SOURCE: Voth, Grant L. and Oliver H. Evans. “Cressida and the World of the Play.” Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 231-39.

[In the following essay, Voth and Evans challenge critics who dismiss Cressida as a calculating prostitute, contending that a close study of her character reveals the difficulty of her decisions and the motivation behind her actions.]

Despite the range and diversity of critical approaches to and estimates of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, one judgment has remained constant: Cressida is a mere prostitute, a cold and calculating woman; she is Falsehood in Love.¹ Even her defenders (and she has had a few) have qualified their admiration of her wit, beauty, and charm by finding her too frail to fulfill Troilus's idealization of her or to answer his love in kind.² Whatever else critics have disagreed about in reading the play, such estimates of Cressida's character have seldom been called into question.

One of the reasons for her dismissal by the critics has been their desire to talk about Troilus. His role and character, unlike Cressida's, have been fully discussed, and responses to him have ranged from unqualified admiration to disdain.³ Such exclusive attention to Troilus, however helpful it has been in illuminating his part in the play, has not been entirely fair to Cressida. Her character is not as static as critics have described it, nor is her behavior as vicious as it has been judged; she does change during the course of the play, and, in context, her decisions are both more difficult and better motivated than has been assumed.

Cressida's movement in the play is from awareness to self-deception and back to awareness again, a counterpoint to Troilus's movement, whether it be from innocence to awareness or from ignorance to animal rage. Cressida begins her career as one totally at home in the world of the play. A realist and a cynic, she knows what men value in women in spite of what they sometimes say they admire. But in the course of her affair with Troilus, she is seduced by him from her initial position and persuaded to believe in his inadequate “ideal” vision. Finally, back in the real world of the Greek generals and Diomedes, she reluctantly returns to her initial and more accurate, if less attractive, understanding of the way things go in the world. There is thus a complexity in Cressida's character and role which has not very often been recognized, and which deserves more attention than it has received.

To understand this complexity, however, it is necessary to understand the nature of the world assumed by Troilus and Cressida. It is, to begin with, a world stripped of metaphysical and temporal dimensions; and it is thus a world in which there is no absolute universal order, as there is in both Shakespearean comedy and tragedy, with which man can harmonize or against which he can struggle. The top of the chain of being is omitted in the play, and its omission, coupled with the absence of temporal dimensions, severely limits the scope and significance of the action.⁴ In this play there is no possibility of a universal order reasserting its claim, and it can end, therefore, only in what Dryden describes as “a confusion of drums and trumpets, excursions and alarms.”⁵

A consequence of this single-dimension reality is the loss of the multiple perspectives which characterize Shakespeare's other plays. In the comedies, for example, love is seen both realistically and idealistically, and we are made to recognize the claims of both.⁶ But in the confined world of Troilus and Cressida, there is only one perspective: the entire world of the play is hopelessly corrupt, and the knight whose sumptuous armor covers a “most putrified core” (V.-viii.1)⁷ is a symbol for that world.⁸

Since there is no higher reality to offer hope of redemption, the juxtaposition of the armor and the putrified core presents us not with the tension of two perspectives but with an ironic contrast between appearance and reality. The contrast is already presented in the Prologue, in which the magnificent walls of Troy, with their “massy staples / And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts” (Prologue, ll. 17-18) are shown to contain nothing more than the truth that “ravish'd Helen, Menalaus' queen, / With wanton Paris sleeps” (Prologue, ll. 9-10); and we discover very quickly that the “brave pavillions” (Prologue, l. 15) of the Greeks hide the reality of Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax, and Thersites. Such contrasts, which run throughout the play, can be seen at their most extreme in Pandarus' “complimental assault” (III.i.43) upon Paris, Helen, and their court:

Fair be to 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!

(III.i.46-49)

Here, in the corruption which lies at the center of the entire play, the excessive language, like the knight's sumptuous armor, only contrasts more markedly with the decay it attempts to hide.

Such irony is available, of course, only to the reader, not to the characters in the play. For them, the eloquent and rhetorical language is an attempt to establish values in their world, to cloak reality in a “fair” cover, to make things more glorious by calling them by different names. Their language, strained and hyperbolic, becomes the sumptuous armor with which the citizens of Troy and of the Greek camp attempt to cover over the putrified core. In spite of their efforts, however, the hollow and botchy core within, like the disconcerting truth that the whole war is being fought over a “placket” (II.iii.21), keeps reasserting itself; like everything else in the play, the language carries within its sumptuous armor a “most putrified core.”

While this is true of most of the language in the play, it is particularly true of Troilus' language, and his idealism should, therefore, be viewed with some suspicion. His verbal projections onto the world of the play, ideal as they may seem, are undermined by the same imagery of disease, mercantilism, and decay present in all the language of the play.⁹ He sees himself, for example, as a courtly lover, but his conceit of the festering wound love has given him undercuts his expression of that sentiment and links his attitude to his corrupt world (I.i.51-64); his deliberately poetic description of Cressida as a pearl, Pandarus as a ship, and himself as the merchant (I.i.103-7) reduces Cressida to an object, whose possession is his aim; and his well-known anticipation speech (III.ii.19-30), with its insistent undercurrent of such sense-words as taste, palate, ruder powers, and love's thrice repured nectar, belies the ideal aspirations which it professes and indicates that the source of Troilus' vision, in spite of his own disclaimers, is the desire to “wallow” in Cressida's “lily beds” (III.ii.13).

Troilus' attempts to project an ideal vision upon the sordid business of the war are likewise unsuccessful, for once again his imagery shows the extent to which his own projections participate in the decaying world he is trying to make “fair without.” In the Trojan council scene, Helen becomes for Troilus the pearl (II.ii.81-82), the silk cloth, and the exotic food (II.ii.69-72) which traders bring back from their voyages; and the Trojan nation becomes a pack of thieves who, having stolen the pearl of great price, have now become too cowardly to keep it (II.ii.94-96). The adaptation of Marlowe's line ironically indicates the baseness of all of Troilus' vision, for it is Helen's “price,” not her “face,” which has launched the thousand ships, and the net result has been that crowned kings have become “merchants” (II.ii.83).

Thus while Troilus spends most of the play projecting on the world his own valuation of it—“What's aught, but as 'tis valued?” (II.ii.53)—his imagery consistently reveals that the core of his vision is as corrupt as the real world of the play. That world is the one in which, as Thersites notes, Menalaus and Paris are simply “cuckold and cuckold maker” (V.viii.9), in which the argument of the war is “a cuckold and a whore” (II.iii.78), and in which “nothing else holds fashion” except “lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery” (V.ii.196-97).¹⁰ No verbal projection of Troilus' own devising can make that world less sordid; in such a world, in fact, the best Troilus' idealism can do is to bring upon himself a catastrophic disillusionment and to lead Hector, indirectly, to his death.

It is in this world, and in contrast to this Troilus, that we must see Cressida. At home in the world of the play, she has no illusions about the “enterprise” (I.ii.309) of love. She knows that once men have achieved their end, they no longer “beseech,” but “command” (I.ii.319); she knows that

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

(I.ii.313-15)

Unattractive and calculating as this may appear to us, given the world of the play, it is a more legitimate approach to love than is Troilus' corrupt idealism.

But there is more to Cressida's calculating posture than a simple desire to delay gratification and thereby to retain control of the situation, for in her wiliness there is also an element of self-defense. During her scene with Pandarus, while he tries to convince her of Troilus' worth, Cressida deliberately misunderstands him, confusing his metaphors for literal truth and his literal truth for metaphors (I.ii.68-191). Unlike Troilus, who wishes to remind himself of his love and to dress it in as fine a language as possible, Cressida uses language to keep herself from remembering how much she loves Troilus and from revealing too much of that love. This becomes clear when Pandarus, in exasperation, makes explicit the defensive tactic she is using by saying, “You are such another woman, one knows not at what ward you lie” (I.ii.282-83). Cressida responds with what, at the outset of the play, has to be her stance in her situation:

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.

(I.ii.285-88)

Her wit is her chief defense, and when it deserts her, she becomes another victim (like Hector) of Troilus' hyperbole and naïveté. In her first confrontation with Troilus, Cressida reveals once more her knowledge of the way things go in the world of the play when she fears that there are “more dregs than water” in the fountain of love (III.ii.72). When Troilus confidently asserts that the only “monstrosity” in love is “that the will is infinite, and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit” (III.ii.87-90), Cressida more accurately replies that “all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform, vowing more than the perfection of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one” (III.ii.91-95).

Ultimately, Cressida yields and confesses to Troilus that she has been “won” all along (III.ii.125). In comedy, in a situation like that of Beatrice and Benedick, such a confession would signal the destruction of barriers that stand in the way of creating a new social and individual identity; in this play, however, Cressida's speech marks a betrayal of herself and of her knowledge of what her world is like: “Where is my wit? / I would be gone. I speak I know not what” (III.ii.157-58).

Throughout the trysting scene, part of the drama lies in the conflict between Troilus' attempt to seduce Cressida to his idealistic vision and Cressida's attempt to act on the basis of what she knows the world to be like. All her attempts to point out the truth to Troilus fail. When she asks him to make her stop talking, Troilus, not understanding, thinks that she is angling for a kiss (III.ii.141-45). When she tries to deflect Troilus' hyperbolic protestations of purity and eternal faithfulness with “In that I'll war with you” (III.ii.179), Troilus again misunderstands. His response is to offer his name as a title for faithful love, and at that point Cressida gives over her position, offering her own name as a type of unfaithfulness (III.ii.191-203). Against what she knows to be the reality of the world of the play, she takes on the sumptuous armor of Troilus' hyperbole and speaks “the thing [she] shall repent” (III.ii.131). Full of false hope and true regret, she tells Troilus, “Prophet may you be” (III.ii.190), closes her eyes to the grim reality of her world, and yields to her lover.

Critics who have insisted that Cressida is nothing more than a wanton have had to do so by ignoring or misunderstanding her speech when she is informed that she must leave Troy (IV.ii.102-11). When she says that she has forgotten her father, she is indicating that, having once committed herself to Troilus, she will now attempt to maintain that commitment in the face of an uncle whose chief interest can be summed up in his question, “How go maidenheads?” (IV.ii.24), and of a world in which there is a price on everything from loyalty (Calchas) to honor (Achilles) to love (Paris). Cressida, of course, has never really escaped from that world any more than Troilus has by calling it by another name; but insofar as she, like Troilus, thinks that she has escaped, she has lost touch with her earlier, more accurate vision. The fullest indication of the extent to which Cressida is taken in by Troilus' vision is the repetition, in the farewell scene, of her vow to have her name stand for faithlessness if she prove false:

                                                                                                              O you gods divine,
Make Cressid's name the very crown of falsehood,
If ever she leave Troilus!

(IV.ii.105-7)

The directness and simplicity of these words, in contrast with Troilus' (and her own) earlier hyperbole, is another indication of the sincerity of her resolve.

At once, however, Cressida finds herself back in the real world of the play, a world in which beauty pleads little more than “fair usage” (IV.iv.126). In the Greek camp, for reasons which are not entirely clear, Ulysses initiates the kissing scene and then, believing that he has read “the tables of her thoughts” (IV.v.60), he dismisses Cressida as a mere “daugher of the game” (IV.v.62-64).¹¹ In so doing, he once again throws Cressida back upon her “watch.” She manages, with her wit, to keep most of the Greeks, including Ulysses, at arm's length for the entire scene; but her tactic here (the same one she used earlier in her talk with Pandarus) is Cressida's admission that she has returned once more to the real world of the play. Once more language must serve as her defense against a sordid and corrupt environment.

For the rest of the play, then, Cressida's “wit” is the “ward” at which she lies. Such a defense, however, is of no avail when she must deal with Diomedes. For Diomedes has no use for the “fooling” of wit, and his hardheaded, realistic appraisal of Helen as a “flat tamed piece,” out of whose “whorish loins” Paris is content to breed his heirs (IV.i.62-64) establishes his position as one poles away from that of Troilus.¹² Thus in his meeting with Cressida, Diomedes' function is almost as much symbolic as it is literal: he, as representative of the real world of the play, comes to reclaim Cressida.

But it is important to see the reluctance with which Cressida finally submits to that real world. The sleeve is the symbol of her brief stay in the vision of Troilus; holding it, she says:

O all you gods! O pretty, pretty pledge;
Thy master now lies thinking in his bed
Of thee and me, and sighs, and takes my glove,
And gives memorial dainty kisses to it. …

(V.ii.77-80)

We know, of course, that he is doing nothing of the sort; but it is the kind of thing Troilus himself might well have said earlier in the play; it is at least consistent with the vision of the world he has seduced Cressida into believing in. There is a definite touch of regret, perhaps even of pathos, in Cressida's final lines as she returns for once and all to the real world of the play:

Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee;
But with my heart the other eye doth see.

(V.ii.107-8)

Cressida's career in the play is, then, neither as simple nor as corrupt as critics have judged it. Derek Traversi has said that “any attempt to subject Cressida's inconsistency to a moral judgment … is out of place because the spirit in which Shakespeare created her made it impossible for her to be shown as really responsible for her actions. …”¹³ Insofar as her actions are determined by the world of the play, a world which makes human attempts at ideals nothing more than attempts to give “fair” covering to sordidness and corruption, Cressida is not responsible. She is responsible, as we have shown, for the “folly” (III.ii.110) of ignoring her knowledge of the world of the play and of giving herself to Troilus's “ideal” vision. It is, however, a folly which we feel has won for her a disproportionate amount of blame.

Notes

1. Thomas Marc Parrott, Shakespearian Comedy, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), p. 53, refers to Cressida as a “wanton”; William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), p. 178, calls her “conscious and calculating”; for W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, 2nd ed. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1960), pp. 140-42, Cressida's passion is “sensual and calculating,” and Cressida herself “a false and shallow woman”; Una Ellis-Fermor, The Frontiers of Drama, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 59, describes her as “a light woman”; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1950), p. 49, finds that she becomes “Falsehood in Love”; and George Wilbur Meyer, “Order Out of Chaos in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Tulane Studies in English, 4 (1954), 53, is content to call her a “whore.”

2. E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London: Sidgewick & Jackson, 1925), p. 196, says that although her vows are sincere when she makes them, Cressida “is not made of the stuff of heroines”; Hamill Kenny, “Shakespeare's Cressida,” Anglia, 61 (1937), 176, qualifies his defense by finding Cressida tainted with “selfishness, inconstancy, frailty, small self-knowledge, and a tendency to be easily enamored”; and Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1960), p. 45, while admitting that she is “a daughter of the game which men would have her play and for which they despise her,” and while finding that she is “more realist than sensualist, more wary and weary than wanton,” still pronounces her a “slut.” For similar qualified apologies, see G. I. Duthie, Shakespeare (London: Hutchinson's Univ. Library, 1950), pp. 110-11, and A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (London: Longmans, Green, 1961), pp. 132-33.

3. The extreme positions can be represented by Winifred M. T. Nowottny, “‘Opinion’ and ‘Value’ in Troilus and Cressida,” EIC, 4 (July 1954), 294, and by Alice Shalvi, “‘Honor’ in Troilus and Cressida,” SEL [Studies in English Literature], 5 (Spring 1965), 294-96. Miss Nowottny feels that while Troilus learns what Cressida truly is, his refusal to “deny the values by which he has lived” makes him noble. Miss Shalvi, on the other hand, feels that Troilus suffers throughout from “impaired judgment” and that Cressida's betrayal brings him no true enlightenment: “the change he undergoes is not a change for the better.”

4. Tillyard, p. 84, notes the omission in Ulysses' speech on degree of “the angelic end of the chain of being” and its consequent limiting effect; John Bayley, “Shakespeare's Only Play,” Stratford Papers on Shakespeare (1963), 58-83, discusses the absence of the dimension of time in the play; and W. R. Elton, “Shakespeare's Ulysses and the Problem of Value,” ShakS, 2 (1966), 95-111, has shown that the order speech itself does not necessarily provide an absolute against which the actions of the play should be judged; it may, in its context, be seen ironically.

5. “Preface” to Troilus and Cressida, John Dryden's Works, ed. Sir Walter Scott, rev. George Saintsbury (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1882), VI, 225.

6. George C. Taylor, “Shakespeare's Attitude toward Love and Honor in Troilus and Cressida,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 45 (Sept. 1930), 784-86, discusses the balance between the ideal and the real in Shakespeare's comedies and then notes that in Troilus and Cressida “Shakespeare bears down much more heavily than in any other play on that side which reduces love and honor to laughter and scorn”; he thus fails to preserve “that more exact and even balance … which elsewhere he kept.”

7. All quotations are from the New Cambridge edition, ed. W. A. Neilson and C. J. Hill (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).

8. A number of critics have seen the world of the play as corrupt: e.g., Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 167; and Barbara Heliodora C. M. F. de Almeida, “Troilus and Cressida: Romantic Love Revisited,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 15 (Autumn 1964), 327-32. Our reading of the “one in sumptuous armour” follows that of S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (Durham: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1944), p. 127.

9. For a discussion of the various ways in which characters are undermined by their language, see T. McAlindon, “Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida,” PMLA, 94 (Jan. 1969), 38-39. Particularly relevant is McAlindon's discussion of “unconscious tapinosis,” whose “effect is to introduce images and ideas which work counter to the speaker's usually panegyric intention. …” While the device, as McAlindon says, “tends … to reveal disorder in the individual rather than in society,” Troilus' particular images link his inner corruption to that of his world; McAlindon's position that Shakespeare and other sixteenth-century poets employed this device as “an apt instrument for expressing their double consciousness of the splendor and folly of passion” is no doubt correct and would be true of Troilus and Cressida were it not for the lack of balanced perspectives discussed above.

10. See Derick R. C. Marsh, “Interpretation and Misinterpretation: the Problem of Troilus and Cressida,” ShakS, 1 (1965), 196. Marsh correctly concludes that since the play shows a world “devoid of genuine honour, love and integrity of any kind,” the judgments of Thersites must be accepted. Marsh goes on to qualify this by saying that “the very violence of [Thersites'] abuse … generates an opposite sort of reaction, strengthening in the reader the feeling that … all love need not be lechery, all honour vanity nor all action stupid, brutal and futile.” The point, however, is that the accuracy of Thersites' judgments must be measured not against all love, honor, and action, but against the love, honor, and action presented within this play.

11. There is no entirely satisfactory way of accounting for Ulysses' behavior here, and critics interested in establishing Cressida's wantonness have generally shifted the discussion to function instead of motive. Thus James Oscar Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1938), p. 215, says that “Cressida goes directly to the Greek camp, and kisses all the men, with an abandon much greater than the liberal customs of Elizabethan salutation prescribed. Ulysses … is conveniently at hand to keep the audience clear on that point.” Ulysses is, however, a somewhat unreliable commentator: a good deal of the action in the first half of the play is given over to his elaborate and highly unsuccessful attempt, based on his misunderstanding of the world of the play, to get Achilles back into the war; and his introduction (albeit second-hand) of Troilus as one who speaks “in deeds, and deedless in his tongue” (IV.v.98) should make us even less willing to accept without question his understanding of Cressida's “game.”

12. Ulysses once again illustrates his unreliability as a commentator by describing this same Diomedes as one whose spirit “in aspiration lifts him from the earth” (IV.v.15-16).

13. An Approach to Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 329-30.