[In the following essay, Lynch argues that the so-called idealism of Troilus is not as pure as some commentators have suggested, but is instead as self-absorbed and corrupt as the world Troilus himself inhabits.]

Troilus inhabits a world of near total corruption where honor serves ambition and love seems little more than lust. Yet within the confines of this bleak and hostile world, Troilus appears extraordinarily idealistic. He describes his will as “infinite,” his desire as “boundless,” and his truth as a “winnowed purity in love” (3.2.82-83, 167). Even after the betrayal scene he claims, “Never did young man fancy / With so eternal and so fix'd a soul” (5.2.165-66). Several commentators have interpreted this hero as a rare and noble exception to the characters that surround him (see, for example, Knight 60; Nowottny 291-93; Biswas 113). Yet when examined closely, the idealism of Troilus, however lofty and extreme, seems very much in keeping with the nature of his world. Though he makes repeated claims to purity and eternal constancy, he puts great emphasis on sensuality, and his actions are more moody and erratic than constant and true. Moreover, his energy and devotion seem concentrated not so much on Cressida as on an image of himself as a superlative and immortal paragon of love. His ideals, therefore, do not rise above the corruption of his world but are an integral part of it, ultimately as misdirected and self-serving as the pride of Achilles or the honor of Hector. Commentators have discussed the delusions of Troilus at some length (see Traversi 331; Dickey 126; Kaula 272-79; Marsh 37-45). Yet the central problem with Troilus seems not that he is deluded (we need no ghost from the grave to tell us this) but that his delusions emerge from an intense egotism in a love affair pursued primarily for self-glorification.

Troilus's egotism becomes evident in his first appearance on stage, as he strives, against all evidence to the contrary, to deify his love. He looks to the gods for a suitable parallel: “Tell me, Apollo, for thy Daphne's love, / What Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we” (1.1.98-99). Not only does Troilus attempt to romanticize the unmistakably perverse Pandarus, but he also tends to conceive of Cressida and himself in the most overlabored terms. His lovesickness verges on the artificial and affected—an impression that is reinforced by his frequent use of Petrarchan clichés:

Why should I war without the walls of Troy,
That find such cruel battle here within?
                                                            I tell thee I am mad
In Cressid's love; thou answer'st she is fair,
Pourest in the open ulcer of my heart
Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice,
Handlest in thy discourse, O, that her hand,
In whose comparison all whites are ink
Writing their own reproach; to whose soft seizure
The cygnet's down is harsh, and spirit of sense
Hard as the palm of ploughman.

(1.1.2-3, 51-59)

In keeping with the Petrarchan convention that the beloved be not only divine but unassailable, Troilus envisions Cressida as “stubborn-chaste against all suit” (1.1.97). As we soon discover, he is not even remotely familiar with the earthy, crafty, and clever woman that we meet in the following scene. It appears that if Troilus is in love, he loves Petrarch and not Cressida; or, more precisely, he loves his own fabrication of a Petrarchan love affair.

When the two lovers finally meet, Troilus continues to ignore the real Cressida while imagining an ideal Cressida. In the grip of his fantasy, he barely listens to or comprehends the actual woman. She professes fears for her “folly,” “craft,” and “unkind self,” concluding that “to be wise and love / Exceeds man's might” (3.2.102, 149-57). Troilus responds with a rather startling non sequitur in which he imposes upon Cressida a series of attributes and virtues that run counter to everything she has just said:

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 beauties 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 winnowed purity in love!

(3.2.158-67)

The speech is a curious blend of awareness and self-deception. Troilus seems to realize that Cressida is no match for his own constancy, but nevertheless he is willing to “presume” that she is. In a rapture of delusion, he overlooks the woman that stands before him and proceeds to fabricate and fall in love with essentially a female version of himself. His energy and devotion are directed not so much to Cressida as to an image of himself as a paragon of “integrity and truth.” He loves Cressida only so far as she provides a necessary counterpart to his own self-image.

As Cressida serves Troilus's egotism as a lover, Helen serves his egotism as a warrior. Indeed the two women are closely associated in his mind: Cressida is a “pearl” in India, Helen a “pearl, / Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships” (1.1.100; 2.2.81-82). As with Cressida, Troilus perceives the inadequacy of Helen—“too starv'd a subject for my sword” (1.1.93)—but proceeds to disregard his perception in favor of a self-serving idolatry:

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.

(2.2.199-202)

In both love and war, Troilus aspires to a profane version of sainthood, a type of deification through great fame. As Helen will “canonize” him as a model warrior, Cressida will “sanctify” (3.2.183) him as a model lover. His aspirations are given symbolic expression in the Trojan “towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds” (4.5.220)—symbols of overreaching pride.

Troilus's intense self-interest surfaces not only in his constant obsession with fame, but also in the very language he uses to pledge devotion to Cressida. Though he repeatedly vows simplicity and truth, he ironically speaks in convoluted grammar and hyperboles:

Troilus shall be such to Cressid as what envy can
say worst shall be a mock for his truth, and what
truth can speak truest not truer than Troilus.
I am as true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth.
True swains in love shall in the world to come
Approve their truth by Troilus. When their rhymes,
Full of protest, of oath and big compare,
Wants similes, truth tir'd with iteration …
“As true as Troilus” shall crown up the verse,
And sanctify the numbers.

(3.2.95-98; 169-70; 173-83)

It is difficult to accept such proclamations as genuine selfless love when we cannot detect in them even a hint of humility. In All's Well That Ends Well, Diana makes a comment that seems pertinent: “'Tis not the many oaths that make the truth, / But the plain vow that is vow'd true” (4.2.21-22). Troilus does just the opposite, making “many oaths” of which few are “plain.” As in the opening scene, his language is overly labored, as if he were intent on being not simply a good lover but the most exceptional lover that has ever lived—an aspiration laden with egotism. Moreover, it is indicative of his self-obsession that he formulates his vow not in terms of fidelity to Cressida but in terms of loyalty to his own name as a synonym for truth. Assuming that Shakespeare used Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde as a source (see Bradbrook and Thompson), Shakespeare certainly took pains to do away with the humility of Chaucer's hero who professes his vow strictly as a means of amending his unworthiness through dedicated service to his beloved:

But herte myn, of youre benignite,
So thynketh, though that I unworthi be,
Yet mot I nede amenden in som wyse,
Right thorugh the vertu of youre heigh servyse …
This dar I seye, that trouth and diligence,
That shal ye fynden in me al my lif.

(3, 1285-98)

While Chaucer's Troilus hopes to attain virtue, Shakespeare's Troilus is confident that he is its very essence.

On the next morning, the deficiencies in his idealism become manifest in his behavior. As Cressida feared, he begins to lose interest:

                                                                                Prithee tarry,
You men will never tarry.
O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off,
And then you would have tarried.

(4.2.15-18)

His refusal to tarry on the morning after seems particularly inconsistent when we remember the constancy and devotion he promised the evening before:

Tro. … This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confin'd, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.

Cres. They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform; vowing more than the perfection of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one. They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares, are they not monsters?

Tro. Are there such? Such are not we.

(3.2.81-90)

Though he boasted an infinite will and a boundless desire, he now acts just as Cressida had anticipated: “Things won are done” (1.2.287) (see Lynch 360-63). It seems peculiar that Troilus should consider himself a paragon of constancy when he is so obviously afflicted with a restless temperament: he refused to “tarry” (1.1.16-22) in winning Cressida, and now he refuses to “tarry” after having won her. The “monstruosity in love,” it turns out, is not merely in the limitations of the world but in the limitations of the lover. This slacking off in his devotion to Cressida is even more evident when we compare his actions to those of his counterpart in Chaucer's narrative poem. After Criseyde urges him to make haste—“For tyme it is to ryse and hennes go, / Or ellis I am lost for evere mo!” (3, 1425-26)—Troilus almost refuses to leave, fearing that he may die from even a brief separation:

                                                                                O goodly myn, Criseyde,
And shal I rise, allas, and shal I so?
Now fele I that myn herte moot a-two.
For how sholde I my lif an houre save,
Syn that with yow is al the lyf ich have?

(3, 1474-77)

Shakespeare reverses the situation: Troilus is up and ready to leave while Cressida pleads for him to tarry. Compared to his Chaucerian counterpart, Shakespeare's hero promises much more and delivers much less.

After he is informed of the plan to exchange Cressida for Antenor, Troilus again acts as Cressida feared. He “reserves an ability” that he “never performs” by not attempting to do for Cressida what he had so willingly done for Helen. Instead, he responds to the news of the transfer with instant and complete resignation: “Is it so concluded?” (4.2.66). Of course nothing really can be done. As Aeneas tells us, Priam is already “at hand and ready to effect it” (4.2.68). But nevertheless Troilus appears a bit too willing to concede. After Cressida inquires four times whether she must really be exchanged, Troilus responds with a distinct lack of energy: “No remedy” (4.4.55). Suddenly, he is willing to turn back the “silks upon the merchant” now that he has “soil'd them” (2.2.69-70). He becomes a “monster” when we evaluate him according to his own standards: “Praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove” (3.2.90-91). Confronted with an unfortunate turn of events, or what Agamemnon would call “the protractive trials of great Jove / To find persistive constancy in men” (1.3.20-21), Troilus fails to “prove” any sustaining power in his vow of eternal constancy and devotion. He joins his brother Hector and his enemy Ulysses in betraying the very ideals he professes.

It is ironic that Troilus recognizes a “dumb-discoursive devil” in the Greeks (4.4.90), and he warns Cressida that “sometimes we are devils to ourselves” (4.4.95), but in his own nature he suspects no devil at all. His actions, however, suggest that he may indeed harbor desires that are less than saintly. The first indication of such a possibility occurs when Cressida proposes her challenge—“In that I'll war with you”—to which Troilus replies, “O virtuous fight, / When right with right wars who shall be most right!” (3.2.171-72). His eagerness to compete in love suggests something rather sinister in Troilus, a desire that he himself may be too young and naive to recognize. In his enthusiasm to prove himself “most right,” he seems almost willing to have her prove false. Not only does he permit the exchange, but he also virtually tempts her to falsehood:

The Grecian youths are full of quality;
Their loving well compos'd with gifts of nature,
Flowing and swelling o'er with arts and exercise.
                                                                                I cannot sing,
Nor heel the high lavolt, nor sweeten talk,
Nor play at subtile games—fair virtues all,
To which the Grecians are most prompt and pregnant.

(4.4.76-78, 85-88)

This unexpected shift from superlative self-esteem to unbounded modesty is matched with rather unusual advice: urging her to “be not tempted” (4.4.91), while assuring her that she will be tempted, and that she has good reason to be tempted. Caught up in a delusion of sanctity, simplicity, and truth, Troilus seems thoroughly blind to any possibility of corruption in his own nature. He seems completely unaware that a devil in himself may be planting in Cressida's mind the very seeds of temptation.

In the following scene, Ulysses speaks a tribute to Troilus that works to heighten our sympathy for the young Trojan moments before the traumatic betrayal he is about to suffer. We are reminded of his tender and susceptible age: “The youngest son of Priam, a true knight, / Not yet mature, yet matchless firm of word” (4.5.96-97). The speech is not altogether objective, as we discover when Ulysses names Aeneas as the source of his information. As Alice Shalvi says, Ulysses “ascribes to Troilus one specific trait which the action of the play shows him as singularly lacking: judgement” (294). Yet however much Trojan flattery may be in it, the speech works to highlight the more noble qualities in Troilus. At this critical point in the play, Shakespeare reinforces our sympathy for the young hero, portraying him not as an object of ridicule or satire (see Campbell 207-18) but as a sensitive hero blinded by the passions and excesses of youth and given over to an impossible idealism that only inexperience would allow.

Our sympathy for Troilus is heightened even more when we see his terrible anguish during the betrayal scene. His sudden disillusionment has no precedent in Chaucer's poem in which the hero is afforded weeks of letters, dreams, and growing suspicions before he finally accepts the awful truth. Moreover, the suffering of Troilus is of an intensity not found elsewhere in Shakespeare's plays. While Lear has time to travel from one daughter to the next before he recognizes their disloyalty, and Othello has time to dwell upon suspicions before he concludes that his wife has been unfaithful, Troilus has only moments to overhaul his elevated conception of Cressida. His suffering is made all the more poignant by his youth and inexperience. Unlike the older, more experienced, and more callous Ulysses, Troilus is not insulated against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Naive and vulnerable, he suffers an almost unfathomable depth of human anguish as he looks with horror upon Diomed and Cressida enacting the irrevocable annihilation of his entire world view.

To make matters even worse, Troilus is accompanied by a very unsympathetic guide, Ulysses, who quickly assures him that Cressida “will sing any man at first sight” (5.2.9). And he watches himself being supplanted by a rather boorish no-nonsense Diomed, who even Cressida realizes will not love her as well as Troilus. He feels a sense of revulsion akin to that which Hamlet expresses when comparing his father to his step-father: “So excellent a king, that was to this / Hyperion to a satyr” (Ham.1.2.139-40). The revulsion of Troilus, however, may be even more sickening in that his feeling of betrayal is all the more personal. His suffering is so unbearable that he at first takes recourse in outright denial, desperately attempting to fabricate an illusion of two Cressidas:

But if I tell how these two did co-act,
Shall I not lie in publishing a truth?
Sith yet there is a credence in my heart,
An esperance so obstinately strong,
That doth invert th' attest of eyes and ears,
As if those organs had deceptious functions,
Created only to calumniate.
Was Cressid here?

(5.2.118-25)

The irony in Troilus's reaction is that he suspects his senses are deceiving him now when in fact they have been deceiving him since Act 1. All along he has been subject to an “esperance so obstinately strong” that has created in his mind an ideal version of Cressida quite distinct from the “attest of eyes and ears.” Now that he is confronted with an onslaught of irrefutable evidence to the contrary, the center of his philosophy—“What's aught but as 'tis valued?” (2.2.52)—can no longer hold. Cressida, like Helen, cannot attain great value solely by having value attributed to her. The illusions of Troilus disintegrate as he is forced to recognize that there is no Cressida other than the one who stood before him:

Instance, O instance, strong as Pluto's gates,
Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven;
Instance, O instance, strong as heaven itself,
The bonds of heaven are slipp'd, dissolv'd, and loos'd …

(5.2.153-56)

Within the brevity of five minutes' traffic upon the stage, Troilus's whole world collapses in on him.

In his profound anguish, Troilus desperately sifts through the wreckage to find some means of salvaging his self-image. While his image of Cressida is hopelessly shattered and quickly discarded—“O false Cressid! false, false, false! / Let all untruths stand by thy stained name, / And they'll seem glorious”—his image of himself emerges virtually intact: “Never did young man fancy / With so eternal and so fix'd a soul” (5.2.178-80, 165-66). Though he abandons his illusions about her, he maintains steadfast fidelity to extraordinarily idealistic illusions about himself. (Chaucer's hero, in contrast, reacts with much greater modesty: “I have it nat deserved” [5, 1722].) To the very end, Troilus remains convinced that his vow of integrity and truth was a genuine vow of love for Cressida:

If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,
If sanctimony be the gods' delight,
If there be rule in unity itself,
This was not she.

(5.2.139-42)

Yet this was she, a fact which implies that their souls did not guide their vows and their vows lacked divine sanctimony. Yet Troilus never realizes the inadequacy of his vow or his failure to live up to it. Unlike Lear or Othello, he suffers without gaining insight. Instead he remains stagnated in a delusion of his own sanctity.

In the final scenes of the play, Troilus struggles to sustain his pride through a double pledge of revenge, first against Diomed for seducing Cressida and later against Achilles for murdering Hector. Commentators such as Brian Morris (490) and Willard Farnham (264) have interpreted Troilus at the end of the play as a more mature and worthy champion of Troy. Yet Troilus's new-found devotion to “venom'd vengeance” (5.3.47) does not seem to differ entirely from his earlier devotion to love. Instead of rising in heroic stature, he exchanges in equal measure one form of excess for another: “as much as I do Cressid love, / So much by weight hate I her Diomed” (5.2.167-68). As he abandons his earlier lovesickness, he vents his frustration in a suicidal devotion to savagery and bloodlust. Recognizing the “sure destructions” of the Trojans, he will “dare all imminence” in pursuit of the one “Hope of revenge” (5.10.9, 13, 31). His persistently obsessive behavior, first with love and now revenge, recalls Hector's observation in the council scene: “pleasure and revenge / Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice / Of any true decision” (2.2.171-72). Metaphorically, Troilus's craving for sexual pleasure and now “venom'd vengeance” has transformed him into an “adder,” deaf to the moderating effects of reason and deaf to the truth about his own nature. The change in Troilus at the end of the play can also be gauged by his treatment of Pandarus: in Act 1 he idealized Pandarus as a “bark” voyaging to India (1.1.104); in Act 5 he dismisses him as a “broker” and “lackey” (5.10.33). Troilus's shift from absolute idealism to absolute cynicism brings to mind the comment Apemantus makes to Timon after Timon's disillusionment: “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends” (Tim.4.3.300-01).

The ending is perhaps the most bleak in all of Shakespeare's plays. There is no Malcolm or Edgar to give us any hope of a restored kingdom. Instead, the final scenes—violent, fragmented, chaotic—render the impression that Ulysses's apocalyptic vision has come about: the universal wolf of will and appetite has been loosed upon the world. The war for honor degenerates to a bloodthirsty quest for revenge. But unlike Shakespeare's other tragic heroes, Troilus does not attain any greater level of awareness or self-knowledge. The play contains almost no soliloquies, and Troilus, typical of his world, does not engage in a moment of penetrating self-analysis. He sees weakness and corruption everywhere but in himself. In distinct contrast, Chaucer's poem ends with the hero finally attaining greater understanding as he looks down from the eighth sphere of heaven:

And down from thennes faste he gan avyse
This litel spot of erthe, that with the se
Embraced is, and fully gan despise
This wrecched world, and held al vanite
To respect of the pleyn felicite
That is in hevene above …
And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so
The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste.

(5, 1814-24)

Of course the transcendence and heavenly perspective at the end of Chaucer's poem would not be practicable at the end of Shakespeare's play. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's Troilus does not attain even a human level of enlightenment. It is ironic that Troilus should recognize his vanity in Chaucer's poem, where things are not so bad, but not in Shakespeare's play, where things could hardly be worse. He clings to his most prized accomplishment, that he remains as “true as Troilus,” and in the narrow limits of sexual fidelity he may be right, but in the broader context of his persistent egotism and lack of self-knowledge he is as “false as Cressid.”

Works Cited

Biswas, D. C. Shakespeare in His Own Time. Delhi: Macmillan of India, 1979. 90-114.

Bradbrook, M. C. “What Shakespeare Did to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.” Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1958): 311-19.

Campbell, Oscar J. Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's “Troilus and Cressida.” San Marino: Huntington Library, 1938. 185-234.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. F. N. Robinson. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1957.

Dickey, Franklin M. Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1957. 118-43.

Farnham, Willard. “Troilus in Shapes of Infinite Desire.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 257-64.

Kaula, David. “Will and Reason in Troilus and Cressida.” Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1961): 271-83.

Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire. 5th rev. ed. New York: Meridian, 1957. 47-72.

Lynch, Stephen J. “Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A Woman of QuickSense.’” Philological Quarterly 63 (1984): 357-68.

Marsh, Derick R.C. Passion Lends Them Power: A Study of Shakespeare's Love Tragedies. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1976. 35-45.

Morris, Brian. “The Tragic Structure of Troilus and Cressida.” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 481-91.

Nowottny, Winifred M.T. “‘Opinion’ and ‘Value’ in Troilus and Cressida.” Essay in Criticism 4 (1954): 282-96.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton, 1974.

Shalvi, Alice. “‘Honor’ in Troilus and Cressida.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 5 (1965): 283-302.

Thompson, Ann. Shakespeare's Chaucer. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1978. 111-65.

Traversi, D. A. An Approach to Shakespeare. 3rd ed. Garden City: Doubleday, 1969. 323-40.