SOURCE: “‘Rule in Unity’ and Otherwise: Love and Sex in Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 139-58.

[In the following essay, O'Rourke proposes that with Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare gave us universal characters that we can recognize as cynical sexual clichés even as we sympathize with them as romantic lovers.]

Troilus and Cressida is not only a notoriously slippery play (comedy, tragedy, or history?) but one founded on a familiar contradiction. The play's relentless vulgarity constructs a scathing critique of the dominant forms of sexuality in Western culture, but at the same time the partners in its central romantic couple engage the sympathies of even the most sophisticated readers. When Cressida reflects sadly that “Men prize the thing ungained more than it is” (1.2.291),¹ and when Troilus wryly observes that Helen's reputation for beauty derives from the amount of blood shed over her (1.1.93-94), they appeal to our own knowingness about sexuality and expose the sexual clichés and conventions of their, and our, culture. But the complicity engendered by this shared knowledge has the paradoxical effect of making an audience identify with Troilus and/or Cressida as they reenact those conventions. Despite their worldly-wise cynicism, Troilus and Cressida, as they enter into the romantic partnership, idealize each other without reserve and without self-consciousness about the utter conventionality of their behavior. Critical commentary about the destruction of their relationship reveals the intensity with which readers habitually identify with the position of one or the other of these characters; expressions of sympathy for one character are almost always overshadowed by condemnation of the other.

Contemporary feminist readings, for example, which have justifiably redeemed Cressida from the censure of a patriarchal (though not always male) tradition of interpretation that took Ulysses' and Thersites' descriptions of her at face value have filled out the spectrum of amour-haine in the romantic couple as they have fingered Troilus as the primary culprit in Cressida's betrayal.² But while Cressida-bashers have had to ignore the play's representations of the historical forces that have denied women the ability to make meaningful choices about their own lives, anti-Troilus readers face the burden of disagreeing with Cressida herself, who never blames Troilus for her plight. Even after her removal to the Greek camp, she laments to Diomedes that Troilus “loved me better than you will” (5.2.92), a line that conveys both the pathos of her loss and her ability to continue to make subtle and accurate judgments in the treacherous terrain of sexuality. While feminist and cultural-materialist readings of the play have given an accurate portrait of woman in history as a potential subject reduced to the status of a commodity, the affective force of Troilus and Cressida cannot be recovered through an ego psychology of individual will and choice that suggests Cressida would be better off without such a lover as Troilus. A Lacanian sexuality of relations rather than of drives, in which desire fails because of its alienation from a third term—the Symbolic Order or Law of the Father—can go beyond analysis of Troilus and Cressida as individual characters and can help to define the structures of power and sexuality in what sometimes seems Shakespeare's most disorderly play. At the final level of determination, though, the vulgarity of Troilus and Cressida exceeds even Lacan's account of the psychic powers of representation and follows the more elemental logic of what Kristeva calls the semiotic order.

The play's systematic critique of sexuality in a patriarchal culture culminates in the image of a venereal disease that is transmitted from a Greek brothel to an English audience. This disease, called by “Mistress Thersites” (2.1.35) the “Neapolitan bone-ache” as he wishes it on “those that war for a placket” (2.3.18-21), is, in the legends of the Trojan War, attached to Cressida. In Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, published as a supplement to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Cresseid is afflicted with leprosy.³ Making Pandarus the communicator of Thersites' curse to the legendarily diseased Cresseid, Shakespeare treats Cresseid's leprosy as an obvious venereal image and the disease itself as a metaphor for Cressida's infamy. But by depicting Pandarus, and not Cressida, as both diseased and the source of disease, Shakespeare places the blame for the corruption of sexuality not on the woman but on the governing term of a patriarchal social order—the patriarch. The Law of the Father, as Lacan calls it, plays a range of roles as it regulates sexuality: it prohibits, as Calchas does when he is brought into the play to exceed the power of the conventional senex and to undo an already consummated union; it facilitates, as Pandarus does when he mediates between Troilus and Cressida; and it commodifies, as Pandarus does in his role as pimp. The legendary defamation of Cressida as a whore is a corrupted version of the metalepsis of Helen's idealization (“Helen must needs be fair, / When with your blood you daily paint her thus” [1.1.93-94]). Just as those who war for a woman will (as they do with Helen) blame the woman, those who drive women into prostitution will identify prostitutes as the source of disease (“gallèd g[ee]se of Winchester” [5.10.54]), when the real source is precisely the patriarchal sexual economy represented by Pandarus and the sexual practices it fosters. Shakespeare is presciently Blakean in his analysis of the sexual economy of London, characterizing prostitution both as a source of disease and as a dominant, not an aberrational, form of his culture's sexuality, and describing the violence in the oedipal triangle as coming from the side of the father and not from that of the son.⁴

The debased nature of this sexual economy shows itself in the interchangeability of the terms “whore” and “woman”. The term “whore” is never used in the play to describe women paid for sexual services but refers to those who have been forcibly transferred from one man to another (Helen [4.1.68] and Cressida [5.2.117]), and to Patroclus, a man who, for lack of “stomach to the war” (3.3.221), has been made a sort of woman, a “masculine whore” (5.1.17). The sexuality of the Greek army is so fully relational, rather than biological, that, in the absence of biological women, Patroclus and “Mistress Thersites” play the role of woman to the heroes Achilles and Ajax.⁵ The Hegelian master-slave dialectic that underlies Lacan's account of the negation of the woman in traditional heterosexuality perfectly describes the sexual behavior of the Greek heroes in Troilus and Cressida: their valor on the battlefield demonstrating that they prize honor above mere survival, Achilles and Ajax become masters and make others their slaves. In a sexual economy the names of master-slave roles are “men” and “women”, and the greatest prestige accrues to the “men” who can keep possession of the most, or the most valued, “women.” As Alexandre Kojève explains the activity of Hegelian masters in their pursuit of the specifically “human” value of prestige “It is human to desire what others desire because they desire it. Thus, an object perfectly useless from a biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy's flag) can be desired because it is the object of others' desires.”⁶ The complete irrelevance of the actual object being fought for is shown in Shakespeare's declension of the role of the femme fatale from Helen to Cressida to Thersites, as even Thersites' defection from Ajax' tent can serve as the occasion for the emulous rivalry of Achilles and Ajax. But even before Achilles “inveigle[s] his fool” (2.3.90) from Ajax, Thersites shows why the heroic identity is so endangered by what it claims to dominate.

The imagery of Patroclus' confession of “little stomach to the war” is foreshadowed in the quarrel between Ajax and Thersites; when Ajax claims the privilege of the master to beat his slave, Thersites threatens to “tell what thou art by inches, thou thing of no bowels” (2.1.49-50). Since Ajax beats him anyway, Thersites tells Achilles what Ajax is “by inches,” tells him that Ajax “wears his wit in his belly” and “Has not so much wit … As will stop the eye of Helen's needle” (ll. 74-81). Thersites thus demolishes the legend of Ajax, of whom Peele says in “The Tale of Troy” that “the stomacke of the man was great.”⁷ The slave, the subject reduced to an object, has the power of the fool (who can tell the demystifying truth about heroic ideology), and, as a sexual slave, Thersites can demystify Ajax in a particularly graphic and literal manner. Thersites' relation to Ajax is the classic Hegelian master-slave relation as it has been demystified by Lacan; the master claims prestige, but it is the repressed term, the Other, that carries the truth. Thersites' analogue in the Greek camp is Cassandra; while he curses those who “war for a placket,” she tells her brothers that “Our firebrand brother, Paris, burns us all” (2.2.110). Cassandra is first spoken of in the play as the exemplar of “wit” as Helen is the pattern of beauty (1.1.43-49), but once Shakespeare equates the woman and the fool, Cassandra's prophecy is characterized as madness by Troilus (2.2.98) and as “divination” by Hector (l. 114); either way, it is outside the Symbolic Order and does not count. Cassandra, who tells the truth to which no one will listen, exemplifies the Lacanian Other, the site of a truth that could be liberating but that never will be heeded.

That this war is about male identity, and that male identity is cross-cultural and sexually based, is demonstrated by the ease with which Greek metaphors travel across to Troy. Achilles closes the scene in which Thersites derides Ajax' “bowels” and “belly” by describing Hector's challenge to “some knight … / That hath a stomach” (2.1.124-25); Hector begins the next scene by comparing himself to a “lady of more softer bowels” as he argues to “Let Helen go” (2.2.11, 17). Hector's sensible computation of the cost of keeping Helen is an ironic reversal of the terms of the challenge he has just sent to the Greek camp, and it is Troilus' invocation of the terms of that challenge, the equation of “Manhood and honor” (l. 47), that will eventually prevail. While the Trojan council scene shows the sons of Priam behaving in a more civilized manner than do the contentious Greek warriors, both societies are in the state of transition described by Freud in Totem and Taboo; the father-figure no longer dominates and controls, and as Priam's sons debate an offer sent to Priam, the younger males are now negotiating their own rights in the context of a war over the possession of the exemplary woman.⁸ Troilus insists that his motivation is not in fact sexual, that it is “glory that we more affected / Than the performance of our heaving spleens” (ll. 195-96), but the imagery of this scene carries a graphic double-entendre as it purportedly serves the theme of glory. Hector introduces the suggestive imagery with his declaration that,

Though no man lesser fears the Greeks than I
As far as toucheth my particular, …
There is no lady of more softer bowels,
More spongy to suck in the sense of fear …
Than Hector is. …

(2.2.8-14)

Troilus continues it with his protest that “For my private part, / I am no more touched than all Priam's sons” (ll. 125-26). Priam's charge that Paris has the “honey” and the rest the “gall” (l. 144) brings a response from Paris that, within this field of imagery, cannot help but suggest, for just a moment, that he is about to propose sharing Helen with his brothers: “I propose not merely to myself / The pleasures such a beauty brings with it” (ll. 146-47). In the slightly less civilized Greek camp, such “sharing” nearly happens to Cressida. All that Paris actually proposes to share, though, is the fame of keeping Helen, and this is the argument that carries the day with Troilus, who proclaims her “a theme of honor and renown” (l. 199), and imagines that, in defending her, “fame in time to come [will] canonize us” (l. 202). The imagery of the scene suggests the complementariness of their fame in sexual terms; Trojan fame will be measured by this “pearl … inestimable,” whom “The world's large spaces cannot parallel” (ll. 81, 88, 162). The thematic convergence of Helen and honor—in Troilus' “Will you … buckle in a waist most fathomless / With … fears and reasons?” (ll. 28-32)—allows the image of a “waist most fathomless” to float free of its tenor as Priam's honor and join its depth imagery to the “lady of more softer bowels” in the figure of the immeasurable Helen. In the sexual imagery of this war, Helen has not a tiny-eyed needle but a spongy, fathomless space, and Trojan honor will be recorded as the manhood commensurate with its depth.

The spurious autonomy of the penis as the phallus and the dependence of male identity on the woman it negates are the primary themes of Lacan's sexualizing of the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave. Although Hegel calls the relation between master and slave dialectical, and Lacan posits the “mirror stage” as the originary identification of the self through its consolidating reflection in the imago of the human form,⁹ neither Lacan nor Hegel imagines a dyadic identity as more genuine than the identity imposed by a cultural order; Hegel's teleology of the state and Lacan's omnipresence of the Symbolic Order make the Aristophanic myth of perfect complementariness sheer fantasy. Lacan never even describes the mother performing the function of the mirror for the infant, and in fact seems to suggest that it is the father who will be the primary pattern of identification for “the ego,” which is formed as a competitive, mimetic entity; the triad of ego/others/objects teaches the ego to imitate the desires of others and to compete with them for the objects of their desires.¹⁰ Lacan thus grounds the Hegelian competition among masters in a phase of psychic development, as the subject learns to place a higher value on immaterial than on material satisfactions in the emergence of the gap between need and demand—the gap in which “desire” emerges. Lacan's assumption that the father's image will set the pattern of imitation for the ego raises obvious questions about the relation of women to “the ego.” Kristeva has come closest, among Lacanian analysts, to entertaining the Aristophanic myth of the romantic couple as a form of identity, describing “the object of love [as] a metaphor for the subject—its constitutive metaphor, its ‘unary feature.’”¹¹ Kristeva stresses, however, that this identification is liminal, an “idealization on the edge of primal repression,”¹² hovering between fragmentation and the Symbolic code; Troilus and Cressida will chart both the formation and the collapse of this idealization in the character of Troilus.

Shakespeare goes even further than Lacan or Kristeva in coupling the mirror imagery familiar in Lacanian analysis with imagery that, given the sexual charge of this play, suggests the imaginary grounding of male identity in the act of sexual intercourse. This conjunction of sexual and specular imagery is most fully developed in a conversation between Ulysses and Achilles that is pervaded by mirror imagery. Achilles is meant, in Ulysses' plot, to discover that “Pride hath no other glass / To show itself but pride” (3.3.47-48), and Achilles quickly discovers in the disdain of Agamemnon, Ajax, and Menelaus that “What the declined is / He shall … soon read in the eyes of others” (ll. 76-77). Ulysses comes to explain the point to him and cites a “strange fellow” (who may be Plato)¹³ who writes that “man, how dearly ever parted, … feels not what he owes, but by reflection” (ll. 96-100). Except for the potential phallicism of being “dearly … parted,” Ulysses here remains within the dominant specular imagery of the scene, but then he adds, “As when his virtues, shining upon others, / Heat them, and they retort that heat again / To the first giver” (ll. 101-3). Achilles claims to know and understand the point and reiterates it with more mirror imagery: “The beauty that is borne here in the face … commends itself / To others' eyes” until, “eye to eye opposed,” it is “mirrored there / Where it may see itself” (ll. 104-12).¹⁴ Ulysses responds that Achilles has missed the most important part of the argument and repeats the imagery of parts and heat, explaining that

… no man is the lord of anything …
Till he communicate his parts to others;
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught
Till he behold them formed in the applause
Where they're extended; who, like an arch, reverb'rate
The voice again, or, like a gate of steel
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
His figure and his heat.

(ll. 116-24)

The imagery of sexual intercourse is vivid, with extended parts entering a gate that responds to its own penetration, and the consummation of the sexual act is described as the final achievement of a male identity that is equated with mastery.

Lacan's interest in taking the psychoanalytic treatment of sexuality away from the “drive” follows the Hegelian course of distinguishing the specifically human desire for prestige from the merely biological satisfaction of the drive. These terms are difficult to disentangle in Troilus and Cressida, however; when Pandarus warns Troilus that he “must be witty” (3.2.30) when Cressida arrives, his surface meaning is that Troilus must retain his ability to speak in a properly courtly fashion. But the sexual imagery that Thersites attaches to “wit” in his quarrel with Ajax gives this line a subtext of performance anxiety, which is then developed in the possibility that lovers might “have the voice of lions and the act of hares,” since “desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (ll. 87, 81-82). It would be a mistake, though, to return to a pre-Lacanian, “Freudian” mode of reading and characterize these lines as only a euphemism for sexual performance anxiety. Desire is “boundless” because there is far more at stake in sexuality than biological pleasure. While Troilus' doubt that “constancy … could be in a woman” (ll. 157-60) has been adduced as a sign of a misogyny that distrusts Cressida and all women, the symmetry should be noted between his fears and Cressida's (“They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform” [ll. 83-85]) as they enter into the romantic couple. The primary signification of these fears is not a hostility toward the opposite sex but the stakes of the game when the desired object (Lacan's objet petit a) is raised to the level of the Other, the reflective surface of one's own sense of identity and worth. Kristeva's ability to imagine the couple as in itself a “utopic wager”¹⁵ short-circuits the competitive triangles of ego/others/objects of Hegel and Lacan as the means of achieving such identity. Kristeva asks,

If desire is fickle, thirsting for novelty, unstable by definition, what is it that leads love to dream of an eternal couple? Why faithfulness, the wish for a durable harmony, why in short a marriage of love—not as necessity in a given society but as desire, as libidinal necessity?¹⁶

It has often been noticed that there is no mention of marriage between Troilus and Cressida, but this omission should not be referred to a realistic economy of representation, where it can serve as a source of suspicion about the character of Troilus; the text does not support such a suspicion. The absence of a public contract suggests, rather, the romantic wager that the couple could sustain itself without the support of the Symbolic Order that is in fact hostile to it. Kristeva's answer to the question “why the couple?” is that, even after technological advances

render the eternal couple socially and scientifically useless, and do the same for marriage as a social necessity that insured optimal conditions for the reproduction of the species … the faithful couple that the law used to wish for remains for many a therapeutic erotic necessity in the face of the loss of identity caused by the open multiplicity of pleasures and jouissances. … [T]he couple is a durable mirror … binding in self-esteem [amour-haine] partners who are tied to such and such a partial object furnished by the other. …¹⁷

For Hegel, the desire for prestige, or recognition by the Other, is the mainspring of the specifically human dialectic of desire, and the triangular relation of competition for the desired objects of others creates that recognition as the winners prove their ability to force others to recognize their claims. But if, as Kojève recognizes in unpacking Hegel, “to desire a Desire is to want to substitute oneself for the value desired by this Desire,”¹⁸ why can't that recognition be given directly and self-esteem be achieved in a dyadic mirroring? The war over Helen is driven by a desire for recognition by an imaginary third term, called “fame” by Troilus; thus, Paris can ask Diomedes, “Who, in your thoughts, merits fair Helen most, / Myself or Menelaus?” (4.1.55-56). Achilles extends protection to Thersites because Thersites' primary value to Achilles is as a marker to others of Achilles' ability to defend such a possession; it is their opinion that proves Achilles' worth. The question remains of whether the relation between Troilus and Cressida is fundamentally different from the relations between Paris and Helen and between Achilles and Thersites.

The first place to look for an answer to this question is in the imagery of power in the courtship scene of Troilus and Cressida. Mihoko Suzuki believes that Troilus' initial fear of losing “distinction” as he distrusts his “watery palate” (3.2.26, 20) means that “he does not see Cressida as a partner but as a vehicle for sexual experience that he simultaneously desires and fears.”¹⁹ While Suzuki is right to connect this fear of losing “distinction” with the terms in which male identity is defined in Troilus and Cressida, her not/but construction is a crucial oversimplification. “Distinction” and “palate” were the metaphors used by Agamemnon and Nestor earlier in the play to describe the trial of merit. Agamemnon proposed that “Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan, / Puffing at all, winnows the light away, / And what hath mass or matter by itself / Lies rich in virtue and unminglèd” (1.3.27-30), while Nestor argued that the Greek response to Hector's challenge is important because “in this trial much opinion dwells, / For here the Trojans taste our dear'st repute / With their fin'st palate” (ll. 336-38). Thus Troilus' fear that “Death,” or “some joy too fine, / Too subtle-potent” (3.2.21-23), will result from his first sexual encounter with Cressida derives from his anxiety over whether he can live up to the hyperbolic male identity that he championed in the argument over whether to continue the war for Helen. But the progress of the scene does not continue to cast him as a warrior. He eventually declares himself “simpler than the infancy of truth” (l. 169) in a metaphor of submission in which a chain of confessions of lack of power culminates. Despite Pandarus' exhortation that “You must be witty now,” he feels himself, in anticipation of Cressida's entrance, “Like vassalage at unawares encount'ring / The eye of majesty” (ll. 37-38), and his immediate response to her appearance is a loss of his talent for Petrarchan wit: he tells her, “You have bereft me of all words, lady” (l. 54).

Anything can be made subject to suspicion of insincerity; Troilus' eloquence in other parts of the play has been used to argue that his interest is more in language than it is in Cressida,²⁰ and his silence here can be used to claim, as Cressida herself does, that he is employing “Cunning in dumbness” (l. 131) to draw her out. But Troilus' image of the vassal awed by the unexpected sight of a king marks him as more simple than Aeneas, whose self-conscious politesse reflects his awareness that the “high and mighty” Agamemnon will look just like other mortals and that he himself will have to put on a properly reverent face in order to observe the protocol for addressing a king (1.3.227-32). When Troilus assures Cressida that his will be “Few words to fair faith” (3.2.94) and that he will not be like “all lovers” who “swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability”—i.e., fidelity—“that they never perform,” he uses a metaphor from the courtly love tradition that casts her as his sovereign: “Praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove; our head shall go bare till merit crown it” (ll. 89-91). The consequences of this metaphor will be mixed; at least at the level of intention, though, it describes the “therapeutic erotic necessity” of the couple from the male perspective. Hegel describes the inadequacy of the satisfactions belonging to the position of the master; having won the struggle for prestige by making the Other his slave, the master discovers that when “he [i.e., his value] is recognized by someone whom he does not recognize,” this “is a recognition without value for him. For he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him.”²¹ A similar paradox can be described in gender terms. In Lacan's account of the primal triangle, the male baby initially sees the mother as having the phallus, since she is the source of the satisfaction of his needs. He learns, however, that he will have to give up the body of the mother in order to acquire the phallus from the father; this is his entry into the world of the fathers, the patriarchal Symbolic Order in which he has a place. Lacan's insistence that there is nothing but madness outside the Symbolic Order leads him to overlook the deduction that Kristeva (and Shakespeare's “strange fellow”) makes about the couple: that in order to recover the pleasure that was deferred when the male infant forsook the body of the mother, he will have to return the phallus to the woman, so that she “tastes” him with the palate of her opinion. In order to obtain the pleasure of being the desired of the Other, he will have to grant her the power of recognizing or not recognizing his claim to a male identity, that is, his ability to provide a satisfying phallus.

Even this account of the libidinal value of the couple from the male perspective puts the woman in an ambiguous position in relation to an idealizing, courtly lover like Troilus. Can he really love her, or is the woman inevitably obliterated as she serves as the vehicle for his consummation of his own desire? Lacan derides the premises of courtly love, seeing its conventions as an “elegant” representation of the fact that the woman is merely the man's means of consummation with the Symbolic Order and declaring that chivalry “is always the discourse of the master,” where the “lady was entirely, in the most servile sense of the term, his female subject.”²² But the literary record is not so unequivocal. Even one of the most misogynistic texts of the courtly love tradition, Capellanus's Art of Courtly Love, which shares with its predecessor, Ovid's Art of Love, a tolerance, under certain conditions, for rape, records a number of decisions of medieval courts of love which emphasize the importance of a woman's independent will and choice. Repeatedly, complicated cases in which knights assert claims based on a protocol or a promise made by a woman are settled by this precept: “The resolution of the immediate question depends more on the will or desire [arbitrio vel voluntate] of the woman than on an understanding of precept of law or special command of love.” In such cases it is left to the woman to decide how she is moved by the “impulse to love [spiritus movetur amandi].”²³

The reliability of Capellanus's text as historical document is problematic; it has been argued that the courts of love never existed, and that adultery could not possibly have been widely practiced in the tightly regulated sexual climate of medieval Europe. De Rougemont cites René Nelli's thesis that, in a society where marriages were contracted not out of love but from “material and social considerations … imposed on the parties regardless of their feelings,” the literature of courtly love, as it idealized adultery, offered to women “a spiritual antipode to marriage, a state into which they had been forced.”²⁴ This would cast the Provençal lays as the medieval analogue to the romance novels sold on supermarket paperback racks today and would suggest the persistence of the Lacanian principle that, in a culture whose sexuality is structured around men's pleasure, women will uphold their jouissance “elsewhere,” in a supplementary (not a complementary) jouissance that exists “beyond the phallus” and outside the law.²⁵ As Shakespeare exploits the medieval tradition of anachronistic revision of classical legends, he uses the resources of the literature of courtly love to create a highly sophisticated sexual psychology in his characters.

Cressida's first soliloquy shows that she fully understands the power of a woman's subjectivity in the realm of sexuality. She alludes to the possibility of being reduced to something subhuman, a “thing,” and counsels that the only way to avoid such debasement is to “hold … off” (1.2.288-89). A woman who convinces men that her desire is difficult to attain thereby enhances its value; the recognition she finally confers gains in value directly in relation to the difficulty of its attainment. A woman who shows her desire too openly, on the other hand, does more than lower her own worth; she positively inspires male paranoia. In one of the most misogynistic passages in The Art of Courtly Love, Capellanus warns his young friend Walter against women who “grant favours readily,” in a passage that shows why Cressida is initially so wary of sexuality and why she is ultimately defamed anyway:

A woman of this type cannot unite herself to anyone with bonds of love because of her excessive sexual appetite; she seeks satiety through the lust of many. So in vain do you seek her love, unless you regard yourself as so virile in sexual matters that you can satiate her lust. But this would be more difficult than draining the seas completely of their waters. … Though you can obtain your will and win her embraces to the full, the consolations she offers will be the occasion of intolerable pain and the source of abundant griefs to you … [w]hen … you come to realise that she is lending herself to another's lust.²⁶

If a woman's desire is independent of male inspiration, there's no telling where it might go, or what it might say; as Thersites' description of Ajax to Achilles shows, the woman's potential sexual mobility can threaten the very basis of male sexual identity. The reaction to this threat is the representation of the woman as promiscuous, a “whore.”

While the courtship scene between Troilus and Cressida addresses the doubts of each about the other sex, Cressida displays a good deal more apprehension over the dangers of romantic idealization; she speaks in a vocabulary of fear and Troilus in a vocabulary of hope. Having confessed her desire, Cressida worries that he will “play the tyrant” (3.2.118) and she the “fool” (l. 149); Troilus hopes that “constancy … could be in a woman,” so that (in elegantly sexual imagery) his own “integrity and truth” might be “affronted” by hers, and he could be “then uplifted” (ll. 157-67). The parrying and testing is inconclusive for most of the scene, as she threatens once to leave (l. 138), loses her composure at two other points (ll. 123, 149), and finally draws him out to her own satisfaction. Her assent to his suit is not final until the following exchange:

Troilus
          … I am as true as truth's simplicity,
          And simpler than the infancy of truth.
Cressida
          In that I'll war with you.
Troilus                                                             O virtuous fight,
          When right with right wars who shall be most right!

(3.2.168-71)

The dramatic hinge of the scene is Cressida's line in that exchange; nothing is settled between them until she casts their relation as an inversion of the Hegelian struggle for mastery. As he adopts her metaphor, their vows to provide faithful service to the other cast each of them in the position of vying not for the position of master but that of servant.

This seeming mutuality is not symmetrical, however, as the terms of their succeeding vows show. Just as Troilus believed that fame would canonize his manhood if he stood by his honor and fought for Helen, so now he imagines that fame, through the agency of “True swains in love … in the world to come” (l. 172), will celebrate his fidelity to Cressida. Cressida imagines no such thing; her negative vows (“If I be false or swerve a hair from truth …” [ll. 183-95]) show that the most she can imagine asking from fame is anonymity. In Lacanian terms, what Troilus imagines is a positive evaluation by the Symbolic Order, an expectation that is the glue of social cohesion. The Troilus who is simple enough to believe his own metaphor about the vassal awed by the sight of a king truly believes in the premises of Ulysses' degree speech (which is probably more than Ulysses does)—i.e., that our earthly arrangements can and should reflect a cosmic order. To anchor this cosmology of an immanent natural order, both he and Ulysses imagine the earth as the center of the universe (1.3.85; 3.2.178). Cressida knows that her only place in such an order is not a happy one; when a simple mutuality of desire is alienated to the judgment of a totalizing authority, women lose their identities as they become the “things” men use to demonstrate mastery and achieve priority within the Symbolic Order. There is a fundamental incompatibility between the fame Troilus hopes to win by warring over Helen and the satisfaction Cressida can offer. Although Troilus describes Helen as a “pearl,” he knows that her value is entirely a construct and that it is only the war itself that paints her as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’; in herself she's like any other “thing” in the Symbolic Order: “[n]aught but as 'tis valued” (2.2.52). In order to get satisfaction from Cressida, however, he needs to believe in her intrinsic value if her opinion of him is to satisfy his need for self-esteem.

The Symbolic Order that has brought about this war is, in linguistic terms, a metaphoric order of substitution in which Cressida stands for Helen and Helen for an abstraction. The romantic narrative that has joined Troilus and Cressida depends upon a metonymic (or Lacanian imaginary) order in which Cressida is simply herself. The shadow of the Symbolic is cast over the lovers by the omnipresence of Pandarus; Cressida's eventual willingness to set aside her fears of sexual exploitation derives from her belief that Pandarus is her ally and that what he represents as the guarantor of their vows could actually be friendly to her desire. Even this most benign form of the paternal metaphor will, however, betray her. The genius of the absolute distinction made in the courtly love tradition between love and marriage, and the insistence in that tradition on the complete secrecy of the true love bond,²⁷ is in the understanding that these practices manifest of the fundamental incompatibility of the binary (Lacanian imaginary) and triangular (Lacanian symbolic) structures of desire. There is nothing in the dyadic relation to satisfy a third term, be that a third person or the entire social order. Pandarus' voyeuristic pleasure in the courtship scene is often remarked upon, but in this he is like Juliet's Nurse in her vicarious enjoyment of Juliet's sexual prospects. When Juliet insists that she will have only Romeo, and the Nurse relishes the prospect of Paris, Juliet discovers that she must act alone. Those who insist on finding an identity within the couple will find no real support anywhere outside the couple. The Symbolic Order will seem to support, and even to legislate, monogamy as a means of its own reproduction, but it does so only by channelling desire into an idealization that, working metaphorically, turns the other (objet petit a) into one's marker of prestige within the Symbolic Order. When this function is at its peak, all men will fight to the death for ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. Pandarus' character is the mediating function of the paternal metaphor that has at one side the seeming affection of Juliet's Nurse and at the other old Capulet turning on his own daughter and telling her that she is nothing but his property. Pandarus' curse on Cressida, “Would thou hadst ne'er been born! I knew thou wouldst be his death” (4.2.86-87), illustrates that Capulet's actions were not the idiosyncrasies of a single, crotchety old man. They were an illustration of the fact, reinforced in the character of Pandarus, that a patriarchy does not really care about its daughters.²⁸

Pandarus' betrayal of Cressida at the end of 4.2 is all the more painful because of her continuing trust in him. I do not consider the bantering just after Pandarus' entry in 4.2 to be nearly as hostile to Cressida as some other readers have found it. Pandarus' jokes about her sexual experience (“Has't not slept tonight? Would he not—a naughty man—let it sleep?” [ll. 33-34]) are the Nurse's jokes (“… for the next night, I warrant, / The County Paris hath set up his rest / That you shall rest but little” [Romeo and Juliet, 4.5.5-7]), and Cressida's “Would he were knocked i' the head!” (l. 35) is not unlike her behavior towards him in 1.2. As for Troilus' behavior in this scene, René Girard has declared that his lines “O Cressida! But that the busy day, / Waked by the lark, hath roused the ribald crows, / And dreaming night will hide our joys no longer, / I would not from thee” (ll. 9-12) manifest such an obvious “highly artificial lyricism” that he “cannot be sincere.”²⁹ To refer once more to Romeo and Juliet, this is Romeo's morning-after metaphor:

It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

(3.5.6-10)

Lyricism is no proof of insincerity. Both Troilus and Cressida continue to try to maintain the secrecy of their love, as far as it can now be protected (4.2.41-42 and 73), and the difference in their responses to the news that they are to be forcibly separated can be traced to their differing beliefs in the existence of a governing natural order. The irony of Paris saying “I know what 'tis to love; / And would, as I shall pity, I could help” (4.3.10-11) is too obvious to be missed, but Troilus does miss it and identifies the agent of their separation as some omnipotent cosmic force, “the gods” (4.4.25) or “Time” (l. 42). From within his belief that the political system in which he lives is beyond question, Troilus can imagine no better response to the forced removal of Cressida than to continue to perform his knightly duty and risk his life in order still to see her. He “will throw [his] glove to Death himself” and “corrupt the Grecian sentinels, / To give thee nightly visitation” (4.4.63, 72-73), in contrast to Chaucer's Troilus, who thought of disguising himself as a pilgrim in order to sneak into the Greek camp but decided that it was too risky.³⁰

The intensity of Cressida's response tells a different story. To Pandarus' admonition to “be moderate,” she responds,

Why tell you me of moderation?
The grief is fine, full, perfect, that I taste,
And violenteth in a sense as strong
As that which causeth it. How can I moderate it?
If I could temporize with my affection,
Or brew it to a weak and colder palate,
The like allayment could I give my grief.
My love admits no qualifying dross;
No more my grief, in such a precious loss.

(4.4.2-10)

Unlike Troilus, who worried about the adequacy of his palate in relation to an ideal norm, Cressida takes the appetite metaphor that stands as an alternative cosmic order in this play (imaged as “appetite, an universal wolf” [1.3.121] just as Time is pictured as a devourer [3.3.146-51]) and turns it within—she now tastes herself—and joins that imagery to the narcissistic masochism of the male lover in the Petrarchan tradition³¹ to create a subjectivity unsecured by any promises or patterns in any symbolic order. The primary modern theorist of such a subject is Kristeva, who writes of the “pangs and delights of masochism” as the lot of the “abject,” the subject who has discovered that “all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being,” and so experiences even its “own body and ego as the most precious non-objects; they are no longer seen in their own right but forfeited, abject.”³² Shakespeare's Cressida, motherless and abandoned by her father, believes for one moment that she can build “a life” (4.2.23) on one object of desire, one objet petit a, only to find that not only that object but her own body can be forfeited by an inexplicable law that demands everything and offers nothing in return.

Cressida's greatest terror in the scene of her parting from Troilus is that she could be betrayed from within the couple. Her response to his repeated exhortations to “be true” is “You love me not” (4.4.82), because his doubt suggests that the mirror effect was a mirage. She feels that her “love / Is as the very center of the earth” (4.2.104-5), and if he does not know this core of her being, then what is he in love with? Lacan argues that the mirror effect is always a mirage, that “When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—You never look at me from the place from which I see you,”³³ because there is no real center of one's being. The self that is projected into the romantic relation is an ideal I, an inevitable metaphor, whose function is to convince the other that I am worthy of love, while the objet petit a, who is, for the real, temporal self the cathexis of an already formed desire, is idealized into the cause of desire. The complementary subjects of a romantic mirroring are not the historical or “imaginary” selves (identical terms for Lacan) but idealizations that have been formed not from within but as patterns given by the Symbolic Order. As Pandarus sells Troilus to Cressida and Cressida to Troilus, he tells her that Troilus is like Hector (only better), and Troilus that she is like Helen (only better).

Shakespeare intensifies the pathos of the breakdown of the romantic construct by maintaining the sincere attachment of his characters to its terms. There is a perfect continuity from Troilus' entrance in the courtship scene “like vassalage at unawares encount'ring / The eye of majesty” through his culminating definition of himself in that scene as “simpler than the infancy of truth” to his final vow to Cressida that “The moral of my wit / Is ‘plain and true’; there's all the reach of it” (4.4.107-8). In the realistic economy of the play, the simplicity of his character is brought out in the contrast between him and Diomedes. Troilus behaves courteously to Diomedes, and expects to be treated courteously; Diomedes, who has already engaged Aeneas in a round of ceremonious hostility, sees such ceremony as only a veil for a more brutal reality. The difference between them is emphasized by the later comments of Ulysses, who ratifies Troilus' depiction of himself as “firm of word, / Speaking in deeds and deedless in his tongue” (4.5.98-99), and of Thersites, who describes Diomedes as the exemplar of the “all lovers” Cressida fears, those who “promise … like Brabbler the hound, but when he performs, astronomers foretell it; it is prodigious” (5.1.92-94). It is Cressida's sensitivity to this difference that leads her to conclude that Troilus loved her better than Diomedes will. But in the mimetic geometry of the play, Troilus sets the pattern for imitation by Diomedes when he, in effect, tells Diomedes that he is Cressida's lover and casts her as a transcendent object of desire. The difficulty of assessing the nature of the romantic bond can be located in this moment of transition as Troilus praises Cressida to Diomedes: is this a sign of the intensity of his love, or is it a violation of the code of secrecy (which would be the only true marker of a self-sufficient mutuality) for the sake of prestige garnered from a third term? Is it any different than Paris' question to Diomedes about who deserved Helen more? Whatever the implicit reality, the appearance is the same.

Janet Adelman has found Shakespeare's account of Cressida's history in the Greek camp a disappointment and a failure of Shakespeare's artistry, seeing Cressida as a character who promised a great deal of depth but who becomes increasingly “opaque.”³⁴ Cressida's motives in her first appearance among the Greeks are fairly obvious; she uses her wit as best she can to fend off a stylized gang rape. A scene is then omitted, as in her next scene with Diomedes they refer to a previous “oath” that the audience never witnesses, but the depth of her character does not disappear with that scene. The first words we hear her speak to Diomedes register her understanding of her vulnerability: “Now, my sweet guardian” (5.2.7). In a society that has made Patroclus and Thersites into a whore and a mistress, she knows that she needs a protector. What is intriguing about Shakespeare's Cressida is that, despite her previous vows to Troilus and her belief that Troilus' vows to her are worth more than those of Diomedes, she finds Diomedes more than a hateful necessity; she finds something in him that appeals to her “heart” when she says, “Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee, / But with my heart the other eye doth see” (5.2.110-11). Adelman believes that this shift does not come from within her character, and that she is the victim of Troilus', and Shakespeare's, inability to reconcile woman as a sexual being with woman as an idealized romantic object. But Cressida's simultaneous attraction to both Diomedes and Troilus makes psychological sense if it is viewed from within what Lacan calls a metonymic sexual economy, one that is not governed by the metaphoric Law of the Father.

The means of satisfying the human need for self-esteem in a metonymic economy of sheer contiguity is to be the desired of the Other, and it must be an Other whose opinion counts. This will be a good trick for Diomedes and Cressida; Diomedes needs to convince Cressida that she is the object of his free choice and not just the only woman in the Greek camp, and Cressida needs to satisfy Diomedes' desire for her “mind” and her “heart” (5.2.15, 85) along with her body. While Thersites characterizes her holding-off as a device for sharpening his desire, the stereotypically feminine strategem of enhancing one's value by seeming difficult to attain, it should be noted that Diomedes behaves in exactly the same way. He threatens twice to leave (ll. 33, 46) and insists that he will not play her “fool” (l. 33), suggesting that he, too, does not care to remain in this relationship unless he can be convinced of the sincerity of her desire for him. His pledge to wear her token into battle follows the courtly convention that equates a knight's valor and his mistress's honor; it is entirely plausible that the Cressida who was impressed by the hacks on Hector's helmet, asking “Be those with swords?” (1.2.210), would be susceptible to Capellanus's principle that “It is the daring of men above all which usually arouses women's love.”³⁵ Whatever the intentions behind the ritual of casting one's desire as difficult to attain, both Cressida and Diomedes emerge from their dialogue satisfied with the libidinal value of this relation.

Cressida's character develops in a direction that follows the course of male paranoia as outlined by Capellanus, but Shakespeare makes her more than an effect of that paranoia. To see her as Adelman does, simply as an effect of Troilus' fear of women's sexuality, reads against the immediate dramatic situation, in which, after their sexual consummation, Troilus continues in romantic pursuit of Cressida and she discovers her own reasons for erotic ambivalence. If her idealization of him is less firm than his of her, this is not the revelation of individual character but the result of the different promises made to men and women in a patriarchal culture. The idealization of the Other, which is the support of monogamy, depends upon the psychoanalytic function of condensation, or, in linguistic terms, the metaphor, so that the objet petit a stands for a place in the grand Other, the Symbolic Order, where value is confirmed. In a subject with profound doubts about the promises of the Symbolic Order, desire is liable to take its naturally metonymic, promiscuous course. Shakespeare does not settle for the simple pathos of Chaucer, whose Criseyde tries to repair her “dishonor” as best she can, pledging that “to Diomede algate [at least] I wol be trewe.”³⁶ Shakespeare's Cressida is a fundamentally divided figure who sends her last words to Troilus, where they become the play's most vivid metaphor of fragmentation as he shreds her letter and casts the pieces to the wind (“Go, wind, to wind! There turn and change together” [5.3.110]).

Troilus, of course, does not begin to understand her behavior. Having imagined himself as the cause of her desire, he cannot comprehend her being sexual in his absence. His disappointment is so thoroughly apocalyptic because he saw their union as proof of a cosmic order of values. His incredulity about the Cressida he now sees—“If beauty have a soul, this is not she” (5.2.142)—reflects his belief that the possession of her beauty was the means by which he had been gratified by that cosmic order for abiding by its principles. Troilus' expectation that he would be rewarded with eternal fame for maintaining his “honor” both in war and in love is a pre-Christian image of immortality, but his disappointment in Cressida embodies Lacan's principle that “in order for the soul to come into being, she, the woman, is differentiated from it. … Called woman [dit-femme] and defamed [diffâme].”³⁷ Troilus finds his world inexplicable because he tries to maintain his relation to two incompatible Others, one a stable, hierarchical system that could terminate in the permanence of immortality and another whose essence is mobility. Cressida's recognition confirmed his male identity, but the independence of her subjectivity—which was necessary for her recognition to matter within the couple—means that male identity cannot be self-grounded. Her defamation is identified precisely with the independence of her judgment as Thersites imagines her saying “‘My mind is now turned whore’” (5.2.117). The woman is not defamed for her body's reduction to an object of male pleasure but for discovering in her “mind” any means of her own pleasure after having been so debased. It is ironic that Thersites, who gets his revenge on Ajax from the position of the sexual slave, should be the one to pronounce this judgment on Cressida, but, as Lacan puts it, what the Symbolic Order calls “perverts” have “a knowledge of the nature of things, which leads directly from sexual conduct to its truth, namely, its amorality.”³⁸ Having been denied an identity within the Symbolic Order, Thersites is not subject to its mystifications about its practices.

Cressida does not want to see herself in these terms. She maintains an image of the ideal I, in relation to which the metonymic promiscuity of her desire seems to her like “turpitude” (5.2.115). But the woman—and this is not a biological entity, since “she” includes Thersites, who is a perfect example of Lacan's claim that real jouissance consists of talking—is the subject who is promised nothing by a transcendent Symbolic Order and so finds her jouissance elsewhere and is defamed for doing so. The only means of escaping this infamy is to take Juliet's course, suicide, which is what generations of Cressida-bashers have implicitly demanded of her. By choosing death over survival without Troilus, Cressida would make the Hegelian choice of preferring an idealized value to mere survival and would confirm that Troilus is indeed worth more than life itself. The mutual suicides of Romeo and Juliet are the confirmation that the couple has made love a value that transcends the biological instinct of survival. Troilus believes that he should make this choice, and so he risks his life for her. But for women—a category that includes Thersites and Patroclus—to meet this Hegelian standard and risk their lives for the sake of an identity better than that of slavery is, historically, not to take a risk but to commit suicide. Shakespeare's Cressida retells and explicates the position of the archetypal woman as it is told in the Troy legends: she does what she has to, she enjoys what she can, and she is condemned as a whore for it.

Adelman is right that for the remainder of the play, its point of view is focused through Troilus, and that the spectator who expected to enjoy an identification with Cressida is disappointed. But as Troilus and Cressida refuses to offer the vicarious pleasure of cathartic identification with the deaths of its heroine and hero, it tells a truer story as it represents woman in history as she whose story is forcibly suppressed. The audience is tantalized by one last possibility of hearing from Cressida when Troilus receives a letter from her, but that opportunity for dramatically ironic pathos is demolished when, instead of reading the letter aloud, he tears it and throws it away. With the play now funnelled through Troilus, it is no accident that the death of Hector follows immediately upon the loss of Cressida. As Kristeva explains the decline into abjection, “when the condensation function that constitutes the sign collapses”—and Cressida's beauty was to Troilus the signifier of a higher order—“in that case one always discovers a collapse of the Oedipal triangulation that supports it.”³⁹ After the loss of Cressida from within the couple, Troilus no longer believes in a natural order or in following codes of conduct that would correspond with that order; his exhortation to Hector to kill “captive Grecian[s]” (5.3.40) is his means of serving notice to what's left of the paternal metaphor that he is no longer bound by any rules of fair play. Hector then becomes a victim of Achilles' practice of precisely the merciless and honorless policy that Troilus urged Hector himself to follow. The symmetry becomes even more precise when we remember that Achilles is enraged because the war that was to serve as an occasion for his glory has deprived him of his romantic Other.

As de Rougemont summarizes the literature of romantic passion, he finds that it is always a literature of suffering and death, and asks, “Why does Western Man wish to suffer this passion which lacerates him and which all his common sense rejects?” De Rougemont offers the Hegelian answer that “he reaches self-awareness and tests himself only by risking his life,” and he sees this as “the most tenacious root of the war instinct.”⁴⁰ But what Hegel sees as a field of human glory, Kristeva describes as an “infernal jouissance,” much like Shakespeare's play, which declines into a disgusted parody of the heroic ethos. Kristeva's name for this is abjection, the “nocturnal reverse of the magnificent legend [of courtliness],”⁴¹ whose logic Troilus revealed with his “common sense” when he described Helen's beauty as painted in blood and capable of turning crown princes into merchants, but whose lure he followed nonetheless. With his paternal metaphor completely dissolved by the death of Hector, Troilus can find no other pattern to emulate but can only “haunt” Achilles “like a wicked conscience” (5.10.28), imitating an Other with no object in view, risking his life with no possibility of satisfaction. The outcome, according to the legends of Troy (including Chaucer's version of the story), is that Troilus will be killed by Achilles. The nadir of the breakdown of the Symbolic Order is the play's final image, which turns this world's governing metaphor into an image of abjection, where even the “rule in unity” of the body itself is violated by Pandarus' body oozing its diseased fluids.

In suggesting that Shakespeare tells us, centuries before Lacan, that the patriarchy is not whole, this essay describes a familiar Shakespeare, the negatively capable, universal Shakespeare of the humanist tradition who can represent everyone's experience, including that of Cressida. A male critic who depicts Troilus and Cressida in these terms after Janet Adelman has described its denouement as a male fantasy about an objectified woman can only do so with a good deal of trepidation. But Adelman's analysis, like the assumption behind Hillis Miller's disbelief that Shakespeare could have known the extent of his subversions of the logocentric order,⁴² depends upon a Hegelian view of the history of ideas as a story of progress, in which a modern systematic hermeneutic is inevitably more knowing than a Renaissance playwright. The structural relation to the past is then the Hegelian structure of the sublation (Aufhebung) that simultaneously cancels the force of Shakespeare's work while it preserves its insights in the critical commentary. Foucaul has gone furthest in our own time in following the Hegelian imperative to know and transcend history in the domain of sexuality, seeking to find the “strictly historical” grounds that have “imbued [sex] with the death instinct” and have sold us the idea that “Sex is worth dying for.”⁴³ Reading Shakespeare at a Foucauldian remove is an adoption of the discourse of the master, while reading him as Virginia Woolf and Kristeva read him, both poetically and prosaically, draws one into the unstable material beneath the constructs of ego formation. The supplementary principle to Woolf's celebration of Shakespeare's androgyny⁴⁴ is Kristeva's abjection, which is the experience that Troilus and Cressida imposes on its audience as it refuses to provide us with the satisfying sublation of a definitive and glorious catharsis and instead simply deprives us of the characters whose libidinal resources had once seemed so promising. The erotics of art, if Kristeva is used as a guide, would not be a simple recovery of pleasure but a free fall into a primal and unstable calculus of pleasure and pain in which love neither lives happily ever after nor dies beautifully, and for which Troilus and Cressida is an exemplary text. To read Shakespeare as our contemporary is to believe, against Hegel, that art is never simply a thing of the past.

Notes

1. All quotations of Shakespeare are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

2. Troilus has been criticized for “inauthenticity,” “predatory attitudes,” and “jaded epicureanism” by Gayle Greene (“Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A Kind of Self’” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds. [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980], pp. 133-49); called “sanctimonious” and a “predator” by Stephen J. Lynch (“Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A Woman of Quick Sense,’” Philological Quarterly, 63 [1984], 357-68); found “insufferable” to the “sensitive spectator” by René Girard (“The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. [New York: Methuen, 1985], pp. 188-209); and condemned for “latent misogyny” and “infantile and narcissistic sensualism” by Mihoko Suzuki (“Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida” in Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference and the Epic [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989], pp. 210-57) and for “posturing aplomb” and “infantilism” by Deborah A. Hooker (“Coming to Cressida Through Irigaray,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 8 [1989], 899-932). Other defenders of Cressida include Grant L. Voth and Oliver H. Evans, “Cressida and the World of the Play,” Shakespeare Studies, 8 (1975), 231-39; Carol Cook, “Unbodied Figures of Desire,” Theatre Journal, 38 (1986), 34-52; Janet Adelman, “‘This is and is not Cressid’: The Characterization of Cressida” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 119-41; Linda Charnes, “‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), 413-40; and Claire M. Tylee, “The Text of Cressida and Every Ticklish Reader: Troilus and Cressida and the Greek Camp Scene,” Shakespeare Survey, 41 (1989), 63-76. Cressida's detractors are too numerous to cite, but perhaps the most surprising member of their company is Joyce Carol Oates, who calls Cressida “evil,” “villainous,” and “impure before becoming Troilus' mistress” in “Essence and Existence in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” PQ, 46 (1967), 167-85.

3. A modern edition that prints Chaucer and Henryson together is The Story of Troilus, ed. R.K. Gordon (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963). Quotations of Chaucer will be taken from this text; for the passage referred to here, see page 362.

4. For Blake's description of prostitution, the well-known text is “London,” The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1965), p. 26; for his description of the oedipal relation, see “The Book of Urizen,” The Illuminated Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1974), p. 293, esp. pl. 21.

5. My reading of the relation between Achilles and Patroclus differs greatly from those of Deborah A. Hooker (cited in n. 2, above), who believes that their relationship is a covert scandal within the Greek camp, exposure of which would violate the “hommosexual” order (a Lacanian neologism that appears in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose [New York: Macmillan, 1982], p. 156), and Eric Mallin, who argues that Shakespeare depicts homosexuality as heroic and heterosexuality as unheroic (“Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida,” Representations, 29 [1990], 145-79, esp. p. 163). My description of heterosexuality and homosexuality as fundamentally similar and operating on the same dynamics of power is consonant with the recent work of David M. Halperin, who argues that the distinction between homo- and heterosexuality did not become rigidly encoded in Western culture until the nineteenth century (One Hundred Years of Homosexuality [New York: Routledge, 1990]). Shakespeare's descriptions of Thersites and Patroclus as mistresses and whores within the single-sex society of the army can profitably be compared to Jack Abbott's description of “women” in the population of contemporary American men's prisons (cited in Halperin, pp. 38-39).

6. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 6.

7. The Life and Minor Works of George Peele, ed. David H. Horne (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), p. 197, l. 353.

8. Freud's account of this transition (in a more violent form) is in Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Vintage Books, 1946), pp. 182-86.

9. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), p. 19.

10. Écrits, p. 19.

11. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), p. 30.

12. Tales of Love, p. 282.

13. For the controversy over the “strange fellow,” see the New Variorum Troilus and Cressida, ed. Harold N. Hillebrand (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953), pp. 411-15.

14. The editorial question of Collier's emendation of Folio's and Quarto's “married” is treated in the New Variorum, where Hillebrand cites both the contemporary justification for the emendation and says, correctly, that “‘mirror'd’ has effectually established itself in modern texts” (p. 177).

15. Tales of Love, p. 222.

16. Tales of Love, p. 225.

17. Tales of Love, pp. 226-27. While “self-esteem” is an extremely loose translation of “amour-haine,” the two concepts are highly interdependent for Kristeva. Self-esteem is precisely what is at stake in the stabilization of amour-haine.

18. p. 7 (cited in n. 6, above).

19. p. 228 (cited in n. 2, above).

20. Greene, p. 142; Girard, pp. 188-89; Hooker, p. 917 (all cited in n. 2, above).

21. Kojève, p. 19.

22. Feminine Sexuality, p. 141 (cited in n. 5, above).

23. Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982), pp. 206-7. This edition is a parallel translation. Other cases that are referred to the same principle of the woman's arbitrio occur on pages 254-55 and 258-59.

24. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Pantheon, 1956), pp. 113-14.

25. Feminine Sexuality, pp. 144-45.

26. p. 221.

27. The importance of maintaining the secrecy of love is discussed by Capellanus and, in this century, by Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). Capellanus says that “He who is eager to preserve … his love undamaged ought to take the greatest precautions to ensure that his love is not divulged to anyone beyond its limits, but preserved secret from all” (p. 225), and Dronke that “The secrecy of amour courtois springs from the universal notion of love as a mystery not to be profaned by the outside world, not to be shared by any but lover and beloved” (p. 48).

28. See Claire McEachern's discussion of this idea in the context of two other Shakespeare plays in “Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism,” SQ, 39 (1988), 269-90.

29. pp. 188-89 (cited in n. 2, above).

30. Chaucer (cited in n. 3, above), p. 340 (Bk. 5, st. 226, ll. 1576-82).

31. “I feed on these particular pains and sufferings with a kind of delight so poignant that if I am snatched away from them it is against my will” (Petrarch, Secretum Meum, quoted in de Rougemont, p. 183).

32. Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), p. 5.

33. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 103.

34. p. 138 (cited in n. 2, above).

35. p. 265.

36. Chaucer, p. 326 (Bk. 5, st. 153, l. 1071).

37. Feminine Sexuality, p. 156.

38. Feminine Sexuality, pp. 157-58.

39. Powers of Horror, p. 53.

40. p. 51 (cited in n. 24, above).

41. Powers of Horror, p. 162.

42. J. Hillis Miller, “Ariachne's Broken Woof,” Georgia Review, 31 (1977), 44-60, esp. pp. 58-59.

43. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 156.

44. Woolf's comment on reading “poetically and prosaically at one and the same time” is on page 46 of A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929); her comment on Shakespeare's androgyny is on page 102.