SOURCE: “‘War and Lechery Confound All’: Identity and Agency in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” in Strands Afar Remote: Israeli Perspectives on Shakespeare, edited by Avraham Oz, Associated University Presses, 1998, pp. 87-112.

[In the following essay, Yogev observes that the courtly and chivalric codes found in earlier versions of the story of Troilus and Cressida are intentionally subverted in Shakespeare's play into opportunities for male sexual aggression and exploitation.]

Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida has occasioned a number of critical discussions of the psychodynamics of identity formation as well as poststructuralist accounts of how its powerfully ambiguous and enigmatic language subverts identity.¹ To my knowledge, however, these two approaches have not been combined to analyze the way in which language and “heroic” activity at once constitute and subvert the identities of the protagonists in Shakespeare's bitter drama. Like Chaucer and Boccaccio before him, Shakespeare juxtaposes the martial plot of the Trojan War with the amorous tale of Troilus and Cressida. But in sharp contrast to his sources, Shakespeare lends neither Troilus or Cressida any tragic depth of character nor even the very qualified comic closure we may find in such figures as Angelo and Isabella from Measure for Measure. Instead, Shakespeare reduces this medieval love story to a sordid mirror of the Trojan War itself. As Thersites succinctly puts it, “War and lechery confound all” (Troilus and Cressida, 2.3.77).² This caustic characterization of the world of the play recognizes the connection between the psychodynamics of love and war at the same time as it lays bare a fundamental instability in the codes of courtly love and chivalric honor that underlie this central legend of Western literature. Thersites' remark highlights the sexual desire and aggression that “con-found,” coconstitute the individual and collective identities in the play—even as they erode and threaten to annihilate those identities. In its dramatic presentation of the erotic disintegration of Troilus, and its biting critique of the heroic ethos of the Trojan War, Shakespeare's text at once anticipates and offers a useful critique of contemporary psychoanalytic explanations of the development of male subjectivity. The stark discrepancy between the heroic ideals and the ultimate lack of chivalric integrity in heroes like Achilles and Hector suggests that this Shakespearean text also leaves room for a more extensive examination into the psychological roots of chivalry and courtly love.

Valerie Traub has argued persuasively that a central element in the sexual dynamics of Shakespeare's plays is the erotic vulnerability of men in a society preoccupied with female chastity as a linchpin of patriarchal, patrilineal culture.³ Discussing the act of sexual intercourse as the familiar Elizabethan pun on death, she points out that

in the act of orgasm, male experience of the female body is not so much that of an object to be penetrated and possessed, but of an enclosure into which the male subject merges, dissolves, and in the early modern pun, dies.

(Traub 1992, 27)

This analysis, together with her reference to the famous Sonnet 129, “The Expense of Spirit,” leads her to conclude that male orgasm in fact underlines the “myth of the unity and self-identity of the masculine subject,” and thereby leads to an intense male anxiety about female erotic mobility, which “threatens the process by which male subjectivity is secured” (Ibid., 27).

While Traub's analysis helps us understand the tyrannical fathers and pervasive male suspicion of apparently chaste female characters in Shakespeare's plays, her description of the male experience of orgasm closely resembles the Freudian pre-Oedipal narcissistic union between male infant and mother. This “myth” of male unity and self-identity may therefore be based (as many myths are) on a related psychological phenomenon—the primary narcissistic phase of a self undifferentiated from the body of the mother, which in turn gives way to the crucial transition from the mother/infant dyad into a discrete male identity and (m)other. It is precisely this phase of male psychological development that appears to me to offer a useful paradigm for an analysis of the grim dynamics of love and war in Troilus and Cressida.

In his essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud relates an anecdote that he claims has caused him to ponder a psychic economy that may exceed his view of the dominance of the pleasure principle in the process of identity formation. Observing a young boy at play in what Freud calls a fort/da game, the child throws away and retrieves a small wooden spool, repeating this action numerous times in connection with its verbal signs, fort (gone) and da (there); the child's articulations are in fact only the vowels o and a, but Freud provides the terms.⁴ Freud speculates that this game is a means for the boy to achieve agency (and hence a first stage of identity formation) despite—indeed precisely through—the fact that his mother has begun to leave home:

The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. It is of course a matter of indifference from the point of view of judging the effective nature of the game whether the child invented it himself or took it over on some outside suggestion.⁵

Freud's language, as always, is as suggestive as the observed phenomenon itself. While the “effective” outcome of a nascent male subjectivity may not be altered by the game's origins, the affective character of the game itself is very intriguing. By viewing this as a “great cultural achievement” Freud hints at a broader dimension to this phase of the male infant's abdication of the primary narcissistic connection to his mother. But Freud leaves ambiguous the question of whether this game is autogenetic or culturally defined and inherited, a lingering ambiguity that marks the affective nexus of individual psychology and culture. In this discussion of the fort/da game, then, it is my impression that Freud not only outlines a paradigm of male subjectivity acquisition, but also begins to reveal the entangled roots of the codes of chivalry and courtly love that continue to inform modern culture. Hence, we should examine a bit more carefully that discussion.

This fort/da game may also be, Freud admits, an enactment of revenge on the mother for violating the primary narcissistic unity her child has hitherto felt with her:

Throwing away the object so that it was “gone” might satisfy an impulse of the child's, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: “All right, then, go away! I don't need you. I”m sending you away myself.”

(Freud 1961, 9)

This aggression is likewise remarked by Lacan in what he terms the “Imaginary register,” when the child remains caught in a realm of visual experience before moving into the “Symbolic” register of language.⁶ Lacan's Imaginary register is the phase in which the child enters the “mirror stage” and

sees an image of himself as something “other.” … an ideal image, not only in the sense of the root connotation “visibility,” but because it is in fact the image of someone perfectly formed. … Hence his earliest “image” of himself is not only alienated, but ideal.

(Kopper 1988, 155)

Such an ideal image can cause a sense of inadequacy due to the discrepancy between the male child's experienced self and its ideal image. Shakespeare's Troilus evidences something akin to this sense of inferiority in the opening scene of Troilus and Cressida:

Call here my varlet; I'll unarm again:
Why should I war without the walls of Troy,
That find such cruel battle here within?
Each Trojan that is master of his heart,
Let him to field; Troilus, alas! hath none.
.....The Greeks are strong and skilful to their strength,
Fierce to their skill and to their fierceness valiant;
But I am weaker than a woman's tear,
Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance,
Less valiant than the virgin in the night
And skilless as unpractis'd infancy.

(Troilus and Cressida, 1.1.1-5, 7-12)

The “cruel battle within” and lack of mastery over his “heart” indicate that Troilus is caught in the Lacanian visual stage where he measures himself against an image of the ideal warrior and comes up wanting. Troilus' alienation from this ideal image is also connected to the phase of primary narcissism by his self-comparisons with abstract qualities cast in feminine terms (“weaker than a woman's tear,” “Less valiant than the virgin in the night”) rather than with specific male warriors or ideal role models. Troilus' “unpracticed infancy” is not, however, so much linguistic as chivalric; rather than suffering from an inability to attain the Symbolic register of language (in a play whose language is so pervasively deconstructive),⁷ Troilus instead dramatizes the cultural as well as individual affect of a pre-Oedipal drive to deal with a disrupted self-image.

Elizabeth Bronfen indicates indirectly how the fort/da game appears to articulate a different dynamic of identity formation than that Lacan would tie to the achievement of the Symbolic register.⁸ Remarking that Freud's child has learned “to obey laws before it has learned the language of those laws,” Bronfen continues:

What Freud sets up in this preliminary description, then, is a different scene in the developmental stages of a child from the one governed by an Oedipal complex, another narrative for the way in which language acquisition and subjectivity are grounded on an acknowledged experience of loss. For the negation that serves both as catalyst for the game and as object or reference of its articulation marks a site independent of the father's castrative “no.” The anxiety-engendering symbolization and self-consciousness in this narrative is of another kind. Initially, there is not father in this game at all, not even an absent one. Though the child plays in an intermediary zone connecting the imaginary register of the mother/infant dyad (governed exclusively by unrestrained drives) and the symbolic register (governed by forbiddances), the anxiety at stake does not involve the father as the disrupting third element.

(Bronfen 1989, 969)

This distinction of the fort/da game from the mirror stage is denied by Lacan; he laughs off the notion that the objet à or spool of Freud's game is anything but a part of the alienated subject which helps lead him into the symbolic phase.⁹ But Freud himself is genuinely puzzled by one aspect of the fort/da game:

The child cannot possibly have felt his mother's departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? It may perhaps be said in reply that her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that lay the true purpose of the game. But against this must be counted the observed fact that the first act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending. …

(Freud, 9; my emphasis)

Precisely at this point in his essay, Freud makes his own observations on what Lacan extensively develops as the “mirror stage”:

A further observation subsequently confirmed this interpretation fully. One day the child's mother had been away for several hours and on her return was met with the words “Baby o-o-o-o!” which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image “gone”.

(Freud, n. 9)

What needs clarification here is precisely which “interpretation” of the fort/da game Freud's reading of this mirror stage fully confirms. There appears to be some deeper psychological compensation in the child's repetition of the first act itself, in the making “gone” of the spool/mother, and later of his causing his own image to vanish from the mirror. Lacan asserts that the repetition compulsion here simply confirms his sense of the fort/da game as equivalent to the mirror stage. As Barbara Freedman explains it,

Even if the child associates his mother's absence with his playing at his own absence, the association itself doesn't imply an effort to master maternal loss. Rather, it suggests a discovery of his own presence as predicated upon absence, and so a splitting that alone makes self-reference possible.¹⁰

Lacan himself is insistent that the distinction between the fort/da game and the mirror stage is a moot one, as far as the constitution of subjectivity is concerned:

If the young subject can practice this game of fort/da, it is precisely because he does not practice it at all, for no subject can grasp this radical articulation. He practices it with the help of a small bobbin, that is to say, with the objet à. The function of the exercise with this object [like the function of the mirror stage] refers to an alienation, and not to some supposed mastery, which is difficult to imagine being increased in an endless repetition, whereas the endless repetition that is in question reveals the radical vacillation of the subject.¹¹

Shakespeare's text, however, dramatizes the “radical vacillation” of a number of male subjects, most prominently Troilus and Achilles. And Troilus and Cressida also presents the disturbing affective corollary of male subjectivity acquisition in an ethos of chivalry: erosion or erasure of female identity, particularly in the cases of Helen and Cressida. Precisely the same dynamic is involved in the transition of Freud's young boy from the fort/da game to the mirror stage, and in the remainder of this essay I will outline why poststructuralist and Lacanian analyses of Shakespeare's texts slight two very significant aspects of the play its representation of the affect of desire, and the dramatic and psychological outcomes of that desire for male and female identity.

Shakespeare's Ulysses articulates the limits of the “mirror stage” in affective terms which suggest those I find so interesting from Freud's essay. Ulysses turns to mirrors—and language—to highlight the slippage of Achilles' stature and the subversion of his very identity among the Greeks:

… A strange fellow here
Writes me: “That man, how dearly ever parted,
How much in having, or without or in,
Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,
Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection;
As when his virtues shining upon others
Heat them and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.”

(Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.95-102)

We should note, however, that the “reflection” here is achieved only through the agency of the “others,” not with a mirror that allows absenting and re-presenting of the self. The mirrors are others, and the “heat” is that generated by action, not by self-regard. Achilles, stung by the deliberate and exaggerated disregard of his fellow Greeks that has just been staged by Ulysses, acknowledges that the mirror is not sufficient to maintain the identity of the “man” he feels himself to be:

The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others' eyes; nor doth the eye itself,
That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,
Not going from itself; but eye to eye oppos'd
Salutes each other with each other's form;
For speculation turns not to itself,
Till it hath travell'd and is mirror'd there
Where it may see itself.

(3.3.103-11)

The aural pun of “eye-I” is relevant here, for if we are speaking about the self-construction of identity, Achilles acknowledges that it must involve another “eye-I.” In fact, “eye to eye opposed” and its punning variations constitute a matrix of identity strategies that are dramatically portrayed in the play: self-reflection (“I to I”), reflection via another (“I to eye”), reflection on/by an ideal image (“eye to I”), and reflection or identity via active combat (“eye to eye opposed”); that each of the terms of this punning matrix are open to alternative and slipping interpretations strengthens my contention that the basis of identity in such characters as Troilus and Achilles is far from stable, and that it requires an active, ongoing reinforcement.

Ulysses' investment in this discussion is not merely theoretical, but instrumental. He brings up the subject of mirrors to suggest the vanity of the greatest Greek warrior resting on his mere image, and by contrast he presents the image of the foolish Ajax as the “I” to whom Achilles is now opposed. To Achilles” irritated query, “what, are my deeds forgot?” Ulysses responds:

… to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery.
.....The present eye praises the present object.
Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,
That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax,
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye
Than what stirs not.

(3.3.151-53, 180-84)

Shakespeare's text thus suggests, in Freudian terms, that the significance of the mirror stage lies in the male subject's active manipulation (and hence ongoing constitution) of his image. The affective dimension of this liminal phase of identity appears in the male characters” compulsion to continually measure themselves, in combat, “eye to eye opposed.” While Kopper and other poststructuralists have focused on how language subverts the characters of the play, I propose to concentrate on how Troilus' jealous formulation of the Greeks as “Fierce to their skill and to their fierceness valiant” articulates an affective frustration. Shakespeare's play indeed seems to me to depict a both unconscious and explicit desire on the part of the male protagonists to continuously re-present themselves in the “mirror” of battle. Moreover, Troilus and Cressida painfully represents the reliance of chivalry and courtly love on a return to the reiterated first term of the fort/da game, a compulsion to make the (m)other fort or absent as a vain (in both its senses) attempt to constitute male identity. By deliberately maintaining as fort or “gone” the (female) object of their desire, the male protagonists inaugurate the potentially interminable “game” of martial combat, the only means through which their honor and distinction can be maintained.

Elizabeth Bronfen's summary of the work of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott may provide insights into the complex dynamics of Shakespeare's knights' relationship to their “ladies.” Recognizing the narcissistic wound that separation from the mother represents for the male infant, both Klein and Winnicott suggest that this wound engenders a latent violence and is countered by the construction of an idealized “internal mother” who neither threatens to engulf or to completely abandon the child. This “internal mother” then allows the male child to make the transition from an undifferentiated world centered in his union with the mother's body to the cultured external world of objects and signs. What Bronfen usefully highlights, however, is the paradox that the stability and effectiveness of Klein's “internal mother” is “contingent on the fact that the material maternal body is already fading before the child's ego”:

Thus a stable relation to the external cultured world not only doubles an internal stability, but in both instances stability is gained through a moment of destruction and loss. I wish to emphasize that Klein sees this emotional trajectory—from destructive impulse, through idealization and denial, to the ambivalent sense of guilty yet triumphant omnipotence in respect to a potentially wounding other—as “the central position in the child's development,” a step in the process of organization and integration that is parallel to but different from and other than sexual development.

(Bronfen 1989, 974)

Winnicott, for his part, addresses the Freudian fort/da game directly, seeing in the spool of the game a “transitional object,”

representing the child's transition from a state of being merged with the mother to a state of being in relation to the mother as something outside and separate, representing, that is, a wounding of the purely narcissistic type of object relating.

(Ibid., 974)

Bronfen's analysis of Winnicott then elaborates how this wounding is overcome by the stability of the returned object now invested as an loving, dependable, and amenable “internal mother.” For Winnicott, then, the ultimate significance of the fort/da game is that “the child gains reassurance about the fate of his internal mother,”

that is, that this internal representation will not fade, will not become meaningless. … Winnicott significantly shifts his interest from body to image—not the maternal body to be secured from fading, but rather the child's internal image. I would add that, if what is secured as “reliable” in the process of this game is the internal image created of the mother, then what is also secured is the child's ability to create. Thus the substitution from real, external maternal body to internal representation and external symbol (transitional object) is one that includes the move from disappearing/reappearing mother to revenging/representing child.

(Ibid., 975)

What emerges from Bronfen's able summary of the work of these two analysts is a paradigm of normal male subjectivity development. But the world of Troilus and Cressida is, as Pandarus continually points out, one of disease. Indeed, what we witness in Troilus and Cressida may be seen as a process of personal and cultural infantilization, in which the male protagonists cannot achieve a stable sense of identity due to the discrepancy between the women in their lives and the “internal image” of Woman they hold as a chivalric culture. Shakespeare's male characters, with the single exception of Pandarus (whose very name embodies the principle of constant transition and “trans-action”) are fixated in the first phases of fort/da and mirror games, suggesting perhaps a summary judgment of the ethos of chivalry and courtly love that Shakespeare so often questions in his work.

What sets off Homer's account of the Trojan War from that of Shakespeare is precisely their different “internal image” of the most significant (m)other of the legend, Helen. While both sides to the conflict in Troilus and Cressida see Helen as the effective cause of the nine years' siege of Troy, they have nevertheless all but abandoned her as the basis of their justifications for this ongoing battle. This indeed makes her the sort of transitional object just described, but the problem is that Helen herself, in Shakespeare's version, is far from inspiring the sort of noble internal image of beauty that she represents in Homer. Shakespeare's Greek Diomedes describes Helen as he delivers a caustic formulation of the dynamic that has perpetuated the war. To Paris' question of who most deserves Helen, he or Menelaus, Diomedes replies in very unidealized terms:

                                        Both alike:
He merits well to have her that doth seek her,
Not making any scruple of her soilure,
With such a hell of pain and world of charge;
And you as well to keep her that defend her,
Not palating the taste of her dishonour,
With such a costly loss of wealth and friends.
He, like a puling cuckold, would drink up
The lees and dregs of a flat tamed piece;
You, like a lecher, out of whorish loins
Are pleased to breed out your inheritors.
Both merits pois”d, each weighs nor less nor more;
But he as thee, each heavier for a whore.

(Troilus and Cressida, 4.1.55-67)

Shakespeare's text depicts a Helen vain to the point of being insipid, in contrast with Homer's portrayal of her as noble and inspiringly beautiful. In either case, however, the function of Helen is more significant than her identity, for Shakespeare and Homer alike the tale of Troy is one of the achievement and exercise of male agency, not of the redress of promiscuity. Shakespeare's Hector bluntly expresses the opinion that Helen herself is a “thing” not worth the cost of keeping:

… Let Helen go.
Since the first sword was drawn about this question
Every tithe soul “mongst many thousand dismes,
Hath been as dear as Helen—I mean, of ours.
If we have lost so many tenths of ours
To guard a thing not ours nor worth to us. …

(2.2.17-22)

For his part, however, Troilus immediately translates the loss of Helen into the loss of his father's and, by extension, of all Troy's honor (an ambiguity of identity instituted by a combination of Elizabethan political theory and the chivalric ethos):

                                        Fie, fie, my brother!
Weigh you the worth and honour of a king
So great as our dread father's in a scale
Of common ounces? Will you with counters sum
The past-proportion of his infinite,
And buckle in a waist most fathomless
With spans and inches so diminutive
As fears and reasons? Fie, for godly shame!

(2.2.25-32)

Hector's reply is one that indicates, similar to Freud, the psychological logic of completing the fort/da game. He recognizes the legitimacy of Menelaus' desire to regain Helen:

… Nature craves
All dues be render”d to their owners: now,
What nearer debt in all humanity
Than wife is to the husband? If this law
Of nature be corrupted through affection,
And that great minds, of partial indulgence
To their benumbed wills, resist the same,
There is a law in each well-order”d nation
To curb those raging appetites that are
Most disobedient and refractory.
If Helen then be wife to Sparta's king,
As it is known she is, these moral laws
Of nature and of nations speak aloud
To have her back return'd: thus to persist
In doing wrong extenuates not wrong,
But makes it much more heavy.

(2.2.174-89)

Yet while this is “Hector's opinion … in way of truth” (2.2.189-90), he nonetheless acquiesces in Troilus's appeal to their collective and personal honor as sufficient justification for keeping Helen as one of the “counters,” in effect perpetuating her as fort in the chivalric game. She is fort for the Trojans as an “theme,” and literally fort for the Greeks; on both sides her status as a cathected object of the game induces them to continue the war and thereby burnish their identities:

My spritely brethren, I propend to you
In resolution to keep Helen still,
For 'tis a cause that hath no mean dependance
Upon our joint and several dignities.

(2.2.191-94)

Troilus seconds Hector's chivalric resolve to not end the conflict over Helen in terms that suggest an answer to Freud's question about the more numerous repetitions of the “departure” phase of the fort/da game:

Why, there you touch'd the life of our design:
Were it not glory that we more affected
Than the performance of our heaving spleens,
I would not wish a drop of Trojan blood
Spent more in her defence. But, worthy Hector,
She is a theme of honour and renown,
A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds,
Whose present courage may beat down our foes,
And fame in time to come canonize us

(2.2.195-203)

The slight syntactic ambiguity of “Whose” here is symptomatic; it cannot refer to Helen, so it must refer to the “deeds” that become then the only way to constitute an enduring fame, to “canonize” their identity.

Hector not only endorses this cathexis of Helen as a “theme of honour and renown,” but personally demonstrates its affective dynamic in his earlier challenge of the Greeks to single combat, delivered by Aeneas to the Greek camp:

If there be one among the fair'st of Greece
That holds his honour higher than his ease,
That feeds his praise more than he fears his peril,
That knows his valour and knows not his fear,
That loves his mistress more than in confession
With truant vows to her own lips he loves,
And dare avow her beauty and her worth
In other arms than hers—to him this challenge:
Hector, in view of Trojans and of Greeks,
Shall make it good, or do his best to do it,
He hath a lady, wiser, fairer, truer,
Than ever Greek did compass in his arms,
And will tomorrow with his trumpet call
Midway between your tents and walls of Troy,
To rouse a Grecian that is true in love.
If any come, Hector shall honour him:
If none, he'll say in Troy, when he retires,
The Grecian dames are sunburnt and not worth
The splinter of a lance. Even so much.

(1.3.264-82)

The terms of address and challenge here collapse the courtly love ethos with the chivalry that idealizes Woman—but often demonizes actual women. Shakespeare's text continually presents the masculine heroes with the troubling discrepancy of their ideal Woman contrasted with those very real women in their lives. Hector's reaction to his own wife, Andromache (so chivalrically evoked in the above passage), who begs him not to fight due to her foreboding dreams, is dismissive to the point of being rude: “You train me to offend you; get you in” (5.3.4). Their ideal of Woman is what convinces the Trojans to continue to hold Helen, and the terms of Hector's challenge clearly reflect how such idealizations provide the psychosocial groundwork for chivalric action. Helen is the lover of Paris and the kidnapped wife of Menelaus, but she has become a “theme of honour and renown,” due only to her status as “A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds.” Neither Hector nor his brothers will heed the dire warnings of Cassandra, their prophetic sister, for they are all, as Hector aptly puts it, “in the vein of chivalry” (5.3.32)—the pun on “vain” is psychologically telling.

Among the Greeks, the issue has almost stopped being Helen; the stalemated battle is the pressing problem. Achilles has been insulted by Agamemnon, and therefore refuses to take the field. In The Iliad, the insult to Achilles is Agamemnon's arbitrary decision to take the maiden, Briseis, from him after Agamemnon has been compelled to return one Chryseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo, to her father. These two women are cousins, and they have in fact been tied to the emergence of Cressida in medieval legend, for there is no mention of her in the classic myths; she is in fact invented as eponymous of female treachery. Cressida's identity is hence even more ambiguous than Helen's, but her function will be much the same. Both Helen and Cressida become, in Shakespeare's text, a form of “anti-ideal image,” so we should not be surprised that the male characters who base their identity to some degree on these women, even as objects, suffer from varying degrees of “dis-ease.” In its representation of the medieval tale from Chaucer and Boccaccio, Shakespeare's text suggests a critique of the objectification of these women as part of the “gear” essential for the ongoing constitution of male identity in the chivalric world.

Our first glimpse of the Greeks (Troilus and Cressida, 1.3) opens with Agamemnon outlining the progress of the long and costly war and Ulysses continuing with the famous speech on the decay of degree as the chief explanation for the stalemate. Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks, discusses at length the need for “persistive constancy in men” (1.3.21) a solidity of character the martial dimensions of which he constructs in a metaphor:

… in the wind and tempest of her frown,
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 unmingled.

(1.3.26-30)

The metaphor's physical lack of substance (mass and matter) and feminine gender are significant here, for Agamemnon's wind of distinction is to reveal male identity; “mass and matter” accrue only to male warriors who (as we have already seen in Ulysses' discussion with Achilles) persist in their combat.

For his part, Troilus is also anxious about “distinction.” Imagining his first meeting with Cressida, Troilus' fear that “I shall lose distinction in my joys” (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.25) voices a concern for self-presence that is threatened in the “death” of sexual intercourse. But the distinction between these two “distinctions” collapses in Cressida's most candid moment of the play, which Shakespeare masterfully places just prior to the political and philosophical discussions of Agamemnon and Achilles:

Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she beloved knows nought that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is. …

(1.2.282-84)

Cressida here formulates the role women as objects of desire play in the constitution of male identity, and hence in the establishment of the “distinction” essential to any assessment of degree. Cressida recognizes the insubstantial or “thing” status of women in both the martial and marital plots, and the necessity for these things to be “ungain'd” in order to provoke and perpetuate male agency and desire. Joy (like its obverse, grief) is an intense experience of self-presence. Cressida outlines here the psychological roots of the idealization of Woman in the ethos of chivalry and courtly love, where she is at once desired and (at least initially) elevated above any actual possession or “en-joy-ment.” Indeed, the desire of the beloved is “lust in action” until that beloved is in fact achieved, at which point the male lover may recoil from the experience that constitutes a death of that intenser self founded on desire:

Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe.

(Sonnet 129, l.4-10)

As we have seen, Troilus sounds the most strident note of “joint and several honour,” so we are not surprised to see from the opening scene of the play that his individual sense of honor—hence identity—is unstable. His deeds have not matched his heroic aspirations early in the play, a fact underscored by the debunking comments of Cressida in response to Pandarus' panegyrics in praise of Troilus (Troilus and Cressida, 1.1.256-276). Troilus is fixated in the Lacanian Imaginary register, where he must face both his ideal figure (and the figures of heroes like Hector and Achilles) and the real figure he has cut to this point. The discrepancy is painful, so he seeks a different mirror, or rather another object through which to attempt to constitute his identity. In effect, he has regressed in Freudian terms, moving back from the mirror stage to that of the fort/da game. Now the object against/through which he will establish his identity is Cressida, the amorous “counter” to his martial desire for honor. The terms in which he imagines their first “en-counter” are fraught with anxiety:

I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
Th'imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense: what will it be
When that the wat'ry palate tastes indeed
Love's thrice repured nectar? Death, I fear me,
Sounding destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness
For the capacity of my ruder powers.
I fear it much; and I do fear besides
That I shall lose distinction in my joys,
As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps
The enemy flying.

(3.2.16-27)

In effect, Troilus here is the little boy contemplating the joy of the again present (da) (m)other, of a completely restored primary narcissism through total union with the maternal body (the metaphors of “wat'ry palate” and “sounding destruction” are only a few of the liquid, dissolving images associated with the female body in this play). Particularly in Chaucer but also in Shakespeare's text, Cressida emerges as a sexually experienced and worldly wise woman, a point Pandarus highlights in exasperation when he exclaims at her witty debunking of his fulgent descriptions of Troilus, “You are such another” (1.2.266). Cressida represents for Troilus not so much an other sexual conquest as “sounding destruction” and “some joy too fine,” the paradoxical experience of psychic dissolution and intense joy in union with the (m)other. Troilus explicitly conflates Cressida with the figure of the mother in his shocked exchange with Ulysses after she has gone over to the Greek camp:

Ulysses. … Cressid was here but now.
Troilus. Let it not be believ'd for womanhood!
Think, we had mothers; do not give advantage
To stubborn critics, apt, without a theme
For depravation, to square the general sex
By Cressid's rule: rather, think this not Cressid.

(5.2.127-32)

The battlefield simile he has chosen to express this loss of distinction further indicates the interrelated character of courtly love and chivalric action. Both of these codes of male honor and distinction are, paradoxically, threatened by the prospect of Troilus actually achieving Cressida, or of Helen being returned to the Greeks by force of arms.¹²

When he finally does meet with Cressida, Troilus' imagined possession of her robs him of any symbolic distinction from her, leading him back to a preverbal phase of primary narcissism: “You have bereft me of all words, lady” (3.2.54). Again Shakespeare seems to have intuitively anticipated Freud and his interpreters, for now Troilus attempts to constitute a ideal image of himself prior to the physical union with Cressida, speaking of his “integrity and truth” as “true as truth's simplicity / And simpler than the infancy of truth” (3.2.163,167-68); his metaphor of childhood represents a return to the presexual phase of Freud's fort/da game, a desire for narcissistic union and not sexual conquest. Cressida, for her part, is allowed only negative formulations of her fidelity: “… let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood, / “As false as Cressid” (3.2.193-94).

Pandarus reinforces the dynamic tension of the courtly lover's simultaneous desire to have the woman of his idealized vision and the urge to “hold I off” (Cressida's turn of phrase is equally true of the male protagonists in the play), thereby maintaining the distinction that is threatened by their union. Pandarus, true to his name, recognizes and attempts to break the courtly stalemate Troilus and Cressida seem to have entered, even as he ironically voices the theme of deeds over words that I view as so central to the play, a critique of too close a focus on language at the expense of the dramatic plot:

Words pay no debts, give her deeds: but she'll
bereave you o' the deeds too, if she call your
activity in question.

(3.2.55-57)

The activity she will call into question is in effect Troilus' own imagined version of the fort/da game, for he will soon become the victim of the inevitable narcissistic wound, the unavoidable loss of the (m)other.

After Cressida rather falteringly admits her love for Troilus, the courtly love tradition of the lady remaining aloof and untouchable begins to break down, and yet both Cressida and Troilus appear to “hold I off” yet a bit longer. One of Cressida's remarks that has become a favorite of those who would attack her touches upon this stasis and destabilization at the same time as it reinscribes the fort/da paradigm I have been discussing—but this time from the (m)other's perspective:

I have a kind of self resides with you,
But an unkind self, that itself will leave
To be another's fool. I would be gone:

(3.2.146-49)

Kind as kinship or relation in human terms is a common Shakespearean pun, but here we find an ironic depth in Cressida's use of the term to describe her imminent connection with, and yet ultimate distinction from, Troilus. Deborah Hooker, discussing at length the nuances of the term kind, remarks usefully that in speaking of her “unkind self” Cressida is asserting “that part of herself, that region not specularized, not mirror-imaged, not resident in man, her “un-man-kind self”—the feminine.”¹³ It is as if the cathected object of the fort/da game, the (m)other made into a spool, now articulates the fundamental ambivalence of many Shakespearean heroines toward their comic or tragic situation as the means whereby male identity and agency are constituted.¹⁴ The fragmented subjectivity she articulates here is one of Shakespeare's most keen anticipations of the bind of being an object of cathexis (an “un-kind self”), a lover and/or mother (“a kind of self resides with you”) and a counter in the games men play to assert their identity (“I would be gone”). Hooker states succinctly the psychology of the chivalric world and the role Cressida and other women play in it:

Though the men of Greece and Troy, Troilus chief among them, fight in the name of women, what truly motivates them is a compulsion toward transcendence, to finally out-appetite appetite. This compulsion, ironically, invokes Irigaray's definition of hysteria. … Male hysteria manifests as an inescapable fixity, a paralysis-through-action, an inability to respond to any given situation outside the parameters prescribed by the male/warrior status quo.

(Hooker 1989, 923)

Ulysses himself describes the self-perpetuating aspect of chivalric appetite in terms that are, ironically, intended to reestablish a proper sense of “degree” and identity as inherent in noble characters and paternal hierarchy, rather than being based merely in the brute achievements of “power:”

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

(1.3.120-24)

Ulysses has in fact been addressing what Hooker calls “paralysis-through-action,” the stalemated war for Troy that neither side can appear to win. But winning is not the point, in fact; the alternative to the unbridled ambition/appetite he describes and the perpetual warfare it institutes is to find “a theme of honour and renown” through which to legitimate the ongoing warfare and somehow ennoble it. As we have seen, this involves a reinscription of the woman as an object that, paradoxically, must never in fact be won—“joy's soul lies in the doing.”

On the morning after Troilus has finally “won” Cressida, the decision to send Cressida over to her father in the Greek camp has already been made. Thus, while the psychocultural machinations are at work to make Cressida a pawn in the male games of war, on the individual level we also see an affect of separation in Troilus himself. Standing outside the room in which their union occurred, when he is approached by Cressida, Troilus attempts to convince her to leave him and go back inside. Speaking in high, courtly terms, he nonetheless betrays a certain violence in his invocation to her to let “Sleep kill those pretty eyes” (again, a pun on “eye-I”?), and in a concise formulation of the narcissistic state of total union/oblivion: “As infants empty of all thought” (4.2.4-6). She, however, will not be put off so facilely:

Cressida: Are you a-weary of me?
Troilus: 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.

(4.2.8-11)

Beneath his “I would not from thee” and his adjective “ribald”¹⁵ we may read a desire to push her away from him, and Cressida reacts to what is clearly a sense of postcoital distance in his tone, remarking almost bitterly:

                                        Prithee, tarry:
You men will never tarry.
O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off,
And then you would have tarried.

(4.2.15-18)

More telling yet, however, is the flat tone of Troilus's response to the news that Cressida must go over to the Greek camp that very morning: “Is it so concluded?” is all he asks, and he then muses, “How my achievements mock me!” (4.2.68,71). The latter comment is indeed the heart of the matter, in psychological terms: Shakespearean men must look to “achievements” to constitute masculine identity, and while achievements may constitute them, in themselves they are as “rusty mail” for an idle Achilles, paradoxically inadequate and even subversive of identity. Hence, the love and war games must go on. Endless repetition is the only answer to a self-subversive mockery, and the spool/other must be sent fort again.

Troilus's rage is now directed toward the masculine figures who make Cressida their own object of desire. He does not evidence the extreme lover's grief that Cressida so movingly expresses (4.2.99-112). Instead, he questions her fidelity in a painfully repetitive insistence, “Be thou true” (4.4.61,64,65,73); we may see here precisely the process of Klein's ideal or internal (m)other being established. She must be true for him, not to him, and her anguished cry “O heavens, you love me not!” (4.2.81) is one of the deep truths of the play. Troilus sounds a chivalric warrior's challenge to Diomedes, and the latter's response to Cressida is only a function of the intensity and degree of Troilus' threat; the men have now established their identities as warriors, and Cressida will become no more significant than the glove Troilus gives to her—and that she ultimately gives to Diomedes.

Once she is in the Greek camp, Troilus' idealized and internalized image of her is radically undermined by her behavior. In this new dramatic context, we no longer have any view of her interior self, but can only uneasily calculate her exchange value as an object sent off and retrieved, lost and won. The scene in which she is welcomed by being kissed in common by all those present in the Greek camp would seem to totally undo any “kind” interpretation of her character. But Shakespeare's genius here is to recognize that her function in the psychocultural drama I have been describing has now changed. Cressida has become as little a “character” as his thinly depicted Helen. Both are merely “daughters of the game” (4.5.63) as Ulysses disgustedly puts it.

Indeed, immediately following the scene that begins the process of Cressida's denigration, we witness Hector arriving in a formal challenge, and hear Aeneas' inflated chivalric rhetoric underlining the two sides' view of themselves as noble “knights” (4.5.65-86). The same Ulysses who only moments before has described Cressida and other “daughters of the game” with undisguised loathing now waxes Homeric to set forth the chivalric warriors from Troy, including Troilus himself:

The youngest son of Priam, a true knight;
Not yet mature, yet matchless; firm of word,
Speaking in deeds, and deedless in his tongue;
Not soon provok'd, nor, being provok'd, soon calm'd;
His heart and hand both open and both free;
For what he has he gives, what thinks he shows;
Yet gives he not till judgment guide his bounty,
Nor dignifies an impare thought with breath;
Manly as Hector, but more dangerous;
For Hector in his blaze of wrath subscribes
To tender objects, but he in heat of action
Is more vindicative than jealous love.

(4.5.96-107)

All the terms of the praise here are active, even those of an internal character (“Speaking in deeds,” “what thinks he shows”), and in his loss of Cressida, then, Troilus has gained the chief distinction he holds in the eyes of his enemies, “dangerous.” Because he has suffered his final disillusionment in the ideal, internal (m)other, his cry “This is and is not Cressid” (5.3.145) indeed indicates how dangerous he will become as a male stuck in the hysteria of chivalric honor and action. In his discussion with Hector in act 5, scene 3 about whether he will fight, Troilus confirms his sense of masculine identity and agency; both the brothers are “in the vein of chivalry” (5.3.32), and their vanity will not brook the misgivings or even the mention of the women with whom they have shared a constitutive bond. Shakespeare's Ulysses is the most callous example of this disregard of women, for he undercuts any sense of Cressida (or Helen) as particular, whole characters; they are simply “daughters of the game.” Troilus' real pain over the loss of Cressida sets the stage for him to seek other “achievements” that will not “mock him,” just as the male child in Freud's fort/da game overcomes his grief at his mother's departure by first playing the game, then moving into a mirror stage that effectively substitutes self-presence for the absence of the (m)other.

More poignantly, however, Troilus here may also serve as a resonant figure for Freud himself. As Bronfen points out, Freud represses the fact that the mother and child of his essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, are in fact his own daughter, Sophie, and his grandson, Ernst. Sophie died at the age of twenty-six of influenzal pneumonia, “snatched away,” in Freud's own words, “from glowing health, from her busy life as a capable mother and loving wife, in four or five days, as if she had never been” (Freud, 961). For Freud this event is a true crisis, for his grief threatens to paralyze him. He writes to Ernest Jones in a letter from 8 February 1920 that

You know of the misfortune that has befallen me. It is depressing indeed, a loss to be forgotten. … Now I may be declining in power of thought and expression, why not? Everyone is liable to decay in the course of time.”

(Freud, 962)

Bronfen sees this as Freud's “rhetorical move from the Other to the self,” a personalizing of the loss as a sign of his own vulnerability and mortality. But, she continues, this movement from the Other to the self also inaugurates a new phase and strategy of identity. Linking this moment to Lacan's analysis of the “destability” of the subject in the mirror stage, Bronfen points out that

what is also contained in this second version of the [fort/da] game, not usually noted by critics, is the notion of imaging as a moment of erasure of the Other when this Other is substituted for an image of the self.

(Bronfen, 976)

This accords well with Freud's own reaction to this terrible event, for rather than sink into a paralysis of grief, he plunges into his work—ironically enough, work on the essay that deals with his daughter and grandson, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Like Troilus, Freud fears losing his distinction as the eminent psychologist and therapist in his terrible grief over Sophie's death, so again like Troilus (and Ernst), he engages in activity that simultaneously constitutes him as agent or actor while depersonalizing and finally erasing one of the women most close to his heart. Sophie is consigned to the status of an anonymous mother in a footnote, the same note in which Freud points out that what he earlier called the young boy's successful “cultural achievement” in accepting his mother's departure, has now become the fact that he evidences no grief over the real death of his mother (Freud, 10).¹⁶

The repressed always returns, however, for in his immersion into the writing of this little essay, Freud writes the story of his own struggle to gain and maintain his intellectual distinction and fame—over the dead body of his daughter, the “scar” in the footnote (Bronfen, 983). Indeed, the most significant parallel between Freud and Troilus is that the impending or actual removal of a beloved woman catalyzes their identity strategies at that same time as it erodes the subjectivity and individuality of the woman on whom those identities are at least initially and partially contingent. This is, and is not Cressid; even the elimination of the last vowel participates in her erasure as a fully human being in the male world of Shakespeare's play, and Freud more authoritatively yet expunges all reference to the identity of his daughter, focusing instead on little Ernst who has achieved a rather pathetic place in the symbolic order, the world of the Father and its chivalric laws of male self-constitution. Sophie Freud is one of the literal “daughters of the game,” and Cressida is her invented and demonized literary sister.

The Trojan War, as a reiterated fort/da game played with the women whose presence/absence and erasure perpetuated it, emerges and reemerges throughout the culture of patrimony. The endurance of its chivalric renunciation/aggression complex in Western culture is remarkable,¹⁷ enacted by Shakespeare's Troilus (heir to the medieval invention and demonization of Cressida, by Freud in his erasure of a daughter in service of his prestige and identity, and by any of the many variations of pre- and post-Rambos via the bodies of often anonymous, objectified, and/or dead women. This fort/da complex reflects a fundamental insecurity at the core of the male identity, which leads to compulsive attempts at reaffirmation through, on the one hand, the agency achieved in the patriarchal exchange of women, and on the other hand, through the competitive emulations of the mirror stage—in which the woman is simply erased. Neither strategy is wholly successful, however, in a world of “war and lechery,” and Shakespeare's particular genius is to allow Pandarus the role of chorus at the close of his play. Eponymous of the uneasy traffic in desire that both determines and subverts male identity, Pandarus indeed can only promise one thing to a culture unwilling to acknowledge the voice of the “unkind” (m)other: an unbroken legacy of “dis-eases.”

Notes

1. Most notable among the psychoanalytic approaches that also address the dramatic function of the characters' (particularly Cressida's) strategies of identity in the play are James O'Rourke, “‘Rule in Unity’ and Otherwise: Love and Sex in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 2 (summer 1992); and Janet Adelman, “‘This Is and Is Not Cressid’: The Characterization of Cressida,” in The (M)other Tongue, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelaine Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 119-41; a revised and expanded version of this essay appears in her Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Carol Cook, “Unbodied Figures of Desire,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Linda Charnes, “‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989); and Douglas B. Wilson, “The Commerce of Desire: Freudian Narcissism in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida”, ELN, Sept. 1983. More specifically deconstructive accounts of Troilus and Cressida are Gayle Greene's “Language and Value in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” SEL 21 (1981); and Elizabeth Freund, “‘Ariachne's Broken Woof’: The Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, Inc. 1985) other deconstructive accounts of the play appear in the following notes. Coppélia Kahn's valuable study, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), while not discussing Troilus and Cressida at any length, provides an essential background to my more specific focus on the psychodynamics of chivalry.

2. All quotations from Troilus and Cressida are from the Arden Shakespeare edition, ed. Kenneth Palmer (1982; reprint, London: Routeledge, 1989).

3. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992). The discussion of these fundamental sexual characteristics of late Elizabethan England occurs in chap. 1, esp. 27-28.

4. Derrida discusses this eruption of the paternal into the prelingual world of the child at length in his early essay on Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “Coming Into One's Own,” trans. James Hulbert, in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 127-28.

5. All quotations from Freud are from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961).

6. This discussion of Lacan is drawn in part from John M. Kopper, “Troilus at Pluto's Gates: Subjectivity and the Duplicity of Discourse in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare and Deconstruction, eds. G. Douglas Atkins and David M. Bergeron (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1988), 149-71. My basic contention, however, is that Kopper and others who read Troilus and Cressida as a play whose subversion of identity and values is to be found in language miss the psychologically cogent aspect of the actual drama, the action of the play, which is primarily that of the amorous encounter between Troilus and Cressida, her exchange for Antenor, and all the chivalric posturing and vengeful activity around the Trojan and Greek camps than accompany them. In a sense, I am using the words of the play to attempt to approach a preverbal analysis of the roots of the ethos of chivalry, an ethos of which Troilus and Cressida constitutes a devastating critique.

7. Kopper's essay finally takes essentially this position, arguing that the dissolution of order in the play is the result of a lack of the Lacanian “Law of the Father,” an erosion of authority systems. But his remark that “Troilus and Cressida enacts the moment of transition from comedy to tragedy, the fence on which confused editors have abandoned the play” (Kopper, 163) posits a sort of generic ambiguity to Shakespeare's dramatic examinations of chivalry and courtly love that coincides with the psychological oscillation and liminality I will suggest. Kopper usefully connects this play to the “problem plays” of 1602-4; I would add that it should be compared with the thoroughly sceptical, Jacobean treatment of chivalry that appears in The Two Noble Kinsmen, on which Shakespeare collaborated with John Fletcher.

8. Elizabeth Bronfen, “The Lady Vanishes: Sophie Freud and Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 88, no. 4 (fall 1989): 961-91. Bronfen's essay has been extremely useful to me as a source of various interpretations of the fort/da game, as well as suggesting parameters for a feminist critique of chivalry that Shakespeare's play may offer.

9. For his discussion of the spool's significance in the fort/da game, see Lacan in “Tuche and Automaton,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 62.

10. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 210. In this essay I have drawn extensively on Freedman's incisive analysis of Lacan's view of the fort/da game, though my ultimate focus is more cultural and affective than hers.

11. Lacan, “Of the Subject Who Is Supposed to Know,” in Ecrits, 239.

12. As William O. Scott points out, Helen's own story has a variant in classical literature, one source of which is Plato's Phaedrus. This variant legend “keeps Helen faithful to Menelaus though separated from him, somewhat as Troilus had hoped for himself (in the case of Cressida).” Scott, “Self-Difference in Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare and Deconstruction, 130-31.

13. Deborah Hooker, “Coming to Cressida Through Irigaray,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 4 (fall 1989): 922.

14. Many heroines come to mind here, but especially Portia, Hero, and Isabella. Portia, in particular, appears to enact a qualified vengeance on the male world that has imprisoned her through the casket test. By setting up the test of Bassanio through an inversion of the marriage ritual, giving him a ring which he is never to lose, she sets the stage for the weighing of Bassanio's love for her with his bond and love for Antonio. But she can only achieve her small measure of vengeance on the Law of the Father by posing as a man, and the outcome of her test clearly indicates Shakespeare's awareness of the essentially male homosocial character of the chivalric world.

15. The OED lists one variant of “ribald” as ribaude, “a woman of loose character, a wanton.” Although a rare and obsolete usage (OED cites two occurrences from the sixteenth century) it nonetheless adds metaphorical depth to the sort of postcoital distance we see in Troilus' affect here.

16. Derrida has discussed at length the significance of this footnote, and of Beyond the Pleasure Principle itself. See his “Coming Into One's Own,” trans. James Hulbert, in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 139-42.

17. Julia Kristeva discusses this renunciation/aggression complex in her chapter on male sexuality through Plato's dual sublime and manic eros and in her examination of narcissism; see her Tales of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 61-136.