SOURCE: “He Do Cressida in Different Voices,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 254-86.

[In the following essay, Hodgdon refers to several different stage adaptations of Troilus and Cressida to demonstrate how the play was constructed to keep Cressida in particular, and, through her representation, Renaissance women in general, under male control.]

When Trojan Hector visits the Greek camp, Troilus and Cressida represents his meeting with Achilles as an exchange of male gazes, powerful speaking looks through which each constructs, or attempts to deconstruct, the identity of the other:

Achilles. Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee;
I have with exact view perused thee, Hector,
And quoted joint by joint. …
Hector. Stand fair, I prithee; let me look on thee.
Achilles. Behold thy fill.
Hector.                                         Nay, I have done already.
Achilles. Thou art too brief. I will the second time,
As I would buy thee, view thee limb by limb.
Hector. O, like a book of sport thou'lt read me o'er;
But there's more in me than thou understand'st.
Why dost thou so oppress me with thine eye?

(4.5.230-40)¹

Among many other references to sight and bodily display,² this passage stands as an especially blatant instance of how Shakespeare's playtext consistently turns the act of spectatorship into a convention which interrogates, theatrically, propositions of identity and value concerning male—as well as female—bodies. Here, too, Hector voices a question that Cressida never asks. For like Hector, males feed their eyes on her “with exact view,” quote her joint by joint, position her as a marketable commodity, read her “like a book of sport.” But whereas Achilles' look searches Hector's body for a point of entry—“whether there, or there, or there” (4.5.242)—in Cressida's case the “local wound” already has a name; the passage through which men can “kill” her (and themselves) is known. In her case, too, the interpretive gap to which Hector alludes between reading o'er and understanding has (always) already been foreclosed.

To be sure, the playtext, like Cressida herself, “holds off” the final revelation of that foreclosure, a strategy which does indeed demonstrate that, like Hector, there's more in her than either the men who oppress her with their gaze or even she herself understands.³ Ultimately, however, to read her is to recognize that “‘As false as Cressid’” constitutes an almost inescapable constant amidst the generalized slippage of identity and value apparent elsewhere—particularly as that slippage concerns the heroic male image—in what Rosalie Colie terms a “monumental mock'ry” of language and form which “attacked literature at its very source.”⁴ Moving beyond Colie's argument, Elizabeth Freund observes, “In no other play does [Shakespeare] take on the redoubtable task of refashioning, decomposing, vulgarizing, declassicizing precursor texts quite so canonical and powerful, and nowhere does he strip both his sources and his own text of their ‘original’ substance with such spirited iconoclasm.”⁵ True, but not, I think, completely true of Cressida. Refashioned she undoubtedly is, but not stripped of her originary substance. Indeed the very process of slippage between prestigious and popular forms which hollows out idealist myth to reveal the social seems to require that she retain her “true” identity, be proved false (by nature), be devalued as (common) property.

The facile answer to this seeming paradox—that further debasing the one character already demonized by literary tradition is somewhat unnecessary—conveniently occludes social process, and within that, the positioning of bodies and voices through which the culture defines gender relations in absolutist (moral) terms.⁶ Yet Troilus and Cressida, as Jonathan Dollimore, among others, points out, consistently calls such absolutist constructions into question.⁷ That is another paradox, and one I want to examine further by focusing especially on the issue of Cressida's authenticity. Like Cressida, who sees herself as divided, my project has a double vision. For I want not only to read Shakespeare's playtext in order to raise questions concerning Renaissance representation and reception, but, more importantly, especially since Troilus and Cressida's performance history is concentrated in the recent past,⁸ to look at a number of twentieth-century performance texts, specific instances of cultural reproduction which arrange, or rearrange, social meaning as theatrical meaning.⁹ And I want to begin, as both the Trojan War and Troilus and Cressida do, with the question of Helen.

Troilus and Cressida is historically positioned to dramatize the change in gender relations occurring in the shift from feudal courtly love, which accorded women political as well as erotic power, linking the one with the other, to pre-capitalist social relations and the consequent double subordination of women to their husbands as well as to the prince.¹⁰ Shakespeare's playtext constructs that shift as a binary opposition between idolatry and adultery, a move which foregrounds the cultural contradictions and strains of the social process. For in the case of Helen, Troilus and Cressida folds the one into the other, collapsing both into a single term: Helen's position as a Trojan icon derives from her adultery, which gives her value in the public realm of male discourse. But whereas Helen's trajectory (at least as she is theorized by the Trojans¹¹) seems to insist that idolatry can contain adultery, Cressida's, which parallels Helen's experientially, suggests just the opposite. Far from containing adultery (or, let's be plain, in Cressida's case, faithlessness), idolatry precisely expresses and focuses it. In this sense, Cressida can be recognized as a transhistorically stable sign of an ideological process in conflict with itself. Indeed, Troilus and Cressida, which “turns” Cressida from idealized to fallen woman, may be viewed as a “set-up,” for she begins by (perhaps) flirtatiously laughing at and with the jokes of a man who, through his mediatory role as a bawd, poses a sexual threat to her, and she ends by being positioned as the object of the gaze of several males who together reconstruct her as a whore. Literally as well as figuratively, she occupies the place that Freud assigned to women in the structure of the obscene joke: the place of the object between several male subjects.¹² In this scheme, which wrests power from the woman, in particular the power accruing to both body and voice, the men (and by association, male spectators) have the last laugh, thereby defusing not only the threat of woman's infidelity but also her potential to subvert patriarchal authority by transgressing its laws. In addition, of course, as an object of exchange within male subjectivity, the woman performs useful (patriarchal) cultural work by ratifying and reinforcing the very homosocial bonds that exclude her.¹³

Such a schematic outline of its gender economy offers an extremely attractive synoptic view of Shakespeare's playtext—attractive, that is, for male spectators. Certainly, as my earlier quotation suggests, Troilus and Cressida repeatedly calls attention to male looking relations. Troilus is led by “eyes and ears” (2.2.63); Ulysses speaks of how the “present eye praises the present object” (3.3.180); men search for their own reflections in each other's eyes (3.3.99). Obsessed as they are with their own looks and with recognizing (or pretending not to recognize) one another, their gazes become commodified as a source of knowledge, most especially so once they are turned on women, who are made accountable to them. As in classical Hollywood cinema, such relentless focus on male surveillance works to endorse similar mechanisms in a male spectator and so privileges the male gaze as well as the male project called the play, offering males particular, and particularly gendered specular competence, or what Laura Mulvey has called “visual pleasure.”¹⁴ But what of a female spectator? To view a spectacle which neatly accounts for her own position and attempts to frame her as false by nature surely constitutes an exercise in restrictive vision. For her, “visual pleasure” exists primarily in terms of intellectual mastery—in recognizing, to paraphrase Stephen Greenblatt, that there is pleasure, no end of pleasure, only not for a female spectator.¹⁵

This statement, however, assumes a point of view consistent with that of a late twentieth-century female spectator. And this in turn raises several important questions. Would a female spectator in the Renaissance share a similar outlook? And to what extent is it possible to historicize the gendered gaze? Given only negative or, at best, indeterminate evidence about Troilus and Cressida's early seventeenth-century performance history, especially as to whether it was performed in public as well as private playhouses,¹⁶ addressing the first question points toward the second, and any precise answers concerning audience positions and responses can only be broadly sketched in from existing documents, none of which were written by women.¹⁷ Certainly women made up a definitely recognizable segment of the audience in the public theaters, but it is difficult to mark any decisive shifts in the composition of audiences in the private theaters around the turn of the century.¹⁸ What can be said, however, is that female spectators, like males, spanned the social hierarchy to include representatives of all classes—apple-wives, fish-wives, citizens' wives, ladies and whores—and that, as Andrew Gurr cautiously notes, “their reasons for playgoing were most open to question and most subject to attack,” primarily from anti-theatrical Puritan commentators. Home was the proper habitat for a respectable woman who, if she went to the theater at all, went with a male companion (preferably her husband); if alone, she could be considered, if not treated as, a whore. Indeed, even by appearing at the theater, a woman risked, with such public display, making a spectacle of herself.¹⁹

Although the assumption that women attended the theater for harlotry or adultery (rather than, say, to watch an all-male spectacle) begins to wane about 1600, shortly before Troilus and Cressida would have been staged, fresh accusations took its place. As Jonson and his fellow theater poets began to rail against unlearned spectators who came to the theater only to see sights, not to listen to and be edified by verse, such complaints were leveled specifically against women's “ignorant eyes.”²⁰ Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) describes, in Nell, the Citizen-Grocer's wife, just such a spectator, one who, as a representative of a steadily growing middle-class audience fast becoming central to the theater's commercial enterprise, condenses many of the supposed attributes of playgoing women. Somewhat “virtuous” in that she has been pleading with George for a year to take her to the theater, her taste runs to romance, particularly to chivalric wandering knights, and particularly when played by Ralph, her husband's apprentice. From her seat on the stage among the gentlemen, a position which mocks her social pretensions, she reads all she sees with perfect comic literalness. Yet, however exaggerated by Beaumont's genial satire against the values of citizens' culture (as opposed to those of aristocratic playgoers) and their desire to see old scenes (primarily those acted in the public theater) replayed on the Blackfriars' stage, the case of Nell reveals one woman's power to alter the staged representation to suit her pleasures.

Apparently Nell was not alone. In the early decades of the century, the woman playgoer grew increasingly vocal about “see[ing] her shadow there”²¹ in representative stereotypes—the shrew, the lusty widow, the country wench, the Amazon, the chaste wife or virgin, the adulteress, the ambitious female. Invited, on the one hand, to assent to such fictions being inscribed on their bodies, on the other, women were, as Jean Howard argues, “positioned as consumers, critics, spectators, and spectacles.”²² As early as 1600, the epilogue of Dekker's Satiromastix, by recanting the opinions of women expressed in the playtext, records some anxiety about pleasing female spectators, a trend which continues to accelerate throughout the early decades of the new century.²³ Although it was not until the late 1620s and early 1630s that stage plays show further signs of catering specifically to women's tastes, women spectators may have been partially responsible for the radical change, around 1610, in the drama's misogynistic portrayal of women.²⁴ If indeed, as Louis Montrose and others have observed,²⁵ the theater functioned as an agent of cultural transformation, the women who attended it seem to have played some part in creating new subject positions, perhaps even in remapping the representation of gender relations to redirect, and recirculate, the exchange of (visual) pleasure.

This brief history suggests that Troilus and Cressida is ideally suited to bring into sharp focus, for female spectators, the contradictions embodied in these heavily gendered looking relations. For Shakespeare's playtext rather precisely analogizes and reproduces in its theater of spectacle the prevalent male anxieties about their exclusive ownership of women, about woman's value and “place.” In addition, it also analogizes the high visibility of women playgoers who were described, looked upon, “quoted joint by joint,” classified, noted, and demonized by male observers. Even in the absence of women's own accounts of their material conditions, it would seem reasonable to assume that perhaps they saw themselves as owners of a potentially transgressive look and, simultaneously, as subject to the male gaze. It is precisely the relative historicity of these looking relations which I wish to investigate further.

In this regard, I see a useful connection between the models generated by recent feminist film theory, which assign gender to as well as psychoanalyze the relations between spectacle and gaze, and Katherine Maus's provocative conjectures about the relations between an eroticized Renaissance spectacle construed, by anti-theatrical commentators, as a “whorish female” and the jealous male's scopic project as one figure for the Renaissance spectator “at his most agonizingly involved and his most scandalously marginalized.”²⁶ Not only is a double standard of spectatorship that positions the male as perceiving subject and the female as perceived object common to both, but the deeply gendered split in subjectivity which both take as a given makes such modes of analysis entirely appropriate to examining looking relations in Troilus and Cressida. Indeed, such notions are peculiarly suited both to reading a playtext which positions women as unable to escape their transhistorical citations²⁷ and to examining its performance texts, which tend to re-produce, and thus re-inscribe, the ideological power of those citations on women's bodies. However, it is equally important to acknowledge at the outset the limitations of both Freudian and Lacanian theory, which, in presupposing the dominance of the male gaze, tend to endow it with a universal, even ahistorical, power. For that reason, I want to pursue a slightly different investigation of spectatorly desire by approaching issues of gender in performance not exclusively through an analysis of the male gaze but, rather, by re-examining the economy of exchange between performer and spectator in performance.²⁸ In this partial reading, my focus rests on Cressida's gaze, and the spectatorly gazes at her, both on the stage and from the audience, in two scenes: her first and last appearances. What I propose constitutes a somewhat subversive project which, by attempting to fix an eye on how Cressida is constructed, not only demystifies her ideological function but (potentially) diminishes the male pleasure of the text. What remains to be seen is whether destabilizing, if not dismantling, the hegemony of the male gaze can disclose some alteration in the looking relations—even, perhaps, some fissures along the gendered sightlines—that mark Troilus and Cressida's recent cultural historicity.

II

Everything about Cressida's first appearance calls attention to sight, and beyond that, to the problematics of recognition and identity. Also at issue are the ownership of the gaze: whether it belongs to a knowing or unknowing spectator; whether these two positions are similar or different; and what exactly is being seen, and by whom. Cressida's opening words—“Who were those went by?”—together with Alexander's response—“Queen Hecuba and Helen” (1.2.1-2)—focus these concerns rather precisely. Her question invites reading her as unknowing—almost as though she is a stranger in Troy—and as a curious onlooker who may be searching for someone. Spectators in the audience, of course, are also strangers to this particular representation of Troy, lookers-on who (presumably) recognize that Troilus and Aeneas, not Hecuba and Helen, have just gone by. A number of puzzles, some of which impinge more specifically on Renaissance than on present-day representation, press into this exchange. For Alexander's reply not only invites offstage spectators to position Cressida in relation to Priam's queen (who never appears elsewhere) as well as to Helen (who does, but is never seen with Cressida) but calls attention to the possibility of misreading one gender for another. Why call into question either the possible (if highly improbable) theatrical doubling of warriors and women, or the convention of boy actors playing female roles, or both, just as Cressida is introduced? Although elsewhere, especially in As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespearean heroines undo, or risk undoing, their gender,²⁹ these instances occur well after the illusion has (presumably) taken hold. In Rosalind's case, it happens at the very point where the play, which rests on fictions of gender-bending, is about to dissolve. One answer, I think, points directly to Shakespeare's own source-bending. For rather than representing, as Chaucer does, Cressida's first sight of Troilus as a solitary spectacle—a twice-repeated pass-by on horseback (at a distance) arranged by Pandar (II. 1247-74)—Shakespeare's playtext rewrites and regenders a scene from The Iliad. There, in a similar spectacle of value, Priam asks Helen to tell him who the Greek warriors are; and in describing their attributes she identifies her own ambivalent, tenuous position in relation to Paris. By transforming these looking relations, Troilus and Cressida not only opens up a space for interrogating the gendered gaze but situates the scene, and Cressida's presence within it, as a potential site of gender anxiety.

Initially, this section of the scene positions Cressida as only slightly different from those who, as in Alexander's description of Ajax, are “all eyes and no sight” (1.2.30-31). If at the first the playtext denies her knowing gaze, however, later on as she and Pandarus watch the returning Trojan warriors, her gaze is, like Helen's in The Iliad, not only privileged but given potential power and agency. Although it is Pandarus who notices Aeneas, the first to enter, Cressida's language calls up the rest of the spectacle—a detail obvious in both Quarto and Folio but masked by edited texts which, in repositioning the stage directions so that it is Pandarus' words that “bring on” most of the Trojans, are complicit with subsuming her gaze in his.³⁰ But although Pandarus certainly attempts to direct her gaze, and although his running commentary seems more knowing than her questions, the play-text also suggests that she may not be “looking his way,” for she is not only the first to see but clearly owns her own gaze. Indeed, it is this ability to know a man if “[she] ever saw him before and knew him” (1.2.66) which the playtext will eventually turn on her, deprivileging her gaze once she becomes looked upon, a spectacle not a spectator, no longer a subject but subjected to the male gaze. Throughout, Cressida's desire for secrecy—“Speak not so loud” (187)—as well as her punning “watch”-fulness (264-75) mask from Pandar how she reads what she sees; only when she is alone, in her sonnet-soliloquy, does she speak her looks, reveal that she is a woman who knows too much.

If the sudden shift in the gender of the spectacle—from a mass of male bodies to a single female body—works to subject Cressida to the gaze of offstage spectators, the position of her soliloquy as well as its rhetorical strategies contradict that subjection. Both accord her considerable power. For she not only allies herself with narrative process and determines her agency within it but appropriates a male discourse and undermines its idealizing strategies. Consider the last ten lines of this oddly deviant, even transgressive, sonnet:

                                                                                Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she belov'd knows naught 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.”
That though my heart's contents firm love doth bear,(31)
Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.

(291-300)

Throughout, Cressida's statements collapse toward emblematic summary, a feature which the rhyme scheme, with its repetitive coupleting, supports. Together with lines 296 and 298, lines 290-91 might stand as a gloss on Sonnet 129, “Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” one often evoked (especially by moralistic critics) to express Troilus and Cressida's “essence.”³² Like that sonnet, Cressida's elides the speaking subject, which sets up a tension between a male agent (syntactically invisible but everywhere there); woman as object (“things,” “thing,” “it”); and the more specifically gendered subjects of following statements (“that she,” “men,” and “I”). In accounting for her own (constructed) position, Cressida hollows out sonnet discourse, destabilizes its terms, and exposes its contradictions, a stance that her “out of love” neatly condenses. In re-voicing the language praising women's erotic and political power, Cressida redoes it in terms of what it has become: a discourse of oppression.³³ Finally, as she expresses her own strategy in terms of vision, of an unreadable gaze, she acknowledges the tyranny of the male gaze which, in decoding her looks and her look, can command her and so take away the power of her voice as well as her gaze.

Whereas Shakespeare's playtext endows Cressida, at this point, with a knowledge of gendered looking relations and with a carefully calculated glance, what it remains silent about—almost Cressida-like—is the worth of the public spectacle Cressida and Pandarus see. For aside from the “Prologue arm'd …, suited in like conditions as our argument” (Pro., 23-25), the playtext remains open on this point, except perhaps to suggest, by representing six instead of nine worthies, that their diminished number (as well as the addition of “common soldiers”) signals diminished worth. Such representation constitutes textual as well as generic politics: the spectacle of the returning heroes determines at least one sign of the value a particular performance text puts on the war action. Further, the stage directions (even when editorialized to include “and passes over” following each hero's entrance) allow for a possibly complex range of looking relations. Although Cressida's and Pandarus' dialogue suggests that the men may simply pass by, unaware of being seen by either onstage or offstage spectators, nothing in the playtext restricts their look. Moreover, although Cressida wishes to remain unnoticed (especially, it would seem, by Troilus [186; 233]), nothing specifically prevents the Trojans from looking her way or from acknowledging her presence as well as Pandar's. What is at issue here involves more than the obvious: the question of whether Cressida, already defined in relation to a male tableau, is further constructed by their gazes. For a particular looking dynamic can signal not only a Troilus and Cressida's attitude toward male heroism but also its “turn” on Cressida and on its originary sources as well as toward locating itself within a particular genre. Indeed, the sexual politics of theatrical representation works to insert Cressida within a double frame, one erected by choices of mise-en-scène, the other by the discourse of a predominantly male interpretive community of reviewers.

Ben Iden Payne's 1936 performance text for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, for instance, suited itself in doublet and hose, with Cressida and Helen in panniered farthingales and feathered hats, as homage to continuing the tradition of William Poel's earlier (1913) Elizabethan revival, which sought to make topical allusions (particularly those to Essex) available.³⁴ Anxious to make all perfectly clear, Iden Payne includes Queen Hecuba and Helen and so explains Cressida's opening query to Alexander; furthermore, a communal spectacle becomes the scene's centerpiece. Each hero crosses the stage accompanied by supers; a group of citizens and “Three Girls” call out his name and cheer him; Helenus (the “priest”) blesses the citizens as he passes. As though reading the scene through Chaucer, Iden Payne cuts all the language except for Pandarus' praise of Troilus, who, unlike the others, peeps out through a lancet window in the set's upper stage just before he enters, catching sight of Cressida and Pandarus. The three girls (apparently Troilus-groupies) flock to him; he turns toward Cressida and Pandarus and salutes smartly; Cressida curtseys to him. But Iden Payne's attempt to show an Elizabethan hero's progress reads more like the military homecoming parades of fairly recent memory; reviewers not only caught the anachronism but mourned the lack of classical costumes.³⁵ More significantly, the fawning women invite spectators both to read their hero worship and to see Cressida's curtsey within a context that already anticipates her subjection to an attractively breeched leg. Further, cutting Cressida's language takes away her voice, so that only her body language (which Ulysses later uses to demonize her [4.5.54-63]) and what one reviewer called her “cozening eyes”³⁶ code her presence. But when this Cressida did speak, she “dissimulated prettily, and … gave the giddy jilt a lisp, … a suggestion of levity and insincerity” that hinted at “her coming demoralization.”³⁷ Moreover, the prompt copy, which rephrases her axiomatic “Achievement is command” as “Achieved men us command” and further underscores the line with music, provides yet another telltale sign of a transhistorical assumption, which locks a female spectator into an imaginary and illusory identification with Cressida, who is made to speak for, as well as to, all women.

If Iden Payne's scene absorbs Cressida's presence within the male spectacle and shows her gaze subservient to Troilus, Glen Byam Shaw's 1954 performance text, also for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre,³⁸ focuses more exclusively on the difference between watchers and watched. Cressida and Pandarus stand high on Troy's massive mid-stage walls, a vantage point from which they look down on the entrances of the warriors, who pass beneath them, too self-absorbed to notice they are being observed. Their display seems directed to the offstage, not the onstage, audience; and their gestures—handing a helmet or gloves to an attendant servant, ordering a sentinel to the walls with a nod—reproduce those of aristocratic officers welcomed home by competent servants, actions which generate a communal sense of an exclusively upper-class wartime community and construct Cressida and Pandarus as outsiders commenting on a serious male ritual. In Shaw's Troilus and Cressida, all eyes focus on this display of male bodies: successful, assured, victorious, the idealized image of England's own recently returned soldiers.

Except perhaps for some eyes, who will surely notice Cressida's shimmering white “Grecian nightgown,” and who, like W.A. Darlington, will “promptly recognize [her] for what she [is],” or who will see “her wanton spirits looking out ‘at every joint and motive in her body.’”³⁹ For in this first appearance as elsewhere, Cressida's costume will permit spectators to read her body in relation to other bodies; and the alternate tradition of costuming Troilus and Cressida in period is just as likely to construct her as a product of male desire and male artistic practice by dressing her in flowing Attic robes which, like the drapery on any classical Venus, permits spectators not just to imagine but to see the contours of her body. Shaw's performance text as well as the 1960 Peter Hall-John Barton and the 1976 Barton-Barry Kyle Troilus and Cressidas (both for the Royal Shakespeare Company) make precisely such choices.⁴⁰ In the 1960 “sand pit” production (part of a season of comedies), Cressida's gown, slit in front to the hip, undulates with her as she enters from upstage and crosses the large central circle of sand in a lazy, barefooted walk, sinking into it at every step: “a wisp of rippling carnality,” according to Bernard Levin.⁴¹ Whether she is positioned at a distance from the returning heroes, as in the 1976 Barton-Kyle performance text, where Cressida and Pandarus occupy a downstage-right balcony, or as in Terry Hands's 1981 bitterly black farce, quite close to the spectacle, such a Cressida constitutes a potentially fetishized icon, coded by conventional tropes of seduction addressed particularly to a male spectator. Moreover, when Pandarus is also costumed in a long flowingly “feminine” robe, as in each of these performance texts except for Iden Payne's, the scene is even more deeply gendered by opposing male and female codes of dress.

While in each of these versions, mise-en-scène and blocking make representational choices that give heroic value to the male spectacle, Terry Hands's 1981 Royal Shakespeare Company performance text reads the Trojans through Thersites' eyes.⁴² Hands's Cressida, barefoot and wearing an ankle-length orange chiffon shift, sits with a nanny-like Pandarus (who carries a small parasol as well as a tiny basket filled with candies, which he shares with Cressida) on soft cushions placed on a siege machine that stands against Troy's blackened walls. Each entering hero crosses directly in front of the watchers, who see a parade of swaggering, self-important peacocks enacting cameo parodies of themselves. Aeneas drinks from an offered cup; Antenor does so as well but spits the drink out; a King Kong-like Hector poses and flexes his muscles, an about-to-go-to-seed footballer who draws audience laughter; Paris' servant hands him a mirror in which he rearranges his hair; Helenus limps in on a crutch (“Can Helenus fight, uncle?” [225]). When Troilus finally arrives, Pandarus grabs his hand and then pulls Cressida toward him, anticipating their later joining together (3.2). Troilus draws his (unbloodied) sword at Pandarus' urging, bending down so that Cressida can see the “hacks” on his helmet; imitating Ophelia's description of Hamlet leaving her closet, he exits backward, gazing at Cressida. In what Michael Billington aptly called “a cynic's Iliad,”⁴³ this mock-heroic spectacle deprives Cressida of at least some of the potential power of her gaze by co-opting that, at scene's end, for Troilus. Unlike the previous versions, Hands's does not represent a doubled spectacle which traces out gendered looking relations and thus marks the distinction between private and public spheres. Rather, only the male spectacle “counts,” and because the heroes wittingly and witlessly showcase themselves as comic-opera buffoons, each displaying a quirky stereotype of male attributes, their masquerade offers a debased pageant which not only includes, and absorbs, its onstage spectators but increases the distance between performers and audience, displacing any potential emotional investment with ridicule. Later on, Hands stages Helen's only appearance as an orgy, which Michael Coveney described as “something like Zsa Zsa Gabor playing Dietrich in a camp floor show conceived by Giradoux,”⁴⁴ a not entirely different kind of spectator sport. As for the Cressida? According to another reviewer, she “establishe[s] herself from the start as that most dangerous commodity, a knowing and flirtatious virgin.”⁴⁵

In one or more features, each of these performance texts uses the openness of Shakespeare's playtext in order to exploit or disempower Cressida. While the playtext suggests that, as a relatively silent spectator, Cressida occupies a potentially dominant position, theatrical practice consistently limits and circumscribes her, perpetuating the structures of male desire and male looking which, as Peggy Phelan observes, “infect and inform all forms of representation.”⁴⁶ Such practice constitutes a kind of early warning system, eagerly complicit with the demonizing literary tradition, with some form of contemporary cultural gender stereotyping, or with both. To be sure, at least one reviewer of each production carped at such anticipatory signals to note, for example, that “at times Shakespeare defeated [a “shallow” or “wanton” or “sensual” Cressida] by giving her words to say which she could not deliver other than sincerely.”⁴⁷ Yet most reviewers also exhibited a certain relish at seeing Ulysses' opinion of Cressida come true. What seems to be operating here is a kind of inherited “cultural capital” which constitutes a particular mode of perception as essential, and therefore natural.⁴⁸ As Pierre Bourdieu observes, “The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education.”⁴⁹ And in the case of these performance texts of Troilus and Cressida, such an “educated” vision depends on recognizing the “legitimacy” of the stories told of Cressida by Chaucer as well as Shakespeare. At least for one interpretive community, it is not simply a question of what is worth being seen but of the right way to see it.

Howard Davies' 1985 performance text for the Royal Shakespeare Company, however, goes against the grain of such inherited looking relations to redraw the map of Shakespeare's playtext. Davies' Brechtian project to recuperate Troilus and Cressida for nineteenth-century history began by inviting the company to do historical research on the period by assigning particular topics (which could be negotiated) to each cast member.⁵⁰ Although certainly not original to Davies, since both the 1968 and 1976 RSC productions were positioned within the context of Vietnam, his idea was to make connections between the attitudes available in the playtext and those of late nineteenth-century as well as late twentieth-century culture. One result was to re-envision Cressida, played by Juliet Stevenson, as a New Woman and so to read her as an historical subject.⁵¹ Among several reviewers, Irving Wardle praised Stevenson's “feminist” Cressida by observing that she “reclaims a part for which some actresses apologize and anchors it in the facts of human behavior.”⁵² Yet a greater number leveled complaints against a Cressida who situates herself in history and thus counters the familiar universalist-essentialist image. To quote several reviewers: “she has little of the mercurial inconstancy necessary for Cressida”; “the production showed only narrow-minded political anger where what was needed was mockery and a cosmic disgust for mankind”; and “it may be hard cheese on the RSC feminist puritans, but Shakespeare is writing about falsity and sexual wantonness, not rape.”⁵³ Precisely because Davies' performance text questions the gendered economy of inherited looking capital and renders it transgressive, it offers a particular kind of “limit-text.” Although some initial signs of this transgression appear earlier, they are most strikingly apparent in Cressida's first appearance, in which looking relations privilege not the male spectacle but the lookers-on.

Set in turn-of-the-century Crimea, Davies' Troilus and Cressida was housed within an abandoned, once-elegant mansion, shuttered, draped with dust sheets and no longer serving its proper function—a space reminiscent of a line from John Osborne's The Entertainer: “Don't clap too hard; it's an old building.” In this “room with a view,” Cressida and Pandarus stand far downstage and look out at the audience through binoculars, passing the pair of glasses back and forth. Cressida notices Troilus without the binoculars, so that when an embarrassed Pandarus finally does recognize the “sneaking fellow,” she falls on her back laughing. By so turning her deliberate misrecognition of Troilus into a joke on Pandarus, she retains control of her own gaze, which not only singles out that part of the (unseen) spectacle that alone has meaning for her but privileges her look as more acute than Pandarus'. Moreover, her long-sleeved, sash-waisted, modest V-neck costume of rather stiff taffeta contributes to reading her as a buttoned-up Victorian who, within the privacy of her soliloquy, finally assesses her position (“Things won are done”) somewhat regretfully (“Men prize the thing ungained more than it is”) yet also, as a soft tune from the player piano covers her exit, remains sure of her ability to turn that to her own advantage. In denying an onstage representation of the returning heroes, Davies' performance text removes any opportunity at this point for an offstage audience to judge the “heroic” action. But by allowing neither the male spectacle nor the male gaze to dominate, his staging (potentially) undermines both and so overturns the conventions of representation to read presence as absence. As Cressida and Pandarus look out at the offstage spectators, this Troilus and Cressida sets up a mirroring or doubling process which calls attention to the act of spectatorship, locating its power and value as decidedly female. Certainly, given Troilus and Cressida's misogynistic politics of gender, such a potentially disruptive gaze decidedly transforms the economy of looking relations to accord at least some visual pleasure to a female spectator. To the extent that it empowers Cressida's look, Davies' staging raises the question of whether her gaze can perhaps undermine patriarchal law or can possibly turn that law on the male spectator, secure with his own identity. But that question opens up further contradictions, for it has a short-term as well as a long-term answer, both of which clearly measure the cost of women's (historical) aversion.

III

Cressida's first appearance in Shakespeare's playtext and in Davies' performance text offers a female viewer particular specular competency. Both endow her look with difference (as well as différance) and permit her to stand apart from, if not completely outside, what Raymond Bellour calls the “place assigned to her by the logic of masculine desire.”⁵⁴ Potentially, such “privilege” includes body as well as voice, a probability Davies' representational strategies bring into sharp focus, especially when compared to those of the earlier performance texts which (in varying degrees) stress Cressida's “to-be-looked-at-ness” and which limit (primarily through cuts) her voice. To the extent that these looking relations afford Cressida relative independence from the hegemony of the male gaze, they also free a female spectator's look, according to Mulvey by way of Brecht, “into dialectics.”⁵⁵ The same is not true, however, of Cressida's final scene, the encounter with Diomedes observed by Troilus, Ulysses, and Thersites (5.2), where Cressida becomes doubly, even triply, specularized, a strategy which stigmatizes her worth as well as circumscribes and contains her voice and body. Yet the very heavy-handedness of the frames in which she is set also reveals the considerable anxiety that lies behind such misogyny.

As with Cressida's first view of Troilus, Chaucer positions him as a solitary observer of the meeting with Diomedes. But, by adding Ulysses and Thersites, Shakespeare's playtext not only calls attention to but overdetermines the male gaze. Further, on the two occasions when Cressida whispers to Diomedes (5.2.7; 34), neither onstage nor offstage spectators can hear what she says. At both points, however, Troilus, Ulysses, and Thersites speak her body and read it, in Thersites' words, as “secretly open” (24). For a female spectator, Cressida's voiceless text, deeply triangulated and elaborately mediated by a series of male gazes, may seem to flood this scene. But all that can literally be heard is the playtext's ability to “speak the father” in a weave of voices and looks which literalizes the gap Chaucer's text sets up between narrator and tale in his ambiguously ironic “men saye.” To watch such a spectacle invites a female spectator to occupy one of two traditionally assigned viewing positions—those Tania Modleski recognizes as “the place of the female masochist, identifying with the woman as victim, or the place of the ‘transvestite,’ identifying with the active male hero.”⁵⁶ But in this case, even the latter position is somewhat compromised, since the act of looking not only immobilizes Troilus in self-doubt (“I will not be myself” [63]) but threatens to destabilize his identity as well as Cressida's. Nowhere else in Troilus and Cressida do looking relations so clearly articulate the contradictory status of the female spectator as one who is and is not herself, a situation which not incidentally analogizes the fluid gender status of the original boy actor of Cressida's part. Moreover, any attempt to construct an alternative viewing position, and thus to escape from this highly structured economy of looking relations, also rather precisely analogizes the problem faced by feminist theory: that of constructing an Archimedean point from which to speak that is not already interpellated within Freudian or Lacanian discourse. Yet any such attempt creates an additional double bind. For to take up such a position involves refusing the (exclusively male) pleasure of the text⁵⁷ which, in staging the construction of “faithless woman,” recuperates and rehearses the priorities of neo-chivalric culture.

These priorities are condensed, even emblematized, in the way the scene handles and dispenses with the threats woman poses to the ideologies sustaining that culture. With Cressida quite literally in the hands of the Greeks, she is ideally positioned to repeat (or revenge) Helen's story; she can become the agent linking Troilus with Menelaus. Also potentially dangerous because of her ability to make Troilus (as he himself claims) “weaker than a woman's tear” (1.1.9), thus feminizing his (naturally?) warlike nature,⁵⁸ Cressida becomes a pawn in Troilus and Cressida's curiously contradictory logic of male valuation. For this scene shows Greek and Trojan, once drawn into war by their agreement that Helen is worth fighting for, united—not by their attitudes toward one another but by their gaze toward, and eventual demonization of, Cressida. Appropriately, one central element in this scene is a hand property, Troilus' sleeve, which Cressida herself calls to Diomed's attention: “You look upon that sleeve” (69). And it is through the handling—both woman-handling and man-handling—of this property that Shakespeare's playtext signifies Cressida's double transgression and inscribes it on her body.⁵⁹ Not only does it become a shorthand representation of the sexual encounter which is not (and cannot) be represented, but it also signifies Cressida's attempt, and ensuing failure, to manipulate correctly an emblem of the male chivalric system. In some sense the un-“virtuous fight” between Cressida and Diomedes for the sleeve constitutes a quarrel over Troilus' ownership: it seems to be the worth of that object rather than the ownership of Cressida (which Diomedes assumes that he has) which attracts him. As one of several shifting signifiers of value, among them Cressida's glove and the armor with the putrified core (5.8.1-2), the sleeve—passed from one pair of male hands to another through Cressida—functions as an emblem of her exclusion from a system which reduces her worth to that of an object within male exchange. In the earlier wooing scene with Troilus, Cressida saw herself, in Dollimore's phrase, “not only as subordinate to maleness but also obscurely derivative of it.”⁶⁰ Now she becomes the means of authorizing maleness as well as of perpetuating male definitions of female faithlessness. Finally, the sleeve is redefined in the public realm as a mark that draws Troilus to Diomedes in the homosocial bonding of battle.

What this scene makes patently clear is that Cressida is read (or misread) as a split text. Her deeply specularized, even fetishized, body speaks against her voice, or for her lack of voice, much as though the several texts war with one another before being re-canonized, by the male gaze, to prove that woman's sexuality derives from and depends on its male use. At the last, Cressida herself acknowledges that division in terms of looking relations, and attributes it to a natural, universal flaw in gendered vision. In her soliloquy, Shakespeare's playtext once again takes a peculiarly contradictory turn toward her doubleness. On the one hand, by privileging Cressida's dramatic power, the soliloquy works to heal the split between body and voice; on the other, it erodes that power by confirming the proposition that oppression works best when it forces the oppressed to undermine themselves.

Especially striking here is the symmetry between this, Cressida's final appearance, and her first, both of which close on soliloquy. Indeed, the one seems designed to deconstruct the other:

Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee,
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
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.
Thersites. A proof of strength she could not publish more,
Unless she said “My mind is now turn'd whore.”

(106-13)

Compared to the earlier sonnet, this one is only half itself. Following a similar rhyme scheme, its language similarly emblematic, it pushes relentlessly toward resolution. Her vision split at first between a looking eye and an eye that sees “with the heart,” Cressida's parallax is corrected through a pun equating “eye” with “I” to rewrite Helena's “Love looks not with the eye, but with the mind” (MND, 1.1.234) as “The error of our eye directs our mind.” “Yet hold I off,” Cressida's earlier phrase, here comes full circle: what the playtext has suspended within a complexly textured web of looks becomes refocused in terms of the disempowered female gaze, as Cressida internalizes the male looking relations which construct her, appropriating them as her own. In this regard she represents a perfect figure not only for the female spectator's mixed sexual body as well as her split gaze but for a spectator of either gender whose ability as a “meaning-maker” is led by visual “error.”⁶¹ This is also precisely the point of her final statements, which turn to address the offstage audience and so reinscribe not just a single “eye” but the communal, doubly gendered regard of those whose minds have been swayed by this particular economy of looking relations. Yet Cressida's are not the last words in this strangely broken-backed sonnet. That privilege belongs to Thersites. By revoicing her statement in an additional summary couplet, he wrests away her “I” and, in recuperating sonnet discourse for males, finally fixes and publishes Cressida as everyone's master-piece.

Although each is entirely complicit with the terms of the Freudian joke, performance texts differ markedly in setting up Cressida's encounter with Diomedes. Iden Payne's 1936 staging positions the two on a centrally located round bench with Troilus and Ulysses downstage right and Thersites at stage left, kneeling behind a column. Cressida and Diomedes, then, are quite literally framed by male gazes; moreover, the strategy of separating those looks by the entire width of the stage enforces, for offstage spectators, the double perspective which the scene appears to resolve in Cressida's own split vision. Here, Cressida seems the aggressor. Laughing at Diomedes' whispers, she kisses him first, just as Troilus remarks, “She strokes his cheek!”, and then three times more: on Diomedes' “I do not like this fooling”; after her final “Good night”; and, finally, after “I prithee, come” (5.2.51; 101; 105). Because all the kisses mark physical advances by Cressida, she seems to be controlling her own seduction, even willing it on.⁶² Indeed the prompt copy, which clearly marks actors' pauses, reveals no hesitations in either her speech or gestures; rather, any delays that might belong to Cressida are appropriated and ascribed to Troilus, written into his reactions, which the performance text privileges.

By titling this scene “Betrayal,” even Glen Byam Shaw's 1954 prompt copy allies itself at the outset with Cressida's falseness. Although half as many kisses permit Cressida's lip to speak for her, their placement is carefully gauged. The first occurs almost as soon as Cressida enters, on “Hark, a word with you” (7), and seems to have little effect on Diomedes, for the choreography reveals that Cressida makes several further attempts to cling to a Diomedes who repeatedly thrusts her away, as though already tainted. The token she brings him, in fact, seems to be his objective, not Cressida, for once he actually has it in hand, his interest immediately shifts to thoughts of tomorrow's battle. Her second kiss, which precedes her “Well, well, 'tis done, 'tis past” (97), confirms her capitulation and accepts her “fate.” Since her final soliloquy is cut, as is much of the exchange between Troilus and Ulysses (but not Thersites' pointed comments), the performance text seems to assume that the gaze of offstage spectators needs no further “attest of eyes and ears” (121) and that onstage and offstage looks are equivalent. Even more significantly, by depriving Cressida of both her voice and the self-directed gaze which her soliloquy incorporates, Shaw's performance text reads Cressida's infidelity as a completely “natural” attribute.

The performance texts directed by both Hall-Barton (1960) and Barton-Kyle (1976) construct a more complex frame of looking relations. Each stages the encounter between Cressida and Diomedes as a circling dance, watched in the earlier version by upstage rather than downstage spectators and, in 1976, by a Troilus and Ulysses positioned in a down-right stage balcony while Thersites perches on an up-left stage balcony, a strategy that reproduces and exaggerates the triangulated structure of vision. Yet another choice further complicates these sightlines, for the production's open-platform set includes a seating space for the audience which encircles the entire upstage area. Placed among these additional onstage spectators, Thersites can seem, to audience members seated off the stage, to speak for those he sits among; and with Troilus and Ulysses closer to the offstage audience, the visual economy simulates a carefully arranged debate, its spectators already divided. And because Troilus and Ulysses stand in the same place where Cressida and Pandarus earlier watched the heroes' return, the Barton-Kyle Troilus and Cressida draws the two scenes together, calling attention to their rhymed—and regendered—looking relations. As he enters, Diomedes carries a large “Helen doll,” which he puts down midstage. At scene's end he retrieves it and slings it over his shoulder, a secondary, blatantly symbolic token, together with the sleeve, of his conquest, his use of women. When Diomedes exists, Troilus descends from the balcony to the main stage, as though he may be about to speak to Cressida, but her soliloquy stops him; he stands aside in the shadows to watch and listen. Her exit, in turn, is delayed until after Thersites' “Unless she say, ‘My mind is now turned whore’” (113), which her cackling laugh indicates she may hear and concur with—a strategy that works to pull the sonnet's two voices toward one another, condensing them into a single, foreclosed expression.

As in the 1960 version (as well as the earlier performance texts I describe), the encounter between Cressida and Diomedes echoes and inverts the patterns of Cressida's “virtuous fight” with herself and with Troilus (3.2). While the earlier scene signals her “holding off” in her attempts to break away from Troilus, performances of this scene rewrite her delaying tactics as teasing provocation, in which it is Diomedes who wishes to leave. What is most striking about the Barton-Kyle version, however, is that both the Troilus-Cressida and Cressida-Diomedes wooings are replayed, once again, after Cressida's exit. Just before the “war” with the sleeve, Troilus puts Cressida's glove on his right hand; as she leaves the stage, his first gesture is to strip it off and throw it down—“think this not Cressid” (132). Now he, like Cressida, is the object of the male gaze; and his “recordation … of every syllable” (115-16) also replays, with her glove, the pattern of advance and retreat just witnessed—taking it up, throwing it down, taking it up again and then finally dropping it as he leaves, abruptly, at Aeneas' entrance. When Ulysses descends from the balcony, he picks up the glove and smells it, only to discard it at center stage, where it remains throughout Thersites' commentary, until he retrieves it and fits it on his own right hand—a token of Cressida as “whore” and “commodious drab,” its power recommodified as “intelligence” destined for Patroclus' ears and hand (190-93).

If Barton-Kyle's Troilus and Cressida deprivileges as well as devalues Cressida by brutally reducing her to fetishized metonymy with the glove, it also makes explicit what the playtext remains somewhat indecisive about: that this is Troilus' tragedy. Certainly, in that Troilus' play with the glove suggests that Cressida, unlike her glove, cannot be so easily put on and taken off, the performance text re-privileges her meaning for him. Also, Ulysses' and Thersites' subsequent handling of the glove effectively protects Troilus to displace her final demonizing onto two voyeurs, parceling her out in a final exchange between the most admired Greek and the most scurrilous Trojan. Such a strategy exempts Troilus to resituate the debate over Cressida's worth in terms of what is done to her in his absence; indeed, this particular instance of manhandling replays her arrival in the Greek camp (4.5). By exposing her construction through a fetishized property, this performance text offers its (doubled) audience a further opportunity to judge the extent to which value lies in the eyes, or hands, of the beholder.

However cruelly reductive to Cressida, the Barton-Kyle Troilus and Cressida also makes a spectacle of the two voyeurs, framing one, Ulysses, through the other's gaze, as though organizing male desire into a (descending) hierarchy. Committed to a different mode of disclosure, Terry Hands's performance text allows for no such careful anatomizing of the male gaze. By positioning Troilus and Ulysses upstage left and Cressida and Diomedes downstage center, Hands's staging exploits the playtext's split between sight and sound to differentiate at first between two sets of looking relations. As the tug-of-war over a scarf (rather than the sleeve) develops, an audience hears and sees an angry exchange that, since it ends with Cressida lying on the ground and Diomedes standing over her, reads to the distant upstage figures as seduction and submission. As Cressida stands, brushing herself off, she again lashes out at Diomedes as he starts to leave: “One cannot speak a word / But it straight starts you”; his biting “I do not like this fooling” tops her accusation (100-01). Then both laugh, as though recognizing each other's “game,” which leads to a final reconciliation and to the promise of tomorrow's assignation. Rather than encompassing the exchange between Cressida and Diomedes within the structuring gazes of onstage spectators, Hands's staging privileges offstage spectators, inviting them to interrogate a double spectacle—those looked at as well as the lookers-on. But although this framing generates two potentially contradictory readings, Hands's representational choices ultimately flatten any possible ambiguities. Since offstage spectators see with unmediated clarity, Troilus' later refusal to believe that Cressida is neither “the real thing” nor herself invites, even enforces, his devaluation together with hers. At this and other moments of performance, Hands's own dis-illusionary eye seems to dominate the playtext's suggestions of multiple, overlapping layers of illusion, subsuming and absorbing all gazes into one.

Although Hands's performance text exaggerates its compass, such a powerfully panoptical male gaze certainly derives from, and is tied to, both textual authority and authoritative male interpretive strategies. Such strategies erect a standard against which to measure Davies' Troilus and Cressida, particularly its distinctly re-visionary moves. Not only does it reauthorize Cressida's history but it also dislocates the hegemony of the male gaze and thus renegotiates the exchange of spectatorly pleasure to accommodate another, less misogynous gaze at the heroine trapped within its visual economy. Certainly, up to the eavesdropping scene, Juliet Stevenson's performance had repeatedly undercut the possibility of defining Cressida as archetypally false by nature. Two scenes in particular contribute to reappropriating her “truth.” Wary and distrustful of Troilus as well as of herself in the wooing scene, hers was indeed a Cressida whose “fears have eyes” (3.2.66) and who, when later forced to leave Troy, seemed to watch her own betrayal from an immense distance (4.4). At this point, costume functions as an especially telling sign. With her hair down, and wearing a loose white nightgown, she is suddenly put on view to the eyes of Pandarus, Troilus, Aeneas, Paris, and finally, Diomedes; as Cressida leaves for the Greek camp, Troilus puts a dark grey military greatcoat over her shoulders. On the one hand, his gesture acknowledges and seeks to protect her extreme vulnerability; on the other, the image of Cressida literally bearing a man's enveloping coat on her back precisely registers both her possession and the anxious strategies through which the men attempt to mask their own potentially guilty desires. Later, shaken at first by what amounts to a gang rape of speaking looks in the Greek camp (4.5),⁶³ she uses her exchange with Menelaus to buy time, so that when Ulysses desires a kiss, she snaps out, “Why, beg [then]” (48), and points her finger to the ground, as though commanding a dog to beg for a bone. By turning his desiring look back on himself, subjecting Ulysses to her gaze, she not only undermines his famous condemnation of her body language as the scornful revenge of a publicly humiliated man but also exposes the male hypocrisy which drives literary tradition, Shakespeare's playtext, and its interpretive communities. But, however much Stevenson's performance may offer Cressida (as well as a woman spectator) a satisfying opportunity to work through her anger (an emotion traditionally disallowed and unacceptable for women) and turn to look at those who would oppress her with their gaze, because Cressida's final appearance offers a more limited range of representational options, it constitutes the test case for re-envisioning the economy of looking relations.

Davies' staging positions Troilus and Ulysses downstage right and Thersites downstage left, both in deep shadows—a strategy which surrounds the bodies of Cressida and Diomedes with the onlookers' disembodied voices and so privileges the offstage over the onstage gaze. Diomedes enters up center, under a staircase-balcony, and lights a cigarette in the gloom. Cressida now has her blonde hair braided to one side and wears a gypsy-ish skirt and blouse, a costume more physically revealing than any she has worn before, and one which marks her as a “Greekish” possession, captive in a strange land. Their rather strained encounter, in which a briskly impatient Diomedes seems less anxious to own Cressida than to settle a bargain, echoes the earlier wooing of Troilus and Cressida only in that it replays their movements up and down the centrally positioned staircase. But the differences in Cressida's changes of mood and the awkward angle of her body as she bends over Diomedes to stroke his cheek invite spectators to read both language and gesture as “untrue,” actions that a woman might play in order to ensure her own survival. As she takes back the sleeve-wrap she had given to Diomedes, for example, her “It is no matter” (87) seems designed to downplay its importance to her and to close off the exchange. For Stevenson's Cressida, Diomedes indeed seems to represent simply a “guardian” who may protect her from the other Greeks; it is that fear which animates her self-absorption and, later, the interior quarrel which structures her soliloquy. When she speaks “I prithee, come” (105), she shrinks back into the deep shadows of the upstage staircase, calling out “Troilus” in anguish; after hearing no answer, her “farewell” marks her quiet resignation (106), splitting gaze and self even before she articulates that separation further. To privilege her desperation and sense of self-loss, the performance text gives her a long exit, from the main stage up the curve of the staircase, “walking in,” this last time, alone.

Although positioning Cressida as the object of the male gaze remains “true” to Shakespeare's playtext, Davies' representational strategies also work to interrogate its predetermined looking relations and so exchange a visual for a verbal economy. For the (relative) darkness of the scene shifts focus from bodies to voices, with several telling effects, not the least of which emphasizes the narrative power of the three male onlookers' voices as well as their ability to control the meaning of the spectacle.⁶⁴ Further, just as neither onstage nor offstage spectators hear what Cressida whispers to Diomedes, her appeal to Troilus is met only by silence. Indeed, both Stevenson's performance and Davies' representational choices call attention to Troilus' lack of response and, beyond that, to his (chivalric?) loyalty, not to Cressida but to his fellow males. This strategy invites offstage spectators of either gender to turn their own gaze away from those of the (unseen) onstage spectators and to read in Cressida's final look—and its absent but (unknown to her) present subject, Troilus—a divided subject of their own fashioning. If the playtext's strategy depends on exploiting Cressida as subjected to the male gaze, Davies' decentering of that spectacle exposes how she is constructed by their looks and offers an alternative viewpoint. Moreover, it reveals Cressida as a special instance of what Dollimore calls “transgressive reinscription”:⁶⁵ positioned as marginal to the male system which oppresses her with its gaze, at the last she not only internalizes, and so validates, its looking relations but simultaneously demystifies their power to construct and fracture her identity.

“Shakespeare dislocated”; “Shakespeare, modern master”; “Out of place”; “RSC's crime in the Crimea”: these review titles attest to the wider implications of such demystification, its discomforting reception.⁶⁶ Citing “misinterpretation of Shakespeare's purpose,” John Barber comments that “in attributing these vices [strife, lechery, crime, rage, and lust] to the Victorians, [Davies] destroys that universality which belongs to a great myth and makes it hurt us where we live.”⁶⁷ Playing Troilus and Cressida as a piece of history threatens to destabilize myth, to exchange transcendental truths—“‘as false as Cressid’” and “‘as true as Troilus’” among them—for a more precisely politicized examination of specific social relations. Yet, while perceived as radically transgressive by some within the interpretive community, does not Davies' performance text simply take Troilus and Cressida further in the direction it was already going? In this regard, certainly the relation of present-day Britons to a legendary imperialist Victorian past rather precisely analogizes the relation of neo-chivalric Elizabethans to the heroic ideals of the ancient world—to its social text as well as to its texts. If as Elizabeth Freund writes, “Troilus and Cressida is all recognition scene, the recognition scene of Renaissance writing,” then indeed Davies' performance text constitutes, for late twentieth-century spectators, another kind of recognition scene, one that most particularly reveals how fictions of gender, the product of looking relations, have been, and continue to be, transcribed onto the bodies of real women—and men. And largely because it accords power to a woman's look and thus incorporates a critique of the male-dominated visual economy which positions Cressida as the object of the male joke, Davies' Troilus and Cressida not only makes it possible for a woman spectator to see more deeply into the joke but also to take pleasure in understanding how it works, even though it works against women.⁶⁸ Indeed, perhaps the most significant and potentially threatening move resulting from such a performance is to topple the inherited cultural capital of the joke itself. But then this particular joke, like many of Freud's, has gone on too long.

IV

The two scenes I have examined mark the beginning and ending of Cressida's speaking role but not the end of her role as a spoken entity. In the final sign of her presence Troilus tears up her letter, brought to him by Pandarus—“no matter from the heart”—and consigns it to the wind, there to “turn and change together” (5.4.108; 110). Splitting her once more into words and deeds, he refuses to give her a public reading. At the last, his construction of the female subject, assimilating her within a male system of desire and representation, overrides any potential deconstructive turn, including Stevenson's and Davies' as well as my own. Suppressing her voice, Troilus writes his own (invisible) letter on Cressida's body, positioning her as she is written, not as she writes.

But Shakespeare's playtext also offers a further instance of Cressida—that is, an instance which once again seems designed to fetishize her absent body, censor her voice, and enclose her within legendary writing. At the close Pandarus reappears, only to be summarily dismissed by Troilus, presumably because he associates Pandarus with Cressida. Yet it is Troilus, not he, who exits: Pandarus remains to speak, first in prose and then in verse—as it happens, in fourteen lines of rhyming couplets interrupted by an apostrophe to spectators, calling them “Good traders in the flesh” (5.10.46). Pandarus' epilogue is unique, especially in its turn toward offending rather than entreating an audience, but also because it represents a textual trouble spot, one that seems both unusually Elizabethan and unusually local in its references. I want to trouble it a bit further, give both its locality and its gender another look.

Certainly Pandarus functions here as a kind of surrogate for Cressida,⁶⁹ and at the linguistic level, his overcomplete sonnet, which obeys the same deviant rhyme scheme as Cressida's two earlier sonnets (the last incomplete), neatly supports such a relation between the two. Consider also the first four lines of his verse:

Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing
Till he hath lost his honey and his sting;
And being once subdu'd in armed tail,
Sweet honey and sweet notes together fail.

(5.10.41-45)

In these lines, sentiment as well as syntax ventriloquize—and regender—Cressida's earlier “That she was never yet that ever knew / Love got so sweet as when desire did sue” (1.2.295-96). A similar gender-bending of voices and bodies occurred as Cressida entered. Now, just as her apparent surrogate is about to exit, and just as the representation stands on its edge, Shakespeare's playtext repeats it. To what purpose? And to what purpose, also, are Pandarus' subsequent references to “brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,” to their weeping eyes, to his legacy of disease (5.10.49-57)? All these features have to do with Cressida—that is, with her future written history, beyond the playtext. Yet they are represented as being not-Cressida. Displaced onto Pandarus, they are done in a different, and differently gendered voice, which issues from a diseased male body. Together, such signs engender the potentially transgressive suggestion that at the close Shakespeare's playtext exchanges Pandarus for Cressida, turning him, not her, into Hélène Cixous' figure for the female body confiscated by male systems of representation: “the uncanny stranger on display—the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions.”⁷⁰ Such a move may not precisely reclaim either Cressida's body or the bodies of those women spectators seated in a public playhouse “full of secrete adulterie”⁷¹ (and, according to some, open to it) from being observed and written down by men. But it does at least locate the possibility of reclamation firmly within the fluid gender economy of a cultural institution that saw itself, in another famous, although perhaps equally false, written figure, as holding a mirror up to nature.

Notes

1. Quotations are from Kenneth Palmer's Arden edition of Troilus and Cressida (London, 1981).

2. Harry Berger, Jr. gives a neat summary in “Troilus and Cressida: The Observer as Basilisk,” Comparative Drama, 2 (1968), 130-31.

3. For Cressida's difficulty in understanding herself, see esp. 3.2.116-49.

4. Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton, 1974), p. 317.

5. Elizabeth Freund, “‘Ariachne's broken woof’: the rhetoric of citation in Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1985), p. 35. See also Linda Charnes, “So Unsecret to Ourselves': Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 40, No. 4 (Winter 1989), 413-40.

6. Palmer, e.g., consistently reads the social as the moral (Arden edition, pp. 38-93). See also, among others, Douglas Cole, “Myth and Anti-Myth: The Case of Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 30 (1980), 76-84. Even apologist readings such as Gayle Greene's position Cressida as an inevitable product of a morally degenerate world (“Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A Kind of Self,’” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn R. S. Lenz et al. [Urbana, Ill., 1980], pp. 133-49). In “The patriarchal bard: feminist criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure,” Kathleen McLuskie outlines an alternative project: “Feminist criticism need not restrict itself to privileging the woman's part or to special pleading on behalf of female characters. It can be equally well served by making a text reveal the conditions in which a particular ideology of femininity functions and by both revealing and subverting the hold which such an ideology has for readers both female and male” (in Political Shakespeare: New essays in cultural materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield [Manchester, Eng., 1985], p. 106).

7. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Brighton, Eng., 1984), esp. pp. 44-47.

8. Palmer conjectures that the first possible performances of Shakespeare's playtext might have occurred in late 1602 or early 1603, but this is conjecture only (Arden edition, pp. 17-18). Dryden's 1679 adaptation saw four productions in the first half of the eighteenth century; at the turn of the nineteenth century, John Philip Kemble prepared an edition that never reached the stage, and, by century's end, Troilus and Cressida had been performed in Munich. But the English-speaking stage history for Shakespeare's playtext begins, for all practical purposes, with a 1907 performance. Although William Poel revived it in 1913, it does not become regularly included in repertory seasons until after World War II. For a capsule stage history, see Kenneth Muir, Troilus and Cressida (Oxford, 1982), pp. 9-12. Joseph G. Price and Jeanne Newlin are in the process of preparing a full stage history.

9. For an argument legitimating theatrical performances as texts, see my The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History (Princeton, 1990). For the relation between social and theatrical meaning, see McLuskie, “The patriarchal bard,” p. 95; and Elin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory / Feminist Theory,” Drama Review, 32 (1988), 82-94.

10. See Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, and Theory (Chicago, 1984), esp. pp. 30-47.

11. In 2.2, the Trojan council scene. See also, however, the exchange between Paris and Diomedes concerning who “deserves fair Helen best” (4.1.52-79).

12. I draw here on Tania Modleski, “Rape vs. Mans/laughter: Blackmail,” in The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (London, 1988), esp. pp. 19-28.

13. For important distinctions between the homosocial and the homoerotic as well as a pertinent discussion of triangulated relationships, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), esp. pp. 1-27.

14. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975); rpt. in Feminism and Feminist Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York, 1988), p. 62. For the notion of the play as a male project, with women as its stagehands, see Naomi Scheman, “Missing Mothers / Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of Women,” Critical Inquiry, 15 (1988), 87.

15. Stephen Greenblatt's phrase, which concludes his “Invisible Bullets,” is “There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us.” See Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, 1988), p. 65.

16. For a summary of Peter Alexander's theory concerning Inns of Court performance, see Palmer, Arden edition, pp. 307-10. See also E.A.J. Honigman, “The Date and Revision of Troilus and Cressida,” in Textual Criticism and Interpretation, ed. Jerome McGann (Chicago, 1985), pp. 38-54; and Gary Taylor, “Troilus and Cressida: Bibliography, Performance, and Interpretation,” Shakespeare Studies, 15 (1982), 99-136.

17. Andrew Gurr reports that very few women—and those few were among the aristocratic and upper classes—were literate; even in London, few women could write their names. See Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), p. 55.

18. Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 57-58, 79.

19. Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 57-58; I reproduce Gurr's index listing under “women” in the alphabetical order he uses, primarily because it nicely mixes class hierarchies. See also Jean Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 440.

20. Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 92-94.

21. Thomas Randolph, The Muses' Looking Glass (1638), epilogue; reproduced in Gurr, Playgoing, p. 238.

22. Howard, “Crossdressing,” p. 440.

23. Dekker's epilogue is reproduced in Gurr, Playoing, p. 214. See also Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana, Ill., 1984), pp. 250-51; and Richard Levin, “Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audience,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 40, No. 2 (Summer 1989), 165-74.

24. Woodbridge, Women, pp. 250-51; Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 102-04.

25. Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios, N.S. 7 (1980), 51-74; and Howard, “Crossdressing,” esp. pp. 437-40.

26. Katherine Eisaman Maus, “Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender, and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama,” ELH, 54 (1987), 578. For the initial theoretical work on the gendered gaze, see Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure.” Further studies respond to, extend and/or qualify her formulations. See Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., 1984); Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, Ind., 1987); and Modleski, Women Who Knew Too Much. See also my “Kiss Me Deadly; or The Des/Demonized Spectacle,” in Othello: New Perspectives, ed. Virginia M. Vaughan and Kent Cartwright (Cranbury, N.J., 1990).

27. For the notion of citation, see Freund, “‘Ariachne's broken woof,’” p. 24.

28. I draw here on Peggy Phelan, “Feminist Theory, Postructuralism, and Performance,” Drama Review, 32 (1988), 111.

29. See Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), 27.

30. So, e.g., in the Pelican, Arden, and Oxford editions.

31. I use Folio's “that” and “contents” rather than Quarto's “then” and “content,” primarily because both point to Cressida's dilemma, not to her “content.” See Palmer, Arden edition, p. 119n. See also Gary Taylor's textual note in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1987), p. 427.

32. Helena, in All's Well That Ends Well, uses similar syntactic constructions in 4.4.21-25; within women's discourse, her expressions resemble Cressida's.

33. For a view of the blazons of sonnet discourse as a language which oppresses women, see Nancy Vickers, “‘The blazon of sweet beauty's best’: Shakespeare's Lucrece,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, pp. 95-115. For a fine reading of Cressida's first and last soliloquies as an especially intractable acting problem, see Lorraine Helms, “Playing the Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism and Shakespearean Performance,” Theatre Journal, 41 (1989), 190-200.

34. Prompt copy at The Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon. My thanks to Sylvia Morris for supplying me with photocopies of all prompt copies I cite and of pertinent reviews.

35. “Shakespeare at His Bitterest,” Morning Post, April 25, 1936. It was the “final proof,” according to Sidney Charteris, “that this Elizabethan business can be carried too far” (Birmingham Evening Dispatch, April 25, 1936).

36. “Trojans Clad as Elizabethans,” Birmingham Gazette, April 25, 1936.

37. Times [London], April 25, 1936; Birmingham Post, April 25, 1936. Most reviewers mention the lisp, a detail which links this Cressida to Hamlet's accusations against women: “You jig, you amble, and you lisp” (Hamlet, 3.1.144).

38. Prompt copy at The Shakespeare Centre Library.

39. W.A. Darlington, “Faithlessness in Women,” Daily Telegraph, July 16, 1954; Claude L. Westell, “Mustard Cressida,” Birmingham Mail, July 16, 1954.

40. Prompt copies at The Shakespeare Centre Library.

41. Bernard Levin, “If Shakespeare did suffer, then it was to good effect,” Daily Express, July 27, 1960.

42. The material printed in the souvenir program—Sonnet 129, an extract from Juvenal's Satire 2, a quote from Heine about seeing “Melpomene dancing the Cancan at a ball of grisettes”—makes this point of view blatantly obvious. Prompt copy at The Shakespeare Centre Library.

43. Michael Billington, “Trojan workhorses,” Guardian, July 9, 1981.

44. Michael Coveney, Financial Times, July 8, 1981.

45. Robert Cushman, “War Games,” Observer, July 12, 1981.

46. Phelan, “Feminist Theory,” pp. 124-25.

47. Darlington, “Faithlessness.”

48. I borrow the phrase from Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), esp. pp. 22-26.

49. Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 3.

50. Some of the results of this research are reproduced, in place of the usual series of quotations from Shakespeare and critical opinions, in the souvenir program. Prompt copy at The Shakespeare Centre Library.

51. For Stevenson's own account of her attempts to re-read other roles, see Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today, ed. Faith Evans (London: Women's Press, Ltd., 1988), esp. pp. 26, 28-29; 37-52; 97-121.

52. Irving Wardle, “Full attention on the lovers allows a brief glimpse of hope,” [London] Times, June 27, 1985.

53. In order, the comments are from Francis Barber, “Out of place,” Sunday Telegraph, June 30, 1985; John Barber, “Shakespeare dislocated,” Daily Telegraph, June 27, 1985; and Michael Coveney, Financial Times, June 27, 1985.

54. Janet Bergstrom, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour,” Camera Obscura, 3-4 (1979), 71-103; esp. 93.

55. “To-be-looked-at-ness” is Mulvey's phrase, “Visual Pleasure,” p. 62; for her restatement of Brecht's dictum, see the same essay.

56. Modleski, Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 25.

57. Cf. McLuskie, “The patriarchal bard,” p. 97, who in turn refers to Jonathan Culler's discussion of “Reading as a Woman” in Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 43-63, where he implies that positioning the reader as a woman is not only a matter of free choice but a coherent position that determines clear-cut readings.

58. Coppélia Kahn notes this feminizing tendency in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 131-32.

59. Only one other property, Desdemona's handkerchief, is so liberally handled, and so gendered and regendered with contradictory signs. See Lynda E. Boose, “Othello's Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,” English Literary Renaissance, 9 (1975), 360-74; and Karen Newman, “And wash the Ethiop white’: femininity and the monstrous in Othello,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York, 1987), pp. 143-62.

60. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, p. 48.

61. Annette Kuhn draws a useful distinction between spectator and audience by labeling the spectator a “meaning-maker,” one who is not only constructed by a text but is part of a larger context, the “social audience.” See “Women's Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory” (1984), rpt. in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London, 1987), pp. 18-28.

62. Editorial practice is willingly complicit with her seduction. A point of special interest occurs at 5.2.80-82 (Arden edition); Cressida is speaking of the sleeve she has just given to Diomedes: “And gives memorial dainty kisses to it, / As I kiss thee—Nay, do not snatch it from me: [Diomedes snatches the sleeve] / He that takes that doth take my heart withal.” Re-examining the status of speech prefixes, Taylor assigns to Diomedes the phrase, “As I kiss thee,” thus making Diomedes, not Cressida, the aggressor and changing considerably the performance options. For Taylor's note, see Wells and Taylor, William Shakespeare, p. 436.

63. David Burke, who played Hector, put it this way: “I'm not saying we could get Cressida down on the floor and rape her—that would be violating the text—but you can see brutal acts of lechery in the eye, in the manner. A look between two men can tell you as much if not more than a hand stuck up a dress” (quoted in a program note).

64. For this function of the voice-over in film, see Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), pp. 48-49; 130-33; 136-40. Admittedly, cinema intensifies the effect of such vocal control over and above that of theatrical representation.

65. Jonathan Dollimore, “Subjectivity, Sexuality and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection,” Renaissance Drama, N.S. 17 (1986), 57.

66. In order, the titles are from Daily Telegraph (June 27, 1985), Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday (all June 30, 1985).

67. John Barber, “Shakespeare dislocated,” Daily Telegraph, June 27, 1985.

68. See Modleski, pp. 25-26. Cf. McLuskie, “The patriarchal bard,” pp. 88-106.

69. Palmer, among others, notes their relationship, Arden edition, p. 303n.

70. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York, 1981), p. 250.

71. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1589), reproduced in Gurr, Playgoing, p. 207.