SOURCE: Introduction to Troilus and Cressida, by William Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998, pp. 1-29.

[In the following excerpt, Bevington presents the debates surrounding the historical context of Troilus and Cressida and discusses whether or not Shakespeare was using the play to mock some of his fellow playwrights; Bevington also takes a close look at the classical subject matter of the play itself and how it has been interpreted in twentieth-century productions.]

‘A NEW PLAY, NEVER STALED WITH THE STAGE’: GENRE AND THE QUESTION OF ORIGINAL PERFORMANCE

An enigmatic publicity blurb inserted in a revised Quarto edition of Troilus and Cressida in 1609, addressed to ‘an ever reader’ from ‘a never writer’, offers to the ‘eternal reader’ a ‘new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar, and yet passing full of the palm comical’. In praising the dramatist as a writer of such ‘dexterity and power of wit’ that even those who are ‘most displeased with plays’ are sure to be ‘pleased with his comedies’, this publisher's preface goes out of its way to flatter a discriminating readership that prefers literature to stage performance. The appeal is neoclassical, learned, even academic in its insistence that the play deserves to be ranked ‘as well as the best comedy in Terence or Plautus’. The potential buyer is urged to acquire a copy before the dramatist's comedies are ‘out of sale’. The publisher represents himself as having made such a collectors' item available to his select reading public against considerable odds, ‘since by the grand possessors' wills I believe you should have prayed for them rather than been prayed’. He does not say who these ‘grand possessors’ were who wished to keep back Troilus and Cressida from the cognoscenti, but his animus appears to be directed at the acting company. The dramatist is not named, although his name does appear on both versions or ‘states’ of the 1609 Quarto title-page: ‘Written by William Shakespeare’.

Seldom has the publication of a book been surrounded with so many mysteries. We learn from this preface that Shakespeare was a name with which to sell books by 1609, and that some readers at least associated him with high culture. We do not learn, however, why publication was delayed some years after it was registered on 7 February 1603, or why a Quarto edition was finally published in 1609 in two states with two different title-pages and front matter, one advertising the play as having been acted by the King's Majesty's servants (Shakespeare's acting company) at their public theatre, the Globe, the other insisting that the play was never acted. Folio publication presents a puzzle as well. Why was the compositorial work on Troilus and Cressida evidently held up in the printing of the First Folio in 1622-3, leaving the play unlisted in the ‘Catalogue’ or table of contents, unpaginated for the most part and oddly placed between the histories and the tragedies?

Some details of textual history and bibliographical anomalies can be examined later on, but the puzzles themselves are essential to our understanding of the play's ambivalent status and genre. As many readers have observed,¹ the prefatory note ‘to an ever reader’ presents the play as a comedy, ‘passing full of the palm comical’, worthy of comparison with the best of Terence and Plautus. The two Quarto title-pages (see Figs 13 and 14, pp. 124-5) offer the play as ‘The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida’ and ‘The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid’. The first page in the Folio text calls it ‘The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida’, and places it first among that volume's tragedies—or else last among the histories; the ‘Catalogue’ or table of contents for the Folio does not make clear to which category it belongs. The evidently last-minute decision to insert the play in an anomalous location between the histories and the tragedies appears to underscore the play's generic indeterminacy. Even the original publishers of Quarto and Folio seem not to have known what to call it.

Troilus and Cressida has struck many critics as in a genre, or mélange of genres, all to itself. To S.T. Coleridge, ‘there is no one of Shakspere's plays harder to characterize’; one scarcely knows ‘what to say of it’. Hazlitt finds Troilus ‘the most loose and desultory of our author's plays’; Swinburne declares it to be a hybrid that ‘at once defies and derides all definitive comment’.² Yeats and Jan Kott refer to it as a tragicomedy. Northrop Frye argues that the play is hard to fit into the usual Shakespearean categories—comedy, history, tragedy and romance—‘because it has so many elements of all four’. L.C. Knights argues a kinship to the morality play.³

Those who see the play as a tragedy of ‘defeated potential’ and ‘tragic waste’ readily concede that it lacks catharsis and does not invite deep sympathy for its characters.⁴ Defenders of the play as a ‘history’ of the Trojan war emphasize its episodic structure and mixture of comedy with high seriousness, and point out that a number of history plays like King John and Richard II contain elements of tragedy,⁵ but must also confront the fact that the so-called tragedies (such as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus) are often historical. ‘Satirical comedy’ or ‘problem play’ are useful terms in analysing the play's insistent mocking and raillery,⁶ but are too easy or too nebulous for some observers; general agreement as to what constitutes a ‘problem play’ is hard to find.⁷ If any consensus is to be found, it is that Troilus and Cressida is an experimental play, characterized throughout by an intermingling of mode, tone, genre and style. Such an open-ended play needs to be read inclusively, rather than being racked on some Procrustean bed of generic classification.⁸

The experimentalism of Troilus can be seen in context when we compare it with other works written during the pivotal years of Shakespeare's development, from about 1599 to 1603. Hamlet (c. 1599-1601), like Troilus, expresses disillusionment about human frailty and sexual inconstancy; so do the Sonnets, hard to date with any precision but at times close to Troilus in their exploration of the disabling consequences of female desertion. Henry V, in 1599, is an astonishing prelude to Troilus, as though seeming to measure the vast distance between the real if complex heroism of a charismatic English monarch and the fallen idols of the ancient classical world. Julius Caesar, also produced in 1599, gives a more sardonic anticipation of disillusionment with its ironic perception that republican efforts to forestall a dictatorship, however idealistically intended, lead ultimately to a collapse of the very senatorial freedoms that Brutus has conspired and fought for. Measure for Measure (1603-4) and All's Well That Ends Well (some time around 1601-5) are well matched with Troilus as ‘problem’ plays in their depiction of male inabilities to come to terms with sexual desire and, especially in Measure for Measure, a sense of social moral decline. In its experimentation and bleakness, Troilus anticipates Timon of Athens.⁹ Whether performed (if it was performed) in public or possibly at one of the Inns of Court, or both, Troilus would presumably have found a receptive audience for its experimental dramaturgy and disillusioning ambiance; we should not assume that public audiences would not have been fascinated by its mordant dramatization of hotly contemporary issues. At the same time, the play is manifestly difficult, controversial, even avant-garde.

‘AN ENVIOUS FEVER OF PALE AND BLOODLESS EMULATION’: HISTORICAL CONTEXT IN THE LAST YEARS OF ELIZABETH’S REIGN

Another aspect of Troilus's generic instability and obscure early stage history can be seen when we look at the play in its immediate historical environment: the last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Troilus takes on the dimensions of a fin-de-siècle work, exploring the disillusionment of troubled times. Two issues may be of particular relevance. The first is the play's putative role in the so-called ‘War of the Theatres’, to the extent that such a ‘war’ in fact existed among Ben Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Dekker and others about the competitive merits of ‘public’ and ‘private’ acting companies, popular morality versus the avant-garde and the like—the ‘Rival Traditions’ characterized by Alfred Harbage.¹⁰ The second concerns the career of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, and his catastrophic attempt at a coup d'état in 1601. Is Troilus's depiction of insolent and divided leadership in time of war a reflection of contemporary disillusionment with some of England's governing elite? These questions depend upon, and can perhaps help determine, the dates of the play's composition and (if it was in fact performed) its performance(s).

The ‘War of the Theatres’, a major fascination in the ‘old’ historicism of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, has been cut down to size more recently. At its height, the supposed ‘stage quarrel’ was imagined to have dominated the London scene in the years 1597-1603 or thereabouts and to have brought into the fray virtually every practising playwright.¹¹ The matter has been blown out of proportion. Still, the remark of an actor playing Will Kempe (in Part 2 of the anonymous The Return from Parnassus, acted at Cambridge University during the Christmas season of 1601-2), that ‘our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, ay, and Ben Jonson, too’, has potential implications for Troilus. Did Shakespeare in fact ‘put down’ Jonson and others? ‘O, that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow!’ continues Kempe in his imagined conversation with Richard Burbage. ‘And he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit’ (1809-13). The offensive ‘Horace’ who attacks other poets and playwrights is patently Jonson himself, whom Dekker and perhaps Marston had pilloried in Satiromastix (1601) by way of satirical riposte to Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (1600). In Act 5 of Jonson's The Poetaster (1601, written quickly by Jonson to anticipate Satiromastix), the poets Crispinus and Demetrius (thinly disguised lampoonings of Marston and Dekker) are arraigned for slandering Horace, whereupon Crispinus is administered emetic ‘pills’ by Horace and proceeds to vomit up scraps of Marston's recognizably eccentric dramatic language.¹² The ‘pill’ mentioned by Kempe is thus clearly identified, with its resulting purgative effect; but did Shakespeare then carry the attack further with his own ‘purge’?

Jonson did take a swipe or two at Shakespeare in Every Man Out of His Humour, 1599. He parodied ‘O judgement! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, / And men have lost their reason’ (JC 3.2.106-7; compare ‘Reason long since is fled to animals, you know’, Every Man Out 3.4.33), and mockingly quoted ‘Et tu, Brutè’ in an absurd context (JC 3.1.78; Every Man Out 5.6.79), evidently in wry dismay at Shakespeare's amateurism as a neoclassicist. His chorus figures sardonically question how it comes about ‘that in some one play we see so many seas, countries, and kingdoms passed over with such admirable dexterity?’ (Induction, 281-6). The motto of the clown Sogliardo in Every Man Out, ‘Not without mustard’ (3.4.86), may glance at the motto Non sans droict on the coat of arms that Shakespeare had obtained for his father and himself in 1599.¹³ Might this have elicited some response from Shakespeare? Jonson did at any rate append an ‘apologetical dialogue’ to The Poetaster in 1601, regretfully commenting that ‘Some better natures’ among the players had ‘run in that vile line’ of attack on him (ll. 141-52). Jonson, who elsewhere consistently views Shakespeare as of a gentle nature, seems to suggest that the latter was never the main target of his anger, and that Shakespeare's brief succumbing to the vituperative tactics of Marston and Dekker was much to be regretted.¹⁴

Could Jonson have taken the view, in 1601, that the portrait of Ajax in Troilus was modelled on him? The pun on Ajax and ‘a jakes’ or privy (see, for example, 3.3.247 and note), made notorious at this time by John Harington's scatological The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), might seem to be implicitly critical of ‘the very basis of the cathartic theory of comedy that Jonson was currently proposing’.¹⁵ Alexander's description of Ajax to Cressida as a man into whom Nature has discordantly ‘crowded humours’ of lion, bear, elephant, folly, discretion, and melancholy (1.2.19-30) might suggest a parody of the Jonsonian character sketch. The likening of Ajax to a bear could point to Jonson's shambling bulk, while ‘slow as the elephant’ might suggest Jonson's well-known laboriousness of style and slow pace of production. (Jonson berated Shakespeare for never blotting a line in his writing.) The virulent revilings of Ajax and Thersites against each other might conjure up the notorious quarrelling of Jonson and Marston. Thersites' ‘gleeful morbidity’ and his colourful ravings at the depraved sexuality he finds so fascinating have reminded several critics of Marston.¹⁶

Particular roman-à-clef identifications seem far-fetched and too reliant on analogies that can instead be explained by the play's internal dynamics.¹⁷ Still, Jonson's apparent sensitivity and Kempe's allegation that Shakespeare had administered Jonson and others some kind of ‘purge’ could point to the way in which Troilus deliberately employs a consciously different kind of social critique from that of Jonsonian humours comedy. Beginning with a clear reference to the ‘armed Prologue’ of Jonson's The Poetaster (l. 2), the Prologue of Troilus insists that he comes as ‘A Prologue armed, but not in confidence / Of author's pen or actor's voice’ (23-4). He thus introduces a play that will not choose the Jonsonian path of authorial self-assertion and certitude. Shakespeare's play chooses instead to explore disillusionment and multiple perspectives in an experimental way that implicitly criticizes Jonson's more dogmatic approach. As James Bednarz argues, Shakespeare in effect negates ‘the first principles on which Jonson had grounded his perspective—the self-confident conviction that he was capable of obtaining a knowledge of truth’.¹⁸ Shakespeare may be addressing other satirists as well, like Marston, George Chapman and Joseph Hall, whose work had enjoyed so much notoriety in the late 1590s in non-dramatic publishing as well as on stage; venomed spleens like theirs had been subjected by Shakespeare to a quizzical crossfire of debate about the merits and social dangers of formal satire by Jaques and Duke Senior in As You Like It (2.7.42-87).¹⁹ If Troilus seems to lack the ‘purge’ that Kempe crows about in Part 2 of The Return from Parnassus, the forbearance is thoroughly in line with all that we know about Shakespeare, and might well have encouraged Shakespeare's company to take the view that Shakespeare had had the last word in this now ended Poets' War.

The circumstances of the debate tend, at any rate, to confirm a date for Troilus. The Poetaster and Satiromastix were performed in 1601; Satiromastix was registered for publication on 11 November 1601. The second part of The Return from Parnassus, announcing Shakespeare's ‘purge’ of Jonson, was acted at Cambridge in the Christmas season of 1601-2. ‘The booke of Troilus and Cresseda as yt is acted by my lo: Chamberlens Men’ was entered in the Stationers' Register on 7 February 1603. The Prologue's reference in Troilus to a ‘Prologue armed’ (Folio text only) seemingly alludes to The Poetaster. This evidence points to a date of composition of some version of the play, including the Folio Prologue, in late 1601.²⁰

Troilus and Cressida's seeming comment on the Earl of Essex and his ill-fated rebellion of 1601 may also illuminate the play's experimental nature and the topical pertinence of its date of performance. Essex was often compared with Achilles in the last years of Elizabeth's reign. Both were controversial and notorious figures, at once mistrusted and admired. Achilles was suspect in Troy-sympathizing Elizabethan England simply because he was Greek; he was, moreover, truculent in refusing to fight alongside his fellow generals and treacherous in his slaying of Hector. On the other hand, he is, in the Iliad, an almost godlike figure whose mighty wrath is Homer's announced theme. George Chapman, whose translation of Seven Books of the Iliads in 1598 Shakespeare must have known, found in Achilles an admirable hero worthy of comparison with Essex, as though Homer, by ‘sacred prophecy’, did but ‘prefigure’ in Achilles the Earl of Essex as the ‘now living instance of the Achillean virtues’. Nor was Chapman the first to laud Essex thus; Hugh Platt had done so in 1594, and Vincentio Saviolo had called him ‘the English Achilles’ in 1595.²¹

Chapman's comparison of Essex and Achilles, both known for arrogant dissension, was bound to be controversial. Even though Essex's star might still appear to be rising in 1598, his career as a politician had been turbulent. He had turned the Accession Day festivities of 1595, nominally intended to laud Queen Elizabeth on the anniversary of her coming to the English throne, into unabashed propaganda for himself in his candidacy to become leading adviser to the crown. Avidly anti-Spanish and interventionist in military affairs, he had led the successful attack on Cádiz in 1596 and the failed attack on the Azores in 1597, only to be passed over for supreme command in the aftermath of those raids. His surly withdrawal from court in 1597 for an extended period drew notices of disapproval. ‘I have lately heard the different censures of many about thy absence in this high Court of Parliament’, wrote a concerned follower to Essex; ‘some, earnestly expecting the worthy advancement of thy most noble house and posterity, wish their service might ransom thy contentment; others, who make daily use of thy absence, confess thy worthiness, and in words only wish with the rest’. Essex's open impatience and ‘discontentment’ ended temporarily when the Queen relented in late 1597 by appointing him Earl Marshal.²² He quarrelled with Elizabeth over his personal right to ransom the prisoners he had taken, like Hotspur in 1 Henry IV. Much as Achilles does with Queen Hecuba in Troilus, Essex secretly corresponded with Spain and Scotland over the question of the English succession.

Elizabeth's uncertainties and vacillations in dealing with Essex did not end with his appointment as Lord Marshal. Claiming to be an heir of Edward III, Essex offered himself as the saviour of English interests in Ireland against the rebel Tyrone in 1598, to the enthusiastic cheering of many hawkish Englishmen, including Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare seems to have joined in the praise. The chorus to Act 5 of Henry V, acted probably in 1599, applauds ‘the General of our gracious Empress’ who may in good time, ‘from Ireland coming’, bring ‘rebellion broached on his sword’. The allusion is, for Shakespeare, unusually explicit in its topicality, and seemingly dates from the interval of time between March of 1599, when Essex hopefully set forth to Ireland, and late September of that same year, when he returned in utter failure to stand trial before a specially constituted court for abandoning his station and for contracting a dishonourable treaty with Tyrone.²³

By the time Shakespeare had completed Troilus and Cressida, probably in late 1601, Essex had been arrested and executed for treason. Having persuaded Lord Mountjoy (who was to become Essex's more victorious successor as Lord Deputy of Ireland later in 1601), the Earl of Southampton and others to join him in a conspiracy to rid the Queen of her pusillanimous advisers, Essex tried to raise the city of London on his behalf, failed to do so, was proclaimed traitor, and went to his death on 25 February 1601. The disillusionment was complete. All the emotional and military build-up of 1599-1600, as the English braced themselves for another possible Spanish invasion and pored over campaign bulletins from Ireland, collapsed into the dismal reality of a tarnished hero.

The case for Shakespeare's having written Troilus and Cressida with this unhappy saga at least partly in mind is circumstantial. It depends in part on Chapman's explicit linking of Achilles and Essex, on Shakespeare's likely acquaintance with Chapman's translation, and on Shakespeare's unusual tribute to Essex in Henry V. The case is strengthened by the thematizing of chivalry in Troilus. By 1599-1600, Essex was not only the ‘now living instance of the Achillean virtues’; he was also the embodiment of a charismatic chivalry that posed a threat to the late Elizabethan regime. In its nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing social order in which aristocrats defended their nation and their ladies' honour, the idealizing of neofeudal chivalry naturally chose as its great image Sir Philip Sidney and the Protestant war party he had espoused, prominently including Essex in 1595 and the years following. The struggles between the Essex faction and the more cautious group gathered around Burghley and then (after Burghley's death in 1598) his son Robert Cecil became the central political story of fin-de-siècle England.²⁴ Essex was immensely popular with Londoners and theatre-goers, as Henry V attests. His campaign to brighten England's honour worked its appeal and then collapsed. Shakespeare's one-time patron, the Earl of Southampton, was caught up in the Essex débâcle and was condemned to death though reprieved and imprisoned ‘during the Queen's pleasure’. Shakespeare's acting company was severely interrogated for its performance of Richard II, seemingly at the instigation of Essex's supporters, on 7 February 1601, the eve of the fateful rebellion. After the events of early 1601, the ideals of neofeudal heroism seemed no longer workable.

As Eric Mallin writes, ‘the chivalric premise lay behind virtually every late Tudor court formality’: its masques and pageants, its Accession Day celebrations, its ceremonial diplomatic missions. Yet this ‘fashion of chivalry’ was barely able to contain the contradictions of which it was composed. In its medieval form, ‘chivalry masked savage and unregenerate self-interest’. Knighthood ‘glorified bravery and martial prowess, but in so doing legitimated and rewarded rapacity’. These tensions were, moreover, exacerbated by conflicts of gender, in which the ideals of service on behalf of womanly honour ran into conflict with male anxieties at court about a woman ruler. Essex's notorious quarrels with Elizabeth—his insolent challenges and disrespectful references to her ageing person, her volte-face of bestowing special favours on him and then taking them away—gave visible definition to the paradoxes of chivalry as a ‘forum for the visibility of masculine courtier power’.²⁵

Whether or not we are meant to see a personal portrait of Essex in Shakespeare's Achilles (Mallin in fact argues that the play gives us a bifurcated image of Essex in the opposed characters of Achilles and Hector) is less to the point than the similarities between the play and important social changes at work in late Elizabethan England. The nation was fascinated during these years with the story of the Trojan war, as though out of fear that if the great commercial city of Troy fell, so must London or ‘Troynovant’.²⁶ The decline of feudal aristocracy in the late sixteenth century was synchronous with an increase in bourgeois mercantilism. Clinging to an outmoded feudal ideology and to the orthodoxies of an unchanging social order based on order and degree, those who had ruled medieval England found themselves displaced to an ever-increasing extent by new wealth. Their protest took rebellious forms of sexual licence and the practice of duelling, forbidden by the Tudor state.²⁷ Essex was the personification of this beleaguered chivalry. The insistent commercial metaphors of Troilus, as we will see, reflect unease in late Tudor England over social change. This is not to argue that Shakespeare takes sides in the conflict, but rather to suggest that he gives expression to many voices of anxiety and discontent in the England for which he wrote this play.

If Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida in the wake of the Essex disaster, that event could explain a number of puzzling circumstances: the lapse of time between the Stationers' Register entry of February 1603 and eventual Quarto publication in 1609 after a change of ownership, the substitution of a second title-page and addition of a preface to the reader, and then still more delays to printing the play in the Folio of 1623. According to the hypothesis of Ernst Honigmann, Shakespeare's company may have found itself in a delicate position in the wake of Essex's abortive coup attempt. Whether Shakespeare and his acting associates had intended to make a political statement or not, their production of Troilus precipitated them into controversy. The connection between Essex and Achilles was a familiar one in England from 1594 onwards; so too were analogies of Burghley and then Cecil to Nestor and Ulysses. If the play Shakespeare had written proved too hot to handle in the upshot of a failed rebellion (and the company had been in trouble over their revival of Richard II in early 1601 on the eve of that attempted coup), the actors may have found it prudent to hold Troilus back. The players are to be identified, then, with the ‘grand possessors’ whom the publisher's preface in 1609 describes as having been reluctant to see the play in print. Other critics too have identified the ‘grand possessors’ as Shakespeare's company; and in any case the preface clearly refers to someone who tried to prevent ‘the scape it hath made amongst you’. The proviso in the Stationers' Register entry of 1603 conferring rights of publication on James Roberts ‘when he hath gotten sufficient aucthority for yt’ should not be regarded as a ‘blocking entry’, since that romantic notion of a stratagem to forestall piracy has now been exploded as a fiction, but it does bespeak the need for authorization that may not have been granted.²⁸

Might this scenario explain the substitute title-page and added preface in 1609 (see Figs 1, 13 and 14, pp. 2, 124-5), done in haste and at some expense and difficulty, removing all mention of performance from the first title-page, ‘As it was acted by the King's Majesty's servants at the Globe’, and speaking as though the play had never even been performed? The phrasing sounds more like an attempt at finding safe refuge than a reporting of the truth, in view of the conflicting evidence that the play was in fact acted. Cecil, now the Earl of Salisbury and more powerful than ever after the fall of Essex, was not a person to take lightly any lampoons that might seem slanderously aimed at him.²⁹

Shakespeare and his colleagues seem to have found themselves with what was essentially a banned play on their hands. Troilus and Cressida is, moreover, a sophisticated play, highly satirical at times, experimental in genre and attuned to an avant-garde idiom not unlike that of private-theatre plays performed with scandalous success by the boy actors. Troilus is rather like the play that Hamlet describes to the First Player as ‘caviar to the general’; it ‘pleased not the million’ (Ham 2.2.436-7). Hamlet is such a play as well; both seem aimed at discriminating audiences whose judgements matter. In both Hamlet and Troilus, we seem to hear Shakespeare answering his critics with a defence of art that is experimentally difficult.

‘WARS AND LECHERY’: DEMYSTIFICATION OF THE HEROES OF ANCIENT GREECE

The experimentalism of Troilus and Cressida may well have contributed to a lack of stage success and belated publication in the 1600s, but that same quality has served the play well in the twentieth century. As the record of performance on stage can testify (see ‘Performance history’, pp. 87-117), Troilus and Cressida has come into its own in recent years. Critically, as well, the play has come to be appreciated for its major originality in achieving a balance between the war story and the love story in a way that no previous extant version does (see the essay on ‘Shakespeare's sources’, pp. 375-97 below). In good part, this is because the play is now perceived as speaking to our modern condition with vivid if dismaying relevance. Nowhere in Shakespeare can our present generation hope to find a more striking dramatization of the grim interconnectedness of war and the pursuit of eros.

We are constantly aware that Shakespeare, in metatheatrical fashion, is playing tricks with time.³⁰ He represents the action as taking place at the time of the great Trojan war, far back in the mythical past, and yet he also expects us to listen and interpret with a modern awareness. The result, again and again, is that the characters in the play seem to anticipate their own destinies. Troilus, Cressida and Pandarus, in particular, appear to understand that history will hold them up as exemplars, even as stereotypes. ‘Let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokers-between panders’, proposes Cressida's uncle, to which they all cry ‘Amen’ (3.2.197-9). Our knowledge that Pandarus' very name has passed into the language as a term for a pimp enriches the irony. Caught up in their hopes and excitement of the moment, these characters do not know what we know all too well, that nothing can save them from playing out the roles that history and legend have determined for them.

The war itself suffers perhaps the greatest demystification in this play about love and war. Shakespeare knew Homer's Iliad in George Chapman's translation (1598), at least in part, certainly enough to have savoured its tragic grandeur and its insistence on the war's great significance to the gods and to the human race. The Iliad has its share of disillusionment, to be sure, but finds greatness in its noble characters and denounces insubordination in Thersites. Shakespeare's depiction of war, contrastingly, focuses on the absurd.

Both sides in the conflict are aware of the ironies that link them to one another even as they long for slaughter. The rhetorical figure of oxymoron well expresses the paradox of friendly enemies who ‘know each other well’ and ‘long to know each other worse’. Their exchanges of vaunts and loving invitations constitute ‘the most despiteful'st gentle greeting, / The noblest hateful love, that e'er I heard of’, concludes Paris (4.1.32-5). The two sides come increasingly to resemble each other as they compete for the same woman, and speak in metaphors that elide the difference between martial and erotic conflict. ‘Better would it fit Achilles much / To throw down Hector than Polyxena’ (3.3.209-10), Ulysses warns Achilles, using ‘throw down’ in a way that signifies both fighting and a sexual encounter laden with homo-erotic suggestion.³¹ (Terry Hands's 1981 Royal Shakespeare Company production is only one of many in recent years that have made an erotic spectacle of the male body; see p. 104.) The bonds that link enemies are also heterosexual and familial, for men in this play ‘traffic’ in women and exploit family ties as a function of their homosocial interactions. Well-informed persons on both sides know that Achilles is secretly pledged to Priam's daughter Polyxena (194-204). All are aware that Ajax is half-Trojan, being the son of Priam's sister Hesione, which means that he is a ‘cousin-german’ to the very Hector whom he is chosen to battle in the lists.³² As Hector acknowledges his dilemma, an ‘obligation of our blood forbids / A gory emulation 'twixt us twain’ (4.5.123-4), and yet they fight.

Diomedes, plain soldier and artful seducer that he is, perceives with sardonic clarity the meaninglessness of a war fought over Helen. When asked by Paris who is more deserving of Helen, Paris himself as her current lover or Menelaus as the estranged Greek husband, Diomedes has his ready assessment of the rivals: they are ‘Both alike’. Menelaus, ‘like a puling cuckold, would drink up / The lees and dregs of a flat 'tamed piece’, that is, would settle for the stale sediment of a broached wine keg, while Paris must be content to breed his heirs out of ‘whorish loins’. Diomedes is bitter because ‘She's bitter to her country’, indeed to both sides. ‘For every false drop in her bawdy veins / A Grecian's life hath sunk.’ The toll is no less appalling on the Trojan side (4.1.55-76). Diomedes' critique is all the more devastating because it is inspired by no moral idealism like that appealed to by Troilus and Hector. Diomedes is a soldier who sees this war as absurd in its cost. Women are to be enjoyed and used, but not at such a fantastic price.

As Linda Charnes has observed, a ‘notorious identity’ hovers over most of the characters in the play,³³ not simply Troilus, Cressida and Pandarus in their prospective roles as archetypal constant man, faithless woman and go-between, but also the major contenders on both sides. Shakespeare's dramaturgical techniques are those of disillusionment. Agamemnon, ‘great commander, nerve and bone of Greece’ (1.3.55), is also presented as a figure of ridicule.³⁴ His noble insistence that the Greeks' hardships are ‘But the protractive trials of great Jove’, designed to test and thereby sort out those who are resolute from those who, like chaff, deserve to be blown away by the ‘wind and tempest’ of Fortune's frown (20-6), must do battle with Thersites' reminder to us that Agamemnon ‘loves quails’ (5.1.50-51)—i.e. prostitutes—as do most men. Agamemnon does quarrel with Achilles over a woman in the Iliad, to be sure, but is not subjected in that poem to the satirical comedy of contradiction. In Troilus and Cressida, on the other hand, even his authoritarian bearing and ‘topless deputation’ or supreme power are the subject of mirthful parody when, as Ulysses reports to his fellow generals, Patroclus and Achilles amuse themselves in their tent with slanderous pageants (1.3.151-8). Recent stage productions have tended to see Agamemnon as dim-witted and obtuse (see pp. 105, 110). We do not necessarily assent to Patroclus' send-ups, but we find them diverting and informative because they represent a demystifying point of view.

Nestor is a figure of contradiction merely because he is old. Although Ulysses acknowledges a fit reverence for Nestor's ‘stretched-out life’, Ulysses is also unkind enough to relate to his fellow generals how the lampoons of Patroclus and Achilles use Nestor's ‘faint defects of age’ for their ‘scene of mirth’. Ulysses obligingly imitates the way in which Nestor is perceived ‘to cough and spit, / And with a palsy fumbling on his gorget / Shake in and out the rivet’ as he prepares for military action (1.3.61, 172-5). Nestor's honourable career as a warrior reaches back further than anyone's, to the expedition against Troy headed by no less a hero than Hercules in reprisal for Laomedon's having defrauded Hercules over the building of the walls of Troy. Hector's grandfather Laomedon thus set in motion a war and lost his daughter Hesione to Telamon as a prize of war, prompting the Trojans to seize Helen in reprisal and thereby precipitate the present and most famous war of Greeks against Trojans. Nestor is a ‘good old chronicle’ that has ‘walked hand in hand with time’, known repeatedly as ‘Most reverend Nestor’ (4.5.203-5). Yet he is no less a tedious and senile old man, ready at a moment's notice to recall when ‘I have seen the time’ (210) and to ramble on through sententious truisms about shallow boats giving way before ‘ruffian Boreas’ and the like (1.3.31-54) as though he were actually adding something to what his fellow generals have already said.³⁵ Their polite condescension suits his role as one who never has an idea of his own and is all too willingly led by the nose by someone as clever as Ulysses. Recent stage productions have generally seen him as a wordy bore, slobbering over an orange (in Hands's 1981 production; see p. 105), ineffectual and weak.

Ajax is perhaps the figure whom the capricious memories of history and legend have treated most unmercifully.³⁶ He is no longer the mighty warrior of the Iliad but instead a fatuous, self-important gull, easily exploited as the tool of Ulysses' machinations aimed at goading Achilles into action. His dull-witted swapping of insults with Thersites, and his inevitable recourse to threats of physical violence when he is bested at the game of wits, make him a pathetic figure even in comparison with the play's most contemptible railer. To a modern producer like Hands (1981), he is a vacuous, gullible athlete, a ‘roaring head-banger’ out of Monty Python, practising karate chops on empty ammunition boxes (see p. 105).³⁷

Broad parody thus offsets the play's more subtle demystifications of Homeric heroism. Ulysses is an interesting figure in this regard, because his character is in some ways close to the Odysseus of Homer. He is ‘the sly Ulysses’ celebrated in Homer's poem. Yet slyness or cunning is an asset in the Greek lexicon, an admired cultural trait, a way of dealing with dangerous enemies.³⁸ Shakespeare's Ulysses turns his cleverness and devious manipulations mainly against his own fellow officers like Achilles and Ajax, employing strategies of flattery, emulation and tantalizing.³⁹ Even his alliances are manipulative, as for example in his conspiratorial talk with Nestor. The wisdom of his speech in praise of order and degree (1.3.75-137), so often quoted out of context, takes on a more complex dimension when we hear Ulysses using his masterful rhetoric to encourage the very emulation he inveighs against.⁴⁰ On stage, the speech can be made to seem the vacuous locution of a pseudo-intellectual, as in Davies's 1985 production, when Ulysses' fellow officers rolled their eyes heavenwards in response to his pontificating (see p. 110). Ulysses is an old hand at gathering of intelligence and at deploying that information in a kind of elegant blackmail (3.3.198-210).

About women Ulysses is contemptuously wary. Cressida is for him only one more confirming instance of ‘these encounterers, so glib of tongue, / That give accosting welcome ere it comes, / And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts / To every tickling reader’ (4.5.59-62). Alone among the Greek generals who greet Cressida with sex-hungry leers and kisses, Ulysses refuses to beg a kiss. Never will be soon enough for him (53). He is appalled by the spectacle of grown men demeaning themselves before a woman; it puts him in mind of the root cause of the Trojan war. There they are, on Dardan plains, risking their very lives ‘to gild his [Menelaus'] horns’, that is, to put a specious appearance of decency on Menelaus' cuckoldry. This is the ‘deadly gall and theme of all our scorns’ (31-2). Perhaps it is not surprising that this most self-possessed and rational of all the Greek leaders, this apostle of self-control and control of others, should wish to rid himself of any indebtedness to ‘the woman's part’.⁴¹

Achilles' decline in historical reputation, as dramatized in this play, is all the more dismaying in that it pertains to the tragic hero of the Iliad. Arrogant, sullen, envious, the Achilles of Homer's epic is notwithstanding a man whose choice not to fight and then to fight is of great consequence. The intensity of loyalties in conflict is for Homer a major theme. Shakespeare is not without sympathy, as theatrical performance can make clear, but he does allow his Achilles to luxuriate ‘Upon a lazy bed, the livelong day’ in indolent resentment, breaking ‘scurril jests’ and abetting insubordination (1.3.147-8). We seldom see him without Patroclus or Thersites, or both.⁴²

Prurient whisperings about Achilles' relationship with Patroclus refuse to go away. Thersites may be partly mocking when he calls Patroclus ‘boy’ and reports saucily to him that ‘Thou art thought to be Achilles' male varlet’, or, in plainer terms, ‘his masculine whore’ (5.1.14-17), and Patroclus bridles at the charge as though denying its validity, but the assumption is inevitable and widespread. Achilles and Patroclus are virtually inseparable tent-mates. Achilles' refusal to fight is generally understood to be the consequence of his ‘great love’ for Patroclus, and Patroclus' ‘little stomach to the war’ (3.3.222-3). Achilles' love for Patroclus is of course central to the Iliad, but the unwillingness to fight is occasioned in the first instance by Achilles' quarrel with Agamemnon over a woman. By deleting this factor, Shakespeare focuses with special intensity on the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus. Achilles' being secretly in love with Priam's daughter Polyxena evinces a heterosexual desire that evidently accommodates bisexuality as well; such a desire, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, often misogynistically eclipses women.⁴³ Male relations generally in this play ‘work to the detriment of the females’.⁴⁴ Yet despite the subversively anti-authoritarian nature of his relationship to Achilles, Patroclus is treated as a hero in his death: the event is reported by Agamemnon in an epic catalogue of Greek casualties, and Patroclus' body is to be taken by soldiers to Achilles (5.5.13-17). As in Homer, he takes his place among the heroes of the war.⁴⁵

The issue of bisexuality thus hovers ambiguously over this relationship, as it does also in Homer. Various voices give us contrasting surmises and interpretations. Theatre directors of late, ever since the pace-setting production of John Barton in 1968, have opted almost unanimously to flaunt a highly visible homosexuality of bared torsoes, shaved legs and drag costume (see pp. 102-3 and Fig. 5). We may take the view that Achilles' and Patroclus' sexual preferences are their own business into which we should not pry, but the play will not let us forget the question, perhaps because it bears so meaningfully on the issue of love and war. Troilus and Cressida struggle to find mutual comfort in a time of dislocation; so, in their various ways, do Paris and Helen, Hector and Andromache. The deep and eroticized friendship of Achilles and Patroclus is still another response to the need for human closeness in an anarchic world, all the more timely in that war brings men into such close and dependent relationship with one another. The friendship of Achilles and Patroclus is a counterpart to Ulysses' response to the sexual urge, which is to repress it and owe nothing to women—or men—in this sexual sense.

Achilles' brutal slaughter of Hector is the last definitive undoing of his reputation. Goaded by Ulysses into bestirring himself lest he fall victim to ungrateful Time, and then by thoughts of revenge for the death of Patroclus, Achilles takes the surest means possible of offending reputation by premeditated savagery that savours, in Bruce Smith's view, of a ‘homosexual gang rape’.⁴⁶ Modern directors have transformed the scene into that of a firing squad (in Davies's 1985 production) or trench warfare (BBC, 1981; see pp. 108, 110-1). Homer of course provides a precedent for the killing and the desecration of Hector's corpse, but Shakespeare has chosen to play up the worst aspects of post-Homeric legend (see p. 390). We see Achilles instruct his Myrmidons to fall upon Hector ‘In fellest manner’ and ‘Empale him with your weapons round about’ (5.7.5-6). To Hector's protest that ‘I am unarmed. Forgo this vantage, Greek’ (5.9.9), Achilles has no answer other than the fulfilment of what he has planned to do. Without remorse, he announces his intent to tie Hector's body to his horse's tail and drag him ‘Along the field’ (21-2). Achilles' exit line is his own epitaph as a man of any pretensions to honour in battle.

History has also dealt unkindly with Menelaus. He is a minor figure in Shakespeare's play, reduced to caricature. Virtually every mention of him refers to the inglorious fact of his being a cuckold, and he himself acknowledges the subject, albeit unwillingly (4.5.182). In a macho world of wars and lechery, where the men routinely challenge one another in the name of their mistresses, Menelaus is the emblem of what every man fears to be: an inadequate male. Modern directors like Davies (1985) generally find him a blockhead and despised nonentity (see pp. 110-1).⁴⁷ Reputation becomes the reality: to be known as a cuckold is to become subsumed by that identity.

Notes

1. For example, Alexander, ‘TC’, 286; Morris, 481; Fiedler, 50-1; Snyder, 89; Muir, ‘TC’, 28. Elton, ‘Textual Transmission’, proposes that the preface was written by John Marston, a friend of Henry Walley, who, with Richard Bonian, entered the play in the Stationers' Register in 1609; see also Finkelpearl.

2. Coleridge, 306; Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, in Works, 1.221; Swinburne, 196-202, esp. 200. See also Heine, 3n. below.

3. Yeats, Essays, 240, and Autobiography, 286, cited by Mowat, 80 n. 1; Kott, 82; Frye, Myth, 62; Knights, ‘TC’, cited by Tillyard, 49.

4. See A. Stein, 163-6; Chambers, ‘Epilogue’, 400; Bayley, Tragedy, 97; Coghill, 78, 125; Hargreaves, 58; Frye, Fools, 16, 59, 66, 69; Morris; Heine, ‘Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen’ (1839), trans. C. G. Leland (1891), also in Heine on Shakespeare, trans. Ida Benecke (1895), 42-5, reprinted in Var, 523, and in Martin, 44-5; Dollimore, 49; Rossiter, 147; Kott, 83; Danson, 75, 93; Oates, 142; Kaufmann, ‘Ceremonies’, 140; Stockholder, 539; Alexander, Life, 197, quoted in Coleman, 117; J. O. Smith, 167.

5. Dodd. Tatlock's contention (769n.) that ‘There is absolutely no essential difference between Troilus and Henry IV’ runs into a similar reductive difficulty. Cited and argued against by Lawrence, Problem, 169-70.

6. Michael Long, 104-5; Schlegel, 419, quoted in Martin, 34-5; Symons, quoted in Martin, 61-3; Brooks, 21, 24; Evans, esp. 169-70; Campbell, 185ff.; Jagendorf, 199; Everett, 125; Sacharoff; Kernan; Lawrence, Problem, 170-2; Lawrence, ‘Troilus’, 429 31; Boas, 375-8; Tillyard, 46; Bentley, 43-4. On Thersites as a satirist, see Bredbeck, 37-8; on Thersites as a railing fool, see Elliott, 137-9.

7. Lawrence, Problem; Tillyard; Toole; Rossiter; Ure; Schanzer. For a review of ideas about what constitutes the ‘problem play’, see Jamieson, 1-2.

8. Colie, 342-5; Helton, 120; Kernan, 192-8; Langman, 57, 67; Schwartz, 304-7; Foakes, ‘TC’, 142-3; Marsh, 182; Seltzer, xxvi-xxxiv; Mowat, 88.

9. See Goddard, 2.21-8; Wheeler, passim; Kaufmann, ‘Ceremonies’, 141-2; Lawrence, Problem, 128ff.; Coghill, 78-127; Meyer, 51-2; Campbell, 191-3.

10. Harbage, Rival Traditions, passim.

11. Among the main proponents of a full-fledged War of the Theatres, see Fleay, 1.359-70, 2.68-72, Small, Penniman and Sharpe. On reducing the often extravagant claims of these earlier researchers, see Enck.

12. For a review of the literary exchanges among Jonson, Marston and Dekker, see Bednarz, 176-7, and Bevington, Politics, 279-88.

13. See Bednarz, and Elton, ‘Ajax’.

14. Chambers, Shakespeare, 1.71 and 2.202-11, is generally sceptical of personal identifications in the Poets' War and in Every Man Out in particular, but he does allow that ‘Shakespeare may be one of the “better natures”’ (2.204).

15. The pun, first proposed by Elton, ‘Ajax’, with citations from contemporary literature (745), is developed by Bednarz, 188-9. The linkage of Ajax to Jonson was first proposed by Fleay in an overstated case. In a similarly reductive vein, see Small, and Jonson, esp. 1.406-10, 418-27.

16. Bednarz, 203, citing Harbage, Rival Traditions, 116 and 118. See also Potts, Kimbrough, 9, 20 and Ramsey, 238-9.

17. Those who reject or criticize topical portraiture, of Jonson particularly, in Troilus include Tatlock, 726-34; Chambers, Shakespeare, 1.71-2 and 2.202-11; Ard², 19; Kimbrough, 21.

18. Bednarz, 206.

19. Bevington, ‘Satire’, 120.

20. Earlier attempts to date the play in 1598 tend to be based on allegorical readings of the Essex affair, assuming that Shakespeare was urging him in 1598 to emerge from retirement and take action. See especially Harrison, ‘Essex’. J.D. Wilson, 101-2, opts for late 1600. See also Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare Suppressed’, 112-14, opting for 1601. A date in late 1601 need not presuppose that it was written after the passage in 2.2.337-62 of Hamlet with seeming reference to the stage quarrel; that Folio-only passage may have been written later, and could refer, as Knutson argues, to more serious matters of offence to members of the Privy Council and other noblemen.

21. Chapman, Dedication to Seven Books of the Iliads (1598), title and lines 60-1; see Briggs, 59. On Platt and Vincentio Saviolo His Practice (1595), see Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare Suppressed’, 115. See also J.A.K. Thomson, 211.

22. State Papers Domestic, 265.10 (series 1, vol. 4, 532-4), loosely paraphrased by Harrison, Elizabethan, 2.235; see also 245 and 294. See Briggs, 60-2; Harrison, Essex, 183-210; Poel, 108ff., for a relevant document also quoted in Var, 377-8. On Essex and Accession Day, see McCoy; Strong, 141; Mallin, 166 and n. 68; Hammer. On Essex's communications with Spain and Scotland, see Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare Suppressed’, 116.

23. DNB, sv. Devereux, Robert. For a minority view arguing that the Prologue to Act 5 of Henry V may refer to Mountjoy rather than Essex, see W. Smith. Muir, Oxf¹, 7, is also sceptical that Essex is intended, but T.W. Craik, in his edition of Henry V (Ard³), offers a powerful argument for Essex (1-3). On Hotspur and Essex, see Harrison, ‘Essex’, and Elizabethan, 2.135.

24. For the suggestion that Nestor and Ulysses can be taken as glancing at the Cecil faction, see Norbrook, 155; Honigmann, ‘Date and Revision’, and ‘Shakespeare Suppressed’, 115; Brooke, 76. Similarly, Campbell, 219-23, argues that any well-informed spectator in 1601 would have recognized in the comradeship of Achilles, Patroclus and Thersites an echo of the Essex group and especially of Essex's relationship with Southampton and with Essex's secretary, Henry Cuffe, a one-time professor of Greek at Oxford and reckless adviser of Essex who was executed for treason in 1601. J.D. Wilson argues that Shakespeare's intent in Troilus was to ‘goad the earl into action’, though not advocating rebellion (101).

25. Mallin, esp. 154 and 157; Montrose; McCoy, 313-20; Harrison, Essex, 42. J. Speed's History (1611) relates how the Earl of Essex, about to depart from Lisbon in May of 1589, ‘in the courage of his martial blood, ran his spear and brake it against the gates of that city, demanding aloud if any Spaniard mewed therein durst adventure forth in favour of his mistress to break a staff with him’ (Q. Eliz. Monarch 61, chap. 24, p. 865, cited by Palmer, Ard², 142 n. 274). In 1591, Essex wrote to the Marquis of Villars, Governor of Rouen, proclaiming ‘that I am better than you, and that my Mistress is fairer than yours’ (Harrison, Essex, 62, cited by Savage, 50, and by Mallin, 166). See Potter, 27-8. See also below, pp. 68-71.

26. Bruster. On the bifurcated image of Essex as both Achilles and Hector, see Mallin, 168. Savage, citing Merritt Clare Batchelder, ‘The Elizabethan Elements in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida’, unpublished University of Iowa dissertation, 1935, pursues overzealously the identification of Hector with Essex.

27. Clarke; Mead.

28. Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare Suppressed’. The ‘blocking entry’ scenario proposed by Pollard has been refuted by, among others, Blayney, ‘Publication’.

29. Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare Suppressed’.

30. See Bayley, ‘Time’; Berger, 135-6; and Charnes, 75-6, on the ‘here and now’ time sense of theatre, with everything taking place in and ending with the theatrical present. For an analysis of 5.2 in these terms, see Clifford Lyons, and Levine.

31. See Charnes, 83, 92-3; Sedgwick, 38; Lévi-Strauss, 29ff., esp. 42-51; and Rubin, on men's ‘exogamous’ trafficking in women. See also Bowen, Gender, 3-22; Cook, 42-3; French, 103; Jardine, 8; Patke, 16; B. Smith, Desire 59ff.; B. Smith, ‘Rape’; and Spear, 409-12, on the homo-eroticizing aspects of warfare.

32. Nass, 7.

33. Charnes, passim.

34. See Daniels, 286-7, Danson, 71, and Adamson, 36-9. For a more sympathetic reading of Agamemnon's rhetoric as ‘close-woven’ and ‘virile’, see Ellis-Fermor, 61, and Ard², 42-3.

35. See Danson, 71-2, on Nestor's garrulity. Again, Ellis-Fermor (61) is more generous.

36. On the conflation of legends of two Ajaxes, Ajax Telamon and Ajax Oileus, see Edelman, 126-7; Cam¹, xxxiv; Oxf¹, 18; Dodd, 43; Bullough, Sources, 6.101; J.A.K. Thomson, 213.

37. See Girard, 201, and Hyland, TC, 73. On the use of music to underscore the ludicrousness of Ajax' situation, see Sternfeld, 203.

38. Those who support Ulysses as a valid commentator include Brower, 243, 253, Bethell, 99-101, and Tillyard, 75. More disillusioned appraisers include Burns, 124, A. Stein, 160, Adams, 91 n. 7, and Leech, 12. See 25 n. 2 and 54 n. 3 below.

39. Girard, 205-6.

40. Those who view this speech as enacting its own loss of order and control through excessive use of accumulation, climax, neologisms and the like include Norbrook, 154-6; Grudin; Potter, 33; Elton, ‘Ulysses’, 98-100; Knights, ‘Theme’, 68-9; Roberts, 4-5 and 84; Goddard, 2.12-15. For more orthodox defences of the speech as an embodiment of noble ideas of order and degree, see, e.g., T. Spencer, 21-5, and Rossiter, 139-40; and see 24 n. 4 above.

41. The phrase, from Cym 2.5.20-2, also serves as the title of an influential collection of essays subtitled Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (ed. Lenz et al.).

42. For a low estimate of Achilles as lazy, arrogant, etc., see, e.g., Chambers, Survey, 197-8, and Lawrence, ‘Troilus’, 435. On the other side, see Powell.

43. Sedgwick, 20-1, 33, 36.

44. Mallin, 159-65, esp. 163. See also G. Williams, Sex, 103.

45. Bredbeck, 27, 33-48, esp. 39; Mallin, 160-1; Skura, 23.

46. B. Smith, Desire, 61. See also Charles Lyons, 239-41. Shakespeare's account of the death of Hector is drawn in good part from Caxton's telling of the death of Troilus (638-9) and perhaps that of Lydgate (4.2647-779); see ‘Sources’, p. 390.

47. In Jacques Offenbach, La Belle Hélène, morceau 7B, Menelaus is derisively referred to as the ridiculous husband of Helen. Kott, 76, briefly pursues the comparison.