SOURCE: James, Heather. “‘Tricks We Play on the Dead’: Making History in Troilus and Cressida.” In Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire, pp. 85-118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, James explores the Elizabethan attitudes reflected in Shakespeare's treatment of history and legend in Troilus and Cressida, explaining that at the time the play was written the legend of the Trojan War and its warriors and lovers were viewed with mixed emotions by Elizabethans. James additionally relates elements of the play to the Essex rebellion.]

The previous chapter argued that the gory, idiosyncratic Titus Andronicus inaugurates Shakespeare's career-long engagement of the translation of empire and that his aberrant reproductions of classical icons should be recognized as calculated assaults on the political program invested in transporting imperial authority from Rome to Elizabethan England. Titus Andronicus' eccentric rhetoric and dramaturgy raise questions about the successful transmission of imperial authority through classical myth and example, which the play gleefully strips of their competence. The legends, icons, and models that Titus once took to be reliable sources of cultural nourishment turn out to be enervated metaphors for values they have come not to betoken but betray. As signs pried loose from their original contexts, Astraea and such once-reputable exemplars as Virginius and Lucrece, Vergil and Horace no longer anchor the Romans to their civic origins and defining virtues. With long histories and impressive credentials, these exemplars are cultural giants and tower over Titus Andronicus as claimants to fame. Yet Titus reduces them to media and not sources of authority, mere allusions to a ghostly past and their earlier, more famous appearances. Shakespeare's next exploitation of the resources of combative imitations comes not in Rome but at the originary site of the translatio imperii: “In Troy, there lies the scene” (1.1.1).

Long before Shakespeare turned to the matter of Troy, poets and historians alike had voiced skepticism about the relationship of the Troy legend to political propaganda. In cantos 33-5 of the Orlando furioso, the knight Astolfo makes his extraordinary voyage to the moon, where he is taken on a tour of the lunar junkyard by none other than the Apostle John. There, Astolfo receives an astonishing lesson in history.¹

Non sì pietoso Enea, né forte Achille
fu, come è fama, né sì fiero Ettorre;
e ne son stati e mille a mille e mille
che lor si puon con verità anteporre:
ma i donati palazzi e le gran ville
dai descendenti lor, gli ha fatto porre
in questi senza fin sublimi onori
da l'onorate man degli scrittori.
Non fu sì santo né benigno Augusto
come la tuba di Virgilio suona.
L'aver avuto in poesia buon gusto
la proscrizion iniqua gli perdona …
Omero Agamennòn vittorioso,
e fe' i Troian parer vili ed inerti;
e che Penelopea fida al suo sposo
dai Prochi mille oltraggi avea sofferti.
E se tu vuoi che 'l ver non ti sia ascoso,
tutta al contrario l'istoria converti:
che i Greci rotti, e che Troia vittrice,
e che Penelopea fu meretrice.
Da l'altra parte odi che fama lascia
Elissa, ch'ebbe il cor tanto pudico;
che riputata viene una bagascia,
solo perché Maron non le fu amico.

(35.25, 27-8)

Aeneas was not as devoted, nor Achilles as strong as is rumored, nor was Hector so fierce. There have been thousands upon thousands upon thousands of men who could, in truth, supersede these men. But the palaces and large villas given by their descendants—these have granted such men boundless sublime honor from the honored hands of writers. / Augustus was not so holy or benign as Vergil's horn sounded. Having good taste in poetry excused his wicked proscription … / Homer made Agamemnon seem victorious, and the Trojans low-class and sluggish; he made Penelope faithful to her husband, and had her suffer thousands of insults from the suitors. If you wish the truth not to be concealed from you, invert the whole story: the Greeks were destroyed, Troy was victorious, and Penelope was a whore. / On the other hand, listen to what reputation Dido left behind, she who had such a chaste heart; she is reputed a tart only because Vergil was not her friend.

The Apostle then declares his affection for writers, stemming from his own authorship of the life of Christ. These were favorite stanzas of Voltaire, who may have had in mind Ariosto's analysis of the economics and politics motivating literary history as well as such historical frauds as the Donation of Constantine when he remarked that “history is tricks we play on the dead.”

In England, the critique of the Troy legend and its political interests was pursued, without Ariosto's sublime blasphemy, in the skeptical questions that humanist scholars asked of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History and its untraceable source, the vetustissimus liber. Geoffrey's contemporaries, William of Newburgh and Gerald of Wales, derided the marvelous stories of Arthur's feats, which filled the void of early British history.² Gerald enjoyed his tale about devils fleeing when the gospel of St. John was placed on their familiar's chest and flocking back with reinforcements when the word of truth was replaced with Geoffrey's History, but he did not doubt Britain's Trojan origins. Not until the fifteenth century and the rise of humanists in Duke Humphrey's circle did the Brutan legend face antagonism and, for a brief moment, the threat of eclipse. What saved the Troy legend for continuance from Caxton's Chronicles of England (1480) to the popular works of Fabyan (1516), Grafton's edition of Hardyng (1543), and Grafton (1568), along with Holinshed and Harrison (1577) and Stow, was the ascent to the throne of the Welsh Henry Tudor in 1485.

The Tudors were willing to host the legend, as long as they were not required to give it credence. Elizabeth I listened to John Dee's earnest arguments that she had rights over Iceland based on Arthur's conquests, but she did not act on them. In her diplomacy and skepticism, she resembled her grandfather: when Henry VII named his first born son Arthur, he fed the Tudor propaganda mill—a christening admired by John Twyne, a great disbeliever in the legend—but Henry also hired Polydore Vergil, the Italian historian who dismantled the legend's historicity with gusto and without reprisal. The Welsh Tudor manifestly stood to gain by preserving the legends of Brute and Arthur, but had greater need for Polydore's defense of the Tudor claim in terms of more recent history: Polydore was better prepared to misattribute Richard II's problems to the lack of an heir than to favor Geoffrey's recreative history over Gildas and Roman histories. Polydore Vergil paradoxically destroyed the credibility of the Troy legend and guaranteed its ardent defense. Tudor supporters, influenced by Reformation sentiment, were less able than the king to stomach the efforts of a foreigner and papist to discredit England's legendary origins.

Leland attacked Polydore tirelessly and somewhat incoherently; John Bale traced Brutus' ancestry to the Bible; Henry Lyte (1592)—whose family motto was Fuimus Troies—and Richard Harvey defended the Brutan legend for its moral value; Sir John Price complimented Polydore's learning but demurred at his conclusions. Touchiness along the lines of Captain MacMorris' “What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?” (Henry V 3.2.125) abounded. The Welsh Arthur Kelton and Humphrey Lhuyd vociferously promoted the Welsh claim to “an uninterrupted descent from the earliest inhabitants of the island” through Brutus³ and lambasted Polydore, who, Lhuyd said, “doth in all places nippe and girde at the Britaynes,” being “an infamous baggage-groome, ful fraught wt. Envie and hatred.”⁴ And when the Scottish George Buchanan expressed doubts about the Brutan legend, he was also accused of trying to cheapen England for Scotland's greater glory. Perhaps to forestall the abuse that skeptics learned to expect from zealous patriots, historians and poets responded to the legend with varying degrees of enthusiasm. While Rastell (Pastyme of the People, 1529), and Elyot, in the 1545 edition of his dictionary, were comfortable with skeptical references to the legend, later generations either glossed over it or applied strippers with the least toxins: Coke was not above citing the Brutan legend to establish the priority of England's common law over the Roman civil law; Camden gently but effectively separated the legend from acceptable historiography; and Selden tried to discourage Drayton from using Geoffrey as a creditable historian rather than a fanciful but inspiring muse.

Increased sophistication in historical methods both weakened the legend and made its continued viability an article of faith. Based on their awareness of its history of ideological manipulation in literature, poets such as Chaucer and Ariosto were making parallel discoveries of the legend's lack of authenticity. In the middle ages, the ranks of authorities, from Dares and Dictys to the more familiar Benoît (c.1160), Guido della Colonne (1287), Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson, Lydgate, Lefèvre (1464), Caxton (1474), and Lemaire (1509)—swelled to include a range of vested interests. Since each of these authorities negotiates the heroic and romance material to stamp different values on the legend and its characters, the legend's generic transformations reflect shifts in ethics, value, and nationalist ideology.⁵ Even in antiquity, the causes and values of the Trojan war were disputed implicitly or directly in the texts of Homer, Vergil, and Ovid. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid pointedly reinterprets the motivations for combat: Aeneas and Turnus fight not for a kingdom in dowry, nor a father-in-law's scepter, nor Lavinia herself, but for conquest—nec iam dotalia regna, / nec sceptrum soceri, nec te, Lavinia virgo, / sed vicisse petunt (14.569-71). In his apostrophe to the Aeneid's unfortunate cipher of a heroine, Ovid insists that the war was wholly about imperial claims legitimated by conquest alone and not, as Vergil suggested, by marriage and inheritance.

While Ovid and the medieval romances “debased” classical epic, the final step that the legendary figures at Troy took down the scale of genres led them into the literary productions of ballad-makers and satirists. There, distilled by time, tradition, and the reductive powers of those genres, they took essentialized forms as the wily Ulysses, blockish Ajax, petulant and destructive Achilles, whoring Cressida, foolish Troilus—Sir Trollelollie to Samuel Rowlands⁶—and pandar or bawd. Elizabethans held no uniform view of the divisive tradition, but could hardly escape skepticism when they had plentiful authorities to intimate that even the great Vergil, like Homer, twisted history to accommodate the interests of his prince, Augustus. Yet even the comforts of disbelief were hard to maintain: another complication for the Elizabethan evaluation of Troy came with Chapman's translation of Homer's Iliades, of which he had published seven books, dedicated to the Earl of Essex, by the time Shakespeare composed Troilus and Cressida. His translation suggested a return to the legend's origin in Homer, controverting the medieval opinion that Homer was a relative late-comer to the tradition. His work revitalized and politicized the epic ethos, however neoplatonized, in the Elizabethan consciousness of Troy. At the time of Shakespeare's play, the lovers and colossal warriors of the Troy legend stood variously prized, devalued, and redeemed.⁷

GENRE, IDEOLOGY, AND THE CRISIS OF EXEMPLARITY

In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare exhibits and exhausts literary and historical authorities on the Troy legend. From the prologue in which time is “digested” and warriors “disgorged” from their ships to the epilogue in which Pandarus bequeaths us his syphilitic disease, the play satirically “digests” the highly privileged tradition only to cast it up, along with the play's women, as “relics,” “scraps,” and “greasy orts.” This play entertains the spectral appearances of all auctores in the tradition—classical, medieval, and contemporary; epic, chronicle, romance, ballad, and satire. At Troy, the originary site of literary representation and political authority, Shakespeare sets imitations of the divisive tradition to battle out, on a synchronic stage, the question of the identities of Troy, its warriors, and its lovers. The result is a play bristling with anger and defenses, one whose competing ideologies are constantly staging their aristeia—the stepping forth of a warrior (or idea) to prove itself in battle. In such a history as that experienced by the Troy legend, authority and identity, national or characterological, do not accrue, stabilize, and deepen. Troilus and Cressida presents the tradition as driven by political and economic hunger to supersede, control, be recognized as a powerful, single essence. As a result of the nationalist and literary battles waged on its ground, however, it is fragmentary and inconsistent—a totality menaced by its various parts.

In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare refuses to privilege or adjudicate among versions of the Troy legend, but instead twists, disorders, and occasionally inverts versions of the Troy legend. Drawing attention to the narrative techniques—rhetoric, genre, and disposition—that stamp interpretive values on the legendary events and heroes at Troy, he exposes lack of authenticity in a legend which exists only to bequeath authoritative origins. Robert Kimbrough, remarks of the play's “experimental principle of discontinuity” that⁸

there is no handling of the Troy legend before Shakespeare's which does not try to point the story with some kind of moral or ethical observation. The sources may be responsible for the facts that make up the ending of Troilus, but the same sources emphasize that Shakespeare made no attempt to shape his material so that it would carry thematic reverberations outside the play.

To sharpen this observation, Shakespeare not only refuses to shape his material, but systematically subverts the narrative shapes into which the Troy legend had been cast, and does so to strip the legend of its power to influence the world outside its texts. In the play's very dramatic construction, Shakespeare reiterates Troilus' notorious query, “What's aught but as 'tis valued?” (2.2.53).

The question is jarring in part because it comes from Troilus, the sometime idealist who has acted his part so often that he has gained an actor's ability to stand apart from his role and consider the economic advantages of the philosophical position he is routinely asked to supply. The question is a version of the Cretan liar's paradox: as the trope for amorous idealism, Troilus cannot interrogate value without calling into question his own continued significance, as well as that of the play and the larger tradition he inhabits. It is a cruel irony that Troilus musters his most passionate commitment to undermine value and continue the war he abhors: “Helen must needs be fair,” he says to Greeks and Trojans alike, “When with your blood you daily paint her thus” (1.1.90-1). His cynical question and paradoxically faithless commitment to the war can only come from a character aware of his own and his world's fatiguing repetitions, which are gradually eroding his marriage to fidelity: this is why Troilus dreams up his appalling analogy, beginning “I take today a wife” (2.2.62), often associated with his ambivalence about Cressida rather than his argument about the grounds for conquest based on the theft of a wife, Helen. Troilus can pose the question of value only in his Elizabethan incarnation, when timeless repetitions of idealistic love have made him both reflexively committed to his traditional position and cynically aware of its lack of authenticity.

The doubleness of Troilus relates to the hybrid character of Troilus and Cressida as a play stymied by its composition from mismatched parts in its long and varied tradition. Shakespeare endows the world of the play with partial awareness of the multiple sources that constitute the Troy legend as well as the politics and economics that underwrite the continual reproductions of its characters and events, and he presents this world as enraged at its own fragmentary, unauthentic, and exploited character. When critics diagnose pathology in the discordant and abrasive play itself rather than its characters,⁹ they respond to the generic anomaly of a play born from the tradition's rarely acknowledged literary psychomachia. The rage mimicked and generated by the play has its roots in the disillusionments of the late Elizabethan period, following the spectacular fall of the earl of Essex, whose ambition and chivalric virtue find their reflection in Shakespeare's Achilles and Hector, respectively. The Troy legend presents Shakespeare with the means to philosophize and exacerbate that disillusionment: to seek out a critique of representation on the ground of Troy is to unsettle Western culture at its putative foundation. In inhabiting the myth of origins but defying its authority, the play enters into a paralyzing struggle with cultural needs for authoritative origin and purposeful direction. Psychological terms offer greater interpretive yield for a play like Troilus and Cressida than for Titus Andronicus: the play's characters have the misfortune of actually being the kinds of emblems and signs from which Titus is alienated and against which he ultimately takes arms.

Generic mutability governs Troilus and Cressida's edgy defensiveness about the ambivalent nature it inherits from the Troy legend. Unlisted on the title page of the Folio, the play is slipped in between the histories and tragedies as if the editors were uncertain of its proper affiliation. The Folio title dubs it a tragedy, while the Epistle to the Quarto finds it “passing full of the palme comicall.” Critical arguments advanced to settle questions of the play's genre often convincingly demonstrate the power of their genre of choice to inform the play's construction and effects.¹⁰ Attempts to dismiss the claims of other genres, however, do not fare well. Critics must resort to textual emendation and even wholesale reconstruction on the lines of Dryden: so Nevill Coghill is obligated to do in support of his argument that Troilus and Cressida is a tragedy that can be recovered only when the distortions of the play's textual histories have been removed.¹¹ In fact, the play zealously exploits its various textual and generic resources with the goal of self-deformation. In this it resembles Ajax, a “very man per se”—the tautology reflects the slipperiness of heroic identity—who is thrown out of Aristotelian balance by partaking of too much. “This man”

hath robbed many beasts of their particular additions. He is as valiant as the lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant: a man into whom nature hath so crowded humours that his valour is crushed into folly, his folly sauced with discretion. There is no man hath a virtue that he hath not a glimpse of, nor any man an attaint but that he carries some stain of it. He is melancholy against the hair; he hath the joints of everything, but everything so out of joint that he is a gouty Briareus, many hands and no use, or purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight.

(1.2.15, 19-31)

Like a Polonian “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral” play or the fishy creature that Horace rejects at the outset of the Ars Poetica, Ajax is over-concocted and undone by the heroic epithets and additions that compound him.

Ajax is one of many characters who act as generic sign-posts for Troilus and Cressida. Critics often champion a representative character who can furnish a defining genre to secure an identity for the elusive play, and traditional favorites are the satirical Thersites or the politic Ulysses. Joel Altman also proposes the unfaithful heroine, Cressida, a felicitous choice in light of the play's defensive, changeful, and self-betraying nature.¹² This woman, who knows only “seems,” prompts her uncle Pandarus to exclaim, “You are such a woman, a man knows not at what ward you lie.” To this she responds,

Upon my back, to defend my belly; upon my
wit, to defend my wiles; upon my secrecy, to
defend mine honesty; my mask, to defend my
beauty; and you, to defend all these; and at all
these wards I lie, at a thousand watches.

(1.2.265-9)

Troilus and Cressida, like its heroine and literary tradition that resist being known, gains its resilience and enigmatic character from an apparent readiness to surrender or betray itself to the certifiable meaning of some one of its historical authorities only to be, suddenly, elsewhere, being someone else's literary kind.¹³ It exhibits an exasperating pleasure in rousing audience expectations based on an anticipated genre or text such as Chaucer's romance or Homer's epic, only to renege on “the promis'd largeness” and “ample proposition that hope makes / In all designs begun” (1.3.3-5) onstage. The play seeks its audience's confusion, and we are left to unperplex the interpretive and evaluative knot into which the play and characters are twisted.

To catalogue the play's subversions of genre and textual precedent would be a daunting task, calling for annotated summary of every frustrating scene and nuance. Admirably begun by Bradbrook, Colie, Donaldson, and Bradshaw, this work would begin with the parodically epic prologue, “Suited / In like condition as our argument” (lines 24-5), who signals the play's participation in ideological skirmishes from the war of the theaters to uses of the Troy legend: his defensive armor, speech, and tone introduce the play's juggling of familiar genres that should facilitate, not hinder, interpretation. The work would then laboriously plow through to the anti-closural conclusion, in which Pandarus turns his diseases to commodities.¹⁴ Disappointing scenes abound. Troilus first appears as a Chaucerian lover, but his cloying and perverse petrarchism replaces Chaucer's sympathetic touches. In the Greek camp, bombast topples the Greek commanders from the epic heights towards which they strive. In the Trojan council, Hector invokes Aristotelian virtue only to toss it aside blithely in favor of an arbitrarily assessed honor. If we search out lyric pleasures in the boudoir of Helen and Paris, we stumble into a bordello.

These scenes conspicuously fail to imitate famous scenes of petrarchan love, epic council, and lyric sweetness. Refining the art of swerving from precedent, Troilus and Cressida reverses Agamemnon's dictum: “Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan / Puffing at all, winnows the light away, / And what hath mass or matter by itself / Lies rich in virtue and unmingled” (1.3.27-30). Sorting through the tradition, Shakespeare selects the least reputable versions of characters and events and heightens their unsavory aspects. Ajax is far from Lydgate's hero, Achilles from Homer's, Troilus from Chaucer's, and Nestor from anybody's version of the experienced counselor. On the other hand, all that is obnoxious in Ovid's account of the Greeks is writ large in the dolts (Ajax), machiavellian politicians (Ulysses), and thugs (Achilles) of Shakespeare's stage. Shakespeare unerringly chooses compromising details from Chaucer to amplify. When Chaucer's Troilus writes his love letter, he laughs at the amorous protestations he cribs from Ovid, and later prefers the exchange of Criseyde for Antenor to elopement with her. In Shakespeare's aubade scene, these choices reappear in more discouraging forms: Troilus shares a knowing laugh with Pandarus—“ha, ha!”—at Cressida's expense, and scarcely conceals his urge to leave once he has eaten the “cake” for which he “tarried.”

Conflating sources and genres similarly disrupts stable signification. The strangest contamination comes in the scene of Pandarus' “complimental assault” on Helen and Paris. As Rosalie Colie demonstrates, Pandarus establishes the sweet and fair terms fit for Helen of Troy, but parodies rather than imitates the sonneteer's stock attitude of idolatry:¹⁵

Fair be you, my lord, and to all this fair company;
fair desires in all fair measure fairly guide them—
especially to you, fair queen: fair thoughts be
your fair pillow!

(3.1.42-5)

The wit he elicits from the “Sweet queen, sweet queen, that's a sweet queen, i' faith” (lines 69-70) recalls another “quean,” Doll Tearsheet. Reduced to a “Nell,” Helen of Troy teases Pandarus into singing a love song: “You shall not bob us out of our melody; if you do, our melancholy on your head” (lines 67-8). His ditty features the cries of sexual love from woe, to pleasure, to regret—“O ho, groans out for Ha, ha ha!—Heigh ho!” (line 121). His parody of orgasm strikes critics as an appropriate answer to Nell's fatuous cry, “this love will undo us all. O Cupid, Cupid, Cupid!” (lines 105-6). Although she gets no credit for it, Nell is grammatically right: the kind of love to which she and Paris are reduced in this play wholly “undoes” them as legendary figures.

Yet as soon as Pandarus leaves the stage, the famous lovers abruptly and inexplicably transcend the satiric genre:

PARIS.
They're come from the field: let us to Priam's hall
To greet the warriors. Sweet Helen, I must woo you
To help unarm our Hector. His stubborn buckles,
With these your white enchanting fingers touch'd,
Shall more obey than to the edge of steel
Or force of Greekish sinews: you shall do more
Than all the island kings—disarm great Hector.
HELEN.
'Twill make us proud to be his servant, Paris,
Yea, what he shall receive of us in duty
Gives us more palm in beauty than we have,
Yea, overshines ourself.
PARIS.
Sweet, above thought I love thee!

(lines 144-55)

In private, Helen and Paris break into verse which reasserts their characteristic ambiguity: self-centered but beautiful, they can almost explain away the Trojan war. No longer a bawdy Nell, this seductive Helen alone can disarm great Hector with her “white enchanting fingers.” Her restored powers introject Homeric resonances into a scene of generic debasement.¹⁶ Here is the romance in epic that the scene utterly denied to the lovers. Paris and Helen's fragile decorum and belief that their passion and beauty can redeem Trojan losses cannot withstand the urbane coarseness of later traditions represented by Pandarus. When he exits, the dominant genre of satire ceases to prevail and, simultaneously, critics cease to comment on the scene.¹⁷ The moment of verse is oddly dislocated and static, like a nostalgic flashback to a time before Pandarus was granted his disillusioning role in the tradition. Through the substitution of genres, the play enacts the repression of an earlier historical period, to recall Jean-Joseph Goux's definition of neurosis.¹⁸ Who remembers this fragile moment of dignity? And yet, who is not haunted by desire for the authenticity that this verse afterthought recalls through the residual lyric genre?

The scene typifies the way the play destabilizes generic, evaluative, and characterological categories. The consequence of over-representation is that all the legendary figures at Troy suffer from the “textual psychosis” that Carol Cook identifies in Cressida. Stressing the difficulties of psychologizing her, Cook expands on L. C. Knights' suggestive term for Cressida, “the wanton of tradition,” and suggests that a “bizarre textual psychosis seems to voice itself through her; she is a creature of intertextuality, of Chaucer, Lydgate, Caxton, Henryson, and others … endowed with self-consciousness.”¹⁹ Cook further notes that “in revealing herself as the creation of a literary tradition, the effect of a textual operation, Cressida discloses the ideological tendentiousness of literary codes” (pp. 48-9). Cook's sense of character as simultaneously constituted and vitiated by conflicted textuality extends to the play's other characters and to the dream of cultural integrity that it translates from its earliest authorities.

If the play were to escape indeterminacy, it would have to subscribe to one genre or text, allowing an Achilles to emerge as conqueror on the battlefield of tradition. The play and the war cannot effectively end before their values have been defined. Yet at its end, the play offers no more than the hostile challenge issued by its armed prologue: “Like or find fault: do as your pleasures are: / Now good, or bad, 'tis but the chance of war” (lines 30-1). Troilus and Cressida allots no settlement to the creatures and events it exposes as dependent upon ideologically motivated genres for significance. In conclusion, Shakespeare's play systematically repudiates its predecessors:

1. Cressida does not “enter with the lepers” as she did in Henryson's “Testament of Cresseid” and the contemporary play by Chettle. Cressida does not shoulder full responsibility for the play's failures of value, and we are denied an edifying moral.
2. Hector turns down his role as hero to play the chivalric fool. He chases a suit of armor about the battlefield while Achilles' Myrmidons stalk and bushwhack the Trojan hero. Committing a crime against heroic epic, the “god-like” Achilles orders his men to keep themselves well-breathed until they find Hector, and then “Empale him with your weapons round about; / In fellest manner execute your arms” (5.7.5-6). When they slaughter the unarmed Hector, Achilles orders them to give him the credit: “On, Myrmidons, and cry you all amain / ‘Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain’” (5.8.13-14). Dispatching epic, the play replaces heroic combat with a sordid, behind-the-scenes execution befitting an Elizabethan revenge drama. At its conclusion, Troilus and Cressida turns the great epic warrior to a political propagandist.
3. Troilus fights but fails to die. He never achieves the status of metonym for fallen Troy, as he does in kindlier sources. Instead, Hector dies in the ambush plotted, in Lydgate and Caxton, for Troilus. Shakespeare denies the eleventh-hour efforts of tragedy to deliver the play from irresolution.²⁰
4. Troilus delivers a ringing speech of choric closure: “Strike a free march to Troy! With comfort go: / Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe” (5.10.30-31). At this moment, Pandarus rushes onto the stage to disrupt the tragic equilibrium Troilus momentarily achieves. Pandarus makes his anachronistic intrusion to complete the movement of the translatio imperii through time, geography, genre, textual variants, and ideology to Elizabethan England and the moment of performance. A play that systematically exhausts value and genre fittingly assigns its last word to Pandarus: he has throughout stood for a skeptical tradition grown weary of itself, and he stands at the last as an Elizabethan bawd appealing to the common bond he claims to share with the audience. We are “Good traders in the flesh” (5.10.46) and “Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade” (line 52), and to us he bequeaths his ancient diseases.

How did we come to be on familiar terms with a pimp who trades in his niece's flesh? The answer depends on taking Pandarus as a personification of the cynical position he occupies in the tradition—a characterological reduction appropriate to the play's metatheatrical and tropical practices. Like Iago, who embodies and mobilizes the language of social hatreds, Pandarus both courts and resists characterological interpretation. Troilus and Cressida gathers no dramatic energy from the war or romance plots, for audiences can hardly suspend knowledge that the Trojans lost the war and that Cressida betrayed Troilus. Instead of trying to revitalize the tradition, the play stages the conversion of its characters into tropes and dead metaphors.²¹ Wherever in their histories the warriors and lovers begin the play, at its end they are identical with Elizabethan by-words, including “merrygreek” and “base” or “honest Troyan,” for bullies, whores, johns, and pimps. When we recognize and accept the “gross terms,” we exchange their characterological potential for their verbal coinage. Like Prince Hal, we study the characters “Like a strange language, wherein, to gain the language, / 'Tis needful that the most immodest word / Be look'd upon and learnt; which once attain'd … comes to no further use / But to be known and hated” (2 Henry IV, 4.4.68-73). However much we would like to except ourselves from Pandarus' fraternity, we do, in fact, trade in the characters' flesh for their significance as “gross terms.” Nor is it at all clear that we are as adept as Hal at purging ourselves of their contagion. Through Pandarus, the play finally insists upon the ideological purchase of tropes, figures of speech, and representation itself. Genre is both the stake and the agency of the representations that seek a narrative and correlative meaning under the auspices of epic, tragedy, satire, or history but fail to fictionalize coherent identities for the characters and events at Troy. Pandarus' epilogue constitutes the play's final defensive strategy: he looks to the audience and assumes its participation in a brokerage of representation.²²

Troilus and Cressida earns its place between the genres of tragedy and history in the Folio, and its reputation as a play that was never clapper-clawed. It both unfixes distinctions and requires an explanatory text or genre to grant it and its legendary material the integrity necessary to establish its historical origin and nationalistic destination and to still its hyperactive oscillations up and down the scale of genres. By disassembling a tradition that usually feigns ignorance of its multiplicity and inconsistency, Troilus and Cressida demonstrates the need to commodify the legendary characters and events in order for them to yield socially usable meaning. The play's self-conscious mishandling of the Troy legend's cultural ambition cuts, perhaps, too deeply into the skins of late Elizabethan audiences, who may not have been willing to applaud a lively witness of their own diseased body politic, as the foreword complains.

“HE PAGEANTS US”: IMITATION IN THE GREEK CAMP

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. What is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

—Walter Benjamin

The play, its characters, and action are subject to the assaults that brought Titus Andronicus' Roman exemplars to their knees. Those legendary icons lost their status as sources of cultural authority: condemned to the ghostly existence of signs, stripped from their original contexts, they came to signify alienation from securing origins. Troilus and Cressida is similarly stripped from the authority that ontological claims can offer an over-produced legend, and the characters feel the difference in their status. The play, as critics have noted, anticipates ideas in Benjamin's famous essay on the mechanical reproduction of a work of art: apposite to Troilus and Cressida's status as a repetition are Benjamin's comments that the reproduction lacks “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” and that “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”²³ The characters of Troilus and Cressida have differing degrees of sensitivity to their existence in multiple forms and their scandalous reproducibility, and at times fret over their jeopardized authority. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare poses a question that lies beyond his concerns in Titus Andronicus: what happens when subjects, in a textually aggravated version of Hamlet's sense of his slippage from his Hyperion-like father, perceive themselves as diminished and altered copies of a lost original?

The legendary figures are not, as were Titus' virtuous exemplars, merely allusions to earlier, stronger performances of themselves. Their peculiar histories of transformative imitation render them complex figures who frequently find themselves at odds with the interim temporality of Troilus and Cressida, which cannot settle in any one of the legend's historical eras. Besides Helen and Paris, who shift from Elizabethan satire to Homeric epic coordinates, and Pandarus, whose intrusion on the battlefield at the play's end reminds the audience of the Elizabethan end of the Trojan war, we might consider Hector's cavalier volte face in the Trojan council, where he intelligently questions the value of the war only to cast aside his doubts in the name of honor. Since he cites no motive for his change of heart, Hector has troubled critics who wish to preserve the fine reputation that Hector earned in the moralizing tradition after Homer.²⁴ The problem is that Hector cannot maintain his distinguished role as the ethical Trojan after he has been tempted by his equally attractive role as the chivalric one: in the Trojan council, he insists upon his ethics and even cites Aristotle on the subject—anachronism intended—and then, warming to Troilus' speeches on honor, formally exchanges one traditional role for the other and issues a highly romantic challenge to single combat.²⁵

These cases of jointly textual and characterological instability seem, at times, to be the result of random mechanical tics of the play rather than willed acts on the part of the characters. There are, however, abundant signs that the characters are possessed by the need to assume definitive identities by choosing the strongest of their many versions. Troilus passionately desires to become the “authentic author” of truth for the citational purposes of love lyric. Nestor and Agamemnon are obsessed to the point of incoherence with the dignity and rhetoric they are accorded in epic and chronicle traditions: as if steeped in Lydgate's “depured rethoryke,”²⁶ their language is hyperbolic, horribly stuffed with epithets and similes, and Nestor is gratified to be termed a “good old chronicle” (4.5.201). The hope of being, not merely imitating, Achilles puffs up the traditionally respectful Ajax. It is true that the characters are often weary with their status as tropes. As John Bayley elegantly writes,

Ulysses is a charade of policy as Nestor is one of age, Troilus of fidelity, Cressida of faithlessness. “He must, he is, he cannot but be wise” is the ironic comment on Nestor. But all of them must, are and cannot but be voices imprisoned in role and argument, figures condemned to tread the mill of time without ever being free of it.²⁷

But they are only so condemned while they inhabit Shakespeare's interim temporality, and they pursue, with determination, lasting and singular identities as tropes. They cast covetous glances at the annals in which they may be recorded as heroes without the Hamlet-like curse of “conscience,” which tells them of the unstable ground on which they tread the mill of time and base their actions. Like Coriolanus, who wishes to be “author of himself” (5.3.35), the characters accept a model of identity that is constituted almost farcically in one's relationship to the many authoritative texts of ones' “future” historiographers.

The characters' sensitivity to their reproducibility becomes epidemic in the Greek camp, where “Pale and bloodless emulation” mimics the larger problems of the much-imitated Troy legend. Shakespeare chooses to let the problem of “emulation”—aemulatio or rivalrous imitation—begin in the closet theater of Achilles, who delights in Patroclus' satirical “imitation” (1.3.150, 185) of the Greek commanders. “Having his ear full of his airy fame,” Ulysses charges, Achilles “Grows dainty of his worth, and in his tent / Lies mocking our designs” (lines 144-6). This unsavory Achilles earns his declension from “the great Achilles” to “the large Achilles,” “god Achilles,” the “broad Achilles,” and “Sir Valor.” While the once great warrior lolls on his bed, Patroclus “Breaks scurril jests” and “pageants us” (lines 148, 151), a term that captures Ulysses' frustration with the politics of camp parody.²⁸ “Sometime, great Agamemnon,” Ulysses continues, “Thy topless deputation he puts on, / And like a strutting player … acts thy greatness” (lines 151-3, 158) with bombast and “hyperboles” (line 161). To drive home his case against presumptuous imitations, Ulysses includes extempore character sketches of Patroclus playing Nestor preparing for an oration and answering a night alarm. The problem is one of unlicensed reproduction rather than “slanderous” inaccuracy. Agamemnon leaves little room for parody when he defines himself through inflated rhetoric: “checks and disasters / Grow in the veins of actions highest rear'd, / As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap, / Infects the sound pine and diverts his grain / Tortive and errant from his course of growth” (1.3.5-9). Nestor is harder on epic style: he issues an epic simile on “the ruffian Boreas” who enrages “gentle Thetis” so that one might “behold / The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut, / Bounding between the two moist elements, / Like Perseus' horse” become a “toast for Neptune” (lines 38-45), i.e., a shipwreck in a storm.

It is symptomatic of the characters' thorough discomfort with their status as imitations of themselves that Ulysses alludes to no parody of himself, unless it is elided in the abstract reference to strategy: “plots, orders, preventions, / Excitements to the field, or speech for truce” are “stuff for these two to make paradoxes” (lines 181-4). Achilles and Patroclus “mock our designs” and call Ulysses' strategy “bed-work, mapp'ry, closet-war” (line 205). While Ulysses is ready to reproduce Patroclus' imitations of others and Achilles' merry applause, he cannot bring himself to duplicate his own caricature, although he inclusively stresses that the actor “pageants us” and makes “paradoxes” of “our abilities, gifts, natures, shapes” (line 179). What would be the reaction of his onstage viewers, one wonders, if he “boy'd” his own greatness, rendering himself a parody, paradox, parallel, and comparison to himself? Might Agamemnon and Nestor privately think, “Excellent! 'Tis Ulysses right?” To parody oneself is to isolate the mimetic in any self-representation, and for Ulysses to mimic the parody of him would put him “beside himself.” Shakespeare is toying dangerously with the royal language of self-reference: the prince alone can be “like himself.”

Imitations hurt because they publicize the fact that the characters inhabit a play in which no originals exist.²⁹ At no small risk to his own appearance as a stable model of policy, Ulysses takes revenge by outdoing the great Myrmidon in “emulation,” and exposing Achilles as an accumulation of warriors: not the greatest warrior in Western civilization, after all, but only a set of copies. Ulysses begins by exploiting Ajax the Greek warrior who traditionally emulates Achilles: he introduces Ajax to a preferable version of himself, and leads him to believe that he might replace Achilles in the annals. For the two versions of Ajax, Shakespeare adopts the Oilean and Thelamonian Ajaxes from Lydgate. Shakespeare's Ajax plays the Oilean miles gloriosus to the hilt: he is “hye of stature and boysous in a press, / And of his speche rude and reckles. / Ful many worde in ydel him asterte.” On the other hand, he in no way resembles Lydgate's Thelamonian Ajax, who is “descrete and vertuous, / Wonder fayre and semely to beholde”; has a talent for music (a harmony which sharply contrasts with the distinct lack of proportion in Shakespeare's warrior); and is “Nor desyrous for to have vyctorye, / Devoyde of pompe hatynge all vaynglorye, / All ydle laude spent and blose in vayn.”³⁰ This man is the mirror that the Greek commanders hold up to their Oilean dupe. The “dull brainless Ajax,” whom they “dress … up in voices” (1.3.381-2), neatly inverts his Thelamonian exemplar: “Why should a man be proud?” he asks, “How doth pride grow? I know not what pride is” (2.3.153-4). Ulysses calculates an act of socially constructing identity which, for the play's audiences, trades on versions of the warrior who goes by the name Ajax. Our recognition of the different Ajaxes exploited to make the one onstage socially usable tends to empty him out characterologically, but deepens our understanding of identity construction in early modern England as a social practice and a theoretical proposition. The figures who have been “known” for centuries and should be self-evident are defamiliarized by their alienated relationships to their conventional representations and their constitution in divisive versions of themselves.

Ajax is an obvious candidate to manipulate: since he traditionally emulates Achilles, he might be said to have a comparatively tenuous hold over his own identity. We might hypothesize that the man Ajax emulates, the greatest of all warriors, will demonstrate greater self-possession. After all, Achilles challenged Agamemnon's right to cheapen his reputation, thus pitting personal merit against social rank. Tradition, however, does not secure Achilles in self-evident identity any more than it does Ajax. The defiant warrior undergoes the play's most elaborately staged identity crisis, one induced by social pressures and conducted in the specifically textual terms that characterize the divisiveness of the play and the tradition behind it. Ulysses instructs the Greek commanders to “pass strangely by [Achilles] / As if he were forgot.” After they “Lay negligent and loose regard on him”—an eye-rolling smirk—Ulysses enters reading a book which holds out the promise of an answer to Achilles' question, “why such unplausive eyes are bent, why turn'd on him?” (3.3.39-43). Achilles knows the importance of eyes/ayes in preserving reputation: “greatness once fall'n out with fortune / Must fall out with men, too,” he says, and the “declin'd” will “read [his fall] in the eyes of others” (lines 75-7). Yet he resists concluding that he has sustained material damage, adding that “Fortune and I are friends. I do enjoy / At ample point all that I did possess, / Save these men's looks, who do methinks find out / Some thing not worth in me such rich beholding / As they have often given” (lines 88-92). When Ulysses enters with his book, Achilles is already caught by the hook of analysis. Poised between confidence and anxiety, the warrior known for his independence is eager to theorize self-construction.

Their discourse on the material basis of epistemology comments slyly on the play's repeated jokes on how men know themselves and each other.³¹ Ulysses muses over the “strange fellow” who writes that man “how dearly ever parted … Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, / Nor feel not what he owes, but by reflection” (lines 95, 98-9). Like Chiron in Titus, who learned Horace's great ode “in grammar long ago,” Achilles has a schoolboy's memory of epistemology and phenomenology but no sense of how they bear on him:

                                                  This is not strange, Ulysses.
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.

(lines 102-11)

Achilles is thinking of secret dignities in a man's life and character, for which he gains no credit until they are discovered by others, and does not acknowledge reputation as the “immortal part” of himself until Ulysses threatens Achilles' literary immortality: “no man is the lord of any thing,” Ulysses comments, “Till he communicate his parts to others … and behold them formed in th' applause” (lines 115-18). A leader gains his stature as magnanimous only as a gift from the society for which he must actively perform, and the public's warm applause constitutes the promethean fire of a great man, for his “virtues, shining upon others, / Heat them, and they retort that heat again / To the first giver” (lines 100-2). To be informed that his reputation is the property of the Greeks is unsettling to the man defined by martial prowess and willful independence.³² Then Ulysses ambushes his pupil with a surprise example to ground their discourse: the as yet “unknown Ajax.”

Up to this point in their quasi-Platonic dialogue, Ulysses essentially follows the plan he outlined in 1.3. Although his method is unexpectedly academic and text-bound, the audience is “in the know” about his goals until Achilles proudly reminds Ulysses that he has “strong reasons,” which he takes as self-evident, for his “privacy,” or withdrawal from the war for reasons of honor. Once Achilles speaks these Homeric words, Ulysses ambushes him—and the audience—with a strategically delayed disclosure concealed even from Nestor:

                                                  But 'gainst your privacy
The reasons are more potent and heroical:
'Tis known, Achilles, that you are in love
With one of Priam's daughters.

(3.3.191-4)

An intense emotion, an unrehearsed anxiety never felt before in his literary history, grips Achilles: “Ha, known?” Halfway through the play, Achilles and the audience together discover that Achilles is “known” to be the lover from the medieval chroniclers and not Homer's “potent and heroical” warrior. Ulysses, head of the Greco-Elizabethan secret service, invades the “privacy” by which Achilles meant his proud withdrawal to his tent. The very appearance of the word instigates an attack on Achilles' right to the self-definition and “self-stabilization” that Lars Engle has found to be virtually impossible in the unstable and “deflationary market” of the playworld where there is no “private life” defined as “a distinct, to some extent idiosyncratic, market of value that each character partially insulates from public scrutiny” (p. 150). Ulysses translates “privacy” to mean the amorous and medieval identity Achilles kept in the closet and the murky inwardness, the simultaneously textual and sexual duplicity, that Shakespeare's warrior tried to conceal in Homeric armor.³³

Under assault is Achilles' identity as a “potent and heroical” warrior—Ulysses tauntingly says, “And better would it fit Achilles much / To throw down Hector than Polyxena” (lines 206-7)—and a subject who constitutes himself partly in a shielded, uninterpretable space. Ulysses' strategy of spying and unmasking gives him the appearance of “knowing” Achilles when the great Myrmidon loses himself in the public exposure of his multiple histories. Ulysses makes a triumphant exit, having managed, to borrow Benjamin's words, “to pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, [which] is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction” (p. 223). In short, Ulysses sets off a chain reaction that causes differing redactions of Achilles to come into abrupt and violent contact and—like the pit in Titus Andronicus—produce an excess of meanings that undo Achilles as a character and “Achilles” as a stable exemplary type.

Once set in motion, the mechanism by which Achilles becomes reproducible—simply, estrangement from the tradition—runs without the guidance of an operator. As Ulysses leaves, yet another copy of Achilles flickers into view onstage. Despite Achilles' exposure as his medieval, romanticized self, motivated by love for Polyxena, Patroclus unaccountably takes responsibility for Achilles' guilty “privacy,” now understood as his sexuality as well as his withdrawal from the war. Patroclus urges the homosexual interpretation of their relationship that has dogged Achilles in the moralizing tradition:

To this effect, Achilles, have I mov'd you.
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 dewdrop from the lion's mane,
Be shook to air.

(3.3.215-24)

No longer the proud Homeric hero, but not exactly the medieval lover, Achilles undergoes severe disorientation by confronting too many versions of himself. Because his sexualities and sexual motivations to abstain from fighting are based on mutually exclusive versions of Achilles in literary history, his sexualities are rival and paralyze him: he is heterosexual and homosexual but not, paradoxically, bisexual. Achilles emerges as an indeterminate creature under erasure in the tradition if he does not satisfy the desires of the other Greeks.

The play provisionally translates Achilles into a contamination of textual and sexual forms which threaten his characterological integrity: the tradition's greatest hero suffers a nervous “breakdown” into his constituent versions. This scene threatens the coherence of the play as well: a notorious crux in traditional textual criticism, its narrative discontinuity is significant as an index of the play's constitution in a tradition that betrays its “matter” and leaves its characters and events as “fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics of [an] o'er-eaten” (5.2.158-9) legend. The contamination of traditions creates an incoherent image of an Achilles who withdraws from war officially for reasons of honor but privately to negotiate with the enemy for a girl while he enjoys continued sexual dalliance with his ingle, the “boy” Patroclus (5.5.45). But what is conspicuously aberrant in the individual is standard procedure in this famous war, which justifies its wasteful economic, nationalistic, and virile interests in terms of the quintessentially seductive Helen of Troy.

In Troilus and Cressida, Helen is a “pearl / Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships, / And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants” (2.2.82-4).³⁴ A “theme of honor and renown, / A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds” who will “canonize” the Trojans (2.2.200-3), she “must needs be fair” when the warriors of both sides “paint her thus” (1.1.90-1). As a commodity enabling the ideological and martial combat of the Trojans and Greeks, Helen of Troy is either a pearl or a whore of great price. Diomedes believes he is unmasking the real Helen when he excoriates her as a “flat tamed piece” and tells Paris, “For every false drop in her bawdy veins / A Grecian's life hath sunk … for every scruple / Of her contaminated carrion weight / A Troyan hath been slain” (4.1.70-3). Diomedes' scapegoating of Helen demonstrates that for good or ill, for epic expansion or satiric reduction, Helen measures and weighs out the value of men.³⁵ The play's interest in the traffic in women partly explains why Helen of Troy, so authoritative elsewhere, is aggressively vacant when she enters into a play in which economics dominate and interpret the action and language.

Achilles' textual breakdown and effeminization link him counter-intuitively to Helen of Troy, excoriated but universally accepted as the general equivalent of heroic products.³⁶ Ulysses provisionally acknowledges the arbitrariness of heroic virtue when he subjects the great warrior to an intense seminar in the contingency of his heroic masculinity. Unmasking the mechanics of self-constitution in one's relations to others and the sovereign state must be provisional: neither Achilles nor Ulysses could continue to function if they were always openly “unsecret to themselves.” As a reminder, Ulysses' stratagem succeeds brilliantly, and Achilles is abruptly removed from the market of heroic exchange and left at his tent to engage only in literal homosexuality.

Achilles regains his heroic masculinity only by foisting his compromised or soiled identity on Hector. His characterological upheaval rouses an unusual desire:

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

(3.3.236-40)

When he meets Hector, he “speculates” on his enemy: “Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee; / I have with exact view perus'd thee, Hector, / And quoted joint by joint … I will the second time, / As I would buy thee, view thee limb by limb” (4.5.230-3, 237). What Achilles seeks to purchase is an image of his own integrated and valued self. Fixing an ambiguous gaze on the Trojan, he regards Hector as an animal destined for the butcher's block and Achilles' trencher and a catamite or a book he is perusing for purchase. To regain his own authority, Achilles reads Hector as Ulysses did him: “O, like a book of sport thou'lt read me o'er” (line 238) Hector observes. Achilles reinscribes his heroic virtue by interpreting Hector's body as a vulnerable text testifying to Achilles' definitive act, the slaying of Troy's greatest hero. His heroic reinscription of himself fully endorses the logic Ulysses used to entrap him earlier: Hector becomes the commodity affirming Achilles' worth to all who doubt it. Ulysses has taught him to understand, as Luce Irigaray puts it, that “in order to have a relative value, a commodity has to be confronted with another commodity that serves as its equivalent.” The value of a commodity is “never found to lie within itself. And the fact that it is worth more or less is not its own doing, but comes from that to which it may be equivalent. Its value is transcendent to itself” (p. 176). The value of Achilles, mirrored in the doomed Hector, transcends the butcher who appears onstage.

Ulysses forces Achilles to look into himself, where he finds his “mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr'd, / And I myself see not the bottom of it” (3.3.306-7). He compares his troubled mind to a stirred fountain because he does not know his origin or source, standard meanings for fons or fountain. He cannot see through the depths of his literary accretions to his origin because it is impossible for him to know what author or even what genre is at the bottom of his identity. The case history of Achilles, like the plight of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, is a textual contamination that ties Shakespeare's play transgressively to the translation of empire. The raped and mutilated Lavinia is transformed into a visual palimpsest of the textual struggles that reflect the loss of cultural integrity in an empire mythically founded on rape. Achilles similarly appears as a palimpsest of the differing versions of him in literary history, when the three accounts of his motivations for withdrawal from the war are issued in rapid succession, rather like critical glosses. These textual operations momentarily render him characterologically unsound, and permanently affect his status as heroic exemplar. Like Lavinia and like Cressida, whose plight is the subject of the next section, Achilles is transformed into an emblem of larger problems of representation in the play and the tradition.

THE TROPE-PLIGHTING OF TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

When Troilus hears that Cressida is to be handed over to the Greeks, he exclaims, “How my achievements mock me!” and inadvertently confesses the extent to which he considers her to be a quite unromantic extension of himself. She is a sign of his labor and value, and Troilus is stunned to find that she has become part of larger negotiations that pre-empt his interests.³⁷ At the very center of the play, Troilus and Cressida act out what I call their “trope-plighting” scene: they swear to become the tropes for faithful and faithless lovers that are their literary destinies. Troilus wishes to become “truth's authentic author to be cited,” declaring, “‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse / And sanctify the numbers” (3.2.180-1). He achieves the illusion of self-authorization through Cressida, whose defection guarantees his own transcendence. Troilus is liberated from his indeterminate identity, however, only when Cressida enters the Greek camp to assume her tropical role. He is then able to read his superfluity and ambivalence in her and define himself as simple truth. The “speculations” that prevail in the Greek camp also dominate the romance plot, with the difference that Helen comes “between men” and Cressida mediates Troilus' relations with himself.

Troilus invents coherent interiority for himself by reading Cressida as a page on which he writes his lyric devotions.³⁸ The play reserves for Cressida enigmatic and compelling representations of selfhood and, simultaneously, strenuous insistence on scripted identity. She emerges as lively and self-possessed in her first appearance, when she bests Pandarus in skirmishes of wit, yet concludes that scene by instructing herself in her contingent worth:

                                                  Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she belov'd knows naught that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungain'd more than 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.”

(1.2.291-8)

Left to soliloquize, Cressida anticipates and personalizes Troilus' question about value: the illusion of an unknown and unachievable interior is functional, she claims, for it defers her inevitable exhaustion by another's desire.

Cressida realizes that she belongs to herself tenuously, at best. In a moment of tantalizing disclosure, she tells Troilus,

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

(3.2.146-8)

Her ambiguous words speak to her liminal state between past and present tenses, a closed and open book. On the one hand, her oracular words predict that she will abandon the self stamped by Troilus in favor of one marked by Diomed: they anticipate her conflation with Helen of Troy, the “contaminated carrion-weight” whose impure body bears the signatures of two men and two nations. Simultaneously—taking the second line as apposite to the first—she says that she must abandon herself and become generically “unkind” to herself in order to become Troilus' lover: she must exchange her interests for his. She fulfills this role in an unexpected fashion when she learns that she is to be traded for Antenor. Exhibiting desperate selflessness, she cries out:

                                                  I have forgot my father;
I know no touch of consanguinity,
No kin, no love, no blood, no soul so near me
As the sweet Troilus. O you gods divine,
Make Cressid's name the very crown of falsehood,
If ever she leave Troilus! 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,
Drawing all things to it.

(4.2.99-108)

In this petition, which recalls the one that prefaces her trope-plighting, Cressida enters fully into her role and appears determined to see Troilus' desires through to their completion. An uncannily perfect Elizabethan wife, she bases her internal coherence on Troilus and seeks to reproduce his will: her willingness to donate her name as a sign of falsehood testifies to the magnetic draw of her love and identity as Troilus' and the tradition's kind of self.³⁹ Cressida continues to pose problems of agency, because she seeks to copy Troilus' will and because the closer she comes to her tropical role, the more she displays an agency that “is, and is not” hers. The sense that she has deepened characterologically comes partly from a shift in her rhetoric: she has a phenomenological intuition, rather than an oracular knowledge, of her literary destiny.

Paradoxically, Cressida fulfills her vow of selfless devotion to Troilus when she enters the Greek camp and is “kiss'd in general” (4.5.21) by a receiving line of commanders. Cressida is silent while Agamemnon sets precedent for Nestor, Achilles, and Patroclus to step up, boast or insult his predecessor, take his kiss, and name himself. Their competition is so overt that Patroclus—by claiming to be Paris and interrupting Menelaus' kiss—jokingly suggests that the commanders are replaying the Trojan war with Cressida/Helen as the “theme of all our scorns” (line 30). When Cressida finally speaks, it is with a cool and pert familiarity that draws Ulysses' withering condemnation:

                                                                                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,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader. Set them down
As sluttish spoils of opportunity
And daughters of the game.

(4.5.54-63)

Ulysses' censure comes, appropriately, at the moment Cressida is consigned to tradition as its most frequently handled figure for wantonness. The role of a censor—he wants to snap shut the pornographic book's covers—may help Ulysses get the better of the discomfort she causes him. Her nonchalant management of the merry Greeks prompts him to describe her as a solicitous blazon⁴⁰ in which her wanton agenda appears in every term of her body—eye, cheek, lip, and unpetrarchan foot. Ulysses successfully depicts Cressida as an emblem of feminine incontinence, largely by presenting her as a gaudy poem that Puttenham might compare to the extravagant fashion statements made by upstart courtiers, or as a deliberate violation of the poetic decorum in which “the skinne, and coat” of language, as Jonson writes, ideally “rests in the well-joyning, cementing, and coagmentation of words; when as it is smooth, gentle, and sweet, like a Table, upon which you may runne your finger without rubs, and your nayle cannot find a joynt.”⁴¹ He less convincingly asserts Cressida's full responsibility, since it takes a “ticklish reader” to find so much solicitation in so many joints and rubs. The “motive” of her body—an exclusively Shakespearean usage of the word—expresses the complicated state of agency and instrumentality that distinguishes Cressida: are those “motives” inward promptings and impulses? Or overinterpreted joints?⁴²

Cressida's textual conversion is characterologically impoverishing in a way that Achilles' textual breakdown is not. John Bayley notes that “Cressida does strike us as a real person, in spite of her role as a commonplace in the play's externalized and intellectual scheme” and “when Ulysses calls her a daughter of the game we may feel obscurely that he is wrong, and, if we feel so, it is at this moment that she gives some sort of impression of personality” (p. 205). Bayley's account rings true, despite the facts that Cressida has never been less comprehensible or coherent and that Ulysses' bitter summary of Cressida is unnervingly accurate: only moments ago, Cressida was a different woman. Troilus and Cressida displays the shocking lengths to which it will go to deliver its characters into the hands of a tradition whose final moves are to eradicate what Joel Fineman calls “subjectivity effects” and replace a characterological function with a rhetorical one.⁴³ When Cressida's character vanishes, a retrospective sense of her subjective possibilities emerges and is felt as loss.

Troilus himself paves the way for Cressida's conversion in the trope-plighting scene, in which he appears more eager for his own tropical resolution than for sexual consummation. Evidently yearning to be free of Troilus and Cressida's epistemologically mired world, he indirectly requests that Cressida relieve him of his burden of doubt:

O that I thought it could be in a woman—
As, if it can, I will presume in you …
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.

(3.2.156-7, 162-8)

Troilus is almost swept up, ungrammatically, in his hopes for release from his skepticism. This is the speech of a fallen idealist whose fears about his lover's reciprocation are overwhelmed by a greater anxiety over his incapacity for the faith that should “convince” and “uplift” him. Logically, when Troilus exclaims, “but alas,” his dejected admission should be, “but I cannot believe.” What he does instead is fall back on the very axiom that he is testing—his traditional simplicity—and redefine “truth's simplicity” as the failure to achieve the complex state of mind required for unverifiable faith in one's lover.

In the plighting of oaths, Troilus predicts his future as a trope for the amorous simplicity and integrity that he described as a consummation devoutly to be wished. In their “trope-plighting,” Troilus and Cressida construct their future identities in the negative image of the other. Troilus swears that

True swains in love shall, in the world to come,
Approve their truth by Troilus; when their rhymes,
Full of protest, of oath, and big compare,
Wants similes, truth tir'd with iteration
(As true as steel, as plantage to the moon,
As sun to day, as turtle to her mate,
As iron to adamant, as earth to th' centre)
Yet, after all comparisons of truth,
As truth's authentic author to be cited
“As true as Troilus” shall crown up the verse
And sanctify the numbers.

(3.2.171-81)

Troilus' speculations are fantasies of an integrated self which he jubilantly greets as his “ideal ego.” He formally exchanges the weakness of infancy—his first complaint of the play—for the infancy of truth, the trope for original devotion. Anticipating his future value, Troilus constitutes himself as a source and author of truth and—by virtue of his status as a citation—a creature presumed to be an “authentic” self.⁴⁴

Cressida assumes the negativity of the doubts Troilus casts off when he resolves to be the essence to which all positive lyrical comparisons will refer:

If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When water-drops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallow'd cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing—yet let memory,
From false to false, among false maids in love,
Upbraid my falseness! When they've said “As false
As air, as water, wind, or sandy earth,
As fox to lamb, or wolf to heifer's calf,
Pard to the hind, or step-dame to her son”—
Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood,
“As false as Cressid.”

(lines 182-94)

Cressida's oath, conditional and subjunctive, differs from Troilus' predictive precedent. She utters an indirect command, a proleptic performative which fulfills Troilus' fantasy of fixed identity, if only as figures of speech.

To become “true as truth's simplicity,” Troilus must await Cressida's entrance into the Greek camp. He implores Pandarus to be his “Charon / And give me swift transportance to those fields / Where I may wallow in the lily-beds / Propos'd for the deserver!” (3.2.9-12). Sexual achievement furnishes Troilus' first anxious steps towards his literary future but does not itself secure for him the integrity and simplicity that he seeks in passing over the river Styx. In the aubade scene, he is so desirous to be gone that his very tenderness menaces: “To bed, to bed. Sleep kill those pretty eyes / And give as soft attachment to thy senses / As infants empty of all thoughts” (4.2.4-6). Cressida laments his readiness to abandon her: “O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off, / And then you would have tarried” (lines 17-18). Lost to the amnesia of literature, this scene cannot enter the annals, where Troilus is to stand for truth. According to the play's mechanics of troping, however, he may assume exemplary fidelity only when Cressida enters the Greek camp.⁴⁵

In the camp and in her father's tent during her meeting with Diomed, the divisions we have witnessed in Troilus are formally inscribed on Cressida:

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

(5.2.106-11)

Her lines, which as Carol Cook aptly notes, sound “like an effect of ventriloquism” (p. 51), are so conclusive of her fault that one forgets, as the tradition will, that Troilus had stopped wanting to “tarry” once he had achieved the grinding, the bolting, and the leavening of the cake. The couplet form highlights the scriptedness of Cressida's last words, an effect further enhanced by the metaphor of printing that the men watching and reading her employ. Thersites comments that “A proof of strength she could not publish more, / Unless she said ‘My mind is now turn'd whore’” (lines 112-13). Troilus himself lingers to “make a recordation to my soul / Of every syllable that here was spoke. / But if I tell how these two did co-act / Shall I not lie in publishing a truth?” (lines 115-18).

Troilus gives full voice to the “madness of discourse,” as he names it in his notoriously opaque soliloquy:⁴⁶

                    This is, and is not, Cressid.
Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth;
And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne's broken woof to enter.
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'er-eaten faith, are given to Diomed.

(5.2.145-59)

He maintains, if barely, his integrity by referring his internal chaos to spiraling epistemological doubts which he inscribes onto Cressida. He is later able to distill his characterological upheaval into a more concise linguistic theory: Cressida, who sends “Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart” (5.3.108), signifies the fickleness of language. We never learn the contents of Cressida's letter. Troilus' condemnation rings with an authority that pre-empts any possibility that Cressida might pursue a narrative and characterological reversal. Such defiance of tradition would introduce intolerable and undermining complications. Cressida is necessarily a sign of fragmentation in the tradition and in Troilus. In Troilus and Cressida, no authority, origin, or integrity is allotted to the Troy legend or its eponymous hero, and Troilus' trauma serves as an extreme representation of the internal division of the tradition and the cultural legacy inherited by Elizabethan England.

THE MYSTERY IN THE SOUL OF STATE: DRAMA, POLITICS, AND TREASON

Ulysses spots a mutiny in the closet theater going on in Achilles' tent, and asserts that Patroclus' unlicensed theatrical imitations for his patron “take degree away,” leaving hapless members of the commonwealth wondering “what plagues and what portents, what mutiny … Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors, / Divert and crack, rend and deracinate / The unity and married calm of states / Quite from their fixture” (1.3.96-101). What cultural conditions prompt Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, to multiply the damage caused by imitation and, taking representational disturbance much further than Patroclus, contaminate the Troy legend?

Explanations may begin with the appearance of Chapman's Homer and the fall of the Earl of Essex. For all the novelty of restoring a neoplatonized Homer to his privileged seat at the head of the Trojan banquet, Chapman anachronistically refeudalizes the power structures and the classical idioms that had come to proliferate in the London market of the late Elizabethan period.⁴⁷Troilus and Cressida, in contrast, reflects a developing capitalist society which promoted social mobility and generated strong tensions among rivals for economic and cultural capital. Unlike Chapman's Homer, Shakespeare's play cheapens the coin of the realm by delivering it over to London merchants: the play is appropriate to a city in which a chapman could have a Homer of his own. When Meres sought for native equivalents for classical talents in Palladis Tamia, and Jonson announced his personal identification with Horace, they suggested that poetic authority was necessary to the establishment of England as a nation with an imperial destiny: poets are bearers of political authority rather than mere conduits for its passage to the crown and court. When Jonson dons his guise as Horace in Poetaster, his upgrading of the playwright's status is analogous to Poetaster's politically transgressive Ovid, who usurps Augustus' identification as Jupiter at his profane dinner of the gods.⁴⁸

The second occasion for Shakespeare's revaluation of the Troy legend is the rebellion and fall of the Earl of Essex, “an overmighty subject, a noble resistant to royalty and centralization, on the one hand, and to market evaluation, on the other,” in Engle's words for Chapman's Achilles (p. 155). In Achilles' private theater Shakespeare places dramatic versions of the questions of feudal rights that Essex imprudently asked Egerton:

Dothe religion enforce me to serve? doth god require it? is it impietie not to doe it? why? cannot princes Erre? and can not subiectes receyve wronge? is an earthlie power an authoritie infinite? Pardon me, pardon me, my lorde, I can never subscribe to these Principles.⁴⁹

Whereas Essex was condemned “to be drawn on a hurdle through London streets and so to the place of execution … [to] be hanged, bowelled, and quartered,”⁵⁰ Achilles strikes the set of his closet theater when he discovers the power of the state over its subjects' basic prerogatives. At the height of Achilles' identity crisis, Ulysses invokes the “providence that's in a watchful state”:

There is a mystery, with whom relation
Durst never meddle, in the soul of state,
Which hath an operation more divine
Than breath or pen can give expressure to.
All the commerce that you have had with Troy
As perfectly is ours as yours, my lord …

(3.3.200-5)

Ulysses introduces a politically topical form of the speculations and eye metaphors involved in the constitution of social subjects: spying. The state gains a divine soul—its arcana imperii—when it uses intelligence agencies to search into, appropriate, and reform its citizens.

Shakespeare and Ulysses are punning, although to different effect, on the meanings of “mystery” as “profession” and something shielded from public view—what Hamlet calls the “heart of my mystery.” Achilles' theater is impotent in the face of the “providential” knowledge that makes his commerce with Troy as “perfectly” known to the government as to himself; defeated, Achilles abandons his subversive theater and plays his part in the Trojan war. Shakespeare, however, does not capitulate to the specter of power in quite the obliging manner of his glorified thug. Instead, he comments on the censors, state officials, and delators who adopt theatrical tactics—disguise, plots, and entrapping dialogue—to keep citizens from overmighty lords to recusants, printers, players, or rogues and vagabonds from “meddling” with state practices. Taking Ulysses' lines as a point of departure, it is possible to see how Troilus and Cressida engages the aftermatch of the Essex rebellion, suffered by the citizens of London as well as Essex himself.

Throughout Elizabeth's reign, direct assaults against state power with “breath” and “pen” tended to end in the speaker's and author's imprisonment, interrogation by the Star Chamber, and punishment. Speech and writing fell under Elizabethan treason laws, which included “compasses, imaginations, inventions, devices, or intentions” and sought out persons who “maliciously, advisedly, and directly publish, declare, hold opinion, affirm, or say by any speech express words or sayings” (p. 414) prejudicial to Elizabeth's sovereign authority.⁵¹ On the issue of succession, Elizabethan treason laws extended to those who “set up in open place, publish, or spread any books or scrolls to that effect,” or who attempted to “print, bind, or put to sale, or utter, or cause to be printed, bound, or put to sale, or uttered, any such book or writing wittingly” (p. 416). Rigorous and comprehensive, Elizabethan treason laws reversed the greater liberality of Edward VI and Mary Tudor, both of whom had begun their reigns by repealing Henry VIII's expansion of treason from deeds to speech and writing. At no time does Elizabeth's government express Mary Tudor's concern (for Catholic martyrs) that certain laws and statutes are made

whereby not only the ignorant and rude, unlearned people, but also learned and expert people minding honesty, are often and many times trapped and snared, yea, many times for words only, without other fact or deed done or perpetrated

(p. 406)

or Edward VI's government's attempt to lighten treason laws:

as in tempest or winter one course and garment is convenient, in calm or warm weather a more liberal race or lighter garment both may and ought to be followed and used, so we have seen divers strait and sore laws made in one Parliament, the time so requiring, in a more calm and quiet reign of another Prince by like authority and Parliament repealed.

(p. 401)

The political crises that led both Mary and Edward to rescind their clement policies⁵² and the constant pressure of plots against the Protestant Queen taught Elizabeth I's government to word its treason laws severely.⁵³ Her government at all times found criminality in speech and writing as well as deeds. In a famous example, John Stubbs paid for his exposure of the “Gaping Gulf” threatening England with the hand that wrote his treatise. Yet what is striking about the range of treasonous activities under Elizabeth I is the inclusion of thoughts and unarticulated motives. With the rise of the secret service, the mystery that lent divinity to the “soul of state,” the government fully undermined Sir Thomas More's claim that “God only … [is] the judge of our secret thoughts.”⁵⁴ Many Londoners of the late Elizabethan reign may have agreed with Cressida that it was increasingly difficult not to be “unsecret to ourselves.”

While Essex engaged in overt treason, Ulysses' surveillance and exposure of Achilles bear on those whose thoughts were not yet “perfectly” known to the state. The Essex rebellion led to a zealous searching out of further accomplices and sympathizers among London's inhabitants. In February 1601, Elizabeth I announced the arrest of Essex along with Rutland and Southampton in a proclamation that concluded with exhortations and warnings, admonishing her “good people” that the “open act” of rebellion⁵⁵

cannot yet be thoroughly looked into how far it stretched and how many hearts it hath corrupted, but that it is to be presumed … that it was not without instruments and ministers dispersed in divers places to provoke the minds of our people to like of their attempts, with calumniating our government … that they shall do well (and so we charge them) to give diligent heed in all places to the conversation of persons not well known for their good behavior, and to the speeches of any that shall give out slanderous and undutiful words or rumors against us and our government; and they that be in authority to lay hold on such spreaders of rumors; and such as be not in authority to advertise those thereof that have authority to the end that by the apprehension of such dangerous instruments, both the drift and purpose of evil-minded persons may be discovered, their designs prevented …

Within a week, her government placed London vagabonds (once again) under Martial Law on the grounds that they, unlike “the loyal and true hearts and settled and unmoveable affections as well as the rest of our subjects as specially of our citizens of London,” were more likely “to lie privily in corners and bad houses, listening after news and stirs, and spreading rumors and tales.” On April 5, she issued a further proclamation

to signify to all manner of person and persons that whosoever shall in any sort either openly or secretly discover and make known to any of the lords or other of our Privy Council, or to the Lord Mayor of our said city, the name of any of the authors, writers, or dispersers of any of the said libels, whereby the offenders therin may be known and taken, shall presently have and receive for their pains therein the sum of £100 of current money paid and delivered unto him by the Lord Mayor …

One thinks of the unscrupulous courtier in John Donne's fourth satire, bent on exhibiting the court's dirty laundry: he recounts “More then ten Hollensheads, or Halls, or Stowes, / Of triviall houshold trash” until, Donne's speaker claims, “I … felt my selfe then / Becomming Traytor, and mee thought I saw / One of our Giant Statutes ope his jaw / To sucke me in” (lines 97-8, 130-3). Howard Erskine-Hill notes that an early manuscript mentions the treason-happy agent, Richard Topcliffe.⁵⁶ After Essex's rebellion cast London under a pall of suspicious and surveillance, Elizabethans grew eager for the next regime to restore the golden age lost in the queen's final years. Pressures from “foreign Enemies, Domestical Discontents” ultimately led Edward Phelips, the new Speaker of the House of Commons who addressed the newly crowned James I, implicitly to criticize Elizabeth I's cultivation of favorites who advanced by denouncing their rivals: “Virtue is now no Treason, nor no man wisheth the Reign of Augustus, nor speaketh of the first Times of Tiberius.”⁵⁷

Despite his brush with the Star Chamber over the Essex rebels' sponsorship of a new performance of the old play, Richard II, Shakespeare continued to test the political issues raised by the rebellion: the liberties of the subject and the sometime greater freedom of speech, writing, and private thought from relation, or delation, to the authorities. Shakespeare was fortunate to work unscathed by censorship and interrogation, unlike his colleague, Ben Jonson, imprisoned for his part in The Isle of Dogs and interrogated by Topcliffe. Jonson recalled the episode in conversation with Drummond:

jn the tyme of his close Imprisonment under Queen Elizabeth his judges could gett nothing of him to all yr demands bot I and No, they placed two damn'd Villans to catch advantage of him, wt him, but he was advertised by his Keeper.

For his revenge, “of the Spies he hath ane Epigramme.”⁵⁸ He suffered interrogation again over Sejanus his Fall, for despite Jonson's efforts copiously to annotate and document his sources, ancient histories had become almost as suspect as modern ones.⁵⁹ Because Shakespeare had the forethought to produce Ulysses' toe-lining speech on degree, bedrock of the Elizabethan World Picture, or perhaps simply because Troilus and Cressida was never “clapper-clawed,” Shakespeare himself did not face the interrogations endured by his fellow playwright or his character Achilles.

Yet his theater, where he filters his sociopolitical critiques through the literature supporting political iconography, warrants close scrutiny. By the end of Troilus and Cressida, the late Elizabethan audience should mortally fear that England has indeed inherited its national identity from the Troy legend. The diseased and leering Pandarus, with his “Winchester goose” of a syphilis sore, is altogether too close: at the play's end he stands in what Nashe called “this great Grandmother of Corporations, Madame Troynovant,”⁶⁰ and specifically in the Southwark brothels, situated on land that fell under the Bishop of Winchester's jurisdiction. The Troy legend made abundant surrogate authorities available for exploitation and analysis: Ulysses himself demonstrates the use of authoritative texts to bolster and mystify the sources and coercive effects of authority. Through surrogate authorities, it is possible to bring into view the institutional mechanisms cloaked by classical reference. Shakespeare investigates, with surprising vigor, the degree to which identity and thought are impinged on by politically authoritative codes ranging from statutes to hortatory norms. All citizens, like Achilles, may consider what it means for their identities to be as fragmentary and conflicted as the cultural codes that inform their social possibilities.

Shakespeare's political readers within his plays suggest that class does not determine the ability to decode the political content of classical signs. Shakespeare dishes up the events and exemplars of the Troy legend as “greasy orts” not “caviar to the general.” His uses for the Vergilian-Marlovian line of classicizing dramaturgy do not require an elitist reader like Prince Hamlet: Ulysses and Thersites outperform Nestor, Agamemnon, and Ajax as interpreters and Tamora and Aaron are skilled in reading political significance in imperial Roman icons, texts, or performances, while Tamora's sons are failures. Titus Andronicus' unfortunate Clown is an unmistakable sign of the consequence of small Latin and worse political cryptography: hanging for treason.

Classical figures and events, moreover, were available to anyone hungry for a ballad or broadside: genre stamped the seal of class distinction on the social coordinates of Ajax, Cressida, Aeneas, or Dido (“A Jakes,” “Cresset-light,” “Any-ass” and “Die-doe” to the irreverent).⁶¹ The sliding scale of class to which Trojans and Romans were susceptible does not mean that late Elizabethan purchasers of a broadside were unaware that upscale models were available in other venues of London. On the contrary, critics need to imagine the circumstances in which a classical allusion would inflame rather than glaze the eye: classics appealed to all because social and political values were at stake, as Chapman knew when he dedicated his Iliades to Essex and as Topcliffe knew when he questioned Jonson over Sejanus. Censors and secret service agents suspected the subversive power of staging events from the classical past, yet the very range of their available meanings rendered the figures and events of the translatio imperii a resilient mirror that Shakespeare might hold up to socially eclectic audiences. Should the need arise, the players might adapt their text or performance to suit the court, the Inns-of-Court, or audiences of the Globe. Yet in any venue, Shakespeare invites his audiences to be Hamlets, and to study, mull over, appropriate, and act on his play.

Notes

1. Orlando furioso, ed. Eduardo Sanguineti (Aldo Garzanti Editore, 1974).

2. My summary of the Troy legend's ideological significance to Tudor and Reformation factions draws on the seminal account of Kendrick, British Antiquity, as well as the studies of Levy, Tudor Historical Thought and Ferguson, Clio Unbound.

3. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, pp. 53-68.

4. Quoted in Kendrick, British Antiquity, p. 87.

5. Marie Tanner points out that Philip the Good of Burgundy commissioned Lefèvre's Trojan epic and that Lemaire's Trojan history culminated with Charles V. Her chapters on “The Revival of Epic Narrative” and “Mythic Genealogy,” The Last Descendant of Aeneas, pp. 52-118, detail the efforts to substantiate Habsburg claims to imperial succession from Troy.

6. Samuel Rowlands, The Letting of Humors Blood in the Head-Vaine, Complete Works (Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1880). Hyder E. Rollins, “The Troilus-Cressida Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare,” PMLA 32 (1917), 383-429, established the reduction in Elizabethan verse of Troilus and Cressida to stereotypes.

7. J. S. P. Tatlock, “The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature,” PMLA 30 (1915), 673-770, extensively reviews the Troy legend's popularity in the renaissance. Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1992), stresses Elizabethan dramatic contexts. For studies of Shakespeare's use of Chaucer, see Muriel Bradbrook, “What Shakespeare Did to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,” Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1958), 311-19; E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Ann Thompson, Shakespeare's Chaucer: a Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool University Press, 1978).

8. Robert Kimbrough, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Its Setting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 73.

9. In Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), Linda Charnes claims that Troilus and Cressida is “arguably the most ‘neurotic’ of the plays in terms of its skewed relations among and between characters, the play's generic inconsistencies, its resistance to a ‘rehearsible’ narrative, and its own self-proclaimed ‘diseased’ matter,” p. 71.

10. See, for example, Oscar Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1959).

11. Nevill Coghill, Shakespeare's Professional Skills (Cambridge University Press, 1964). See also Gary Taylor, “Troilus and Cressida: Bibliography, Performance, and Interpretation,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982), 99-136.

12. Joel Altman, “The Practice of Shakespeare's Text,” Style 23 (1989), 466-500.

13. For the concept of a woman being “elsewhere,” see Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 29.

14. Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton University Press, 1974), analyzes the play's abuse of petrarchan lyric; Bradbrook, “What Shakespeare Did,” and Donaldson, The Swan at the Well, focus on the subversion of Chaucer; Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare's Skepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), incisively discusses the prologue.

15. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art, p. 332.

16. Homer's seductive Helen discloses an intrigue to her relationship with Hector:

    I wish I had been the wife of a better man than this is, / one who knew modesty and all things of shame that men say / … But come now, come in and rest on this chair, my brother, / since it is on your heart beyond all that the hard work has fallen / for the sake of dishonoured me and the blind act of Alexandros.

    (6.350-1, 354-6)

    The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1961).

17. See Roman Jakobson, “The Dominant,” Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987). The satiric genre so dominates this scene that critics behave as if Pandarus' obscene ditty ends it. Mihoko Suzuki, a deft reader of literature's transformations of Helen, cuts off nine lines before the transition to verse and summarizes the scene by noting that “Helen as ‘Nell’ has been entirely stripped of her epic stature and appears callous and selfish, so unlike her former incarnation in the Iliad,” Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 226. Although she does not consider the passage's oil-and-water relationship to the rest of the scene, Laura Levine aptly characterizes it as “the perfect emblem for beauty's dangerous disorganizing power” in Men In Women's Clothing, p. 38.

18. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 83.

19. See Cook's important essay, “Unbodied Figures of Desire,” Theater Journal 38 (1986), 34-52, p. 50 and Knights' “The Theme of Appearance and Reality in Troilus and Cressida,” Some Shakespearean Themes (Stanford University Press, 1960, 1959), p. 69. See also Elizabeth Freund's deconstructive reading, “‘Ariachne's broken woof’: the Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 19-36.

20. Readers no longer assume that the play is tragic and that we are supposed to identify with Troilus as a hero, as do Coghill, Shakespeare's Professional Skills, and J. C. Maxwell, “Shakespeare: the Middle Plays,” The Age of Shakespeare, ed. Boris Ford (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963, 1955). By refusing to preserve the Troilus who dies heartrendingly, Shakespeare reverses his stunning choice to alter another source and kill King Lear.

21. For the troping of the lovers, see Norman Rabkin, “Troilus and Cressida: the Uses of the Double Plot,” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1969), 265-82, p. 265; and Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art, p. 323.

22. Margaret Ferguson discusses the tu quoque form of renaissance poetic defenses in Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983).

23. Benjamin distinguishes between the stage actor, who retains his aura, and the film actor, who is estranged from his image: “aura is tied to … presence” and “there can be no replica of it,” Illuminations, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1968), p. 229. Benjamin concludes that when the camera replaces the public audience, “the aura that envelops the actor [playing Macbeth] vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays” (p. 229). The problem of transmitting aura and presence is no stranger to Shakespeare's stage. The chorus in Henry V craves real kings, countries, and wars to animate history. Moreover, Shakespeare's legendary characters take no comfort in imagining their greatness boyed: Cleopatra and the Greek commanders view dramatic imitations as attacks on their authority. They are aware that their power to “be themselves”—a phrase recurrent in Shakespeare's public figures—depends on their unreplicated presence.

24. For the scene's importance to criticism, see Bradshaw, Shakespeare's Scepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 132-44.

25. In his careless chivalry, Hector is reminiscent of Sidney and Essex, who issued a similar challenge to single combat at Lisbon in 1589 and whose heroics during his 1591 expedition in France earned the Queen's sharp reproof. See Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 79-81, and G. B. Harrison, The Elizabethan Journals, 1591-1603 (London: Routledge, 1938), pp. 50-3.

26. The phrase is from Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who also refers to Chaucer as “the fader and founder of ornate eloquence,” and quoted in Doran, Endeavors of Art, p. 35.

27. John Bayley, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), p. 191.

28. Discussing the erotics of spectatorship, Barbara E. Bowen notes Ulysses' pleasure in reproducing the theatrical camp of Patroclus: Gender in the Theater of War: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), pp. 129-33. While I do not find that Ulysses' “parody is liberating” (p. 132) for him, Bowen's remarks remind me of ways in which the characters perversely enjoy reducing companions to tropes even more than rivals.

29. Gayle Greene studies this problem in terms of comparison and tautology: “words suggest other words … [and] the subject slips away in a series of comparisons” (pp. 278, 282-3), “Language and Value in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in English Literature 21 (1981), 270-85. See Charnes' excellent account of the effects of comparison on the play's female characters, Notorious Identity, pp. 81-2.

30. I quote from Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 6, p. 158.

31. Cressida teasingly says that she knows a man if she has seen him before and known him; Thersites contends that Ajax should not be recognizable to others because he does not know himself; Thersites claims to be Patroclus' “knower”; and Aeneas maliciously pretends to Agamemnon himself that he does not know which of the Greeks is the general.

32. Achilles' Homeric struggle with Agamemnon recalls the Earl of Essex's resistance to his subjection under Elizabeth on the grounds of aristocratic ideology. As McCoy puts it, the Earl was deeply entangled in “the latent conflict between inherent distinction and that bestowed by the monarch—‘native’ and ‘dative’ honor,” The Rites of Knighthood, p. 89. For an influential discussion of the Essex revolt, see Mervyn James, Society, Politics, and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 9.

33. Achilles' classical and medieval incarnations are the subject of Katherine Callan King, Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer through the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). For Aeneas' evaluation, see Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Vergil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989).

34. Shakespeare adapts Marlowe's lines describing Helen of Troy in Doctor Faustus to emphasize her economic function. Thoroughly entrenched as the Trojan war's “general equivalent,” she is faceless in an unmarlovian way: although the lines Troilus speaks are routinely attributed to Helen, they apply equally to Hesione, who is the referent closest to Troilus' “pearl.” The context is as follows: “The Grecians keep our aunt. / Is she worth keeping?—Why, she is a pearl / Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships” (2.2.81-3). In Troilus and Cressida, the decrepit Hesione is as much a pearl as Helen, “whose youth and freshness / Wrinkles Apollo's, and makes stale the morning” (2.2.79-80).

35. In Horatian satire, Helen is the taeterrima causa belli, a reduction to a single anatomical part (the cunus) and to her function in a sexually and economically motivated war.

36. See Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market”; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the’Political Economy’ of Sex,” Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157-210. Carol Cook, Eric Mallin, and Linda Charnes treat the play's homoerotic concerns. Cook observes that the warriors “could all live and die in the eyes of one another. The exchange of recognition and admiration among men narcissistically reinforces their idealized images of themselves as heroes and soldiers ‘worthy of all arms’” (“Unbodied Figures of Desire,” pp. 43-4). Following Montrose's argument, in “‘Shaping Fantasies’,” about the convergence of sexuality and politics in the Elizabethan court in order “to show the increasing ineffectiveness of the sexual and political mechanisms by which the Elizabethan court maintained its dangerous balance” (p. 175), Mallin applies some gains of feminist and psychoanalytic criticism to a new historicist reading in “Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida,” Representations 29 (1990), 145-79.

37. With delightful acerbity, Raymond Southall, “Troilus and Cressida and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Shakespeare in a Changing World, ed. Arnold Kettle (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 217-32, insists that critics stop romanticizing the quality of Troilus' love: “It is extraordinarily difficult” to find “any intensity in the love of Troilus, or rather any love in the intensity of Troilus,” p. 216. Southall's focus on the bankruptcy of petrarchan language relates to his Marxist reading of economics and capitalism in the play.

38. Leading defenders of Cressida are Gayle Greene, “Shakespeare's Cressida: A Kind of Self,” The Woman's Part; Carolyn Asp, “In Defense of Cressida,” Studies in Philology 74 (1977), 406-17; Grant L. Voth and Oliver H. Evans, “Cressida and the World of the Play,” Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975), 231-9; and Janet Adelman, “‘This is and Is Not Cressid’: The Characterization of Cressida,” The (M)other Tongue, ed. S. N. Garner, C. Kahane, and M. Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 119-41. By psychologizing her motivations, the critics attempt to combat Cressida's literary fate. Their sympathy with Cressida confirms the sense that Shakespeare is concerned with the costs to the subject of representational tactics meant to transmit authority to a privileged reader. Douglas Bruster, however, attractively argues that Cressida gains agency: “realizing that she is seen as a commodity, Cressida decides to take control of her commodity function,” Drama and the Market, p. 98.

39. Janet Adelman analyzes Shakespeare's use of tragedy to meditate problems of uniting separate wills and minds in marriage: “Is thy Union Here?: Union and its Discontents in Troilus and Cressida and Othello,” Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

40. Noting the speech's relation to the petrarchan blazon, Cook relates it to pornography, “Unbodied Figure of Desire,” pp. 49-50. Bruster, Drama and the Market, p. 103, develops the relationship of petrarchism to commerce, with particular reference to the image of the merchant-adventuring ship that Spenser, Donne, and Drayton adapt from Petrarch.

41. Quoted from Herford and Simpson, vol. 11 (1952), p. 271. Jonson further exhorts the poet not to let “the skin and coat” of language become “horrid, rough, wrinkled, gaping, or chapt”—the kind of language Shakespeare represents in Pandarus. Puttenham's comparison of poetic to courtly decorum, particularly in dress, appears in the Arte of Poesie III.xxv.

42. The O.E.D. defines “motive” as a moving limb or organ and specifies that this is an exclusively Shakespearean meaning. The other instance of this usage also meditates a complex state of agency and instrumentality: Bolingbroke swears that he will bite off his tongue as “the slavish motive of recanting fear” if he obeys King Richard's order to withdraw from combat with Mowbray (Richard II 1.1.193). Rather than allow his tongue to be the instrument of Richard's will, Bolingbroke would bite it off as a traitor to his own will.

43. “Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape,” Representations 20 (Fall 1987), 25-76.

44. Troilus' ecstatic greeting of his ideal ego is, as Cook notes, reminiscent of Lacanian ideas of ego-formation, and particularly the role of “speculation.” The great Myrmidon, however, can hardly be said to greet his identity “jubilantly”: when he resumes his heroic identity by taking credit for Hector's death, Achilles goes about his business grimly.

45. To focus on the aubade scene calls for the audience or reader to tug against the play's and Troilus' pull toward closure and coherence. See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers and Rene Girard, “The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, pp. 188-209, for detailed readings of this curiously misplaceable scene.

46. J. Hillis Miller, “Ariachne's Broken Woof,” Georgia Review 31:1 (1977), 47-60, describes Troilus' shifts from illusory unity to doubling and finally fragmentation. Jonathan Dollimore reads the speech's linguistic and philosophical implications in terms of a disintegrating society in Radical Tragedy.

47. For a discussion of early modern London's neofeudal character and emerging capitalist market, see Lawrence Manley, The Literature and Culture of Early Modern London. Also relevant to my concluding section are the studies of Lars Engle, Richard McCoy, and Raymond Southall, and Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: the Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

48. Jonson adapts the scene from Suetonius, where it is Augustus who presides over the bacchanalian dinner. In The Boke Named The Governour (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1907), Sir Thomas Elyot describes the ignominy which spurred Augustus to self-reformation:

    The noble Emperor Augustus, who in all the residue of his life was for his moderation and temperance excellently commended, suffered no little reproach, forasmuch as he in a secret supper or banquet, having with him six noblemen, his friends, and six noble women, and naming himself at that time Apollo, and the other men and women the names of other gods and goddesses, fared sumptuously and delicately, the city of Rome at that time being vexed with scarcity of grain. He therefore was rent with curses and rebukes of the people, insomuch as he was openly called Apollo the tormenter, saying also that he with his gods had devoured their corn. With which liberty of speech, being more persuaded than discontented, from thenceforth he used … frugality or moderation of diet …

    (III.xxii)

49. Quoted from Braunmuller, ed., A Seventeenth Century Letter-Book, pp. 66-7.

50. William Cobbett, T. B. Howell, et al., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 42 vols. (London, 1816-98), vol. 1, pp. 1333-60. Essex was grateful to escape public execution: after his abrupt shift from honor-bound self-righteousness to pious self-condemnation, Elizabeth's government granted his request for a private execution in the Tower.

51. All references are to J. R. Tanner, Tudor Constitutional Documents, 1485-1603 (Cambridge University Press, 1922), “The Law of Treason,” pp. 375-451.

52. The body counts of these early Tudor rebellions were high: D. M. Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies (Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 73, 113-14, notes that sixty to seventy men died in battle during Wyatt's rebellion and as many were executed for treason.

53. Alison Plowden discusses Walsingham's development of his secret service in response to Catholic plots, domestic and international, against the queen's life in The Elizabethan Secret Service (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). In Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986) Lacey Baldwin Smith surveys educational, political, and behavior manuals as well as court politics to establish the culture of suspicion in England, and devotes several chapters to Essex. Drawing on seminal work in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribners, 1971), Carole Levin, “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 91-120, describes less publicized or clearly motivated conspiracies of commoners against the queen.

54. Quoted from Tanner, Tudor Constitutional Documents, 1485-1603, p. 435.

55. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969).

56. I quote Donne from H. J. C. Grierson, Donne's Poetical Works, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). In The Augustan Idea in English Literature, a valuable guide to the literary, political, and religious contexts in which the renaissance understood the Augustan age, Howard Erskine-Hill notes the significance of the early manuscript reading (p. 81). His emphases on the law and politics in the chapter on Donne's satires furnish stimulating groundwork for understanding Troilus and Cressida as a translation of empire.

57. I quote from Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature, p. 130, who takes the allusions to Augustus and Tiberius as reference to a providential pattern of rise and decline. Blair Worden elaborates Erskine-Hill's discussion of the late Tiberian-Elizabethan political scene in “Ben Jonson among the Historians,” Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 67-90. Malcolm Smuts, “Court-Centered Politics and Roman Historians,” published in the same volume, pp. 21-43, stresses that Roman history reminded early seventeenth-century Englishmen of the vulnerability of “ancient constitutional forms,” and notes that the collapse of the Republic and establishment of the empire, an intensively studied period of Roman history under Elizabeth and James, was “a story of constitutional instability and subversion” (p. 41).

58. Herford and Simpson, vol. 11, p. 574. On the institutional censorship of drama, see G. E. Bentley, “Regulation and Censorship,” The Professions of Dramatist and Player in Shakespeare's Time (1971; rpt. Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 145-96, and V. C. Gildersleeve, Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1908; rpt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

59. Anticipating political misconstructions, Samuel Daniel burned his history of Cleopatra and Camden deferred his history of Queen Elizabeth's reign. John Hayward was imprisoned for publishing his Life and Reign of King Henry IV (1599), which “was interpreted as a parallel with recent events, and was alleged to be an apology for the Earl of Essex and an incitement to Elizabeth's subjects to overthrow her, as Henry IV had overthrown Richard II,” Worden, “Ben Jonson among the Historians,” p. 75. Suspicions were well-placed: Hayward dedicated the history to Essex and published it in 1599, just before Essex left for Ireland. Tacitean historiography, practiced by Hayward, Savile, and Bacon, found a home in the Essex circle. See James, Society, Politics, and Culture, ch. 9. The author and printer were brought to the Star Chamber, and the licenser, Samuel Harsnett, wriggled out of responsibility: see Greg, London Publishing Between 1550 and 1650, pp. 61-2.

60. Quoted from Manley, London in the Age of Shakespeare, pp. 277-8.

61. Frank Kermode notes the puns on Dido and Aeneas in Middleton's The Roaring Girl (1607/8) in the Arden edition of The Tempest (London and New York: Methuen, 1958), p. 47n. Rowlands dubs Cressida “Cresset-light” in The Letting of Humors, and Sir John Harington commemorates the scatological joke on a “jakes” in A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596).