SOURCE: Gil, Daniel Juan. “At the Limits of the Social World: Fear and Pride in Troilus and Cressida.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2001): 336-59.

[In the following essay, Gil demonstrates that the Greek and Trojan warriors in Troilus and Cressida have grown weary of the establishment of homosocial bonds through the bodies of women. Supporting his contentions with a study of Renaissance thinking on the nature of personal identity and the definition of the self, Gil argues that the warriors want to distinguish personal sexual identity from social relationships and experience.]

The story of the Trojan War that Shakespeare retells in Troilus and Cressida seems to invoke Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of “homosociality,” in which social bonds between men are secured through the bodies of women.¹ The Greeks, after all, are fighting to restore the marriage bond, through which homosociality is guaranteed; moreover, the movement of Cressida from the Trojan camp to the Greek camp suggests an impulse to restore the imbalance caused by the abduction of Helen by “giving” the Greeks a Trojan woman who is said at every turn to be comparable to Helen.²

Yet many warriors in Troilus and Cressida seem weary of homosocial bonds secured in this way. This weariness is expressed in the misogyny that afflicts the Greek warriors, who look upon Helen as a garden-variety whore, as well as the Trojan princes, who think that Helen should be returned. Troilus, for example, begins the play by announcing that Helen is “too starved a subject for my sword” (1.1.89), and Hector argues that Helen should be handed back to the Greeks because she is “a thing not ours” (2.2.22).³ Helen is “not ours” both because she is Greek and because she is a woman.⁴ Referring to the warriors who are also Trojan princes, Hector asks:

If we have lost so many tenths of ours
To guard a thing not ours, nor worth to us
(Had it our name) the value of one ten,
What merit's in that reason which denies
The yielding of her up?

(II. 21-25)

The Greeks share Hector's point of view. During the prisoner exchange Diomedes goes out of his way to tell Paris that the Greeks, too, love their warriors more than they love Helen. She is, says Diomedes, “bitter to her country. Hear me, Paris: / For every false drop in her baudy veins / A Grecian's life hath sunk; for every scruple / Of her contaminated carrion weight / A Trojan hath been slain” (4.1.70-74). In the love for his own men Diomedes finds the only possible common ground with his enemy; he appeals to Paris on the grounds that the Trojans love Trojan men as much and in the same way as the Greeks love Greek men. It is a love that cannot easily be reduced to the geometries of homosociality.

I will argue, in fact, that fatigue with homosocial ties represents a desire for a discourse of sexuality that leaves the orbit of homosociability. According to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, sexuality as such does not arise until the nineteenth century and then it does so as a personal identity—sexual desire becomes an inner truth that defines one as heterosexual or homosexual or any of the more florid nineteenth-century species of sexuality Foucault discusses.⁵ To scholars of the early modern period, a period when desire had not yet coalesced into personal identity, the notion of homosociality has seemed valuable precisely because it foregrounds the continuity between sexual relationships between men and social bonds between men screened by women. Sexual expression could thus inhabit a whole range of social relationships not specifically designated as sexual. As Jonathan Goldberg puts it, in the early modern period “sexuality … does not stand apart as a separate domain.”⁶ But by allowing warriors on both sides to openly express fatigue with homosocial ties, Shakespeare announces a desire to emphasize sexuality and produce knowledge about whatever distinguishes it from a whole range of social experiences.

The discourse of sexuality that emerges in Troilus and Cressida occupies a tenuous space. On the one hand, it must distance itself from the homosocial ties on which Shakespeare's unabashedly patriarchal society depends; but on the other hand, it does not attack homosociality in a way that would make sex seem aggressively antisocial or even revolutionary. Shakespeare goes to considerable lengths to distinguish sexual ties from sodomy—the feared category of relationships dangerous to the homosocial order. But whereas in the modern context nonpublic but nondangerous sexual relationships might simply be located in a compensatory private sphere characterized by intimacy, Shakespeare presents sexuality as a category of decidedly public relationships that are neither social nor antisocial but which proceed at a tangent to normal social conventions, including homosocial ties.⁷ To capture these peculiar but quite intense relationships, Shakespeare turns to representations of powerful humoral emotions. In the early modern period, emotions are not yet obviously psychological; they still seem like states of the body more than states of the mind. As such, emotions offer a sort of grammar that establishes connections between bodies when social connections between persons have become temporarily unavailable. Thus, to use Foucault's terminology, this discourse is not a scientia sexualis but an ars erotica; it aims not to produce personal truth about sexuality but to catalogue the range of physical sensations associated with early modern sexual experience.⁸

The central historical claim I will make is that Shakespeare opens this affective discourse of sexuality by exploiting a massive historical contradiction between competing ways of understanding the social world and the relationships that constitute it. In the context of the persistent inhumanity of the Trojan war, Shakespeare sets the idea of a modern social totality based on a struggle to define the terms of universally “humane” relationships against the still-active remnants of a pre-modern social imaginary. In the latter, social relationships are governed (I could almost say “legislated”) by an inherited social hierarchy that renders all social relationships transparent. Specifically sexual bonds arise when a successful humane relationship is foreclosed by a resurgent emphasis on inherited rank. This foreclosure triggers the powerfully physical, one-sided emotions—notably fear and pride—that define specifically sexual connections between bodies.

The underlying mechanism that enables a switch from the social register into a sexual one derives from discourses of class or status and is therefore identical both for men and women and for same-gender and cross-gender relationships. But the sexual turn away from the homosocial paradigm is not equally liberating for men and for women and is experienced differently in the case of cross-gender and same-gender relationships. To Cressida, for example, trapped within a patriarchal world in which sexual appeal is her only capital, the bracketing of homosociality sometimes seems like an attack on her social viability. And because patriarchal society subsumes male-female bonds beneath the male-male bonds on which social reproduction depends, the fact that Troilus fails to see Cressida as a token in social exchanges with men and instead sees her as the object of sexual attention opens him to the risk of being feminized. On the other hand, because male-male bonds themselves lie at the very heart of patriarchal society, suspending the social consequences of such relationships can be redescribed as an attack on society itself. This redescription is often accomplished by deploying the feared category of sodomy. But I see both the accusation of feminization and the accusation of sodomy as ways of disavowing the specifically sexual relationship that is characterized not by its threat to the social world but rather by its indifference to it. Such relationships are endangered when social consequences, whether bad or good, are reattached to them.

Norbert Elias's notion of the civilizing process plays a central role in my discussion because it captures the contradiction between two ways of understanding the social world and the relationships that constitute it, a contradiction that creates the sexual domain.⁹ According to Elias, from the Middle Ages onward the life of the body was increasingly submerged beneath a highly elaborated set of manners—a veneer of civility—that governed everything from behavior at table to behavior in the bedroom. As Elias puts it, during the early modern era the threshold for feeling shame was gradually lowered, and individuals became more sensitive to the impact their own bodies had on others. This account of the pressure of “civility” on individuals has often been seen as dovetailing with Freud's account of the spread of repression in Civilization and Its Discontents; Elias himself occasionally describes his work this way. But the heightened sensitivity to the responses of others indicated by the importance of shame suggests that Elias tells not the story of individuals confronting an increasingly powerful censoring agency but the story of the emergence of new forms of relationships, self-consciously humane relationships characterized by courtesy, self-restraint, and the deployment of codified behaviors. This form of relationship is based on a hypothetical core of humanity shared by and respected in everyone. Again and again in his De civilitate morum puerilium, for example, Erasmus emphasizes the need for sensitive observation of and even identification with other human beings as the basic rationale for good manners.¹⁰ Because it is founded on respect for a universal core, this new form of relationship is theoretically applicable to all relationships. But because the human core that all civil subjects share is constructed only through mutual reaffirmation, conduct manuals have a persistent sense of self-revision. Weberian (or Foucauldian) skepticism might lead one to conclude that they are inculcating not rules but a technique of self-monitoring and self-disciplining. While I do not disagree, I prefer instead to see the emphasis on context sensitivity as evidence of how the project of civility points to a world organized around continuing struggle to define the very terms of humane relationships.

But even as civility refers, in principle, to all social relationships, the civilizing process identifies “new” aristocrats in the absolute monarchies of Europe as avatars of refinement who are held up by writers like Erasmus as models to be emulated. But by identifying the new cultural elites as an hereditary vanguard, the discourse of civility supports a symbolic distinction achieved through successful struggle within a complex social totality onto a feudal ideology of aristocracy in which social status is defined, a priori, by blood. Thus supplied with an aristocratic imaginary, the cultural elites within the early modern state come to seem as if they embody a degree of refinement permanently out of reach for other social agents.¹¹ As such, these elites appear capable of seceding from humane, civilized social relationships precisely in the name of the civility and humanity they possess as if by birth. This blocks any humane relationship with them. The cultural elites around the monarch signal a social breaking point, a tear in the social fabric that can be exploited in the name of producing a sexual charge. When a relationship spans an impossible divide between a potentially inclusive “humanity” and a resurgent sense of aristocratic autonomy, it ceases to seem functionally social and instead comes to seem sexual.

Seeing the civilizing process as encoding a fundamental contradiction between incompatible ways of defining social relationships,¹² I use Elias's work to translate Leo Bersani's exemplary modern account of sexuality into an early modern framework. That Bersani's account requires such a translation is clear because he constructs sexuality as a self-shattering, a turn against the ego. In his influential 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” for example, Bersani sees (and celebrates) sex as a “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self.”¹³ He argues that the homophobic responses to the AIDS crisis make visible the association of sexual desire with a death impulse. The value of sexuality is precisely that it aims to suspend, dissolve, or even kill the dignified and well-constituted ego.

The Renaissance famously saw an explosion of interest in the definition of the self or ego. New-historicist accounts have cast the task of fashioning selves as a pressing cultural project throughout the period. But the proud, masculine self that Bersani can more or less take for granted as a modern cultural and social ideal cannot be assumed in any discussion of the early modern period. There are moments (as in Coriolanus, for instance) when a recognizably Bersani-esque sexuality emerges as a resistance to the pressure of self-fashioning. But the phenomenon of the well-fashioned self itself depends on the social reality of specific kinds of gendered and hierarchized relationships. This fact is at the heart of Bersani's account of sexuality. Discussing Freud's early Three Essays on Sexuality, for example, Bersani notes that while the essay as a whole is structured by a formal impulse to attain “mature” interpersonal ties defined by the resolution of the oedipal conflict, Freud reiterates the notion that desire is an overwhelming and destabilizing of the self which threatens the psychic structures that make all interpersonal relationships possible. Bersani writes,

on the one hand Freud outlines a normative sexual development that finds its natural goal in the post-Oedipal, genitally centered desire for someone of the opposite sex, while on the other hand he suggests not only the irrelevance of the object in sexuality but also, and even more radically, a shattering of the psychic structures that are the precondition for the very establishment of a relation to others.¹⁴

Some of Bersani's descriptions resonate broadly. Embracing the view that sex is fundamentally antisocial, that it undermines ties that are otherwise socially functional, Bersani celebrates sexuality's ability to suspend the norms constraining and regulating other forms of relationships. This leads Bersani to find ironic common cause in Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin's critique of pornography. Of Dworkin and MacKinnon he writes, “Their indictment of sex … has had the immensely desirable effect of publicizing, of lucidly laying out for us, the inestimable value of sex as—at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects—anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.”¹⁵ Unlike MacKinnon and Dworkin, Bersani does not aim for what he calls a “redemptive reinvention of sex” that would make it better, more politically progressive, or more egalitarian.¹⁶ Instead he embraces the fundamental incompatibility of sexual desire with functional social bonds. Sexuality is based on a constitutive inversion of the norms and techniques for welding people together in society, appearing as “socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart.”¹⁷ That is, it drives people together without delivering the terms for functional bonds between them. In Troilus and Cressida characters exploit the contradiction between two conflicting ways of defining social relationships in order to open bonds that are not based on functional, communal ties. Instead these relationships seem to hold open—temporarily or permanently—a form of social incompatibility that, in radically transformed terms, constitutes Bersani's more modern view.

Cressida is handed over to the Greeks in a prisoner exchange that seems to restore the homosocial imbalance caused by the abduction of Helen. Yet the exchange scene illustrates how two different social models can fuse to produce a sexual charge that stands at some remove from the conventions of homosociability. Modern readers may be tempted to see the moment in which the Trojan prince Aeneas welcomes the Greek Diomedes in the name of “human gentleness” as the most enlightened of the play, pointing toward a humanity that undermines the two soldiers' factional and perhaps racial differences. Yet despite its comforting start, Aeneas's welcome does not delay in turning strange. “In human gentleness, / Welcome to Troy!” he begins, but continues, “By Venus' hand I swear, / No man alive can love in such a sort / The thing he means to kill more excellently” (4.1.22-24, 26). The word “human” here gestures toward a concept of social life as an inclusive but competitive whole structured by basic norms of civility and sociability. But it fails to fully displace an aristocratic order that assigns Aeneas “gentleness” by birth. It is this aristocratic “gentleness”—which Aeneas may recognize in his rival—that evokes the unchecked aggression humanist pedagogues such as Erasmus and Ascham, committed to the program of a shared humanity, saw as the mark of an unreformable aristocracy for which no place could be found in modern society. Aristocratic isolation from the struggles of social life, premised on the celebration of blood lines and inherited rank, here short-circuits a universal humanity which thereby becomes the occasion for aggressive inhumanity. And if Aeneas's expression of hateful love toward Diomedes seems erotic (he greets his enemy “By Venus' hand,” for example), then it does so because it stages the collision between a feudal social imaginary, in which status is inherited, and a modern social imaginary, in which status results from competition for the restraint and refinement that mark one as capable of “humane” relationships. Aeneas and Diomedes point to a rupture within the universal fabric of humanity that makes their relationships seem not homosocial but specifically sexual, and their encounter provides a blueprint for the other specifically sexual relationships explored in the play.

The relationship between Troilus and Cressida refracts this basic outline, seeming sexual because it is caught in the contradiction between an aristocratic worldview and the emerging norms of a humane relationship. When long-desired consummation with Cressida is finally within sight, Troilus imagines not secured sociable intimacy but something dangerous, something as dangerous as a battle that he is losing.¹⁸ Imagining sex with his beloved, Troilus fears “That I shall lose distinction in my joys, / As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps / The enemy flying” (3.2.25-27). But what seems like a simple case of what Adorno might call the bourgeois fear of sex, in which the brutishness of sexual pleasure threatens the dignity of the individual (what Troilus calls his “distinction”), is in fact the opposite, the fear that an exalted style of love will threaten Troilus's brutish self. Troilus repeatedly claims to be utterly simple and without sophistication and asserts that Cressida is unimaginably more sophisticated than he.¹⁹ Resorting to the digestion metaphors that saturate this play, Troilus claims that the moment when his “wat'ry palates taste indeed / Love's thrice-repured nectar” will spell death:

                                        Death, I fear me,
Swooning 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.

(II. 19-25)

The degree of refinement and humanity embodied by Cressida should be learnable, but Troilus experiences it as permanently out of reach. It is as though Cressida possessed her gentility not by learning and successful social competition but by birth, and at this moment an aristocratic imaginary floods back into the potentially universal logic of humanity. Because a social relationship between them can take place neither on the terms of a shared humanity nor on the terms of an inherited hierarchy, it comes to seem impossible; to Troilus, Cressida's love is like food from another world, another social world, and he fears he will choke on it.

By seeing Cressida as a member of an hereditary elite from which he is permanently excluded, Troilus converts social distance into a sexual pleasure equipped with a specific complex of affects; once evacuated of social terms, the relationship becomes legible to Troilus primarily with reference to the fear he feels when looking on the social aporia constituted by Cressida. Offering a blazon of fear, Troilus says that when he gazes on Cressida,

Even such a passion doth embrace my bosom.
My heart beats thicker than a feverous pulse,
And all my powers do their bestowing lose,
Like vassalage at unawares encount'ring
The eye of majesty.

(II. 33-37)

In order to give himself that loving feeling, Troilus positions Cressida as absolute monarch.²⁰ The fear that Troilus feels when he looks on her is thus equipped with an entire sociology, for at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period the absolutist courts were vanguards of humane refinement, sites for the elaboration of ever more highly articulated forms of behavior that gradually increased the cultural separation of the court world from the popular milieu. Even though the Jacobean theory of divine right hints at the state's future autonomy, throughout the early modern era the state was still closely associated with a social elite on whose cultural separateness the authority of the state depended. In early modern England the court came to base its authority on sponsoring a culture characterized by a humane refinement and civility that seemed permanently out of reach for other segments of English society. For Troilus this secessionist potential within the heart of the absolutist court has value because it enables him to define his relationship with Cressida: this relationship is impossible in just the same way that a relationship with the Elizabethan court is impossible. For Troilus the liaison is located not in a shared space of assured mutuality, commonality, and recognition but rather in a space defined by the fear that marks the absence of any properly social connection at all. Troilus makes use of the unequally distributed symbolic resources unleashed by the ideal of shared humanity as a means of inducing a fear that is, evidently, constitutive of the sexual per se.

One basic form of functional sociability invalidated by Troilus's erotic deportment toward Cressida is the homosocial struggle for relationships with men through the bodies of women. In order to open a specifically sexual connection with Cressida, Troilus somewhat theatrically strips himself of social privilege (he is, after all, a Trojan prince) in relation to a woman who is identified as having no social privilege whatsoever. One consequence of this erotic debasement is Troilus's extrusion from the homosocial struggle of the war as a whole. Troilus's first action in the play is to disarm: “I'll unarm again,” Troilus says, asking, “Why should I war without the walls of Troy, / That find such cruel battle here within?” (1.1.1-3). Under the pressure of his love for Cressida, Troilus comes to gaze on homosociality from the outside; when he complains that “Helen must needs be fair, / When with your blood you daily paint her thus” (ll. 86-87), he comes close to disclosing the open secret that competition for Helen is merely a vehicle for desire between men.

The fact that Troilus refuses to define advantageous male-male bonds through Cressida is foregrounded (rather than refuted) by the supposedly comic Pandarus subplot. As an orthodox homosocialist, Pandarus thinks of the women he is related to as chips to be traded to other men, and he views setting up a liaison between the lovers as a means of securing a liaison with Troilus for himself. “Had I a sister … a grace,” muses Pandarus, “or a daughter a goddess, he [i.e., Troilus] should take his choice. O admirable man!” (1.2.228-29). When word comes that Cressida must be handed over to the Greeks, Pandarus's sole concern is for his prospective nephew-in-law: “Would thou hadst ne'er been born!” he says to his niece, “I knew thou wouldst be his death” (4.2.86-87). But the Pandarus-Troilus relationship's distance from homosociality is announced from the beginning, when Troilus complains that he must woo Pandarus as much (or in the same way) as he woos Cressida (“And he's as tetchy to be wooed to woo / As she is stubborn-chaste against all suit” [1.1.92-93]). Moreover, Pandarus ends the play with an Epilogue in which he seems less like one who traffics in women and more like the object of traffic himself, afflicted with the venereal “diseases” (5.11.56) that Chaucer gave to Cressida as ritualized punishment for her being a “whore.”²¹ Disturbed by this, Kenneth Palmer remarks in his Arden2 edition that “there is no natural reason why a pander should become infected by his trade; but Pandarus is a kind of surrogate for Cressida.”²² But if Pandarus can become a surrogate for Cressida, then the model of homosociality that he apparently embodies proceeds at some tangent to the smooth suture of the sexual and the social. Since Pandarus offers Troilus no social advantages, his need to woo Pandarus is simply another opportunity to distance his motivations from the red-blooded competition with real-world stakes that functional homosociality is supposed to represent. By declining this competition, Troilus converts a mode of struggle with real-world consequences into the source of a fear that singles him out as a sexual subject.

At least in Hector's eyes, the kind of homosocial struggle for a woman that Troilus declines seems to be an important source of energy for the war as a whole. In an effort to invigorate the war, Hector issues an erotic challenge to the Greeks to defend the honor of their mistresses. This challenge picks up the same complex of ideas that Troilus uses to define a specifically sexual bond, but uses it to articulate the terms of social competition between men with real consequences to the participants. “If there be one among the fair'st of Greece …,” Hector begins,

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. …

(1.3.265, 269-72)

Here, too, women are paragons of beauty and refinement, but the conspicuous courtliness of the challenge (with its implication that Hector knows how to behave around women, whereas the Greeks do not) suggests that competition for mistresses is at the same time competition with other men for symbolic attributes such as good manners, refined taste, and proper self-restraint. Aeneas, to whom the challenge is delivered, correctly concludes that what is at stake in Hector's erotic challenge is the loss of symbolic face within a competitive social totality in which status is the result of successful competition. At the Elizabethan court it was often women (from the queen on down) who represented the highest standards of humane behavior. Within the Petrarchan tradition, which provides a master code for refined interpersonal behavior, the beloved typically wants to have a “humane” relationship with her poet-suitor, a relationship based on refinement, self-cultivation, and mutual respect for a shared human core. Masculine speakers of Petrarchan poems find this new standard of relationship difficult to meet; such speakers struggle for a specific kind of relationship with a beloved woman, but at the same time (as Agamemnon suggests) they struggle with other men at court to display a conspicuous refinement. The ability to enter into refined, humane relationships—the ability, indeed, to clarify for everyone what such a relationship would be—is a sign of distinction and produces a social status-effect that is very different from the status conferred by aristocratic blood.²³ On hearing the exaggerated rhetoric of the Trojan messenger who delivers Hector's challenge, Agamemnon wonders whether “This Trojan scorns us, or the men of Troy / Are ceremonious courtiers” (ll. 233-34). Hector's challenge is about relationships between men, but these relationships are defined against the backdrop of a new concept of a society in which relationships are not legislated by an inherited hierarchy but are worked out through struggle over the very terms of social relationships.

In the context of Hector's version of the Trojan War as competition between men for the honor of their women. Cressida's removal to the Greek camp threatens to force Troilus back into homosocial competition for his beloved. After he gets the news that Cressida will be handed over to the Greeks, Troilus worries that she will desire the Greek youths because they possess the symbolic refinement that Cressida also possesses but that Troilus so evidently lacks. “The Grecian youths are full of quality,” Troilus muses,

Their loving well composed with gifts of nature,
And flowing o'er with arts and exercise.
How novelty may move and parts with person,
Alas, a kind of godly jealousy—
Which, I beseech you, call a virtuous sin—
Makes me afeard.

(4.4.75-81)

In Troilus's eyes, Cressida belongs with the Greeks because she is as civilized as they are. René Girard glosses this passage as follows: “Everything Troilus says confirms the mimetic nature of his relationship to the Greeks. He certainly wants to acquire the talents and achievements that he admires in them. Which young man in love would not?”²⁴ The only way out of fear and jealousy for Troilus would be “a Greek education,” an education that Girard thinks impossible only because it would take more time than Troilus has at this moment of crisis.²⁵

What I want to point out is that Troilus's fear of being cheated on is also a fear that the asocial, specifically sexual domain defined by the impossibility of entering into a humane relationship with Cressida will be closed off as Cressida establishes functional ties with the Greeks (to whom she is “naturally” similar anyway). To try to preserve the sexual bond, Troilus actively refuses to imagine a program of reeducation that might gradually undo the civility differential that divides him both from his beloved and from his enemy. Troilus treats the civility of Cressida and the Greeks as permanently out of reach, as though they possessed it by birth. This fact allows Troilus to preserve a sexual relationship with Cressida even after she moves into the Greek camp by declining to compete with or emulate the Greeks who now possess her. In Girard's view, loving Cressida is merely a cover for the love and aggression that Troilus bears toward the Greeks; Girard indicts Troilus for not loving Cressida enough.²⁶ But in prescribing real heterosexuality as the antidote to a love that is directed toward one's enemies, Girard misses how the sexual relationship between Troilus and Cressida is essentially identical to the competition between men across the faultlines of civilized social life—but minus the social consequences.²⁷

Paradoxically it is Cressida who must defend homosociality from the encroachment of a specifically sexual realm. For the vulnerable position Cressida inhabits in this patriarchal world makes it impossible for her to indulge in a mode of relation that attenuates the real-world stakes of a relationship between a man and a woman. Far from experiencing the fraying of homosocial bonds as a liberation, Cressida recognizes that her entire social viability depends on appealing to powerful male protectors. This gendered vulnerability colors Cressida's perception of the specifically sexual bond throughout the play. Like Troilus, Cressida experiences desire as dangerous to her social standing and dignity; yet, unlike Troilus, she apparently cannot accept the risk. Addressing Troilus, she asks: “bid me hold my tongue, / For in this rapture I shall surely speak / The thing I shall repent” (3.2.125-27). She worries that

If I confess much, you will play the tyrant.
I love you now, but till now not so much
But I might master it. In faith, I lie;
My thoughts were like unbridled children, grown
Too headstrong for their mother. See, we fools!
Why have I blabbed?

(II. 115-20)

Cressida's desire for Troilus, a desire that might lead her to willingly accept Troilus's authority, is as unsettling as rebellious children. Cressida sees that only unattainability is safe for a woman. She famously claims that “Women are angels, wooing; / Things won are done” (1.2.277-78). When she wishes she were a man (“I wished myself a man, / Or that we women had men's privilege / Of speaking first” [3.2.123-25]), it is only partly because men are authorized to woo. Cressida also hints that men can take risks that women cannot, that men may indulge in a desire that is characterized by its tendency to undermine social credibility, dignity, and authority. It is because of the difficulties gender causes her that Cressida must struggle with and, I think, finally conquer a powerful impulse that Troilus simply gives in to.

This experience of sexuality helps to explain the speed and ease with which Cressida embraces the role of coquette once she has been removed to the Greek camp. When the Greek leaders paw at her minutes after she has left her lover, Cressida coolly plays with their desires. Her coquettishness does not get her far (it elicits an aggressively misogynist reply from Ulysses), but Cressida may well be making the most of an extremely weak hand. This realistic resignation sets Cressida up for the charge of faithlessness, yet there is a sense in which it allows her own desire for Troilus to remain more or less intact, something dangerous that resides inside the self and threatens at every turn to undermine even Cressida's tenuously held position in the Greek camp. This may account for Cressida's profound struggle with herself when she accedes to Diomedes's request for a favor. What is surprising here is not that Cressida finally gives in but that she comes close to holding out; this would surely be something of a suicidal gesture. When Cressida tells Diomedes that the pledge he has just taken from her belonged to one “that loved me better than you will” (5.2.96), it sounds as if she is resigning herself to the claims of reality. For if Troilus loved her better than Diomedes, Diomedes can certainly protect her better now that she is in the Greek camp. Cressida is essentially choosing a homosocial relationship over an erotic one. If she preserves an erotic connection to Troilus as an unrealized potential, she simultaneously condemns him to the homosocial exchanges from which he had felt pleasurably excluded under the pressure of his passion for Cressida.

Witnessing Cressida's apparent betrayal while secretly spying on her and Diomedes, Troilus exits vowing revenge upon his rival. Insofar as the Cressida/Troilus/Diomedes story replays the Helen/Menelaus/Paris story in reverse (a parallel emphasized by Thersites as he spies on Ulysses and Troilus spying on Cressida and Diomedes²⁸), Troilus's desire for revenge promises to inject some energy into the war as a whole. In the very next scene Troilus argues with his brother Hector, who is apparently prone to flamboyantly chivalric gestures on the battlefield:

                                                  For th' love of all the gods,
Let's leave the hermit Pity with our mothers,
And when we have our armours buckled on,
The venomed vengeance ride upon our swords,
Spur them to ruthful work, rein them from ruth.

(5.3.44-48)

Whereas Troilus had begun the play in the grip of thoroughgoing disaffection from combat, he now becomes an advocate of total war. He urges Hector to ignore both an outdated code of honor and the entreaties of his wife, sister, and father, who beg him to sit out the battle. Moreover, in the battle that takes up most of Act 5, Troilus's actions stand as an emblem of the Trojan War as it ought to look. Ulysses says that Troilus has

                                        done today
Mad and fantastic execution,
Engaging and redeeming of himself
With such a careless force and forceless care
As if that luck, in very spite of cunning,
Bade him win all.

(5.5.37-42)

Ulysses worries that his own famous “cunning” will be no match for Troilus's “careless force.” Yet by describing Troilus's anger as “careless,” Ulysses implies that deep within an apparent commitment to the public responsibilities of war lies a turn against the self that hints at the persistence of a sexual element in Troilus's new-found martial interest. Troilus, too, hints that there is something “careless” in his bravery: “Fate, hear me what I say! / I reck not though thou end my life today” (5.6.26-27); and at the end of the play, after the catastrophe of Hector's death, Troilus presents himself not as the second Hector and best hope of his people but as the harbinger of final destruction: “Sit, gods, upon your thrones and smite at Troy! / I say at once: let your brief plagues be mercy, / And linger not our sure destruction on!” (5.11.7-9). These are almost the last words of the play, and they suggest how heroism in defense of one's city can resemble a death-wish. Even as Cressida's anguished decision returns Troilus to the homosocial fold, to a war in which he had lost interest, it also, perhaps secretly, shifts the sexualized comportment he had adopted toward her onto another terrain.

While Troilus's decision to seek revenge on the battlefield for Cressida's faithlessness seems to reinvigorate the flagging war, it is worth wondering whether the war depicted in such detail in Act 5 still constitutes a defense of homosociality. One way of approaching this question is through the figure of Achilles, who holds up the progress of the war by refusing to fight. I will argue that Achilles's refusal opens a specifically sexual mode of relation by embodying the same contradiction between an archaic and an emerging modern social imaginary that informs the Troilus-Cressida relationship. Around Achilles, however, it is relationships between men that are sexualized rather than the relationship between a man and a woman. This reduction of functional social bonds between men invites us to imagine an alternative form of sociability that might displace the homosocial practices of patriarchy altogether. There is a real sense that the war finally constituted by the battlefield encounter of Achilles, Hector, and Troilus is neither the inversion of social life nor its continuation but rather the rebuilding of society on a new foundation.

That Achilles does not follow social conventions is the obvious problem faced by the Greek leadership. The terms of social ordering against which Achilles rebels are invoked by Ulysses in the famous speech in 1.3 where he defends the hierarchy that Achilles's refusal undermines. This speech is a recognizable type of Elizabethan forensic exercise. Ulysses, however, relies on the physiological metaphors that permeate the play to express his vision of the disciplined army, foregrounding digestion as the privileged model for integrating Achilles into social life. “When the general is not like the hive,” Ulysses asks, “To whom the foragers shall all repair, / What honey is expected?” (1.3.81-83). Ulysses recognizes Achilles's recalcitrance as detrimental primarily because it interferes with the orderly process during which the bees both bring food to the general and are then eaten by him. A derangement of appetite ensues:

Then everything includes itself in 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.

(II. 119-24)

This final phrase—“And last eat up himself”—is, of course, Shakespeare's slogan for the disease that afflicts Achilles as well as the young man of the Sonnets, namely, pride. Agamemnon says simply, “He that is proud eats up himself” (2.3.152); and Ulysses describes “the proud lord” as “bast[ing] his arrogance with his own seam [i.e., fat, grease]” (ll. 181, 182). By consuming itself, pride “steals” food from the collective by withholding the body of Achilles: this is precisely the point Shakespeare tries to make in the procreative sonnets when he complains about the proud young man's refusal to reproduce.

From Ulysses's viewpoint pride is a problem because it ruins the appetite of others, the appetite of the hive, the appetite of the general himself. “Great Agamemnon,” Ulysses concludes his Act 1 forensic exercise, “This chaos, when degree is suffocate, / Follows the choking” (1.3.124-26). The general chokes on Achilles, a point later made by the general himself when, speaking of Achilles's virtues, he says:

                                        yet all his virtues,
Not virtuously on his own part beheld,
Do in our eyes begin to lose their gloss,
Yea, like fair fruit in an unwholesome dish,
Are like to rot untasted.

(2.3.115-19)

Achilles is or is becoming rotten food that will stick in the throat. His pride is distance and inhumanity figured specifically as antisocial, a kernel that seems impervious to the demands of social life. His refusal to enter into bonds at all is figured in the Greek camp as producing nausea. In the play Ajax offers to return Achilles to the general food supply by making him into bread: “I will knead him; I'll make him supple” (l. 218). The wish to break Achilles's pride and thereby to make him edible leads Ajax to wish that Achilles “were a Trojan” (l. 230). The entire Greek leadership shares Ajax's view that there is something treacherous about Achilles, something that makes Achilles more dangerous than the Trojans.

Like Troilus's fear, Achilles's pride is the effect of a contradiction between social imaginaries. Achilles deprives the social world of its function of recognizing and reflecting the virtues of the hero, a function that points toward a social imaginary in which status is worked out through successful competition with other agents. In Act 3, Ulysses asserts:

                                        no man is the lord of anything,
Though in and of him there be much consisting,
Till he communicate his parts to others;
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught
Till he behold them formed in th'applause.

(3.3.116-20)

It is specifically the function of praising him, of applauding him, that Achilles denies the other members of the social world, precisely the function that the young man of the Sonnets seems to disable. In the Sonnets the forestalling of praise makes Shakespeare, as a lyric speaker, seem superfluous, pointless, and makes a relationship between the poet and the object of poetic praise seem impossible as well. Yet in the case of the Sonnets, it is precisely within this space of social impossibility that sexuality becomes possible. By breaking with the metaphorics of praise that ought to join a low-status poet with a high-status patron, the proud young man makes the speaker of the Sonnets superfluous in just the way the entire Greek polity is superfluous for Achilles. Like the young man, Achilles essentially imposes a sociological distinction premised on successful competition within a charged social totality—premised, that is, on eliciting praise—onto an outdated aristocratic imaginary in which status derives from blood alone. The pride of Achilles therefore marks the moment at which a social order based on constant struggle to define the very terms of human relationships collapses back into a feudal aristocracy.

Ulysses's arguments notwithstanding, Achilles does indeed believe himself to be “lord” even when he does not “communicate his parts to others.” In the Sonnets the injection of symbolic distinction into the veins has the curious effect of making it impossible to tell whether the young man is an aristocrat or, as William Empson puts it, a career-minded arriviste.²⁹ Such a confusion of status also afflicts Achilles and for exactly the same reason. In both cases pride identifies a peculiar moment of social dysfunction. Ajax summarizes the prevailing view in the Greek camp by asking simply, “Can he not be sociable?” (2.3.207). The question of sociability—of the terms on which Achilles can be integrated into the normal practices of social life, the terms on which a relationship with pride is possible—is the central question faced by the Greek camp. And since, as Ulysses puts it at the beginning of his Act 1 speech, “Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength” (1.3.137), it is in some sense the central question addressed by the play. This question is posed in terms of pride, the pride that eats itself and thus threatens to spoil the appetite of others, replacing the well-ordered appetite of Ulysses's beehive with a nausea evoked by the spoiled fruit on which the general may choke.

The problem of how one can enter into a relationship with pride defines one important component of the sexuality Shakespeare explores in this play. As is the case with Troilus and Cressida, social impossibility points to the specificity of the sexual. Ajax himself transfers the disgust Achilles makes him feel into the sexual register: “I do hate a proud man as I hate the engendering of toads” (2.3.156-57), an image also used by Othello to describe the disgust he feels at the thought of Desdemona's sexual infidelity. What makes pride and the encounter with pride look sexual is precisely that it makes society look impossible. To encounter pride is to encounter an aporia, to feel useless, to feel more or less supplementary, to feel like the subject of a sexual relationship as Shakespeare seems to understand it. Moreover, if fear marks a state of social emergency, then pride threatens to institutionalize that state of emergency by providing an alternative matrix of male-male relationships. While Achilles's expression of pride defines all relationships with him as sexual, that pride itself exhibits an alarming tendency to replicate itself in others.³⁰ If pride enacts a conversion of the social into the sexual, it also encourages others to become proud and thereby to open specifically sexual relations with still other members of the community. Near the beginning of the play, Ulysses provides an image of the reproduction of asocially prideful couples in the “factions,” the Greek warriors who, in “envious fever / Of pale and bloodless emulation” (1.3.133-34), imitate Achilles's pride by keeping to their tents as he does. In the Greek camp the imitation of pride is evidently irresistible, and Ulysses fears that the ensuing factions will cause the Greeks to lose the war. Achilles's pride keeps open (indeed, widens the purview of) the asocial space that also appears in the Troilus-Cressida relationship. Shakespeare's play locates in the antisocial pride of Achilles a kernel capable of radically remodeling the “normal” conduct of social life by generating an entire society around the nonrelationships that are defined as sexual.

I want to argue that the sexual mode instantiated by Achilles's pride does not so much attack the authority of the state that Ulysses represents as make use of that authority in a new way. Ulysses complains:

The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns
The sinew and the forehand of our host,
Having his ear full of his airy fame,
Grows dainty of his worth and in his tent
Lies mocking our designs. With him Patroclus,
Upon a lazy bed, the livelong day
Breaks scurril jests,
And with ridiculous and awkward action—
Which, slanderer, he imitation calls—
He pageants us. Sometimes, great Agamemnon,
Thy topless deputation he puts on,
… like a strutting player, whose conceit
Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich
To hear the wooden dialogue and sound
'Twixt his stretched footing and the scaffoldage. …

(II. 142-56)

Patroclus reduces the affairs of state to comic pageants, while Achilles acts like a member of a rowdy Elizabethan audience: “The large Achilles, on his pressed bed lolling, / From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause, / Cries ‘Excellent! 'Tis Agamemnon just. / Now play me Nestor …’” (ll. 162-65). Through Patroclus's parodies of the “Achievements, plots, orders, preventions” the Greek high command are reduced to “stuff for these two to make paradoxes” (ll. 181, 184). Patroclus's comic theater undermines the respect that the state ought to induce. Here, for example, Ulysses gives his view of how subjects ought to relate to the state:

There is a mystery—with whom relation
Durst never meddle—in the soul of state,
Which hath an operation more divine
Than breath or pen can give expressure to.

(3.3.203-6)

Ulysses's invocation of what E. R. Curtius calls the inexpressibility topos suggests that the court's legitimacy depends, in part, on remaining socially unavailable.³¹ The state's “mystery” is coeval with its refusal of any normal relation to society at large. The divine-right monarchy explicitly theorized by James but powerfully anticipated by Elizabeth relies for its social validity on its refusal of the terms of public social intercourse. The inexpressibility topos is frequently invoked in lyric poetry, often in response to the beauties of a beloved lady, as when Troilus encounters Cressida and temporarily loses his powers of speech. In the case of the comic theater in Achilles's bedroom, however, the topos militates powerfully against the dependence of Elizabethan public theaters on representing the elite to the popular audience. By representing what ought to be unspeakably distant, namely, the awe-inspiring state, Patroclus converts social impossibility into pleasure, a formula that also makes possible a relationship with the proud Achilles. I am not arguing that Patroclus's comic theater undermines the cultural and social distance of the state in reality. Indeed, the pleasure of his playacting evidently lies partly in its being a representation rather than the real thing. Ulysses complains that Patroclus is a bad actor, that his imitations of the Greek leaders are as little like their models as “Vulcan and his wife” (1.3.168), but this difference, and the fact of representation that it foregrounds, is part of the pleasure Achilles takes in consuming Patroclus's performances. The distance that ought properly to divide the court from the people it governs is foreclosed as the awesome power of the state is brought into the bedroom, not in reality but only as cultural representation, not in the name of power or surveillance but in the name of pleasure. Through this representation the court is used to inject social distance into the heart of a personal relationship.

While the Achilles-Patroclus relationship does not attack the state but merely makes tactical use of it, Thersites's response illustrates how social consequences can always be reattached to a relationship between men that tries to define itself as asocial. Everyone in the Greek camp knows that Achilles and Patroclus are sleeping together; Thersites refers to Patroclus as “Achilles' male varlet” and as his “masculine whore” (5.1.15, 17). As Gregory Bredbeck has observed, Thersites invokes the discourse of sodomy, a discourse intimately associated with Thersites's own satirically antisocial persona.³² For Thersites the Achilles-Patroclus relationship is a sign of the degeneration of the entire body politic; this sodomitical discourse essentially countersigns Ulysses's fear that Achilles is attacking the very foundations of Greek social order. Through the implied charge of sodomy, Thersites imputes significant social consequences to the Achilles-Patroclus bond, seeing it as an attack on all of society. This is just what Nestor does when he uses Patroclus's death to goad Achilles back onto the battlefield by telling his soldiers to “bear Patroclus' body to Achilles” (5.5.17).³³ Nestor is defending against the specificity of the sexual in precisely the same way that Thersites does: in both cases a relationship built on the absence of a functional social ground is denied in favor of a relationship with over-whelmingly social consequences, whether those consequences are bad or good. What is finally so disturbing about the Achilles-Patroclus relationship is that a fully theatricalized encounter across the armed border between the cultured court and the lower orders is undertaken in the name of a pleasure fully compatible with the absence of a relationship at the social level.³⁴

This pleasure suggests a different path to war than the social discipline that Ulysses has been advocating. Most of the action on the Greek side centers on Ulysses's various strategies for breaking Achilles's pride, including selecting Ajax rather than Achilles to answer the challenge sent by Hector to defend women's honor. But the problem of sociability that is constituted by Achilles's pride is finally solved not by cunning but by love.³⁵ “I have a woman's longing,” Achilles announces,

An appetite that I am sick withal,
To see great Hector in his weeds of peace,
To talk with him, and to behold his visage
Even to my full of view.

(3.3.239-43)

The appetite for another that pride retards is directed only toward the enemy; but if the desire for Hector in his weeds of peace, like Aeneas's greeting of Diomedes in the name of gentle humanity, seems to open a space for humanity and restraint in the midst of the ravages of war, the encounter itself makes war seem not a violation of the terms of social life but the very essence of social life differently conceived. For Achilles the desire to behold the visage of Hector is perfectly consistent with, even premised on, the desire to destroy that visage. When the heroes do meet, they are like two bodybuilders admiring one another's dangerously enlarged musculature. “Now, Hector,” says Achilles, “I have fed mine eyes on thee; / I have with exact view perused thee, Hector, / And quoted joint by joint” (4.5.231-33). But this loving gaze is merely a prelude:

Tell me, you heavens, in which part of his body
Shall I destroy him? Whether there, or there, or there?
That I may give the local wound a name
And make distinct the very breach whereout
Hector's great spirit flew. Answer me, heavens!

(II. 242-46)

And it is evidently on these terms that Achilles invites Hector to gaze back—“Behold thy fill” (l. 236)—and takes offense when Hector says he has already seen enough. Achilles assumes that Hector enjoys looking at the muscles of the man who promises to use them to inflict pain. Being invited to enter into a relationship with Achilles on these terms makes Hector uneasy, an uneasiness that he can label only by invoking the pride that names the one way in which anyone can have a relationship with Achilles. “It would discredit the blest gods, proud man, / To answer such a question” (ll. 247-48). On these thoroughly nonsocial terms the relationship may go on forever, a possibility that Hector articulates when he departs from Achilles with a warning:

                                                  Henceforth guard thee well;
For I'll not kill thee there, nor there, nor there,
But, by the forge that stithied Mars his helm,
I'll kill thee everywhere, yea, o'er and o'er.

(II. 253-56)

When Hector can kill Achilles “everywhere, yea, o'er and o'er,” pride becomes the condition for a relationship as much as its abrogation. The hole within the normal operations of the social world opened by the pride that admits of no appetite for others and that refuses to serve as food for others is here converted into the ground of a relationship that may go on forever. Social life is revealed in a radically new light because it has lost any link to the homosocial bonds that the war was initially undertaken to uphold. At this moment Shakespeare's play participates in what Bersani terms the mythic reconfiguration of modes of relationality, which he sees as one of the tasks of literature.³⁶ Shakespeare's play locates a mode of relation that proceeds from recognition of radical similarity (Hector and Achilles as mirror images of each other) to a form of social practice premised on making the relationship itself seem impossible, over and over again.³⁷ A new picture of society emerges here, in which the most compelling bond is one that proceeds on the ground of a relationship whose closest modern analogue may be sadomasochism.

This sadomasochism has, of course, already been spelled out in the truce scene, in which Aeneas says to Diomedes that never has anyone so loved the thing he means to kill. If the violence of the encounters between Diomedes and Aeneas and between Achilles and Hector is partially explained by the impulse to aristocratic secession from shared social life, then the humanity of the civilizing process nevertheless delivers the powerfully binding force against which these relationships agitate. This force gestures toward what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the “spontaneous sociology” or implicit map of a social totality that is defined by struggle over the very terms of social relationships.³⁸ In Shakespeare this emerging spontaneous sociology is as valuable for the powerfully modern social totality it apparently projects as for the failures it inevitably foregrounds, the moments when the forces of shared humanity threaten to break down. For Shakespeare the notion of such a humanity is valuable primarily because it persistently fails to deliver the terms for social relationships. Troilus cringes before Cressida, Aeneas greets Diomedes, Hector stares at Achilles, Achilles laughs at Patroclus: these relationships foreground failures within the universal humanity and sociability dreamt of by the civilizing process. And these relationships also gesture toward an alternative world in which the most fundamentally social desire is also Hector's desire: the desire to kill, everywhere, over and over again.

Notes

1. The term homosocial is drawn from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential account in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). The notion of the “traffic in women” that informs both Sedgwick's account and my own is derived from Gayle Rubin's “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, Rayna R. Reiter, ed. (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.

2. Pandarus makes the comparison frequently; for example, at 1.1.72-73 he says of his niece, “and she were not kin to me, she would be as fair o' Friday as Helen is o' Sunday.”

3. Quotations of Shakespeare in this essay follow the Arden Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida, ed. David Bevington (Walton-on-Thames, UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998).

4. Valerie Traub, too, notes that in this play all women seem like foreigners; see her Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of sexuality in Shakespearean drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 71-87, esp. 77. Traub situates the play within the early modern discourse of syphilis and identifies women as potent sources of political as well as sexual infection. Traub goes on to make the suggestive claim that, under the pressure of the discourse of syphilis, Troilus and Cressida makes all sexual relationships seem diseased.

5. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978-).

6. Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1994), 1-14, esp. 5. See also Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992). Along with Goldberg and Sedgwick, Alan Bray has played an important role in developing the model I refer to here; see especially his Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1988).

7. I see essentially no continuity, however, between Shakespeare's interest in dramatic affects and modern interest in the affects of the novel, which is apparently undertaken from a secure ideology of emotions as the terrain of intimacy. For a sophisticated sociological account of the rise of intimacy as the preeminent home for sexuality, see Niklas Luhmann, Love as passion: The codification of intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998).

8. In some respects, I see a similar approach employed by Foucault himself in The Use of Pleasure, Volume 2 of his History of Sexuality.

9. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978-82). For a historical account that sees civility as an effort to make inner states publicly legible and thus to increase the integration and discipline of the social body, see Jacques Revel, “The Uses of Civility” in The Passions of the Renaissance, Roger Chartier, ed., Vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1987-91), 3:167-205. For a suggestive treatment of the impact that conduct literature had on relationships between humanist intellectuals and their aristocratic patrons, see Barbara Correll, The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1996), 58-76.

10. See Desiderius Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium (London, 1532).

11. The two tendencies contained within the civilizing process, on the one hand generating universal standards of behavior and on the other hand using a restricted civility to mark a social elite, may be associated with two genres of conduct literature. While the universalizing tendency is represented by Erasmus's De civilitate morum puerilium, the restricting tendency is represented by Baldassare Castiglione's The Courtier. While Erasmus's texts were often addressed only to aristocratic charges, the speed with which they were translated and republished during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests a tendency toward universal application.

12. I am using the term contradiction as Althusser does in his essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an Investigation,” which is reprinted in Althusser's For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 87-128. For Althusser, contradiction refers to the accumulation of terms for social struggle from different historical epochs. Axes of archaic social struggle fuse with those of modern social struggles to create a weakness in the social fabric. In my discussion I emphasize the fusing of incompatible social imaginaries, one feudal and one modern, each of which also points toward social struggles in its own terms.

13. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” October 43 (1987): 197-222, esp. 215. A revised version of this essay is reprinted in Reclaiming Sodom, Jonathan Goldberg, ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 219-64. See also Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1986). Bersani draws heavily on the psychoanalytic work of Jean Laplanche, whose emphasis on the ego's origin in a masochism that remains in play in all sexual expression is deeply relevant to my account as well; see his Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976).

14. Bersani, 217.

15. Bersani, 215.

16. Bersani, 215.

17. Bersani, 222.

18. Shakespeare's interest in defining sexual relationships in a way that bypasses the intimacy mediated by shared emotions is paralleled by Candace Vogler's recent discussion of marital sexuality as a place in which the norms that regulate domestic life are temporarily violated; see her “Sex and Talk,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 328-65. Vogler's account draws on Bersani's persistent critique of a pastoral model of sexuality in which sexual relations are seen as governed by the same mechanisms that govern “normal” social life.

19. Troilus is, of course, a prince. The point I wish to make is that in order to define the relationship as sexual, Troilus disavows a real social status to invest his relationship with Cressida with the radical social impossibility that alone is erotic. This tactical renunciation of “real” social status is also expressed by his demotion to the status of a woman. Declining Pandarus's entreaties to enter battle, for example, Troilus responds: “I am weaker than a woman's tear” (1.1.9).

20. In a different context Jonathan Goldberg describes how social codes can invest relationships with specific affects, even producing physiological responses; see his “Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Differences 4.1 (1992): 172-204.

21. Commenting on the Epilogue, in which Pandarus announces both that he has become infected with venereal disease and that the theater audience will become infected, Traub argues that the audience is here forced to acknowledge its participation in a kind of sexual relationship (80). I agree that there is a kind of analogy between sexual relationship and the cultural consumption of theater but do not believe that this fact is meant to elicit audience anxiety.

22. See Kenneth Palmer, ed., The Arden Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), 303n.

23. For a sociological account of the mode of social competition Agamemnon invokes here, see Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984). Whigham's account tends to deemphasize the sexual politics that, together with the cultural politics he describes, define the gestalt of social convention against which Shakespeare rebels in the interest of making sexual relationships socially legible. For an account that attempts to connect cultural and sexual politics at the court of Elizabeth, see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).

24. René Girard, “The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 188-209, esp. 198.

25. Girard, 198.

26. Girard, 198. Linda Charnes, too, sees the play as a struggle to restore homosociality; as she puts it, the abduction of Helen “is important only insofar as it enables several kinds of ‘commerce’ between Greek and Trojan men” (“‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 [1989]: 413-40, esp. 424). Charnes's account is valuable because she attempts to apply the traffic-in-women model to the social and psychic dynamic of attaining social status, but she does so without attention to the specific logic by which the struggle for distinction is undertaken in early modern England. Thus she writes: “Through the holding of Helen, difference is established, and with difference (in the language of the play, ‘distinction’) ‘reputation’ is built and confirmed” (424). My own account describes the social logic of distinction as a potent way of disrupting a model of the homosocial that depends on the traffic in women but includes, or can include, sex between men.

27. Once Cressida is handed over to the Greeks, seeing her becomes physically dangerous, a fact that fits in perfectly with Troilus's conception of sexual desire as pushing him to the limits of the social world. When Cressida reminds Troilus that it will be dangerous for him to visit her in the Greek camp, Troilus excitedly embraces this danger: “I'll grow friend with danger” (4.4.69). There is also, however, a sense that once she has been removed to the Greek camp, Cressida becomes off-limits for Troilus in a way that threatens the specificity of the sexual connection between them despite his efforts to preserve it. After all, in the Greek camp Cressida is possessed by men—by her father, Calchas (whose blood she tries unsuccessfully to disavow: “I have forgot my father. / I know no touch of consanguinity” [4.2.97-98])—but also by Diomedes, on whose protection Calchas evidently relies and to whom he has evidently surrendered his daughter.

28. At 5.2.200 Thersites compares Menelaus and Troilus.

29. See William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), 91-92.

30. An affect is both a feeling and a publicly available expression. In Shakespeare's play the expressive component of affects is so strongly emphasized that Achilles's pride is significant to other characters trying to enter into a relationship with him. Early modern affects essentially define states of the body that place it in definite relations to other bodies. Silvan Tomkins balances the two aspects of emotions in several essays reprinted in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds. (Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1995).

31. For the inexpressibility topos, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), 159-62.

32. See Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1991), 33-48. A version of Bredbeck's comments on the play also appeared as an article entitled “Constructing Patroclus: The High and Low Discourses of Renaissance Sodomy” in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt, eds. (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991), 77-91. Bredbeck sees Thersites's somewhat hysterical comments as participating in a Renaissance discourse of sodomy which is designed to reinforce normative social categories and hierarchies. Shakespeare seeks to differentiate the sexual ties he defines from the kind of antisocial danger identified by the discourse of sodomy.

33. Anger at the murder of his friend finally drives Achilles back onto the battlefield and thus sets the classical story of the Trojan war back on course to its fateful dénouement. This allows Ulysses to declare a victory not against the Trojans but against Achilles: “O, courage, courage, princes! Great Achilles / Is arming, weeping, cursing, vowing vengeance. / Patroclus' wounds have roused his drowsy blood” (5.5.30-32). This seems like a moment in which social consequences accrue to a specifically sexual bond, although what Achilles ends up doing on the battlefield (namely, murdering Hector in a spectacular violation of chivalry) seems not to be exactly what Ulysses had in mind for him.

34. Insofar as it simply keeps him from his social duties, the relationship with Patroclus is analogous to the relationship Achilles is said to have with the Trojan princess Polyxena. But while Achilles's relationship with Patroclus elicits the charge of sodomy, Achilles's relationship with Polyxena elicits the charge of feminization. When Ulysses remarks, “better would it fit Achilles much / To throw down Hector than Polyxena” (3.3.209-10), Patroclus himself draws the conclusion: “To this effect, Achilles, have I moved you. / A woman impudent and mannish grown / Is not more loathed than an effeminate man / In time of action” (ll. 218-21).

35. For a historical contextualization of the figure of Achilles which is relevant to this encounter, see Eric S. Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 25-61.

36. See, for example, Bersani's discussion of Genet in Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1995).

37. See Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, “A Conversation with Leo Bersani,” October 82 (1998): 4-15, esp. 4.

38. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991), 38.