SOURCE: “The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, Fall, 1997, pp. 295-313.

[In the following essay, Hillman contends that Shakespeare wrote and produced Troilus and Cressida with a view to concentrating on the grossly physical aspects of the human body in order to bring life to a tale that had already been frequently told and whose language had thus been rendered abstract through overtelling.]

Ignorance in physiologicis—that damned ‘idealism.’

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo¹

1. THE MATTER OF TROY

Why did Shakespeare write Troilus and Cressida? Why, that is, did he turn his attention to a story that was so overdetermined as to have become, by the end of the sixteenth century, little more than a compilation of clichés? The Trojan story was enormously popular during the decades preceding composition of the play,² and the most obvious motive suggested by this popularity is the play's commercial potential (written by an already-famous playwright, reworking material that was all the rage in contemporary London). While this motive is called into question by the Epistle attached to the play's Quarto in the second state,³ the pervasiveness and mass appeal of the matter of Troy was, I believe, nevertheless a decisive factor in Shakespeare's choice of this subject. For in placing these endlessly reiterated, rhetoricized, and textualized heroes onstage, he could not help but embody them;⁴ and the limning of these “unbodied figure[s]” (1.3.16) in flesh and blood presented a perfect opportunity to wrestle with the issue that, I will argue, lies at the very heart of the play: the relation between language and the body out of which it emanates. Both within the play and in the cultural milieu that produced it, Troilus and Cressida enacts a restoration of words, and of the ideals created out of them, to their sources inside the body.

The play thrusts both its protagonists and the audience back into the body, recorporealizing the epic of the Trojan War. The story's unparalleled canonicity created heroes of a deeply textual nature, protagonists who by Shakespeare's time had become little more than, in Rosalie Colie's words, “rhetorical and proverbial figure[s].”⁵ The play's “dependence on a prodigious literary and rhetorical legacy” entangles it (as most critics of the play agree) with issues of citationality and originality.⁶ When Shakespeare turns to the legend, he places the relationship between origins and citations at the core of his play. He does this by reintroducing, as it were, the substance or “matter” of the body to the “Matter of Troy.” Indeed, the very word matter, often associated in Shakespeare with the interior of the body, recurs no fewer than twenty-four times in the play.⁷ The missing “matter” that Shakespeare reintroduces into the story is that of the truth of the body, which has been displaced over countless reiterations by something like pure citationality. “[T]ir'd with iteration” (3.2.174), the heroes' identities have become ever further removed from their material sources: the pun on tir'd (attired/tired) implies the increasing distance from the body, as if each retelling adds a layer of covering—a cover story—to the protagonists' flesh, with the overdetermined citationality that constitutes the “starv'd … subject” (1.1.93) of Troy rendering it disembodied, “pale and bloodless” (1.3.134). (“Troy,” apostrophizes Spenser's Paridell, “[thou] art now nought, but an idle name.”⁸). By the time Shakespeare comes to write the play, these post-Homeric heroes have all become “Words, words, more words, no matter from the heart” (5.3.108).

Troilus and Cressida has often been described as being “consciously philosophical,” as coming “closer than any other of the plays to being a philosophical debate.”⁹ There is little physical action in the play; mostly there are rhetorical arguments about degree, about honor, about time and value. Yet the play is compulsively body-bound; from start to finish, its language is replete with imagery of the body's interior, the ebb and flow of its humors looking out at every joint and motive of the text. There is, I think, a powerful connection between the play's intellectuality and its unyielding corporeality, a link that can perhaps be best elucidated by glancing briefly at what Friedrich Nietzsche says about the relations between philosophy and physiology. Entrails, for Nietzsche, are inherently anti-idealizing, undercutting metaphysics and transcendent aspirations of any kind: going into the body lies at the opposite pole from going beyond it. As Eric Blondel writes, “it is in order to contrast an abominable truth to the surface of the ideal that Nietzsche speaks of entrails.”¹⁰ Idealization usually involves a turning away from or repression of the messy truth of the body—toward what Agamemnon calls, in Troilus and Cressida, “that unbodied figure of the thought” (1.3.16)—or, alternatively, a conception of the body as a perfect, finished surface.¹¹ But while the exterior of the body is easy enough to idealize, its interior has a rather more offensive, unsavory reality, as Nietzsche repeatedly points out: “What offends aesthetic meaning in inner man—beneath the skin: bloody masses, full intestines, viscera, all those sucking, pumping monsters—formless or ugly or grotesque, and unpleasant to smell on top of that!”¹²

Reminding us of the existence of this monstrous “inner man” is, throughout Nietzsche's work, a way of revealing the reality beneath thoughts, systems, ideals. In “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense,” for instance, Nietzsche points out the irony involved in the fact that “the urge for truth” is so often a product of our “proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers. … ”¹³ Excavating the body is thus for Nietzsche—the “physiologist of morals”¹⁴—a foundational act of skepticism; in his view any hermeneutic undertaking must begin from the body—and, moreover, from its interior, which is why he speaks of the “hard, unwanted, inescapable task” of philosophy as a kind of vivisection; Socrates, for example, is “the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the ‘noble.’”¹⁵ This, too, is what Nietzsche means when he speaks of “philosophizing with a hammer”: “sounding out idols. … For once to pose questions here with a hammer, and, perhaps, to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound which speaks of bloated entrails—what a delight. …”¹⁶ The hammer here is one that can both “sound out” the interior (like a tuning-fork) and, if necessary, smash through to this interior (like a sledgehammer).

I offer this brief reading of Nietzsche's conceptualization of entrails as a potentially instructive analogue to my reading of Troilus and Cressida, for both are uncompromising when it comes to revealing the distance between our proudly deployed language and the body's internal reality. Bloated entrails are a dominant image in the play; as Patricia Parker has recently argued, “the inflation or bloating that affects both bodies and words in Troilus also affects its presentation of its epic theme, matter, or argument, repeatedly said to represent an overheld or inflated value.”¹⁷ In foregrounding the physiological processes taking place within its protagonists' tumid bodies, the play “sounds out” the Homeric idols, the epic heroes at the very source of European culture; it finds at the center of their beings little more than disease and raw appetite, representing them all, more or less, as “idol[s] of idiot-worshippers” (5.1.7). “[M]ad idolatry” (2.2.57) is a subject repeatedly addressed by the play, which, we could say, depicts a kind of “Twilight of the Idols”—ending, as it does, as “the sun begins to set, / … [And] ugly night comes breathing at his heels” (5.8.5-6). The play uses a turn to the interior of the body to debunk time-honored ideals—to reveal the “Most putrefied core” (5.8.1) of the heroic ethos.¹⁸ It depicts “the veins of actions highest rear'd” (1.3.6) in the most literal sense of “veins”; even Hector's honorable soldiership is—in his own words—no more than “th'vein of chivalry” (5.3.32) on a good day. In Troilus and Cressida the twin ideals of heroism-in-war and idolism-in-love are exploded in no small part through the attention directed to the “polluted” insides of the body, “more abhorr'd / Than spotted livers in the sacrifice” (5.3.17-18).

The idea that the play evinces a general disgust with corporeality was for many years practically undisputed; and indeed the vast majority of the play's references to the body insist on its internally diseased and utterly corruptible state. My argument here runs not so much “against the hair” (1.2.27) of these interpretations as under it; for to take this as a rejection of corporeality as such does little more than reproduce Thersites's bitter invective against the body—echoing his perspective rather than interpreting it. The main thrust in Troilus and Cressida is a turn not against but back toward the body, in the same way that Nietzsche's philosophy embraces corporeality with all its “formless or ugly or grotesque” aspects.

Shakespeare's response to the endless reiteration of the legend of Troy is simultaneously a response to the major genealogical project of Tudor mythographers—the tracing of the ancestry of the British nation to the Trojan War, a teleology culminating in the glories of the Elizabethan nation. But, as I am describing it, it was not so much this genealogy that Shakespeare was interested in as in a kind of Nietzschean genealogy, an enterprise of (re)linking words, and the values and ideals constructed out of them, to their bodily origins, to “the basic text of homo natura.”¹⁹ Shakespeare's attempt to restore materia to the Matter of Troy constitutes a powerful countermovement to this founding narrative of English nationalism—as if to say that this narrative does not delve far enough.²⁰ That is: while Tudor mythographers sought a heroic site of origin in the Trojan epic, Shakespeare's skeptical satire seeks the origins of the legend of Troy in the bodies of its heroes.²¹

The implied repudiation of the idealizing narrative of Elizabethan nationalism simultaneously suggests a radical rereading of the progress-bound idea of time on which this history relies. Troilus and Cressida comes closer to a view of history as reiterative or circular in its perpetual return to human physiology as the source of action. The play, in fact, thematizes the question of what the perspective of time does to historical events. Time here is repeatedly personified—an all-consuming scavenger, a thief snatching at scraps of history with which to cram up his thievery, a vulture pouncing on the leftovers of every human deed. And as “raging appetite” is imagined as the origin of both the love plot and the war plot, this same appetite is figured as the terminus of all action, the universal wolf which last eats up itself.

Shakespeare's anti-mythologizing return to the body could be described as nostalgic, though it is anything but idealizing. It is in a sense a turning away from his medieval and early modern sources and back toward Homer, whose epic never for a moment flinches from describing the horror of the human body's utter destructibility. Both the Iliad and Troilus and Cressida—to quite different ends, to be sure—present the human being as “a bundle of muscles, nerves, and flesh” subjected relentlessly to “force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter.”²² It is this restoration of the body—a restoration of the heroically repressed, or the unveiling of what we might call the entrails of epic—which produces the play's ubiquity of corporeal images.

The return, as it happens, is simultaneously an etymological return, since the very name Ilium means, in Latin (in the plural form of ile), “intestines, guts.” The play can thus be described as not only a genealogical excavation but also, in true Nietzschean fashion, a philological one. And (in case Shakespeare's “small Latine” did not extend this far) we might note that Ilium and Ilion (the two forms of the Homeric designation for Troy used alternately in the play) are—and were in the sixteenth century—alternative anatomical names for the largest part of the intestinal tract, the part affected in the apparently then-common disease called “iliac passion”: bloating of the intestines.²³ If Tudor historiography traced the birth of the British nation to Ilium, Shakespeare traces “Ilium” back to the body. In this sense—and speaking hyperbolically—the entire play can be said to take place within one large, bloated intestine.

2. THE SATIRIST AND THE CANNIBAL

The ending of the Trojan legend, we might here recall, is inseparably linked to the idea of full intestines—to the Trojan horse, that is, with its bellyful of silent Greek warriors—a proverbial symbol of guile throughout the English Renaissance.²⁴ Writers of the period persistently figured the potential for deceit as a potential gap between words and the bodies out of which they emerge. A story particularly popular in early modern England was Lucian's version of the tale of Momus and Hephaestus. In Hermotimus, or Concerning the Sects—a satire of all manner of philosophical schools and pretensions—Lucian relates the story of how Momus, mocker of the gods, judged a competition among Athena, Poseidon, and Hephaestus. To settle a quarrel among the three gods over which of them was the best artist, Momus is appointed to judge their creations; Athena designs a house, Poseidon a bull, Hephaestus a man. “What faults he found in the other two,” writes Lucian, “we need not say, but his criticism of the man and his reproof of the craftsman, Hephaestus, was this: he had not made windows in his chest which could be opened to let everyone see his desires and thoughts, and if he were lying or telling the truth.”²⁵

Lucian—“the Merry Greek,” as he was known to sixteenth-century Englishmen²⁶—was a philosopher whose caustic, disillusioned perspectivism may well have influenced Troilus and Cressida directly (the epithet “merry Greek” is used twice in the play²⁷); Shakespeare's comic satire shares with him a disenchantment with ideals, a deeply relativist attitude to questions of value, and a level of scoffing unparalleled elsewhere in the canon. But my interest here lies less in Lucian's influence on Shakespeare than in the way Momus's tale succinctly highlights a tendency that is central to satire in general and to Troilus and Cressida in particular. Momus's criticism of Hephaestus's man exemplifies a desire shared, in one form or another, by many skeptics and satirists: the desire to puncture pretense by revealing the body's innards. This skeptical impulse often takes the form of a desire to see into, or to open up, the body of the other. Troilus and Cressida partakes of this satirical tradition of figuring the puncturing of deceit and delusion as a puncturing of the body. The skepticism evinced by the play is itself described within the play in just such terms: “[D]oubt,” says Hector, “is call'd / The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches / To th'bottom of the worst” (2.2.15-17).²⁸

Such a penetrative impulse stems from an imagination of the interior of the body as capable of concealing an ulterior truth, a fantasy of the possibility of absolute knowledge of the other.²⁹ In “The Inside and the Outside,” Jean Starobinski discusses the origins of such a corporeal schema in its archetypal form. Turning back to Homer's Iliad—“one of the first poetic documents in which the censure of duplicity is given full and emphatic voice”—Starobinski quotes Achilles's rebuke to Agamemnon (“For hateful in my eyes, even as the gates of Hades, is that man that hideth one thing in his heart and sayeth another”) and comments: “the doubling, the splitting which causes one thing to be hidden and another said … takes on spatial dimensions: what goes unsaid is actively hidden in the heart, the space of the inside—the interior of the body is that place in which the cunning man dissimulates what he doesn't say.”³⁰ The Iliad is, to be sure, a particularly effective place to look for such corporeal dimensions, as the exegeses of Bruno Snell and R.B. Onians have made abundantly clear: “emotional thoughts, ‘cares’, were living creatures troubling the organs in one's chest,” writes Onians in elucidating the inseparability of body, mind, and soul in Homer.³¹ But the bodily schema Starobinski points to has been too tenacious over the centuries to be dismissed either as a manifestation of primitive or archaic thought or as merely a convenient metaphor.³²

The explicitly somaticized nature of the urge to puncture deceit and delusion was never more evident than during the English satire-vogue of the final decade of the sixteenth century, a vogue to which Troilus and Cressida was Shakespeare's main contribution.³³ “The Satyre should be like the Porcupine, / That shoots sharp quils out in each angry line, / And wounds the blushing cheeke,” wrote Joseph Hall; and John Marston described the “firking satirist” as “draw[ing] the core forth of imposthum'd sin.”³⁴ The strong corporealization of the satiric impulse owes much to the materialistic habits of early modern thought (and to the centrality of the practice of anatomy in particular); throughout this period, whether the trope is one of injury, anatomical dissection, or medical purgation, both the penetrative drive and the target of this drive—the bodily interior of the satirized object—are practically explicit.³⁵

“The Gods had their Momus, Homer his Zoilus, Achilles his Thirsites,” writes the melancholy anatomist Robert Burton in his discussion of satirists and calumniators, adding that the “bitter jest … pierceth deeper then any losse, danger, bodily paine, or injury whatsoever.”³⁶Troilus and Cressida's chief satirist, “rank Thersites,” pierces each and every one of the play's protagonists with his “mastic jaws” (1.3.73). As this last phrase indicates, the penetrative drive of satire can appear at the same time as an impulse to devour the object under attack—it often manifests itself in a specifically oral form of aggression; as Mary Claire Randolph writes, “Renaissance satirists frequently picture themselves as … sinking their pointed teeth deep in some sinner's vitals.”³⁷ This idea of oral sadism is a recurrent theme of satirists; it is often figured as a compulsion to bite. Marston, for example, writes that “Unless the Destin's adamantine band / Should tie my teeth, I cannot choose, but bite”; and Burton, quoting Castiglione, says of satirists that “they cannot speake, but they must bite.”³⁸ To say that the aggressive impulse of “byting” satire is predominantly oral is to approach redundancy (as Milton points out in dismissing Joseph Hall's “toothlesse Satyres”: it is “as much as if he had said toothlesse teeth.”)³⁹ But there is in satire, over and above this oral aggression, an urge to devour—an urge, moreover, specifically directed at the human body. The satirist typically fantasizes not only penetrating the other's body but devouring it, as if entering this body is a concomitant of being inhabited by it. The derivation of the word satire—from the Latin satura, meaning “full, satiated”—points to this cannibalistic drive; as Walter Benjamin writes, in his essay on Karl Kraus: “The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization.” And, he adds, “the proposal to eat people has become an essential constituent of his [the satirist's] inspiration.”⁴⁰ The projective mechanism of satire, in this view, makes it both embody and thematize a cannibalistic urge, an urge epitomized by the delicious ending of one of the earliest Menippean satires, Petronius's Satyricon, where the rich Eumolpus bequeaths his wealth to his friends “on one condition, that they cut my body in pieces and eat it up in sight of the crowd.”⁴¹

The misanthropic cannibalism of satire is glimpsed in Troilus and Cressida's relentless use of imagery related to food, eating, and digestion.⁴² And while this alimentary obsession has often been noticed, a distinct pattern emerges when we examine its figurative trajectory through the course of the play.⁴³ The outline is one of more or less linear progression, from the early talk of culinary preliminaries (“[T]he grinding … the bolting … the leavening … the kneading, the making of the cake, the heating of the oven, and the baking” [1.1.18-24]; “the spice and salt that season a man … a minced man; and then to be baked with no date in the pie” [1.2.259-62]; the “bast[ing]” in one's “own seam” or grease [2.3.186]) and of “tarry[ing],” “starv'd” (1.1.15, 93), before the meal; followed by the promises of “tast[ing]” on the “fin'st palate” (1.3.337-38, 389), the readiness of the “stomach” (2.1.127), the “raging appetites” (2.2.182), and the preparation of “my cheese, my digestion” (2.3.44); then the “imaginary relish” (3.2.17) leading up to the meal itself, associated as it is with sexual consummation (“Love's thrice-repurèd nectar” [3.2.20]); and thence to the “full[ness]” (4.4.3; 4.5.271; 5.1.9) and “belching” (5.5.23) of engorgement, of having “o'er-eaten” (5.2.159)—and the ensuing nausea, associated with the “spoils” (4.5.62), the rancid leftovers, the “lees and dregs” (4.1.63), the “orts [i.e., refuse] … / The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics” (5.2.157-58). In view of this, it would not be going too far to call Troilus and Cressida a bulimic play, one that evokes in its audience (as has often been noted in a general way) a reaction akin to the figurative nausea of the imagistic trajectory delineated above. The play, in fact, begins with a “disgorg[ing]” (Pro.12) and proceeds through overeating to its anticathartic ending in Pandarus's stomach-turning Epilogue. The Prologue has referred to the ensuing action as “what may be digested in a play” (Pro.29), and—in spite of the Arden editor's rather severe gloss (“Not part of the food imagery of the play”)—there is, I think, an implication of the nauseating effect of this “unwholesome dish” (2.3.122) on the digestive systems of its spectators.⁴⁴ What should also be noted here is that the lion's share of the imagery of food and eating in the play is cannibalistic—that is, it consistently imagines the object of alimentary consumption as a human being. The play thus places its spectators in the position not only of diseased “traders in the flesh” (5.10.46) but also of uneasy “eaters of the flesh”—of cannibals: little wonder that it was apparently “neuer stal'd with the Stage” in Shakespeare's time, and that audiences still find it somewhat unpalatable.

The notion of cannibalism is implicit, too, in the play's repeated evocation of images of self-consumption. The connection between the two is remarked on in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici: “We are what we all abhorre, Anthropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves.”⁴⁵ The most prominent image of self-consumption in the play is of course Ulysses's speech on appetite, which “Must make perforce an universal prey, / And last eat up himself” (1.3.123-24)—a phrase that Kenneth Palmer calls an “image … of cannibalism as the last consequence of disorder”;⁴⁶ but the disorder can take any of several forms (e.g., “He that is proud eats up himself” [2.3.156]; “lechery eats itself” [5.4.35]), so that, in this play at least, self-consumptive cannibalism appears pervasive. The entire project—comprising Shakespeare's relation to his sources, the audience's relation to the play, and the characters' relation to each other—is implicitly cannibalistic.

Forcing the idea of cannibalism on the audience entails, among other things, forcing it to come to terms with the corporeality—the very flesh—of the protagonists of the story. It is Thersites, above all, whose constant punning obsessively returns language to the body's internal “matter.” Thersites even appears to know (and this is typical of the play's proleptic style) that he himself is destined to become, quite literally, a disembodied figure of speech, the rhetorical figure of “the standard rhyparographer” (or filth-painter).⁴⁷ When threatened by Ajax with “I shall cut out your tongue,” he replies: “'Tis no matter” (2.1.112-13). Thersites's pun takes the material organ of speech to be immaterial, construing Ajax's “tongue” in its entirely figurative meaning (i.e., speech), and thus constituting himself, in one sense, as pure citation. (The irony, of course, is that the actor playing Thersites must use his material tongue to say these words, thereby revealing the odd status of the body in Troilus and Cressida: the play both depicts and—in its reiteration of the tale—enacts the body's displacement by speech even as it reverses this displacement by both foregrounding the role of the body and embodying the tale on stage.) Thersites's quibbling ways with the word matter begin earlier in the same scene: “Agamemnon—how if he had boils, full, all over, generally? … And those boils did run—say so—did not the general run then? Were not that a botchy core? … Then would come some matter from him: I see none now” (2.1.2-9). With his first words in the play, Thersites, whose every third thought is of the body's putrefaction, points punningly to the gap between the substance of the body and the argument of words; as Patricia Parker explains, “The ‘head and general,’ supposed to be a source of ordered and reasoned argument, the generation of ‘matter’ for discourse as well as the hierarchical embodiment of order itself, is in this play only a ‘botchy core,’ the source of ‘matter’ in an infected body politic.”⁴⁸ Here, though, Thersites's “Then would come some matter from him: I see none now” announces a lack of “matter” at the core of Agamemnon, thereby hinting, synecdochically, at a lack at the heart of the entire legend of Troy. The story's hero, Achilles, is figured in Troilus and Cressida as “a fusty nut with no kernel” (ll. 103-4); Ajax is a “thing of no bowels” (l. 52); and Agamemnon himself should be—and, in this play, is clearly not—a “great commander, nerves and bone of Greece, / Heart of our numbers” (1.3.55-56). Troy itself, with the death of Hector, is deprived of interior matter: “Come, Troy, sink down! / Here lies thy heart, thy sinews, and thy bone” (5.8.11-12).

Critics of Troilus and Cressida tend to discuss its two salient imagistic strands—those of disease and of eating—separately. But the two are repeatedly intertwined in the play: they are twin manifestations of a pervasive “appetite”—“an appetite that I am sick withal” (3.3.237). We could say that as hunger is taken metaphorically for all beginnings of desire, disease is understood synecdochically as the terminus of all desire—hence the play's ending with Pandarus's bequeathal of his “diseases” to the audience's already “aching bones” (5.10.57, 51).⁴⁹ Nor is the disease imagery in the play solely a matter of syphilitic or venereal sickness, associated with a narrow (sexual) definition of desire:

Now the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o' gravel i'th'back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, whissing lungs, bladders full of impostume, sciaticas, lime-kilns i'th'palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries!

(5.1.16-23)

Thersites's cursing, while specifically attacking homosexual activity (“preposterous discoveries”), encompasses a dozen kinds of illness, most of which have nothing to do with sexuality but are rather the result of quite diverse forms of appetite. Disease and alimentary imagery are linked, first, by their relation to internal physiology and, second, by their relation to appetite in the broadest sense of the term. This is why the idea of self-consumption recurs so often in the play: appetite contains—or wills—its own end. For the play seems to me to conceive of appetite as something very like Nietzsche's “will to power”—an insatiable, appropriative urge that, for all its myriad manifestations, finds its sources in the physiology of each and every organism:

Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.

(1.3.119-24)

The deflation of the ideals and of the high-flown rhetoric of these epic heroes centers on this idea of an insatiable, pervasive, polymorphous appetite. The Renaissance's hierarchy of desires, from the merely appetitive to the spiritual, is here portrayed as completely reducible to its lowest common denominator; it is only the arbitrary imposition of degree that stops this collapse. And it is this reduction of all forms of desire to the urge for food—the refusal to separate sexual, martial, and alimentary forms of desire—which makes the play so cannibalistic.

I am suggesting that we think of desire in Troilus and Cressida in a very broad scope. Catherine Belsey has recently argued that the play “shows a world where desire is everywhere. … Desire is the unuttered residue which exceeds any act that would display it, including the sexual act.”⁵⁰ As Troilus himself puts it, “desire is boundless”—boundless, that is, not only in aspiration but in origin. Troilus's famous lament—“This is the monstruosity in love, lady: that the will is infinite, and the execution confined: that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit” (3.2.79-82)—has too often been taken to imply little more than that all lovers fall short of their aims. But desire, the entire play seems to be saying, is not only unsatisfiable in relation to its objects—it is insatiable (or, to use Belsey's language, “excessive”) at its very source; it is a “slave to limit” not only in that it can never fulfill its aims but also in that it must, perforce, choose these aims, these objects, though in and of itself it is “infinite.” The various manifestations of desire here—alimentary, martial, amorous, hetero- and homosexual, mimetic—are all conceived of as just that: manifestations of some absolutely voracious and polymorphous physiological drive. All these expressions of desire are merely its protean forms, “Dexterity … obeying appetite” (5.5.27).

The theme of alimentary appetite appears everywhere in the very fabric of the play. As in Nietzsche, the alimentary process is here a central metaphor for any manifestation of a will to power; eating and digestion appear indiscriminately as tropes for the play's two main themes of love and war: the “generation of love” is figured as “eat[ing] nothing but doves” (3.1.127, 123), the origin of the “factious feasts” (1.3.191) of bellicosity as having a “stomach” to the war (3.3.219; 2.1.127; 4.5.263). This is not, I think, simply a matter of an interpretive reduction to the level of physiology; it is a way of understanding human activities and processes metaphorically. To describe the “spirit,” Nietzsche—like Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida—turns to the body: “The spirit,” he writes, “is more like a stomach than anything else”:

This inferior being [the stomach] assimilates (assimiliert) whatever lies in its immediate vicinity, and appropriates it (property initially being food (Nahrung) and provision for food), it seeks to assimilate (einverleiben) as many things as it can and not only to compensate itself for loss: this being is greedy (habsüchtig).⁵¹

The “raging appetites” (2.2.182) of both Greeks and Trojans figure the insatiability of this process; their actions, again and again, constitute a display of “the will of the weak to represent some form of superiority.”⁵²Troilus and Cressida's depiction of the endlessly shifting shapes that desire can take (the folie circulaire of heterosexual activity expressing itself as martial activity expressing itself as homosexual activity, and so on⁵³) ultimately means that the protagonists “lose distinction” (3.2.25) between these shapes, as the spectators, by the end of the play, lose any sense of distinction between Greeks and Trojans, “hot” (3.1.125) lovers and “hot” (4.5.185) warriors: just about any of them could be described as wearing “his wit in his belly and his guts in his head” (2.1.75-76).⁵⁴ Nor, at this level, is there a differentiation between male and female: entrails (in this play) are conspicuously ungendered; nowhere is “matter” linked (as it is, for instance, in Hamlet⁵⁵) to mater, the maternal. All difference is, to use Nietzsche's term, “assimilate[d]”—“consum'd / In hot digestion of this cormorant war” (2.2.5-6)—even, it seems, the distinction between comedy and tragedy. The play displays an indifference to, or at least a profound skepticism about, the many forms of desire, including their generic concomitants; as Valerie Traub points out, “Troilus and Cressida declines to differentiate types of desire.”⁵⁶ It is almost, as Joel Fineman puts it, “as though in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare had turned against desire itself,”⁵⁷ exposing its ostensibly distinct manifestations as inextricable from each other at their source. The endlessly “dext[rous]” forms of desire seem to amount, in the end, to little more than “the performance of our heaving spleens” (2.2.197), the “pleasure of my spleen” (1.3.178), “a feverous pulse” (3.2.35), “the hot passion of distemper'd blood” (2.2.170), “The obligation of our blood” (4.5.121), “bawdy veins” (4.1.70), “too much blood and too little brain” (5.1.47), and so on; this approaches Nietzsche's “the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers.” Metaphors all, in a sense, but nonetheless figuring the distance between the deep sources of human motivation and their manifestations in rhetoric and action:

However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment remain wholly unknown to him. … Our moral judgements and evaluations too are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us, a kind of acquired language for designating nervous stimuli.⁵⁸

It is precisely the question of “the laws of their nutriment”—and of the “ebbs and flows” (as Agamemnon puts it) of the body's “humorous predominance” (2.3.132, 131)—that the play opens up.

Such a view goes some way toward explaining the strangeness of the play, the fact that Troilus and Cressida is so difficult to discuss profitably in terms of “character” or coherent “character development.” The play seems almost perversely to flout any attempt to perceive full subjectivity in its dramatis personae; these are, without exception, flattened out, reduced to caricatures compared with their Homeric or Chaucerian predecessors.⁵⁹ As Shakespeare recorporealizes the story, he (quite uncharacteristically) “decharacterizes”⁶⁰ its heroes; they become little more than “ciphers” in the “great accompt” (Henry V, Pro.17) of the Trojan legend. As Matthew Greenfield points out, “the play works through two related theories of human behaviour, one physiological (humors) and the other psychological (emulation, or what René Girard calls ‘mimetic desire’). Both are theories of damaged agency, of compulsive, involuntary action.”⁶¹ There is something entirely stripped-down, rather than fully rounded, about all the play's characters; Carol Cook speaks of “the play of drives” depicted here.⁶² The unflinching nature of this vision can, again, be viewed as a return to Homer, to the “geometrical rigor” of what Simone Weil has called “the poem of force.”⁶³ The entire spirit of the play drags any metaphysical or psychological pretensions back down to earth; indeed, the very word spirit is used repeatedly in Troilus and Cressida with strong overtones of its physiological sense (as the vital substance that inhabits the body's vessels).⁶⁴ In radically shifting our view of these heroes of the Western world, in its materialist reduction of motivation to something like the corporeal “will to power,” Troilus and Cressida profoundly addresses the question of the relation between language and the body.

3. CANNIBALISM AND SILENCE

Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent!

Karl Kraus, “In these Great times”⁶⁵

For all its grand rhetoric—or perhaps, more accurately, as a necessary concomitant to this rhetoric—Troilus and Cressida reveals an extreme distrust of (not to say disgust with) language. If the play leaves one with a sensation of satiety with words, it is likely that this sensation was one that Shakespeare, in coming to write the play, was himself unable to avoid. Many writers of the period comment on this dilemma, several of them using a specifically oral metaphor: George Whetstone declares that “the inconstancie of Cressid is so readie in every mans mouth, as it is needlesse labour to blase at full her abuse”; Montaigne writes that “There is nothing, liveth so in mens mouthes as … Troy, as Helen and her Warres”; Burton describes the story's popularity vividly, in a phrase that evokes the play's nausea: “our Poets steale from Homer, he spewes, … [and] they licke it up.”⁶⁶ Perhaps it was this sense of verbal surfeit which impelled Shakespeare to turn the Trojan legend into material for satire, satura; such a sense may in fact be an inherent component of satire—oral satiety turned to oral sadism. Burton, in his discussion of satirists and calumniators, warns against “fall[ing] into the mouths of such men … for many are of so petulant a spleene, and have that figure Sarcasmus so often in their mouthes, so bitter, so foolish, as Baltasar Castilio notes of them, that they cannot speake, but they must bite.”⁶⁷ Confronted with a glut of retellings of the legend of Troy, Shakespeare may indeed have found, when he turned his attention to the writing of Troilus and Cressida, that he could not speak without biting; hence, perhaps, the play's turn toward cannibalism.⁶⁸

This difficulty in speaking without biting perfectly figures the perplexed relation between language and the body in Troilus and Cressida; and for early modern Europeans the idea of cannibalism has a recurrent stake in interrogating this problematic matter. We are speaking here of a period of crisis in the understanding of this relation, a period during which print technology and the exhaustion of the humanist project of “fattening up” language—to name just two factors—had resulted in a profound dissatisfaction with the hollowed-out discourses of European culture. It is at times of cultural crisis such as this, as Elaine Scarry has argued, that “the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend … cultural construct[s] the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty.’”⁶⁹

The cultural construct of cannibalism was used in a similar way. Here I would like to turn briefly to Montaigne, whose “motivated confrontation of the philosophical and the anatomical”⁷⁰ recalls Troilus and Cressida's linking of the two, and whose essay “Of the Cannibals” can provide us with some illuminating parallels to the play's staging of these issues. Both these texts portray attitudes toward love and war as exemplifying a society's ethical value. Montaigne displaces the idea of savagery back onto European civilization, describing his own countrymen's behavior as far crueler than that of the New World's cannibals; in the process of this displacement, as Michel de Certeau explains, “the word ‘barbarian’ … leaves behind its status as a noun (the Barbarians) to take on the value of an adjective (cruel, etc.).”⁷¹ From one perspective, Troilus and Cressida's trajectory is a diametric inversion of Montaigne's: instead of revealing and ratifying the deeply ethical imperative underlying the culture of cannibal society (and thereby assimilating the latter to “civilization”), it defamiliarizes (or disassimilates) the epic ethos, infusing it with a “cannibalism” that is seen as “savage strangeness” (2.3.128). The former society's “noble and generous”⁷² heroism-in-war (the heroism of the victim) and polygamy-in-marriage (based on the love of the wives) are precisely inverted in Shakespeare's barbarism-in-war (the antiheroism of the perpetrator, exemplified by Achilles's butchering of Hector) and cuckoldry-in-marriage (based on the infidelity of the women—both Cressida and Helen). Yet the play ends up in more or less the same place as “Of the Cannibals,” proclaiming the “barbarism” (5.4.17) of the heroes of the Iliad—the cradle of its own European culture.

Both texts evince a profound dissatisfaction with what Montaigne called, in the title of another essay, “the vanity of words.”⁷³ But Montaigne's (idealized) savage culture is everything that Shakespeare's (debased) European culture is not. Where the former as de Certeau brilliantly shows, “is founded upon … a heroic faithfulness to speech [which] produces the unity and continuity of the social body,” the latter's “Bifold authority” (5.2.143) emphasizes the antiheroic faithlessness of language, fragmenting any vestige of social—and, ultimately, individual—unity. Why is cannibal speech so reliable? Because it is “sustained by bodies that have been put to the test”:⁷⁴ “These muscles,” sings the cannibal prisoner before he is eaten, “this flesh, and these veines, are your owne.”⁷⁵ Why is the speech of Shakespeare's Greeks and Trojans so unreliable? Because it contains “no matter from the heart.”

The enigma of the relation between body and speech lies at the very center of both Montaigne's and Shakespeare's texts. Both are concerned with the question of the corporeal source of words, a question about the veracity or duplicity of voice. It is this turn from bodily source to disembodied discourse—the trope of voice—which is the target of much skeptical and satirical attack. Skepticism questions the accuracy of the connection between words and things; here, more specifically, it is the matter of the coherence of the link between the source of things (words, desires) within the body and their emanation in discourse that is at issue. Montaigne's cannibals have no need of skepticism, no use for it, since they are materially inhabited by the body of the other, and this inhabitation guarantees the quality of the link between language and corpus. Cannibalism, here, is a fantasy of speech as “a thing inseparate” (5.2.147) from the body. It is in this sense that what is taken into the body—the gastric—can be imagined as an antidote to the speech—the rhetoric—that leaves it: both Montaigne's cannibals and Shakespeare's protagonists are, in a sense, what they eat.

Montaigne's cannibal society is “a body in the service of saying. It is the visible, palpable, verifiable exemplum which realizes before our eyes an ethic of speech.”⁷⁶ Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida holds out no such hope of “faithful and verifiable speech.”⁷⁷ But where Montaigne offers, as an alternative to the morally depleted discourses of early modern Europe, a new “ethic of speech,” Shakespeare offers no hope of a language guaranteed by the body. Instead he offers the only other possible alternative: an ethic of silence. In the context of the play's outpouring of alternately high-flown, empty rhetoric and scurvy invective, one character stands out in his utter wordlessness: Antenor. A.P. Rossiter, the only critic (as far as I know) who comments on his existence, calls him “Shakespeare's one strong silent man.”⁷⁸ Onstage on at least five separate occasions, mentioned by those around him a dozen times, he utters not a single syllable throughout. In his silence he is strikingly at odds with his traditional role: Homer, for example, calls him “strong in talking,” and Caxton says of him simply that he “spacke moche.”⁷⁹ His speechlessness in Shakespeare, then, is quite deliberate, a kind of rebuttal of the nauseatingly “cramm'd” (2.2.49) rhetoric circulating in and around the play. (And Shakespeare's knack for squeezing meaning out of the names he is given may be at work here, for Antenor can be related readily enough to the Greek private an- [“not” or “without”] prefixed to tenor [“the male voice”].)⁸⁰ If Troilus and Cressida as a whole shares with Montaigne a skeptical, Pyrrhonic sense of pervasive relativism, Antenor's tenacious muteness may be imagined as a Pyrrhonic commitment to aphasia, a “silence, / Cunning in dumbness” (3.2.130-31).⁸¹

Leaving behind (like Pyrrho) no textual trace of his voice, Antenor is the embodiment onstage of what de Certeau calls the “(t)exterior [hors-texte]”⁸²—the space carved out by Montaigne for the figuration of the perfect corporeality of the savage. In his mimetic immediacy, Antenor literally fills this space of the “hors-texte.” If Troilus and Cressida “thematizes the relationship between the mimetic and the citational,”⁸³ Cressida, upon being “changed for Antenor” (4.2.94), becomes the purely citational to his purely mimetic. She is his precise opposite: “unbridled” (3.2.121) in her language, “glib of tongue” (4.5.58), she has betrayed herself from the outset by having “blabb'd” (3.2.123) to Troilus. She becomes, in the end, a figure of pure textuality—even her body, in Ulysses's mocking description of her, is a text: “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” (4.5.54-57). Her faithlessness is figured as the faithlessness of language itself: “I will not keep my word” (5.2.98). She is, we could say, the “whore-text” to Antenor's “hors-texte”—“right great exchange” (3.3.21) indeed.

Antenor, the man of silence, exists only as body, the word made flesh. His is an “art of silence”⁸⁴ which offers the only real space of alterity to the surfeit of degraded language with which he is surrounded, both inside and outside the play. “Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold sarcasm against ‘beautiful words’”—this is how I imagine him.⁸⁵

I imagine, too, that the actor who played Antenor originally was Shakespeare himself—his own silent, sly escape from the overwhelming citationality of his material. A playwright, though, cannot long remain silent. Shakespeare's great tragedies, written in the years following Troilus and Cressida, portray repeated—and often failed—attempts to recover the possibility of a meaningful language, a place for words that retain their integrity with the bodies from which they emerge, a way to heave the heart into the mouth—to love, without being silent.

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 241.

2. According to J.S.P. Tatlock, “no traditional story was so popular in the Elizabethan Age as that of the siege of Troy and some of its episodes” (“The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, Especially in Shakespeare and Heywood,” PMLA 30 [1915]: 676-78). For a good sense of how many competing versions of the legend were in circulation at the time, see Robert Kimbrough, Shakespeare's “Troilus and Cressida” and its Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964), 24-46; and Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia UP, 1957-75), 6:83-221.

3. According to the Epistle of The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid (1609), the play was “neuer stal'd with the Stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar” (¶2). All quotations from Troilus and Cressida follow the Arden text of the play, edited by Kenneth Palmer (London and New York: Methuen, 1982). Quotations from other plays by Shakespeare follow the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

4. The very fact of putting these heroes onstage, in the inescapably embodied media of the theater, must have brought into sharp focus the disjunction between the rhetorical (and disembodied) and the mimetic (and corporeal). “I am half inclined,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge about the play, “to believe that Shakespeare's main object, or shall I rather say, that his ruling impulse, was … to substantiate the distinct and graceful profiles or outlines of the Homeric epic into the flesh and blood of the romantic drama” (Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes [New York: Capricorn Books, 1959], 248-49). On this topic, see especially Harry Berger Jr.'s “Text vs. Performance in Shakespeare: The Example of Macbeth,” Genre 15 (1982): 49-79.

5. Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974), 326.

6. Elizabeth Freund, “‘Ariachne's Broken Woof’: The Rhetoric of Citationality in Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York: Methuen, 1985), 19-36, esp. 21. Linda Charnes's “‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida” (Shakespeare Quarterly 40 [1989]: 413-40) similarly stresses issues of citationality in the play.

7. For occurrences of the word matter in Troilus and Cressida, see The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, comp. Marvin Spevack (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1973), 798. On matter as bodily substance—and, more specifically, pus—see Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare-Lexicon: A complete dictionary of all the … words … in the works of the poet, 2 vols. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1874-75), 2:700-701; and Elaine Scarry, ed., Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988), xxii.

8. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. (Harmondsworth, UK, and New York: Penguin, 1978), 514.

9. S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London: Staples Press, 1944), 98; L.C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), 58. Cf. R.J. Kaufmann's comments in “Ceremonies for Chaos: The Status of Troilus and Cressida,” ELH 32 (1965), 139-59, esp. 145.

10. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991), 220. My understanding of Nietzsche's use of the physiological metaphor is indebted to Blondel's excellent analysis, as well as to Elizabeth Grosz's essay “Nietzsche and the Stomach for Knowledge” in Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory, Paul Patton, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 49-70.

11. This idealized, closed, opaque corporeal model has been described by Mikhail Bakhtin as the “classical” body, in contrast with the open, flowing, “grotesque” body that foregrounds its orifices and protuberances (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky [Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1986], esp.18-30); Shakespeare's play adds to this binary a third model—the “abject” body whose interior organs and physiology are represented. For while Troilus and Cressida's bodies are grotesque, it is not so much their orificial or protuberant status that makes them so as their internal ebb and flow, the diseased status of their visceral interiors.

12. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, quoted here from Blondel, 220.

13. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 42-50, esp. 44.

14. The phrase is taken from Georg Stauth and Bryan S. Turner, Nietzsche's Dance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 17.

15. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 137 and 138: “By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they [philosophers] betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man” (137).

16. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer in The Portable Nietzsche, 463-563, esp. 465.

17. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), 224. Parker stresses the association of bodily swelling with rhetorical tumidity in the play.

18. The phrase has sometimes been taken as a symbol for the entire play; Eric Mallin's comment is particularly apt: “Hector discovers that the ideal has become entirely flesh, a corrupted thing” (“Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida,” Representations 29 [1990]: 145-79, esp. 168).

19. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 161. Graham Bradshaw comments on this genealogical project in his excellent chapter on Troilus and Cressida in Shakespeare's scepticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987), 126-63. Though Bradshaw addresses primarily questions of the construction of principles of value, his project shares with mine some basic assumptions about the play.

20. Cf. Matthew Greenfield's comment in “Undoing National Identity: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida” (unpublished paper presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Chicago): “The work of Troilus and Cressida is not to provide England or Elizabeth with a genealogy but rather to undo the genealogies created by other myth-makers” (5). In Troilus and Cressida, wrote Tucker Brooke, Shakespeare was, “however subconsciously, anatomizing the England of the dying Elizabeth” (“Shakepeare's Study in Culture and Anarchy,” Yale Review, n.s. xvii [1928]: 571-77, esp. 576).

21. There is an analogous reversal in that the normative end of the Trojan story is in the belly of the Trojan horse; Shakespeare makes the belly the origin rather than the culmination of the tale. Troy and the belly are again linked—rather oddly—in Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island (Cambridge, 1633), where the “vale” of the belly is described as “A work more curious, then which poets feigne / Neptune and Phoebus built, and pulled down again [i.e., Troy]” (20).

22. These quotations are from Simone Weil's description of Homer's epic in Weil, The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Iowa City: Stone Wall Press, 1973), 6 and 33. Cf. Sheila Murnaghan, “Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy,” Yale Journal of Criticism 1 (1988): 23-43: “No reader of the Iliad fails to be impressed by the poem's vivid accounts of the body materializing as it is severed from the animating psyche, or spirit” (24).

23. For this etymology, see the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. Ileum, Ilion, and Ilium; and A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire Ètymologique de la Langue Latine (Paris: Klincksieck, 1959), 308 (“ilia, -ium … parties latérales du ventre”). For the anatomical data, see, for example, Thomas Vicary, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (London, 1548; rpt. London: Early English Text Society, 1888), 65.

24. On the symbolic significance of the Trojan horse, see Robert Durling, “Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell” in Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979-80, Stephen J. Greenblatt, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), 61-93, esp. 74.

25. Lucian of Samosata, Hermotimus, or Concerning the Sects, trans. K. Kilburn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1959), 297-99.

26. On the familiarity of Lucian to Elizabethan readers, see Douglas Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979), 82-96. Prominent allusions to Momus's tale appear in Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning (1605), where Bacon refers to “that window which Momus did require: who seeing in the frame of man's heart such angles and recesses, found fault there was not a window to look into them” (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. William Aldis Wright [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900], 228-29); and in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), where Burton observes, “How would Democritus have beene moved, had he seene the secrets of [men's] hearts? If every man had a window in his brest, which Momus would have had in Vulcans man. … Would hee, thinke you, or any man else say that these men were well in their wits?” (Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner et al., 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989-94], 1:55-56). On Troilus and Cressida as a Pyrrhonist play, see especially Robert B. Pierce, “Shakespeare and the Ten Modes of Scepticism,” Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994): 145-58, esp. 151-52.

27. At 1.2.110: “she's a merry Greek indeed”; and at 4.4.55: “A woeful Cressid 'mongst the merry Greeks.” Cf. Troilus's comment “Were it a casque compos'd by Vulcan's [i.e., Hephaestus's] skill, / My sword should bite it” (5.2.169-70).

28. A “tent” in this context is a surgeon's instrument for opening and probing a wound. Cf. Thersites's (typically somatizing) answer to Patroclus's “Who keeps the tent now?”: “The surgeon's box or the patient's wound” (5.1.10-11).

29. For more on this fantasy in Shakespeare's plays, see my “Visceral Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, and the Interior of the Early Modern Body” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 81-105.

30. Jean Starobinski, “The Inside and the Outside,” The Hudson Review 28 (1975): 333-51, esp. 336; Starobinski slightly modifies the translation of A. T. Murray in The Iliad, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1930-34), 1:405.

31. Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: The University Press, 1951), 86; Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover, 1982), 1-22. See also Murnaghan, 23-24; and Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Dim Body, Dazzling Body” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, Michel Feher, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 18-47, esp. 29-30.

32. The idea of an inherent connection between truth and entrails is at least as old as the practice of haruspices—or, in the case of human entrails, anthropomancy. In both Old and New Testaments, as Elaine Scarry has shown, “the interior of the body carries the force of confirmation [of belief]” (Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985], 215).

33. Throughout this brief discussion of satire, I generalize about a wide field of material. The specific examples, which I take to be representative of the genre, can do no more than gesture toward this field. For more on early modern English satire, see especially Mary Claire Randolph, “The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory,” Studies in Philology 38 (1941): 125-57; O.J. Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (London and New York: Oxford UP, 1943); and Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1959).

34. The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: The University Press, 1949), 83; John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, Part One in The Works of John Marston, ed. A.H. Bullen, 3 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), 1:50. Cf. Marston's description of the satirist as a kind of barber-surgeon, lancing the sores of the world: “Infectious blood, ye gouty humours quake, / Whilst my sharp razor doth incision make” (The Scourge of Villanie, in Bullen, ed., 3:339).

35. Direct injury is usually figured either as biting or as scourging; but even in the latter case, the aim, as often as not, is to get beneath the skin: “Each blow doth leave / A lasting scar, that with a poison eats / Into the marrow” (Thomas Randolph, The Muses' Looking Glass, quoted here from Mary Claire Randolph, 150). Kernan writes that “gross, sodden, rotting matter is the substance of the satiric scene” (11).

36. Burton, 1:337-41, esp. 337 and 339.

37. Mary Claire Randolph, 153. The combination of impulses delineated here hints at what we might think of as a strongly preoedipal component to the satirist's aggression; Melanie Klein describes the first year of life as full of “sadistic impulses directed, not only against its mother's breast, but also against the inside of her body: scooping it out, devouring the contents, destroying it by every means which sadism can suggest”; so, too, the projective mechanisms crucial to this stage of life are central to the operation of satire. The satirist's oral sadism can be thought of, from this perspective, as an exacerbated version of this primary infantile position (Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” in Love, Guilt, and Reparation, and Other Works, 1921-1945, Vol. 1 of The Writings of Melanie Klein [London: Hogarth Press, 1975], 1:262-89, esp. 282).

38. Marston, The Scourge of Villanie, in Bullen, ed., 3:355; and Burton, 1:337-38.

39. The Works of John Milton, Frank Allen Patterson, gen. ed., 18 vols. (New York: Columbia UP, 1931-38), 3:329. “Byting” comes from the title of Joseph Hall's first collection, “Of Byting Satyrs.”

40. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 260-61. Despite the popular Elizabethan notion that the word satire came from the Greek satyr, the correct Latin etymology was not unknown at the time. See, e.g., Thomas Drant, A Medecinable Morall (London, 1566), A2^r (cited in Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1952], 217), where the etymology of satire is traced to both the Greek and the Latin sources, as well as to the Arabic for a glaive (i.e., a lance or spear). See also The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 790.

41. Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon in Petronius, trans. Michael Heseltine (London: William Heinemann; New York: MacMillan, 1913), 321. Swift's A Modest Proposal is English literature's most overt example of the satiric urge to eat people.

42. See Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge: The University Press, 1936), 320-24.

43. There are, of course, images that don't fit into this trajectory, which is impressionistic rather than rigorous.

44. On the way Troilus and Cressida “work[s] to extend the logic of the play from the relations among characters to the relations between characters and audience,” see Harry Berger Jr., “Troilus and Cressida: The Observer as Basilisk” in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, John Patrick Lynch, ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 130-46, esp. 141.

45. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 6 vols. (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), 1:48.

46. Palmer, ed., 130n.

47. Colie, 343-44. Kimbrough adds that “an Elizabethan audience would have recognized [Thersites] as a walking, talking figure of speech” (39). Shakespeare, however, seems to have associated Thersites less with language than with the body: “Thersites' body is as good as Ajax' / When neither are alive” (Cymbeline, 4.2.252-53). Cf. Burton's comment that all men “are in brief, as disordered in their mindes, as Thersites was in his body” (34).

48. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 89.

49. Is, for instance, “the open ulcer of [Troilus's] heart” (1.1.53) the source or the result of his love for Cressida?

50. Catherine Belsey, “Desire's excess and the English Renaissance theatre: Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello” in Susan Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 84-102, esp. 93. Carol Cook's “Unbodied Figures of Desire” (Theatre Journal 38 [1986]: 34-52) relates desire not so much to the subject's body in the play as to its objects' corporeality.

51. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, quoted here from Blondel, 219 and 218.

52. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 123.

53. Charnes's account of these complex circulations in the play is ingenious: “We might posit the circuit thus: possession of Helen generates desire for war, desire for war generates desire for Helen, desire for Helen generates mimetic desire, mimetic desire generates competitive identification between Greek and Trojan men, competitive identification generates homoerotic aggression, homoerotic aggression generates desire for more war, and finally, desire for more war reproduces desire for Helen” (437).

54. The phrase comes from Cornelius Agrippa and, interestingly, is used by Burton side by side with a reference to cannibalism: “To see a man weare his braines in his belly, his guts in his head, … or as those Anthropophagi, to eat one another” (1:53).

55. See my “Hamlet, Nietzsche, and Visceral Knowledge” in The Incorporated Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment, Michael O'Donovan-Anderson, ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 93-110.

56. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of sexuality in Shakespearean drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 84.

57. Joel Fineman, “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), 70-109, esp. 100.

58. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 74-76.

59. See especially Colie's comment about the characters “refusing altogether to conform to the conventions of psychological illusionism” (326). Cf. Bethell, 102. This is where I part ways with Linda Charnes's powerful account of the play: it is not, I think, part of Shakespeare's enterprise here to take on “the task of giving mimetic spontaneity to, and representing viable subjectivity in” his Homeric characters (417)—quite the contrary.

60. The term is taken from Stephen Roderick's “Et Tu, Jello,” Boston Magazine 87, no. 5 (1995): 66.

61. Greenfield, 10; Greenfield quotes René Girard's “The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida” in Parker and Hartman, eds., 188-209.

62. Cook, 40.

63. Weil, 15.

64. See especially the Prologue's “expectation, tickling skittish spirits” (l. 20); Troilus's “spirit of sense” (1.1.58), echoed by Achilles's “most pure spirit of sense” (3.3.106); Ulysses's “her wanton spirits look out / At every joint and motive of her body” (4.5.56-57); and Achilles's “That I may give the local wound a name, / And make distinct the very breach whereout / Hector's great spirit flew” (4.5.243-45). Bradshaw calls spirit “a word to watch in this play”; beginning with the Prologue, the play “release[s] the perjorative senses the word spirit may have. These are many and include the clinical senses in humors psychology” (130). On the role of the “spirits” in humoral theory, see especially Gail Kern Paster, “Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body” in Hillman and Mazzio, eds. On premodern conceptions of “spirit” as a vapor or liquid inhabiting the body (and as “seed”), see Onians, 480-89, esp. 480-85.

65. Karl Kraus, In These Great Times (Montreal, Quebec: Engendra Press, 1976), 70-83, esp. 71.

66. George Whetstone, The Rocke of Regard (1576), quoted here from Bullough, ed., 6:97; Michel de Montaigne, “Of the worthiest and most excellent men” in The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1603), ed. Israel Gollancz, 6 vols. (London: J.M. Dent, 1897), 4:327-38, esp. 330; and Burton, 1:11. Emphasis added in all three quotations.

67. Burton, 1:337-38 (emphasis added except for the last phrase, which is italicized in the original). Perhaps we should think here of Shakespeare as attempting to displace his own anxieties about assimilating or digesting these “massively overdetermined” characters onto his audience; cf. Freund's observation: “Homer and Chaucer are sufficiently rich fare to daunt the digestion of even as voracious a literary imagination as Shakespeare's; and one cannot overlook the rancid flavor of o'ereaten fragments, scraps and greasy relics dominating a text which abounds in food imagery” (21).

68. One way of understanding this turn is as a return to a pre-verbal state—to infancy (speechlessness)—as a concomitant of the infantile oral sadism and projective mechanisms described above in relation to satire: cf. Klein's view of infantile sadism (see n. 37, above).

69. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 14.

70. Gary Shapiro, “Jean-Luc Nancy and the Corpus of Philosophy” in Thinking Bodies, Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin, eds. (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994), 52-62, esp. 60. On the bodiliness of Montaigne's skepticism, see Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), 115-51.

71. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 72. My understanding of Montaigne's essay is indebted to de Certeau's powerful reading of it.

72. Montaigne, “Of the Cannibals” in Essayes, 2:32-54, esp. 226.

73. Montaigne, 2:51. On the slipperiness of language in the play, see in particular C.C. Barfoot, “Troilus and Cressida: ‘Praise us as we are tasted,’” SQ 39 (1988): 45-57: “Troilus and Cressida leads us to the conclusion that we can no more trust our heroes, or even our anti-heroes, than we can trust our words” (55).

74. De Certeau, 73.

75. Montaigne, 2:51.

76. De Certeau, 75.

77. De Certeau, 75.

78. A.P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Graham Storey (London and New York: Longman, 1961), 151.

79. The Iliad, 3:148; Bullough, ed., 6:194. It is perhaps not surprising to find that the only character to escape his predetermined citational identity is Antenor, the figure of pure mimesis.

80. I thank Jeff Masten for this observation. Troilus and Cressida, as we have seen, includes several such denominative jokes—“Ilium” and “Ilion,” “the Matter of Troy,” and the scatological play with the name “Ajax” (a jakes or privy) come to mind.

81. Silence is not, however, invariably an honorable way out of the degradation of language in Troilus and Cressida. Ajax's silent treatment of his compatriots in Act 3 is held up to merciless ridicule by Thersites: “Why, a stalks up and down like a peacock, a stride and a stand; ruminates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her brain to set down her reckoning; bites his lip with a politic regard. … He's grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster. … Why, he'll answer nobody: he professes not answering; speaking is for beggars” (3.3.250-53, 262-63, 267-68): clearly, not all languagelessness stems from an ethic of silence.

82. De Certeau, 73.

83. Charnes, 429.

84. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 311. Sir Francis Bacon uses the same phrase—“the art of silence”—in De Augmentis, where he relates the story of Zeno, who, having remained silent throughout an audience with a foreign ambassador, told the latter to “‘Tell your king that you have found a man in Greece, who knew how to hold his tongue’” (Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., 14 vols. [London: Longman, 1868-90], 5:31).

85. Nietzche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, 556.

I would like to thank Stanley Cavell, G. Blakemore Evans, Elizabeth Freund, Marjorie Garber, Jeff Masten, Ruth Nevo, and the members of the Harvard Renaissance Colloquium for their helpful and generous comments at various stages of the writing of this essay.