SOURCE: “Troilus and Cressida and the Definition of Beauty,” in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 36, 1983, pp. 85-95.

[In the following essay, Dusinberre maintains that Shakespeare's concept of beauty resides not in the bodies of such women as Helen or Cressida, but instead in the power of language to represent beauty truthfully—something which is impossible to accomplish in the corrupt world of Troilus and Cressida.]

The problem of how to define beauty is central to Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare depicts Helen as incapable of acquiring symbolic stature and this creates in the play questions about the nature of beauty.¹

In the world of Troilus and Cressida beauty is defined by the beautiful woman, whether it be Helen or Cressida. But the idea of Helen as the archetype of beauty seems to have been challenged very early by shifts in perspective. The poet Stesichorus was legendary for a poem defaming Helen, for which the gods blinded him. He recanted and recovered, as Plato records in both The Republic and Phaedrus. Stesichorus' palinode asserted that the Helen story was a fabrication:

          False, false the tale
Thou never didst sail in the well-decked ships
          Nor come to the towers of Troy.(2)

Dio Chrysostom, a first-century critic of Homer, declared that Homer was a beggar who told lies for a living and that the Judgement of Paris was an unlikely tale, in the first place because the ‘consort of Zeus’ would not have required Paris, a mere shepherd, to testify to her beauty, and secondly, because Helen was Aphrodite's sister, and the goddess would not have wished to disgrace her. Dio claims that Helen was lawfully married to Paris: ‘If anyone does not accept this account under the influence of the old view, let him know that he is unable to get free of error and distinguish truth from falsehood.’³ Euripides' version of the story in the play Helen, in which Paris abducts a phantom while the real Helen is taken to Egypt by Hermes, finds an echo in the Renaissance in the writings of the art historian, Giovanni Petro Bellori, who believed that the Trojan war was fought for art rather than nature:⁴

Helen was not as beautiful as they pretended, for she was found to have defects and shortcomings, so that it is believed that she never did sail for Troy, but that her statue was taken there in her stead, for whose beauty the Greeks and the Trojans made war for ten years.⁵

In the late Dialogue ‘Greater Hippias’, Plato focuses on the intellectual dilemma which lies at the heart of the Helen myth.⁶ Socrates presses the Sophist Hippias to define beauty, but ruthlessly demolishes each definition that is offered. Whether or not Shakespeare knew this Dialogue, its arguments throw light on the dramatist's preoccupations in Troilus and Cressida.

I

When Socrates asks Hippias what beauty is, he replies, as any of the characters in Shakespeare's play might do, that beauty is the beautiful maiden. Socrates refuses to accept the definition because it admits the possibility of comparison. The beautiful maiden is more beautiful than a mare, a lyre or a pot, but ‘ugly in comparison with the race of gods’.⁷ By the yardstick of heavenly beauty her human beauty is ugliness and therefore cannot embody the essence of the beautiful.

The opening scene of Troilus and Cressida sets up a competition between the beauty of Cressida and of Helen. Troilus sighs for ‘fair Cressid’, Pandarus declares that ‘she look'd yesternight fairer than ever I saw her look, or any woman else’, and is betrayed by his own tag into placing her in his mind's eye at Helen's side:

An her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen's—well, go to—there were no more comparison between the women. But, for my part, she is my kinswoman; I would not, as they term it, praise her, but I would somebody had heard her talk yesterday, as I did. I would not dispraise your sister Cassandra's wit: but—⁸

Troilus responds with poetic ardour:

                                        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 …

(1.1.54-7)

It seems as if Troilus, with true gallantry, disdains to compare his lady to another. But does he? The softness of the cygnet's down is tellingly evoked in Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, xiii, where Polyphemus praises Galatea in words which recall the contest on Mount Ida:

Of valew more than Apples bee although they were of gold. …
More soft than butter newly made, or downe of Cygnet is.(9)

Troilus, despite the different contours of his imagination, like Pandarus measures Cressida's beauty by Helen's. Pandarus tries to heat the young man's passion with both praise and disparagement of his niece: ‘An she were not kin to me, she would be as fair a Friday as Helen is on Sunday.’ Troilus protests: ‘Say I she is not fair?’ and Pandarus retorts in a fit of pique, partly feigned and partly real: ‘I do not care whether you do or no. She's a fool to stay behind her father. Let her to the Greeks; and so I'll tell her the next time I see her’ (1.1.75-81). This is not all bluff; Pandarus calculates the effect which later in the play Cressida's beauty does have on the Greek camp. In Troy, cheek by jowl with Helen, she will always be black where beauty is counted fair.

Shakespeare might have known of an early Greek Cressida—very different both from Chaucer's Criseyde and from Henryson's—who was alert to the dangers of comparison. Dio Chrysostom's ‘Sixty-First Discourse: Chryseïs’,¹⁰ gives substance to the shadowy Homeric figure of Agamemnon's concubine, whom medieval writers sometimes identified with Briseis, beloved of Achilles, when they looked for Criseyde's Homeric ancestry.¹¹

When Dio's Chryseïs observed that the fall of Troy was imminent she contemplated the prospect of returning with Agamemnon to the household of Clytemnestra. But the king's propensity to compare her with his wife—‘For he says that she is in no wise inferior in mind to his own wife’—alarmed the concubine:

For Chryseïs knew that such talk breeds envy and jealousy. Then too, she observed Agamemnon's character and saw that he was not stable but arrogant and overbearing, and she calculated what he would do to her, a captive, when he ceased to desire her, seeing that he referred to his wife, queen though she was and the mother of his children, in such disparaging terms. For though foolish women delight in their lovers when they are seen to disparage all other women, those who are sensible discern the true nature of the man who acts or talks that way.¹²

Another Cressida calculates how the successful lover will behave:

That she belov'd knows nought that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is.
That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue;
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach;
Achievement is command; ungain'd, beseech.

(1.2.280-5)

Dio suggests that the likelihood that Agamemnon's favourable comparisons would turn into unfavourable ones in the course of time, and that his devotion would be translated into tyranny, led Chryseïs to prompt her father to send for her to the Greek camp. Events proved her wisdom, for her successor in Agamemnon's love, Cassandra, another witty daughter of a priest, was murdered on her return with the king. Pandarus' boast that his niece is wittier than Cassandra may testify to the dramatist's residual memory of an earlier Chryseïs who chose to return to her father rather than suffer comparison with another woman. In the Greek camp it is Cressida who will do the comparing, as Troilus anticipates:

                                        I cannot sing,
Nor heel the high lavolt, nor sweeten talk,
Nor play at subtle games—fair virtues all,
To which the Grecians are most prompt and pregnant.

(4.4.84-7)

In her first scene in the play Cressida teases Pandarus by disparaging her lover: ‘There is among the Greeks Achilles, a better man than Troilus.’ Pandarus explodes: ‘Well, well! Why, have you any discretion? Have you any eyes? Do you know what a man is? Is not birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and such like, the spice and salt that season a man?’ ‘Ay,’ snaps the Beatrice of the ancient world, ‘a minc'd man’ (1.2.239-48). Dio's Chryseïs would have felt as sceptical as Socrates of Hector's challenge to the Greeks that:

He hath a lady wiser, fairer, truer,
Than ever Greek did couple in his arms.

(1.3.275-6)

When Dio's second speaker admits Chryseïs' prudence but doubts Dio's version of the story, the critic retorts that the real is more worth writing about than the ideal: ‘Would you rather hear how they [events] assuredly did take place, or how it would be well for them to have taken place?’¹³ Cressida, Diomedes and Thersites are all governed by their regard for the unideal aspects of their world. Cressida has enough of Chryseïs' discernment to realize that in Troy her beauty is the casualty of the comparative mood.

Troilus is obtuse about the threat to beauty implicit in comparisons, but yet quick to deny Socrates' premise that the beautiful maiden is ugly compared with the gods:

He brought a Grecian queen, whose youth and freshness
Wrinkles Apollo's, and makes stale the morning.

(2.2.78-9)

Such a claim would have been sacrilege in the ancient world. But one of the radical differences between the Iliad and Troilus and Cressida lies in Shakespeare's discarding of deities. In Homer the Trojan war is waged as much in heaven as in Troy. In Shakespeare the gods are names but not numina. Men and women have deposed them, so that Helen is more beautiful than Apollo and Agamemnon a ‘god in office’. Compared with other plays set in the pagan world—King Lear, Cymbeline, even The Winter's Tale—Troilus and Cressida lacks religious dimension.¹⁴ It is as though Shakespeare asked what the significance of beauty might be once the gods no longer cared about the fate of Troy. The impact of Troilus' comparison is poetic not religious. Socrates might have argued that Troilus, beautiful and appealing though his image is, sacrifices the intellect to the imagination, thus denying beauty immutability. For a man to find a beautiful maiden more beautiful than the gods demonstrates not her beauty, but how little his gods mean to him, a denial of order which looks forward to Ulysses' great speech, and which Hippias, wordly Sophist though he is, never contemplates. In Troilus and Cressida beauty translated into the form of the beautiful maiden must, like Helen and Cressida, come to dust.

II

Hippias abandons the beautiful maiden when logic forces him to. But turning triumphantly to his tormentor, he shifts ground, claiming that beauty is distinguished by gold. In Troilus and Cressida Greeks and Trojans alike identify Helen's beauty by what it costs.

Troilus, surprisingly enough considering his championing of Helen in the Trojan debate, is the first person in the play to claim that the cost of Helen's beauty is too high. Throwing down his arms he cries:

Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair,
When with your blood you daily paint her thus.

(1.1.89-90)

Helen's beauty is grotesquely embellished not with vermilion but with blood, like a painted statue.¹⁵ The image contains the two Renaissance themes of Nature improved by Art and yet corrupted by artifice. Troilus' outcry implies what Hector later argues: ‘She is not worth what she doth cost / The keeping’, but in the debate Troilus forgets his own scepticism, declaring: ‘What's aught but as 'tis valued?’ (2.2.51-2). According to this argument beauty is defined by what it costs, as Hippias tells Socrates. Yet Troilus had seemed in that first scene to value Helen's beauty in Diomed's negative terms as ‘a hell of pain and world of charge … a costly loss of wealth and friends’ (4.1.59, 62):

For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian's life hath sunk; for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Troyan hath been slain.

(4.1.71-4)

Paris's retort: ‘Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do, / Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy’ (4.1.77-8), recalls the lightweight sparring of Shakespeare's comedies¹⁶ and sounds incongruous amidst the carnage of war. Yet Bassanio's rejection of the golden casket at Belmont expresses a Renaissance distrust of beauty adorned by gold, which anticipates the buying and selling metaphor in Troilus and Cressida:

                    Look on beauty
And you shall see 'tis purchas'd by the weight,
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it;
So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind
Upon supposed fairness often known
To be the dowry of a second head—
The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.
Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty.

(3.2.88-99)

The language of gold, weight, light, fair, the Indian beauty and the dangerous sea suggests the eulogy of Cressida which follows Troilus's outburst against the folly of defending Helen's fairness:

Tell me, Apollo, for thy Daphne's love,
What Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we?
Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl;
Between our Ilium and where she resides
Let it be call'd the wild and wand'ring flood;
Ourself the merchant, and this sailing Pandar
Our doubtful hope, our convoy, and our bark.

(1.1.97-103)

Here Cressida is the pearl sought by the merchant across perilous seas. In the Trojan debate Troilus defends Helen's beauty:

                    Why, she is a pearl
Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships,
And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants.

(2.2.81-3)

For Troilus beauty is defined by cost. To deny Helen's worth is to deny Cressida's, for in the world of Troy both are weighed in the same scale.

Troilus' image identifies a beauty measured by price. There are no gods in the play, but neither is there any royalty, despite a plethora of princes. Majesty has been devalued by merchantry. The pearl of great price, symbol of the spiritual life, is here both literal and secular. The word ‘thousand’ recurs in the play as part of its inflated currency, the thousand ships sent for Helen haunting Cressida's brag of love:

But more in Troilus thousand-fold I see
Than in the glass of Pandar's praise may be.

(1.2.276-7)¹⁷

Hundredfold is the Biblical measure of perfection. The inflation of language describes an economy where beauty has proved not priceless but worthless. No one in the play is capable of understanding Juliet's: ‘They are but beggars that can count their worth’ (2.6.32). The pricing of beauty has forced it into the market-place to be valued, bought, sold, stolen or sullied: ‘We turn not back the silks upon the merchant / When we have soil'd them’ (2.2.69-70).

III

Having routed gold and the beautiful maiden as definitive of beauty, Socrates proposes to Hippias that beauty is perceived truly by the senses of sight and hearing. He rejects the witness of taste and touch as being rooted in the physical and incapable of ascent to the spiritual.

Troilus argues in the Trojan debate that Helen has been chosen through the consent of the eyes and ears, as all men choose beauty:

I take to-day a wife, and my election
Is led on in the conduct of my will;
My will enkindled by mine eyes and ears,
Two traded pilots 'twixt the dangerous shores
Of will and judgment.

(2.2.61-5)

Sight and hearing mediate between ‘will’, with its Elizabethan sense of sexual drive, and ‘judgment’, the operation of reason. But the thrust of the passage is to give greater dominance to will:

                    How may I avoid,
Although my will distaste what it elected,
The wife I chose?

(2.2.65-7)

Troilus' Platonic orthodoxy in recognizing eyes and ears as arbiters of the beautiful is here compromised by the word ‘distaste’. In the Commentary on Plato's Symposium Ficino reinforces Socrates' distrust of the lower senses:

What need is there of the senses of smell, taste, and touch? Odors, flavors, heat, cold, softness, hardness, and like qualities are the objects of these senses … Love regards as its end the enjoyment of beauty; beauty pertains only to the mind, sight, and hearing … Desire which arises from the other senses is called, not love, but lust and madness.¹⁸

Troilus' rhapsody on the softness of Cressida's hand is echoed later in Paris' plea to Helen to unarm Hector with her ‘white enchanting fingers’ (3.1.144). According to both Plato and Ficino the tactile imagination of wallowing in lily beds would demonstrate the local sensuality of lust or madness, as does Troilus' anticipation of the taste of loving:

Th' imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense; what will it be
When that the wat'ry palate tastes indeed
Love's thrice-repured nectar?

(3.2.18-21)

The sweetness of love for Cressida is tainted by its dramatic proximity with Pandarus' saccharine flattery of Helen in the preceding scene: ‘My sweet queen, my very very sweet queen … honey-sweet queen’ (3.1.75, 134). Sweetness has gone off in this play, as Thersites observes:

Hector. Good night, sweet Lord Menelaus.
Thersites. Sweet draught! ‘Sweet’ quoth 'a? Sweet sink, sweet sewer!

(5.1.72-3)

Shakespeare knew as well as Socrates that beauty identified by taste turns swiftly to distaste. But where Socrates relies on the superior senses of sight and hearing, in Troilus and Cressida eyes and ears persuade the will of the form of physical beauty, but mislead the judgement about its relation to goodness. Cressida blames the eye for the vacillation of her affections:

Ah, poor our sex! this fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind.
What error leads must err; O, then conclude,
Minds sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

(5.2.107-10)

The false logic almost parodies Socrates' methods of disputation. But Shakespeare refuses to endorse the gendered vision. Troilus, who had boasted of choosing with eyes and ears, is staggered by their false witness:

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.

(5.2.118-22)

The eye and ear seemed to promise unity between the good and the beautiful where the judgement is forced to concede disunity.

In the ‘Greater Hippias’ Plato exposes the dilemma of the two and the one with brilliant if evasive wit. Socrates ties Hippias in knots over the problem of how the double sense of sight and hearing can perceive the single nature of beauty, forcing the Sophist to admit that he himself is two rather than one, and bidding an insouciant farewell to ‘the two of you’.¹⁹ Ficino, more concerned to elucidate than to obfuscate, explains Plato's premise in Philebus that the good and the beautiful are one, by pointing to the dissolution which attends their disjunction: ‘All things are preserved by unity, but perish from disunity … Whoever departs from the good falls away from the one too.’²⁰ Observing a beauty fallen away from goodness, Troilus is confounded by the evidence of disunity where eyes and ears had claimed oneness:

If there be rule in unity itself,
This was not she.(21)

Identity cannot survive such division:

                                        This is, and is not, Cressid.
Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth;
And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne's broken woof to enter.(22)

Cressida's recognition of the two and the one parodies Troilus':

Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee:
But with my heart the other eye doth see.

(5.2.105-6)

Socrates chose eyes and ears as the registers of beauty because he believed that they created a harmony inherent in the beautiful. Cressida divides the organ of sight against itself, one eye looking one way and one another. The single nature of the beautiful and the good has disintegrated into a grotesque disunity of perception.

The philosopher Plotinus argued that beauty is inevitably fragmented by its embodiment in material form: ‘In the degree in which the beauty is diffused by entering into matter, it is so much the weaker than that concentrated in unity.’²³ Plotinus shares Socrates' scepticism about the power of the beautiful maiden to embody beauty itself. Beautiful human beings are no more than the shadows of an eternal and immutable spirit of beauty: ‘Whence shone forth the beauty of Helen, battle-sought; or of all those women like in loveliness to Aphrodite; or of Aphrodite herself; or of any human being that has been perfect in beauty?’ Lovers of the beautiful, swayed by eyes and ears: ‘Undisciplined in discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it, run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs us.’ Beauty resides not in the ‘concrete object’ but ‘in soul or mind’.²⁴

In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare seems deliberately to have rejected any consciousness of beauty in the mind. Troilus may cry despairingly: ‘If beauty have a soul, this is not she’, but can resolve despair into a complex pun: ‘Farewell, revolted fair!’ (5.2.136, 184). In the same spirit of resurgent parody on the part of the dramatist Paris' servant ushers Pandarus into his master's bedroom:

Servant. With him the mortal Venus, the heart-blood of beauty, love's invisible soul—
Pandarus. Who, my cousin, Cressida?
Servant. No, sir, Helen. Could not you find out that by her attributes?

(3.1.30-5)

Shakespeare seems to burlesque the whole concept of inner beauty. Yet it is one which is recurrent in his drama as a whole. Viola in Twelfth Night bears ‘a mind that envy could not but call fair’ (2.1.26). She trusts the Sea Captain because she ‘will believe thou hast a mind that suits / With this thy fair and outward character’ (1.2.50). The play, despite transitory disruptions—‘O, how vile an idol proves this god!’ (3.4.349)—celebrates concord between the beautiful and the good, the inner and the outer man, the fair in body and the fair in mind. Even Iago perceives a relation between the two which is inaccessible to Paris and Troilus:

                                        If Cassio do remain,
He hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly.

(Othello, 5.1.18-20)

Shakespeare could have injected such awareness into the world of Troilus and Cressida, yet it remains conspicuously absent. Even Hector, the closest to owning a daily beauty in his life, cannot escape the debased values of his own society, its preference for will over judgement, its self-absorption, faded chivalry and domestic poverty:

Andromache, I am offended with you.
Upon the love you bear me, get you in.

(5.3.77-8)

The lack of religious dimension in the play has turned the worship of beauty as Plato conceived it into idolatry of its material forms.

Plotinus argued that the power to perceive inner beauty behind the outward is dependent on the purity of each man's soul. A man must shape his own nature to accord with the beautiful, just as the sculptor fashions stone according to his Idea of beauty: ‘When you know you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining … can shatter that inner unity.’²⁵ Beauty and identity are here one and the same, singleness of spirit defining the single nature of the beautiful. The fragmentation of identity everywhere apparent in Troilus and Cressida, which reaches its apotheosis in Troilus' recognition of a Cressida divided against herself,²⁶ is part of the dramatist's complex vision of the disintegration created by war. Ironically the defence of beauty in the Trojan retention of Helen, and its pursuit by the Greeks, creates a savagery and moral deformity which blinds men and women to the true nature of beauty itself. The eye which in other plays discerns the unity of the beautiful and the good can in this play only see the beautiful through the obscuring mists of its own imperfections.

The mirror into which a man looks in order to know himself, a favourite Renaissance image culled from both Socrates and Seneca, can easily become a means not to self-knowledge but to self-regard.²⁷ In Shakespeare's Sonnet 3 it serves both ends:

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another.

The mirror reflects a self-devouring beauty vowed to sterility:

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

The poet advises the young man to defy Time by refusing to keep his beauty to himself. By embracing the destructions of age he will renew himself in youth. But in Troilus and Cressida the mirror offers no such advice. It betrays men and women into Narcissism. The self-loving man devours himself: ‘He that is proud eats up himself. Pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle; and whatever praises itself but in the deed devours the deed in the praise’ (2.3.149-53). Ulysses urges that men should cease to allow Achilles to see himself in the mirror of their deference:

                                        Pride hath no other glass
To show itself but pride; for supple knees
Feed arrogance and are the proud man's fees.

(3.3.47-9)

Shakespeare no doubt recalled in this image of Pride gazing into its own glass Spenser's picture of Pride, ‘a mayden Queene’, in Book I of The Faerie Queene:

And in her hand she held a mirrhour bright,
Wherein her face she often vewed fayne
And in her selfe-lou'd semblance took delight.(28)

The beauty, regality and vanity of Spenser's allegorical monarch audaciously laud and satirize the real Virgin Queen whose favour Spenser industriously and unsuccessfully courted. When Shakespeare came to show Richard II, a monarch whom Elizabeth I ruefully admitted to be her prototype, deposed by Bolingbroke, he has him call for a mirror in which to view his clouded majesty:

                    Was this the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink?

(4.1.276-9)

The sun imagery looks back to Spenser's maiden ‘that shone as Titans ray’, forward to Helen, whose beauty ‘Wrinkles Apollo's, and makes stale the morning’ (2.2.79). But even more significant is the characteristic form in which Richard II's question is cast, with its obvious echo of Marlowe's Faustus:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?(29)

When Shakespeare embarked on his own creation of Helen of Troy adulation of Elizabeth was over. The Queen who had seen herself mirrored in Richard II died the year that Troilus and Cressida was registered by the Stationers' Company. The Elizabethan myth she had cultivated was already dead. Shakespeare's Helen with her tarnished image, her vanity, her obsession, shared with Achilles and with Cressida,³⁰ with what other people see in her, bears witness to an emergent Jacobean consciousness of beauty corrupted by self-love and left succession-less. The maiden Queen fascinated by her own reflection had proved after all to be Time's subject, self-consumed in her own sterility.

When Achilles gazes into the mirror of the self, as Plotinus commands, he sees in his soul confusion rather than clarity:

My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr'd;
And I myself see not the bottom of it.

(3.3.303-4)

Shakespeare shows that eyes and ears fail to perceive a beauty at one with truth because the senses are deluded by self-regard. Unable to know themselves, the characters in Troilus and Cressida remain the slaves of beauty in its material forms, rather than the servants of its spirit.

IV

Troilus and Cressida dramatizes not the conjunction of the beautiful and the good but the inseparability of the fair and the foul in human experience. The consequence is the disintegration of language as the tool of rational discourse. This is evident early in the play when Paris argues for keeping Helen:

I would have the soil of her fair rape
Wip'd off in honourable keeping her.

(2.2.148-9)

The antithetical responses evoked by the juxtaposition of ‘fair’ and ‘rape’ and of ‘soil’ and ‘fair’ rob language of stability. The word is no longer the signifier of the thing, but the evasion of its reality. The same coupling of beauty and falsehood in Cressida incites Troilus' outburst against discourse itself, which Ficino called ‘the messenger of reason’:³¹

                    O madness of discourse,
That cause sets up with and against itself.

(5.2.140-1)

The same inner divisions in language appear in the dialogue between Hector and Troilus about the conduct of battle:

Troilus.
          When many times the captive Grecian falls,
          Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword,
          You bid them rise and live.
Hector.
          O, 'tis fair play!
Troilus.
          Fool's play, by heaven, Hector.

(5.3.40-3)

The now commonplace expression ‘fair play’ was first coined by Shakespeare some ten years earlier in King John, where it is twice used with its modern meaning of fair dealing.³² But the fact that the compound was so new to the language allows Shakespeare to exploit in Troilus and Cressida its willingness to regress into its separate elements of ‘fair’ and ‘play’. Hector uses the words in the new sense to mean ‘just behaviour’, Troilus in their separate senses of ‘beautiful sport’ or even, in the context of the play, ‘sport for beauty’. The word ‘fool’, so nearly related in sound to ‘foul’, contains a linguistic augury of where Hector's sport will lead him, to his own foul slaughter at the hands of Achilles, which follows hard on the fool's play of hunting the warrior in fair armour. Just as beauty in the play is the carcass of itself, lacking inner life, so the language of the beautiful, the rich Elizabethan word ‘fair’, has disintegrated into empty compliment:

Pandarus. Fair be to you, my lord, and to all this fair company! Fair desires, in all fair measures, fairly guide them—especially to you, fair queen! Fair thoughts be your fair pillow.
Helen. Dear lord, you are full of fair words.
Pandarus. You speak your fair pleasure, sweet queen.
Fair prince, here is good broken music.

(3.1.41-7)

The play records the breakdown of discourse as the badge of the rational being. At the end sweet notes fail. There is nowhere to go but silence.

V

The pursuit of beauty in Troilus and Cressida has thus brought its adherents to a vision of its worthlessness which trivializes even the burning of Troy. Shakespeare destroys the definition of beauty as the beautiful maiden more ruthlessly than Socrates himself without offering any alternative testimony to the reality of the spirit behind the physical form. Yet his other plays affirm that reality. He seems deliberately to have excluded from Troilus and Cressida some element vital to his drama as a whole.

In Plato's Symposium Diotima defines love as the desire to possess the beautiful and the good in perpetuity:

All men, Socrates, are in a state of pregnancy, both spiritual and physical, and when they come to maturity they feel a natural desire to bring forth, but they can do so only in beauty and never in ugliness.³³

Physical procreation is the lower form, spiritual the higher. But in Troilus and Cressida there is no time for the creation of the beautiful in spirit, any more than there is any place for the creation of children. Andromache is not allowed the luxury of her Homeric lament for Astyanax, the child who will never carry his father's renown into the future. The legitimate are cut off, while gods stand up for bastards, as Thersites boasts in his absurd encounter with Margarelon, bastard son of Priam: ‘One bear will not bite another, and wherefore should one bastard? Take heed, the quarrel's ominous to us: if the son of a whore fight for a whore, he tempts judgment. Farewell, bastard’ (5.7.19-24). Defence, the aim of war, is also the aim of love, as Cressida, loving a thousand-fold, knows, lying ‘at a thousand watches’: ‘If I cannot ward what I would not have hit, I can watch you for telling how I took the blow; unless it swell past hiding, and then it's past watching’ (1.2.256, 259-62). The whore is the physical emblem of the barrenness of beauty in the play. Helen has no posterity:

He like a puling cuckold would drink up
The lees and dregs of a flat tamed piece;
You, like a lecher, out of whorish loins
Are pleas'd to breed out your inheritors.

(4.1.63-6)

From whores and wars men inherit only diseases. To such has the pursuit of beauty brought them.

The vital element missing from Troilus and Cressida is a commitment at the heart of the drama to the power of beauty to re-create itself. Dio Chrysostom recorded in his ‘Twenty-First Discourse: On Beauty’ his sense of decline in the Greek ideal of physical beauty: ‘As if the beautiful have died out in the course of time just like some plant or animal—the fate which they do say has overtaken the lions in Europe.’³⁴ Perhaps Shakespeare meant Troilus' comparison of Hector's generosity to that of the lion to forebode extinction. The play shows beauty unable to survive in a world pledged, with deep irony, to its defence. Without the power to propagate, either in body or spirit, its men and women remain trapped in time, obsessed with the past and the future, powerless to own the present. Their stake in the future lies in the slanders of Time itself.

Troilus' question about whether he will lie in publishing the truth of Cressida's faithlessness recalls Greek scepticism about the story of Helen. Yet despite Shakespeare's destruction of the myth, outside the play Helen retains symbolic stature.³⁵ Shakespeare defines beauty by giving it the power to generate life not in the time-bound past of the Trojan war but in the recreating present of the work of art, the play itself.

Notes

1. John Vyvyan, Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty (1961), argues Shakespeare's familiarity with Neoplatonic thought. Since Vyvyan's study J.E. Hankins has discussed in Shakespeare's Derived Imagery (Lawrence, Kansas, 1967) and Backgrounds of Shakespeare's Thought (Hassocks, 1978) the extensive influence on Shakespeare of Pierre de la Primaudaye's The French Academie, of which the first three parts were translated into English in 1586, 1594 and 1601 respectively. I.A. Richards's essay, ‘Troilus and Cressida and Plato’, in Speculative Instruments (1955), pp. 198-213, contributes to an older debate about Plato's influence on the play, which is fully documented in the New Variorum Troilus and Cressida, ed. Harold N. Hillebrand and T.W. Baldwin, pp. 391-2 (Ulysses' speech on degree and Republic viii), and pp. 411-15 (Ulysses' ‘strange fellow’ and Achilles' mirror speech, related to Plato's First Alcibiades).

2. Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series, 71 (Princeton, 1961), p. 475. I refer to this edition hereafter as Plato, Dialogues.

3. Dio Chrysostom, ‘The Eleventh, or Trojan, Discourse’, trans. J.W. Cohoon, i (Loeb Library, 1932), pp. 453-4. First translated—before any of the other Discourses—by Filelfo in 1428 and printed at Cremona in 1492, this one Discourse was followed by complete Latin translations of Dio in the mid sixteenth century (1555, 1585, 1604). Thomas Watson's Latin translation, Helenae Raptus, published in 1586, of the Greek Colothus' version of the Judgement of Paris (a manuscript discovered at the end of the fifteenth century) contains in the 1731 edition notes which refer to Dio's scepticism about the story.

4. Vyvyan, Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty, p. 164, records both Euripides' version of the Helen myth and the fate of Stesichorus.

5. ‘The Idea of the Painter, Sculptor and Architect, Superior to Nature by Selection from Natural Beauties’, reprinted in Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J.S. Peake (Columbia, 1968), p. 161.

6. Although Shakespeare might have read Ficino's translations of Plato and Plotinus in a number of editions, it is tempting to see the publication of the Basel Opera Omnia of Plato in 1602, with adjacent columns of Latin and Greek, as a spur to the composition of Troilus and Cressida, which appears in the Stationers' Register in 1603.

7. ‘Greater Hippias’, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Plato, Dialogues, p. 1542.

8. 1.1.30, 32-4, 41-6. All quotations from Shakespeare are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951).

9. Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Arthur Golding Translation, 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (New York, 1965), p. 344. Shakespeare probably used some lines from Metamorphoses, xii, and the first 500 lines of xiii, as a source for the play (Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 6 (1977), pp. 151-7). Having read Ovid's account of the Trojan war earlier in Book xiii Shakespeare might naturally have connected Polyphemus' worship of Galatea's beauty with Paris' giving of the apple to Aphrodite and with the goddess's promised reward of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy.

10. Shakespeare might also have read Dio's ‘Sixty-sixth Discourse: On Reputation’, a mordant attack on seekers after fame in which the sequence of images of over-eating, uncurrent coin and beggary anticipate Ulysses' speech ‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, / Wherein he puts alms for oblivion’ (3.3.145-6). Dio remarks that Perseus carried in his wallet the Gorgon's head with which to turn men to stone but that ‘most men have been turned to stone by just one word, if it is applied to them; besides, there is no need to carry this around, guarding it in a wallet’ (v.109). He asserts that ‘notoriety-seekers’ become ‘beggars and no longer would any one of all who formerly were fain to burst their lungs with shouting greet them if he saw them’ (v.91). Achilles observes the neglect cast on him by the Greek generals: ‘they pass'd by me / As misers do by beggars—neither gave to me / Good word nor look. What, are my deeds forgot?’ (3.3.142-4). While Shakespeare might have found such images in other sources the cynical tone of the Discourse brings to mind not only Troilus and Cressida but also Timon of Athens. Dio recalls in the same Discourse Thersites' deflating jests.

11. Although the heroine of John Lydgate's The Hystorye Sege and Dystruccyon of Troye (1513), is called ‘Cryseyde’, in Caxton's translation of Raoul Lefevre, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (c. 1474), her name is Breseyda. Dares Phrygius, writing in the sixth century, calls her Briseis in De Excidio Troiae Historiae, and in Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie she is again Briseida (Bullough, vol. 6, pp. 90, 94). Bullough notes that the translation of Benoît's romance into Latin prose by Guido delle Colonne in Historia Troiana (1287) ‘became the chief medium by which the story of Troilus was disseminated’ (vol. 6, p. 90).

12. Dio, Discourses, v.3, 15.

13. Discourses, v.21.

14. Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (1968), p. 106, remarks on ‘the absolute lack of any sense of non-human guidance’.

15. Arnold Stein, ‘Troilus and Cressida: The Disjunctive Imagination’, ELH, 36 (1969), 145-67; p. 148.

16. Compare Love's Labour's Lost, 2.1.15. ‘Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye, / Not utt'red by base sale of chapmen's tongues.’

17. Chaucer uses ‘thousand fold’ in Troilus and Criseyde as a measure of intense feeling: the pain of love (i.546), curiosity (ii.142), ardour (iii.1540) and fulfilled passion (iii.1684). But it is also used more ambiguously in flattery of Troilus by Pandarus (ii.1103) and by Helen and the guests at the supper party when Troilus is sick and Pandarus contrives to bring Cressida to his room for him to declare his love (ii.1586). It acquires the dubiety it has in Shakespeare's play in Pandarus' prevarication with Criseyde about whether Troilus is in his house on the night on which he has planned for the love affair to be consummated:

    Soone after this, she gan to hym to rowne,
    And axed hym if Troilus were there.
    He swor hire nay, for he was out of towne,
    And seyde, ‘Nece, I pose that he were;
    Yow thurste nevere han the more fere;
    For rather than men myghte hym ther aspie,
    Me were levere a thousand fold to dye.’

    (iii.568)

    All line references are to The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston, 1933; repr. Oxford, 1957).

18. Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium, trans. Sears Reynolds Jayne, The University of Missouri Studies, 19 (Columbia, 1944), 130, translating the Latin text, p. 41: ‘Quid olfactu? Quid gustu? Quid tactu opus est? Odores, sapores, calorem, frigus, mollitiem et duritiem, horumque similia sensus isti percipiunt … Amor tamquam eius finem fruitionem respicit pulchritudinis; ista ad mentem, visum, auditum pertinet solum … Appetitio vero, quae reliquos sequitur sensus, non amor sed libido rabiesque vocatur.’

19. Plato, Dialogues, p. 1559.

20. Marsilio Ficino: The Philebus Commentary, trans. Michael J. B. Allen (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 102-3.

21. Hankins, Backgrounds of Shakespeare's Thought, pp. 68-70, discusses Troilus' use of ‘unity’ in relation to the mathematics of Plato and Macrobius (in Timaeus, in Ficino's Compendium in Timaeum, and in Macrobius' Opera). See also Vyvyan, Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty, pp. 169, 197, 199.

22. It is interesting that Ficino uses the image of the spider's web in his discussion of the difference between reason in human beings and instinct in beasts, in Five Questions Concerning the Mind: ‘Thus all spiders weave their webs in a similar manner; they neither learn to weave nor become more proficient through practice, no matter how long’ (trans. Josephine L. Burroughs, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and others (Chicago, 1948), p. 206). Shakespeare's reference to Ariachne's web in an outburst about the annihilation of reason might have been prompted by Ficino's Latin: ‘Omnes arancae similiter texunt telam, neque texere discunt, neque tempore quamius longo in melius texendo proficiunt’, where ‘arancae’ suggests ‘Ariachne’ (Marsilius Ficinus, Opera (Basileae, 1576), vol. i, p. 680).

23. The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (1956), p. 422. I am indebted to the very clear discussion of Plotinus' views on beauty in Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, pp. 25-32.

24. The Enneads, pp. 423-4.

25. The Enneads, p. 63.

26. Vyvyan, Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty, p. 197.

27. In Nannus Mirabellius' Polyanthea, a schoolroom compilation of extracts from Latin and some Greek authors arranged in dictionary form, which T.W. Baldwin argues was used in grammar schools, Socrates' advice about gazing into the mirror of the self is placed under two headings: Pulchritudo (Beauty) and Amor Sui (Self-Love).

28. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (Harmondsworth, 1978), i.iv.8, 10; p. 81.

29. Doctor Faustus, 5.1.99, in The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Irving Ribner (New York, 1963).

30. Cressida's ‘Tear my bright hair, and scratch my praised cheeks’ (4.2.106) recalls Chapman's ‘bright-cheekt Brysys’ in The Iliads of Homer, I, reprinted in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 6, p. 118. The glass of other people's praise is equally vital to Achilles, as is apparent in the speech traditionally associated with Plato's First Alcibiades: ‘The beauty that is borne here in the face / The bearer knows not, but commends itself / To others' eyes’ (3.3.95).

31. Five Questions Concerning the Mind, in Cassirer (ed.), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, p. 206.

32. 5.1.67: ‘Fair-play orders’; 5.2.118: ‘According to the fair play of the world’; OED, entry for ‘Fair’, 10(c).

33. Plato, The Symposium, trans. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth, 1951), p. 86.

34. Discourses, ii.273. Hardy notes this decline in the face of Clym Yeobright, the sign ‘that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life’, The Return of the Native, Book 3, chap. 1.

35. Douglas Cole, ‘Myth and Anti-Myth: The Case of Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (1980), 76-86, p. 84; R.A. Foakes, ‘Troilus and Cressida Reconsidered’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 32 (1963), 142-54; p. 154.