[In the following essay, Barfoot examines the human relationships in Troilus and Cressida in relation to the “mercantile metaphor” that runs throughout the play. This metaphor, the critic contends, “suggests that we are all traders in our relationships, and, as victims and perpetrators, susceptible to the inevitable treachery that trade brings in its wake.”]

In his famous outburst towards the end of the harrowing scene in which he observes Cressida seducing Diomedes (or allowing herself to be seduced by him), Troilus shifts violently from a faith or belief in “rule in unity” to a recognition of the need henceforth to live with “bifold authority.”¹ In this speech Troilus's experience as a lover is brought into line with the experience of others in the play as warriors: that is, “wars and lechery” may teach one the same kind of lesson. Troilus may be right in a general way when he asks, during the Trojan debate, “What's aught but as 'tis valued?” (II.ii.53), but what he is on the verge of learning in V.ii is that the state of the valuer does not remain constant, nor do the circumstances of the valuation. He comes to realize that the person valued is able to rate him or herself differently from the valuation attributed by another; and the individual, as distinct from an object, is capable of opposing his own estimation of his value to that of an outside observer, and has the authority of self-esteem or self-distrust to do so.

Throughout Troilus and Cressida we find characters offering us and each other valuations of their friends and their foes and of their superiors and their inferiors, as well as of their peers and of themselves. Frequently the play implies that value should be based upon a unity of thought and action, of passion and reason, of word and deed, of what the eye beholds and what is truly there to be seen, of appearance and being, of the object or the person and the gratification of the senses.² The thing and the name, the character and the epithet, the praise and the price, the attribute and the prize should be one. “Integrity”³ and not “bifold authority” should govern the world, and the “good” should be identical with the “beautiful.”⁴ “Truth and plainness” (IV.iv.104) should indeed be the basis of worth in all human relations, and we should all be “as true as truth's simplicity, / And simpler than the infancy of truth” (III.ii.167-68) in our regular, and even in our not so regular, transactions. But we are not, and the world is not like that since neither we nor the world is composed according to the image of Troilus's vulnerable ideal. In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare is intent on exploring the consequences of this and why it is so.

The nature of transaction lies at the very core of the problem of human relationships that concerns Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida. As several other critics have suggested,⁵ this concern is signified by the prevalence of the mercantile metaphor that runs through the play, and that suggests that we are all traders in our relationships, and, as victims and perpetrators, susceptible to the inevitable treachery that trade brings in its wake. Overt instances of the metaphor are found from the first scene onwards with Troilus's fancies or fantasies (I.i.100-104); picked up unawares by Ulysses two scenes later (I.iii.358-59); returned to by Troilus in the scene of the Trojan debate (II.ii.70-71); and used by Paris in his retort to Diomedes's unexpectedly sharp response to his question “Who … deserves fair Helen best—/ Myself, or Menelaus?” (IV.i.53-54):

Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do,
Dispraise the thing that they desire to buy;
But we in silence hold this virtue well,
We'll not commend, that not intend to sell.

(IV.i.76-79)

In his farewell to Cressida, Troilus shows himself equally conscious of the marketplace, as well as, perhaps, of the dubious original connotations of “sell”:

We two, that with so many thousand sighs
Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves
With the rude brevity and discharge of one.

(IV.iv.38-40)

According to the OED, “The chief current sense” of sell, “to give up or hand over (something) to another person for money … to dispose of (merchandise, possessions, etc.) to a buyer for a price; to vend” (sense 3), was possibly preceded and long accompanied by sense 2: “To give up (a person) treacherously to his enemies; to betray (a person, a cause, country, etc.).” In other words, contrary to what one might have expected, sense 2 is not a figurative development of sense 3 (the OED quotes Henry V, II.ii.10-11, to illustrate Shakespeare's use of the word in sense 2). Troilus's lines not only imply a sudden emotional deflation in economic terms (for it appears that either the goods have lost value or the purchasing power of sighs has increased), but reflect the suspicion that in love relationships the use of the language of trade is bound to cast a venal shadow on the heart and passions.

Apart from these explicit mercantile metaphors, throughout Troilus and Cressida there are other reminders of the marketplace: Pandarus's “words pay no debts” (III.ii.55) and “how go maidenheads?” (IV.ii.23); Ulysses's reference to “peaceful commerce” in his “degree speech” (I.iii.105), and his later comment to Achilles on “All the commerce that you have had with Troy” (III.iii.204). When Achilles meets Hector he views him “limb by limb” as though, he says, “I would buy thee” (IV.v.237). At the end of the play, Pandarus, dismissed as a “broker-lackey” by Troilus—earlier he had described himself as the type of “all brokers-between” (III.ii.203)—as patron of “brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,” enacts a verbal equation between “traitors” and “traders” (V.x.37 ff.).⁶

Overall, Troilus and Cressida is concerned to press on us the view that we are all inclined to be traitors once we have something to sell, either by underselling or overselling goods, or ourselves, or others, or even merely by putting ourselves, or our goods, or others up for sale at all. When Aeneas checks himself in his praise of his fellow Trojans, he seems conscious of the treachery involved in turning oneself into a verbal billboard (I.iii.240-43). In any event, as Thersites speaking of Diomedes (I.i.89-94) reminds us, treachery is bound to come in the gap between advertisement and performance; and of this, too, Cressida complains (III.ii.83-85). At a basic level, the everyday treachery of human transactions consists of the gulf between “matter of the heart” and “words, words, mere words,” as Troilus concludes (V.iii.108). The treachery of trading, however, can only be compounded or shown up for what it is if resort is made to such vessels as “this sailing Pandar,” where one notes the pun on the homophones “sail” and “sale,” and the structurally more incisive near-homophone “selling,” “this sailing / selling Pandar” (I.i.103). This phrase in the first scene already undermines the would-be romantic turn of Troilus's first mercantile analogy with its reference to “India” and “a pearl” and “the wild and wand'ring flood”; but if we re-examine the prologue of the play, we soon realize that even there the glamour of rhetoric and diction is similarly put in question by the transformation of the “high blood” of “the princes orgulous” into a “warlike fraughtage”—a mere freight to trade in a deadly fashion for Helen and the dishonor and treachery of her ravishment.

This trade in human freight or flesh is given particular emphasis in the opening dialogue of III.iii, where the traitor Calchas uses business jargon to promote the exchange that separates the lovers. For him, the recently captured Antenor represents currency with which to purchase his daughter, Cressida, as a means of receiving recompense for his desertion: “Let him be sent, great princes,” Calchas tells the Greeks, “And he shall buy my daughter” (III.iii.27-28). It is uncertain whether Shakespeare knew that in some accounts this same Antenor was later to be a traitor to Troy, but this exchange at the heart of the play enacts the mercantile equation that hitherto had been expressed only metaphorically.⁷

It is evident that the exchange and trade-off initiated by Calchas is only one of a series that occurs in Troilus and Cressida, or is referred and alluded to, or is to be understood as underlying the whole narrative and action of the play. Paris's abduction of Helen is in retaliation for the provocative Grecian capture and retention of “an old aunt,” Hesione.⁸ In the play itself not only do we see the father buying his daughter out of the arms of one lover, ostensibly gained for her by her uncle, to dispatch her into the arms of another—and with Troilus (as well as Ulysses and Thersites) we observe that bartering transaction taking place—but we also hear of Achilles trading his place in the field for the good favor of the Trojan queen, Hecuba, and the affections of her daughter, Polyxena (III.iii.191 ff.). This particular offstage transaction is not completed, for later in Act V, with the death of Patroclus, Achilles hastens to the battlefield to complete the purchase, instead, of Polyxena's brother, Hector, whom he had already weighed up in IV.v as a potential piece of merchandise. Hector, who had earlier taken part in a desultory encounter with Ajax (the not very satisfactory commercial substitute for Achilles in the challenge of champions), is the victim both of his own self-betrayal (signified by his pursuit of the “goodly armour” that had cost the life of its original owner with a “most putrefied core”) and the treachery of Achilles (who avenges Hector's chivalry, when he refuses to take advantage of the out-of-practice Greek hero, by having his hired gang of followers strike down the unarmed Trojan).⁹

Throughout Troilus and Cressida we are reminded by imagery and action that, in this world of trade and calculation, matters of life and death frequently hinge on what is perceived to be the market value of the person or the object that is being bought or sold or assessed in terms of a commodity price. Individuals weigh themselves in a like manner, as we find Achilles doing in the scene in which Calchas first appears, where he struggles to square his sense of his own value with the evidence of how he is currently prized, or priced, by his fellow Greek commanders (III.iii.74-92). Pondering the current absence of “such rich beholding” as he has been accustomed to in the past, Achilles touches upon the wider question of how value is usually signalled in this society that attempts to know the price of everything.

One conventional way of pinning a price tag on a person is particularly evident throughout Troilus and Cressida in the excessive use of attributive honorifics: “fair,” “true,” “brave,” “valiant,” “gallant,” “great,” “good,” “worthy,” “heroic,” and, a favorite complimentary epithet in this distinctly sour play, more full of gall than honey, “sweet.” This last is picked on with ferocious irony by Thersites's “Sweet draught! ‘sweet’, quoth a? Sweet sink, sweet sewer!” (V.i.75-76), while the mannerism of address as a whole is parodied in the playacting initiated by Achilles (III.iii.272-78). In the single scene in which Helen appears, Pandarus swathes the prize for which men are fighting and dying (and over which the Trojans have debated the price that they have had to pay) with festoons of “fairs” and “sweets,” intensified by repetitions and variations (III.i.42-155). Pandarus, as broker and middleman, has the vocabulary of the salesroom at the tip of his tongue, and the first two scenes of the play show him preparing and practicing his sales pitch. But, as we have already observed, other characters are continually weighing themselves and others up, and calculating their current market price. The use of honorific epithets plays its part in ensuring that there is no rapid deflation, since the heroes live in an ambiance of evaluative salutation and emulative rivalry, most marked when distinguished members of both sides meet.¹⁰

The heady atmosphere of IV.v, especially when Hector greets “old Nestor” as “good old chronicle” who has “so long walk'd hand in hand with Time” (ll. 200-202), reminds us that the major figures in Troilus and Cressida are inclined to regard themselves and others as live advertisements for the advantages of appearing in a primary epic. However, the essential irony of the play is that the proper audience for it is not likely to be taken in by the Homeric glamour that the heroes themselves are so affected by, nor to be impressed by their self-proclaimed virtues and their mutual backslapping.¹¹ On the evidence before it, an audience must doubt whether “a Nestor,” “an Hector,” “an Ajax” amounts to very much, and watching legend in the making, when the young lovers pledge themselves in terms of proverbial phrase and familiar usage (III.ii.180, 194, 198-200), horrifies rather than thrills the spectator with a premonition of misplaced confidence.

Every character in Troilus and Cressida (including Thersites, but with the possible exception of Cassandra) is too secure in the belief that present and future audiences, browbeaten perhaps by the streams of favorable epithets, will evaluate them at their own estimation. Even Hector is twice deceived by surface appearance and the enchantment of words—fatally as a consequence of the pursuit of the armor; and, in an action symptomatic of that later failure, in the earlier debate scene, when, having argued finely against making an idol of market valuation as advocated by Troilus with his furious polemical query, “What's aught but as 'tis valued?”, he succumbs to the alluring notion of “our joint and several dignities.” Hector's grievous fault is to dress up the treacherous trade terms of war with the deceptively gaudy armor of “honour” and “dignity.”

II

“Praise,” “prize,” “price”; all three words in their various grammatical and morphological forms occur frequently in Troilus and Cressida.¹² More significantly, perhaps, it often appears that the three root words are working in conjunction, as if the etymological source that they share is exerting itself both to remind us of their overlapping meanings and to prompt us to make necessary hairbreadth distinctions between them. When, for instance, in her final speech in the second scene of the play, reflecting on the conditions of the market from the buyer's and from the seller's points of view (quoting the maxim “‘Achievement is command; ungain'd, beseech’”) Cressida asserts that “Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is” (I.ii.294), we feel the force in “prize” of both “praise” and “price.”¹³ This is partly the consequence of the opening lines of the soliloquy (ll. 286-90) immediately after the exit of Pandarus, where “bawd”—in Cressida's “you are a bawd” (l. 285)—is by implication equated with a salesman who offers “Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love's full sacrifice … in another's enterprise.” Cressida disclaims the need of “the glass of Pandar's praise” (which might almost be understood as the prize medallion or the price ticket that the salesman has attached to the object), since she herself sees “more in Troilus thousand-fold.” With this whole speech Cressida leads us to reflect that for an object not yet obtained, words can never satisfactorily commend it, and no riches are sufficient to purchase it. In such circumstances the purchaser is easily persuaded to adopt the evaluation of the vendor, since it is in the interests of both to inflate the praise and the price of the prize, especially when, as is the case of mistress and lover, the vendor and the object are one and the vendor is also a purchaser.¹⁴

That the form and the semantic implications of these cognate words easily, and uneasily, shift may be observed in the scene in which Troilus hands Cressida over to Diomedes to be escorted to the Greek camp. Jealously, Troilus retorts to Diomedes:

Grecian, thou dost not use me courteously,
To shame the zeal of my petition to thee
In praising her. I tell thee, lord of Greece,
She is as far high-soaring o'er thy praises
As thou unworthy to be call'd her servant.

(IV.iv.119-23)

Diomedes's shift of the vowel in his reply is insidious and insulting:

                                                                                When I am hence
I'll answer to my lust. And know you, lord,
I'll nothing do on charge: to her own worth
She shall be priz'd.

(ll. 129-32)

Here “priz'd” already implies a stage beyond the commendations of a courtly lover, well on the way to purchase and possession. From this vantage point, an ominous portent of the degradations of language and of character that the play pursues reveals itself in the Trojan debate scene when Troilus uses a mercantile metaphor, not so far mentioned, which clearly announces the commercial degeneration of monarchs:

                                                                                Why, she [Helen] is a pearl
Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships,
And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants.(15)

(II.ii.82-84)

There is a ludicrous tone of patronage in these lines, and in the speech as a whole, created partly by the slightly vulgar emphasis of “above” (in “above a thousand ships”) and “crown'd” (in “crown'd kings”), and partly by the naive notion that it might be considered any sort of sensible commendation that the “price” of this “pearl” has been sufficient to transmogrify kings into commercial travellers.¹⁶ Beyond that, the real gimcrack nature of Troilus's argument derives from his salesroom transmutation of Marlowe's famous lines.¹⁷

In this same speech the moral slide that Troilus's defense of theft in the names of honor and worthiness basically represents (“O theft most base, / That we have stol'n what we do fear to keep” [ll. 93-94]) is to some extent disguised by his careful placing of “prize” (“worthy prize” [l. 87]) and “priz'd” (l. 92). Both words come at the end of lines, and the emphasis thus given restores a degree of dignity to the pearl with a price tag. Helen has now become a reward of enterprise and Fortune, and in between the use of these words Troilus appeals to the Trojans' collective memory of their unanimous praise when, as he reminds them, “you all clapp'd your hands / And cried ‘Inestimable!’” (ll. 88-89). This reminiscence of the applause for the person beyond price or praise (literally, “inestimable”) is only the first of two such references in Troilus and Cressida and suggests the basic physical gratifications that a prize or a praiseworthy person offers. For a “prizeworthy” person him or herself, applause is one of the most easily registered signs of whether his or her price has been retained in the marketplace. As Ulysses informs Achilles (the second occasion referred to): “Nor doth he of himself know them [his parts] for aught, / Till he behold them form'd in the applause / Where th'are extended” (III.iii.118-20).¹⁸

III

It is never easy to untangle overtones in closely related words, especially in a work written nearly four hundred years ago. Originally “praise,” “prize,” and “price” had the same meaning, derived from a single form. But as Coleridge suggested when discussing “fancy” and “imagination,” the nature of language, or the mind of the language user, abhors exact synonymity. Presented with two words apparently identical in meaning or close in form, the ingenuity of man will be avid to explore distinctions.¹⁹ Homophones and homonyms are exploited by poets to tempt the audience or the reader to test how words close in appearance, sound, or sense may be distant or may differ in rhetorical and moral significance.

Troilus and Cressida is full of meaningful phonemic shifts and shadings. We have already noted how “this sailing Pandar” equally represents “this selling Pandar.” That oft-repeated “sweet” threatens to slide into “sweat,” and by the end of the play has done so, when Pandarus's penultimate line, “Till then I'll sweat and seek about for eases,” with its swing between the stressed vowels of “then,” “sweat,” “seek,” and “eases,” suggests a souring of the sweet compliments of the past. In III.ii, “fair” nearly collapses into “fear,” or threatens to use “fear” as a point of coquetry, perhaps (ll. 66 ff.). In the next scene “feed” becomes “fees” (l. 49). Inevitably, “fall” is coupled with “fail” (“Fall, Greeks: fail, fame”—with fame only a consonant away from failure [V.i.42]), as earlier (III.iii.78) we have seen the same speaker, Achilles, associate “feel” with “fall.” At V.iii.42-43 in the exchange between Hector and Troilus, by its opposition to “fair,” “fool” seems to imply “foul”: “O, 'tis fair play.” “Fool's play, by heaven, Hector.”²⁰ Earlier in the play, in appropriate commercial fashion, “deeds” are expected to pay for “debts.” Throughout there are constant overlaps between “Troy,” “truth,” “troth,” and “Troilus” (at IV.iv.29-31, for instance); and the original spelling and pronunciation of “Trojan” as “Troyan” suggests an equation with “true one.”²¹

For all their similarities, “praise,” “prize,” and “price” are different. “Praise” we may take as the most disinterested of the three, attributing worth and value without necessarily making any claims of its own. With the recognition of a “prize,” praise begins to become covetous and wishes to possess what is praised, to make what is praised its own and win not only a prize but also a little reflected glory. By these means the possessor hopes, in turn, to win praise and be increasingly prized, since to hold the prize is to attract envy, which is a mark of value, almost a price/prize tag.²² With “price” we become even more calculating and begin to reckon what the prize, the praise, the envied possession will cost in terms of energy, blood, and cash. We are tempted to become cynical about the sources of true value and worth, and although it is unlikely that Oscar Wilde had Troilus and Cressida in mind when he defined the cynic as a man who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing, the Greeks and Trojans in the play have learned to put a price tag on everything—a beautiful woman, a splendid city, a sumptuous suit of armor.²³

The moment in the play when these three cognate words are most revealingly subsumed in one is in the central love scene and the curious prose dialogue between Troilus and Cressida, which, it has been argued, is a late addition to the printer's copy for the quarto (1609).²⁴ To Cressida's charge that “all lovers swear more performance than they are able” and her question that, since they “have the voice of lions and the act of hares, are they not monsters,” Troilus answers:

Are there such? Such are not we. Praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove. Our head shall go bare till merit cover it: no perfection in reversion shall have a praise in present.

(III.ii.89-92)²⁵

The triple overtones of the first “Praise” here (it is as though Troilus is saying “praise us,” “prize us,” “price us”—and seventeenth-century pronunciation would bring the words closer in sound than they are for us)²⁶ are supported by the multiple senses of “allow,” the second of the two pivotal words in the rhetorical structure. These senses are summarized in the OED as follows:

I. To praise, commend, approve of. II. To admit as probable. III. To permit. IV. To bestow, grant. V. To take into account, give credit for.

In the crucial sentence—“Praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove”—although “praise” and “prove” are foregrounded by alliteration and by their initial and culminating positions respectively, “praise” and “allow” are linked semantically and syntactically. Consequently, “tasted” is the only key word without an immediately evident rhetorical or semantic partner, even though it shares a structurally pivotal position with “allow.” But “the proof of the pudding is in the tasting,” in which case “tasting” is a means of proving, and at the same time “tasting” is “testing,” and indeed in Shakespeare's English “proving” is “testing.” “Taste/tasting” becomes another word, like so many in Troilus and Cressida, with phonemic and semantic instability.

Earlier in this same scene Troilus had said to himself, “Th'imaginary relish is so sweet / That it enchants my sense: what will it be / When that the wat'ry palate tastes indeed / Love's thrice-repured nectar?” (ll. 17-20), at a time when he was looking forward in fearful anticipation to tasting/testing Cressida for the first time: an occasion that will compel him equally to taste/test himself and his own capacities for registering and enjoying the full sensual pleasures of intercourse. Recalling Caroline Spurgeon's commentary on the food images in Troilus and Cressida,²⁷ one is led to perceive an expressive association between those images and the praise/prize/price cluster and the related concepts of merit and reputation by way of the taste/test overlap. For instance, Nestor remarks that “the Trojans taste our dear'st repute / With their fin'st palate” (I.iii.337-38), where there is no doubt that the sampling is also a testing; as, likewise, in Calchas's phrase when he is about to ask the Greeks to arrange his daughter's exchange “as in way of taste” (III.iii.13), where the Arden edition notes “(a) small quantity as sample; (b) trial, proof” and cites King Lear, I.ii.47: “an essay, or taste of my virtue.” Throughout Troilus and Cressida whenever “taste” or one of its compounds is used the pull of both senses is felt.²⁸ Such an example is to be found in Diomedes's initial response to Paris's inquiry who “deserves fair Helen best—/ Myself, or Menelaus?”:

                                                                                                    Both alike:
He merits well to have her that doth seek her,
Not making any scruple of her soilure,
With such a hell of pain and world of charge;
And you as well to keep her that defend her,
Not palating the taste of her dishonour,
With such a costly loss of wealth and friends.
Both merits pois'd, each weighs nor less nor more,
But he as thee, each heavier for a whore.

(IV.i.54-61, 66-67)

In this bitter reply the metaphor of tasting (testing?) on the palate, both perceiving the flavor “of her dishonour” as well as judging the extent of its disflavor, is embedded in an equally appropriate extended image of measuring, of weighing, of testing worth and value in full recognition of the price that has to be paid.

In the scene in which Calchas asks for a “taste” of what the Greeks had promised him as a reward for his treachery, we move to the conversation between Ulysses and Achilles already referred to several times. There we find Ulysses spelling out the implications of consuming pride in metaphors that make explicit the imagery of appetite that runs through the play: “How one man eats into another's pride, / While pride is fasting in his wantonness!” (III.iii.136-37). The unexpected repetition of “pride” seems to suggest that the first time the word is used there is a phonemic overlap with “prize”; while the association of “fasting” with “wantonness” seems to hint that pride fasts when it has already feasted on a prize, or on praise, perhaps. Almost inevitably Ulysses is led to describe Time as the feaster, “A great-siz'd monster of ingratitudes” devouring the “scraps” of “good deeds past” (the prizes, the praise, for which a price has been paid). He reminds Achilles that “The present eye praises” (prizes? has a price to offer for?) “the present object”; in response to which Achilles pleads that he has “strong reasons” for his “privacy,” another addition to the alliterative and assonantal loop of diction in this scene, which soon brings us to “Priam” and “providence.”²⁹

What I am suggesting is that in Troilus and Cressida not only is there an underlying complex of imagery having to do with food and appetite, as Caroline Spurgeon long ago suggested, but also a foregrounding of words based on “praise,” “prize,” and “price” (including “pride” and “place”). In turn, these words are involved in another complex of mercantile imagery. This diction and this imagery are frequently found together to articulate the closely related themes of the play, themes that question the stability of value and the reliability of attribution, despite the constant assumption of the former and the assertion of the latter. As others have noted, this is not only a name-dropping play, but also a play in which characters are constantly being called upon to introduce themselves, conscious that their names are one of their major attributes, the bushel they should not attempt to blush behind. When Aeneas visits the Greek camp, he cannot, or pretends he cannot, recognize the Greek commander simply by his name and attributes (I.iii.214 ff.). Later Paris's servant is astonished that Pandarus claims not to be able to “find out [Helen] by her attributes,” which have just been recited to him: “the mortal Venus, the heart-blood of beauty, love's visible soul—” (III.i.31-35). Conventional complimentary phrases, like conventional additions (“the high and mighty Agamemnon”) are shown not to be descriptions but accepted valuations; and for all the confidence with which they are recited they no more guarantee quality—or a quality or qualities—than a price tag invariably denotes a prize.³⁰

Troilus and Cressida leads us to the conclusion that we can no more trust our heroes, or even our anti-heroes, than we can trust our words.³¹ In Troilus's famous speech we observe him struggling with the evidence of “bifold authority” that what he has seen “is, and is not, Cressid.” The kind of contradiction that has brought Troilus himself almost to the point of disintegration—from now on he “is, and is not” Troilus—has already been anticipated on a frivolous level in the gossip of the play's second scene, where Cressida caps Pandarus's wavering description of Troilus's favor, “Faith, to say truth, brown and not brown,” with the infinitely more ominous, “To say truth, true and not true” (I.ii.97-98). But then much of the language in Troilus and Cressida is “true and not true.” Division is to be found in words as in wars; armies and camps are divided both within and without, as also are individuals. Long before Troilus has to struggle to come to terms, even self-destructive terms, with the divided Cressida, Cressida herself has recognized her own self-division:

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

(III.ii.146-48)

Troilus and Cressida suggests that we trade in selves just as we trade in words, even as we trade in literature, which we conventionally assume is a transmitter, but not inevitably a transmuter, of value and truth. As a consequence of the play's effect, the traditional qualities and attributes of some of the major characters in the primary literary work of the Western world (and their later Romance and chivalric successors), which should be beyond assault, are all put in doubt, since they have been sold for cash (to a potential clapperclawing public) and turned into cultural commodities (an occurrence with which, in this play at least, they appear to be gleefully collaborating). Maybe Shakespeare does not intend us to go so far as Thersites, whose voice within the play serves admirably to help us to modify our more radical doubts, just as Pandarus's exploitation of cynicism prompts us to question the harsher skepticism that the play engenders and inspires. But the skepticism of Troilus and Cressida contains and exudes a skepticism about literature itself—about the ability of great, of classical, literature to tell the truth, to represent, through words and through actions, the truth promoted, accounted for, and recounted in words that are other than idealized propaganda, and to ensure that the observation of people and events in the past and the present does not degenerate into a glamorized voyeurism and that commentary does not decline into gossip. Of voyeurism and gossip Troilus and Cressida is full, represented in the literary self-consciousness of the figures who are only too aware that whatever may be the results of the conflicts both within and without the walls of Troy, as well as between the two armies and the heroes on either side, all of them are destined for literary immortality. Essentially that is the prize they are after.³²

From an initial sense of being honored to be witnesses to the greatness of the classical past, the feelings of audience or reader of Troilus and Cressida are brought to a stage where they cannot but question the capability of drama or literature to enshrine and pass on, without idealistic inflation or scurrilous deflation, to present and future generations a sense of traditional values whose precedent is an heroic cultural ancestry.³³ We might even begin to interrogate our own motive for routinely expressing our admiration for writers of works that have created a consciousness of literary and cultural tradition. Are they not also rather lists of attributes, famous names, mere verbal emblems, unstable words, really, which we are aware of as having cash and prestige value on the education or general cultural market? If this is as true of Homer, Chaucer, and Shakespeare as it is of the characters that they have created, and the narratives that they have shaped and dramatized, while not giving them in their collaborative effort in Troilus and Cressida any tragic depth greater than that achieved by their creatures in the play, it does indicate why this comedy, this history, might also be truly regarded as this tragedy.

Notes

1. Troilus and Cressida, V.ii.137-45; all references are to the Arden edition, ed. Kenneth Palmer (London: Methuen, 1982).

2. So that “no art” is needed “To find the mind's construction in the face” (Macbeth, I.iv.11-12).

3. “Integrity” is twice used in the play: by Agamemnon, “most divine integrity” (IV.v.169 [see Arden note]); and by Troilus himself, “my integrity and truth to you [Cressida]” (III.ii.163).

4. See Juliet Dusinberre, “‘Troilus and Cressida’ and the Definition of Beauty,” in Shakespeare Survey, 36 (1983), 85-95. Gayle Greene discusses the disjunctive breakdown of unities in the play, which “suggests, by means of style and pattern, a division of word from reality which follows from the loss of absolute sanctions of value: style diverges from substance, discourse from actuality, in a pattern that culminates in Troilus's vision of universal dissolution” (“Language and Value in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in English Literature, XXI [1981], 271-85, esp. p. 285).

5. J. C. Maxwell in The Age of Shakespeare (Penguin Guide to English Literature [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955], Vol. 2), pp. 217-18; R. A. Yodor, “‘Sons and Daughters of the Game’: An Essay on Shakespeare's ‘Troilus and Cressida,’” ShS, 25 (1972), 11-25, esp. p. 21; and Dusinberre, pp. 88-90, among others, have touched on the theme but have not explored it extensively. Kenneth Palmer in the Arden edition talks about Troilus picking “up a theme touched on elsewhere,” but the argument of the first part of this present essay is that it is a theme more intrinsic than this implies, and more than “the merchant's language of love” that Troilus is said, without justification (as parts of this essay will attempt to show), to dislike (Introduction, p. 51). In his consideration of “The Commerce of Desire: Freudian Narcissism in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Douglas B. Wilson describes how in the play “love and war alike are demystified by the imagery of tainted vendibles” and how “Shakespeare couches his philosophic theme of value in imagery of merchandising” (English Language Notes, 21 [1983], 11-22, esp. p. 15).

6. The word “trade” occurs in compounds on two other occasions: “traded pilots” (II.ii.65) signifying the “eyes and ears” as “skilled navigators” (see Arden note) “'twixt the dangerous shores / Of will and judgement”—but, as it turns out, treacherous guides, since they enkindle the will instead of steering clear of it, and when the damage is done, reveal too late the scope for misjudgment and its consequences (as we see in Troilus's speech with which we began); and “th'untraded oath” (IV.v.177) used by Hector in a gibe at Menelaus, reminding him of the loss of his goods (Helen), to which Menelaus responds by briefly implying the deadly price that has been paid for her.

7. See Arden Tro., pp. 69-70 and note; and cf. Geoffrey Bullough's comments on the role of Antenor in his discussion of “The Lost ‘Troilus and Cressida,’” Essays and Studies, n.s. 17 (London: English Association, 1964), p. 37. It is tempting in the context of this present essay to surmise that Shakespeare might have seen in Chaucer's line “So whan this Calkas knew by calkulynge” (Troilus and Criseyde, I, 71) more than an indication of his gift of divination. The very name of Cressida's father suggests someone who is calculating in a mathematical, political, and Machiavellian sense (see OED's first definition of “calculate” vb.).

8. See II.ii.77-81. This same aunt, according to the tradition followed by Shakespeare, is Ajax's mother, and therefore indirectly responsible for the abortive nature of the single-armed fight between Ajax and Hector.

9. One of the meanings given by the OED for “Myrmidons” is “an unscrupulously faithful follower or hireling; a hired ruffian; a base attendant” (sense 3); but the first quotation is from 1649 (Milton). It is difficult to know how base Shakespeare thought the Myrmidons were before writing the very play that, it might be said, helped to ruin their reputation.

10. It is in this context that Ulysses's account of Troilus (IV.v.96 ff.) is touchingly and ironically “placed”: a full-scale, formal panegyric shortly before its subject, accompanied by Ulysses, confirms and confounds the truth of this character sketch delivered, it appears, originally by Aeneas.

11. See Arden Tro., Introduction, p. 63, for comment on characters in the play “acting … not only for us, but for one another.”

12. According to Spevack (A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare [Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968], Vol. III) “praise” occurs more frequently in Troilus and Cressida (seventeen times) than in any other work of Shakespeare's apart from Love's Labour's Lost and the Sonnets. The frequency of other forms of the verb and the two other words is “prais'd” (4—only in Cymbeline does it occur more often), “praised” (1), “praises” (3), “praising” (1), “price” (2), “priz'd” (2), “prize” (3), “prizer” (1), and “prizes” (1).

13. As Kenneth Palmer notes: “Q's price is the older form of the same verb; but the situation is complex (see OED sv prize),” p. 119n.

14. See Dusinberre, p. 89.

15. Cf. Troilus's “pearl” applied to Cressida at I.i.100 and Cressida's “thousand-fold” with reference to Troilus at I.ii.289.

16. As Dusinberre says, “Majesty has been devalued by merchantry,” p. 89.

17. Cf. T. McAlindon, “Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 29-43, esp. p. 39.

18. Oddly, there is a third reference to applause in the controversial Epistle to Troilus and Cressida, which occurs only “in copies of Q in the second state” (see Arden Tro., p. 95). Whoever wrote it (it is headed, “A neuer writer, to an euer reader. Newes”) pre-empts some of the themes discussed in this essay when he commends the “new play” as one “neuer stal'd with the Stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger,” and goes on to deplore the changing of “the vaine names of commedies … for the titles of Commodities” (p. 95).

19. See Biographia Literaria, chap. IV: “in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning” (ed. J. Shawcross [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907], Vol. I, 61, 63n.). The OED traces the complicated relationship of the three words discussed here from “OFr preisier … to price, value, prize, praise” concluding that “from the 15th c. we have prise, prize vb. beside pris, price sb., and praise sb. beside praise vb.”

20. Some of these examples are discussed by Dusinberre, p. 94.

21. See Arden Tro., Introduction, p. 17. No doubt such overlaps and distinctions between similar “minimal pairs” may be found throughout Shakespeare's works (and indeed it would be worth investigating them as a feature of his rhetoric). One notes particularly in Timon of Athens, a play that shares something of the tone and mood of Troilus and Cressida, such an exchange as that between Timon and the Jeweller, in which the following observation occurs: “Things of like value, differing in the owners, / Are prized by their masters,” where “priced” or “praised” would equally well apply, especially when the Jeweller goes on to say “Believe't, dear lord, / You mend the jewel by the wearing it” (I.i.173-75). In Timon of Athens such minimal pairs are to be found as “Feast-won, fast-lost” (II.ii.175: see the note on pronunciation in the Arden edition, ed. H. J. Oliver [London: Methuen, 1959]).

22. In “The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida,” René Girard's examination of “mimetic desire” indicates the psychological and dramatic means by which praise transforms a person or an object into a coveted prize, upon which the praiser is ready to place a price tag (Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman [New York: Methuen, 1985], pp. 188-209).

23. Wilde's aphorism applies, of course, to the unconscious cynic: in effect, to a Troilus or a Cressida, to a Diomedes, and, on occasions, to many if not most of the Greek and Trojan leaders. Shakespeare's true cynics, Thersites to some degree, and certainly Apemantus in Timon of Athens, are much closer to the philosophical origins of cynicism, where the cynic is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as “one who sarcastically doubts human sincerity and merit.” Pandarus, as usual, occupies the middle position of a broker, manufacturing expressions of sincere feeling and opinion as a means of marketing a product—his niece or Troilus or himself.

24. See Arden Tro., Appendix I, pp. 304 ff.

25. Unfortunately this passage is not without its textual difficulties, but they are not such as affect the argument here.

26. Helge Kökeritz in Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953) does not discuss these words; but accounts of the vowel sounds concerned … indicate their greater closeness in the seventeenth century than today.

27. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery, and What It Tells Us (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935), pp. 320-24. Kenneth Muir in ShS, 8 (1955), 30-31, is one among the many who have discussed this aspect at some length, associating it either with the imagery of time or disease in the play.

28. Apart from “taste,” “tastes,” and “tasted,” one finds “untasted” and “distaste” (twelve occurrences in all). Various forms of “feed” and “eat” occur some fifteen times (cf., however, Timon of Athens—see note 21 above—which uses the last words some eighteen times in a much shorter play).

29. In this scene one is tempted to perceive a rhetorical structuring of words beginning with “p,” starting with Ulysses's reflections on Achilles's “pride” addressed to “princes all” (III.iii.38 ff.). Then comes Achilles's concern with becoming “poor” (l. 74) which leads to “place” and “prizes” in lines 82-83. Ulysses discusses the evaluation of “parts” and their dependence on “applause” (ll. 117, 119), and this brings him to the part played by “perseverance” (l. 150). By way of the “praise” of line 176 we arrive at the triple “p”s of the line quoted in the text with “present … praises … present.” Even Thersites cannot resist “prophetically proud” at line 247.

30. See Kenneth Palmer's discussion of “Identity and Attributes,” Arden Tro., Introduction, pp. 71-77.

31. Dusinberre (passage cited in note 20 above) discusses language robbed of stability in the play; but the most important article on this aspect is, probably, McAlindon (see note 17 above). Muir (p. 37) notes the shifting point of view in Troilus and Cressida, and countless critics have observed the general slipperiness of the play, even when it and they lay the stress upon the consciousness of the need for consistency, order, and authority expressed in the play as a response to the threat of chaos (e.g., Yodor, pp. 17-18). Richard D. Fly in his discussion of “Imitative Form” in the play (“Suited in Like Conditions as our Argument,” SEL [Studies in English Literature 1500-1900], XV [1975], 273-92) links the theme of disintegration in Troilus and Cressida to its “disjunction in the plot, discontinuity in the scenario, inconsistency in characterization, dissonance, redundancy, noncommunication in diction and language, disintegrative processes in texture and spectacle, lack of emphatic closure and resolution in Act V” (p. 291). R. A. Foakes reconsiders the double ending of the play as an expression of its inconclusiveness and instability (University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXII [1963], 142-54).

32. For the effects of “Time” on the self-consciousness of the characters in Troilus and Cressida, see Arden Tro., Introduction, pp. 63 ff.; there is hardly a critic who has not commented on this central theme.

33. See Douglas Cole's discussion of “mythic delusion” in the play: “Myth and Anti-myth: The Case of Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (1980), 76-84. In “‘Ariachne's broken woof’: the rhetoric of citation in Troilus and Cressida” (Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, pp. 19-36), Elizabeth Freund is moved to reflect on the play “as a sustained meditation on the parasitism of texts and on the plight of a belated writer who knows that all the stories have already been told. … In no other play does [Shakespeare] take on the redoubtable task of refashioning, decomposing, vulgarizing, declassicizing precursor texts quite so canonical and powerful, and nowhere does he strip both his sources and his own text of their ‘original’ substance with such spirited iconoclasm” (pp. 34-35).