SOURCE: McCandless, David. “Troilus and Cressida.” In Gender and Performance in Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, pp. 123-66. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, McCandless explores the play's approach to masculinity, particularly Shakespeare's treatment of the Trojan War as a process of emasculation. The critic maintains that the play's dramatic representation of sexual difference is left unresolved.]

Troilus and Cressida is the most problematic of the problem comedies, the most removed from the ameliorative comic structures that lend All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure a provisional integrity. It deploys the largest screen for its projected crisis in gender, turning the epic Trojan War into a vast spectacle of emasculation, and leaves its drama of sexual difference even more unresolved. It more provocatively deconstructs its sources, deflating heroic legends instead of fracturing folk tales. For these reasons, I am discussing Troilus and Cressida last, even though, chronologically speaking, it is the first of the problem comedies.

Shakespeare depicts the Trojan War as an arrested collective oedipal plot in which the quest for masculinity is frustrated by the unavailability and inadequacy of its object/obstacle/objective. Victory in war—achievement of manhood—depends upon possessing Helen, and Helen is unpossessable. To the extent that she underwrites the warriors' heroic endeavors, she exists as a purely mythical construct—the awesome beauty of legend—and, therefore, cannot be possessed. To the extent that she is a mere woman, she also proves unattainable, an emasculating seductress unamenable to male governance. Helen the woman is utterly unequal to her legendary image, unworthy of the carnage she causes. Like the Duke, she is a signifier of lack who is herself lacking, a figure of the veiled phallus.¹

In the Trojan Council scene, Hector attempts to expose Helen's lack, protesting the “mad idolatry” that “attribute[s]” to her a value she does not intrinsically possess (2.2.56-60). In effect, Hector decorously translates Thersites' aspersion of Helen as a “placket,” a slur collapsing Helen with the female sexual organ, which, in a phallocentric frame of meaning, signifies nothing. For Hector, Helen is nothing but a transgressive wife—subject to the laws of men—who ought to be returned to her husband (2.2.173-88). Troilus, by contrast, equates her with the male sexual organ, or at least with the organ of the king's power, which he locates in a vast protrusion from the waist. “Fie, fie, my brother!,” he exclaims,

Will you with counters sum
The past proportion of his infinite,
And buckle in a waist most fathomless
With spans and inches so diminutive
As fears and reasons?

(2.2.25-32)

To retain Helen is to sustain the Father's erection—or at least to allow his fathomless waist to protrude unchecked. Troilus invents a mythically powerful father-figure—one vastly different from the ineffectual Priam—in order to borrow from him a phallus for Helen. In so doing, Troilus publicly indulges in the profligate fetishizing of Helen that he had privately denounced: “Helen must needs be fair,” he had protested earlier, “when with your blood you daily paint her thus” (1.1.90-91). To “paint” Helen is either to beautify her with cosmetics or to paint her picture. In either case, she becomes more an effect than a cause of the war, a mythical being spawned from male bloodshed.

The empty Helen functions as a signifier for the emptiness of the whole enterprise of the Trojan War. Not only is what the armies strive for not worth having, it is scarcely “there” at all. In Euripides' Helen, the title character never goes to Troy at all, but is (mis)represented by a phantom. In Shakespeare's play, she goes to Troy—but she is still misrepresented by a phantom: a projection of the warriors' need to substantiate their quest for masculinity, a masculinity preemptively denied them from the outset.

Ulysses confirms this essential male “lack” in decrying the futility of redressing the collective emasculation inflicted on the Greek generals by Helen's cuckolding of Menelaus: “O deadly gall, and theme of all our scorns,” he exclaims, “for which we lose our heads to gild his horns (4.5.30-31)! The Greek warriors “lose their heads” (submit to emasculation) while aggrandizing the emasculated Menelaus.

The Trojan soldiers are as essentially “lacking” as the Greeks: “you have the honey,” Priam scolds Paris, “but these [his fellow warriors] the gall” (2.2.144). The Trojans also lose their heads for a woman they cannot possess. Nor does Paris truly possess her. Helen, it is clear, possesses him: “I would fain have arm'd today,” Paris tells Pandarus, “but my Nell would not have it so” (3.1.135-36). Paris puts down his own arms in order to lie in Helen's, surrendering male potency to lose himself in a female bower of bliss. At the scene's end, Helen promises to disarm Hector upon his return from battle—an “unmetaphoring” of her seductive capacities.

Helen's seductiveness derives from her willingness to inhabit the warriors' misrecognition, to be forever unassimilable to her seductive image and thus forever uncapturable, defeating their efforts to constitute themselves in her capture.² To paraphrase Viola, they'd be better off capturing a dream. If Helena of All's Well displays a subjectivity exceeding the lack assigned her, Helen of Troilus and Cressida displays a lack contradicting the distinction awarded her. Her one scripted scene amply dramatizes her defectiveness. Idly lounging with the besotted Paris, persistently interrupting Pandarus in order to request a randy song, she cuts a frivolous, vacuous figure ill-befitting her status as “theme of honor and renown” (2.2.199).

At the same time, performance could confirm her formidable seductiveness. The director could stage the scene as a virtual fulfillment of the male fantasy embedded in Troilus' longing to “wallow” in Elysian “lily-beds” (3.2.12, 22): presenting Paris and Helen in luxuriant repose, listening to music while nibbling on fruits and nibbling at each other—enacting the specifically oral gratifications that Troilus evokes in his speech, offering an image of the recovered lost plenitude for which he longs.

Helen dispels the fantasy of blissful fusion at the scene's end, however, asserting her difference from the image of compliant sex-object by reaffirming her unpossessability. “[B]y my troth, sweet lord, thou hast a fine forehead,” Helen says (3.1.107-108). Editors have been inclined to assume she addresses this line to Pandarus, but she could just as easily say it to Paris. In fact, in the quarto version, the line reads, “by my troth, sweet lad”—an appellation better suited to Paris than Pandarus. In that case, Pandarus' response, “you may, you may,” could be addressed not to Helen (as in “you may have your joke”) but to Paris (as in “you may have a fine forehead one day—when Helen cuckolds you”). By raising the specter of emasculation, Helen asserts her unmasterable otherness.

In performance, Helen's status as seductive image could also be conveyed through a series of fetishizing tableaux that parallel in visual terms the play's recurrent verbal references to her. These tableaux would establish her status as gaze, the phallus transferred to the visual field. She could be omnipresent throughout the play's action, framed in contemporary images of adulation: trailed by adoring fans and autograph hounds, swarmed upon by paparazzi, lovingly and lavishly attended by a sycophantic entourage. Helen is the gaze as center of attention, focus as well as founder of the spectacle, deriving power not from looking but from being looked at. Her essential persona could be that of the world's preeminent supermodel, the apotheosis of “feminine” glamor and celebrity, serving not simply as specular treat for men but as mirror of misrecognition for women, modeling a fabricated femininity.

Images of Helen's vanity and vapidity could provide ironic counterpoint to the weighty debates, heated passions, and frenzied fighting that she implicitly incites, underscoring her inadequacy as the war's “theme.”³ One moment, in particular, could assist in this gestus: during the Trojan Council scene, when Troilus and Paris praise Helen's peerlessness, she could be seen savoring the lavishments of her worshipful entourage, as they dress and coif her and apply her makeup, confirming her status as constructed icon.

Helen's status as gaze could be established from the outset. The play could open with a startlingly contemporary yet gestically potent image: a video featuring Helen simulating a supermodel's photo shoot, assuming the obligatory sultry and pouty poses to the accompaniment of soft-rock music.⁴ As the video ends, the play could move to another gestic moment: Helen, now glamorously clad in a shimmering gold gown, takes the stage accompanied by a smartly dressed older gentleman, basking in the attention of frantically jostling photographers. When her dandified consort, Pandarus, raises his hand, Helen and the photographers freeze into a tableau. Pandarus then speaks the lines of the prologue, literally cuing the arrival of the enemy armies, the “princes orgillous” from Greece (2) on one side of the stage, and the “sons of Troy” (13-19) on the other, each freezing into fiercely combative poses.⁵ Having conducted Helen, the subject of the quarrel (8-10), to a position between the two armies, Pandarus then waves his arms, cuing the eruption of war; the two armies rush ferociously to meet each other, all the while yelling and heaving and thrusting. Helen, a poised, glittering jewel, drifts among these hacking behemoths, unobserved and undisturbed, dominating the spectator's field of vision, ratifying her status as gaze. As the fighting progresses, she sits on a golden chair attached to wires and is lifted slowly above the savage combat, serenely observing the slaughter until she ascends out of sight.

THE WAR AS EMPTY SPECTACLE

Helen's status as phallus/gaze, as signifier of the warrior's disarmament, figures crucially in the play's apocalyptic imagery. Ulysses' speech on violated degree records a fear of female dominance suggestive of Helen's emasculating power: “the bounded waters / Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, / And make a sop of all this solid globe” (1.3.111-13). Ulysses' striking image expresses dread not of castration but of engulfment, portraying a catastrophic flood as a profusion of breast milk—or at least of a liquid emitted from perilously unbounded “bosoms.” The lines manifest fear of losing masculine solidness and becoming infantilized sops for female bodily emissions, of regressing to a state of subjugation by a powerful female force.

Thersites also records the cataclysmic consequences of elevating Helen to the status of phallus, but in terms of a plague of venereal disease rather than a flood of female liquid. Remorselessly trumpeting the theme of “war and lechery,” he wishes on both armies the “Neopolitan bone-ache” and the “dry suppeago”—the fitting curse, he suggests, for “those that war for a placket” (2.3.18-19, 74, 19-20). Because the goal of both armies is to possess a whore, their proper fate is to contract venereal disease. The war is contaminated at its source. So too are its warriors, infected by their contact with the corrupt woman who delivers them to ravaging combat. Like Lavatch and Lucio, Thersites circulates the dread of female sexuality that underlies male efforts to claim power and autonomy.

These images of emasculation, engulfment, and infection mark male subjectivity in the play as always already lacking. Troilus and Cressida offers a representation of the Trojan War—and of male heroism—that foregrounds its absence.⁶ Today's spectator may not know the story of Troilus and Cressida but will almost certainly remember the Trojan War as a great heroic legend. In place of that heroic legend, the play offers a jolting parody, an empty spectacle in which the war not only falls startlingly short of its fabulous model but scarcely qualifies as a war at all. Until its concluding scenes, the play substitutes posturing, vaunting, plotting, and speech-making for dramatized combat. Acting substitutes for action, exhibitionism for productivity.

In short, the play radically destabilizes a masculinity defined by military prowess. It turns a traditional field of “masculine” self-substantiation into a degraded theater of “feminine” self-display. The effort of the play's “lacking” heroes to match their heroic legacies—to actualize imposed myths of themselves—suggests the perils of a purely textual subjectivity. As in Lacan's Symbolic Order, “lacking” would-be subjects become objects of spectacle and attempt to fit themselves to culturally prescribed identities.

One moment that amply illustrates this male specularity comes when Pandarus trains Cressida's look on the returning Trojan warriors: “Hark, they are coming from the field,” he tells Cressida, “shall we stand up here and see them as they pass toward Ilium?” (1.2.177-79). Pandarus presents this public processional as an exhibition of male glamor, reading the implements of war—the bloody swords and hacked helmets on display—as signifiers of masculine allure, costumes worn by contestants in a male beauty pageant, with Troilus the clear winner (“Look you how his sword is bloodied, and his helm more hack'd than Hector's” [1.2.232-33]).

The director, of course, must determine the extent to which the processional matches Pandarus' glitzy mediations—the extent to which the warriors consciously make spectacles of themselves.⁷ Given the play's persistent deflation of military posturing, however, and its deferral of battle scenes to its denouement, one can certainly make a case for staging the Trojans' entrance as a full-fledged spectacle, with a boisterous throng lauding and ogling a bevy of preening, muscle-bound warriors. John Barton's 1969 RSC production achieved something of this effect, with narcissistically self-aware, glamorously burnished warriors disporting themselves in “minute, coquettish, pleated kilts,” costumes that converted rugged “masculine” materials into implements of feminized exhibitionism.⁸ The warriors in Barton's production coveted one another's admiring looks, embracing specularity with a “feminine” sensuality and self-consciousness.⁹

Such flagrant exhibitionism confirms the warriors' consignment to a spectacle in which they are preemptively effeminized, displaced to a world of appearances in which they must do what women have been encouraged to do within a phallocentric order: cover their “lack” with seductive display. Their masculinity amounts to a strenuous resistance to emasculation, a culturally mandated charade of power.¹⁰

Even Achilles, the play's most illustrious figure, is revealed to be kin to Parolles, an avatar of the disreputable braggart soldier, whose valor is derived from display and attribution. Certainly, Achilles does nothing within the world of the play to merit his reputation. Indeed, it is precisely by doing nothing that he hopes to enhance his greatness—a greatness simply posited as fact, a legacy of the lost original. We rarely see him on the battlefield—and, when we do, he disgraces himself with his cowardly ambush of Hector. Like Helen, Achilles is essentially a celebrity, famous for being famous. He proves himself as bogus an exemplar of masculinity as Helen is of femininity, as much the recipient of a mass delusion, as much a figure gilded and exalted by an adoring public gaze. He is, as Thersites puts it, an “idol of idiot-worshippers” (5.1.7).

Nestor affirms Achilles' status as constructed idol when, contemplating Hector's proposed “sportful combat,” he asserts that the Greek champion (meaning Achilles)

shall give a scantling
Of good or bad unto the general,
And in such indexes (although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes) there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large. It is suppos'd
He that meets Hector issues from our choice.
And choice (being mutual act of all our souls)
Makes merit her election, and doth boil
(As 'twere from forth us all) a man distill'd
Out of our virtues, who miscarrying,
What heart receives from hence a conquering part
To steel a strong opinion to themselves?
Which entertain'd, limbs are his instruments,
In no less working than are swords and bows
Directive by the limbs.

(1.3.341-56)

The reference to “pricks” underlines Achilles' function as phallic signifier: his small pricks (individual feats) are the index of their collective masculinity (“the giant mass of things to come at large”).¹¹ His valor reflects and elicits theirs. The opinion owed him in victory will animate their stricken limbs and enable them to wield their weapons once more—an unmistakable image of restored masculine potency.

Yet the Achilles celebrated here is a mythical figure, a construct from which they wish to construct themselves, the “issue” of their “choice” (born in an act of collective male parthenogenesis) who is also pregnant with their reputation (thus in danger of “miscarrying”). Achilles becomes the repository of their fantasies of ideal masculinity, the mirror in which they misrecognize themselves.¹²

Achilles essentially aims to meld with this seductive image of himself by withdrawing from the war. He achieves the Helen-like status of gaze, drawing the attention of all the warriors and inspiring some, like Ajax, to emulate him (1.3.185-96). He reconstitutes the spectacle by placing himself at its focal point, achieving through his absence the preeminence denied him when he was present. Achilles' withdrawal is an act of exhibitionism, a histrionic disarmament that converts effeminate retreat into masculine self-assertion. He gives up masculine production for feminine seduction, achieving mastery over those who would deny him a power commensurate with his productive prowess. By shying away from his fellow generals and enshrining himself in a seductive image, Achilles engages them in a game of courtship, drawing power from his status as desired object. Like Helen, he subdues them through imagery. He ceases to be a warrior and becomes the sign of one, invincible and indisposable as he could never be in actual battle. The disarmed Achilles represents a veiled phallus, the unpossessable object of the army's desiring look, the absent signifier who fixes them as “lacking.”

Achilles' act of disarmament is also a contemptuously mimetic gesture, a way of representing what he perceives to be the Greek generals' fundamental “lack.” He carries this scornful mimesis one step further by eliciting Patroclus' mocking caricatures of Nestor and Agamemnon, which function as derogations not simply of the generals themselves but of their “plots, orders, preventions”—their “policy,” which, says Ulysses, Achilles calls “cowardice” (1.3.197). Inasmuch as Achilles “esteem[s] no act / But that of hand,” he reads the generals' stratagems as signs of effeminacy, as a lack of manly action (199-200). Their “wisdom” is “no member of the war” (emphasis mine) but mere “bed-work, mappr'y, closet-war” (198, 205), images that connote unmanly consignment to domestic spheres, with a suggestion (particularly in the phrase “bed-work”) of degrading prostitution or even of auto-erotic self-stimulation.¹³ It is as if the Greek generals, having lost the ennobling text of the heroic Trojan War, try to substitute a text of administrative expertise and find themselves transformed, through Patroclus' contemptuous impersonations, into punctilious cowards and exhibitionists, who offer the show of warriorship rather than the substance. Achilles' tent theater—his conversion of the war into a private spectacle for his entertainment—mockingly mirrors their closet war. Patroclus' caricatures debase the Greek generals by underlining their counterfeit status, their unlikeness to the legendary models they implicitly strive to actualize. Already second-rate replicas, they become, through Patroclus' derisive “pageant,” imitations of imitations. In fact, Patroclus' caricatures—which the contemporary director would be well-advised to stage—could be closer to Shakespeare's characters than those characters are to their Homeric originals. Agamemnon, after all, is so unlike his image as “god in high office” that Aeneas, bearing Hector's challenge, fails to recognize him, even when directly addressing him (1.3.215-56).

In Barton's production, Achilles, too, engaged in histrionic mimicry, dressing in drag for much of the play. This decision, which discommoded many reviewers, simply confirms the mimetic dimension of Achilles' disarmament, his interest in mocking the generals by mirroring their effeminacy.¹⁴ Wearing a dress asperses their manhood, not his. As Barton explains, “what we did was show him playing at effeminacy and homosexuality in order to mock and outrage the Greek generals.”¹⁵ In the production I'm imagining, the director could go even further, costuming Achilles in a gold dress identical to the one Helen wears. Besides underlining Achilles' status as a parallel Helen, the image registers his ironic embrace of “feminine” seductiveness as well as his contempt for the war the generals wage—conveyed through mimicry of its contemptible origin.

Achilles' partner, Patroclus, might seem a better candidate for cross-dressing since he could be considered—and could be played—as a figure of the boy actor. His “pageant” of the generals marks him as an actor, and Achilles and Thersites, despite wildly divergent opinions of him, establish him as a “boy” (5.5.45, 5.1.14). While it seems unlikely that Patroclus could be as young as the boy actors of the Tudor-Stuart stage, he could be conspicuously younger than the other Greek warriors; as he professes “little stomach to the war” (3.3.220), one may infer that Patroclus withdraws not simply out of loyalty to Achilles but out of his own aversion to combat, an unwillingness to embrace war-making as a means of proving his manhood. Patroclus thus enacts the emasculating disarmament that Achilles only affects.

His resistance of the phallic masculinity of soldiership matches his dephallicized status as Achilles' catamite. Thersites reviles him not for homosexuality but for effeminacy, not for loving a man but for being like a woman. Patroclus, according to Thersites, is a “male varlot,” a “masculine whore,” and therefore a “preposterous discover(y)”—preposterous in a literal sense, it seems, for putting his behind in front and hiding the organ that defines him as male (5.1.15-24).¹⁶ If Achilles' effeminacy fortifies his manhood, Patroclus' effeminacy represents a renegade self-emasculation.

The contemporary director could amplify Patroclus' resemblance to the boy actor and enhance his renegade status by having him cross-dress in two distinct ways. First, Patroclus—rather than Achilles—could don Helen's dress, expanding his repertoire of mocking impersonations. This drag act could represent both a subversive teasing of his own dephallicized status and an ironic theatricalization of his role as a parallel Helen—the disarming, desired object whose seductive charms keep Achilles from the war. Patroclus-as-Helen could even engage Achilles in an erotic pantomime virtually identical to the one I've imagined for Helena and Paris (at the beginning of 3.1). In this manner, Achilles and Patroclus theatricalize their own erotic relationship, turning it into a stinging parody of the war's disreputable origin.

Second, Petroclus might engage in an unhistrionic, unparodic transvestism aimed not at female impersonation or masochistic self-shaming but at subversive indistinction. Patroclus—or, rather, the actor playing him—could disdain the stereotypical effeminate mannerisms that would render him too easily legible (and dismissable) as a “queen” and thereby resist absorption into a phallocentric economy of meaning.¹⁷ If Patroclus—although boyish, pacifistic, and disposed to cross-dress—conforms in all other respects to expectations of normative masculinity, the resulting incongruity renders him unreadable in phallic terms. His cross-dressing serves not as a straightforward affirmation of effeminacy but as an ironic confounding of it—and therefore as a confounding of the masculinity that effeminacy reifies by inverting. Patroclus could be seen as refusing the gender that his body, mannerisms, and vocalizations evoke, embodying a difference that cannot be readily assimilated to the phallocentric gender system. He becomes an outlaw in gender not because he is effeminate but because he is undefinable. By demonstrating gender's constructedness, Patroclus implicitly discredits his own lover's attempt to concretize an heroic masculinity.

Prying Achilles from his seductive image is precisely the strategy that Ulysses employs. Ulysses counters the Patroclus-Achilles spectacle with a charade of his own, contriving—in collusion with the other Greek generals—to transform Ajax into an imitation Achilles, promoting him as the new Greek champion. In fashioning the doltish Ajax in Achilles' image, Ulysses gives Achilles a taste of the degrading impersonation he so gleefully inflicted on the Greek generals. Like Nestor and Agamemnon, Achilles finds himself replaced by a caricature of himself. Having transformed himself into a seductive image, Achilles finds that the image can be replicated. Cut loose from his myth, Achilles becomes disposable, lacking.

Ulysses deprives Achilles of his status as gaze, the observed of all observers, by urging his comrades to transfer their worshipful looks to Ajax (3.3.38-49). He aims to wrest from Achilles his control of signification, to resituate the spectacle within the arena of war, and thus to place Achilles outside it, where he cannot signify or can signify only as a degraded noncombatant. Instead of mirroring the generals' effeminacy, Achilles' disarmament becomes a signifier of his effeminacy—as evidenced by the shifting presentation of his motives for withdrawal. Initially, Ulysses blames inflated pride for Achilles' abstention (1.3.142-45). But, once resolved to decenter Achilles, Ulysses charges him instead with effeminizing desire (3.3.195-215). Patroclus himself confirms the shift by urging Achilles to reclaim his manhood in battle: “a woman impudent and mannish grown / Is not more loath'd than an effeminate man / In time of action” (3.3.217-19). Having chosen spectacle as his means of self-substantiation, Achilles faces a degradation of self when Ulysses takes over his play.

Ulysses impresses upon Achilles the perils of specularity, the menace of inhabiting a “self” constituted in the look of the other, of inhabiting a world in which the degree whose “vizarding” Ulysses so expansively laments is simply a vizard for purely relational distinctions. Achilles himself affirms:

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

(3.3.103-11)

The passage yields a peculiarly Lacanian sense of subjectivity. The subject is visible to himself only through the mirror of the other, in whose reflection he substantiates himself. Ulysses goes even further, however, in contending that the other does not merely reflect but “forms” the subject: a man cannot know his “parts,” cannot know of what he “consists,” until “he behold them formed in th' applause / Where th' are extended” (3.3.115-20). Achilles is what others make of him; he consists in their regard. Ulysses impresses on Achilles the necessity of recreating himself in the “rich beholding” of his comrades (3.3.91), rescuing himself from the invisibility to which he has consigned himself by eliciting visible reflections of his worth.

Ulysses' speech confirms what his strategic promotion of Ajax implies: that Achilles is a disposable creature of attribution. Of course, Ulysses' ultimate goal—inducing Achilles to return to battle—presupposes precisely the opposite: his indisposability, his intrinsic worth as a warrior, his manifest difference from the oafish Ajax. Certainly there is much comic mettle to be mined in Ajax's ungainly attempts to assume Achilles' image. Still, the play also registers his essential likeness to Achilles. Like Achilles, Ajax reads his heroic image in the idolizing looks of his comrades, assuming the “screen” receptive to their exalted image of him, even if imperfectly. Like Achilles, Ajax is propped up by opinion as the imitation of a lost original. Like Achilles, Ajax draws criticism for his insolence and unsociability (in the very act of taxing Achilles for these faults [2.3.208-11]). Ajax's incompetent mimicry becomes an inadvertent form of mockery. His swaggering, self-absorbed brutishness serves as the distorted mirror of Achilles' masculine vanity. Ajax also carries to parodic, farcical extreme Achilles' attempt to meld with his own image, becoming so transported by his new identity as awesome champion that he loses the self he formerly inhabited and becomes “a very landfish, languageless, a monster,” a macho warrior turned womanish, “ruminat[ing] like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her brain to set down her reckoning” (3.3.263, 252).

When Achilles finally reenters the spectacle of the war, he succeeds only in proving himself shockingly unequal to the misrecognized image of exalted warrior he means to authenticate. Finally engaging Hector in one-on-one combat, he finds himself overmatched, blames his prolonged idleness (5.6.13-20), then returns with his Myrmidons. Catching Hector unarmed and vastly outnumbered, he orders his ambush (5.8). He proceeds to exalt the killing he did not actually carry out: “On Myrmidons, and cry you all amain, / ‘Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain!’” (5.8.13-14). His promise to drag Hector's corpse about the battlefield (5.8.21-22) in conformity to Homeric precedent only reinforces his essential unlikeness to the Homeric figure. Achilles' ignoble behavior belies Agamemnon's earlier distinction between “the bold and the coward” (1.3.23) or Nestor's confident claim that “valor's show and valor's worth divide / In storms of fortune” (1.3.46-47). Achilles' cowardly dispatching of Hector not only aligns him with “valor's show” but undermines the ideal of valor itself, discrediting military prowess as a measure of masculinity. Achilles, the male ideal, turns out to be a fraud. Shakespeare's play exposes the lack disavowed by the collective look in which Achilles and Helen “consist.” As Thersites suggests, Achilles is the “picture of what [he] seemest” (5.1.6), the semblance of a semblance, unable to transubstantiate the idealized masculine self he represents.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA: THE LIMITS OF SEXUALITY

Troilus offers another image of male subjectivity at the margins, beginning the play disarmed, enmeshed in an emasculating passion for Cressida, pronouncing himself unfit for manly combat. In a startling image, Troilus positions himself female in a grotesque act of intercourse, in which Pandarus “pours” into Troilus' bleeding hole (“the open ulcer of my heart”) Cressida's imagined body parts (“her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice” [1.1.53-54]). Displacing his mouth to a lower bodily opening, Troilus consumes Cressida's body piecemeal, an eerie instance of both the oral fixation that pervades his expressions of desire and his penchant for fragmenting Cressida. By protesting that Pandarus, with his ecstatic tributes to Cressida, “lay'st in every gash that love hath given me / The knife that made it” (1.1.62-63), Troilus implicitly blames Cressida for the bleeding gashes inflicted on his femininely penetrable body.

If Troilus strikes a masochistic pose, wearing (imagined) bloody wounds as badges of his abject longing, he eschews the masochist's acceptance of emasculation as punishment for desiring a woman placed beyond desire's reach. Nor does he emulate Angelo's retributive scheme of sadistically violating the exalted female for lashing his body with shameful desire. Troilus wishes neither to descend into dephallicized servility nor to resort to vindictive phallic aggression but to step outside the phallic register altogether—to purify sex by reconfiguring it as presexual delectation, an unmediated consuming of maternal sustenance. Deprived of Cressida's nurturance, he regresses into infantile helplessness:¹⁸

I am weaker than a woman's tear,
Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance,
Less valiant than the virgin in the night,
And skilless as unpractic'd infancy.

(1.1.9-12)

Several scenes later, anticipating Cressida's arrival, Troilus imagines himself on “Stygian banks” awaiting Charon's “waftage” to the watery realms of Elysian lily beds, where he proposes to “wallow” (3.2.8-13). Through this image of static, blissful, watery oblivion, Troilus portrays his desire for Cressida as a wish to return to the womb, to the primordial mother-child dyad. He goes on to express his sexual excitement as a longing for preoedipal bliss:

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

(3.2.18-29)

Troilus not only dephallicizes the imagined act of love, presenting it as exclusively oral, but transforms Cressida into an image of the preoedipal maternal body, a transcendent dispenser of heavenly nectar. The desire Troilus exercises in this speech goes through a Lacanian circuit, moving past its ostensible object to an originary, mystified (m)other.¹⁹

At the same time, Troilus marks the perfect fusion for which he longs as a kind of death, the loss of the “distinct” masculine self that depends upon resisting regression to female domination. Such a regression invites the very chaos of violated degree that Ulysses imagined: losing phallic hardness in a flood of female liquid. Troilus' dread evokes the necessity of hardening the masculine self within the triadic structure of the Symbolic Order, in which female otherness is not exalted but converted, by virtue of phallic law, into a masterable opposition.

Yet Troilus' speech also hints at the confounding limits of phallic sexuality. His fear of finding the exquisite sensations of sexual union unendurable evokes a less abstract dread of losing hardness—specifically, a fear of premature ejaculation. In a later speech, Troilus affirms overtly that the phallic register condemns desire to perpetual frustration, substituting limited acts of discharge for acts of unlimited consumption: “This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is / infinite, and the execution confin'd, that the desire is / boundless, and the act a slave to limit” (3.2.81-83). From Troilus' perspective, every ejaculation is premature. To achieve orgasm is to die, to spend desire rather than to fulfill it, in a confined execution unequal to it, returning from a temporary transcendence to a terrible finitude.²⁰ Troilus' lament calls to mind Lacan's description of desire as both inexpressible and insatiable, a drive surpassing its object or any act that would express it, a volatile nomadic signifier futilely seeking an anchoring signified. Such narcissistic desire is forced to arrest itself with attempts to possess what is ultimately unpossessable: an other capable of articulating the self.²¹

Implicit in Troilus' lament is an indictment of the female lack so feverishly disavowed in his “giddy” speech. By depicting “the act” as essentially auto-erotic (omitting any reference to its object), he confirms the desired female's negligibility; and by depicting it as unfulfilling, he confirms her inadequacy. He no longer portrays the female body as a transcendent source of unlimited nectar but as a disposable receptacle of his limited discharge. By enabling the spending of male desire, the desired female destroys the source of her own value, rendering her unworthy of the passion she arrests, confirming her status as flawed substitute for an unrecoverable original.

Troilus' behavior following the tryst seems to confirm Cressida's inadequacy. Affecting a concern for her health, he enforces their separation, sending her back to bed, making clear his determination to leave, despite her pleas for him to stay (4.2.1-20). His eagerness to depart suggests an instinctive recoil from a limited act far removed from imbibing exquisite nectar. Ironically, Troilus seems to enact the very scenario of “distast[ing] what [he] elects” that he decries when protesting the proposed return of Helen: he “turns back” the “silks” he has “soiled,” tossing the “remainder viands” into an “unrespective sieve” (2.2.61-71).²²

This experience of despoliation is precisely the fate that Cressida fears. Her initial strategy of “holding off” derives from the dread of losing the power and value she achieves by denying satisfaction of the desire she elicits. She fears the shift from adored goddess to disposable receptacle:

Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she belov'd knows nought that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungain'd more that it is.
That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
Achievement is command; ungain'd, beseech.

(1.2.286-93)

If one must be an object, better to be an unattainable one; better to conceal a reciprocal desire than, by confessing it, leave oneself vulnerable to a disclosure of lack.

Like both Helena and Isabella, Cressida confronts the difficulties of representing herself as a desiring subject within a phallocentric register in which she can function only as an object, a prize to be won or a body to be used, either fetishized (when ungain'd) or found lacking (once achieved). The inescapability of this register within the world of the play forces her to try on a series of culturally available “feminine” guises that fail to capture her complex interiority and condemn her to incoherence and fragmentation, to a succession of self-befuddling performances that summon Kristeva's famous phrase, “that's not it” and “that's still not it.”²³

In her first scene, for instance, Cressida essentially constructs herself as the emasculator of Troilus' imaginings, transferring lack to him as though confirming his bleeding wound. When Pandarus praises Troilus' attributes as “the spice and salt that season a man,” Cressida replies, “Ay, a minc'd man, and then to be bak'd with no date in the pie, for then the man's date is out,” metaphorically castrating him (1.2.256-57). In an earlier exchange, Cressida also casts doubt on Troilus' phallic sufficiency. Told by Pandarus that Helen loves Troilus, Cressida brazenly returns, “Troilus will stand to the proof, if you'll prove it so” (1.2.129-30).

Cressida's bawdy deflections of Pandarus' lewd solicitings recall Helena's ribald evasions of Parolles. She, too, initially refuses the role of compliant sexual object appointed her, duplicating Helena's portrayal of sexual intercourse as an act of male aggression: “If I cannot ward what I would not have hit, I can watch you for telling how I took the blow—unless it swell past hiding, and then it's past watching” (1.2.267-70). Anticipating Helena's image of “blown-up” women, Cressida portrays pregnancy as the swelling wound that results from the “blow” that a woman sustains during intercourse.

As with Helena, Cressida's wisecracking bawdry covertly vents a sexual avidity that she must otherwise evade and suppress. Once Pandarus departs, she executes a volte-face even more startling than Helena's, shifting from jaded anti-romantic to distressed lover. She not only confesses her desire for Troilus but betrays a likeness to him by wistfully longing for a sexual satisfaction outside the phallic register: “that she was never yet that ever knew / Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.” In suggesting that a woman cannot “get” the “love” promised her by a desiring male, Cressida expresses a longing for jouissance—or at least for satisfaction on her own terms, beyond mere fulfillment of male desire.²⁴

Confined to the phallocentric economy of lack and fetish, however, Cressida's sexuality must become defensive, negative, and secretive. The bodily space of desire's fulfillment she calls “what I would not have hit” and the “thing ungain'd” (emphasis mine). Her remark that she depends upon “secrecy, to defend mine honesty,” though partly jocular, neverthless evokes a private realm of forbidden desire whose disclosure would prove her unchaste (1.2.261-62). Similarly, when she taxes Troilus, after their tryst, “you men will never tarry,” she sounds like a veteran of clandestine affairs (4.2.16), or at least the owner of a sexuality more developed than she explicitly divulges.

As the scene ends, Cressida seems determined to disavow her sexuality. She moves in the direction opposite of Helena—toward “feminine” helplessness instead of away from it—resolving to suppress desire instead of fulfill it. When Cressida does opt for fulfillment, her decision is not dramatized. If Helena expresses her sexual intentions cryptically and evasively, Cressida does not express hers at all. Pandarus expresses them for her, in his characteristically puerile voice. While on a mission to persuade Paris to invent an excuse for Troilus' absence from supper—from which one may infer Cressida's assent to an assignation—Pandarus tells Helen, “My niece is horribly in love with a thing that you have” (3.1.97-98), crudely reducing Cressida's sexual desire to a craving for Troilus' sexual organ, effectively imprisoning her in the phallic realm.

SEDUCTION

In agreeing to meet Troilus for a tryst, Cressida implicitly overcomes her dread of despoliation and reaches for a meaningful intimate relation. Troilus, however, proves himself less interested in relation than in seduction. Beset by consciousness of what Baudrillard calls the “quick, banal end” of sex, Troilus turns to the unending drama of seduction, in which the seducer continually challenges his victim to go to ever greater lengths to prove her limitless love, to prove herself completely seduced.²⁵ Troilus seeks the sustenance of unequivocal conquest rather than the nurturance of a preoedipal merger unrecoverable in genital sex. His erotic goal is to seduce Cressida into assuming the role of seductress in order to play out the scenario of his seduction—thus substantiating his preferred self-image as doomed transcendent lover, betrayed by Cressida's characteristically female incapacity to reciprocate his undying devotion. Reifying his myth as ontologically true requires subduing Cressida to her inherited role as congenitally false.²⁶

Troilus is not a self-conscious seducer. He does not so much artfully manipulate a world of appearances as permanently reside there, unable to distinguish himself from his own seductive myth. He therefore dodges the specter of lack that disrupts Achilles' attempt to substantiate his image, the consciousness of inhabiting a spectacle whose integrity is impeached from the outset by the absent female who founds it. Troilus resists such emasculation by gaining access—in a private realm of desire—to a surrogate Helen and contriving to discover her lack in order to fortify his fragile masculinity. Achilles, confined to a world of men, cannot be the gaze. Troilus, engaged in a game of seduction with a single woman, can be.

Troilus thus declares himself “truth's authentic author,” not simply the standard but the origin of truth (3.2.181). To be the origin of truth in a world of appearances is to be the origin of fiction, to take on the status of the veiled phallus, regulating the culturally encoded signs that construct “truth” in the symbolic order. The “truth” that Troilus authors is the fiction of his own truth, the fiction of the substantiality of the spectacle he means to regulate, of the story of which he is a part. Troilus becomes not simply a character in an inherited tale but the custodian of its legacy, the guarantor of its fixity. The traditional story of Troilus and Cressida becomes his play, with Cressida assigned the reductive role of seductress. His impenetrable superficiality defeats her depth; his unawareness of the constructedness of the reality he inhabits condemns her to it. His insistence on the fiction of his essence converts her potentially adaptive, decentered core self into an utterly textualized cipher.

Cressida's subjectivity is thus constricted by a gender ordinance disguised as a textual legacy. To seduce Troilus, to love him and leave him, is to fulfill the destiny appointed her by literary tradition. Yet this literary tradition is complicit with a patriarchal script that portrays female seduction as the original sin and makes all women potential seductresses. The notorious identity mapped onto Cressida's body is merely a patriarchal “destin'd livery,” a “lacking” representational overlay recording the absence of a coherent self. Cressida is ultimately unidentical to her infamous model.²⁷ Troilus endeavors to erase the distinction.

Pandarus assists in this erasure, enabling Troilus to seduce Cressida into assuming a seductive image so that she may be misrecognized as a vessel of transcendent sex. Until Pandarus brings them together, the play offers no evidence of direct contact between them. At first their attraction is based entirely on his mediation of their desiring looks. Pandarus carries out what Baudrillard identifies as the covert operation of all seduction: “the transubstantiation of sex into signs.”²⁸ He channels a reciprocal attraction of bodies into a symbolic register, personifying the signifying media that define desire and regulate its circulation, that ultimately seek to arrest its erratic trajectories by anchoring it to a misrecognized object of satisfaction. Pandarus projects the culturally available imagery through which Troilus and Cressida read each other's bodies. They “consist” in each other's culturally mediated looks.

“I cannot come to Cressid but by Pandar,” Troilus declares (1.1.95). Troilus at first comes to Cressida through the seductive image that Pandarus projects to her, using the peerless Hector as screen; in asserting at length that Troilus surpasses Hector in masculine allure (as evidenced by his more lavishly hacked helmet [1.2.60-91]), Pandarus positions Troilus as epitome of Trojan manhood.²⁹ Yet the constructedness of this image becomes clear when Cressida, parrying Pandarus' extravagant tributes, mischievously inquires, upon Troilus' entrance, “what sneaking fellow comes yonder?” And Pandarus, not immediately recognizing him, replies, “Where? Yonder? That's Deiphobus—'Tis Troilus!” (1.2.226-29).

Pandarus also offers himself as an image of Troilus, serving as surrogate wooer as well as saucy emissary. Declares Cressida, “words, vows, gifts, tears, and love's full sacrifice, / He offers in another's enterprise” (1.2.282-83). Yet Pandarus does not simply mirror Troilus to Cressida; he also mirrors Cressida—or an image of her as desirous and seducible—to herself, modeling the transports of feminine infatuation, demonstrating the swooning adoration to which his projected image of Troilus ought to move her:

Brave Troilus, the prince of chivalry! … O brave
Troilus! Look well upon him, niece. Look you how his
sword is bloodied, and his helm more hack'd than
Hector's, and how he looks, and how he goes. O
admirable youth!

(1.2.228-35)

Pandarus also enacts for her emulation the ecstasy of eliciting Troilus' desire, of “consisting” in his look: “I could live and die in the eyes of Troilus!” he exclaims (1.2.246-47), hoping to move her to a comparable bondage.

Pandarus must not only help seduce Cressida but fashion her as seductive in order to gratify Troilus' wish to be seduced. By comparing Cressida favorably to Helen (1.1.41-43, 73-75), he posits the ultimate figure of seductive femininity as the screen upon which to project Cressida's alluring image. Accordingly, in performance, when Pandarus begins to praise Cressida's beauty, a huge banner bearing her likeness could be unfurled. Or her picture could be projected as a backdrop for this scene and all others focusing on the two lovers, corroborating Pandarus' role as projector of seductive imagery.³⁰ This picture could present a Cressida constructed in Helen's image, assuming one of the alluring poses that Helen struck in the preshow video, positioning herself as a culturally mediated male fantasy.

Whenever Cressida appears, she must compete with this looming, counterfeit, dream-girl image, which inevitably overwhelms and diminishes her, making evident her inability to “measure up.” It provides a potent gestus for Cressida's “doubleness.” From the outset, the spectator receives a visual cue that she is unidentical to her image, that “this is and is not Cressida.” The weight of Troilus' expectations bear down on her—as does the weight of her notorious identity. For contemporary audiences unfamiliar with the Troilus-and-Cressida tale, this larger-than-life picture of Cressida as seductress conveys her burdensome, inherited image as not only desirable but (due to her resemblance to Helen) deceitful. Like Helena in All's Well, Cressida is continually accompanied by an imposed image of herself but, unlike Helena, she cannot assimilate it. To become the image is to collude in her own erasure, to accept the role of seductress that Troilus—and her notorious identity—appoint her.

When Cressida first meets Troilus for the tryst, she seems prepared to become a seductress, to embrace a new “feminine” guise as impersonal, compliant sexual object. She enters wearing a veil, and says nothing until inviting Troilus to enter her bedchamber. Her position is strangely analogous to that of Helena and Mariana during their bed-tricks: she veils herself in “shadow and silence” and enables the fulfillment of a male sexual fantasy, taking care not to contradict Troilus' image of her, not to let him know that she is other. In that sense, her position also is analogous to that of Diana and Isabella: she is both the woman whose misrecognized image drives the fantasy and the woman who lends her body to its enactment.

Her veil reflects her liminal status as a spectre summoned from the limbo of Troilus' fantasies, a living “picture” (as Pandarus calls her [3.2.47]) which, once unveiled, must be confirmed as real. The kiss Troilus gives her confirms Cressida's tangibility, the availability of her heretofore unavailable body. The kiss becomes the equivalent of Leontes' exclamation, “O, she's warm” when confirming the reality of the liminal Hermione in The Winter's Tale. When her veil is removed, Cressida returns Troilus' look; she ceases to be an unapproachable picture and becomes a possessable mirror, reflecting to Troilus his preferred self-image as potent lover.

However, having led Troilus to the threshold of fulfilled fantasy (“O, Cressid, how often have I wish'd me thus!” he exclaims when she invites him in [3.2.61]), Cressida suddenly balks, unable to maintain her pose as serviceable object. “That's not it,” she seems to say. She attempts to represent herself as other than his image of mystified (m)other, a subject in her own right, torturously desirous of Troilus but unable to meld with his misrecognition. “I have a kind of self resides with you,” she tells Troilus, “But an unkind self, that itself will leave / To be another's fool” (3.2.148-50). The “kind of self” is a self that is kind to Troilus (like him, formed in his image), but unkind to itself (not like itself, not itself).³¹

Cressida fears the loss of distinction that will attend wholesale surrender to the role of seductress. “To seduce,” says Baudrillard, “is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion. It is to be taken in by one's own illusion and move in an enchanted world.”³² Cressida seems to have one foot in this enchanted world and one foot out, essentially remaining liminal. She cannot completely die to herself, cannot transform herself into the “Cressida” of Troilus' fantasy. So she remains perpetually divided, forever watching herself, aware that she competes with Troilus' image of her, which, in the performance I imagine, watches her.

Cressida's difficulty in representing herself becomes clear when she proceeds to destabilize the core self she has just struggled to establish—the self to which the self she fashions for Troilus is unkind. First she discredits her own testimonial to its existence: “where is my wit? I know not what I speak” (3.2.151). Cressida disjoins the speaking self and the core self, portraying the former as an inadequate substitute for the latter, a would-be kind self that is also unkind. By implication, she portrays the core self as unrepresentable and the speaking self as incoherent, as her strangulated, contradictory outbursts seem to confirm. Next, as though saying “that's still not it,” she suggests that the speaking self may not be ineptly mimetic but cunningly performative: “Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love, / And fell so roundly to a large confession, / To angle for your thoughts” (3.2.153-55). Cressida's statement does not so much deny her undeniable passion as dispute the coherence of her self-presentation by underlining its presentationality. Cressida asserts her illegibility as a subject, her essential alienness—to herself as well as to Troilus.

Cressida also reiterates her need for a distinct satisfaction, countering Troilus' implicit indictment of female lack with a protest against male inadequacy—the true source of “monstruosity” in love.

They say all lovers swear more performance than they are
able, and yet reserve an ability that they never
perform; vowing more than the perfection of ten, and
discharging less than the tenth part of one. They that
have the voice of lions and the act of hares, are they
not monsters?

(3.2.84-89)

Cressida portrays herself as the victim of frustrated desire, the unlucky recipient of limited male “discharge,” implicitly casting doubt on Troilus' capacity to satisfy her. She once more evokes the impossibility of jouissance within a phallocentric economy of desire.

Pandarus corroborates Cressida's status as a sexual subject with daunting testimonials to her insatiable desire. When Troilus concludes his kiss with Cressida by exclaiming, “you have bereft me of all words, lady,” Pandarus replies, “Words pay no debts, give her deeds; but she'll bereave you o' th' deeds too, if she call your activity into question” (3.2.55-57). Pandarus not only exhorts Troilus to make love to Cressida (“give her deeds”) but also warns that she may wear him out (“bereave you o' th' deeds”) and still remain unsatisfied (“call your activity into question”).

Yet Cressida's attempt to assert herself as desiring subject only increases her disposability as an object. In confessing desire for Troilus, she reveals herself to be even more “open” to him and thus more vulnerable to the disclosure of lack, renewing her fear of disempowerment and devaluation. “If I confess much,” she protests to Troilus, “you will play the tyrant” (3.2.119). Having “achiev'd,” he will “command.” Consenting to have sex with Troilus is one thing, but in confessing desire for him she reveals herself to be seduced.

Moreover, Pandarus, once bringing the lovers together, becomes more distinctly the medium of a “male gaze,” defeating Cressida's efforts to be anything other than a sex-object. He frames the entire tryst as a kind of pornographic peepshow, the object of which is removing the veil of mystery from Cressida's fetishized body. He begins by literally unveiling her to Troilus' desiring look and proceeds (through his eager preparation of the trysting place, his voyeuristic savoring of their kisses and endearments, and his ribald, incontinent punning) to undress both lovers metaphorically and turn their soaring, fretful rhetoric into so much foreplay. When visiting them afterward, he verbally “screens” a flashback of the tryst that focuses specifically on Cressida's deflowering. First he positions Cressida as a sexual performer, naughtily inquiring, “how go maidenheads?” as though addressing a prostitute (4.2.22). Next, he conjures the act itself: when Cressida protests, “you bring me to do—and then you flout me too,” he obscenely ripostes, “to do what, to do what, let her say what!” (26-27) Finally, he executes the equivalent of pornography's anatomical zoom, zeroing in on Cressida's genital zone: “has't not slept tonight? Would he not, a naughty man, let it sleep?” (32-33, emphasis mine).

Pandarus' “close-up” corroborates the demystifying consequences of Troilus' conquest of Cressida—the conversion of her once exalted body into a site of unimpeded access (Troilus “would not let it sleep”). Troilus himself seems to confirm this devaluation when, emitting a Pandarus-like snicker, he willfully misconstrues Cressida's summons to her chamber—provoked by her fear of detection—as a sexual come-on, as though joining in Pandarus' depreciation of her as a common gamester (4.2.35-40). Troilus drops the delirious rapture of the ardent lover for the coarse familiarity of the jaded customer.

THE LIMITS OF SUBJECTIVITY

Cressida's quest for subjectivity is derailed by her seduction into disclosing lack—and not simply in the sexual realm. Even before the tryst, Troilus anticipates a far more cataclysmic discovery of her inadequacy, asking for a satisfaction more rarefied and permanent than sex could ever provide. The satisfaction he requires is evidence of her indisputable satisfaction by him—an absolute fidelity confirming his masculine adequacy, retracting her doubts about his sexual performance. Having extracted from Cressida a confession of desire, Troilus reaches for a vow of unequivocal devotion capable of seducing him into the expectation of constancy:

O, that I thought it could be in a woman—
As, if it can, I will presume in you—
To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love,
To keep her constancy in plight and youth,
Outliving beauties outward, with a mind
That doth renew swifter than the blood decays!
Or that persuasion could but thus convince me
That my integrity and truth to you
Might be affronted with the match and weight
Of such a winnowed purity in love!
How were I then uplifted! but alas,
I am as true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth.

(3.2.158-70)

Troilus here posits female jouissance as the measure of male sufficiency (“how were I then uplifted!”). As Stanley Cavell puts it, the gift of female jouissance—“something more,” as Lacan calls it³³—represents the gift of the world to a male subject beset by the withdrawal from the world of a transcendental signifier: “[I]s she satisfied, and is her satisfaction directed to me? There is no satisfaction … apart from a favorable conclusion here.”³⁴ The desired woman becomes a possessable gaze, whose reciprocal look substantiates the male subject's cherished self-image. Troilus needs Cressida to be constant not only to him but to his preferred image of her as an image of himself. He wishes her to be constantly possessable, enabling a symbolic colonizing of difference that founds his own subjectivity.

Cressida seems prepared to satisfy Troilus' expectations, as though seduced into embracing the new “feminine” guise of faithful beloved. Told of her exile to the Greek camp, she affirms her satisfaction by Troilus in the most extravagant terms. She dispels the qualms that shadowed her previous professions of love. “My love admits no qualifying dross,” she tells Pandarus, “no more my grief, in such a precious loss” (4.2.9-10). Twice she asserts her determination to defy her banishment (4.2.94, 109). Like Helena, she insists that she has “forgot” her father. “I know no touch of consanguinity; / No kin, no love, no blood, no soul so near me / As the sweet Troilus” (4.2.96-99). In making Troilus her only kin—her only kind—she implies that the self that is kind to Troilus is kind to its kind and therefore cannot be, as she had previously asserted, unkind to itself. Like Helena, she locates her own subjectivity in her beloved's desire. She reconceives herself in his image, offering Troilus precisely the sort of prodigious fidelity he had solicited, locating love in a realm beyond the bodily:

Time, force, and death,
Do to this body what extremes you can;
But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth.

(4.2.101-104)

Cressida not only pledges a love “outliving beauties outward” but proposes to mar those outward beauties, to “tear my bright hair and scratch my praised cheeks” (4.2.107)—a gesture not only of grief but of fanatical devotion.

Cressida's hyperbolic pledges of constancy affirm her likeness not only to Troilus' preferred image of her but to Troilus himself. She appears to solve the problem of representing herself by imitating him. However, because Troilus is unassimilable to his notorious identity—too readily reconciled to estrangement to qualify as unwaveringly devoted—Cressida could be said to imitate an imitation. She tries to transcend the world of appearances by mirroring the appearance of Troilus' inordinate adoration, involuntarily discrediting her own vows of fidelity by speaking them in his voice. Even at her most strenuously sincere, Cressida cannot escape displacement into lacking representation.

Having seduced Cressida into directly mirroring his chosen self-image, Troilus raises the stakes yet again, challenging her to accept her banishment and still remain constant, to represent her satisfaction not only nonsexually but nonrelationally—to transfer it from their covert, dyadic netherworld to the light of the Symbolic Order. Her satisfaction must be represented by becoming demonstrable as a choice of him over others—specifically, over the handsome Greek warriors whose seductive wiles he explicitly fears (4.4.76-91). The question, “is she satisfied, and is her satisfaction directed to me?” implies that it could be directed to someone else. Cressida must convince Troilus that he alone suffices.

Troilus surrenders her to the world of men governed by the Law of the Father, in which women function as exchangeable commodities in the marketplace of masculine self-affirmation. If Cressida stays true to Troilus, if she disdains the inevitable advances of the comely Greek warriors to whom he unfavorably compares himself, then she projects her satisfaction by him into the very sphere of male endeavor in which he must substantiate himself. Cressida's preference for Troilus lends him the mirror of the rejected Greeks in which to read his own validated manhood.³⁵

In addition, Cressida's banishment saves Troilus from a sustained intimate relationship with her, from a sustained confrontation with sexual difference. Having subdued difference by seducing her into emulating him, he aims to subdue sexuality by fashioning her as his own celibate votary, conferring upon her a retroactive purity that lends her a second try at dispensing maternal nurturance—this time to his psyche rather than his body.

Yet Troilus, wedded to his inherited tale of female treachery, betrays his expectation that she will fail him—that she must fail him. His pleas for constancy inevitably disclose a foreboding of her failure. Requesting her reciprocal purity, he exclaims, “O that I thought it could be in a woman—/ As, if it can, I will presume in you … but alas” (emphasis mine). Troilus strongly implies that women are incapable of the constancy he requires and, when bidding Cressida farewell, proceeds to make clear his distrust of her, assaulting her with incessant admonitions to fidelity as though expecting her to betray him—as though expecting her to prove herself just like a woman.

“O heavens, you love me not!” she concludes (4.4.82). Cressida must betray him because that's what a seductress (that's what a woman) does. As Cressida, as Woman, she must fail to satisfy and fail to be satisfied, dispelling the image of transcendent nurturer narcissistically projected onto her. Cressida's displacement to the Greek camp enables the betrayal Troilus requires in order to confirm the insufficiency of the female object of desire, to fulfill the scenario of his own seduction, a scenario subsumed by the myth of Troilus and Cressida, itself subsumed by the myth of female inconstancy.

Cressida's imprisonment in the myth is especially evident in the scene in which she and Troilus exchange vows by citing their notorious identities. Put on the defensive by Troilus' coercive mistrust, Cressida pledges her devotion in terms that evoke the very role of seductress she wishes to disclaim: “If I be false … let memory upbraid my falsehood. … When th' have said ‘as false / As’ … let them say … ‘As false as Cressid’” (3.2.184, 191-92, 196). Cressida tries to protest her faithfulness; what one hears instead are invocations of unfaithfulness. At least Pandarus seems only to hear them, negating Cressida's oath by translating her “if” into a “when”: “[L]et all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids,” he declares (3.2.202-203). Yet Cressida had stipulated that false women could be called Cressids only if she herself proved false. Pandarus simply assumes that she will, or so his “conclusion” implies. He turns her protestation of fidelity into a portent of infidelity. Cressida is here overburdened by textuality: the received text of Troilus and Cressida, the patriarchal text of female wantonness, the oedipal text that dramatizes the subduing of female difference. Having to cite her own legendary inconstancy while pledging her constancy illustrates the inescapability of subjugating gender myths—imaged in performance by the looming picture of Cressida-as-Helen, Cressida-as-seductress.

FEMINIST GESTUS

The feminist gestus I have in mind would underline, rather than mitigate, the play's fragmenting of Cressida, presenting her subjectivity as a masquerade, a sequence of adaptations to imposed images of femininity. As Cressida strikes a different attitude in virtually every scene in which she appears, she could also sport a different look in virtually every scene—which would, in turn, always be referable to the omnipresent, projected fantasy image, at times startlingly convergent, at others wildly divergent. In the opening scene, for instance, Cressida ought to look distinctly different from the projected image—just recognizable enough to accentuate the discrepancy.

When she first meets Troilus, by contrast, she could look virtually identical to it, underlining her self-presentation in the scene as a desperate glamorous make-over, an effort to refashion herself in Helen's image. If she enters the scene not only veiled and silent but clad in a dress identical to Helen's, she could even, at first, be mistaken for her. Her attempt to animate the picture only measures her distance and her difference from it. Her erratic behavior in the scene with Troilus—which could be rendered visually as movements toward and away from him—conveys her moments of conformity to and deviation from this reductive fantasy image.

In her farewell scene with Troilus (4.4), Cressida could once more look distinctly different, dropping her sex-kitten guise while not entirely disdaining seductive display, in keeping with her curious position: feverishly professing her love in a manner sufficiently close to Troilus' histrionics as to seem emulative and performative—another version of an essentially reactive femininity.

Cressida's kissing game with the Greek generals (4.5)—which has seemed to some critics a violation of the character's integrity, the point at which her psychological coherence is sacrificed to her notorious identity³⁶—may instead be read as yet another performance, the adopting of a new “feminine” persona suitable to the circumstances. Having sampled the roles of caustic anti-romantic, forlorn inamorata, conflicted dream girl, and would-be transcendent lover, she now takes the part of calculating sex object.³⁷ The feminist gestus turns Cressida's fragmentation into an advantage, into the very basis for her characterization.

In this scene, then, Cressida dons an overtly provocative costume and proceeds, through her strategic exhibitionism, to control this potentially threatening situation. She implicitly reenacts her dictum that “achievement is command, ungain'd beseech,” deriving power from her exploitation of male desire—the only power available to her. She gives Ulysses a taste of that power, demanding that he beseech her for a kiss: “why, beg then.” Although he declines, asserting that he will claim a kiss from her “when Helen is a maid” again (i.e., “never”), Cressida still effectively humiliates him, linking him with the emasculated Menelaus as the only unkissed Greek generals (4.5.48-52).

Upon her exit, Ulysses denounces her “speechless dialect”:

Fie, fie upon her!
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give accosting welcome ere it comes,(38)
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader! set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity,
And daughters of the game.

(4.5.54-63)

This is and is not Cressida. In the scene I envision, Cressida does indeed seductively display her physical charms, does indeed “give accosting welcome ere it comes,” does indeed make a spectacle of herself. Her exhibitionism so provokes Ulysses because it fixes him as lacking; she is the object of his desiring look (consumable, as she was for Troilus, in parts) who becomes a representative of the gaze. At the same time, the audience is positioned to view Cressida's “wantonness” as performative, an adaptation to the Greek generals' image of seductive femininity. She once more consents to inhabit a misrecognition, to collude in male self-deception, to seduce. Ulysses' speech testifies to the success of Cressida's seduction, her mastery of the world of appearances that constitute “reality” within this heavily textualized playworld.

Some recent productions, sympathetic to Cressida, have taken a different tack with this scene, essentially demonstrating that the lascivious “encounterer” of Ulysses' censure is emphatically not Cressida—or, to the extent that she is, she is forced to be. Two productions, in particular, have treated the scene as a kind of gang-rape in order to acquit Cressida of any lascivious intentions. In Libby Appel's 1984 production for the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Cressida became a “hapless victim” who was “literally thrown from one Greek hero to another.”³⁹ In Howard Davies's 1985 RSC production, Cressida was subjected to “brutally violent kisses” that shocked and appalled her; she then proceeded to turn the tables on the Greek generals, however, “tartly” demanding that Ulysses beg for his kiss and “snapping her fingers to indicate that he should kneel.”⁴⁰

I am sympathetic to this treatment of the scene, which, like Angelo's near-rape of Isabella, aims to make explicable and sympathetic an action that might otherwise be alienating and incomprehensible. Both approaches affirm continuity between the Cressida who consorts with the Greek generals and the one who pledges her devotion to Troilus. They also depict a vulnerability to male brutality that casts Cressida's later behavior with Diomedes in a less incriminating light.⁴¹

Still, presenting a fragmented Cressida offers an even more promising means of dramatizing her plight, accenting the discontinuity between the exhibitionist of this scene and the plaintive exile of the previous one. Seen in isolation, a flirtatious, body-flaunting Cressida may appear to be a “daughter of the game”; seen in the context of successive adaptations to male-enforced images, she becomes an embodiment of a female subjectivity vexed and constricted by the oedipal plot. Cressida is unidentical to any self she assumes or constructs, including that of her notorious identity. The “kind” self that performs the version of femininity circumstantially required must forever be unkind to itself. Cressida not only cannot be “true” to Troilus, she cannot be true to herself. She cannot be constant when her essential difference from him—and from the other men who “encounter” her—must be converted to varieties of mastered opposition. Her fate exposes the limits of Baudrillard's celebration of the female's seductive power. To control the world of appearances is to be forever confined to it, without the possibility of achieving depth, coherence, or meaningful relation.

Cressida's “infinite variety”—in particular, her manipulation of costuming—offers an instance of Irigarayan mimicry, demonstrating the theatricality of “femininity.” This mimicry takes part in a feminist gestus by destabilizing the play's mimetic structure, forcing the audience to ask, “Who is Cressida?” She functions as a site of proliferating signifiers, expressive of yet excessive to any discernible signified, thus dislocating the phallocentric economy of meaning that constructs her. If Helena's subjectivity seems excessive to the feminine role she chooses to play, Cressida's feminine mimicry seems excessive to the subjectivity she wishes to forge.

The danger, of course, is that a Cressida who constitutes herself in wildly divergent, discontinuous looks may so recede as a character as to seem, in performance, an impenetrable, unengaging cipher, unable to interest the audience in the drama of her fragmentation, her failed attempt to forge a coherent subjectivity.⁴² She must have an accessible core of provisional selfhood in order for her discontinuities to signify dramatically—a core perhaps not easily recognized if Cressida looks and even acts differently in every scene in which she appears.

One tactic that could help, while adding to the gestus of masquerade, would be for Cressida to be greeted after each of her exits by Helen, standing next to an imposing clothes rack. Helen would then pull Cressida's next outfit off the rack, display it briefly, and hand it over to her. (She might once or twice actually hold it up to Cressida and nod approvingly.) This business could help establish Cressida's core self by dissociating her from whatever specific masquerade she concocts, whatever accoutrement of “femininity” she employs. (It might be effective if Cressida were to put on each outfit in view of the audience, provided such business does not steal undue focus or stir undue prurient interest.) Helen's dispensing of costumes has rich gestic potential, transforming the familiar act of shopping for clothes into an image of shopping for an identity, as the utterly constructed Helen tries to find Cressida the correct image with which to meld.

Ultimately, the actress must provide the “strong base and building” of the character, not simply through her irrefutable embodiedness but through an imaginatively sympathetic creation of interiority. The actress must internally unify an externally fragmented character; she must achieve psychological coherence in order to be gestically legible. The audience may not be able to define the self that Cressida conjures, but if they discern its embattled, fitful manifestations, they may be drawn into the drama even as her discontinuities distance them. By giving Cressida a “spine,” the actress exacerbates rather than mitigates her puzzling variability, making it an attribute of a beleaguered subject-in-process rather than that of a confounding blank.⁴³

Yet another Cressida emerges in her scene with Diomedes, one unidentical to the figure of traitress that Troilus constructs. Once more she struggles to reconcile her complex interiority to an image of a male-constructed seductive female. Once more she destabilizes the role she is destined to play, vacillating between complying with Diomedes' demands—thereby confirming her notorious identity—and honoring her vows to Troilus.

The performative basis of her new persona is made evident by the presence of spectators: her flirtation with Diomedes is framed as spectacle by the spectatorship of Troilus, Ulysses, and Thersites—a collective male look predisposed to read the flirtation as unambiguous betrayal. The scene's presenter, Ulysses, essentially repeats his earlier characterization of Cressida as “daughter of the game” by seconding Troilus' imputation of “familiarity” to her: “She will sing any man at first sight” (5.2.9).

Troilus' true fellow voyeur and secret sharer is not Ulysses, however, but Thersites. Like Lavatch and Lucio, he functions (in this scene at least) as an unlikely alter ego to the play's central male figure, articulating the unpresentable sexual subtext of the hero's crisis. His own overt voyeurism—the titillation he derives from the spectacle of Cressida's ungainly coquetry—literalizes the metaphoric language of sexual arousal encoded in Ulysses' remonstrances to Troilus' bodily convulsions (“you are mov'd … you shake … come, come” [5.2.36, 49, 51]). This parallelism could be underlined in performance by positioning the two as mirror-images, partners in voyeurism, even if unseen to each other. Thersites' leering mediations turn Troilus' spasms of passion into harrowing parodies of the dizzying rapture that he displayed in his meeting with Cressida.

Thersites articulates Troilus' darkest thoughts, contemptuously identifying Cressida as a cunning whore from the outset: “[A]ny man may sing her if he can take her cliff” (5.2.10-11). He construes her retrieval of the love-token and dismissal of Diomedes (“visit me no more”) as mere tactics for heightening his desire: “[N]ow she sharpens. Well said, whetstone” (5.2.74-75). If Thersites reads Cressida's acts of resistance as seductive gamesmanship, Troilus simply ignores them, seizing instead on her expressions of encouragement to Diomedes (5.2.35, 45-46, 52, 67). As such, they both misrecognize Cressida and misrepresent the scene, substituting a simplified, degraded version of what takes place—as performance could make clear.⁴⁴

The first part of the scene consists of Cressida's trying to wriggle free from her agreement to have sex with Diomedes. “Tempt me no more to folly,” she exclaims, later adding, “do not hold me to mine oath” (5.2.18, 26). When her (whispered) attempt to placate him fails, she promises compliance and fetches a token in order to allay his doubts. The second part consists of Cressida's vigorously renewing her resistances, shamed by the token into remembering her promised fidelity to Troilus. She engages in a virtual tug-of-war with Diomedes over the sleeve and, having lost, negates his victory: “I will not keep my word,” she asserts (5.2. 98). When Diomedes threatens never to see her again, she again affirms her willingness to have a tryst, but without much enthusiasm: “Ay, come—O Jove!—do come.—I shall be plagu'd” (5.2.105). Much of what Cressida does is equivocal, even contradictory, and much of what she says is inaccessible. On two occasions, she whispers something into Diomedes' ear (5.2.7-11, 34-43); on another, her exchanges with Diomedes are inaudible—or so they would have to be, as they are not specified in the script (5.2.49-58).

This is, and is not, the scene of Cressida's betrayal. Certainly, she does not make love to Diomedes here in any sense of the phrase. She strokes his cheek at one point (so, at least, Troilus says [5.2.52]), offers him a few endearments (or at least calls him “sweet” on three occasions [5.2.7, 18]), and eventually promises to honor her original promise to sleep with him. But the play does not dramatize or even substantiate the fulfillment of that promise, and therefore does not dramatize or substantiate her betrayal. When Diomedes asks, “What, shall I come? the hour?” Cressida replies that he should come, but she conspicuously declines to specify the hour (5.2.103-104). The betrayal is deferred to an altogether uncertain future. Perhaps when they next meet she will once again stall and equivocate; perhaps she will put Diomedes off indefinitely, forever vacillating between her attraction to him and her sworn fidelity to Troilus. Perhaps she will persevere in constancy while awaiting one of the visitations that Troilus promised her (4.4.66-67, 72-74) or, failing that, simply await the end of the war.

Of course, none of these scenarios squares with Cressida's notorious identity. But, one may well ask, how much authority should that identity be granted, particularly when Shakespeare declines to ratify it unequivocally and contemporary spectators cannot be expected to know it? As a demonstration of Cressida's proverbial inconstancy, the scene is inadequate, lacking, unequal to its literary predecessors—a misrecognition of the scene for which it insufficiently substitutes. Particularly in performance, the discrepancy between Cressida's ambivalent lapse and Troilus' thundering denunciations could underline the extent to which he willfully misreads the scene as proof of the inconstancy he requires.

Cressida does, of course, end the scene by denouncing herself for an anticipated infidelity:

Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee,
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah, our poor sex! this fault in us I find,
The error of our sex directs our mind.
What error leads must err; O, then conclude,
Minds sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

(5.2.107-12)

Cressida laments the depravity to which a woman's desiring look—the “eye” that leads the “heart”—drives her. She refers her own errant desire to a mythology of female turpitude (“ah, our poor sex! this fault in us I find”), finally buckling under the burden of textuality, not so much the received text of “Troilus and Cressida” as the fundamental myth of female corruption it reiterates. She prepares to surrender to her notorious identity by reaching past it to its originary myth. The word “fault” conflates error with female genitals (“this fault in us I find”), as does the phrase “the error of our sex” (emphasis mine). If Isabella blames herself for being a desired object, Cressida blames herself for being a desiring subject and converts her sense of guilt into a pretext for transgression, as though compelled to submit her inherited sense of depravity to corroborative display. She essentially says, “I feel like a whore—I might as well act like one.” With this speech, Cressida begins to recede as a subject. She simplifies her conflicted, desiring subjectivity by misrecognizing herself in the image of a depraved sex maniac. She proves herself hopelessly self-divided, acceding to an unkind self that consents to be another's fool: Diomedes' concubine, Troilus' seductress, patriarchy's female wanton.⁴⁵

Yet Cressida is not finished vacillating. As one may infer from Troilus' description of its contents (5.3.108-12), the letter that Pandarus delivers to Troilus essentially recants her farewell speech, or at least repledges her fidelity to Troilus. She tries to negate the text of inherited depravity with her own text. Because the letter represents her final statement in the play, she recedes even further as a subject, essentially becoming the text of her letter, which Troilus, disbelieving, tears into pieces and scatters to the wind, once more fragmenting and now silencing her, underlining her failure to cohere as a subject within the oedipal plot. Yet Troilus certainly errs in asserting “my love with words and errors still she feeds, / But edifies another with her deeds” (5.3.111-12). Within the world of this play, Cressida has “done the deed” only with him; it is Diomedes to whom she offers only words.

Of course, from Troilus' perspective, Cressida does not actually have to do the deed with Diomedes. Her promise to do it, her farewell, her brazen “familiarity” with Diomedes are sufficient to establish his insufficiency, his incapacity to satisfy her.⁴⁶ She claims to have one eye yet that looks on Troilus, but she has trained her gaze away from him, deprived him of the reciprocal look he requires to fill a place in the social spectacle. To withdraw her satisfaction is to withdraw the world:

Instance, O instance, strong as Pluto's gates,
Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven;
Instance, O instance, strong as heaven itself:
The bonds of heaven are slipp'd, dissolv'd, and loos'd;
And with another knot, five-finger-tied,
The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,
The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics
Of her o'ereaten faith, are given to Diomed.

(5.2.153-59)

Cressida, who once seemed capable of dispensing “thrice-repured nectar” to Troilus, now offers repellant scraps of greasy left-overs to Diomedes. The image recalls that of the fragmented body parts (“her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice”) that he consumed through the “open ulcer of [his] heart” as well as the scraps of her letter that he scatters to the wind.

Her conversion into gross, fragmented material reflects his consignment of her to a fallen female body. Cressida demonstrates a sexuality unassimilable to his image of female purity, derived from a nurturing, maternal body. If the dissolution of their sexual relationship had restored Cressida's potential value as an exemplar of “winnow'd purity,” her assertion of a sexual desire outside the circuitry of his own needs and drives disqualifies her as provider of lost plenitude:

Think, we had mothers; do not give advantage
To stubborn critics, apt, without a theme
For depravation, to square the general sex
By Cressid's rule. Rather, think this is not Cressid.

(5.2.130-33)

In distancing her from a maternal ideal, Troilus confirms Cressida's fulfillment of her destiny as flawed substitute for an unrecoverable original.

Troilus manages, however, both to preserve the mystified ideal and to excuse Cressida from it by proclaiming, “this is and is not Cressida” (5.2.146). The transgressively sexual woman becomes “Diomed's Cressida” (5.2.137), the vessel of purity “Troilus' Cressida.” Troilus preserves the “rule in unity” Cressida supposedly violates by splitting her in two, as madonna and whore. He thus upholds the unity of the phallocentric economy founded on a female lack that can be either sadistically confirmed (“whore”) or fetishistically disavowed (“madonna”).

The former proves a more useful strategy to Troilus, allowing him to reify the feminine “false” that defines his masculine “true.” Indeed, “Diomed's Cressida” deserves the name “Troilus' Cressida” more than the idealized construct to whom he gives it. The infidelity that incites Troilus' apparent disintegration actually enables his integration as betrayed eternal lover (“never did young man fancy / With so eternal and so fixed a soul” [5.2.165-66]). Troilus thus concludes his lamentation by unifying the divided Cressida in the image of corruptress, essentially declaring, “this is Cressida”: “O Cressid! O false Cressid! false, false, false! / Let all untruths stand by thy stained name, / And they'll seem glorious” (5.2.178).

By assuming the role of “stained” seductress, however provisionally, Cressida confirms the success of Troilus' seduction, yielding to the reductive mythology of female treachery that Troilus, as “truth's authentic author,” means to substantiate. The ultimate end of seduction, Baudrillard suggests, is the death of the seduced, self-annihilation as a gesture of absolute surrender.⁴⁷ Troilus' seduction of Cressida culminates in a kind of death for her, an incapacity to denote herself truly, a descent into terminal indefinition. Cressida's core self, the self to which her kind self is unkind, simply does not receive coherent articulation within the world of the play. It is missing, hidden, radically unstable. Cressida is not simply a mimic but an hysteric, excessive or inaccessible to the representational frame that seeks to contain her. Like Helena and Isabella, she ends the play as a body aspiring to yet escaping signification.

The play provides an image of the hysterical woman in the “mad” Cassandra, whose prophetic speeches are dismissed as nonsense.⁴⁸ If the fixed icon Helen sells her soul to phallocentric representation, the non-signifying Cassandra stands forever outside of it. Cressida, burdened throughout by the picture of herself in Helen's image, ends the play in a position much closer to Cassandra's—unassimilable to phallocentric constructs. In performance, one could attempt to establish Cassandra as Cressida's dopplegänger by having her shadow Cressida through the scenes at Troy, perhaps literally emerging from the shadows after each of Cressida's major scenes. When Cressida finally turns away from Troilus in order to leave with Diomedes in 4.4, she could find Cassandra standing directly in her path, as though confronting an image of her true exile—not to the Greek camp but to the hystera theater of nonsignification to which she is ultimately headed.

Following the Cressida-Diomedes scene, two additional pieces of staging could extend the feminist gestus. In the first, Troilus could conclude his jeremiad on Cressida's inconstancy by ripping her huge picture in half. If the image is a projection rather than a poster, Troilus could actually hurl himself at it and (depending on the material onto which the image is projected) wrestle with it, swim in it, bump and grind against it. A new image could then be projected: the same picture torn in half. Troilus' final speech could be accompanied by the mending of this fragmented image, either manually (in the case of a poster) or electronically (in the case of a projection). The image he assaults and consequently repairs is precisely the one he requires to authenticate his own myth: Cressida as seductress. Even as he disowns Cressida as irretrievably false, he retrieves the image conjuring her falseness, underlining his dependence on the very thing he vilifies.

More importantly, in the later scene when Pandarus delivers Cressida's letter to Troilus, Cressida herself could be brought on stage on a mobile platform (a “wagon”) surrounded by mannequins outfitted in her various costumes, representing the various “feminine” personae she has assumed throughout the play. She herself would be dressed in simple, casual, contemporary clothes, the sort of outfit the actress playing her might have worn to early rehearsals. This tableau would serve, first of all, as an image of Cressida's fragmentation into lifeless images of femininity, into an array of different fashionable “looks” that define and constrict her subjectivity. The tableau conveys Cressida's doubleness, simultaneously registering her difference from and her similarity to the mannequins, signifiers of a constructed femininity. She is a single, sensate, unadorned woman amidst multiple, lifeless, glamorous, “feminine” caricatures but, at the same time, these lifeless figures relay the images through which she becomes representable within the world of the play. They constitute her signifying “screens.” She is and is not a mannequin. Cressida becomes a kind of spectral actress, unrepresentable without her costumes, speechless without her lines, a would-be subject under erasure.

As Troilus surveys the missive, Cressida could turn to face him. When, having finished reading the letter, he tears it up and discredits its contents, she could turn back to the audience, the light on her fading as the platform is pulled offstage, as though she were condemned to this limbo of lifeless fragmentation. If Cressida's masquerade defamiliarizes normative femininity, it leaves her own subjectivity elsewhere.⁴⁹

Yet this Elsewhere, this fragmented limbo, becomes as much a measure of Cressida's nonmimetic subversiveness as does the staged bed-trick for Helena and the protracted nonreply for Isabella. In this final tableau, Cressida's dialect also becomes speechless, exclusively bodily, opposing itself to the displayed markers of her feminine masquerade, establishing her as other-than-Other. If Cressida's elsewhere seems closer to nowhere than do the nonreferential registers of Helena and Isabella, it is because she comes closer to symbolic erasure than they do. Like them, she is confoundedly double, coexisting with her own negation. But the negation with which she coexists has the imposing force of literary tradition behind it. Thus, Cressida all but embraces her notorious identity in her farewell speech, donning the “destin'd livery” of treacherous seductiveness.

Yet because the play adumbrates a subjectivity for Cressida at odds with this identity, because it fails to provide an unequivocal image of her betrayal, and because it allows her the (albeit hidden and disregarded) last word, Cressida ultimately resists seduction, negating the negation that Troilus insists on projecting to her. The feminist gestus underlines this negated negation (this “not not, but”), accentuating Cressida's unassimilable otherness, lending her a subjective meaning inaccessible to the oedipal plot.

BETWEEN MEN: THE HOMOEROTICS OF WAR

In the play's final scenes, Troilus undertakes a course similar to Bertram's. He flees female engulfment and goes to war, prepared to rescue his imperiled masculinity. Because of Troilus' protracted disarmament, the war functions for him, as for Bertram, as a male rite of passage, even though he has previously participated. Hector reinforces this image, treating Troilus as untested, excusing him from battle on the same grounds that the King evoked against Bertram: youth. “Let grow thy sinews till their knots be strong,” Hector tells him, “and tempt not yet the brushes of war” (5.3.33-34). In response, Troilus chides Hector for his “vice of mercy” and makes clear his determination to “get the woman out”: “[L]et's leave the hermit pity with our mother” (5.3.37-45).⁵⁰

Troilus undertakes to realize his reputation as a second Hector—as “manly” as his brother “but more dangerous,” in the words of Agamemnon (4.5.104). The war becomes his stage for proving himself the new Trojan champion, taking over for his slain brother. His replication of Hector, however, is less than perfect. The Greek generals describe both warriors as veritable juggernauts, exhibiting an invincibility driven by ferocious desire. But whereas Hector's “appetite” is disciplined by skill (5.5.19-29), Troilus' is recklessly promiscuous; he fights with “such a careless force, and forceless care / As if that lust, in very spite of cunning, / Bade him win all” (5.5.40-42). “That lust” channels Troilus' “boundless desire” into a jealous martial rage aimed specifically at Diomedes. The infinite will that sought transcendent satisfaction with Cressida now seeks frenzied revenge against her paramour. If Hector functions as the model of Troilus' awesome military feats, the image that drives them, the mirror into which Troilus looks, is that of Diomedes.

Diomedes assumes the figure of the seductive Greek youth against whom Troilus had warned Cressida, and against whom he had unfavorably measured himself. Diomedes uses Cressida as a tool for conquering Troilus, as his vaunting and taunting of Troilus during Cressida's exchange make clear. Cressida has value, he tells Troilus, as he desires her, not as Troilus praises her (4.4.116-20). “Use her well,” Troilus warns Diomedes, or “I'll cut thy throat” (4.4.126, 129). To “use her well” means not to “use” her sexually. If Diomedes regards her as a penetrable body, Troilus will similarly regard his body on the battlefield. Diomedes dismisses the threat. “When I am hence,” he returns, “I will answer for my lust”; he will vindicate his conquest of Cressida by conquering Troilus in battle, proving himself the better man (4.4.131-32). Diomedes' desire for Troilus' desired object manifests a desire for Troilus—a desire to render him “lacking” by depriving him of the signifier of his masculine potency, to read in the mirror of Troilus' humiliation the image of his own power.

Cressida accordingly is reduced to a pawn in a male power struggle. Rather like Helena, she stands silently by as two headstrong men debate her worth. Diomedes essentially replaces her as the source of Troilus' “lust.” She becomes the catalyst for aggressive male bonding. “Hold thy whore, Grecian!” Thersites brays as Diomedes and Troilus ferociously clash, “now for thy whore, Trojan!” (5.4.24-25). After losing track of the combatants, Thersites exclaims, “what's become of the wenching rogues? I think they have swallow'd one another. I would laugh at that miracle—yet in a sort lechery eats itself” (5.4.32-35). Thersites' imagery is highly suggestive, given the play's association of desiring and feeding. The “wenching rogues” channel the desire to taste Cressida into a desire to swallow each other—a “lecherous” consumption carrying homoerotic overtones. Thersites' assertion that “lechery eats itself” corroborates Ulysses' image of “appetite” as a “universal wolf” that, “seconded with will and power,” must “make perforce an universal prey, / And last eat up himself” (1.3.120-24). Thersites' repellant raillery is littered with images of eaten-up, disease-ravaged bodies—the wages, he clearly implies, of unchecked appetite. Thersites, like Pandarus, focuses on the body, but on its corruption and perishability rather than its eroticism. Thersites is Yorick's skull made animate, a talking death's head, serving the same function as the skull in Holbein's painting The Ambassadors. Yet, unlike the skull, Thersites is visible from every angle. He is everywhere.⁵¹

The Troilus-Diomedes conflict becomes an image of the Trojan War in miniature—a private war provoked by competitive desire for a “placket.” The rivalry it exercises essentially erases the shared object of desire; the male bonding Cressida facilitates supersedes any male bond to her. Similarly, the entire war assumes the shape of triangulated homoeroticism. The rival armies' relation to each other is far more tangible and important than their relation to Helen; as the Trojan Council scene makes clear, she serves her purpose by enabling the pursuit of masculine distinction, the launching of a vast homosocial enterprise.

Both Cressida and Helen (each of whom is compared to a pearl) function as objects of exchange in a male economy of power and desire, tokens of purely attributive value used to purchase honor. Even Hector's proposed “sportful combat” posits woman as signifier of male distinction, throwing down the gauntlet of his “lady's” peerlessness: “[H]e hath a lady wiser, fairer, truer, / Than ever Greek did couple in his arms” (1.3.275-76). He challenges “Grecian[s] true in love” to avow their mistresses' “beauty” and “worth” in “other arms than hers” (1.3.279, 271-72). This image suggests a near continuum between homosocial bonding and homosexual coupling: the warrior forsakes the arms of his beloved for the arms of his cherished enemy.⁵² Embracing Diomedes, Aeneas ecstatically declares, “no man alive can love in such a sort / The thing he means to kill, more excellently,” conflating male-to-male love with murderous violence (4.1.24-25). Told by Aeneas that Paris has been wounded by Menelaus, Troilus responds, “Let Paris bleed, 'tis but a scar to scorn; / Paris is gor'd with Menelaus' horn” (1.1.111-12). Here the murderous violence is specifically imaged as penetration: Paris' bleeding wound reflects the penetrability of the male body.⁵³ And once more the female intermediary of the coupling males, Helen, recedes from view.

Barton's production was particularly attentive to the homoerotic dynamics of the war, inspiring one reviewer to observe, “the great love affair of this play is not Troilus and Cressida, but the Greeks and the Trojans.”⁵⁴ Another critic put it even more forcefully:

This war, [Barton] suggests, is a sort of lechery itself. War is sex and sex is war. Cressida destroys Troilus, and the Trojans meet the Greeks like lovers, almost naked, agog for the dark orgasmic flutter of killing or being killed.⁵⁵

Within a war that fetishizes male bonding, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus becomes transgressive not because it is homosexual but because it is anti-(homo)social, ensnaring both lovers in unmanly desire, as Patroclus himself affirms:

A woman impudent and mannish grown
Is not more loath'd than an effeminate man
In time of action. I stand condemn'd for this;
They think my little stomach to the war,
And your great love to me restrains you thus.
Sweet, rouse yourself, and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,
Be shook to air.

(3.3.217-24)

Achilles' effeminacy stems not from a specifically homosexual desire but from the emasculating effects of desire itself, its capacity to deflect a man from his narrative of competitive self-actualization. Patroclus once more takes a position usually reserved for a woman: the seductive siren who submerges the questing hero in sensual languor. Patroclus blames himself for effeminizing Achilles just after Ulysses blames Polyxena, a woman who, because she has previously not merited a single mention, seems almost a female alter ego for the effeminate Patroclus—or a convenient figure through whom Ulysses can indirectly indict Patroclus. When Ulysses counsels Achilles, “better would it fit Achilles much / To throw down Hector than Polyxena” (3.3.207-208), he implies that it would also better fit Achilles to throw down Hector than Patroclus. “Make war, not love,” Ulysses seems to say, and it matters little whether Achilles makes love to Polyxena or to Patroclus: in either case unmanly desire deters him from combat. He must spurn a homosexual relationship with a seductive “varlot” and embrace homoerotic grappling with macho rivals. Within the world of this play, a man makes love to a man not through sex but through war.

The moment that marks Achilles' reanimation as ruthless warrior comes when he and Hector gaze into each other's eyes. Just after Patroclus exhorts him to shake off his effeminacy, Achilles asserts, “I have a woman's longing, / An appetite that I am sick withal, / To see great Hector in his weeds of peace” (3.3.237-39). Achilles' desire is womanish because it implicitly positions Hector not as a rival warrior armed for battle but as a potential lover outfitted in “weeds of peace.” Hector confirms Achilles' lack by looking at him with insulting brevity, as though colluding with the Greek generals:

HECTOR.
Stand fair, I pray thee, let me look on thee.
ACHILLES.
Behold thy fill.
HECTOR.
Nay, I have done already.
ACHILLES.
Thou art too brief. I will the second time,
As I would buy thee, view thee limb by limb.

(4.5.235-38)

Achilles quickly shifts from a womanish, desiring gaze to a warrior's rapacious look, surveying Hector's body as a composition of penetrable, dismemberable parts—parts that he will soon “lack.” “Why dost thou so oppress me with thine eye?” Hector, seemingly unnerved, inquires (4.5.241). “In which part of [Hector's] body, / Shall I destroy him?” (4.5.242-43) Achilles wonders, perhaps not simply surveying Hector's body parts but actually touching or thrusting at the parts to which he refers—“there, there, or there” (perhaps the last “there” indicates Hector's crotch—an arguably over-bold choice that would nevertheless effectively accentuate the violent homoerotics of war). Achilles, who, Patroclus suggests, had “gor'd” himself (3.3.228-29), must now restore his manhood by “goring” Hector—penetrating his body in a martial rather than sexual act. Hector returns Achilles' vaunt and projects his own dismembering gaze: “[S]tand again,” he instructs Achilles, promising to kill him not “there, or there, nor there” but “everywhere, yea, o'er and o'er” (4.5.256). The conflating of looking, desiring, and dismembering in the scene underlines the essential sadism of war, in which “gor'd” men violently attempt to transfer lack to feminized surrogates.

Achilles' inventory of Hector's dismemberable parts becomes chillingly fulfilled as the Myrmidons ambush him, carrying out Achilles' orders, “empale him with your weapons round about” (5.7.5). Indeed, the scene could be staged not simply as an ambush but as a kind of grotesque gang-rape, as the Myrmidons—who have themselves suffered dismemberments at Hector's hands (“that noseless, handless, hack'd and chipp'd come to him” [5.5.34]—take turns thrusting their swords into his prone, penetrable body. Hector then becomes the very picture of what his sister Cassandra had prophesied: an assemblage of “bleeding vents” (5.3.82).

Hector's transformation into feminized victim coincides with his embrace of specularity. Despite his penchant for sparing the enemies he disables, Hector does not hesitate to kill a warrior whose sumptuous armor he covets. “Wilt thou not, beast, abide?” he vaunts, “why then, fly on, I'll hunt thee for thy hide” (5.6.30-31). Hector wishes to possess the sumptuous armor presumably because its visual splendor more emphatically advertises his greatness. By donning the glittering armor, he will be better able to make a spectacle of himself, constituting himself in the idolizing looks thereby elicited. Having won this prize, Hector disarms, effectively dephallicizing himself—leaving himself open to the thrusting swords of the Myrmidons.

In performance, this disarming could precede an actual attempt on Hector's part to don the glittering armor, clearly his eventual goal. Such a staging underlines the act of disarming as a register of “lack,” as Hector exchanges his functional armor for a glorious costume, shifts from “masculine” productivity to “feminine” self-display. Hector is seduced by the armor, misrecognizing himself in its dazzling image and preparing to use it as a tool for seducing his fellow warriors' admiring looks. If the armor has the same golden hue as Helen's gown, then Hector's attempt to don it becomes a kind of cross-dressing, parallel to Achilles' donning of Helen's dress but without the representational frame that transforms it into an image of the generals' “lack.” Hector's mirroring of Helen forecasts his death, his ultimate “lack.” To be like the gilded, ghostly Helen is to court oblivion. As with Euripides' Pentheus, an act of cross-dressing not only portends but embodies disaster, setting Hector up for ignominious death and the brutal violation of his corpse recorded in The Iliad—the fate fixed by his notorious identity. In Richard E. T. White's 1984 production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Hector attempted to defend himself with his new ornamental weaponry, which immediately broke.⁵⁶ If Hector is killed while wearing the armor (or part of it), the glittering costume becomes his tomb; he trades places with “the most putrefying core, so fair without” (5.8.1), imaging the corruptible flesh beneath the masculine glamor, a corrupting flesh associated in Thersites' mind with the corrupt woman who has caused the war. Given the visual parallel between Hector's golden armor and Helen's glittering dress, and the connection between male specularity and lack, one might say that Helen, signifier for the glossy emptiness of the war, has indeed disarmed Hector, just as she said she would.

FINAL SCENES

Shakespeare gives the final word in the play to Pandarus, who, since the break-up of the lovers, has appeared only once, delivering Cressida's letter to Troilus and lamenting his own physical decline, complaining of a “tisick,” of “rheum” in his eyes and aches in his bones, and prophesying his own death (“I shall leave you one o' th's days” [5.3.101-106]). In performance, Pandarus could look hideously transformed in his final appearances, a wheezing, disheveled old bawd bearing only the slightest resemblance to the natty bon vivant of the play's earlier scenes.⁵⁷ Pandarus functions as a repository of the very diseases that Thersites invokes in his bitter invectives against both armies. His diseases signify the wages of flesh-trading—in both sex and war. He becomes a kind of walking putrefying core, symptomizing the essential corruption of an image-mongering medium that stokes appetite by fetishizing the flesh.

Pandarus continues to play the role of mediator, bequeathing to the audience, in the play's final line, the diseases he seems to have inherited from Thersites (5.10.56). He turns Thersites' curse—“the burning devil take them all” (5.2.195-96)—into a chillingly jocular gift, essentially saying “the burning devil take you all.” To the extent that Pandarus is going blind, he also bequeaths his voyeuristic look to the audience—or at least implicates them as fellow voyeurs, carrying on the flesh-trading (the mediation of erotic spectacle) that he must abandon. It might be highly effective if Pandarus were actually blind in the final scene, complete with cane and dark glasses, signifying the erasure of his glamorizing pseudo-gaze by corrosive “appetite.”

The end of the play could be staged as an eerie reprise of the beginning. Instead of the cacophonous beginnings of a mammoth battle, the final stage image could present the eerily silent tableau of a battlefield littered with corpses, perhaps even including dismembered limbs and “bleeding vents.” In the middle of Troilus' speech proclaiming Hector's death (5.10.4-31), some Trojan soldiers could enter with a litter bearing Hector's covered remains along with the sumptuous armor. This entrance could motivate Troilus' line, “stay yet” (5.10.23). He could then lift the covers and become palpably revolted and enraged at the sight of Hector's ravaged corpse (still hidden from the audience's view), which could, in turn, motivate his final furious vaunts (“you vile abominable tents, … I'll through and through you! and thou great-siz'd coward, … I'll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still” [5.10.23, 26, 28]). He could accompany these lines by preparing to put on the sumptuous gold armor, dismissing his army at the end of the speech. Pandarus, walking through the corpse-strewn field, tapping his cane against the bodies so as to avoid stepping on any of them, could reach Troilus around the same time, only to be rebuffed, thus proceeding downstage to deliver his final speech.

At the conclusion of his speech, the resplendent Helen could be lowered onto the battlefield, a glittering goddess descending from the heavens, gliding her way around the corpses as though unaffected and uncorrupted by them. In a reprise of the production's opening images, she could rejoin Pandarus. Completing the final tableau would be the reemergence from the shadows of Cressida's wagon, possibly pulled by Cassandra.

Helen's function as veiled phallus becomes particularly evident in these final images. Like Cressida, but on a vaster scale, she has colluded in a seduction, enabling a massive—and massively destructive—self-deception, spurring sadistically rapacious acts aimed at reifying an imperiled masculinity. She appears at the play's end as a kind of angel of death. She cued the play's opening battle, and now she returns as though having completed a mission of destruction, rejoining her once robust partner who has metamorphosed into a living corpse, as if he too were her victim. She looks unvaryingly, indefatigably glamorous and seductive, even while the world around her disintegrates.

The image of Troilus' donning Hector's armor offers another image of death, not simply by ensuring that the cycle of destruction will continue but by confirming his absorption into the same exhibitionistic, degraded masculinity that assured Hector's doom. As the play ends, Troilus struggles to fit himself to a masculine glory as fictitious as his legendary truthfulness. At the same time, the image of Cressida surrounded by her mannequins confirms her imprisonment in incoherence. Hector slaps on the armor of a mythical masculinity, while Cressida swims forlornly in the fragmented images of glamorous femininity.

If All's Well That Ends Well ends as well as it can, and Measure for Measure ends as unwell as it ought, Troilus and Cressida does not really end at all and renders standards of “wellness” or “unwellness” virtually irrelevant. Chronologically the earliest of the problem comedies, Troilus and Cressida offers the most extreme version of an unresolved crisis in gender. Cressida manifests a sexuality even more subversive than Helena's (because even more unamenable to a normative femininity) and a subjectivity even more elusive than Isabella's (because even more performative). Troilus ends the play where Bertram arrives at mid-point—in a hypermasculine warrior mode hostile to reconciliation with female difference. He has passed through an Angelo-like experience of frenzied misogyny and sexual disillusionment but lacks a Helena or a Duke to force him to confront otherness. The war enacts the crisis in gender on a grand scale, an empty, inglorious spectacle in which “lacking” warriors, maimed by a female phallus, sadistically hack at one another in hopes of affirming their manhood.

The problem comedies have enjoyed critical attention and a theatrical life in the last few decades that would have been unthinkable to earlier generations of critics and directors. To a significant extent, this startling renaissance may be ascribed to their provocative interrogation of erotic politics, their powerful exploration of the distresses and strains of the phallocentric gender system, and the volatile interplay of power and desire within it. In the problem comedies, gender becomes a highly unstable—and highly dramatic—process of negotiation, as male and female subjects struggle unsuccessfully to perform and reify myths of masculinity and femininity that cannot adequately regulate the vagaries of desire or tame the terrors of difference. The plays expose the representational limits of a phallocentric economy of meaning founded on the mastery of difference and persistently frustrate the oedipal plot, leading to their notorious open-endedness.

The problem comedies' critique of representational orthodoxy makes them particularly apt vehicles for gestic renovation on the contemporary stage—for exciting, provocative performances that would vitalize, within the plays' narrative and mimetic framework, the drama of difference uncovered by a criticism sensitive to issues of gender and subjectivity. My study has been propelled by the conviction that the process may also work productively in reverse, that an appreciation of gestic stagings both actual and hypothetical can lend crucial insight into the plays' critique of the sex-gender system and can expand their range of meanings. A theoretically engaged performance criticism seems essential. So much stands to be gained from making inquiry dramatic and drama inquisitive.

Notes

1. Carol Cook also notes the way in which Helen serves as “the empty marker of value in the economy of masculine desire,” the “black hole which draws all things to it” (“Unbodied Figures of Desire,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Practice, ed. Sue-Ellen Case [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990], 182). See also Linda Charnes's insightful discussion of Helen as a “curiously inadequate” phallic signifier (“‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Troilus and Cressida,” in Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993], 83. These two brilliant essays offer especially powerful accounts of the way subjectivity and gender are constructed within the world of the play.

   Cook's essay examines the play in relation to Lacan's critique of desire and anticipates my argument in her assertion that the play illustrates that the female subject cannot sustain male desire unless suffering transformation from a materially present subject to a symbolically lacking object—whose lack may be either (as the play demonstrates) fetishistically disavowed or sadistically reviled.

   The phrase “notorious identity,” which I use repeatedly, comes from Charnes. Her central claim is that Troilus and Cressida “represent[s] neurosis in the form of subjectivity crippled by cultural inscription” (72). In her emphasis on the play's destabilizing mimesis—the gap it opens up between the play's characters and their celebrated originals—and her discussion of a male homosociality mediated by the exchange of women's bodies, Charnes's argument is close to mine. My central disagreement with her essay is the prohibitive power it affords textual precedent, ironically affirming, in the context of literary influence, a myth of origins that her essay so skillfully discredits in the context of subjectivity. Although she acknowledges that “the brilliance of this play resides in the way it at once pays its legendary ‘debt’ and prods us to anticipate” a new ending to the story (“this time, maybe, Troilus will ‘stand up’ for Cressida and … she will ‘hold out’ for him” [101]), she ultimately affirms the unalterability of the original conclusion. Not only Troilus but the play itself forces Cressida to assume the figure of legendary traitress. Cressida not only meets her preordained end but is constantly, painfully aware of its inevitability. “Cressida must bear the awareness that every step she takes toward Troilus seals her ‘fate’ as an artifact, and secures her signification as the ‘heart of falsehood’” (79).

   I argue, by contrast, that by failing to dramatize Cressida's infamous betrayal, by lending her scene with Diomedes so much silence, equivocation, and ambiguity, and by allowing Cressida an attempt to represent herself beyond this scene—an attempt that Troilus defeats—the play does not deliver Cressida to her notorious identity. Moreover, I argue that Cressida is aware not of a specific textual identity she must necessarily enact but of a generalized gender image that she is seduced into nearly enacting.

2. My discussion of seduction is heavily indebted to Jean Baudrillard's fascinating treatise, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin's, 1990). See the Introduction of this book for my critique of Baudrillard's reification of phallocentric gender ideology. His case for the superiority of feminine seduction to masculine production presupposes the unalterability of a “phallocratic” order and glosses over the effects of disenfranchising women from the productive, discursive agencies that he reserves for the masculine. In the political realm, the culturally imposed lack for which Baudrillard's theory of seduction compensates remains a formidable mechanism for marginalizing women.

3. In Keith Hack's 1974 OUDS production, Helen was suspended above the action for the entire play—another way of conveying her status as veiled gaze: “Helen, swinging langourously and preening herself in a looking-glass, was the constant reminder that the war was fought for this” (Ralph Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare [London: Allen and Unwin, 1981], 61-62).

4. This video could mimic the Star Search “photoshoot” competition, in which rivals for “spokesmodel” salaciously display themselves in simulated modeling sessions. The similarity might provoke laughter from the audience, which is fine.

5. The assembling of the Trojan army that I describe does not accord with the action of “sperring up,” which evokes a locking of the city's gates. One could, however, easily substitute the folio's “stir up” for “sperr up,” as Kenneth Palmer does in the Arden edition (Troilus and Cressida [London: Methuen, 1982], 98), which conveys an image of the Trojan troops preparing for battle in a manner congruent with the staging I envision.

6. In addition to Charnes (“So Unsecret to Ourselves,” 72), Elizabeth Freund also writes insightfully on the play's characters' displacement from their legendary models (“‘Ariachne's Broken Woof’: The Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman [New York: Methuen, 1985], 19-36).

7. In Sam Mendes's 1990 RSC production, the stage picture contradicted Pandarus' words. “Displaced from the centre of the stage to the side gallery,” Pandarus mediated not a processional but a ritual of purification—“an integral part of the serious fact of [the warriors'] having survived a day's battle, washing the blood from their swords and then washing their faces or drinking” (Peter Holland, “Shakespearean Performances in England, 1989-90,” Shakespeare Survey 44 [1992], 172). In a wonderful essay, Barbara Hodgdon discusses four different stagings of this scene. Her conclusion is that, by making Cressida the object of the soldiers' (and spectators') look, most directors exploit and disempower her, depriving her of an autonomous look. Hodgdon argues that Howard Davies's 1985 RSC production restores priority to Cressida's look by positioning her and Pandarus far downstage, viewing the (absent) soldiers from a distance (“He Do Cressida in Different Voices,” English Literary Renaissance 20 [Spring 1990], 254-86). I would argue that one captures the play's looking relations more precisely if Cressida's autonomous look is trained on exhibitionistic warriors who are more covetous of one another's admiring glances than of hers.

8. See Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare, 59.

9. See Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare, 59.

10. Gary Spear similarly traces the connection between virile display and effeminacy in his fine essay, “Shakespeare's ‘Manly’ Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (Winter 1993), 409-22, esp. 414-16. As Spear aptly puts it, “how do you know when someone is acting like a man or only acting like a man?” (415).

11. For an analysis of the homoerotic dimensions of the passage's procreative imagery, see Spear, “Shakespeare's ‘Manly’ Parts,” 416.

12. For a corroborative account of Achilles' constructedness, see Rene Girard, “The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, 207.

13. Charnes also analyzes these phrases as aspersions of the generals' masculinity (“‘So Unsecret to Ourselves,’” 93-94).

14. For an account of the perplexed and mostly negative reactions to Barton's cross-dressing Achilles, see Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare, 59. Barton himself comments on the controversy: “We were attacked for presenting Achilles as an effeminate homosexual, which was something that had never entered our minds” (“John Barton Talks to Gareth Lloyd Evans,” Shakespeare Survey 25 [1972], 70).

    For representative criticism of this iconoclastic choice, see Richard David, Shakespeare in the Theatre (Cambridge UP, 1978), 121. Although Barton, upon reviving the play in 1976, dropped the characterization of Achilles as cross-dresser, David and other reviewers still saw him as perversely effeminate: “[T]he memory of the earlier production inclined one to see, in Achilles' wig, dress, and bangles (no doubt Trojan male attire assumed in compliment to his Trojan lady-love), a wholly feminine apparel” (123). Roger Warren also found the 1976 Achilles a “showily effeminate” retread of the original transvestite (“Theory and Practice: Stratford 1975,” Shakespeare Survey 30 [1977], 174).

15. “John Barton Talks to Gareth Lloyd Evans,” 70.

16. Leo Bersani connects the catamitical position with femininity and castration in his essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (October 43 [1987]), which Silverman discusses in her extraordinary essay, “A Woman's Soul Enclosed in a Man's Body: Femininity in Male Homosexuality” (in Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 339-88). For an alternative view of Patroclus, see Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1991), 33-48, esp. 39. Bredbeck argues that “there is nothing in the play to substantiate Thersites' bitter condemnations as more then mere possibilities,” that Patroclus “transcends the base labels applied to him” (39). Yet, inasmuch as Patroclus identifies himself as Achilles' lover (3.3.219-25), Thersites' labels, stripped of their “baseness,” may be considered essentially accurate. Patroclus' status as “boy,” his “little stomach” for the war, even his penchant for acting destabilize his “masculinity” far more than his inclusion in Agamemnon's listing of dead warriors (which Bredbeck sees as evidence of his nobility) upholds it.

17. See Spear's objection to the characterization of Patroclus as a drag queen in the Yale Repertory Theatre production in 1990 (“Shakespeare's ‘Manly Parts,’” 412, note 8). My point is simply that Patroclus' effeminacy derives not from mannerism or sartorial habit but from his refusal of phallic masculinity, signaled by his lack of appetite for the war and his role in prolonging Achilles' absence from it. He is effeminate for eschewing the power that defines masculinity, not for looking or acting “feminine.” Hence the conundrum caused by his cross-dressing.

18. My understanding of Troilus' fantasy of maternal plenitude is indebted to Janet Adelman's brilliant essay on Troilus and Cressida in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 38-63, esp. 52-55. Ultimately, I see this fantasy as subordinate to another: the fantasy of female lack that foreordains Cressida's failure as (m)other. Troilus' image of maternal nurturance is, from the beginning, less a sustaining fantasy than a disabling fiction, an impossible dream. Troilus is less interested in realizing a fantasy of recovered maternal plenitude than in seducing Cressida into demonstrating its unrecoverability.

19. See Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 146-78, esp. 160-64.

20. For many critics, the separation that follows sexuality is the key aspect of the lovers' relationship. See, for instance, Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 325-37; L. C. Knights, “The Theme of Appearance and Reality in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” in Some Shakespearean Themes (Stanford UP, 1959), 67; Charles R. Lyons, “Cressida, Achilles, and the Finite Deed,” Etudes Anglaises 20 (1967), 233; and Barbara Everett, “The Inaction of Troilus and Cressida,” Essays in Criticism 32 (1982), 126. Stephen A. Reid provides a Freudian reading of this separateness (“A Psychoanalytic Reading of Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure,” Psychoanalytic Review 57 [1970], 263-82), emphasizing the temporal limitations of the sexual act. Adelman provides an interpretation grounded in object-relations psychology, in which, “from the first, Troilus' desire for Cressida is invested with the power of a nostalgic longing for, and fear of, union with an overpoweringly maternal figure” (Suffocating Mothers, 52). And Cook offers a Lacanian reading, in which “the desired object does not satisfy desire but kindles it” (“Unbodied Figures of Desire,” 184).

21. See Lacan, “Sexuality in the Defiles of the Signifier,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1978), 153-55. See also Alan Sheridan's note on desire as Lacan conceives it: “[D]esire (fundamentally in the singular) is a perpetual effect of symbolic articulation. It is not an appetite: it is essentially excentric and insatiable. That is why Lacan coordinates it not with the object that would seem to satisfy it, but with the object that causes it” (“Translator's Note,” in Four Fundamental Concepts, 278). I should like to reiterate that I regard such desire not as normative but an narcissistic.

22. Troilus' recoil from Cressida also calls to mind Pandarus' song about the honey bee, which offers an image of male sexual experience as not only frustrating but defeating. Instead of imbibing nectar, one loses honey:

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

    (5.10.41-44)

    Typically the song omits reference to the desired female object, but her presence is strongly implied. It is she who takes the honey and removes the sting, who “subdues” the desiring male. Kenneth Palmer believes that Pandarus describes himself in this verse—that the songless humble bee is the disprized pimp rather than the disaffected lover—even while pointing out that “he appeals, in effect, to the sexual pattern: expectation, attainment, revulsion” (the Arden Troilus and Cressida, 302). Considering that Pandarus evokes “the sexual pattern” in order to answer the question, “why should our endeavor be so lov'd and the performance so loath'd?” (5.10.38-39), the verse more likely addresses the sexual disillusionment that causes Troilus to rebuff Pandarus rather than the implications of the rebuff itself.

23. Julia Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabella De Courtivron (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980), 137.

24. Jouissance “transgresses” the “law of homeostasis that Freud evokes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, whereby, through discharge, the psyche seeks the lowest possible level of tension … in that respect, it is beyond the pleasure principle” (Sheridan, “Translator's Note,” in Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 281). See also Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of the Woman” and “A Love Letter,” in Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985), 137-61.

25. “The law of seduction takes the form of an uninterrupted ritual exchange where seducer and seduced constantly raise the stakes in a game that never ends” (Baudrillard, Seduction, 22).

26. Many critics have made this point, of course. What I take to be unique in my argument is the idea that Troilus tries, from the beginning, to seduce (in Baudrillard's sense of the word) Cressida into the betrayal that will substantiate his cherished self-image. Subsequent to finishing my work on this play, I was fortunate enough to encounter Richard Hillman's essay, which offers a parallel discussion of Troilus as a “non-Machiavellian manipulator,” improvisationally constructing himself through the construction of Cressida (William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays [New York: Twayne, 1993], 26).

27. Even critics sympathetic to Cressida believe that she ultimately plays the role of traitress traditionally assigned her. Knights, for instance, while noting the sincerity with which Cressida confesses her love to Troilus, nonetheless observes, “so far as she is presented directly, she is the wanton of tradition” (“The Theme of Appearance and Reality in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” 68). Freund, while employing a strikingly different methodology, reaches virtually the same conclusion: “Even as—indeed, precisely because—we are persuaded that her love is stronger than her craft, we are made to realize that in being her rhetorical self (and there is surely no other) she can never be herself” (“‘Ariachne's Broken Woof,’” 24). To have no other self but her rhetorical self is to be the wanton of tradition. Even Charnes, who argues that Cressida's subjectivity exists precisely in the gap between her notorious identity and her attempts to escape it, asserts that Cressida is “constituted to be false” (“‘So Unsecret to Ourselves,’” 77).

28. Seduction, 13.

29. When that strategy fails, he spins a yarn for Cressida meant to prove that Helen finds Troilus desirable, a tactic ostensibly aimed at stirring jealousy but which also has the effect of reinforcing Helen's status as Cressida's mirror (1.2.92-176).

30. I draw this image quite directly from Fassbinder's film, Gods of the Plague, which Silverman discusses in “Fassbinder and Lacan,” 134-36. “Pinned on the wall over Margarethe's bed is an enormous poster of a blonde woman's face, presumably a blown-up advertisement. The face bears a sufficiently close resemblance to Margarethe as to make evident even to the casual viewer that the poster represents the mirror in which that character sees herself. However, whenever Margarethe appears in the same frame as the larger-than-life woman, she is not only dwarfed, but diminished by the comparison” (134).

31. Catherine Belsey points out the ambiguity of this speech. The “unkind self” may not be synonymous with the “kind of self” that resides with Troilus, as I have taken it, but an alternative to it, “already determined to leave Troilus and become another's fool” (“Desire's Excess: Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman [New York: Routledge, 1992], 95). Charnes takes this latter view, arguing that Cressida, overburdened by her notorious identity, knows that she will, in fact, betray Troilus. (“‘So Unsecret to Ourselves,’” 78). Such a reading seems to me to reduce Cressida's subjectivity to an effect of textuality and to minimize Cressida's difference from her notorious identity.

32. Seduction, 69.

33. See note 28.

34. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge UP, 1987), 35.

35. Girard contends that Troilus loses his desire for Cressida after sleeping with her and retrieves it only when her reference to herself as “a woeful Cressid 'mongst the merry Greeks!” (4.4.56) conjures the presence of male rivals (“The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida,” 188-98). Girard contends that Troilus' rivalry with the Greeks—his “mimetic desire”—revives his desire for Cressida. While I would agree that, within the world of the play, “it always takes other men to make an erotic or military conquest truly valuable in the eyes of the conqueror himself” (193), I would argue that Troilus' desire—his desire for satisfaction—remains intact after sleeping with Cressida, and that her assignment to the Greek camp enables precisely the symbolic satisfaction for which he ostensibly longs.

36. See Adelman's incisive analysis of Cressida's characterization. The problem is not her “inconsistency” but her “opacity” once she leaves Troilus. She ceases to be a character in her own right: “[T]he play makes her status as subject contingent on her relationship with Troilus: separated from him, she becomes irreducibly other; and her sexual betrayal is the sign of her status as opaque object” (Suffocating Mothers, 52). I would certainly agree that Cressida recedes as a subject once she leaves Troilus, that the spectator has less access to her interiority, but the continuity in her characterization is more important than the discontinuity. Cressida has difficulty representing herself and appears “irreducibly other” throughout the play. Her “opacity” once leaving Troilus only intensifies her essential unrepresentability. I would agree with Freund's assertion that “Cressida always exists only as a sign to be recontextualized” (“‘Ariachne's Broken Woof,’” 31)—so long as one strikes the words “always” and “only.” In the play's phallocentric world, she exists as a sign to be recontextualized, all right, but also as a desiring woman aspiring to a coherent subjectivity. The feminist gestus I have devised is designed to capture the tension between the two.

37. Adelman astutely points out that Cressida's behavior in the “kissing scene” revives the defensive sexual wit she displayed in 1.2 (Suffocating Mothers, 51). Inasmuch as that witty persona turned out to be fraudulent, however, one could say that she offers, in the kissing scene, the performance of a performance.

38. I have substituted the Arden “accosting” for the Riverside (and quarto and folio) “a coasting” in order to clarify the image: Cressida welcomes accosting; she incites amorous overtures; she seduces. See Kenneth Palmer's note on this line (Troilus and Cressida, 247).

39. Geoffrey Aggeler, “Utah Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (Summer 1985), 231.

40. Roger Warren, “Shakespeare in Britain,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (Spring 1986), 117.

41. As Barbara Bowen observes, “In this context, Cressida's choice of Diomedes becomes an understandable reaction to the need for a guardian and her ‘betrayal’ of Troilus appears guiltless and inevitable” (Gender in the Theater of War [New York: Garland, 1993], 56).

42. This problem of unengagement arose at Shakespeare Santa Cruz's 1994 production of The Merchant of Venice, in which the character of Portia was essentially fragmented into three separate personae: an empty-headed princess in a silly wig and frilly gown; an insecure, cross-dressed girl over-matched by her self-appointed mission, and a powerful, charismatic woman. Portia became an aggregate of three unassimilated images, lacking the underlying sense of character with which to make them signify dramatically or provide a stable base for the director's intended gestus of female empowerment.

43. Lorraine Helms discusses the difficulties of acting Cressida in her essay, “Playing the Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism and Shakespearean Performance,” in Performing Feminisms, 196-203. Helms raises some important issues, but I would disagree that the “calculated artificiality” of rhymed couplets in Cressida's soliloquy in 1.2 “serve[s] mimetically to represent the coquetry which patriarchal criticism attributes to Cressida” (200). Skilled actors can minimize the artificiality of rhymed couplets through arhythmic readings and strong subtextual dynamics. Because Cressida, left alone, is unburdening herself of her deepest anxieties, her speech need not seem calculated or artificial.

44. Helms discusses the way in which this scene was staged in the 1987 Stratford, Ontario, production: “Diomedes subjected Cressida to relentless symbolic violence, intermittently underscored by physical menace. He left Cressida so near hysteria that, when she came to her soliloquy, the words were virtually unintelligible. The text of Cressida's collusion gave way before an image which represented the terror of rape as forcefully as Gloucester's on-stage blinding represents the horror of mutilation.” Helms suggests that this staging achieved a feminist gestus, not simply because it “deconstructed the patriarchal representation of a vain and shallow coquette,” but because it also deconstructed Troilus' vilifying of her: “[T]he audience had just seen a rape; they now saw patriarchal ideology at work as Troilus bustled about blaming the victim” (“Playing the Woman's Part,” 202-203). This staging, like the gestus of gang-rape in the kissing scene, employs the imagery of male brutality not only to create sympathy for Cressida but to explain otherwise inexplicable behavior and thus preserve the character's continuity and integrity. I would argue that a more equivocal treatment of the scene and a less violent dislocation between Cressida's conduct and Troilus' interpretation more ably renders her position as a fragmented female subject. Judging from Barbara Hodgdon's account, Davies's production seems closer to the mark: Juliet Stevenson's moody, anxious Cressida bestowed affections on Diomedes in a manner that, according to Hodgdon, could be read as strategic rather than sincere, rendering the male spectators' pejorative commentary explicitly erroneous. Moreover, the scene was set in semi-darkness, shifting focus from Cressida's and Diomedes' bodies to the male onlookers' voices, underscoring their ability “to control the meaning of the spectacle” (“He Do Cressida in Different Voices,” 282-83).

45. Adelman implicitly finds this speech inadequate as an explanation of Cressida's action, arguing that, “after 4.4, the play gives us no place to ground our speculation” about her motives; “exactly when we most need to understand what Cressida is doing, we are given no enlightenment” (Suffocating Mothers, 51). Helms asserts, “these lines make sense from Troilus' perspective, from Ulysses' or Thersites', but not from Cressida's. Such decentering renders this speech among the most difficult to perform in the Shakespearean canon; it also presents perhaps the greatest challenge to a feminist performance” (“Playing the Woman's Part,” 202). I believe the speech, albeit sketchy and recessive, does contain clues for both the textual exegete and the actress. Assuming that Cressida actually does find herself attracted to Diomedes, as their scene together suggests, she resolves her conflicted feelings by submitting them to the patriarchal notion of female wantonness: “The error of our sex” is the received myth through which she manages an otherwise unmanageable sexuality. Taking her attraction to Diomedes as evidence of her unredeemable depravity, she consents—at least within the scene—to the act that would confirm it.

46. Joel Fineman contends that Cressida's faithlessness threatens Troilus with “No difference,” with a denial of his necessary distinction from Diomedes and all other men (“Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP], 99). Fineman's argument coalesces somewhat with mine: the “distinction” that Troilus wishes for depends, I would say, upon Cressida's demonstrating her satisfaction by him.

47. Seduction, 22.

48. In Libby Appel's 1984 production for the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Cassandra “spoke the prologue and remained on the balcony above the main stage during much of the action to function as a chorus. In the play's concluding scene, she was joined by Thersites and Pandarus to utter in a choric chant Pandarus' bitter farewell to the audience” (Geoffrey Aggeler, “Utah Shakespearean Festival,” 230).

49. In Barton's 1976 revival, Diomedes entered the scene of his encounter with Cressida with a “Helen doll” slung over his shoulder, which he retrieved after exiting, triumphant, with the sleeve that Cressida gave him (see Hodgdon, “He Do Cressida in Different Voices,” 278). At the end of the play, after Pandarus' final speech, Thersites could be seen in an underground vault fondling a life-size female doll (see Bowen, Gender in the Theater of War, 53). These dolls, like my mannequins, situate Cressida's downfall within a phallocratic culture that objectifies and fetishizes the female body. As Bowen puts it, “it seems clear that Barton was suggesting that Cressida's self-division … is inevitable in a world that turns women into icons. Barton's final image, then, of Thersites holding a doll becomes a bitter parody of Paris and Helen, Troilus and Cressida, Cressida and Diomedes; in fact, of the whole Trojan conflict over sexuality as possession” (Gender in the Theater of War, 53).

    Bowen also credits Barton with two other choices conducive to feminist subtext: “Helen appeared bound to Paris by a golden chain, with which she was led about the stage; Cressida in the betrayal scene was given a courtesan's mask to wear on the back of her head, revealing it only as she turned to exit with Diomedes” (Gender in the Theater of War, 53).

    Some reviewers saw the mask not as a gestic signifier of Cressida's subjection to text, however, but as a reductive, unironic confirmation of her descent into harlotry (see Warren, “Theory and Practice: Stratford 1976,” 175). Interestingly, the mask later was dropped in favor of Cressida's emitting a brazen cackle as she accompanied Diomedes offstage. By transforming Cressida from sign (mask) to agent (cackle) this choice becomes a more straightforward signifier of her corruption, making her not the hapless recipient of a notorious identity but the active embodiment of it.

50. As Adelman observes, “in its treatment of Troilus as a warrior … the play here conflates a developmental narrative (in which young Troilus emerges into fierce manhood) with a narrative of escape from emasculation (in which love has disarmed an already accomplished warrior)” (Suffocating Mothers, 61).

51. In Sam Mendes's 1990 RSC production, Thersites was a “white-faced” hunchback, “with eyes red with rheum, his hands covered in surgical gloves to hide his eczema” (Peter Holland, “Shakespeare Performances in England, 1989-90,” 173). Certainly Thersites' own bodily corruption could help account not simply for his disease-ridden language but for his snarling misanthropy, perhaps even his status as “privileged man”—a man forced into marginalization by his physical repulsiveness.

52. I theorize these homosocial dynamics with help from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's seminal study, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), esp. 1-27.

53. See Spear's extended discussion of the play's evocation of the penetrable male body (“Shakespeare's ‘Manly Parts,’” 418-19).

54. Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare, 59.

55. Robert Speaight, quoted in Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare, 59.

56. See Alan C. Dessen, “Price-Tags and Trade-Offs: Chivalry and the Shakespearean Hero in 1985,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (Spring 1986), 104.

57. In Davies's production, Pandarus was devastated by the separation of the lovers: “[H]e broke down, and ended up a wreck in dark glasses, obsessively playing the piano throughout the final battle sequences while the set collapsed around him” (Roger Warren, “Shakespeare in Britain, 1985,” 118).