Habermas has argued, the subordinate classes do not necessarily believe in the legitimacy of those norms: “The factual recognition of such norms does not, of course, rest solely on belief in their legitimacy by those affected. It is also based on fear of, and submission to, indirectly threatened sanctions, as well as on simple compliance engendered by the individual's perception of his own powerlessness and the lack of alternatives open to him (that is, by his own fettered imagination)” (96). Thersites knows his own powerlessness against force: “He beats me, and I rail at him. O worthy satisfaction! Would it were otherwise—that I could beat him, whilst he railed at me” (2.3.2-4). He knows that the only power that he can wield resides in language, and through language he tries to keep his imagination unfettered.

Thersites's sense of the power of language, I think, accounts for the extreme violence and obscenity of his words—in order to have any authenticity, his own language must distance itself as far as possible from the mystifying rhetoric of authority. For Thersites sees clearly enough how the politicians use the concepts of hierarchy as a means of control, as he indicates to Achilles and Ajax: “There's Ulysses and old Nestor … yoke you like draught-oxen, and make you plough up the wars” (2.1.101-04). He sees things differently, and his only means of countering the oppressions of legitimate power is his own illegitimate vision. He is constantly uncrowning his superiors, re-categorizing them in terms of disease, of appetite, of bestial metaphor, or of the grotesque body: Ulysses as dog-fox, Agamemnon as botchy core, Ajax as itching scab or land-fish, Nestor as mouse-eaten cheese. We can hear in him clearly (if grimly) the voice of Bakhtinian carnival: “As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete” (109).

Carnival is concerned with topsy-turveydom, with the world upside-down, with inverted hierarchies, and Thersites constructs hierarchies of his own, parodying the order that Ulysses is attempting to restore with his hierarchy of folly (in which he ironically locates himself): “Agamemnon is a fool to offer to command Achilles, Achilles is a fool to be commanded of Agamemnon, Thersites is a fool to be commanded of such a fool, and Patroclus is a fool positive” (2.3.58-61). More devastating is his treatment of Menelaus, on whose behalf the war is being fought; he is put at the bottom of a bestial hierarchy, lower than a louse on a lazar (5.1.55ff). Thersites surely performs the negative function proposed in R. Stamm's definition of the carnivalesque: “On the negative, critical side the carnivalesque suggests a demystificatory instrument for everything in the social formation which renders … collectivity difficult of access: class hierarchy, political manipulation, sexual repression, dogmatism and paranoia. Carnival in this sense implies an attitude of creative disrespect, a radical opposition to the illegitimately powerful, to the morose and monological” (55). In Troilus and Cressida the carnivalesque voice represented in the bastard Thersites is set up to oppose and expose the “illegitimately powerful.”

I am not suggesting that we should like or approve of Thersites's character, but if we see him as a “demystificatory instrument” we can also see that moral condemnation of his scurrilous attitudes and behavior misses the point. What he says is all he can say; his words are the only weapons he has to represent the otherwise impotent rage of the oppressed and marginalized. His voice is not authoritative, but it does form part of a polyphony, and to deny interpretive legitimacy to it, to claim that it is simply “dismissed,” is to perpetuate the kind of repression that created the voice in the first place. In our own troubled times, when the notion of “political correctness” has been used by authoritarian voices from both left and right to police language and thought, Troilus and Cressida takes on a special significance as a play in whose critical history the official, legitimate voice has for so long been heard to drown out the unofficial voice. Perhaps its illegitimate voice should be all the more carefully attended to, not “in the interests of contemporary ‘relevance’,” but because it represents, in however ugly a manner, a comprehensible account of the real and painful impotence of the great mass of the dispossessed whose voices we now never hear at all.

Note

1. All quotations from Troilus and Cressida are taken from Kenneth Muir's Oxford edition of the play. Quotations from other plays are taken from The Complete Works edited by Peter Alexander.

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