[In the following excerpt, Marsh focuses on a single passage from Troilus and Cressida (I.ii.249-86) which, he contends, shows Cressida to be both a tease and a sincere lover. Marsh explains that this apparent contradiction in fact reveals, on one hand, the stereotypical male view of women as temptresses, and on the other, Cressida's genuine feelings for Troilus.]

ANALYSIS: TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, 1, II, 249-86

The extract we have chosen to study shows Cressida in two contexts: first in her uncle's company, then alone.

PAND:
You are such another woman! one knows not at what ward you lie.
CRESS:
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.
PAND:
Say one of your watches.
CRESS:
Nay, I'll watch you for that; and that's one of the chiefest of them too. If I cannot ward what I would not have hit, I can watch you for telling how I took the blow—unless it swell past hiding, and then it's past watching.
PAND:
You are such another.
                                                  Enter Boy.
BOY:
Sir, my lord would instantly speak with you.
PAND:
Where?
BOY:
At your own house. There he unarms him.
PAND:
Good boy, tell him I come. [Exit Boy.]
I doubt he be hurt. Fare ye well, good niece.
CRESS:
Adieu, uncle.
PAND:
I'll be with you, niece, by and by.
CRESS:
To bring, uncle?
PAND:
Ay, a token from Troilus.
                                                  Exit Pandarus.
CRESS:
By the same token, you are a bawd.
Words, vows, gifts, tears and love's full sacrifice
He offers in another's enterprise:
But more in Troilus thousandfold I see
Than in the glass of Pandar's praise may be.
Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she belov'd knows naught that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.
That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
‘Achievement is command; ungained, beseech.’
Then, though my heart's contents firm love doth bear,
Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.
                                                  Exit.

(Troilus and Cressida [The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, 1998], 1, ii, 249-86)

This is the final section of a long scene in which Cressida has the role of onlooker, inquiring about and commenting on events that occurred elsewhere, gossip, and public figures who pass across the stage before her. The scene's first episode shows Cressida and her servant Alexander. She asks for news and Alexander tells her the latest about Hector. Pandarus's entry sets up the contest of wits between uncle and niece: he praises and Cressida derides Troilus, or she praises others in his stead. Pandarus's most outrageous claim is that Helen would like to exchange Paris for Troilus; her response is to call Troilus a ‘sneaking fellow’.

Alexander leaves soon after Pandarus's arrival. One by one, Aeneas, Antenor, Hector, Paris, Helenus and Troilus, followed by a group of soldiers, all pass across the stage, battle-weary, without speaking. Pandarus's ‘boy’ arrives with a message from Troilus, then leaves. Finally, Cressida is left alone to reveal her thoughts to the audience in soliloquy. The scene is rather contrived and theatrical, then: in the central episode, we watch a dumb-show, and listen to the audience (Pandarus, Cressida) giving a witty commentary. The opening of the scene, with its gossip about Hector, harks forward to watching the warriors return; the end of the scene harks back to what they have just seen—Troilus's return. This is a formal structure which highlights the artificiality of their transparent banter, and highlights the element of spectacle in which we watch great events with watchers.

A glance at the text on the page tells us that the first part of our extract is in prose, then it changes to verse for Cressida's soliloquy. The change is not merely one to the naturalistic rhythm of blank verse, however. Cressida speaks in metrical rhyming couplets and the audience cannot fail to notice the change as soon as Pandarus leaves the stage and she has made her parting comment on him (‘you are a bawd’). Cressida begins with four strong stresses, ‘Words, vows, gifts, tears,’ which give startling emphasis to her oration. Then her speech takes on an iambic regularity that is only mildly broken, for emphasis, twice. First, ‘Women’ in line 277 reverses the foot to emphasise both the change of subject, and the proverbial style of Cressida's thought—a generalisation about her whole sex. Secondly, ‘Nothing’ reverses the first foot of line 286. Perhaps this conveys her determination to control and hide her real feelings.

However, the most noticeable elements in Cressida's poetry are the initial demand for our attention, with four strong stresses, and the regularity of her couplets for the remainder of the speech. Similarly, the diction is direct and clear, with very little imagery. Cressida describes Pandarus's praise of Troilus as a ‘glass’ reflecting him, saying she prefers the reality to the image; she expresses the courting lover's praise by saying ‘women are angels’; and she uses a common figure of speech in which her heart ‘carries’ love as its ‘content’ (with a pun on content as happiness). These, however, are plain and common tropes which do little more than express Cressida's meaning neatly. Cressida's language is also plain and clear: ‘won’, ‘done’, ‘joy’, ‘prize’, ‘sweet’—she constructs her theory of love out of monosyllables in everyday use.

We have noticed a surprising lack of features in Cressida's soliloquy: regular couplets, no remarkable imagery, ordinary language. The question is, what effect does this plainness produce? To answer, we need to look at the prose of her exchanges with Pandarus.

Pandarus mentions ‘ward’ (position of guard—a fencing term), and Cressida elaborates on the metaphor. Her list of ways in which she must guard herself is full of sexual innuendo. Cressida jokingly describes herself as subject to constant, multiple attacks on her chastity, emphasising her alertness (‘at a thousand watches’ suggests that she dare not even sleep). At the same time she implies her sexual interest in the secondary meaning of ‘Upon my back’, and the implication that it is desire that keeps her awake. Pandarus enjoys this witty elaboration and invites more of the same, whereupon she obliges with a further complicated play on ‘ward’ coupled with the newly-introduced pun-word ‘watch’ and ‘watches’. Cressida brings in an archery image, using ‘hit’ (= arrow into target) for loss of virginity, and makes obvious references to pregnancy which might ‘swell past hiding’. When Pandarus leaves, promising a ‘token’ from Troilus, Cressida continues in the same vein with a pun on ‘token’ in her first line. Clearly, Cressida's witty, elaborate repartee is dense with metaphor, plays on words and doubled or even trebled connotations. There could hardly be a greater contrast in style between the prose Cressida speaks in her uncle's presence, and her closing soliloquy.

This contrast highlights both sides of a split in Cressida's tone and behaviour: on the one side, artificiality, trivial levity and lightness of emotion are emphasised in the characters' witty banter; on the other side, the plainness and rhymed form of the soliloquy emphasise sincerity and seriousness. This scene is Cressida's first appearance. The audience is encouraged to judge her as a gossip, a witty tease and a coquette. For all that we laugh at scene ii, enjoying Pandarus's discomfiture and Cressida's wit and innuendo, we would nonetheless be reaching negative judgments about her as a woman. In other words, we are encouraged to fit Cressida into one of our own, pre-existing stereotypes of feminine behaviour: that of the coquette. In this context, the sudden change of form, and the plain sincerity of her soliloquy, comes as a considerable surprise and revelation. It is typical of Cressida throughout the play, that she unsettles judgments we have been encouraged to form.

The soliloquy is a paradox: it both undermines and confirms the stereotype. It both reveals that she loves Troilus (‘my heart's content firm love doth bear’); and confesses and justifies her teasing behaviour (‘Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear’). At the same time, Cressida sets out a specific understanding of male and female roles in courtship and sex; and states the duality that, in one form or another, has influenced the problematic characterisations of both Helena from All's Well that Ends Well and Isabella from Measure for Measure. Cressida says:

                              Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.

Cressida is not, of course, telling us what women are. She tells us what men think women are, pointing out the two contradictory stereotypes of women that dominate men's relations with the opposite sex. Cressida contrasts ‘angels’—with connotations of purity and religious faith—with the monosyllabic, brutal phrase ‘Things won are done’. This coarse phrase treats women (and sex) as ‘things’, and is phrased to imply war and conquest. Remember that one of the first features of this play that drew our attention, was the ironic interplay between love and war.¹

Cressida's response to this stereotyping, is to use the power of her position as thoroughly as she is able by extending the period of ‘wooing’ for as long as possible. During this time, she can ‘hold … off’ and pretend indifference, tease and manipulate. Ironically, however, she is similar to Troilus in that she fears the time after courtship. She, like Troilus, is filled with uncertainty about love: she knows the pattern of courtship, but has no trust in what will follow. Like Troilus, she seems to have no clear concept of a lasting sexual relationship. The values and language of her society have taught her to feel a deep mistrust about this—if she once gives up her sexual power, she expects to be undervalued afterwards because ‘Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.’

Her fears and those of Troilus correspond quite closely. Remember that Troilus feared how ‘blood decays’ and mistrusted any woman's ability to ‘feed for aye her lamp and flames of love’. Here, Cressida expresses the same fearful belief that sexual pleasure will fade:

That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.

Cressida tells us, in fact, that she feels love; but she has learned cynicism from her society—and it is this cynicism that conditions her behaviour.

In this extract, then, we find that paradox and contrasts in style and mood, in Cressida's character, first encourage our judgment, then unsettle us. Two further examples confirm that Cressida provokes this process throughout the play. Turning to Act 3, scene ii, we find Cressida's confession of love (lines 114-29). She seems embarrassed, anxious and sincere in this speech. Her teasing defences crumble (‘Why have I blabb'd? Who shall be true to us / When we are so unsecret to ourselves?’); she acts out of stereotype—acknowledging her departure from the feminine role (‘I wish'd myself a man, / Or that we women had men's privilege / Of speaking first’); and acts in every way as if her love is so powerful that it has overcome her restraint.

The conflict between desire and self-control is further acted out as Cressida tries to leave, and her language is peppered with terms for wisdom and foolishness, strength and weakness, which express her evident fear of the consequences of submission. The audience is clearly invited to see a passionate, loving girl bashfully overwhelmed. It is an alluring, romantic idea: passionate love sweeps aside the cynical manipulations learned from a corrupt and artful society.

Cressida then says:

Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love,
And fell so roundly to a large confession
To angle for your thoughts.

(3, ii, 148-50)

Well, did she show ‘craft’? Was all that pretty speechifying, in which passion swept restraint aside, an act? Here, again, the audience is encouraged to form a value-judgment of Cressida; but she immediately throws our judgment back into confusion. Notice that this example shows the process working in reverse. Our extract shows a negative judgment unsettled by Cressida's suddenly sincere soliloquy. Here, an attractive, positive judgment is unsettled by her sudden cynicism.

What happens at the end of the play? Cressida's final appearance is in Act 5, scene ii, when Troilus and Ulysses observe her tryst with Diomed. In this scene we witness another pretty performance as Cressida acts out reluctance, but gives Diomed the sleeve as a pledge. We hear her endearments (‘sweet honey Greek’, ‘my sweet guardian’, and so on), and she plays on Diomed's competitive spirit by building up the importance of the pledge (‘You shall not have it, Diomed …’ Twas one's that lov'd me better than you will’). At the same time, on the two occasions when Diomed threatens to leave her, she calls him back.

We are encouraged to see Cressida's behaviour as that of a false coquette and nothing more. Thersites underlines every stage of the process (‘And any man may sing her, if he can take her clef: she's noted’); Diomed defines her clearly (‘You are forsworn’, ‘Fo, fo, adieu, you palter’ and ‘I do not like this fooling’); and Troilus's comments show the enormity of her betrayal (‘O beauty, where is thy faith?’). With all this, the audience is ready to condemn Cressida out-of-hand.

Following Diomed's exit Cressida speaks a further six lines, in soliloquy again (although she is unwittingly overheard by Troilus and Ulysses on this occasion). This final speech expresses shame and regret, and tells us that at least some of her reluctance with Diomed was not an act. She bids a sad ‘farewell’ to Troilus and admits that ‘One eye yet looks on thee’. The rest of her speech defines her betrayal clearly. She is in ‘error’ and because this ‘error’ leads she must ‘err’, which is ‘turpitude’. Furthermore, Cressida explains her weakness as the weakness of women: ‘Ah, Poor our sex! this fault in us I find: / The error of our eye directs our mind’ (5, ii, 113-18). This seems to mean that the superficial, physical attraction of Diomed is enough to master her ‘mind’ and force her to betray the better part of herself. Thersites cynically—and correctly—summarises Cressida's speech: ‘My mind is now turn'd whore’ (5, ii, 120); and Troilus's subsequent speeches are among the most powerful of this painful play.

On the other hand, Cressida's final lines do complicate our judgment. Yes, she admits her fault, and has no excuse. At the same time, Cressida again reveals a divided self, with ‘one eye’ fighting her ‘other eye’ which sees with her ‘heart’ and overcomes her ‘mind’. She castigates herself for ‘error’ and ‘turpitude’ just as she did for having ‘blabb'd’ and being a ‘fool’, in Act 3, scene ii. Why do we find Cressida's divided self charming when she submits to Troilus, and reprehensible when she submits to Diomed? Is this the conclusion of the whole of Cressida's characterisation, that women are, simply, too weak: it's not her fault because she is only a woman?

To further complicate our judgments, we may remember the soliloquy in our extract: there, Cressida described her situation in terms of her assigned gender-role, and declared her intention of acting up to the self men have allotted to her. She would tease and inflame Troilus's desires in order to maximise her sexual power—and all in the interests of her true feelings, for she loved Troilus. In Act 5, scene ii, Cressida again follows the role assigned to her. It is the ‘fault’ and weakness of ‘poor our sex’ to be inconstant. We can hear the insistent hammers of male expectation, brutally defining her throughout the scene: Thersites and Ulysses expect no better outcome, as their comments show. Thersites is brutal, while Ulysses simply regards the entire business as predictable. When it is over, he says to Troilus ‘All's done, my lord’, and asks ‘Why stay we then?’

Cressida's final lines, then, do not upset the predominantly male judgment on her—she admits her fault in the same terms Ulysses would employ to define her. On the other hand, these lines refuse to lie down and go to sleep: they evoke our sympathy, or our regret, for the tension Cressida's behaviour and speeches have conveyed throughout the play—that between behaviour, assigned roles, and natural emotion; or between artifice and sincerity. We cannot simply dismiss her as Thersites does: ‘Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion.’ In her way, Cressida is like Helena and Isabella: her characterisation maintains two competing discourses, and these different versions of her reality are not resolved. In one discourse, she is simply a coquette and a betrayer; an inconstant woman who breaks Troilus's heart. In the other discourse, however, we learn of a split self, always at war with itself and striving for power and control, while caught between assigned gender-roles. Cressida is unable to escape the condemnation of others and herself.

A full apology for Cressida would also look at Act 4, scene ii, where her prediction that Troilus will tire of her once she submits, may seem to be coming true; and would take into account the fact that Troilus never considers offering marriage. Our point is simply that the pressures of gender-stereotyping have acted so crushingly upon Cressida, and that this provides an alternative discourse. The audience is therefore denied satisfaction or complacency. …

CONCLUSIONS

In Troilus and Cressida, the dominant discourse is male and is carried on by a variety of voices. The main contributors are Troilus himself, who is allotted the most sympathetic role at the end of Act 5, scene ii with his extended speeches of disillusionment and pain; Thersites, Pandarus and Ulysses. Cressida not only receives her condemnation from the male discourse, as ‘noted’ and a ‘whore’; her ‘turpitude’ is also condemned in male terms out of her own mouth. The Greeks discuss her sexuality (‘her wanton spirits look out / At every joint and motive of her body’ [Ulysses, 4, v, 57-8]), and even the apparent sincerity of her love counts against her because of the bitter irony of her vows. See, for example, how she calls down history's curse ‘as false as Cressid’ on herself, should she betray Troilus; and repeats the same call when told that they must part: ‘O you gods divine, / Make Cressid's name the very crown of falsehood / If ever she leave Troilus!’ (4, ii, 100-2).

In all three plays, this male discourse about women hinges on the same polarisation of stereotypes. From the male point of view, women are either saints or whores. The economic and social power of virginity is emphasised, as is its use as a sexual weapon. In All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure, chastity is also associated with a significant theme of religion and faith. In other words, women are pure, perfect and divine, as long as they are chaste. On the other hand, they lose all value and become objects of revulsion and contempt when their purity is called in question. The power and cruelty of the ‘whore’ stereotype is apparent throughout Troilus and Cressida, and Cressida is thoroughly condemned in these terms. To show its power in All's Well that Ends Well [The Arden edition of the works of William Shakespeare, edited by G. K. Hunter, 1959], we have only to remember Bertram's slighting reference to Diana as one of several ‘parcels of dispatch’, a ‘business’ which he fears ‘to hear of it hereafter’ (see 4, iii, 87-94); and the insulting terms in which he publishes her character before the King:

                                                                                She's impudent, my lord,
And was a common gamester to the camp.

(5, iii, 186-7)

In Measure for Measure we should notice that Lucio regards marrying the woman he got with child as ‘pressing to death, / Whipping, and hanging’ (5, i, 520-1), and the Duke clearly regards this as a fit punishment also. However, to see how sanctimoniously male condemnation of impurity can weigh, look at the Duke's exchanges with Juliet in Act 2, scene iii, where she is obliged to say that she ‘take[s] the shame with joy’ (2, iii, 36), while Angelo has referred to her simply, as ‘the fornicatress’ (2, ii, 23).

The women in these plays, then, are forced to steer a course determined by these two, polarised, assigned stereotypes; and they must be seen, and see themselves, as fitting either one or the other, either saint or whore.

On the other hand, we have found an alternative discourse in each of the plays. In the case of Helena, we meet a challenging woman who resolves to take her fate into her own hands and, at times, expresses a revolutionary attitude of independence. From then on, we are never allowed to settle on a single ‘truth’ about her character—whether she is practical, resourceful and manipulative (which she certainly is), or pure and divinely aided. In Isabella we have found thornier and darker undercurrents: this chaste maid judges with double standards, and her sexual continence is matched by the incontinence of her puritan wrath and righteousness. In Cressida, there are both: the object of a courtly lover's devotion who swears faithful love with apparent sincerity, yet at the same time an oversexed whore, too weak to resist damning herself. Neither of these Cressidas is allowed to disappear, and both are perceptions founded on polarised extremes. It is significant that Troilus himself highlights this point when he witnesses her betrayal. Troilus cannot cope with his own stereotypes, and cannot fit his painful experience of Cressida anywhere in his concepts of femininity where it makes sense. This is why he harps on the unresolved question of her identity:

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

(5, ii, 153-9)

In Chapter 2, we noted how Troilus's mind sheers away from this puzzle, and focuses on battle-rage and patriotism instead, at the end of the play.

It is an important common element in these plays, then, that they exhibit all the signs of an incipient, subversive, alternative version of gender-politics, raising critical questions about courtship, male-dominated sexual and marital mores; and that the female characters are coerced by their assigned saint/whore duality, yet all escape its definition. Finally, that all of these issues are left open, in an unhappy, uncertain, unresolved state, in all three plays.

METHODS OF ANALYSIS

In this Chapter we have made use of the same approaches as in Chapters 1 and 2. This chapter had the avowed purpose of analysing three women, however, so we have had a different clear question in mind before we approached the text in detail. This time, we asked: What can we reveal about femaleness and feminine attitudes from analysing these women? In particular, we looked at the way these three characters present themselves, and at the way they see their roles in the action or in the world. This has led us to make distinctions between ‘stereotype’ roles—the parts men expect women to play—and other, less male ideas about female experience and behaviour.

We have used some modern terms while analysing these three characters, such as ‘gender-roles’, ‘assigned stereotypes’ and ‘gender-politics’. However, these terms have been used more as a convenience than as indicating any opinion; and there is plenty of evidence in all three texts that Shakespeare does explore these issues even though he would not have used the same words. …

Notes

1. See Chapter 1, …, where we remarked on the warlike Prologue which leads directly into Troilus's ‘unarm,’ and his complaints about love-sickness, which has rendered him ‘weaker than a woman's tear’; and Chapter 2, where Troilus's two passions—love and war—seem interchangeable.