[In the following essay, Spear examines the themes of masculinity and effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida in order to explore “the cultural fictions of male power.”]

A pivotal moment from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida serves as my starting point for a discussion of the problematics of effeminacy in early modern culture. In Act 3, scene 3, after being taunted by Ulysses about Ajax's growing popularity and esteem, Achilles is in turn chastised by his male “varlet,” Patroclus, who chides him for being “an effeminate man / In time of action,” a deplorable, inverted condition as loathsome, says Patroclus, as its apparent corollary, “A woman impudent and mannish grown” (3.3.216-20).¹ So compelling is the charge that Achilles can answer it only by recontextualizing this effeminacy as a source of strength and power, by claiming a “woman's longing, / An appetite that I am sick withal, / To see great Hector” (ll. 236-37). This complex exchange, referencing multiple slippages between literal, sexed bodies and gendered discourses of power, figures masculinity as fully realized only in tension with historically and socially specific notions of effeminacy. As a recontextualization of socially produced ideas of the feminine, effeminacy in early modern culture possesses a twofold critical relevance, signifying at the same time a disarticulation of masculine authority and the “unnatural” empowerment of biologically and socially “inferior” women, and signalling within one conceptual frame the deployments of both gendered discourses. The very idea of effeminacy, then, has a profound, though hitherto hidden, critical and historical relevance. It marks a point where the cultural correspondences between sexed bodies and gendered codes can be revealed as implicated in larger systems of cultural production, where masculinity and femininity signify less the qualities of biologically sexed bodies and more the cultural forms through which power circulates.

My concern here is with the essential instability lodged at the center of all constructions and embodiments of masculinity, an instability that is anxiously elaborated in the early modern discourse of effeminacy. Contemporary Shakespeare criticism has made much of the relationship between the theatrical practices of the transvestite stage and the perceptions of effeminization in English culture.² It is now almost commonplace to discuss effeminacy in English culture in terms of the antitheatrical pamphlets that emphasized the corrupting power of the transvestite theater and named the early modern stage as one site from whence the “epidemic” of effeminacy spread outward into society. My interest goes beyond any of the currently narrow identifications of effeminacy with either the transvestite boy actor or the “sodomite,” however, and will examine the discourse of effeminacy not as localized on the body of any single figure but rather as a framework responsive to a number of social and political deployments.³ This more open, flexible model enables us to resituate the deployments of effeminacy within a matrix of historical concerns relating to both men and women; thus it points to the complicity of codes of gender—specifically masculinity, femininity, and effeminacy—with other systems of social, political, and economic organization.⁴

Before the strata of social content can be peeled away, it is necessary first to confront the essentially indefinable nature of the term effeminacy itself. The impossibility of any convenient, single definition is particularly apparent when we examine the varied historically specific meanings of the term from the 1550s onward, even at the most literal level. As the OED amply demonstrates, “effeminate” could be either an adjective or a noun. As adjective it designates a man as “womanish, unmanly, enervated, or feeble” (1. a.); “delicate” (1. b.); “gentle, tender, compassionate … without implying reproach” (1. c.); or through a pseudo-etymology, “self-indulgent” or “voluptuous” or “devoted to women” (3). As a noun it designates a man who possessed any or all of the above qualities (a “wanton, young effeminate”) or a sexually passive sodomite. (A translation of the term effeminatii in the Vulgate into “effeminates” in a 1609 Biblical commentary is mistranslated as “Sodomites” in the King James Bible of 1611.) Thus the term could name phenomena as widely divergent as male physical weakness, love of excessive pleasure (especially sexual pleasure with women), or an antiheroic military ethos (“Shall we at last conclude effeminate peace?” York asks indignantly in 1 Henry VI, 5.4.107). Effeminacy could attend the vice of sodomy, though early modern culture did not yet have the modern word homosexual to serve as the convenient identifier of socially and politically contestory positions.⁵ Ambiguity exists even within the most literal parameters, since to be “womanish” in early modern culture did not apparently mean the same thing as to be “unmanly.”

To make matters even more vague, effeminate could also be used as a verb, meaning to weaken, to corrupt, to cause to degenerate—not just to enfeeble men but to weaken and corrupt entire social institutions and structures identified with male (or, as later feminist criticism would have it, “patriarchal”) power.⁶ In this sense the transvestite theater was often referred to as hastening a general social and spiritual degeneration among the English people, both men and women. It thus authorized the discussion of a set of social inversions—the feminization of men and the masculinization of women—as both symptomatic of effeminacy. “[A]n effeminate man / In time of action” had a direct, structural relationship to “A woman impudent and mannish grown.” Most discussions of the period, however, grant an ideological priority to the “womanish” man; his debasement enables the simultaneous inversion that makes women powerful. As little more than a spokesman for the official point of view, a “mannish woman” in a 1620 pamphlet justified her masculine character as necessary in order to preserve “those manly things which you [womanish men] have forsaken.”⁷

Early modern English writers constituted the discourse of effeminacy, then, to comprehend a number of differing yet overlapping social phenomena—the fluctuations and vulnerabilities of male power; the clamoring of women for social representation; and the cultural diseases attendant thereon and elaborated in a number of symptoms, including (but again not limited to) increased prostitution, widespread commercialism, and the breakdown of hierarchical social relations organized by class, race, gender, and emergent national identity. The figure of the “womanish” man reveals vulnerabilities lodged within the multivalent ideological processes of early modern English culture and discloses beneath the apparent stability of collective social structures a number of local sites for ideological regulation and discursive reproduction.

Troilus and Cressida reveals this tension and its attendant belabored productions with an emblematic clarity in a number of crucial scenes, most obviously perhaps in the case of the “effeminate” Achilles, but especially in the play's multiple erotic and homoerotic subtexts.⁸ The play repeatedly challenges our notions of masculinity and draws attention to the effeminacy and emasculation of nearly every central male figure—whether it is Troilus, “weaker than a woman's tear” (1.1.8); Ajax grotesquely “ruminat[ing] like an hostess” (3.3.251); Paris enslaved to Helen's whims; or Patroclus sapping Achilles's manly strength through a restraining “great love” (l. 220). My focus on the “womanish” men of Troilus and Cressida will help to show that the cultural productions of masculinity and male authority—unstable, performative, contingent, and, most important, ideological—are unmistakably and inadvertently caught up in early modern obsessions with delineating and defining effeminacy, and in mapping its effects across emerging constructions of subjectivity, sexuality, and nationalism. This idea of male power as always necessarily shadowed by opposite and competing notions of emasculation and effeminacy serves as an important way of specifying the distance between our own modern concepts of patriarchy, gender, masculinity, and sexuality and those of early modern England.

In order to understand the structural relationship between masculinity and effeminacy—in fact between all normative codes of gender and their crossings—it is necessary to draw notions of gender first into a postmodern conceptual framework, for the specific purpose of seeing both masculinity and effeminacy as modes of dramatic performance through which the male body is displayed and acted out in accordance with a range of cultural imperatives.⁹Troilus and Cressida emphasizes this performative context in a number of different scenes, most obviously perhaps in Act 3, scene 3, where Ulysses tells Achilles that virility is little more than a seamless performance “form'd in the applause” of admiring male spectators who consume, imitate, and circulate various modes of self-presentation (3.3.105ff.). Shakespeare's performances of masculinity in Troilus and Cressida share assumptions about the legibility of bodily gestures common in discussions of the effeminate man in contemporary pamphlet literature. Like masculinity, effeminacy appears on the surface of the male body with the clarity of an inscription. As early as Aristotle, the effeminate man was identifiable by his gestural habits as a man who “lets his cloak trail the ground to escape the fatigue of lifting it” and by his possession of such tell-tale bodily signs as “eyes that are dry and weak.”¹⁰ Closer to Shakespeare's own day, Lancelot Andrewes codified the effeminate body in a very graphic way: such men “goe proudly in gate,” have “stretched forth necks,” “goe on tiptoe,” and their faces are characterized by “rolling of the eyes, casting them scornfully on the one side first and then on the other.” Most noticeable is his walk, described as “a mincing gate … as if [his feet] were shackled.”¹¹ Such “mincing” is behind Cressida's joke about masculinity in 1.2, where Pandarus attempts to educate her about the anatomy of manliness by directing her gaze toward the spectacular effects of the Trojan military parade. When Cressida resists full complicity in this fabricating endeavor, Pandarus petulantly responds with an authoritative inventory of “manly” parts:

PANDARUS
Have you any eyes? Do you know what a man is? Is not birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality and such like, the spice and salt that season a man?
CRESSIDA
Ay, a minced man. …

(1.2.256-61)

Cressida teases her uncle with a complicated, subtle barb that capitalizes on the operative ambiguity at the center of all representations of masculinity, a demystifying joke that insists there is a very fine line between virile display and effeminate refinement. Her witty comeback—that a man thus anatomized is a “minced” man—drives the rhetorical and specular dimensions of masculinity toward their effeminate conclusion. To divide a man into parts is to feminize him, to make him the object of an erotic gaze, to “mince” him in a double way: to castrate him (as the OED hints with the phrase “to deprive of some essential part” [emphasis mine]) and to render him “minced” (affected, overly refined). When Pandarus explicates the cultural determinations of true manliness, he inadvertently conjures up their paradoxical double, and Cressida is there to remind him that effeminacy and masculinity exist not as antitheses but as modalities of one another. The very signs that mark a man as an idealized virile warrior are the same signs that, recontextualized, stigmatize him as effeminate, soft, weak, womanish, “minced.”

Throughout the play the surplus value of masculinity is defined as effeminacy; excessive masculinity is encoded as “womanish.” In this sense Achilles's supreme masculinity and Ajax's effeminate masquerade draw upon the same representational strategy, though taken to differing degrees of performance. Achilles has long since mastered the manipulation of collective fantasies of masculine display. His various posturings so perfectly reflect the preconceptions of Greek manliness—itself a convoluted system of significations and performances—that they bestow upon him the authority that “emulous factions” envy.¹² Standing before his tent as the soldiers leave the battlefield, having his personal messages conveyed by Patroclus, withdrawing himself from all observation while rumors circulate about his private activities—all of these performative strategies mimic the strategies of power and stage his masculine image by regulating its display, sometimes even rendering it invisible and removing it from view. In counterpoint to Achilles's carefully contrived performance stands Ajax's emasculated (because blatantly overacted) spectacle, which instead of consolidating his claim to manliness renders him symbolically feminine. As Thersites reports, he “stalks up and down like a peacock, a stride and a stand; ruminates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her brain to set down her reckoning; bites his lip with a politic regard” (3.3.250-53). Rather than generating the emulous desire of other men, Ajax's performance enacts a series of emasculating reversals—from man to woman to animal, eventually making him less than human: “a very landfish, languageless, a monster” (ll. 262-63).

Shakespeare carefully manipulates the sequence of dramatic events in Troilus and Cressida as if to draw our attention to the disjunctions between the virile pageantry of warfare and the weak, effeminated men who can scarcely perform their roles.¹³ He accomplishes this by focusing on the collective processes by which manliness is constructed out of the powers of language, display, and resignification. One clear instance of this is that which Cressida refers to as “the glass of Pandar's praise” (1.2.290). Pandarus's presentation of the Trojan soldiers to Cressida is itself a testimonial to the susceptibility of all shows of manliness to the higher powers of observation and rhetoric, and the “glass of praise” aptly refers to the power to create erotic and homoerotic responses through the mutually distorting media of language and representation. Pandarus's power as the arbiter of erotic value and worth—of both men and women—is tied to his ability to exploit and manipulate scopic and rhetorical dimensions. When commenting on the spectacle of the homeward-bound soldiers, his narration of the personal qualities of each one rings with the claims of their individual manly qualities: Aeneas (“is not that a brave man?” [l. 188]); Antenor (“he's a man good enough; he's one o'th'soundest judgements in Troy whosoever, and a proper man of person” [ll. 193-95]); Hector (“there's a fellow! Go thy way, Hector—there's a brave man, niece—O brave Hector! Look how he looks” [ll. 201-4]). Yet the very spectacular nature of the parade enacts a performative displacement, one that stages manliness through certain dramatic effects—how the warriors move, the objects they carry, the way they look. Hector's dented helmet, Troilus's bloodied sword, and his “helm more hacked than Hector's” testify to the objectification of masculinity within this dramatic scenario. We might even go so far as to say that this enterprise evokes an anxiety about the essentially performative nature of manliness: restated, how do you know when someone is acting like a man or only acting like a man?

The illusionistic qualities of “real” masculinity are not confined to Pandarus's representational practices but operate freely throughout the play to locate the essence of masculinity in acts of performance, negotiation, and exchange. The plot concocted by Ulysses and Nestor to “physick” Achilles by creating a rival hypermasculine persona for Ajax only highlights the tremulous yet malleable qualities of masculinity. Their enterprise shadows Pandarus's more openly erotic manipulations. Like Pandarus, who manages to conjure illusions of valor out of the remnants of manly dignity, Ulysses capitalizes on the power of opinion to create “real” men by exploiting qualities of masculinity that are explicitly dramatic. Setting up Ajax as Achilles's manly rival is merely a matter of costuming: “We'll dress him up in voices,” Ulysses proclaims in an unmistakably theatrical phrase. What this breakdown signifies is the already impoverished, false economy of masculinity articulated through the play's recourse to the imperfect registers of protocapitalist commerce. When Ulysses proposes to substitute Ajax for Achilles, he likens it to a false barter (“Let us like merchants / First show foul wares” [1.3.358-59]), a formulation that ties the production of manly reputation to the merchandising of commodities. The entire charade of setting up Ajax as the “better” man is predicated on the assumption that, like value, masculinity can be produced in social relations, regulated in complicated exchanges, even—in Ajax's case—counterfeited and inflated.

Hector's challenge to single combat in 1.3 not only presents Ulysses and Nestor with a uniquely dramatic opportunity to stage Ajax's recently acquired status as the “better man”; it also presents the Greeks with a new problem by placing their collective masculinity on trial and by pitting national identities against one another. For the man chosen, Nestor remarks, will have a symbolic authority that is both overdetermined and representative: “for the success, / Although particular, shall give a scantling / Of good or bad unto the general” (ll. 340-42). Such a conflict could result in either a confirmation of the superior manly valor of the Greeks or a humiliating revelation of their collective emasculation:

And in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.

(ll. 343-46)

What Nestor has to say is perhaps less interesting than the way he chooses to say it, since the language belies a perfect understanding of the communal constructions of manly “parts.” The inscriptions of masculinity (the “small pricks” which, according to the OED, denote both the slight markings of punctuation within a text and, as Shakespeare's sonnets illustrate, the penis) become overvalued and symbolically overdetermined because they represent in their swelling to “the giant mass of things to come” the common creation and collective fantasies of manliness itself. That such a process is profoundly homoerotic is made clear when the choice of an aptly representative man takes the form of a collective parthenogenic birth. Such a paragon is “boil[ed] / As 'twere from forth us all” and emerges “distill'd / Out of our virtues” (ll. 349-51). As the embodiment of symbolic man-to-man reproductive exchange, an “issue” from “the mutual act of all our souls,” such a figment takes on its own generative and deconstructive power, the ability to “miscarry” his creators' embodied projections (ll. 350ff.). Nestor's assessment of the dilemma reveals the collective libidinal and social investments in producing the “better man.”

Even before Cressida demystifies this type of trafficking, we are already privy to the most trenchant irony at the heart of this empty charade. From the first scene, we see a Troilus very different from the one Pandarus builds up for Cressida's erotic appraisal. The Troilus we witness in the play's first scene is anything but “Brave Troilus, prince of chivalry,” as Pandarus calls him (1.2.231-32); we see instead a man who depicts himself in clearly effeminate terms as “weaker than a woman's tear, / Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance, / Less valiant than the virgin in the night” (1.1.9-11). When Aeneas asks about Troilus's absence, the lovesick soldier returns a “woman's answer” because absence from the mise-en-scéne of masculine display feminizes him: “For womanish it is to be from thence” (ll. 105-6). Our awareness of the “womanish” Troilus severely undercuts Pandarus's presentation of him and heightens the disjunction between his already divulged lapse from manliness and Pandarus's attempts to recuperate his valor (and his value within the masculine signifying economy) through rhetorical and performative displacements. The bloodied sword, the dented helmet, his “looks,” his movements—all of these elements appear mediated and resignified through Pandarus's “glass of praise,” a mirror surpassing all true mirrors in its capacity to reflect what is not there.

The spectacle of Troilus “weaker than a woman's tear” in the first scene of the play foregrounds yet another important deployment of the cultural construction of effeminacy—the coordination of effeminacy with the regulation of sexual desire, a regulation seen in the early modern period as important to the ideological organization of the male subject. In this context effeminacy was considered the result of inordinate sexual appetite and was associated with a range of sexual practices that ran counter to the increasingly intense proscriptions defining sexual intercourse as solely a means of reproduction within the confines of heterosexual marriage. Such an understanding was crucial to the installation and maintenance of a number of cultural hierarchies and boundaries, like those between the sexes and classes. It is also here that critical expositions of historically specific relationships between effeminacy and sexuality become complicated, since the degeneracy signified by effeminacy functions culturally to police a range of erotic and autoerotic pleasures.¹⁴ Effeminacy is a trait of excessive male desire regardless of object choice, be it, for lack of better terms, heterosexual or homosexual. Sexually induced effeminacy is always primarily about the fragility of the male subject, and heterosexual relationships disordered by excessive passion prove effeminating for men because they disrupt the very groundwork of cultural conceptions that define the essence of masculinity in strict self-discipline and psychic disavowals. In this way Troilus's lovesickness exists as the antithesis of manly self-restraint and places the highly individualistic pleasures of sexual desire over and above the manly allegiances of national militaristic bonds. Troilus's emasculation arises from these two separate but related conditions—his rejection of the manly venture of national defense and his excessive sexual desire for Cressida. This double dilemma only grows in scope when it is revealed to be the chief problem facing other men in the play. Paris suffers from similarly effeminating circumstances. In his inordinate indulgence of Helen, who prevents him from participating in the imperatives of masculine display (“I would fain have armed today, but my Nell would not have it so” [3.1.132-33]), his manly character is reportedly softened from “gall” to “honey” (2.2.145).

The equation of effeminacy, sexual excess, and the neglect of warfare is operative in the Greek as well as the Trojan camp, chiefly in the character of Achilles. His effeminacy is more complicated than that of either Troilus or Paris, however, because it is ambiguously attached to two love objects: Patroclus, his “male varlet,” and Polyxena, who appears virtually out of nowhere in 3.3. Patroclus diagnoses Achilles's loss of manly presence (and thus essence) as the result of having “weak wanton Cupid” amorously enfolded around his neck (3.3.221). The identity of this “Cupid” seems most likely to be Patroclus himself, especially since he is blaming Achilles's negligence on “my little stomach to the war” and the “great restraining love” they share; it could just as easily be Polyxena, however, since Ulysses hints that “Greekish girls” will mock Achilles's choice to court Polyxena rather than fight (l. 210). In either case the condition of effeminacy is the result not of the loss of any sexually inscribed identity but of the loss of “manly” psychic autonomy and self-control.

Despite the fact that there are clear indications of a homosexual relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, the play shifts concerns to the constitution of masculinity by holding up all sexual liaisons for criticism and scrutiny. Heterosexual passions are at least equally disastrous if not more disruptive, since they subordinate men to women who use their sexual wiles as a source of power. Narratives of national and communal identity in the early modern period rest firmly on the premise that society is best served when men excise sexuality, sensuality, and passion from their bodies and souls in order to carry out the more demanding and more important business of the nation. In this sense Spenser's Sir Guyon and his defeat of Acrasia occupy the same imperial and national space as Milton's Adam and Samson in their consolidation of an idea of manliness as a precondition for social, political, and national identities and for territorial expansions.¹⁵ The effeminacy pervading both the Greek and Trojan camps represents what Elizabethans would have viewed as a dangerous suspension of such national imperatives in the service of individual sexual desire.

Though the constructions of effeminacy bear no exclusive or direct relationship to homosexuality in the play, the essential vulnerability of manliness is graphically depicted in a symbolic phenomenon that haunts the play and that structures scenes of homosocial and homoerotic military exchange—the image not of castration but of the penetrated male body.¹⁶ To represent the male body as open to sexual or homoerotic penetration is to contest the cultural presumptions of its inherently closed nature and to pluralize the avenues of sexual contact beyond their already exploited association with the “strumpets” of the play. To be effeminated is thus to become sexually passive, to be symbolically feminized.¹⁷ In these terms Achilles realizes his debasement in the masculine economy of war as a type of penetration: “My fame is shrewdly gor'd” (3.3.227). The images of the penetrability of the male body collapse the adulterous context of the battle, the “fair rape,” as Paris oxymoronically calls it, into other symbolic emasculations and feminizations of the male body. The homoerotic qualities of military confrontation are often brought to the surface in explicit awareness of their literal outcomes: the debasement of the virile soldier to an emasculated, penetrated, feminized casualty. Thus Paris, when mistakenly assumed to be wounded in battle, symbolically replaces the sexual object he has stolen by being “gor'd with Menelaus' horn” (1.1.112). Similarly, when proposing the joust, Hector sees it as a displacement of manly performance from one erotic arena to another, when manliness will be determined not in sexual liaisons but between men in “other arms than hers” (1.2.271). In the man-to-man contest itself, Hector's “gory emulation” is stopped short, and the penetration that would have occurred is foreclosed in a sexualized embrace: “Let me embrace thee, Ajax. By him that thunders, thou hast lusty arms. / Hector would have them fall upon him thus” (4.5.134-36). After many thwarted trials, when Hector and Achilles finally do meet, the spectacle of martial masculinity gives way to the fantasy of repeated penetrations (ll. 242-44, 254-56). Numerous puns on the penetrability of the male body conjure the heroic ethos of warfare as both homoerotic and sodomitical, most noticeably with the double entendre of “arms” as both military weapons and the embracing arms of a lover, a double meaning that foregrounds the antithetical nature of excessive heterosexual passion and military victory. “Better would it fit Achilles much / To throw down Hector than Polyxena,” Ulysses advises (3.3.206-7). In order to regain his military reputation, Achilles must redirect his heterosexual urges into the homoerotics of male combat by transferring his sexual desires from one arena to another.

As these incidents show, the masculine display in battle is grounded in a double imperative that both involves and excludes women in precise ways. In one sense the cultural imperatives of manliness consolidate collective, communal bonds by invoking a model of masculinity, a model that is hostile to sexuality (especially excessive heterosexuality), that is grounded in the precise acting out of cultural scripts, and that is endowed with explicit homoerotic overtones that always shadow even the most seamless performance of virility with images of effeminacy, emasculation, and sodomy. This redirection of effeminacy is impelled by, enacts, and thus reconfirms the importance of “manly” autonomy to the emerging concerns of the early modern state. Yet in another sense this cultural imperative also requires that the feminine be repeatedly stigmatized—femininity being a quality not always localized in the female body, as the womanishness of the effeminate man demonstrates, but nonetheless of particular use in securing the place of women as paradoxically subordinate and disruptively powerful. The attraction that Troilus feels for Cressida operates with both of these imperatives intact. He has abandoned his position on the battlefield and thus lies “weaker than a woman's tear,” completely effeminated by his excessive desire for her, identifying so thoroughly with her that he compares himself to a “virgin in the night.”

This public stigmatization of the feminine in the play—both in terms of effeminate men whose weakness is antithetical to the goals of national glory and in terms of women whose sexual lures pose considerable threats to the integrity of male political and social relations—accounts for the paradoxical place of women and female power in the play. The presentation of masculinity and the attendant erasure of effeminacy are elaborate performances that generate and subsume male aggressive rivalry. Women occupy a crucial yet different place within this signifying economy. Cressida's ironic response to the spectacle of the Trojan soldiers in 1.2 appears to mark a place of resistance to this compelling mode of production, to situate her outside the illusions of male value and valor. Her blatant rejection of the seductive power of appearances and rhetorical embellishments even seems to confer on her the authority to divest such a game of its power: “But more in Troilus thousand-fold I see / Than in the glass of Pandar's praise may be” (1.2.289-90). Even though such moments seem to constitute a break in the circulations of male scripts, the women of the play, principally Cressida and Helen, are nonetheless brought back into this structure as objects through which the indeterminate contours of manly power take form. Such an investment of masculinity in the objectification of women—the “traffic in women,” to use Gayle Rubin's term—is apparent early in the play when Troilus, effeminated by his love for Cressida, bespeaks the frailty of his sense of manly identity.¹⁸ He begins by symbolizing his erotic desires as a type of mercantile transaction:

Tell me, Apollo, for thy Daphne's love,
What Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we.
Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl.
Between our Illium and where she resides,
Let it be call'd the wild and wand'ring flood,
Ourself the merchant, and this sailing Pandar
Our doubtful hope, our convoy and our bark.

(1.1.98-104)

His studied attempts at self-definition realize his place only through an elaborate set of social relations that refract his shifting and unstable male identity through the equally unstable conditions of mercantile economy. Cressida is but a distantly placed “pearl” awaiting her incorporation into the quasi-mercantile system of exchange, the object outside the signifying system of manliness yet necessary in order to constitute its practices.¹⁹ Like the pearls to which they are compared, Cressida and Helen only attain value within the masculine signifying economy when they circulate back to give the shapelessness of the entire structure form and definition. This becomes explicit in 2.3 when Helen's “value” exists only to the degree that she can be reckoned into the system of male heroic valor. She becomes worthy of the effort when Troilus makes it clear that she will escalate the value of the Trojan men: “She is a theme of honour and renown, / A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds, / Whose present courage may beat down our foes, / And fame in time to come canonize us” (2.3.205-8). This conclusion is reached after her value as a “pearl” (like Cressida) has been accurately assessed (“Why, she's a pearl” [2.2.82]). Helen's value lies in her function as a pretext for the manly enterprise of battle—she serves as its motivating cause but is, at the same time, excluded from its scenes and invoked only when the worthiness of the war and how the outcome will reflect upon male heroic valor become issues.

More to the point, the motivation of men in the play to reduce women to so many “pearls” arises from a corresponding imperative to regulate and contain female sexuality and its potentially effeminating pressures. The image of a woman as a “pearl”—a passive object completely within the control and ownership of men, available for their exchanges and transactions in a wholly unproblematized way—has its counterpart in the disorderly, threatening images of both Cressida and Helen as prostitutes or “strumpets,” a word that echoes throughout the play. If the woman-as-pearl bespeaks a certain male fantasy of complete control over the feminine, then the woman as prostitute reverses that fantasy, replacing it with the nightmare of the woman whose sexuality the lover cannot possess. In the mercantile terms of the play, and rebounding this register back on issues of male identity, the prostitute is perceived as a threat to male autonomy because she is a woman capable of being owned only for a prescribed period of time. As the site of what is fantasized as sexual excess, female self-possession, and the disarticulation of a male identity realized through the possession of women, the prostitute's body is the embodiment of a kind of gender-crossing, evidenced in its signification of female power and effeminating sexual pleasure.²⁰ Such constructions explain in one way at least how Cressida can be perceived by the men in the play as a prostitute. Her penchant for bawdy language and sexual innuendo casts doubt on her chastity and marks her as a sexually threatening and unpossessable woman. Once conveyed to the Greek camp and passed around for salutary kisses, her witty repartee marks her as sexually promiscuous. (Ulysses believes he has just witnessed the duping of the Greek commanders by a skillful prostitute, a “daughter of the game.”) All shout in confirmation, “the Trojan's [s]trumpet” (4.5.65). Her mode of self-delivery eventually distances Troilus from her to such a degree that, disgusted with her, he vows to reenter the battle to kill Diomedes. Misogyny underwrites the destruction of Troilus's effeminated self once Cressida becomes “a theme of depravation” in his eyes. Such feelings redirect him to the homoerotic sphere of battle, and Thersites envisions Troilus as “tickling” Diomedes's helmet (5.3.176).

To read the play from this angle is to suggest that early modern notions of masculinity and male power were essentially empty and, paradoxically, made real only through illusion. More than any other Shakespearean drama, Troilus and Cressida leaves us with that cynical conclusion by conveying us from one arena to another—from the battlefield to the theater itself. The fundamental emptiness of both performative productions is figured in a number of literal objects: there is, for example, Troilus's empty sleeve, which serves as a reminder of the play's chivalric frame and a mocking symbol of its antiquated meaning; and there are the cheap painted cloths mentioned in Pandarus's epilogue, imitations of the tapestries that adorn two places that traffic in the power of illusions—the playhouse and the brothel—both driven by the cultural fictions of male power, an authority that is both artificial and troublingly real in its falseness.

Notes

1. All quotations of Troilus and Cressida follow the Arden edition prepared by Kenneth Palmer (London and New York: Methuen, 1982). Citations will appear in the text in parentheses.

2. Numerous articles discuss the complexities of transvestite theatrical practice and the place of crossdressing within the sex-gender system of early modern England. See, for example, Jean Howard, “Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 418-40; Laura Levine, “Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642,” Criticism, 28 (1986), 121-43; Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect, or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), 7-29; and Phyllis Rackin, “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” PMLA, 102 (1987), 29-41. Howard summarizes the state of the crossdressing debate predating her own contribution (p. 419, n. 3). Jonathan Goldberg persuasively unmasks some of the assumptions concerning the relationships between crossdressing, sexuality, and sodomy in a particularly useful chapter in Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 105-43. Lisa Jardine revises some of her earlier thoughts on the transvestite stage in “Twins and Travesties: gender dependency and sexual availability in Twelfth Night,” and Peter Stallybrass discusses the “prosthetic” aspects of crossdressing in “Transvestism and the ‘body beneath’: speculations on the boy actor,” both collected in Erotic Politics, Susan Zimmerman, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 27-38 and 64-83, respectively.

3. My emphasis here and throughout this essay is on the construction of masculinity in relation to discourses of gender and sexuality. I draw heavily on recent studies of sexuality and sodomy in the English Renaissance, even though I choose to pluralize the sites of sexuality and do not focus exclusively on the relationship between effeminacy and sodomy. For me as a critic, the issue is one of dissociating the qualities of effeminacy from the male homosexual body in the early modern period and reconstructing their centrality to all constructions of gender and normative sexuality—both heterosexual and homosexual. This seems to me all the more urgent given the persistent identification of effeminacy with homosexuality in our own day and the deployment of images of effeminacy as a way of humiliating, degrading, and inflicting violence on gay men. Historically there was an association of effeminacy with sodomy, however, and this relationship has been investigated by the following critics: Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982), pp. 81-114; Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 33-60; Jonathan Goldberg (cited in n. 2, above); Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 38-39; and Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 134-36. Traub importantly disarticulates the relationship between effeminacy and “adult homoeroticism” (p. 135). My approach differs from hers in the conception of effeminacy as a cultural form that situates and disciplines both men and women through a simultaneous deployment of discourses of masculinity and femininity.

4. My discussion of the social and political place of gender owes much to Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 28-50.

5. More precisely, effeminacy was considered an attribute of the sodomite who was sexually passive and anally penetrated. In these terms the passive, “effeminate” sodomite was thought to occupy the same cultural place as the “socially inferior” woman. Traub rightly speaks of a “phallic” logic behind this identification (p. 134), yet I do not choose to employ this term because of its suggestion of a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework and the problematics of using psychoanalytic frames to discuss masculinity in the early modern period (see n. 16, below). The negative association of the passive effeminate with the woman mobilizes emerging homophobic and misogynistic logics as they appear in Western theological culture, specifically beginning with St. Thomas Aquinas, who discusses effeminacy under “Question 138: Of the Vices Opposed to Perseverance.” In his elaboration of what constitutes an effeminate man, Aquinas draws heavily on Aristotelian concepts, but his discussion also borrows from Roman Stoic philosophy as well. In this section he maintains that men might be “like women” in two ways: “in one way, by custom, for where a man is accustomed to enjoy pleasures, it is more difficult for him to endure the lack of them. In another way, by natural disposition, because to wit, his mind is less persevering through the frailty of temperament. This is how women are compared to men, as the philosopher [Aristotle] says: ‘wherefore those who are passively sodomitical are said to be effeminate, being womanish themselves, as it were’” (Summa Theologica, 3 vols. [New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1947], Vol. 2, p. 1757). For more on the ideology of gender explicit in Aquinas's statement, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 9; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980); and Thomas Laqueur, Making SEX: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 28-44. Boswell argues unconvincingly that Aquinas's views ought not be seen as misogynistic.

6. By “feminism” here, I mean of course what is usually designated as “first wave” feminism, a critical perspective that relied heavily on a culturally and socially uninflected notion of patriarchy. My own analysis of masculinity draws on a materialist-feminist critique that argues for a more nuanced formulation of patriarchy as a social and political force. See Rosalind Coward, Patriarchal precedents: Sexuality and social relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 270-77, esp. p. 272.

7. I refer to the pamphlet titled Haec Vir: Or The Womanish-Man, dated 1620 and reprinted in Half-Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640, Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, eds. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 277-89, esp. p. 288. For a fuller discussion of the cultural tensions embodied in the crossdressed woman (as opposed to the crossdressed boy actor of the early modern stage), see Marjorie Garber, “The Logic of the Transvestite: The Roaring Girl” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 221-34; Stephen Orgel, “The Subtexts of The Roaring Girl” in Zimmerman, ed., pp. 12-26; and Mary Beth Rose, “Women in Men's Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl,” English Literary Renaissance, 14 (1984), 367-91.

8. The stagings of Achilles's effeminacy in recent dramatic productions only foreground the difficulty of dissociating effeminacy from stereotyped modern homosexuality for modern audiences. In the Yale Repertory Theater production in the fall of 1990, despite the textual attribution of effeminacy to Achilles, it was Patroclus who pranced around in a woman's negligee, much like a contemporary drag queen.

9. My discussion of the performative aspects of gender relies heavily on Judith Butler's treatment of this subject in her Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. pp. 16-25 and 31-33.

10. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947), p. 110; and the Physiognoma, collected in Aristotle: The Minor Works, ed. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955), p. 103.

11. The Moral Law Expounded (London, 1624), p. 778.

12. René Girard discusses the mimetic rivalry of Troilus and Cressida in “The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Geoffrey Hartmann and Patricia Parker, eds. (London: Methuen, 1988), pp. 188-209. For the relationship between rivalry and disease in the play, see Traub, pp. 74-76.

13. For a discussion of characters and their playing of roles in this play, see Linda Charnes, “‘So Unsecret to Ourselves’: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” SQ, 40 (1989), 413-40. Charnes explores the inability of Shakespeare's characters to live up to their previous textual identities and thus focuses on the intertextual relationships not discussed in this essay. My focus on masculinity must also direct the discussion of Helen and Cressida in very specific ways. For a fuller discussion of their female identities, see Janet Adelman, “‘This Is and Is Not Cressid’: The Characterization of Cressida” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 119-41.

14. The links between sexual activity and masculinity are forged in terms of manly self-restraint and the regulation of all sexual activities, whether they involve men, boys, women, or even masturbation. Lancelot Andrewes associates effeminacy with excessive masturbation and invokes the authority of contemporary medical treatises along with Biblical references to support his argument. He writes, “This [masturbation] is even against man's own body and [in] the pollution of it they do foam out their shame. Physicians say it is an enemy to the life of man; it is one of the special cases that preserveth a man's life, the preserving of the genetalis humor, or the genitall humor: and there is not that breedeth a more debility to the vegetative faculty. It is a shortening of life and bringeth upon a man rotten disease” (The Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine at large, 2 vols. [London, 1650], Vol. 2, p. 762).

15. For a discussion of effeminacy within the romance tradition, see Mary Nyquist, “Textual Overlappings and Dalila's Harlot Lap” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 341-72.

16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick first introduced the term “homosocial” to mark “the structure of men's relationships with other men” in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985) and to set it apart from homosexual relationships, which are in her definition “genetic” or relating to specific genitally grounded sexualities (pp. 1-2). Later, she more fully examines the relationship between homosexuality and homosociality in the context of the eighteenth-century molly houses (pp. 88-89). To adapt her framework to a pre-eighteenth-century context, I would argue more for a model whereby normative masculinity (not yet sexually inscribed as either heterosexual or homosexual) was constituted out of material practices and relations of power within which the regulation of sexual desire directed and redirected heterosexual, homosexual, and homosocial impulses. While it is possible that homosociality precluded homosexuality, it also seems possible that it generated and produced homoerotic responses (as registers of male penetration imply in Troilus and Cressida), and that such acts were not marginal and secondary but primary to defining social responsibilities and bonds in the early modern world, both in the proscriptive discourses of sodomy and in the constitution of male subjectivity itself. Traub explains this penetrative symbolism with recourse to a “phallic” logic (pp. 52-54) and a Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic paradigm. Rather than reifying the male ego as psychoanalysis does in the service of normative heterosexuality, I choose instead to see the male subject in postmodern terms as unstable, de-essentialized, and susceptible to slippages and shifts between poles of masculinity and femininity (hence my foregrounding of effeminacy, which modern psychoanalysis comprehends as symptomatic of latent homosexuality).

17. The masculine signifying economy not only operates to legitimate relations of sexuality but also deploys sexuality in the service of legitimating a range of social relations. For a further theoretical discussion, see Joan Wallach Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” and Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” both in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, David M. Halperin, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 3-42 and 397-415.

18. See Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, Rayna P. Reiter, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157-210.

19. See Charnes, pp. 424-25.

20. For a further discussion of the early modern prostitute as a female crossdressed figure, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender” in Body/Guards, Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 80-111.