SOURCE: Maguire, Laurie E. “Performing Anger: The Anatomy of Abuse(s) in Troilus and Cressida.” Renaissance Drama n.s. 31 (2002): 153-83.

[In the following essay, Maguire explains Cressida's submission to Diomedes, contending that she is a victim of Diomedes' abuse and manipulation and that “Cressida consequently behaves as do most abused women: she submits.”]

Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary to beat her and maul her when you want to keep her under control.

—Machiavelli, The Prince¹

Shakespeare's Cressida has been heavily criticized for her transfer of allegiance from Troilus to Diomedes. Just twenty-four hours after consummating a relationship with Troilus, the man she has loved for “many weary months,” she accepts the advances of her Greek guard, Diomedes, and cements the relationship with a gift—the love token that Troilus had given her on parting. In Cressida's defense, critics note that her change of affection does not mean that her earlier love for Troilus was insincere, nor does one change of allegiance constitute promiscuity or prostitution.² They further note that the realities of wartime deem such behavior “at worst pragmatic.”³ But such defenses of Cressida are primarily exculpatory, agreeing that Cressida has transgressed, and self-consciously justifying her peccadillo. In so thinking, Cressida's detractors and defenders concentrate only on the conclusion of act 5, scene 2 (Cressida's yielding to Diomedes) rather than on the hundred or so lines that lead up to that conclusion. This essay began as an attempt to answer one question: why does Cressida give Diomedes the love token from Troilus? The answer to that question, I believe, lies in Diomedes' manipulation of Cressida. Diomedes is a bully, an emotional terrorist—what today's mental health professionals call an abuser—and the scene is a textbook example of abuse. Cressida consequently behaves as do most abused women: she submits.

First, a word about methodology. Any discussion of abuse and of abused figures necessarily takes us spelunking in the cave of character as we consider behavior, motivation, interiority, and psychology. New Criticism first rendered character analysis unscholarly as artifactual analysis superseded the subjective and speculative criticism that gave us the girlhood of Shakespeare's heroines. Now, as Alan Sinfield observes, poststructuralism “threatens to make character an altogether inappropriate category of analysis.”⁴ But character is a palpable emotional reality on stage, and character analysis has never been obsolete for actors: Stanislavski reigns in all drama bookstores and underpins the insights offered by actors in the four volumes of Players of Shakespeare and Clamorous Voices.⁵ Furthermore, as Robert Watson observes, if characters are not real people, audiences are.⁶ But rather than making character criticism obsolete, poststructuralism has simply admitted it by variant vocabulary. Subjectivity, agency, affect, intentionality, representation, contestation: these may not intentionally be synonyms for “character,” but they describe what Sinfield calls “character effects.” Concerned to avoid essential humanism or Bradleyan speculative character criticism, Sinfield highlights two areas: “an impression of subjectivity, interiority, or consciousness, and a sense that these maintain a sufficient continuity or development through the scenes of the play.”⁷

It is, of course, Cressida's lack of continuity that has so troubled critics. Janet Adelman finds that, on arrival in the Greek camp, Cressida becomes “a mere character type, a person with no conflict or inwardness at all,” and believes that Shakespeare offers us “no enlightenment” as to Cressida's motivation.⁸ Zvi Jagendorf applies this view to the play as a whole, accusing it of a “severely minimalist rendering” of character: “we do not go to this play to study the minds of its characters, though we can explore through their language and predicaments the question of character in an abstract almost philosophical way.”⁹ But what is character if not the nexus of mind and situation, the intersection of “language” and “predicament”? That Shakespeare is interested in character in this sense is obvious in Troilus and Cressida from his generically daring isolation of the protagonists and their romance from a vast epic scenario. Epic is not meant to focus on individuals except as cameos in the epic panorama. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare presents Ovidian lovers in camera. They are antiepic, as is their situation, and so is the play in which they appear. And that play is theirs: not The Trojan War or The Iron Age or The Iliad but The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida.

Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human has aroused new interest in character criticism (two seminars were devoted to the topic at the 2001 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America).¹⁰ From Aristotle onward, tragic theory has required one of two components: character and situation. But character is partly created, affected, and altered by the power structures and cultural contingencies (that is, situation) to which Foucault and others have taught us to be attentive. My interest lies not in resuscitating or rejecting character criticism as previously practiced but in finding some appropriate and meaningful way to use it in conjunction with contemporary critical approaches.

In this essay, I want to analyze how Cressida is structurally positioned. I focus on character and situation to look at the workings of anger, power, and abuse in those two arenas in which foul play is traditionally deemed fair: love and war. My approach is juxtapositional, setting twentieth-century psychological research about spousal abuse in dialogue with early modern drama. Juxtaposing the present with the past is the agenda of feminist and new historicist schools where using the contemporary to contextualize the early modern fruitfully reveals continuities and discontinuities. Recent successes in this vein include Emily Detmer's application of Stockholm syndrome (in which a captive falls in love with the captor) to The Taming of the Shrew and Helen Ostovich's application of prison psychology to Richardson's Clarissa.¹¹ (Of course, applying the results of contemporary investigations to older texts underlies all psychoanalytic criticism.) My goal in this essay is twofold: to understand the nature of abuse in the Greek camp scene and in our own age. By working both backward (from twentieth-century psychological research) and forward (from a concentration on the characterization of Cressida), we see that abuse is an enduring aspect of patriarchy. With its cynical approach to war, Troilus and Cressida has been seen as a quintessentially twentieth-century play. Its exposé of the dynamics of anger, violence, and abuse makes it, alas, even more relevant.

ABUSE

Abuse is a contemporary concept with a very long history. Obviously, any culture that views women legally as objects owned and traded by men, that views women spiritually as evil and in need of subjugation and physical correction, that views women intellectually as inferior and institutionalizes this view in education, politics, and law, that views women physically as substandard versions of men, and that views marriage as a hierarchy rather than a partnership is likely to lead to abuse. Misogynist cultures that deem women inferior in all these areas have brought exceptional creative ingenuity to bear on the development of physical cruelty to women. In the West, we find chastity belts, infanticide, femicide, rape, witch burning, wife beating, branks, and cucking stools; in the East, foot-binding and suttee.¹² Legal systems and societal custom have long been on the side of the abuser. An Elizabethan proverb proclaimed, “A woman, a spaniel [an ass], and a walnut tree …, the more they're beaten, the better they be”;¹³ until 1891, British husbands were legally permitted to keep their wives under lock and key.¹⁴

That abuse is confined to physical violence is a common misconception, among women as among men. In current medical parlance, psychologists identify three different kinds of abuse: physical abuse (also called “wife-battering”); sexual abuse (rape, incest); and psychological abuse. Psychological abuse is sometimes called verbal abuse because it is achieved and maintained by verbal manipulation and coercion; “verbal abuse constitutes psychological violence.”¹⁵ All three forms have a common denominator in the abuser's need to control his partner.¹⁶

Verbal abuse is “a kind of battering which doesn't leave evidence comparable to the bruises of physical battering.”¹⁷ The key to distinguishing verbal abuse from normal, healthy anger and argument is teleology: control of the partner. Normal anger does not seek to control. The verbal abuser seeks to get his own way, to impose his own view of events, to manipulate. The verbal abuser is an emotional terrorist.¹⁸

Contemporary psychologists show that verbal abuse comes in many forms. It can manifest as countering (that is, blatant contradiction: calling the sun the moon); discounting (denial of the victim's reality, as in “you're overreacting,” “you're too sensitive”), diverting (changing the topic), blocking (“I'm not responsible for your reactions”), scoring rhetorical points which fail to address the issue, accusing and blaming, judging and criticizing, trivializing, undermining, threatening (“do what I want or I'll leave / be angry / hit you / get a divorce”), name-calling, revising history (“I don't remember saying that”; “I don't see the situation that way”), ordering, and—most important—anger. “Anger underlies, motivates, and perpetuates verbally abusive behavior.”¹⁹ Anger prevents the possibility of mutuality because it is based on inequality: accusation and defense. As stressed earlier, the difference between normal anger and abusive anger is teleological. Normal anger lets off steam, providing an emotional release for the angry person. Abusive anger is manipulative: it forces or terrifies the partner into letting the abuser have his own way.

Psychologists have identified other constituent behaviors in verbal abuse: mercurial moods, a disjunction between private and public behavior, intensity, speed, and repetition. A charming, loving partner can unpredictably switch to vituperative outburst or hostile silence, a tactic designed to unbalance the partner. Verbal abuse usually takes place in private so that the outside world sees the abuser the way he sees himself: as a decent man. Since the object of verbal abuse is to release the abuser's sense of helplessness by asserting control, it is never followed by an apology, for to apologize would be to relinquish power. Verbal abusers are often intense, being as excessive in romance as in anger, and their intimate relationships normally move quickly in the opening stages—another tactic to disarm the victim. Although I use the word “tactic,” verbal abuse is not a consciously planned operation. It is unconscious and instinctive; the abuser is simply reacting to his sense of powerlessness by exerting power over another human being. Hence, a further identifying characteristic of abuse is repetition. Many men (and women) might identify themselves in the aforementioned list of characteristics. Many human beings lose control occasionally and shout, threaten, or resort to violence (to furniture, if not to a partner). One episode of anger, violence, or manipulation does not make an abuser. To behave this way repeatedly, however, indicates a behavioral pattern intended (albeit unconsciously) to control: the adult equivalent of a toddler's temper tantrum.

Psychological abuse is dangerous. It often leads to physical violence: all physical violence is preceded by a pattern of verbal abuse;²⁰ it breaks the victim's spirit; and it causes somatic illness and depression in the victim. The victim of psychological abuse responds in exactly the same way as does the victim of physical abuse: she becomes passive, acquiescent, willing to abase herself in any way to appease the abusive partner.

It is obvious from the foregoing summary that several Shakespearean characters fit the profile of the abused woman. Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew is the most obvious example. Although New Criticism may interpret Petruchio's “countering” (“Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain / She sings as sweetly as a nightingale”)²¹ as a game, a loving tease with the positive psychological aim of behavior modification, in the twenty-first century it is difficult to find the subjugation of a woman a suitable subject for comic treatment.²² In Othello, Iago and his wife, Emilia, are classic examples of an abusive husband and an abused wife. Emilia is a relatively colorless individual; any sense of personality is well-nigh effaced in her desire to please and placate her husband. It is not until the final act, when she realizes that Iago is responsible for Desdemona's death, that a new Emilia (the old one?) finds the courage to speak out.²³ As is so often the case in abusive relationships, however, this newfound knowledge of the nature of her husband and her threat to leave (“Perchance, Iago, I will ne'er go home” [Othello 5.2.197]) endanger her safety: Iago kills her before she can reveal further truths about his character and actions.²⁴

Although abuse was a blunt reality of early modern life, enabling us to trace a continuum of physical and psychological assault from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, the word “abuse” follows no such straightforward trajectory. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “abuse” was understood as sexual abuse—violation, defilement (in the 1611 translation of the Bible we find that the Benjamites “abused her [a concubine] all the night until the morning”; Judg. 19.25)—but the OED notes that this usage became obsolete in the eighteenth century. Abuse also existed in the sense of “verbal abuse,” as we find in Measure for Measure and Othello. “Hark how the villain would close now, after his treasonable abuses!” protests Angelo when the Duke affirms his love of the man he has just slandered (Measure for Measure 5.1.342-43), and Bianca responds to Emilia's denunciation of her as a “strumpet” with the fervent denial, “I am no strumpet, but of life as honest / As you that thus abuse me” (Othello 5.1.122-23); however, in both instances the sense is one of general verbal injury, injustice, or slander rather than specific belittlement for the purpose of control. When Philip Stubbes uses the noun in the plural in The Anatomy of Abuses, he is referring to nonsexual moral transgressions and improprieties: plays, elaborate clothing, gambling, dancing, moneylending, nonreligious activities on Sunday.

In Stubbes, as in Shakespeare, abuse is public; the insidious hallmark of abuse today is privacy. Early modern domestic violence was public (even when carried on at home, for the household was a public place). The “branked” wife was paraded in the street; the charivari was a public event; crowds assembled to watch cucking of scolds.²⁵ Even if the husband lacked witnesses to his physical control over his wife, he had no need to conceal the means by which he achieved domination, for his mastery was a matter for celebration, not secrecy. What distinguishes abuse today is its concealment: the loving public personality of the man belies his private mistreatment of his partner.

Thus, the attitude to abuse has changed; the precise meaning of the word has changed; but the basic facticity of abuse has not. Some aspects of abuse have continuity. I want to insist on this point, despite obvious differences such as the permitted and public nature of wife beating in sixteenth-century England. Although Shakespearean characters (mis)treat women in ways legitimized by their culture, that does not exempt them from our critical scrutiny, just as the fact that anti-Semitism was dominant in Nazi Germany, or racism in 1950s America and Britain, does not prevent us bringing anti-Semites or racists to trial. (One of the jobs of feminism is to point out that a phenomenon is not acceptable just because it is common.) Shakespeare may not have had our vocabulary for abuse, but he certainly staged the phenomenon in male-female relations in ways affined with twentieth-century sympathies.

In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare lays bare the workings of abuse in the scene between Cressida and Diomedes. There is much in the acts prior to this to illuminate Cressida's reactions here, and I shall turn to this “much” shortly. For now, let me emulate the Chorus, leaping o'er the vaunt and firstlings of the play, beginning in act 5, scene 2.

CRESSIDA AND DIOMEDES

In act 5, scene 2, we see Cressida exposed and stripped of the protective wit which has been her trademark in earlier scenes (notably act 1, scene 2 and act 4, scene 5). She is alone with Diomedes, and Shakespeare paints a painful picture of female fear and male manipulation. Diomedes ignores Cressida's evident reluctance, pain, and ambivalence, using a simple tactic—anger—thus making the episode one of male coercion rather than female agreement. Cressida's instinct is to halt his anger at all costs. In the face of anger, psychologists tell us, the sensitive or the insecure will abase themselves, agree, submit, concede, do anything—including relinquishing Troilus's love token—to stop the angry attitude or vituperative rhetoric. “Nay, but you part in anger,” says Cressida to Diomedes (5.2.44), and Troilus asks, aside, “Doth that grieve thee?” His interpretation could not be more wrong. It does not grieve Cressida: it frightens her, bewilders her. Note how the dialogue between Diomedes and Cressida repeats one pattern throughout the scene: she asserts herself in making a request, he breaks off in evident anger, and she capitulates. Note how Diomedes is on the point of exit several times in the scene, but she cannot let him part in anger. Note how he gets what he wants, even though it is clear that this is not what she wants. Note how he overrules her. Note how her “No” goes unheard because she falls into self-denying submissive behavior. (I omit all asides from the three eavesdroppers and add implied stage directions.)

CRESSIDA.
… tempt me no more to folly.
DIOMEDES.
Nay then—[He offers to exit]
CRESSIDA.
I'll tell you what—

(5.2.18; 20-21)

CRESSIDA.
I prithee do not hold me to mine oath,
Bid me do anything but that, sweet Greek.
DIOMEDES.
Good night. [He offers to exit.]
CRESSIDA.
Diomed—
DIOMEDES.
No, no, good night, I'll be your fool no more. [He offers to exit.]
CRESSIDA.
Hark a word in your ear. …

(5.2.26-28; 31-32; 34)

DIOMEDES.
… And so good night. [He offers to exit.]
CRESSIDA.
Nay, but you part in anger.

(5.2.44-45)

Cressida then gives Diomedes Troilus's pledge—the sleeve—but instantly regrets the gift and recalls it. Diomedes insists on having it and aggressively questions Cressida about its original owner. It is clear from the conversation between Diomedes and Troilus in act 4, scene 4 that Diomedes can be in no doubt about the identity of his rival, but his insistent “Whose was it?” (repeated four times, at lines 71, 87, 88, and 90) indicates his need to have Cressida surrender fully as “proof of his conquest.” Cressida bravely defies Diomedes—“I will not keep my word”—but Diomedes' angry threat of exit, his fifth (at line 98), is more than she can cope with: “You shall not go. One cannot speak a word / But it straight starts you” (5.2.100-1). She accurately identifies his behavioral pattern (“I can't say anything without you reacting with anger and withdrawal”). He ignores her diagnosis-cum-plea, uttering only a terse (and, in the BBC film, extremely menacing) response: “I do not like this fooling” (5.2.101).²⁶

It is important to note how Shakespeare's atmosphere of fear and threat contrasts with Chaucer's depiction of the situation between Diomedes and Criseyde. In Chaucer, Diomedes engages in a calculated process to win Criseyde. “This Diomede, … / Goth now withinne hymself ay arguynge, / With al the sleghte and al that evere he kan, / How he may best … / Into his net Criseydes herte brynge. / To this entent he koude nevere fyne; / To fisshen hire he leyde out hook and lyne.”²⁷ His observation that Criseyde has not laughed since coming to the Greek camp leads him to suspect that she has left a love in Troy. This whets his appetite for Criseyde: like Richard III after him, he feels it is a triumph to win a woman who mourns another (“But whoso myght wynnen swich a flour, / From hym for whom she morneth nyght and day, / He myghte seyn he were a conquerour”).²⁸ Despite this attitude of competitive conquest, Diomedes is gentle in behavior. He engages Criseyde quietly in conversation about the war, inquires about her adjustment to Greek customs, about her father's marriage plans for her, discusses Helen's abduction, asks for her opinions, and, in the end, shyly, nervously, and chivalrously proposes to her.²⁹ She agrees to allow him to visit her again for the purposes of conversation.

As Clifford Lyons points out, the story line of Shakespeare's Cressida-Diomedes plot is simple: Diomedes will leave her if she will not submit.³⁰ And Cressida needs Diomedes' protection (she twice calls him “guardian”; he refers to her as his “charge”) at any cost. Diomedes' treatment of Cressida is doubly abusive: he abuses her as a human being, and he exploits his position of power as her military guardian. Diomedes employs six of the standard tactics of abuse. He orders (“do then”; “give me some token”); he threatens (“do what I want or I'll leave”); he employs anger (“nay but you part in anger”); he changes mood unpredictably (the couple whisper and stroke just seconds before his angry outbursts); he humiliates Cressida in his need to have her submit fully by revealing Troilus's name; and he has clearly wooed Cressida rapidly and intensely. On the evidence of one scene, Diomedes looks very much like an abuser.

If Cressida's defensive wit deserts her in the face of Diomedes' psychological abuse, what can protect her? Cressida answers this question proleptically in act 1, scene 2, in a conversation with Pandarus. With teasing exasperation, Pandarus complains that he does not know “at what ward” Cressida lies; that is, he does not know what defensive position she adopts. In reply, Cressida recounts the defensive tactics available to her. First, she says, she can lie “upon my back, to defend my belly” (1.2.260). No editor before 1998 has glossed this perplexing phrase. In a note exploring variant interpretations, the play's most recent editor, David Bevington, suggests that Cressida “may regard sexuality itself as a defence.”³¹ Lorraine Helms is less tentative and more explicit. Cressida will “accept concubinage to avoid rape.” In other words, “surrender becomes her last line of defense.”³² Like most victims of abuse, Cressida protects herself by submitting.

The question of abuse becomes more charged in time of war. Wars as diverse as Henry V's invasion of France, culminating in marriage to Princess Katherine, and the current civil war in the former Yugoslavia with its ongoing Serbian atrocities of genocidal rape (as will be discussed shortly) illustrate how easily abuse can become official policy during military action. Henry V's warning to the Governor of Harfleur threatens rape, infanticide, geronticide, “licentious wickedness” (Henry V 3.3.22), “hot and forcing violation” (3.3.21), “headly murther, spoil and villainy” (3.3.32). Whether the threats are tactical or serious, Henry's sexualized language shows the abuse that becomes acceptable, if only rhetorically, in war.³³ His soldiers are “rough and hard” (Henry V 3.3.11); Harfleur, a vulnerable female city defending itself against what are elsewhere described as “underminers and blowers-up” (All's Well That Ends Well 1.1.120-21), is yet but “half-achieved” (Henry V 3.3.8). In order to seize the “chance of war” (Troilus and Cressida Prologue, line 31) one must, as the quotation from Machiavelli which prefaces this essay advises, act violently. Domination of the goddess Fortuna is achieved in the same way as domination of any woman—abuse. Fortune, Machiavelli concludes, responds to men who are “brutal,” allowing herself to be “won over more by these types of men than by those who proceed dispassionately.”³⁴

Like the typical abuser, Henry blames the victims for failing to cooperate and pacify him: “you yourselves are cause” (Henry V 3.3.19). When the Governor yields, it is with a futile plea for detumescence (“soft mercy”) even as he invites entry:

We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy.
Enter our gates, dispose of us and ours,
For we no longer are defensible.

(Henry V 3.3.48-50)

This military rape is revised in act 5 in terms which are only marginally more acceptable. In the so-called wooing scene, Henry asks Princess Katherine to marry him. The wooing is pro forma: the French king has already received a schedule of Henry's demands. Any possibility of Henry wooing Katherine for personal reasons is belied by his earlier rejection of her when her accompanying geographical territory (and hence political value) was nugatory: “some petty and unprofitable dukedoms” (Henry V act 3, Chorus, line 31). Henry attempts to speak the language of romantic wooing, but he, and presumably everyone else on stage, knows that marrying Katherine is simply a way of legitimizing the rape of her country.³⁵

Beverly Allen's sobering and eye-opening book, Rape Warfare, describes the forms of genocidal rape currently practiced by Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia for the purpose of “ethnic cleansing.” In one tactic, Serbs publicly rape women in villages in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia and then depart. News of the rapes spreads and terrifies the villagers. The Serbs return a few days later to offer the villagers safe exit provided they never return. In another strategy, women are herded into “rape camps” where they are systematically raped for the purpose of impregnation. When a pregnancy has passed the point of safe abortion, the pregnant woman is released. The resulting baby is considered to be only Serb.³⁶ Henry V's suggestion that he and Katherine “compound a boy, half French, half English” (Henry V 5.2.207-8) to defeat the Turks may seem a much more civilized invitation to political sex, but it is simply a variant of the Balkan rapes.

Rape and war merge more obviously in Troilus and Cressida. The Trojan war was caused by the rape of a woman, Helen of Troy (herself the product of a rape). We see little of Helen in the play, but her story and its military consequences are omnipresent in the wooing of Cressida. The vocabulary of courtly love is the vocabulary of siege warfare. Troilus's “militarized courtship” is, like the Trojan war, a long, drawn-out attack,³⁷ and Cressida, like Troy, engages in defensive tactics. But by act 5, scene 2, the situation has changed. Cressida is no longer on home territory, and the man designated her protector has become her abuser.

Cressida gives in verbally to pacify Diomedes' verbal violence, and she submits sexually to prevent his sexual violence. As we saw, verbal abuse often leads to physical abuse; and in war, rape becomes a ubiquitous, acceptable form of physical violence.³⁸ Katherine of France becomes a bride rather than a rape victim. So does Helen of Troy; and so does Cressida. “Wars and lechery” go together, as Thersites realizes. The “chance of war” includes sexual violence. The best defense is a good offense? For women, the best defense is sometimes surrender.

One might object that I ignore Cressida's culpability by underplaying her acquiescence: after all, she agrees to submit to Diomedes. I am, obviously, uneasy with such an argument. Acquiescence in war has a different inflection; one could argue that victims of highway robbery “acquiesce” in that they hand over their money or that Jews “acquiesced” in the Holocaust inasmuch as they boarded the trains. What Diomedes wants (and gets) is what Angelo wants (and doesn't get) in Measure for Measure, the problem play that follows Troilus and Cressida in the Shakespeare chronology: compliance. Angelo could have raped Isabella; instead he asks for her cooperation, which is, in a sense, more insidious.³⁹ Audiences and critics have never forgiven Isabella for her decision, just as they have never forgiven Cressida, and the two situations are linked. Isabella doesn't give in; Cressida does. Both are blamed. The paradigm of female behavior in such situations is Lucrece, and her ghost haunts both Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure—plays which offer women alternatives to killing themselves.⁴⁰

Many critics observe that Cressida surrenders to Diomedes at considerable personal cost.⁴¹ What she gains in security she loses in emotional satisfaction. Such self-abnegating and ultimately self-destroying behavior is, as we saw earlier, a typical response to abuse.

However, other plausible (and sympathetic) accounts of Cressida's surrender have been offered by directors and critics, and it will be appropriate to review them briefly here. For Claire Tylee, commenting on Juliet Stevenson's performance in the 1985 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production (directed by Howard Davies), Cressida was “emotionally cauterized”;⁴² for Robert Wilcher, reviewing the same production, she was “left no choice but to become ‘a love object after all.’”⁴³ In Sam Mendes's 1990 RSC production, Cressida was “an emotionally damaged refugee.”⁴⁴ As Bevington notes, in the production's world of “egotistic nihilism … the question turned out to be not why she betrayed Troilus ‘but why she ever entertained the possibility of faithfulness.’”⁴⁵

Other critics and directors see Cressida as vulnerable by gender and situation (she lacks a male protector if she does not comply with Diomedes), as inexperienced, as terrified, as overtaken by survival instincts (BBC 1981, directed by Jonathan Miller; cf. “upon my back to protect my belly”), as a “fatal casualty of war” (RSC 1996, directed by Ian Judge),⁴⁶ or as hopeless: her culture has offered her only two paradigms of behavior—promiscuity or submission.⁴⁷ Bevington declares his own hand in a series of rhetorical questions (“What is a woman to do when the men are so unanimous in their judgements of her and their plans for her? … How is she to resist being what all these importunate men expect her to be?”) and then in an emphatic tricolon (“Cressida yields to Diomedes … through fear, susceptibility to male authority, and hopelessness”).⁴⁸

This plurality of approaches by the sympathetic is possible because Shakespeare gives us so little to go on. Cressida does not declare her motives or rationale or feelings; she simply (re)acts. My conclusion about abuse overlaps with some of the previously mentioned behavioral diagnoses (fear, war victimization, despair), but I reach my conclusion by focusing on the one piece of concrete evidence Shakespeare gives us: the localized language to which Cressida reacts. In the light of what we now know about verbal abuse as a cultural phenomenon, Diomedes' linguistic pattern of anger and threatened withdrawal on no fewer than five occasions, for the purpose of getting what he wants, seems to me to warrant the diagnosis of abuse.

CRESSIDA AND TROILUS

Drama, typically, lacks one of the characteristics of life: repetition. Where repetition is thematically necessary, as in Pericles (which illustrates patience, a quality best shown in a variety of situations over a number of years), structure and chronology are affected: the play covers fourteen years and numerous countries. Repetition, as we have seen, is one of the hallmarks of the abuser. In Troilus and Cressida, we do not see a repeat of episodes such as act 5, scene 2 between Cressida and Diomedes. Shakespeare caters to repetition in another way, however: Diomedes' behavior is a variant of Troilus's.

If the profile of the abused woman includes ontological uncertainty and a willingness to submerge what self there is, the typical abuser is a narcissist. He gains control by aggrandizing himself and belittling the woman. Because these behavioral patterns become ingrained in both sexes, vulnerable women often have a history of abusive partners, and aggressive men often seek out vulnerable women. It comes as no surprise, then, to see that Shakespeare's Troilus, like Diomedes, fits the profile of the controlling male and that Diomedes' manipulation of Cressida is an action replay of Troilus's.

To say that Troilus is a narcissist is to say no more than that he is a stereotypical courtly lover. But his selfishness is insidious, not a consequence of courtly love so much as an indication that he may not be in love of any kind with Cressida. Celia's caveats to Rosalind about Orlando (erroneous, as it turns out), seem directly applicable to Troilus:

CELIA.
Nay certainly there is no truth in him.
ROSALIND.
Do you think so? … Not true in love?
CELIA.
Yes, when he is in—but I think he is not in. … O, that's a brave man! he writes brave verses, speaks brave words, swears brave oaths, and breaks them bravely …

(As You Like It 3.4.20-21; 26-27; 40-42)

Tradition labels Cressida the oath breaker, with Troilus's niche as the betrayed lover remaining secure. As we shall see, however, Troilus's behavior contradicts his oaths three long acts before Cressida so dramatically and painfully breaks hers in the Greek camp. Troilus's behavior, in other words, cues Cressida's. David Bevington characterizes the Trojan's acquiescence in the removal of his lover to the Greek camp as “Troilus' desertion of Cressida,” and Claire Tylee concludes that in giving Diomedes Troilus's love gift, “Cressida treats Troilus's token for what it is worth.”⁴⁹

Troilus views sex as sport (1.1.114-15), women as goods (3.2.69-72), and he finds marriage fit only for violation (3.2.148-49) or rhetorical illustration (“I take to-day a wife”; 2.2.61). He does not talk of love, although he talks much of passion and desire, of truth and faith,⁵⁰ nor does he talk of marriage to Cressida. He talks, as he thinks, of self and the senses. He wants to “wallow” in the lily beds of Cressida's environment (3.2.12).⁵¹ He will “stalk” about her door (a verb from the territory of sexual harassment; 3.2.8).⁵² His “imaginary relish” is not of the spiritual but the sensual (3.2.18-29). Even as he and Cressida exchange confessions of love, he turns the conversation to himself. With six personal pronouns in thirteen lines (3.2.158-70), he extols his personal merits and belittles woman's constancy (and thus Cressida's)—a sobering start to any relationship. Not one of his romantic [sic] speeches can match the simple sincerity of Cressida's “I have lov'd you night and day / For many weary months” (3.2.114-15). He is indeed full of “brave oaths,” but if we look ahead to act 4, scene 2, we see how little substance there is behind his sentimental protestations.

Aeneas announces the immediate exchange of Cressida for Antenor. Troilus's question, “Is it so concluded?” (4.2.66) may be the dazed response of a devastated man. Yet he makes no protestation, no denial (contrast Cressida's anguished and determined lines at 94-109: “I will not go. … I have forgot my father”), and his first thoughts (line 69) are typically of himself: “how my achievements mock me!” (two personal pronouns in one line). Is this all Cressida is to him—an “achievement”? His second thoughts are similarly unsentimental, a quick priming of Aeneas in protective mendacity: “and, my Lord Aeneas, / We met by chance, you did not find me here” (4.2.70-71). He exits; no thoughts of Cressida; no farewell; no comfort.⁵³

This reaction is in striking contrast to Troilus's “energetic” rhetoric in support of keeping Helen,⁵⁴ and it is in even more striking contrast to Chaucer's depiction of events. Troilus's reaction and efforts to keep Criseyde occupy 203 stanzas in Chaucer's book 4. In the poem, Troilus's immediate consideration is twofold: (1) how to save Criseyde's honour, and (2) how to contend against the exchange. His instinct is, naturally, to protest:

Love hym made al prest to don hire byde,
And rather dyen than she sholde go;
But Resoun seyde him, on that other syde,
“Withouten assent of hire ne do nat so,
Lest for thi werk she wolde be thy fo.”

(4:162-66)

Thus, in an impressive granting of autonomy to Criseyde, he resolves to let her decide what she wants to do: “And whan that she hadde seyd hym hire entente, / Therafter wolde he werken also blyve, / Theigh al the world ayeyn it wolde stryve” (4:173-75). He is supported by Ector, who protests to the Greeks that Criseyde is not a prisoner of war (4:179); “we usen here no wommen for to selle” he adds (4:182). Ector campaigns for Criseyde till the last, but the Trojan parliament votes against him.

Pandarus at this point suggests to Troilus that he resort to that most Trojan of solutions, abduction: “Artow in Troie, and hast non hardyment / To take a womman which that loveth the?” (4:533-34). Troilus tells Pandarus that he has already thought of this, but he has good reasons for not proceeding in this way:

First, syn thow woost this town hath al this werre
For ravysshyng of wommen so by myght,
It shold nought be suffred me to erre,
As it stant now, ne don so gret unright

(4:547-50)

He lists the possible alternatives, considers the potential damages to Criseyde (heartache, slander), before concluding that her honor is dearer to him than anything else. Chaucer's Troilus continues to think only of Criseyde's welfare. Unlike Shakespeare's Troilus (for whom such advice is unnecessary), he has to be advised to think about himself too.

Meanwhile, Criseyde reacts to the news with equal demonstration of love and distress (4:666-1162), and by the time the lovers discuss their prospects, Troilus is once more in favor of running away. Criseyde counsels against it: they would regret it later; she does not want him to abandon his friends for any woman; Troy needs him; if they were found out, her life and his reputation would be in danger; people would say Troilus fled out of lust and “coward drede” (4:1573); his honor would be lost, and her good name, too. Criseyde therefore advises that they yield to politics, optimistic that she will be able to return to Troy within ten days. Troilus agrees to this plan, but his anguish never ceases (“but yet to late hire go / His herte mysforyaf hym evere mo”; 4:425-26).

Shakespeare grants his lovers no such lengthy decision-making discussions. When Troilus returns in act 4, scene 4, it is as part of the official Trojan delegation to accompany Cressida to the Greek camp. The brief private good-bye with Cressida is embedded in an atmosphere of mistrust: five commands to “be true,” which distress rather than reassure Cressida (“O heavens, ‘be true’ again?”), and prompt her most poignant cry, “O heavens, you love me not!” (4.4.82). Critics rightly condemn Troilus for insensitivity here. “At this moment when Cressida surely needs comfort and sympathy, he again insults her integrity with a series of imperatives.”⁵⁵

Furthermore, Troilus's language and attitude in leave-taking are as narcissistic as they were in lovemaking. The separation is seen as affecting only him, as divine punishment for his love:

Cressid, I love thee in so strain'd a purity
That the blest gods, as angry with my fancy,
More bright in zeal than the devotion which
Cold lips blow to their deities, take thee from me.

(4.4.24-27)

His next speech is similarly fanciful. Personified images of chance and time take center stage, and images of commodification reappear: “We two, that with so many thousand sighs / Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves” (4.4.39-40). The verb “sell” implies termination, that the relationship is over. This certainly appears to be the message behind Troilus's previous statement, where, as Howard Adams points out, the elaborate phrasing is unambiguous in intent: “Chance … strangles our dear vows / Even in the birth of our own laboring breath” (4.4.33-39).⁵⁶ Troilus seemingly accepts an externally imposed conclusion to their relationship, leading several critics to believe that he grasps this opportunity with relief: Cressida is now remainder viands. Troilus here seems as passive as he was in the dull acceptance of act 4, scene 2 (“How my achievements mock me”). Apparently one night's “sport” has satisfied his sense of “achievement.” These reactions confirm the “monstrous” nature of his earlier vows and lead Cressida and us to suspect that his vow to visit the Greek camp nightly is “in the category of vowing to ‘weep seas, live in fire.’”⁵⁷ Troilus has (as Cressida feared in act 3, scene 2) the voice of a lion and the act of a hare (3.2.79).

As he continues his farewells, we see how justified was Cressida's fear that achievement is command. Troilus autocratically legislates Cressida's behavior. I am thinking not just of the repeated injunctions to be true but also of his controlling response to Cressida's pained ejaculation, “I true? How now? what wicked deem is this?” (4.4.59). He overrules her anguish and her protest (that is, her feelings) with a behavioral caveat which seems to extol gentleness but functions controllingly as reprimand: “Nay, we must use expostulation kindly, / For it is parting from us” (4.4.60-61). First Cressida's behavior and now her speech are under male correction and control.

Troilus's behavior, so far, has much in common with that of the abuser. Typically the abusive male does not demonstrate controlling behavior until marriage or sexual relations with the woman have begun.⁵⁸ Although this is no doubt convenient in protecting his image, it is not an intentional tactic. Simply, the effort he puts into wooing the woman satisfies his need to feel in control.⁵⁹ It is only when the woman has been won that he transfers his controlling tendencies to her behavior. Achievement becomes command.⁶⁰ From the first, Cressida fears that Troilus is a controller. Her speech is “threaded with allusions to power or its absence,” and when she declares her love, she immediately fears that her lover will prove a “tyrant” (3.2.121).⁶¹

As the scene continues, we see the superficial nature of Troilus's understanding of love, and his ignorance of “what Cressid is.” He describes the Greeks' charms, charms that he fears will attract Cressida: singing, dancing (“the high lavolt”), “sweet … talk,” “subtile games” (4.4.85-87). These are externals. Cressida's love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, as she revealed in the first act: “more in Troilus thousandfold I see / Than in the glass of Pandar's praise may be” (1.2.284-85). Troilus now delivers a short sermon—seven pious, pragmatic, and emotionally inappropriate lines on the subject of temptation (4.4.89-91, 94-97)—before Cressida's faltering question, “My lord, will you be true?” (my emphasis; 4.4.101). So far, the conversation has comprised nothing but instructions for Cressida's behavior. Troilus sidesteps a direct response to her question (a question which clearly asks for reassurance and love) with a return to arrogant self-advertisement:

Alas, it [fidelity] is my vice, my fault:
Whiles others fish with craft for great opinion,
I with great truth catch mere simplicity;
Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns,
With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare.
Fear not my truth: the moral of my wit
Is “plain and true”; there's all the reach of it.

(4.4.102-8)

The glibly dismissive rhyme is the last Troilus speaks to Cressida in the play. Kenneth Muir's view of Cressida's speech in act 1, scene 2 (“the rhymed verse and the proverbial wisdom contained in it give the impression that she is too self-possessed to be desperately in love”) seems to me to be more applicable to Troilus's couplet here.⁶² There is not a single indication in act 3, scene 2; act 4, scene 2; and act 4, scene 4 (the only scenes between Troilus and Cressida) that Troilus is truly in love with Cressida. She, I believe, goes off to the Greek camp with that heartbroken realization. “O heavens, you love me not!” is her last statement to Troilus, not an expression of fear but an interpretation of evidence.

This evidence is, as I have argued, abundant in Troilus's language, but his behavior additionally supports such a conclusion. For a Shakespeare lover, for a hero with romantic hyperbole, Troilus is curiously unromantic in behavior. Orlando “would be talking” of his Rosaline to strangers like Jaques and Ganymede, and he carves his love on every tree. Troilus conceals his love, and, the morning after consummation, goes about the day's business with commendable dispatch rather than reluctance. This antiaubade is as painful as it is surprising. The need for secrecy is never articulated. Is it because it is dangerous for a prince to woo the daughter of a traitor? Is it because of the impropriety of unchaperoned meetings (Cressida is an isolated figure, whereas Criseyde is surrounded by her ladies, who even accompany her to the Greek camp). Yet Trojan society has a flexible (im)morality which would surely work to Troilus's advantage: it tolerates, indeed sanctions, Paris and Helen, and acknowledges Margarelon.⁶³ Troilus's failure to acknowledge Cressida publicly contrasts strikingly with the attitude of Hector, who expresses his pride in his wife through a challenge to the Greeks. Even old Nestor pays greater tribute to his (deceased) beloved than does Troilus.

A woman who is not acknowledged publicly by her lover is likely to have her confidence in herself and the relationship shaken. And Cressida, despite her public wit and control, is a woman with little confidence in her own value.⁶⁴ This is disconcerting when one considers Chaucer's presentation of his Criseyde who, in the same political and personal circumstances, is depicted as ontologically much more confident. Before returning to Shakespeare, we need to consider Chaucer's characterization of Criseyde, Troilus, and the situation between the two lovers.

CHAUCER, CRISEYDE, AND TROILUS

In Chaucer, Criseyde is a woman of considerable independence and self-assurance. As a widow, she runs her own household (Shakespeare's Cressida apparently resides with her uncle) and enjoys her freedom:

I am myn owene womman, wel at ese—
I thank it God—as after myn estat,
Right yong, and stonde unteyd in lusty leese,
Withouten jalousie or swich debat:
Shal noon housbonde seyn to me “Chek mat!”

(2:750-54)

Allas! Syn I am free,
Sholde I now love, and put in jupartie
My sikernesse, and thrallen libertee?

(2:771-73)

Personally confident, her vulnerability, such as it is, is political. When the news of Calchas's defection spreads throughout the town, the citizens call for Calchas's entire family to be burned (1:90-91). Criseyde hears daily of her father's shame and treason (1:106-7), and it is a combination of grief and fear (1:108; my emphasis) that drives her to seek an audience with Ector and beg his protection. Pandarus is as vulnerable in Troy as is Cressida, and it is partly self-protection that motivates him to promote a liaison between his niece and a Trojan prince.

In Chaucer (as, to a lesser extent, in Shakespeare), Pandarus and Troilus are bosom friends (2:1403-4), and Pandarus's allegiance to Troilus is such that he will even help Troilus win Helen if that is whom he desires (1:676-78). Accordingly, when Pandarus learns that Criseyde is the woman for whom Troilus pines, he plots with care and in detail how to bring Troilus to where Criseyde may catch sight of the prince and how to make Criseyde extend sympathy and friendship.

Chaucer's Troilus is a typical courtly lover: that is to say, his excessive and obsessive affection endangers his life. Pandarus uses this danger to exert emotional pressure on Criseyde: be nice to Troilus or Troilus will die; be nice to Troilus or I will kill myself (2:322-25). Pandarus denies that he is a bawd, that either he or Troilus plan to dishonor or shame Criseyde (2:353). A display of friendship is all that he requires of his niece, “So that his lif be saved atte leeste” (2:362). Pandarus does not let this emotional blackmail drop: the threats of death are repeated and rephrased in book 2 at lines 329, 335, 338, 433, 439-42, and 1279.

Criseyde is alert to the impropriety of a woman in her position showing affection for a man and a prince (2:414-20) and is critical of Pandarus for promoting a liaison that, as her uncle and protector, he should condemn (2:412-13). She is swayed, however, by thoughts of the harm to Troilus and Pandarus attendant on her noncompliance (2:454) and decides ultimately that of two evils, one should choose the lesser.⁶⁵ She will therefore offer Troilus encouragement rather than risk her uncle's life (2:470-72). In fact, she reasons, there might be honor in being friends with a prince, whereas the rejection of her king's son could worsen her plight (2:708-12).

Troilus and Pandarus now plot a chance sighting in which Criseyde can glimpse Troilus from her window (2:1009-15). Criseyde falls in love with Troilus but initially keeps her feelings secret. The couple subsequently meet, and she warns Troilus that, although he is a prince's son, he shall not have “sovereignete … in love” over her (3:171-72). Troilus himself had introduced this motif in book 1, assuring Pandarus that he has no dishonorable feelings toward Criseyde (1:1030-36). Pandarus now stresses the need for secrecy, as a protection for himself and Criseyde. People, he says, would view Pandarus as a traitor for serving Criseyde up to Troilus, and Criseyde's hitherto blameless reputation would be lost (3:274-336).

Chaucer's Troilus is a master of dissimulation and plotting, and eventually, with the help of Pandarus and a rainstorm, gains access to Criseyde's bedroom. But he is also a genuine comforter and protector of Criseyde: “wel she felte he was to hire a wal / Of stiel, and sheld from every displesaunce” (3:479-80). Criseyde's trust in him is borne out, as we saw, in book 4.

The lovers' situation is different in Shakespeare, where the characters of both Troilus and Cressida are heavily revised. The differences between Chaucer's Troilus and Shakespeare's are obvious. The former is a caring lover; the latter, as we have seen, is not. The differences between Criseyde and Cressida relate to depicted ontology. Criseyde is a social being, happy and confident in the company of her friends. She appreciates the privileges of widowhood and is not interested in remarriage. Shakespeare's Cressida is vulnerable both politically and personally. Obviously in any war situation, these two vulnerabilities are linked, but whereas Chaucer stresses the political, Shakespeare investigates the personal.

Cressida's personal insecurity is most visible in the morning-after-consummation scene when she interprets Troilus's alacrity in leaving as proof that “men prize the thing ungain'd.” This prompts her to ask the ingenuous question, “Are you a-weary of me?” (4.2.7)—a desperate plea for reassurance, an aching display of vulnerability.

Cressida's vulnerability is visible long before she loses her virginity. The soliloquy in act 1, scene 2 in which she reveals her decision to “hold … off” because “men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is” is much debated (1.2.289). Her economic philosophy—commodity inflation through scarcity—may indicate her clear-eyed understanding of her society's fiscal attitude (and the play's commercial imagery): sex has “a market value and she is determined to get full price.”⁶⁶ Equally, it may be an attempt to avoid being turned into a commodity like Helen.⁶⁷ It may be a sad realization, of the kind exaggerated playfully by Rosalind: “men are April when they woo, December when they wed; maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives” (As You Like It 4.1.147-49). It may be Trojan cynicism in a milder form: disillusion, antiromance. It may be philosophical pragmatism, like that expressed by the Friar in Much Ado about Nothing: “what we have we prize not to the worth / Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost, / Why then we rack the value” (4.1.218-20).⁶⁸ However, I see in the speech nothing but fear, sensitivity, vulnerability, and a precarious attempt at self-protection. The decision to “hold … off,” the conclusion that “though my heart's content firm love doth bear, / Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear” (Troilus and Cressida 1.2.294-95) is far from being the coquettish ploy of a manipulative minx: it is the most insecure women, not the most confident, who conceal their feelings. Cressida, critics argue convincingly, is fearful. And it is in this speech that we first see such insecurity.

Throughout the play, Cressida engages in deflection and self-protection, and, unusually for Shakespearean heroines, her “wit” is a public image, concealing insecurity rather than revealing confidence.⁶⁹ She relies on this faculty to protect herself from Pandarus' plots and prurience in act 1, scene 2. When she abandons it in act 3, scene 2, confessing love for Troilus in speeches of uncensored, naked honesty, she feels vulnerable: “Where is my wit? I know not what I speak” (3.2.151). On delivery to the Greek camp in act 4, scene 5, she is initially and unusually silent, an indication of her bewilderment as she is exposed to the osculatory equivalent of gang rape; she regains and uses her wit to deflect kisses from Patroclus and Ulysses.

Wit for Cressida is self-protective not “self-expressive,” as Grace Tiffany argues.⁷⁰ (Consequently, it is open to misinterpretation. Ulysses' reaction, “a woman of quick sense,” uses “sense” as sensuality rather than wit.)⁷¹ In an article full of cogent insights, Tiffany points out that Cressida fights against self-expression.⁷² A chameleon in speech and behavior, Cressida adapts to her audience, according to Adams.⁷³ She is salacious with Pandarus, teasing with the generals; initially aloof and inaccessible to Troilus, as befits the role in which he has cast her (courtly beloved), she subsequently adopts his hyperbolic rhetoric when exchanging vows. This willingness to adjust linguistic self is painfully in contrast to a character like Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew for whom verbal honesty is “psychologically necessary for … survival.”⁷⁴

A large part of Cressida's problem with identity comes from the play's central question: “What's aught but as 'tis valued?” (2.2.52). Unfortunately, this question means different things to men and women. To the men in the play it means, “What value does anything have but that which I assign it?” To the women it means, “What value do I have but that which is assigned me?” Thus, for women the question can only be tragic. The misogynist imagery in Troilus and Cressida creates a situation in which men are represented as valuing women little, yet insistent that they be as they are valued.⁷⁵

Cressida's value, like her language, fluctuates in the play, denying her a stable identity. As daughter of a traitor, she is compromised;⁷⁶ as inamorata of a prince, she is enhanced. As virgin, she is valued; as deflowered female, she is not. As goods (a pearl) her rate, like Helen's, is unstable (“chapmen … / Dispraise the thing that they desire to buy”; 4.1.76-77) and beyond her control, for objects cannot decide their own value. Cressida is unequivocally an object: she is traded from Pandarus to Troilus to Diomedes to the Greek generals to Diomedes to Calchas to Diomedes.⁷⁷

Abandoned, objectified, and abused, Cressida has no personal sense of value. Troilus deifies Cressida, enthrones her as a goddess, and then blames her for not living up to that image. Like Diomedes, like most abusers, he is a combination of the two leading roles that Bottom so coveted—tyrant and lover. Shakespeare gives us a classic profile of the psychologies in an abusive relationship.

“WORDS, WORDS, MERE WORDS”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones / But words will never hurt me,” asserts the children's playground chant, defiantly but erroneously. Quite simply, words wound. Hence censorship (in both early modern and contemporary society); hence the category of “verbal abuse”; hence Supreme Court action against racist speech, hate speech, “fighting speech”—the kind of speech whose illocutionary force exempts it from protection by the First Amendment.

The category of illocutionary speech was introduced by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words.⁷⁸ In Austin's definition, illocutionary speech is a deed, an utterance that enacts, speech that does what it says at the time of saying, such as a judge saying, “I sentence you.” It is distinct from perlocutionary speech, which, as its prefix indicates, leads to effects later; since these effects are not synchronous with the speech act, perlocutionary speech is not constituted as a deed. Judith Butler builds on Austin's work to examine forms of illocutionary speech in contemporary American law (racist speech, homosexual self-definition, pornography). Butler's interest is not legal but linguistic: the constative, metaleptic status of hate speech as discriminatory action or attack, the ways in which “linguistic injury acts like physical injury,” the ways in which racist speech is a “verbal assault.”⁷⁹ Citing Toni Morrison, Butler agrees that “oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence.”⁸⁰ Simply put, language has agency.

Butler's premise is directly relevant to the topic of verbal abuse. We are linguistic beings, as nominalist narratives such as Genesis and psychoanalytic authors such as Lacan remind us. Formed in and by language, defined in and by speech, we can therefore be injured by words. In Troilus and Cressida, the scenes between men and women (Helen, Cressida, Cassandra, Andromache) illustrate a number of different ways in which speech can wound.

To readers of Greek drama, Hector, the Trojan warrior-hero par excellence, is equally famous for his domestic role as beloved husband of Andromache. In Troilus and Cressida act 1, scene 2, we are offered a glimpse of Hector's private life, but it is a picture of masculine power and petulant temper rather than marital bliss. Alexander reveals that the usually patient Hector was moved to anger because Ajax had defeated him in the previous day's battle. Hector's anger manifests itself as violence: “he chid Andromache and strook his armorer” (1.2.6). Verbal violence is directed at his wife, physical violence at the servant; but both are social subordinates, Hector's property, and we know from plays like The Taming of the Shrew that violence directed at a servant functions as a reminder to the wife that “she, too, is his [the husband's] subordinate and that he could beat her if he chose.”⁸¹ Nor, despite Alexander's depiction of Hector as an exemplar of patience, is this an isolated example of ill temper. Act 5, scene 3 opens with Hector's brusque response to Andromache's petition that he unarm and shun combat: he orders her inside (5.3.4) and tells her to be quiet (5.3.7). David Bevington speculates, not unreasonably, that Andromache leaves the scene in tears.⁸² Hector's peremptory verbal domination not only reflects social control, it “enacts it,” as Butler notes, “becoming the vehicle through which that social structure is reinstated.”⁸³

Cressida, as we have seen, is similarly controlled by anger, whether by Diomedes' aposiopetic explosions or by Troilus's admonitions and reprimands. Cassandra is dismissed and ignored, and her situation illuminates by its stark contrast Cressida's acceptance of verbal mistreatment, for, if we are constituted in language, derogation is preferable to “not being addressed at all.”⁸⁴ Cressida is used to being verbally mistreated, if Pandarus's conversation is any gauge: he talks about his niece, and addresses her directly, as “it,” a pronoun used for children (3.2.33; 4.2.32-33), confronts her bluntly about sexual activity (4.2.23-24, 31-33), and tries to maneuver her into articulating sexual vocabulary (4.2.27-28).

The languorous scene between Helen and Paris in act 3, scene 1, often dismissed as an example of Helen's frivolity, idleness, and disregard for the war conducted in her name, seems an example of linguistic health when compared to the other male-female relationships and communications in the play. Paris, unlike Hector, listens and responds to his “wife”: “I would fain have arm'd today, but my Nell would not have it so” (3.1.136-37). His homely use of the diminutive here and at line 52 is in marked contrast to the other characters' talk of Helen and helps explain her interest in him: for Paris, Helen is a real-life woman, not an icon of beauty, not a disembodied “theme of honor,” not an adjunct (or loss) representing sufficient (or inadequate) manhood.⁸⁵ The couple converses: Paris shares a joke with Helen (3.1.52-53); they assess Pandarus's mood (3.1.127-30); Helen volunteers information in response to Paris's general question about Troilus (3.1.137-40); Helen compliments Paris (3.1.99-100), and he compliments her (3.1.150-54). Paris's mode of address to Helen is permissive and petitionary rather than peremptory: “Let us to Priam's hall … / Sweet Helen, I must woo you / To help unarm our Hector” (3.1.148, 149-50, my emphasis). Given his position in Troy as Helen's lord, he might put his requests more into command than entreaty—as do Hector, Troilus, and Diomedes. Instead, we have a scene of conversational give-and-take remarkable in the play for its straightforward honesty.⁸⁶ Paris's concluding expression of love—“Sweet above thought, I love thee!” (3.1.159)—seems a “thank you” to Helen for her elegant speech at lines 155-58. Helen's speech is dutiful and would not be out of place in The Taming of the Shrew—she believes a woman derives more beauty from dutiful service to a lord than from her physical appearance—but Paris's response shows that he does not take such statements for granted. The prince whose action prompted the Trojan war (his “rape” of Helen being abduction and perhaps also sexual violation) is presented by Shakespeare as the least verbally abusive partner in the play.

In act 5, scene 3, line 108, Troilus dismisses a letter from Cressida as “words, words, mere words.” The play, however, reveals that there is no such thing as a “mere” word. Injurious words and tones enact power relations as well as reflect them. That is why the performative, illocutionary nature of anger and verbal abuse constitutes such a major development in studies of abuse, as Cressida's predicament illustrates only too well.

Notes

1. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Stephen J. Milner (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), 123.

2. Claire M. Tylee, “The Text of Cressida and Every Ticklish Reader: Troilus and Cressida, the Greek Camp Scene,” Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 65; Grace Tiffany, “Not Saying No: Female Self-Erasure in Troilus and Cressida,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35 (1991): 44.

3. Simon Russell Beale, “Thersites in Troilus and Cressida,” in Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance, ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 171. See also Margaret J. Arnold, “‘Monsters in Love's Train’: Euripides and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Comparative Drama 18 (1984): 45; and Arlene N. Okerlund, “In Defense of Cressida: Character as Metaphor,” Women's Studies 7 (1980): 13.

4. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 58.

5. Philip Brockbank, ed. Players of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Russell Jackson and R. L. Smallwood, eds., Players of Shakespeare, vols. 2, 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 1993); R. L. Smallwood, ed., Players of Shakespeare, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Carol Chillington Rutter, Clamorous Voices, ed. Faith Evans (London: Women's Press, 1988).

6. Robert N. Watson, “Tragedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 327.

7. Sinfield, Faultlines, 62.

8. Janet Adelman, “‘This Is and Is Not Cressid’: The Characterization of Cressida,” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 137-38.

9. Zvi Jagendorf, “All against One in Troilus and Cressida,” English 41 (1982): 199.

10. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998).

11. Emily Detmer, “Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 273-94; Helen M. Ostovich, “‘Our Views Must Now Be Different’: Imprisonment and Friendship in Clarissa,” Modern Language Quarterly 52 (1991): 153-69.

12. K. J. Wilson, When Violence Begins at Home (Alameda, Calif.: Hunter House, 1997), 252; Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Wilson reminds us that not all patriarchal cultures are misogynist. “Although the earliest writings of Greece, Rome and Israel contain and justify female subordination, they are not misogynous. This attitude came later in the Greek poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e., in the satires and poetry of the first century a.d. in Rome, and in the Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Old Testament from the second century b.c.e. to the third century a.d. Women would then be stigmatized as innately evil” (252).

13. Morris Palmer Tilley, ed., A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), W644.

14. Stephen M. Morgan, Conjugal Terrorism (Palo Alto, Calif.: R and E Research Associates, 1982), 6.

15. Patricia Evans, The Verbally Abusive Relationship (Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Media Corporation, 1992), 81.

16. Patricia Evans, Verbal Abuse Survivors Speak Out (Holbrook, Mass.: Bob Adams Publishers, 1993), 17. I use the masculine possessive pronoun here since this essay concentrates on male abusers of women. Abuse, however, is a hierarchical rather than a gendered phenomenon. Frances Dolan shows that Katherine treats servants in The Taming of the Shrew in a manner not dissimilar to Petruchio's treatment of her. Dolan concludes: “The play suggests that persons with power over others often abuse that power, relying on violence to assert themselves” (Dolan, The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts [Boston: Bedford Books, 1996], 24). Thus, abuse can exist in same-sex relationships; in Mistress Ford's and Mistress Page's treatment of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor; and in Sir Toby's, Maria's, and Andrew Aguecheek's treatment of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Female “nagging” (shrewishness) in patriarchal cultures is not considered abusive because the power relations are unequal. The shrewish wife is not taking advantage of a powerless individual, nor does law or custom support her attempts at control.

17. Evans, Verbally Abusive Relationship, 17.

18. The information in this and subsequent paragraphs comes from Evans, Verbally Abusive Relationship and Verbal Abuse Survivors; Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them (New York: Bantam Books, 1986); Morgan, Conjugal Terrorism; and Wilson, When Violence Begins at Home.

19. Evans, Verbally Abusive Relationship, 105.

20. Ibid., 82.

21. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 2.1.170-71. All further references to Shakespearean plays will be to this edition.

22. See Shirley Nelson Garner, “The Taming of the Shrew: Inside or Outside of the Joke?” in “Bad” Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney (Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1998), 106: “Since I am outside the community for whom the joke is made and do not share its implicit values, I do not participate in its humor.” For a good example of New Criticism's positive interpretation of Shrew as ludic, see Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London and New York: Methuen, 1974), 41-62.

23. Recent critics have not been slow to point out that Desdemona transgresses most of the conduct-book prescriptions for obedient wifely behavior, conforming more to the stereotype of the “shrew”; Emilia, by contrast, is an egregious example of the dutiful wife.

24. In the 1997 production of Othello at the Landsbergh Theatre in Washington, D.C., Emilia was played very clearly as an abused wife, her posture a combination of brainwashed passivity and terror. Sinfield argues that Desdemona is an abused wife: her strong, confident demeanor in act 1, when she admits she was half the wooer in courtship, and expresses (in the F text) eagerness to consummate the marriage, crumbles by act 5 when she becomes egregiously passive and “allows herself to be killed with slight protest. … The final Desdemona, who submits to Othello's abuse and violence takes the posture of other abused women in texts of the period” (Faultlines, 53). See also Barbara Hodgdon, “Race-ing Othello, Re-Engendering White-Out,” in Shakespeare: The Movie, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (London: Routledge, 1997), 37-41.

25. Frances E. Dolan, The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), 14-24, 218-25, 244-303.

26. The atmosphere in the BBC film (directed by Jonathan Miller) was threatening throughout, as the manipulative verbal treatment threatened to become physical: Cressida was forced into a semisupine position in her tent, with Diomedes pressing toward her, leaning over her, physically restraining her. A similar atmosphere of constraint was created by the set in the RSC production of 1990, directed by Sam Mendes. Cressida's tent was represented by steel ladders, and she looked as if she were behind prison bars.

27. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 5:771-77.

28. Ibid., 5:792-94.

29. Ibid., 5:918-31.

30. Clifford P. Lyons, “The Trysting Scenes in Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespearean Studies, ed. Alwin Thaler and Norman Sanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1964), 115.

31. David Bevington, ed., Troilus and Cressida, Arden 3 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 357.

32. Lorraine Helms, “‘Still Wars and Lechery’: Shakespeare and the Last Trojan Woman,” in Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, ed. Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 38.

33. See John Donne's Elegy 16, which talks of “my words' masculine persuasive force,” where the adjective “masculine” reveals that the persuasive force is not simply rhetorical. Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). On rape and “romance” in Henry V, see Laurie E. Maguire, “‘Household Kates,’” in Gloriana's Face, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 129-65; and Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation (London: Routledge, 1997), 196.

34. Machiavelli, The Prince, 124, 123.

35. Lance Wilcox, “Katherine of France as Victim and Bride,” Shakespeare Studies 17 (1985): 61-88.

36. Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

37. Helms, “Still Wars and Lechery,” 30.

38. In Aphra Behn's The Rover, Florinda is threatened by “the licens'd lust of common soldiers” (my emphasis). Behn, The Rover (London: Methuen, 1993), 9.

39. The desire for acquiescence in violence recurs throughout early modern poetry. In “Batter My Heart,” Donne presents himself to God as a woman begging to be raped. Thomas Carew's “A Married Woman” promises that “no rough sway / Shall once appeare, if she but learne t'obay” (The Poems of Thomas Carew with his Masque of Coelum Britannicum, ed. R. Dunlap [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949; 1964], 115-16). In Elaine Hobby's paraphrase of Carew's line, “if she will give her ‘free’ consent, he will not be rough with her” (Hobby, “The Politics of Gender” in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell, ed. Thomas N. Corns [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 45). In The Law's Resolution of Woman's Rights (London, 1632), T. E. condemns situations such as Carew's: “When sweet words, fair promises, tempting, flattering, swearing, lying will not serve to beguile the poor soul, then with rough handling, violence and plain strength of arm they are, or have been heretofore, rather made prisoners to lust's thieves than wives and companions to faithful honest lovers” (quoted in Hobby, “Politics of Gender,” 46).

40. The situation is particularly marked in Measure for Measure where Isabella's vocation as a nun admirably equips her for martyrdom, a step she conspicuously refuses to take. Shakespeare's project in all three “problem” plays seems to me the revision of women's role in myth. Cressida is reassessed in Troilus and Cressida, both in her own right and as a reflection of the Helen of Troy story (like Helen, as a woman in an enemy camp, her strategy for survival shows how reputations are made and marred); Lucrece is reassessed in Measure for Measure where Isabella fails to follow her example; and Helen of Troy is assessed again in All's Well That Ends Well where, unhistorically rejected, the heroine places Bertram in the role of adored and pursued mythic creature only to find that he doesn't like the situation one iota.

41. Tiffany, “Not Saying No,” 46; Beale, “Thersites,” 171.

42. Tylee, “Text of Cressida,” 73.

43. Robert Wilcher, cited by Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 109.

44. Irving Wardle, cited by Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 113.

45. Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 113.

46. Richard Dillane, cited by Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 114.

47. Lars Engle, Shakespeare and Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 162.

48. Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 55.

49. Ibid., 62; Tylee, “Text of Cressida,” 73.

50. Lyons, “Trysting Scenes,” 111.

51. For a good analysis of this line, see Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 40-41.

52. On courtly love as sexual harassment, see Gary Walter, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London: Longman, 1986), 81-82, who observes that Petrarchan poetry “provides a discourse of control and domination. While the lover idealizes his beloved he is intent on controlling her and what she stands for. … In short, the Petrarchan mistress is less the subject of eroticization than power.”

53. The BBC film, clearly uncomfortable with such an exit, follows act 4, scene 2 with scene 4, so that Troilus and Cressida can react together after the news of her exchange for Antenor. Bevington offers a sobering survey of Troilus's conduct in act 4, scene 2: “His perspective is unremittingly male. He scarcely bothers to consult Cressida's feelings or predicament” (Troilus and Cressida, 42-43).

54. Stephen J. Lynch, “Shakespeare's Cressida,” Philological Quarterly 63 (1984): 363.

55. Okerlund, “In Defense of Cressida,” 9. See also Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 52-53.

56. Howard C. Adams, “What Cressid Is,” in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, ed. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (New York: Mellen Press, 1991), 85.

57. Arnold, “‘Monsters in Love's Train’,” 53 n. 26. See also Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 41.

58. This is the point in the relationship at which we first see Diomedes' manipulative behavior.

59. Evans, Verbal Abuse Survivors, 64.

60. We might note that Troilus's first commands to Cressida are postcoital: he thrice orders her back to bed. Adams and Bevington interpret this not as conjugal-style concern but as protective condescension. See Adams, “What Cressid Is,” 83; Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 41.

61. Nikki Stiller, The Figure of Cressida in British and American Literature: Transformations of a Literary Type (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 1990), 62.

62. Kenneth Muir, ed., Troilus and Cressida (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 67.

63. Okerlund, “In Defense of Cressida,” 8.

64. Carolyn Asp, “In Defense of Cressida,” Studies in Philology 74 (1977): 409; Adams, “What Cressid Is,” 81-87; Sharon M. Harris, “Feminism and Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘If I Be False …,’” Women's Studies 18 (1990): 74; Tiffany, “Not Saying No,” 48.

65. It is this concessional lifesaving aspect of courtly love that Shakespeare satirizes in Much Ado 5.4.95-97: “I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption.”

66. Lynch, “Shakespeare's Cressida,” 359.

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

68. The Friar's philosophy simply inverts the sequence of Cressida's: he moves from possession to lack, she from lack to possession, but both conclude with value, believing that value is affected by circumstance. Okerlund, who cites the Friar's speech, notes soberly that what critics deem “wisdom” in the Friar is called “profligacy” in Cressida (“In Defense of Cressida,” 9).

69. Adams, “What Cressid Is,” 80; Tiffany, “Not Saying No,” 48.

70. Tiffany, “Not Saying No,” 50.

71. The problem is not one of misinterpretation but of metalepsis: language equals deed. If the only modest woman is a silent woman, a speaking woman who uses speech to protest innocence is ipso facto sexual. This is now a commonplace in early modern drama, but nowhere is it better illustrated than in the scene of Cressida's arrival in the Greek camp. Ulysses' reaction is an example of what we might call “Anita Hill syndrome,” where speech acts are sexualized: “In speaking, Hill displays her agency; in speaking of sexuality, she displays her sexual agency; hence, any claim made against the sexualization of discourse from that position of the active sexualization of discourse is rhetorically refuted by the act of speech itself.” For “Hill,” read “Cressida.” In both cases the result is a “performative contradiction”; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 83.

72. Tiffany, “Not Saying No,” 48.

73. Adams, “What Cressid Is,” 75-76.

74. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 108.

75. Gayle Greene, “Women on Trial in Shakespeare and Webster: ‘The Mettle of (Their) Sex,’” Topic 36 (1982): 12.

76. Contrast the situation in As You Like It where Duke Frederick banishes Rosalind on the grounds that her father is a traitor. Rosalind, confident in her identity and sense of self-worth, succinctly defends herself (“Yet your mistrust cannot make me a traitor”; 1.3.56) in a way unthinkable for Cressida. Whereas Duke Frederick's charge of treason against Duke Senior was blatantly mendacious, Calchas, in defecting from the Trojans to the Greeks, is undeniably a traitor, however much he may wish to separate name from identity: “I have … incurr'd a traitor's name” (3.3.5-6). Calchas's position as traitor—the name and the thing—places his daughter, Cressida, abandoned in Troy, in a difficult ontological and political position.

77. Tylee, “Text of Cressida,” 70. The value debate is not neatly polarized, however, because Cressida is caught in the play's cross fire between value as monetary and moral, between different standards for men and women, Greeks and Trojans. In that her Trojan father has defected to the Greeks, Cressida is like Ajax, half-Greek, half-Trojan. Chaucer's poem makes much of Calchas's ontological transfer: “ich was / Trojan” (4:71-72; my emphasis), “what eiled the / To ben a Grek, syn thow art born Trojan?” (4:331-32). In Shakespeare's play Hector laments that he cannot say of Ajax, “This hand is Grecian all, / And this is Troyan; the sinews of this leg / All Greek, and this all Troy” (4.5.125-27).

78. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

79. Butler, Excitable Speech, 4.

80. Ibid., 6.

81. Dolan, Taming of the Shrew; 19.

82. Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 32.

83. Butler, Excitable Speech, 18.

84. Ibid., 27.

85. On Menelaus's loss of Helen, see Bevington, Troilus and Cressida, 29.

86. Stage productions offer many variants on this scene: indolence, love, foreplay, selfishness, hypocrisy (Paris does not fight in the war he began); a scene of conversation between Helen and Paris interrupted by Pandarus; a scene of conversation between Paris and Pandarus interrupted by Helen; a public scene; a private scene (in the 1996 to 1997 RSC production directed by Ian Judge, Helen and Paris entered naked from a Turkish bath).

This essay was written during tenure of a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am grateful to the Folger for its financial support, and to Dympna Callaghan and A. E. B. Coldiron for helpful discussions while this essay was in progress.