[In the following essay, Mead suggests that the instability of the Renaissance economy is reflected in the metaphors of coinage used in Troilus and Cressida to describe the shifting moral stances and unreliable characters within the play.]

There are two sorts of wealth-getting … that which consists of exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another.

—Aristotle, Politics

As a dramatist and businessman, Shakespeare knew the vagaries of the theater business and the shifting faces of currency in the Elizabethan economy. Even in a period in which money was a frequent topic on the stage, Shakespeare distinguishes himself by using terms of coinage, currency, exchange rates, counterfeiting, and minting practices to dramatize the mutability of supposedly absolute ideals. With the concurrent phenomena of New World exploration (and the resultant import of precious metals), increased competition in the European trade markets, trade imbalances with Asia, shifting exchange rates at Antwerp, and the depletion of domestic treasure, even the common merchant, businessman, or theater owner would be forced to bring contemporary economic wisdom to his trade.

At this time in European literary and economic history, the traditional association of purse and person (with regard to monarchs as well as to other persons of wealth) becomes enmeshed in and complicated by contemporary anxieties concerning the very substance of wealth and value. Viewed from a perspective of economic history and theory, Troilus and Cressida reflects the impending chaos of a world in which people continue to rely upon a system of references even after their own betrayals of coded meaning have rendered such a system arbitrary and ruthless. The characters' belief that they live in a heroic world creates such a jarring discordance within the play that Troilus and Cressida has been a subject for every problematizing school of criticism.¹ For many critics, the play seems to compose a series of opposites that cancel each other out. For each promising Troilus there is a performing Diomedes, for the idealistic Hector a pragmatic Achilles, for the war-wisdom of Ulysses the whore-wisdom of Thersites. In this study I would like to suggest that the extraliterary debates over the meaning of money, wealth, and exchange show themselves in the very rupture that makes Troilus and Cressida the problematic play it is: the discrepancy between abstract ideals and manipulated commodities. The protean nature of money, as it was experienced and in part understood by the economic thinkers of Shakespeare's age, resonates with the characters' understanding of themselves and one another.² Reputation—that great commodity in both Ilium and the Greek camp—is inseparable from the historical discussions of coinage, national wealth, and the mercantilist policies pursued by early modern European principalities.

Although there had long been falsifications of coin such as clipping, sweating, restamping, and gilding, Shakespeare wrote in an age in which the substance of money was shifting in common understanding from coin specie of “intrinsic” worth to a representational signification. Bills of exchange, dependence upon long-term credit, and manipulation of exchange rates became commonplace among merchants and sovereigns in the second half of the sixteenth century as the exploitation of the New World and the gradual movements away from bullionist strategies made international trade boom. “Money of account,” it has been argued, “lost its distinctness from real money with each variation.”³ But once money ceases to be worth its intrinsic value by being cheapened in fineness or weight, by being called up or called down, or by representation on paper, it begins to display many of the characteristics of language and loses its façade of absoluteness. Troilus and Cressida is about money as language and language as money: each is a signal system that claims its authority by relying upon the other. Shakespeare's play dramatizes this chaos by exploring the human impulse to validate meaning in a world where human beings constantly betray their very codes and constructions of meaning.⁴

Reputation, a product of language represented by Shakespeare in his metaphors of money, is a superimposed identity, just as the “intrinsic worth” of coin is a determination of declared value. Munro writes that “princes were naturally concerned to protect the integrity of their mints, their coinage, and their country's ‘stock of treasure.’ Their honor and sovereignty were at stake, as well as their purse.”⁵ Not only are money and reputation often similar; at times they can be one and the same. In Shakespeare's play, when someone's reputation is altered by the language of others, that person is “chang'd,” both transformed and coined. To be coined, for currency and person, is to be a publicly declared value that may or may not correspond to substance. It is a move away from individual identity and toward a quantifiable function of circulation.

In spite of their growing awareness of the arbitrariness of money's valuation, the Elizabethans seemed reluctant to let go of the idea of intrinsic worth. Their insistence upon absolute value is demonstrated by royal attempts to control the exchange rate, by Elizabeth's great coinage reform, and by England's constant attempts to keep domestic specie in the realm and to import foreign bullion. Still, each royal machination to bring money back to some ancient, absolute value further served to prove the chimerical nature of intrinsic worth.⁶

Shakespeare's play, I shall argue, reflects these larger economic concerns. Moreover, Shakespeare uses contemporary economic ideas for dramatic ends. The playwright dramatizes Cressida's reputed falseness in economic terms to suggest that the declared value of money and reputation are constructs of a shifting human will. Even Cressida's identity—as it comes to Shakespeare—is a construct: by placing the story of Cressida's betrayal in terms of coinage, Shakespeare suggests that it is her reputation and not her character that is counterfeit. Furthermore, words such as “true” and “false” have no meaning in a discourse that remains bound to a defunct system of economic values. Cressida is not, therefore, a false coin that is exposed in a new market, but rather an ordinary piece of domestic currency that is set down when she is “chang'd” for Antenor. The central idea of Troilus and Cressida is that what happens normally, if regrettably, to a coin occurs to a character, and it occurs because the language of currency has bled through to the language of human character and identity, where it assumes an absolutism that belies the natures of both currency and humanity. While an exposé of Cressida's reputation in literary tradition remains of great concern, Troilus and Cressida primarily insists that those who use language and live by wages understand both institutions as human constructs. To forget this is to become, paradoxically, a slave of one's own invention, as the Trojan characters sadly attest.

I

The idea of the English pound represents a correspondence of language and value: twelve ounces of sterling silver was a pound sterling.⁷ From this mentality came the doctrine of bullionism, the belief in the absolute worth of precious metals.⁸A Discourse of the Commonweal of the Realm of England (1549) was a bullionist tract of which, it seems, the Tudors approved. Challis claims that “gold and silver were the sinews of power: with them munitions could be bought, mercenaries hired, and the country defended, but without them England stood at risk.”⁹ The mercantilist policy of bullionism was pursued vigorously by many European nations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spain and Portugal were the most extreme, regulating trade so that the price of exports always exceeded the price of imports. By this method the governments piled up heaps of silver and gold, which either became worthless because they did not circulate or left the country because they did. Although English policies were not nearly so strict as those of the Iberian nations, the apparent necessity for coins to preserve the correspondence between character (face value) and integral worth (precious metal) did much to maintain a bullionist disposition, if not an outright governmental bullionism.¹⁰ England's economic ideology at the turn of the seventeenth century was an uncomfortable mixture of the belief in gold- and silver-based wealth and the growing view that tradable goods more truly constituted wealth.

Still, its economy was essentially bullionist. Munro asserts that “medieval England's bullionist policies were the most severe of any in Western Europe,” and that even in the Renaissance, “no other West European nation even approached such conservatism in its mint policies.”¹¹ In 1607 the transportation of specie rose to such a height that a proclamation had to be issued against it.¹² English monarchs tried to limit the use of credit, fix exchange rates, demonetize base coin, and prohibit the export of specie—all policies that reflect a belief in bullion as wealth itself. Even paper money was directly backed by bullion.¹³ In the middle of the sixteenth century, it was, consequently, common for merchants to keep balances to check the weight of coins, a practice that they would later abandon when bullionist practices and beliefs began to fade.¹⁴

As the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance proved times of devaluation, of coins called down, currency debased, reformed, and recoined, the whole process recurring over and over again, the practical value of a coin increasingly deviated from its appellation, from the language that gave it name. By the time Elizabeth came to the throne, the whole country was fully aware of the debased condition of the money. Coins of all finenesses were blanched (coated with silver) to improve their appearance. But coins of only one-third silver did not keep such appearances long. Feavearyear quotes an epigram of John Heywood: “These testons look red, how like you the same? / 'Tis a token of grace: they blush for shame.”¹⁵ Even a copious supply of bullion offered no security to a country's economy. Quite apart from exportation, coins simply wore out; good coins were hoarded; clipped coins were lightened—bullion disappeared. Munro explains that “a country's coinage can diminish drastically unless it is frequently and substantially replenished with fresh mintings. Coins do die.”¹⁶ The loss of metal from the coins themselves was astonishing. For example, conservative estimates of fourteenth-century metal loss noted that seven tons of silver simply vanished into thin air every decade, through wear alone.¹⁷ As coins lighten, their decreed values are no longer accepted by merchants, who will eventually discount the entire coinage. The result of such discounting is that the monarchy must accept its own declared value (its public measure, for its own reputation) for the coins so that the domestic merchants will do the same. These domestic merchants will then pay their taxes with the light coins, thus impoverishing the crown, while foreign merchants will only trade for the better coins—and good coin leaves the country. Gresham's Law summarizes this process well: when good coins circulate with bad coins, the bad coins force the good ones out of the country.

The currency problems in sixteenth-century England began with Henry VIII's depletion of his father's hoard and his subsequent debasement of the coinage. Gresham writes that “the fall of the exchainge did growe by the Kinges Majesty, your latte Father, in abasing his quoyne From vj ounces fin too iij ounces fin. Wheruppon the exchainge fell From xxvi s. viii d. to xiii s. iv d. which was the occasion thatt all your Fine goold was convayd ought of this your realme.”¹⁸ Elizabeth's reform was, in short, to make only one kind of money current—surely a sound move, but one whose goal was to keep bullion in the realm. Hence, even the good advice she took reflected a purely bullionist understanding of wealth. It was not until the 1590s that Elizabeth instituted two finenesses of gold: 22-karat “crown gold” and 23[frac12]-karat fine gold. The crown gold was by far the more prevalent. From 1601 onward, fine gold was used almost exclusively for making angel coins by which monarchs ostensibly healed sufferers from scrofula.¹⁹ By the second half of the sixteenth century and certainly by the turn of the seventeenth, money was manifestly becoming understood as a signifier, no longer specie of absolute value. Indeed, the value of money was becoming a matter of opinion.²⁰ Merchants, following the lead of the royal tax collectors, increasingly accepted the face value of coins and no longer passed coins by weight.²¹ Money came to resemble language and to become more and more a product of language. One need only look at the royal proclamations that made England's a metal-fiat currency to see the self-consciousness with which Tudor and Stuart monarchs would “command” money to be worth what it used to be.

One particular change that Elizabeth made offers a striking illustration of how the coin changes the monarch as the monarch attempts to change the coin. Sir Albert Feavearyear tells the story of Elizabeth's attempts to pull base coins out of circulation by transforming the face of her half-brother. The base coins were supposed to be told from the better ones by the fact that on the latter, Edward had been given “a short neck and a round face,” and on the former, “long neck and a lean face.”²² But the transformed Edward alone was not sufficient to distinguish the coins. Confusion arose, and indeed Edward the base often topped Edward the legitimate. The better coins were then stamped with a portcullis before the face of the king, a practice no doubt intended to frustrate the counterfeiting method of “washing out.” This method of falsification removed a distinguishing feature from a coin to confuse it with another coin of higher worth. In the past, this method was used to change the three-farthing piece to a penny.²³ This anecdote seems especially apt, as it introduces the idea that there may be two particular individuals circulating, sharing the same name, but somehow distinct in value and identity.

The problem, of course, with developing a money system in which face value does not correspond to intrinsic value is not only the danger and relative ease of counterfeiting, but more profoundly, the world-view inherent in a multinational economy in which absolutes have been proven false. A merchant could refuse to accept paper money, for example, and insist on silver coins. To a bullionist, he would be refusing the signifier or promissory note in preference for the signified or the wealth itself. But as all bullionist mercantilist principalities were to learn, not even pure specie backed money, for specie itself was not backed by anything more than reputation: the signified was itself a signifier of language. Currency, then, came to represent an agreed-upon equivalence, and these agreements were constantly shifting.

The connection of currency and language is obvious from a twentieth-century perspective, but it was not necessarily so in an economy that predated established credit policies, corporations, bonds, and the stock market. Still, James I seems to have understood how important language can be in the perceived value of money. His ten-banner shield on the back of each coin tested the minter's art; his ubiquitous slogan quae Devs conivnxit nemo separet urged a congenial unification of Scotland and England.²⁴ But James proved himself sensitive to the economic power of language as well:

1606. On the 11th of November. in this year, a Proclamation was set forth to abolish the use of the word sterling, with respect to the coins of Ireland. It began with stating, that his Majesty had not only reduced the base Money of the late Queen, first to one third of its current value, and afterward to one quarter, but also had established a new standard of nine ounces fine, being the old standard of the kingdom of Ireland, and had ordained that every piece thereof, which bore the name of a Shilling, should go current and be taken for Twelve Pence sterling, and the other pieces in proportion. Which word sterling had bred an error: being construed as if every of the said Harp Shillings should be taken for sixteen Pence of the Money of Ireland, and so should carry as high a valuation as the sterling Shilling of England; whereas in Truth his Highness meaning was, that every of the said Harp Shillings should have and bear the name and valuation only of Twelve Pence Irish, according to the old standard of that Realm; being in true value no more than nine Pence English.²⁵

A word has “bred an error” and caused a coin to “go current” and be “taken” for something that it is not. And by another word, the King's proclamation, a “new standard” is established—which is the “old standard.” What is also fascinating about this passage is the distinction between the “word” and the “meaning.” A coin of intrinsic worth ought not to need anyone to do its explaining for it, especially if it has a “true value,” but when currency can be “denominated,” “called down,” “called in,” “descried,” and “uttered,” there is clearly more to a coin's value than its metal. Words prove as effective as fineness and weight. Elizabeth, for example, coined no crowns for twenty years, until the end of her reign, because of the possible confusion with the debased French crown.²⁶

Coexistent with the concern of the unpredictable effect language could have upon money, there was a kind of economic nostalgia for a past that never was, in which one could set one's bearings and in which language, worth, and identity corresponded, a past in which absolute value was unconditionally guaranteed by unshakable collateral. Tudor and Stuart economic documents reveal a drawn-out period of royal attempts to reconcile face value and intrinsic worth, to reconcile the problematic present with the idealized past. Elizabeth's currency reform of 1560-61 sought to exchange the “old false” coins for “new coins” of the “old sterling,”²⁷ and here again we see an English monarch attempting to reclaim the old by establishing the new. Others have written that raising the face value of real money (devaluation) was the crux of every currency and price problem of the period.²⁸ The result of debasement is that “real” money becomes, in fact, money of account: imaginary money.²⁹ But much the same thing occurs when money is brought closer to the worth of the metal: “Her majesty is constrained to calling some of the base money to its true value.”³⁰ By attempting to be faithful to an absolute measure, Elizabeth established that very measure; she did not submit to one. Further, if money can be demonetized, was it ever irrefutably money in the first place? Still, Elizabeth's proclamation of coin reform on 27 September 1560 intimates the nostalgic impulse that coexists with the economic imperative: “Her Maiestie well perceiveth … her Realme to be … impoveryshed [and] the auncient and singuler honour and estimacion … is hereby decayed and vanyshed away.”³¹ Elizabeth's stated purpose in the reform was to “have the monyes of this Realme to be of one sorte of finenesse, richnes, and goodnes, as may be a treasure of estimacion.”³² Again, Elizabeth wished to bring the coin back “to the auncient standard … as it was in the time of her father.”³³ The concern with reputation, it seems, is always connected to the spirit of nostalgia. Of course a coin reform also served to legitimize her own monarchy, both by strengthening the economy and by founding that strength on associations with Henry VIII.

Gerrard De Malynes's treatise on the exchange (1601) offers further information on the Elizabethan understanding of money: “Monie must alwaies remaine to be the rule, and therefore is called publica mensura … monie must be still the measure, and is valued by publike authoritie at a certaintie: whereby it doth not onely give or set a price vnto all other mettals: but receiveth (as it were) by repercussion a price in it selfe.”³⁴ Money must be valued at a certainty, and yet the price it gives other metals in turn gives itself a price. It is the measure of all things, and yet it is measured by all things. De Malynes's repetition of the word must suggests that those in authority have a responsibility to keep money in this position of rule and certainty; the implication is that without supervision, money will naturally become merely another commodity. This concept reflects the understanding of Gresham, who wrote forty-three years earlier that “exchainge is the thing that eatts ought all princes, to the wholl destruction of ther comon well, if itt be nott substantially loked unto.”³⁵ The best that money can do is to serve as a vehicle to establish a standard which is arbitrary; the “price” that money “receives” is the public estimation of how successfully it establishes and maintains that standard. By the best reckoning of Elizabeth's advisors, the integrity of the coin kept money at a certainty. When the coins were not quite up to snuff, something else was called for. The exchange rate, Gresham wrote to the Queen in 1558, “is only keppt up by artte and Godes providence; for the quoyne of this your realme doeth not corresponde in finnes not x s. the pound.”³⁶

Part of “Godes providence” was the curious phenomenon that some economists believe occurs when bullion is scarce and coins are devalued.³⁷ Because base coins contain less specie than their face values express, bullion in cheap coins can be in more places at once. And because a swift circulation of bullion mitigates the effects of bullion scarcity, devaluation—the separation of intrinsic worth from declared value—can actually promote a healthy trade economy. Bullion is like reputation: it must circulate to have worth, and the lesser the worth, the swifter the circulation must be.

Not only were coins (“except those few gold coins that enjoyed international acceptance”³⁸) reminted upon arrival in a foreign country, but even at home coins were of negotiable and transmutable value. Hence, it is not only the counterfeiter who exploits the arbitrariness of the mutable sign;³⁹ the currency system itself constitutes a veritable jungle of signals that often contradict one another. Art and Providence, as Gresham wrote, keep up the exchange—not absolute or easily negotiated worth.

II

In Troilus and Cressida, all debates reflect the common understanding of the elements that constitute wealth. The war itself may be understood as a bullionist contention between two principalities. The bullion, which these societies understand as wealth itself, is Helen, the signified. Those who win praise fighting to win or keep her become enriched with the currency of reputation—a currency backed by Helen's agreed-upon worth. As she is the origin of all esteem, Helen herself is deemed “inestimable” (2.2.88).⁴⁰ Troilus articulates the world view of many characters when he states that it is “a quarrel / Which hath our several honors all engag'd / To make it gracious” (2.2.123-25). His later speech at the Trojan council amplifies this theme:

Were it not glory that we more affected
Than the performance of our heaving spleens,
I would not wish a drop of Troyan blood
Spent more in her defense. But, worthy Hector,
She is a theme of honor and renown,
A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds,
Whose present courage may beat down our foes,
And fame in time to come canonize us,
For I presume brave Hector would not lose
So rich advantage of a promis'd glory
As smiles upon the forehead of this action
For the wide world's revenue.

(2.2.195-206)

Troilus's speech is replete with economic terms and sensibilities. The “promise” of glory signals the “performance” of spleens much as the promise of payment requires the performance of that debt. The Trojans and the Greeks, as the prologue reminds us, set all on hazard: they spend blood in anticipation of “rich” advantage that will be more profitable than all the world's “revenue.”

But the very characters who construct Helen as an absolute value constantly try to enhance or denigrate that value. Paris “would have the soil of her fair rape / Wip'd off” (2.2.148-49); Menelaus “makes no scruple of her soil” (4.1.57); Diomedes measures her in scruples of her “contaminated carrion weight” (4.1.72); and Troilus, most importantly, likens Helen to a pearl (as he has also likened Cressida) “Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships, / And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants” (2.2.81-83, emphasis added). Troilus argues that Helen is the signified, a kind of economic primum mobile, the transmuter who turns royal crowns to numismatic crowns, kings to merchants. Shakespeare, however, suggests that it is the “chapmen” Greeks and Trojans who have turned Helen into a valuable pearl. Both Trojan and Greek play a losing game: they insist on the absolute value of Helen and yet ceaselessly attempt to negotiate, to transmute that value in their own interests. This strategy produces a preponderance of deceptive signals. Ulysses plots with Nestor:

Let us like merchants first show foul wares,
And think perchance they'll sell; if not,
The lustre of the better shall exceed
By showing the worse first.

(1.3.358-61)

Paris accuses Diomedes of a similar practice when they meet in Troy:

Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do,
Dispraise the thing that they desire to buy,
But we in silence hold this virtue well,
We'll not commend what we intend to sell.

(4.1.76-79)

The Greeks have learned, as good merchants, to operate within a system of mutable signs: Calchas has sensed the blowing winds and becomes a Greek; the Greek commanders practice playacting in front of Achilles's tent; Patroclus playacts within that tent; Ulysses flatters Ajax; and two pairs of opposing warriors—Ajax and Hector, and Aeneas and Diomedes—declare in one breath their love and enmity.⁴¹ Achilles himself, of course, is the terror of the Trojans while he woos Priam's daughter. The list could go on, and it would certainly include the Horse itself as an archetype of the art of counterfeiting.

The Trojans, though would-be manipulators of “absolute” value, nevertheless are deceived by their own constructions. Hector, for example, dies because he will not bend his word that he has given the day before. Achilles will kill Hector and effectively win the war because he breaks his word (not to mention the code of arms) several times. The Greeks seem to create deceptions consciously and casually. When his stratagem with Ajax fails, Ulysses blithely moves to another tack. One would be hard put to imagine him disillusioned.

To the Trojans, Helen is a priceless signified that determines the wealth of all else. To the Greeks, she is merely a finite supply of bullion in a time of scarcity, a quantity that Diomedes can weigh in scruples. Until Helen is returned to the Greeks, all things—including Menelaus's horns—are gilt. The conversation between Ulysses and Achilles reflects the necessity of swift circulation in a bullion-poor currency. Having just been scorned by the Greek commanders, Achilles understands that a warrior's worth is equal to his esteem by others:

                                        speculation turns not to itself,
Till it hath travell'd and is mirror'd there
Where it may see itself.

(3.3.109-11)

Ulysses agrees and asserts that “no man is the lord of any thing … Till he communicate his parts to others” (115, 117). He then brings the analysis to specifically monetary terms:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion …
                                                                                Let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was …
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all with one consent praise new-born gawds,
And give to dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud than gilt o'erdusted.

(3.3.145-46, 169-70, 175-79)

Hoarded money, like dusty gold, is unpraised and hence virtually worthless. Reputation, like money, is movement, and that which does not move is bound for oblivion. As Troilus has argued in another context, what is anything but as it is valued? Like money, a man's fame does not even exist unless others say so. Each is inherently an unsignified value, a sign that points only to its very signifiers, in this case, the opinions of others. Therefore, Achilles's reputation says less about him than about his countrymen: if they say he is not a good soldier, then he is not. Achilles must pay for his fame continually with deeds; accordingly, a country's treasure must be frequently and substantially replenished, and that treasure must be one, in Elizabeth's words, of “singular honour and estimacion.”⁴² A country's treasure must inspire the esteem of domestic and foreign powers; if Achilles does not terrorize the Trojans, he is as worthless as a lost hoard of gold. He must “circulate” on the battlefield to achieve a reputation that will in turn give him an identity.

Had the Trojans understood the concessionary and circulatory nature of worth, they would have realized that Helen is without value as a treasure hoard inside Ilium. The Trojan cause, however, is predicated on the surety of absolute value, on the mentality that venerates the Palladium as a thing of immeasurable value if it remains within Troy. The Trojan council reveals the central condradicton of the sons' thinking. On the one hand, Hector argues, to declare the worth of a thing and then to be subservient to that thing because of its worth is both causeless and superstitious. On the other hand, by waging war, the Trojans effect an opportunity for gathering wealth in the form of honor and renown.⁴³ In what for many critics is the most frustrating speech of the play, Hector reverses himself and condemns his country to oblivion. Troilus, who has complained that the cause is too starved an argument for his sword, then argues that the cause is not Helen but honor (and so, presumably, a good enough argument for his sword); later, he will stop Hector on his way to the honorable war and chide him for showing mercy to wounded Greeks. Paris too thinks poorly: his pride (displayed in a later scene) in not commending what he intends to sell is indeed poor business and, in this play, poor warfare.⁴⁴

III

As Cressida is central to Shakespeare's play, so she is thematically central to the Trojan War, which is as much a conflict about declared value as it is about anything else. Alone in Troy, save for a none-too-protective uncle, unmarried, and apparently virginal, Cressida is uncoined, an unknown, untested quality. It lies first for Troilus, with a prince's prerogative, to declare her worth something:

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.

(1.1.98-104)

Like a pearl, like Helen herself, Cressida is a priceless abstract: a signified. Because it is unique, a pearl has no equivalent; it has no measurable or concrete value. A pearl is outside of currency; it cannot be minted or counterfeited. It is the perfect metaphor of abstraction: India is its platonic residence and Cressida its local image. But because Helen is the preeminent pearl, Cressida's value must in fact be finite and subordinate. In the Trojan council Troilus argues that Helen is

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

(2.2.81-83)

In both cases, pearl denotes that which has worth, but whose price is incalculable. Merchant denotes those who nevertheless attempt to price that pearl. The war itself has augmented the inestimable value of Helen, as each day Greeks and Trojans die in partial payment of the cost of keeping or retrieving her. Cressida's pearl-like quality, however, is far less stable. She is, even by Troilus's infatuated reckoning, only a pearl so long as she is untaken, unbedded, unstamped, unimpressed—in short, she only has untouchable worth so long as she assumes a negative existence. She is money of account, with no physical reality.

But even though Troilus values the negative being of Cressida, he constantly asks what in fact she is (1.1.99). Cressida too thinks in these absolute terms; she knows well that “men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is” (1.2.289). She has a sense of her own calculable worth, for she implies that Troilus overrates her. After all, the conventional adage is that men prize the thing ungained more than the thing gained, but Cressida flatly states that men falsify the object of their desire and stamp upon it a face value that exceeds the object's intrinsic worth. The oppression that is the logical result of declared value occurs when Cressida is discovered by the prince. Once Cressida is “known,” she is a calculable quality, assigned a concrete equivalent in quantity. She is bullion minted and ready for circulation, and it is no coincidence that her exchange is effected the morning after. No matter what worth Cressida is assigned, to be fixed at a certain amount is inherently to be debased.

If we understand the unbedded Cressida as an abstract signified, we may come to grips with Troilus's troublesome speech, in which he enthusiastically anticipates his tryst with Cressida:

Th' imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense; what will it be
When that the wat'ry palates taste indeed
Love's thrice reputed nectar? Death, I fear me,
Sounding destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtile, potent, tun'd too sharp in sweetness
For the capacity of my ruder powers.

(3.2.19-25)⁴⁵

The earthy desire of Troilus contrasts well with the platonic, mystical being he imagines Cressida to be. The virginal Cressida is too fine a thing to taste, too subtle a thing to know. She is an abstraction, a gross parody of the caritas that such humanists as Castiglione had written of. But once Troilus does know her, once she is impressed in the bed, she is a consumed, calculable commodity ready to be “chang'd.”

As if on cue, Cressida is informed of her change the morning after, appropriately enough by Pandar, the broker. Chang'd incurs a complex of meanings that reveal themselves fully only en masse. Literally, of course, Cressida is exchanged for Antenor. Metaphorically, she is transformed from a Trojan girl sought by a prince to a traitor's daughter camping among the Greeks. Finally, Cressida is coined, made into change; specifically, she is brought to a lower denomination—literally “set down.”⁴⁶

The debate between Troilus and Diomedes during the exchange of Cressida closely resembles what happens to coins that leave the country in which they were minted. As we recall, coins were nearly always either set down (declared to have a lower value) or reminted when they arrived in another country, unles these coins were among the few that enjoyed international esteem. Helen represents the latter, Cressida the former. Troilus begins by asserting his sovereignty:

                                        Here is the lady
Which for Antenor we deliver you.
At the port, lord, I'll give her to thy hand,
And by the way possess thee what she is.

(4.4.109-12)

Troilus attempts to transfer his authority regarding Cressida's worth to the Greek. Once again the verb to be, which speaks so eloquently of Troilus's world view, appears: it suggests that, to Troilus, Cressida is one thing, irrespective of time, place, supply, or demand, that a piece of consistent intrinsic worth ought to demand an equally consistent estimation. But as Joyce Appleby illustrates, while balance-in-trade theorists (the critics of bullionists) “recognized that silver constituted a universal standard and the principal source of value in coin, they also realized that because payments were made in the coin of a certain country that meant the demand for the products of a certain country would produce a demand for the coin of the same country.”⁴⁷ The silver of a coin might remain constant, but an increased or decreased demand for the coin would alter its practical value. Appropriately, Troilus will take them to the “port,” a word associated with international trade and exchange. Diomedes, a far less complex character, whose world view is consistently relativistic, asserts the empirical method: “The lustre in your eye, heaven in your cheek, / Pleads your fair usage,” he tells Cressida (4.4.118-19). Diomedes's own assessment of her face value, and not Troilus's denomination, will determine Cressida's “intrinsic” worth. Shakespeare's audience, we should recall, would know that Diomedes's other great exploit during the Trojan War was to help Ulysses steal the Palladium from Troy. Such an association sets him squarely counter to the Trojan mentality of absolute worth. But Troilus insists on his princely prerogative: “I charge thee use her well, even for my charge” (126). Diomedes retorts, “When I am hence … To her own worth / She shall be priz'd” (131-34). That is, to Diomedes's determination of Cressida's own worth Cressida will be prized.⁴⁸ Economically, of course, Diomedes is perfectly right: outside of Troy, a coin or a prize will be worth what the market says it is worth. If her metal is deemed to be alloyed, Cressida will have to circulate swiftly to have any worth.

Although Troilus has set up Cressida as a priceless pearl, the exchange proves that nothing is priceless if someone agrees to let it go for a price. Cressida is not anything once and for all.⁴⁹ Cressida's introduction into the Greek economy is essentially a reminting.⁵⁰ All the Greek nobles are present, and Cressida is presented to them first as “Calchas' daughter.” Before Cressida has spoken a word, the generals kiss her five times amid bawdy puns of losing heads and gilding horns. When Cressida denies Ulysses the impress of his kiss, he publicly stamps her:

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

(4.5.54-63)

Ulysses's speech articulates the general kissing, the declared stamp on Cressida's face. Assessing a foreign coin, Ulysses reads her face value interpretively, imposing upon her a language that he would have us assume comes from her. In short, he falsifies her appearance and declares that that appearance signifies Cressida's worth. Set them down crystallizes the influence of language upon a coin's value. To “set down” means to declare a coin at a lower worth than its face value.⁵¹ For Cressida, it is a new, devalued estimation.⁵² Ulysses's setting down of Cressida is then validated by the next stage direction and line: “Flourish. / All. The Troyans' [s] trumpet” (4.5.64).

Diomedes's tryst with Cressida completes her change. As Diomedes goes to Calchas's tent, followed by Ulysses and Troilus, Thersites prefaces the betrayal scene:

Diomed's a false-hearted rogue, a most
unjust knave. I will no more trust him
when he leers than I will a serpent when
he hisses. He will spend his mouth and
promise, like Brabbler the hound, but when
he performs, astronomers foretell it: it is
prodigious, there will come some change.

(5.1.88-93)

This speech connects the idea of falsification with that of “change” by means of promise and performance. The falsifying Diomedes will change Cressida; after promising to “use her” well, he will perform sexually. He will spend his mouth in anticipation of spending, and hence cheapening, Cressida.

The debasement of Cressida as coin is not a simple matter of counterfeiting, for such an assessment presumes an absolute value system that has been abused. Rather, Shakespeare suggests that simultaneously manipulating a value system and believing it to be absolute results in a loss of all reference and identity. It is then left for the characters either to accept reputation as identity or to disappear into oblivion. By promising to transmute her name to the “very crown of falsehood” (4.2.100) if she leaves Troilus, Cressida engages herself in the value system that will destroy her country as well as herself. She tells Troilus that she has only “a kind of self … an unkind self, that itself will leave / To be another's fool” (3.2.148-50). Her reputation is unnatural in that it will abandon the Cressida beneath the legend to be changed into the legendary Cressida.

Although Cressida intimates an understanding of the shifting currencies of identity and worth, Troilus maintains an absolutist philosophy that only recognizes a thing's being or nonbeing: “This is, and is not, Cressid!” (5.2.146). Perhaps his early assessment of the Trojan War is not sarcastic when he notes that “Helen must needs be fair, / When with your blood you daily paint her thus” (1.1.90-91). If so, then the war signifies Helen's worth. Why then has his attention, his “particular will,” not signified the pearl-like Cressida? His absolutist philosophy leads him to an insoluble paradox: Troilus must choose one Cressida (his Cressida or Diomedes's Cressida) as true and consider the other Cressida an uncurrent illusion, much as Elizabeth's coin reform tried to rid the nation of the false Edward for the true. Like Ulysses, Troilus concludes that Cressida has sent erroneous signals: “O false Cressid! false, false, false!” (5.2.178). Because Cressida's declared value has changed in the Greek camp, Troilus assumes that her metal must always have been base. But calling Cressida a base coin is itself erroneous; Troilus does not realize that a system of human values is inherently a system of shifting values.⁵³

Troilus's speech after having read Cressida's letter from the Greek camp is supremely ironic. Because he now sees her as a base coin, he rejects her promissory note, then attempts to declare her old value as fraudulent:

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart;
Th' effect doth operate another way.
                                                                                                    Tearing the letter.
Go, wind, to wind, there turn and change together.
My love with words and errors still she feeds,
But edifies another with her deeds.

(5.3.108-12)

Like a king whose coin has left the realm and been called down, Troilus no longer believes that words can declare anything meaningful. His declaration of Cressida's worth was unheeded by Diomedes; therefore, Cressida's own declarations of love are equally ineffective. Significantly, Troilus uses the words “turn” and “change” in their basest senses: Cressida has turned from him; she has changed lovers. He can no longer accept a declared value from her. To Troilus's mind, a word unbacked by a deed is a kind of nothing, like a promissory note whose collateral someone else is spending. But because he has seen his own declarations invalidated, Troilus can only conclude that he has misread the face value.

Shakespeare suggests that Troilus, like coin-reforming monarchs, ought to scrutinize “ancient standard,” his own role in manipulating that standard, and its applicability to one's perceptions of other human beings. Despite his dismissal of Hector's view that “value dwells not in particular will” (2.2.53), Troilus is unable to act upon his convictions. Troilus and Cressida asserts that when a value system becomes corrupt or ceases to be meaningful, it falls upon the individual—in the face of the general will—to determine worth as well as he or she can. In other words, as the ancient standard no longer holds, one must disengage the discourse of individual worth from the discourse of public currency. The desire of Elizabethan and Stuart monarchs to preserve the integrity of coinage was in part a facet of the deeper philosophical anxieties of the age—anxieties that juxtaposed metallic purity with estimable sovereignty, language that belies the coin it appears on with coins that belie the language stamped upon them, honor with treasure, and individual worth with economic equivalency. These anxieties Shakespeare explored through myths that transcend the economic exigencies of his time.

Notes

1. Linda Charnes's recent article, “‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 413-40, considers many of the issues brought forth in this study from a psychological and New Historical perspective. She argues that the play “represents neurosis in the form of subjectivity crippled by cultural inscription” (415). A history of responses to Shakespeare's most problematic “problem play” reveals an unusually broad spectrum of opinion. From Dryden's “heap of rubbish” and Evans's “a failure” to George Bernard Shaw's assessment of Cressida as “Shakespeare's first real woman,” critics have sought ways to condemn, praise, or otherwise scrutinize Troilus and Cressida—but always to talk about it. Lawrence seems to have been the first to isolate the discordance in the play's world as a source of the “problem,” a lead followed by Muir, Traversi, Tillyard, Campbell, Rossiter, Foakes, and Thompson. Feminist criticism has helped to sharpen this approach by focusing on Cressida's character as the cynosure of this discordance. See Oscar James Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's “Troilus and Cressida” (Los Angeles: Adcraft, 1938); E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960); R.A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays: From Satire to Celebration (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971); Gayle Greene, “Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A Kind of Self’,” in Carolyn Lenz et al., eds., The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 133-49; W.W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York: Macmillan, 1931); Priscilla Martin, Troilus and Cressida: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1976); Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare's Comic Sequence (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979); A.P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1961); Ann Thompson, Shakespeare's Chaucer (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978); E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (London: Mouton and Co., 1966); D.A. Traversi, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960); Edwin Wilson, Shaw on Shakespeare (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1961).

2. Concerning England's chronic shortage of coin and attempts to deal with it at the turn of the seventeenth century, Joyce Oldham Appleby writes, “The major difficulty lay with finding a definition of money that would be adequate to the many new roles it played during the decisive decades of growth and development.” See Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 199.

3. E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds., Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 383.

4. Marc Shell argues a point distinct from my thesis in Money, Language, and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Shell proposes that money is not only talked about in particular works of literature, “but that money talks in and through discourse in general” (180). Such a claim, it seems, posits an authority to “money of the mind” that is not easily demonstrated. I recognize no such superiority of money over discourse; rather, I would suggest that both “money of the mind” and discursive constructions such as symbolization or metaphorization proceed from a commonly held, antecedent impulse.

5. John H. Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange in England, 1272-1663: A Study in Monetary Management and Popular Prejudice,” in UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Dawn of Modern Banking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 169-239, esp. 185.

6. Charnes argues that the characters of Troilus and Cressida exhibit symptoms of neurosis in that they not only mistake absence for loss, but they deny the loss itself (“‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’,” 415). Something similar was happening outside the play in English economic thinking: English economic manipulations manifested nostalgia by attempting to retrieve a value of money believed lost. It was not neurotic because no one would have denied its loss, even if one were to believe it was retrievable.

7. See A.B. Feavearyear, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money, rev. E. Victor Morgan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), for the possible origins of sterling, penny, and shilling (7-9). Of course, as a physical object, the pound did not exist. The English pound was an idea—an abstract value about which all currency revolved and from which currency took its substance and significance.

8. See Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange,” 174.

9. C.E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 185.

10. Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange,” muses with some surprise that “pre-Enlightenment Europe seems to have suffered the delusion that silver and gold was wealth per se and its sole form” (174). He reads Clements Armstrong's assertions as evidence of this. See R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, 1924; reprint New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), 3:105, 124.

11. Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange,” 187, 191.

12. William A. Shaw, The History of Currency, 1252 to 1894 (London: Wilsons and Milne, 1895; reprint New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), 134.

13. Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 4:386.

14. Challis, The Tudor Coinage, 281.

15. Feavearyear, The Pound Sterling, 63.

16. Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange,” 178.

17. Ibid., 179.

18. Quoted in Tudor Economic Documents, 2:146-47.

19. See Charles Oman, The Coinage of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), 285; Challis, The Tudor Coinage, 228; Sir John Craig, The Mint: A History of the London Mint from A.D. 287 to 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 131.

20. See Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 14.

21. Harry A. Miskimin, “The Impact of Credit on Sixteenth-Century English Industry,” in The Dawn of Modern Banking, 275-89, esp. 285.

22. Feavearyear, The Pound Sterling, 81.

23. Challis, Tudor Coinage, 284.

24. See Oman, Coinage of England, 292.

25. Rogers Ruding, Annals of the Coinage of Britain and Its Dependencies, from the Earliest Period of Authentick History to the End of the Fiftieth Year of the Reign of His Present Majesty King George III (London: Nichols, son, and Bentley, 1817), 2:199-200.

26. See Shaw, History of Currency, 130.

27. S.T. Bindoff, Tudor England, in The Pelican History of England, vol. 5 (New York: Penguin, 1978), 199.

28. Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 4:391.

29. It is about this time that paper money was becoming more familiar. The Cambridge Economic History of Europe states that paper money was used furtively in the fifteenth century, cautiously in the sixteenth, and insistently in the seventeenth (ibid., 389).

30. Oman, Coinage of England, 176.

31. Tudor Economic Documents, 2:196.

32. Ibid., 197.

33. Ibid., 193.

34. Ibid., 3:387-88.

35. Ibid., 2:148.

36. Ibid., 146-47.

37. See Miskimin, “The Impact of Credit,” 285.

38. Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange,” 173.

39. See R.A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1983), 35.

40. All references to Shakespeare's plays are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). I have silently removed brackets.

41. See especially 4.1.15-31.

42. Tudor Economic Documents 2:196.

43. Cf. the immature sense of war as a marketplace for honor in All's Well That Ends Well, 2.1.32.

44. R.A. Shoaf's book carefully considers many of the issues in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde that I raise in this study of Shakespeare's play. Although we disagree on many principles, Shoaf also notes that in Chaucer's poem, Troy is “bad at business.” See Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word, 258.

45. I have followed F1 in using “thrice reputed” instead of the Riverside's use of the Q “thrice-reputed” for a number of reasons. First, “reputed” is an extremely rare term, cited in the OED as being used only twice besides the present use. The meaning in the only two other uses recorded is of something returned to a pure state, which is probably not Shakespeare's meaning. Second, “reputed” is a far more common word for the time. Third, all possible variants of “repure,” such as “repurge” or “repurify,” carry only the sense of a dirty thing having been cleaned. If “repured” were actually Shakespeare's choice, it would have to mean something like “so clean that it is three times purer than normal pure things.” Although possible, this reading seems to me less likely than “reputed,” especially in the context of Troilus's naive speech of anticipation. We should remember that while Shakespeare remains vague concerning Cressida's virginity, there is little question regarding that of Troilus.

46. Sandra Fischer's notes on change in Econolingua seem especially relevant to the legendary Cressida, who in other versions of the story (Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, for example) becomes a whore, a beggar, and a leper: “The implication is that women constantly have an eye out for new sexual partners and that their favors can be bought with money.” Fischer notes associations with prostitution and the obliteration of the stamp or impress of the king that makes the coins tender (53). A scene probably written by William Rowley in The Old Law also demonstrates that other contemporary writers were noting the figurative and linguistic associations between Cressida and “lighter” economic units of measurement: in a discussion of Helen of Troy, Gnotho quips, “Cressid was Troy weight, and Nell [Helen] was avoirdupois.” See The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A.H. Bullen, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 4.1.74-75. Although Feste remarks in Twelfth Night that “Cressida was a beggar” (3.1.55) while trying to beg coins from Viola, Shakespeare does not suggest in Troilus and Cressida that Cressida becomes a whore; he rather asserts that she comes to be taken for one. Gayle Greene argues that “by showing Cressida in relation to the men and society who made her what she is, he [Shakespeare] provides a context that qualifies the apparently misogynist elements of her characterization.” Greene further notes that “the stereotypical in her character occurs in a context that constitutes a critique of stereotyping.” See “Shakespeare's Cressida: A Kind of Self,” 145.

47. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 203.

48. The reappearance of the word prize puts Diomedes's speech in the context of Cressida's earlier self-assessment (1.2.289).

49. Writing of the betrayal scene, A.P. Rossiter makes a comment that is generally applicable: “For every participant in the scene there is a phenomenon called ‘Cressida.’” See Angel With Horns, 135-36.

50. In Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word. Shoaf argues that what Criseyde was truly in Troy becomes manifest in the Greek camp: “Exchanged for Antenor and circulated to the Greek camp, her own alloy dominant again, her own character visible again, especially her ‘slydinge corage’ (5.825), Criseyde becomes Diomedes's coin, and he wastes no time in spending her” (258). Shakespeare's Troilus shares this opinion. Still, I believe that Shakespeare takes his cue from Chaucer in suggesting that Cressida's “worth” is entirely external to her.

51. See Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange,” 173-74.

52. “Calling down,” synonymous with “setting down,” is associated with prostitution. See Shaw, History of Currency, 123.

53. Cf. Troilus's metaphor on being true and being false when he and Cressida must part: “Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns, / With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare” (4.4.105-6).