[In the following essay, Greenfield argues that by depicting Troy as decadent and corrupt in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare undercut England's efforts to build national pride by connecting its ancestry as a nation to the heroic and ancient city of Troy.]

Literary critics largely agree that Shakespeare's history plays raised troubling questions about who qualified as a member of the national community.¹ Problematic cases include: the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish; bastards; ethnic half-breeds; foreign brides; women generally; and sometimes all non-aristocrats. Still, though, despite these questions and anxieties, Shakespeare's tetralogies and the other English history plays move toward closures in which the nation heals and the dream of community reasserts its claim.

Troilus and Cressida explores a more pessimistic political argument. If Shakespeare's histories maintain an investment in some idea of national community, Troilus and Cressida works programmatically to reveal the nation as a collection of fictions. Where the histories construct genealogies for England, projecting a new social formation backward into the past, Troilus and Cressida attacks the very idea of genealogy. In King John the bastard Faulconbridge represents the real England: he embodies the principle of legitimacy in all but the most literal sense. In Troilus and Cressida, on the other hand, the bastard Thersites speaks from a cosmopolitan, extranational perspective. During the climactic battle he cheers alternately for the Trojans and for the Greeks. His illegitimacy liberates him from the ideological claim of the nation, whose central trope imagines citizens as brothers. Where Faulconbridge functions as a synecdoche for the nation, Thersites stands outside its borders. Thersites emblematizes the project of Troilus and Cressida: much of the play's continuing power to disturb derives from its relentless attack on nationalism's narratives, its tropes, its strategic amnesia, and its assumptions about human character and agency.²

TROY AND THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH

Most political scientists locate the origin of nationalism in the eighteenth century: their theories carefully distinguish political units centered on monarchs from those defined by allegiance to what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities.”³ In these theories neither ethnicity, a shared language, religion, nor territorial boundaries constitute national identity—they are its raw materials. The moment of nationalism arrives when citizens see the state as a reflection of their will, as an expression of the collective sovereignty of the people. Nationalism is not a fact of political structures but a way of understanding oneself and one's social environment. The citizens of a nation imagine themselves as a community, and they imagine this community as invested with a sovereign power. Citizens must forget the differences of rank and wealth that divide them, and they must repudiate ties that bind them to those outside the boundaries of the nation.⁴ Liah Greenfeld argues that this moment arrived in England earlier than elsewhere.⁵ Whether or not Greenfeld's chronology is correct, English nationalism certainly developed unevenly. Some Protestant intellectuals, drawing on an older, religious conception of community, expressed a passionate nationalism early in the sixteenth century. One can also detect a quieter nationalist discourse in the language of the civil servants who staffed the new, rapidly growing state bureaucracy: in the second half of the sixteenth century they began to use words such as nation, state, and people in their modern senses.⁶ Through the combined action of these two elites, the nationalist idea began to diffuse throughout the rest of the population. One crucial factor was the state's dissemination of vernacular Bibles and prayerbooks. Writers and theatrical companies also played an important role. The emergence of the nationalist idea required the rejection of two older forms of authority and the idea of community they entailed. First, the English had to detach themselves from the universalist claims of the Catholic church. Second, in a subtler process, they had to transfer their allegiance from the person of the monarch to the concept of the nation. Though almost invisible during the reign of Elizabeth, this transfer had been glaringly obvious earlier, during the reign of her older sister, Mary, and would become so again during the reign of Charles I. Over the course of the sixteenth century the English developed a powerful sense of their political agency as a people.

Discussions of nationalism are complicated by the fact that some inhabitants of a nation may not be fully enfranchised citizens. A further complication is that even a citizen has an identity composed of multiple narratives and affiliations with multiple communities—religious, familial, and professional as well as territorial and political.⁷ While political scientists usually describe identifications with nations as gradually displacing identifications with transnational religious communities, both narratives nevertheless might simultaneously exert strong claims on a single person. In Shakespeare's Richard II, for example, Mowbray experiences a curious regression of social identities: deprived by exile of his Englishness, he reimagines himself as a member of a broader Christian community and, we later learn (4.1), dies fighting the Turks on behalf of the Venetians. Mowbray abandons his distinctively early modern national identity for a feudal role as a Christian knight. This vignette can serve to remind us that nations and other imagined communities answer a strong human need. Without them, we cannot define our values and interests—our tongues become unstringed instruments. Self-narration always requires at least the fantasy of a “common space” within which one can be understood.⁸

Because creation of a collective identity requires a reinvention of the past, the English nationalists of the sixteenth century set about constructing a national literature, a national language, a shared historical memory, and common ancestors. In early modern England many of the fictional genealogies invented to give the infant nation an appearance of antiquity centered on the fall of Troy. The English began to elaborate a fantasy of the translation of empire, the translatio imperii, in the late Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century Geoffrey of Monmouth told the story of the colonization of England by a Trojan named Brut, a grandson of Aeneas. In Geoffrey's narrative King Arthur was descended from Brut. The myths concerning Brut and his posterity served to legitimate a variety of institutions and group identities. Among their other functions, they helped to solidify the Tudor monarchy's shaky claim to the throne. Spenser used the story as part of his project of dynastic legitimation (and dynastic speculation) in The Faerie Queene. Use of the myth became particularly intense toward the end of Elizabeth's reign, when it became apparent that James might inherit the crown of England. James could claim descent from Brut on both sides of his family—both Tudors and Stuarts had Welsh kings among their ancestors. Similarly, the fantasy of a translatio studii occupied a central location in English letters. The first printed book published in England was William Caxton's 1478 translation of Raoul Lefèvre's The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy. Extending Virgil's westward translation of empire, Caxton's translation quietly suggested that England had inherited the cultural energies passed from Troy to Rome. The Brut myth helped to defend vernacular literature against accusations of rudeness and belatedness. When the Italian humanist Polydore Virgil suggested that Geoffrey had fabricated the Brut story, he aroused a storm of protest. The Protestant polemicist John Bale furiously denounced Polydore in his 1548 catalogue of English men of letters, Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum Summarium. Bale needed the myth in order to assert the antiquity and continuity of English literature.⁹ At the end of the sixteenth century Thomas Heywood used the Brut myth to glorify not only the English but also his own artistic venue, public theater. In the dedicatory letter to his Trojan history play, The Iron Age, Heywood linked the history play with other, more prestigious literary forms such as the epic: “For what Pen of note, in one page or other hath not remembered Troy, and bewayl'd the sacke, and subuersion of so illustrious a Citty: Which, although it were scituate in Asia, yet out of her ashes hath risen, two the rarest Phoenixes in Europe, namely London and Rome.”¹⁰ Later, when Dryden revised Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in 1679, the prefatory poem by R. Duke concluded with the optimistic thought that “our great Charles being sung by you, / Old Troy shall grow less famous than the new.”¹¹

Toward the end of Elizabeth's reign Troy began to serve with increasing frequency as a point of origin for the English nation, not just for the English monarchy or English letters. George Peele, for instance, claimed that he wrote his pamphlet history of Troy in order that “my Countrymen famed through the worlde for resolution and fortitude, may marche in equipage of honour and Armes, wyth theyr glorious and renowned predicessors the Troyans.”¹² Similarly, Edward Coke used the myth to reinforce the authority of the common law, claiming that its unbroken descent made it older and more coherent than Roman law. The law, Coke argued, was therefore superior to the monarch. When Sir John Hayward responded to Coke with a defense of monarchical prerogative, he found himself attacking the Brut myth, despite its importance in the iconography of his patron, James I:

From these [critics] I expect two principall obiections. The first is, that the lawes of England were neuer changed since the time of Brutus; not onely in the peaceable state of the realme, but not by any of the seueral conquerors thereof: not by the Normanes, Danes, Saxones; no not by the Romanes, who vsually changed the laws of all other countries which they brought vnder the sway of their sword: but that in all other changes, whether of inhabitants, or of state, the lawes doe still remaine the same, which Brutus compiled out of the Troian lawes; and therefore it is not fit they should in any point be altered. I will not now spend time vpon this opinion; partly because it is not commonly receiued, but especially for that I haue in a particular treatise examined at large, the parts and proofes of this assertion. Not as derogating any thing from the true dignitie of the common law; but as esteeming hyperbolicall praises now out of season; as neuer suitable but with artlesse times.¹³

Hayward was writing in favor of the union of England and Scotland, and he proposed a merger of the legal systems, rituals, and customs of the two nations. In arguing for this new, hybrid political entity, Hayward reminded his readers of the mixed ethnic heritage of the English people and their institutions. He brought back into view the successive invasions of Britain which Coke's vision of the uncontaminated purity of English institutions had occluded. An attack on the Troy myth generally functioned as an attack on the legitimacy of an institution, an attempt to undo a customary arrangement and to open up a space for change. In his Hypercritica, Edmund Bolton expressed a cautious skepticism about Geoffrey of Monmouth's history but warned of the danger of discarding it entirely: “Nevertheless out of that very Story (let it be what it will) have Titles been framed in open Parliament, both in England, and Ireland, for the Rights of the Crown of England, even to entire Kingdoms. … If that Work be quite abolished there is a vast Blanck upon the Times of our Country, from the Creation of the World till the coming of Julius Caesar.”¹⁴ One might say that Troilus and Cressida works to expand Bolton's “vast Blanck.” Unlike Heywood's Iron Age, Troilus and Cressida completely ignores the Brut story. And unlike Spenser, Shakespeare displays no interest in creating a genealogy of English literature centered on Chaucer. Neither the play nor its prefatory material alludes specifically to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.¹⁵ While the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries (and many of his own plays) set out to bolster the prestige of an emergent nation and its literature, Troilus and Cressida undercuts the genealogical narratives of literary history and nationalism. The play shows the Troy myth being produced through a series of falsifications.¹⁶ At every stage of the process, a dishonorable deed becomes heroic or a crime is blamed on an innocent victim. The play is not a history but a skeptical analysis of history-making, an emptying out or undoing of the work of the chronicles.

SATIRE AND NATIONAL BELONGING

An imagined community presupposes a particular kind of agent, one who is capable of freely choosing to join in such an association and who can meaningfully assent to the reciprocal obligations that constitute it.¹⁷ The politically enfranchised citizen whose agency is seen as defective, incapable of meeting these requirements, poses a severe challenge to this notion of collective sovereignty. If the defective citizen's actions are compulsive and involuntary, then he or she is an animal, a machine, a bundle of appetites, and not a person. The possibility of such a citizen continues to haunt policy debates and liberal theory in our own time, and it cast its shadow even over the origins of nationalism in England.¹⁸ Whether they were literary thinkers such as Ben Jonson and George Puttenham, theologians such as Richard Hooker, or jurists such as Edward Coke, theorists of the imagined community had to develop theories of how the defective citizen was produced and how he might be rehabilitated. They had to imagine the community as resilient and powerful enough to absorb and neutralize aberrant behavior. In the political theory of Jonson's comical satires, the satirist collaborates with the state in order to discipline dysfunctional citizens, purging them of their humors by showing them how they are perceived by others and by resituating them within the community's web of reciprocal relations. Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida examines the same questions of social control, but it finds no workable solution for the maintenance of a stable imagined community. In Troilus and Cressida Ulysses and Nestor form a plan modeled on the conspiracies of Jonson's satirist figures: they stage a pageant in which each Greek leader in turn feigns disdain for Achilles. Ajax in his jealousy of Achilles also uses the language of the satirist: “I'll let his humour's blood” (2.3.205).¹⁹ Achilles and Patroclus, though, have a satirical project of their own, one antithetical to that of Nestor and Ulysses. Patroclus mimics the behavior of the Greek camp's leaders: “And with ridiculous and awkward action, / Which, slanderer, he ‘imitation’ calls, / He pageants us … like a strutting player” (1.3.148-52). In addition to amusing Achilles, this performance has the function of asserting a set of values, a vision of how the community should be organized. Achilles and Patroclus both value the achievements of the warrior over those of the leader or the orator: “The still and mental parts / That do contrive how many hands shall strike, / When fitness calls them on, and know by measure / Of their observant toil the enemy's weight, / Why this has not a finger's dignity. / They call this bed-work, mapp'ry, closet-war” (1.3.198-204). Each group uses a theatrical technique derived from comical satire to attack the value system of the other. This symmetrical opposition of satirical projects reveals both systems as local and contingent, lacking the authority of true social norms. Neither plot leads to a satirical purgation.

If Ulysses attempts to employ satire as an instrument of military discipline, the figure of Thersites conducts a sustained critique of nationalism and the war effort. Thersites invents a particularly interesting alternative to national identity in his brief encounter with Margarelon:

MARGARELON
Turn, slave, and fight.
THERSITES
What art thou?
MARGARELON
A bastard son of Priam's.
THERSITES
I am a bastard too; I love bastards. I am bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valor, in everything illegitimate. One bear will not bite another, and wherefore should one bastard? Take heed; the quarrel's most ominous to us; if the son of a whore fight for a whore, he tempts judgement. Farewell, bastard.

(5.7.13-22)

Although there are conceptions of citizenship that do not involve biological consanguinity, even these conceptions are usually expressed in tropes that involve a genealogy. To belong to a national community is to be a legitimate heir to its history.²⁰ Thersites inverts the trope, imagining a community defined by illegitimacy and dispossession. He attempts to persuade Margarelon that their national affiliations are not the most important facts about them. Although Thersites advances this theory out of a desire for self-preservation, his contempt for the idea of national difference sounds genuine. In his view his own nationality is an arbitrary label rather than an essential component of his identity. He regards the aristocratic honor culture that motivates the warriors as a dangerous delusion and treats the war as a spectator sport. On the battlefield he cheers alternately for both sides: “Hold thy whore, Grecian! Now for thy whore, Trojan!” he says to Diomedes and Troilus; and to Paris and Menelaus, “The cuckold and the cuckold-maker are at it. Now, bull! Now, dog! 'Loo, Paris! 'Loo now, my double-horned Spartan!” (5.4.22-23; 5.7.9-11). Thersites also attempts to reason his fellow Greeks out of their ideological commitment to the war: “There's Ulysses and old Nestor, whose wit was mouldy ere your grandsires had nails on their toes, yoke you like draught-oxen, and make you plough up the wars” (2.1.101-4). Where Jonson's satirist figures work to preserve the community and to enforce its norms, Thersites attempts to demonstrate to Ajax and Achilles that their interests diverge from those of their leaders. Thersites adopts what one might call a cosmopolitan point of view, a resistance to simple citizenship that sometimes has the force of an ethical commitment—although at other times Thersites seems more mad than principled.²¹

Thersites occupies a position at once dramatically central and socially marginal. As a social critic, he proves impotent: like the rest of Shakespeare's fools, he has a deep understanding of events but cannot communicate this understanding to the other characters successfully.²² He uses the verse satirist's language of medical cure and of judicial whipping, but his curses and insults fail to effect lasting changes in his victims' behavior.²³ His actual function within the community is that of entertainer. Although Ajax and Achilles threaten and even beat Thersites for his insults, they compete for his services: “Why, my cheese, my digestion, why hast thou not served thyself in to my table so many meals?” Achilles asks (2.3.38-40). Thersites's impotence within the play's frame is, however, balanced by his power to step outside that frame. Thersites has the Elizabethan fool's privileged relationship to the audience. Like the Vice figure of the morality play, Thersites claims as his own the stage territory closest to the audience, the zone between dramatic fiction and critical reflection on that fiction.²⁴ Thersites frequently serves as an interpreter of the play's action, like the metatheatrical commentators in Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour and Cynthia's Revels. In the scene where Cressida surrenders Troilus's sleeve, Thersites observes Ulysses and Troilus as they observe Cressida and Diomedes. Thersites's perspective brackets those of the other characters. As Robert Weimann points out, Thersites frequently has the last word, offering his bitter assessment of events after the other characters have exited.²⁵ On the battlefield, offering his commentary on the fighting, he occupies a vantage point that is both metatheatrical and extranational. The clowns and fools played by Will Kemp and Robert Armin generally possessed a similar independence from the social and dramatic conventions that governed the behavior of the other characters.²⁶ This independence mirrored the clown's actual position within the theater company. Armin, who played Thersites, worked simultaneously for the Chamberlain's Men at the Globe and the boys' company at Whitefriars, and also gave solo performances at the Curtain and published his own pamphlets and plays. Armin, like Kemp before him, developed a set of routines that he transported from play to play, and both actors thus functioned as Shakespeare's collaborators in the writing of scripts. The fool worked, in effect, as a free agent.

It is instructive to compare the Thersitean critique of communal identity with the narratives of an emergent English nationalism. In 1579 the Protestant extremist John Stubbes wrote a pamphlet imploring Queen Elizabeth not to marry the Duc d'Alençon. In the pamphlet Stubbes developed a strange and memorable image of the relations among Englishmen:

It is naturall to all men to abhor forreigne rule as a burden of Egypt, and to vs of England if to any other nation vnder the son First, it agreeth not vvith thys state or frame of gouernment, to deliuer any trust of vnder gouernment to an alien, but is a poyson to it, when vve receiue any such for a gouernour. And that is euident by our lavves and auncient customes of the lande disabling any alien to inherite the highest gouernement of vs. vpon this reason, no doubt because a senceles and careles forreiner, cannot haue the naturall and brotherlike bovvells of tender loue tovvards this people vvhich is required in a gouernor, & which is by birth bredd & dravven out from the teates of a mans ovvn mother country.²⁷

Stubbes suggests that all Englishmen share a familial lineage. Their nationality is not an accidental or contingent fact about them but part of the core of their identities, coded into their characters and even perhaps into the chemistry of their bodies. In order to essentialize English national identity in this way, Stubbes has to repress the memory of the ethnic hybridity of the English. Even though much of the English nobility could claim French ancestry, Stubbes represents the French as dangerously alien. English nationalism, in other words, requires the forgetting of ordinary consanguinity: the nation becomes one's true family and the central context for the development of one's identity. The difficulty of the imaginative effort required by nationalism is visible in the strange and even monstrous trope of the mother country as a single body with hundreds of thousands of breasts. This image is uncannily close to the grotesque exaggerations and distortions of satire but is intended to have the opposite effect: Stubbes wants to produce fellow-feeling rather than subject it to scrutiny. Troilus and Cressida, as I have argued, mounts a sustained attack on the genealogical trope at the heart of nationalism. With its procession of bastards, cuckolds, exiles, traitors, and racial hybrids, the play persistently undermines the idea that national identity is an unambiguous aspect of self-definition.

FRAGMENTS OF CITIZENSHIP

The bad citizens who people Troilus and Cressida frequently imagine each other as microcosmic versions of their dysfunctional communities. Thersites, for example, makes Agamemnon's body an image of the Greek army: “Agamemnon—how if he had boils, full, all over, generally? … And those boils did run? Say so, did not the general run then? Were not that a botchy core?” (2.1.2-6). The “general” here is both the leader and his army.²⁸ Similarly, Ulysses suggests that the choice of a Greek champion will “boil, / As 'twere, from forth us all, a man distilled / Out of our virtues” (1.3.345-47). The designated champion, Ajax, proves to be a suitable emblem of his army: like the Greek camp, Ajax seems to be paralyzed by internal dissension. In the playful description of Cressida's manservant, Ajax is “a man into whom nature hath so crowded humours that his valour is crushed into folly, his folly sauced with discretion … he hath the joints of everything, but everything so out of joint that he is a gouty Briareus, many hands and no use, or a purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight” (1.2.21-29). And Achilles imagines the bleeding body of Hector as the city of Troy: “Come, Troy, sink down! / Here lies thy heart, thy sinews, and thy bone” (5.8.11-12). Individuals and communities in Troilus and Cressida are linked by a species of sympathetic magic.

Most of the characters in Troilus and Cressida embody in microcosm not one but both communities and the war between them: they are suspended between the moral and emotional claims of Troy and Greece.²⁹ In some cases these conflicting claims result not just in divided loyalty but in a multiple-personality disorder, with each community trying to produce a particular kind of person: a character manifests two different identities, depending on location or situation. Shakespeare's Achilles, for example, has two distinct personalities. The Iliadic Achilles is the lover of Patroclus, his “masculine whore,” in the words of Thersites (5.1.17). The other Achilles, who comes from Caxton and medieval romance, loves Priam's daughter Polyxena: “Of this my privacy,” Achilles says, “I have strong reasons.” Ulysses answers: “But 'gainst your privacy / The reasons are more potent and heroical. / 'Tis known, Achilles, that you are in love / With one of Priam's daughters” (3.3.190-94).³⁰ Whereas the first Achilles abstains from battle out of pride, in order to highlight his preeminence among the Greeks, the second honors an oath to his lover and her mother, attempting to protect a space within which intimacy can unfold, a space sealed off from the public struggle for reputation. Each nation works to produce its own version of Achilles. Hecuba and her daughter want an Achilles committed to the pleasures and obligations of private relations, while Ulysses wants a warrior who values above all else his reputation and duty to the community. These antithetical claims turn Achilles himself into a war zone: at one point Ulysses suggests to the other Greek leaders that “Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages / And batters down himself” (2.3.169-70). The conflict has at best an ambiguous resolution: Achilles goes into battle to perform his public duty but only out of grief for the loss of his male lover.

The fragmentation of national identity in Troilus and Cressida proceeds by a sort of contagion. When characters are pulled away from their communities, they also destabilize the national identities of their friends, relatives, and lovers. The sequence of transformations begins in the play's prehistory with the abduction of Priam's sister, Hesione, by the Greeks. Her child, Ajax, is a hybrid, half Trojan and half Greek. The Trojans in turn seduce Helen away from her husband, leaving her no longer Greek but not fully Trojan: she lives under the shadow of the possibility that she will be returned to her husband. When the Greeks lay siege to Troy, they precipitate the undoing of more national identities. Achilles falls in love with Polyxena, and the Trojan seer Calchas defects to the Greeks. This act of opportunism forces Calchas to abandon not only his city but the identity defined in relation to that city:

                                                                                          … Appear it to your mind
That, through the sight I bear in things to come,
I have abandoned Troy, left my possessions,
Incurred a traitor's name, exposed myself
From certain and possessed conveniences,
To doubtful fortunes; sequest'ring from me all
That time, acquaintance, custom and condition
Made tame and most familiar to my nature;
And here, to do you service, am become
As new into the world, strange, unacquainted.

(3.3.3-12)

Despite its hilarious hypocrisy, Calchas's speech has a certain pathos. He has eloquently described the division of identity that the war eventually effects in almost all of the play's characters. Moving from one side to the other involves not only a change of political allegiance but an impoverishment of the self.

Calchas precipitates a similar crisis in his daughter, splitting her into a Trojan self, Troilus's lover, and a Greek self, which Troilus calls “Diomed's Cressida” (5.2.135). Her roles develop in relation to the communities in which she resides and, more particularly, to the men who claim her as their property: Troilus and her uncle Pandarus on one side, Diomedes and her father Calchas on the other. Cressida's self-division begins with a conflict between her prudence and her desire for Troilus: “I have a kind of self resides with you, / But an unkind self that itself will leave / To be another's fool” (3.2.138-40). One might describe this as a split between Cressida as proprietor of herself and Cressida as erotic commodity, Troilus's property. Cressida develops a new self-conception centered on her connection to Troilus: “I have forgot my father; / I know no touch of consanguinity; / No kin, no love, no blood, no soul so near me / As the sweet Troilus” (4.2.94-97). When Troilus fails to protest the trade, the result is an unmaking of Cressida's identity.³¹ By asking the Greeks to exchange their prisoner Antenor for her, Calchas erases her identity as a Trojan, recreating her as “Diomed's Cressida.” Traces of Troilus's Cressida remain, and the result is a sort of schizophrenia: “Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee, / But with my heart the other eye doth see” (5.2.105-6). Torn between two versions of her identity, Cressida keeps canceling her own actions: she gives Troilus's sleeve to Diomedes and then takes it back; she makes an appointment with Diomedes, announces that she will not keep it, and then coaxes him back. Her schizophrenia, her loss of agency, reflects her position between the two communities. Cressida's splitting creates in turn a civil war within Troilus: “Within my soul there doth conduce a fight / Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate / Divides more wider than the sky and earth” (5.2.145-47). Troilus finds his powers of reason and decision to be momentarily paralyzed.

Ajax has a similar destabilizing effect on Hector. The two enemies are cousins—Ajax's mother, Hesione, is Hector's aunt—and this relationship produces conflicting attitudes in Hector: “This Ajax is half made of Hector's blood; / In love whereof half Hector stays at home; / Half heart, half hand, half Hector comes to seek / This blended knight, half Trojan and half Greek” (4.5.83-86). Unmoved by this consanguinity, Ajax appears willing and even eager to kill his cousin. Hector, though, is less self-contained, more open to sympathetic identification, more aware of his obligations to others, and imagines a bizarre solution to the problem posed by Ajax's hybrid origins:

Were thy commixtion Greek and Troyan so,
That thou couldst say ‘This hand is Grecian all,
And this is Trojan; the sinews of this leg
All Greek, and this all Troy; my mother's blood
Runs on the dexter cheek, and this sinister
Bounds in my father's’: by Jove multipotent,
Thou shouldst not bear from me a Greekish member
Wherein my sword had not impressure made
Of our rank feud; but the just gods gainsay
That any drop thou borrow'dst from thy mother,
My sacred aunt, should by my mortal sword
Be drained!

(4.5.124-35)

In Hector's fantasy Ajax's mixed bloods are separated and his dual nationalities untangled.³² With firm boundaries drawn around national allegiances, Hector could act freely, guided in an unambiguous way by his sense of the values and interests of Troy. But the Ajax he imagines is an impossible creature, spiritually as well as physically bifurcated, one who would be obliged to battle himself, his left arm against his right. This hybrid monster mirrors Hector's own divided mental state. Without the ethical framework provided by an affiliation to a single community, action becomes impossible. In the space between nations Hector is suspended between systems of values.

Although the encounter with Ajax has only a momentarily paralyzing effect on Hector, the claims of the opposing communities cause a more permanent dissociation, splitting him into three different persons. Whereas Cressida becomes a sort of palimpsest, with a second character scribbled over the first in a way that leaves both visible, Hector's selves seem to have no memory of each other. Cressida experiences an agonizing self-division, but each of Hector's selves has a sharp, clear outline. If Cressida's character seems shaped by her circumstances, Hector's seems flatter and less human, more like a series of cartoon outlines than a person.

The first version of Hector has a well-developed theory of moral decision-making. During a debate in the Trojan council over whether to return Helen to the Greeks, he displays a knowledge of Aristotle's thinking on self-discipline and the relation between the will and the passions:

The reasons you allege do more conduce
To the hot passion of distempered blood
Than to make up a free determination
'Twixt right and wrong; for pleasure and revenge
Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice
Of any true decision. Nature craves
All dues be rendered to their owners. Now
What nearer debt in all humanity
Than wife is to the husband? If this law
Of nature be corrupted through affection,
And that great minds, of partial indulgence
To their benumbèd wills, resist the same,
There is a law in each well-ordered nation
To curb those raging appetites that are
Most disobedient and refractory.
If Helen then be wife to Sparta's king,
As it is known she is, these moral laws
Of nature and of nations speak aloud
To have her back returned. Thus to persist
In doing wrong extenuates not wrong,
But makes it much more heavy. Hector's opinion
Is this in way of truth. …

(2.2.167-88)

The speech concerns “true decisions” and “free determinations,” but the nature of Hector's own decision-making remains opaque. In Hector's theory of human agency a true decision requires a reasoned analysis based on law and moral principle. Hector works through such an analysis, reducing the question of whether to return Helen to a series of syllogisms. He sounds genuinely exasperated by the intemperate suggestions of Troilus and Paris. Then, almost as an afterthought, Hector reverses himself, announces that he agrees with his impulsive younger brothers, and subscribes wholeheartedly to the chivalric ethos.

… Yet ne'ertheless,
My sprightly brethren, I propend to you
In resolution to keep Helen still;
For 'tis a cause that hath no mean dependence
Upon our joint and several dignities.

(2.2.188-92)

His irritation evaporates instantly. Hector goes on to say that before the meeting began he had already decided to announce a challenge to the Greeks. Even during the moment when he argued passionately that the Trojans should surrender Helen, Hector had already committed himself to continuing the conflict. The second Hector advocates a blind nationalism, while the first Hector takes a more cosmopolitan perspective: the “laws / Of nature and of nations” adjudicate between individual nations.

The phrase “law of nations,” or ius gentium, was itself a foreign import. In the Roman Republic the ius gentium developed to regulate both the affairs of foreigners living in Rome and Rome's relations with neighboring states. Subsequent Christian political theories linked the ius gentium to natural law, the ius naturale, which was apparent to all rational men. In the dedicatory epistle to The Pandectes of the Law of Nations, William Fulbecke promises to compare the “judgments,” “censures,” “advises,” and “practices” of “the renowmed Assyrians, the valiant Persians, the spirit-guided Hebrewes, the prudent Grecians, the admirable Romanes, the noble harted Carthaginians, the victorious Macedonians, the deliberatiue Turkes, the politike Italians, the chiualrous French [and] the most puissant & inuictis Romano Marte Brittanis.”³³ In his evenhanded attribution of a separate virtue to each nation, Fulbecke demonstrates the peculiar self-estrangement inherent in any serious reflection on the ius gentium: the concept requires seeing the similarities between oneself and the Turks and recognizing the contingency of every nation's customs and values, even one's own. The first section of Hector's speech displays an objectivity similar to Fulbecke's, but the second lapses into chauvinism. The first Hector has an identity defined in relation to a transnational community of rational men, while the second Hector identifies himself as a Trojan. The gap between sentences before the word “Yet” is the gap between two emotions, two value systems, and perhaps even two different persons: suddenly, an impetuous knight replaces the prudent moral philosopher, a Trojan replaces a citizen of the world.

In the fifth act of the play Hector mutates again, and a third identity displaces both the moral philosopher and the knight. The metamorphosis occurs just after Hector has graciously and foolishly afforded Achilles a chance to catch his breath. When Achilles departs, Hector notices a Greek in unusually beautiful armor. Hector hunts down this anonymous Greek, kills him, and strips him of his armor.³⁴ The third version of Hector, unlike the first two, has at least a passing interest in material possessions, and in pursuing them, he exhibits a ruthlessness quite alien to the chivalric Hector. Earlier in the fifth act Hector had spared not only Achilles but also Thersites, while before the day even began Troilus had reproached him for his “vice of mercy”: “When many times the captive Grecian falls, / Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword, / You let them rise and live” (5.3.37, 40-42). In both Caxton's Recuyell and Lydgate's Troy-Book, Hector kills Greeks for their armor. In Shakespeare's version of the story, though, this act of covetousness requires an audience to revise its understanding of Hector.³⁵ The chivalric Hector views the accumulation of honor in economic terms, but the honor he covets entails a disdain for actual material wealth—and even for the military imperative of reducing the enemy's numbers. The third Hector, on the other hand, operates as a privateer, a John Hawkins or a Francis Drake rather than a Philip Sidney. While the first Hector, the moral philosopher, inhabits a transnational community, and the second Hector has a strong Trojan patriotism, the third Hector does not appear to frame his conduct in relation to any particular community.

One of the most disturbing features of Hector's death is, of necessity, that both the courteous Hector and the acquisitive one die together, one punished for his generosity and the other for his greed. Achilles and his Myrmidons come upon Hector sitting beside the corpse he has just stripped. “I am unarmed,” says Hector; “forgo this vantage, Greek” (5.8.9). Achilles nevertheless orders his men to butcher Hector. Achilles's savagery, cowardice, and hypocrisy would be enough to make this incident shocking, but what makes it so resistant to placement within a moral framework is the death's double causation. A few minutes before his death the acquisitive Hector killed a weaker man out of paltry self-interest. A few minutes before that the chivalric Hector allowed a winded Achilles to withdraw from combat. One Hector dies unjustly, while the other has forfeited his right to mercy.

When playwrights who subscribed to a nationalist ideology told the story of Troy, they needed to make Hector more unambiguously heroic. This, in turn, demanded a Hector with a coherent and continuous personal identity. The comparison between Heywood's version and Shakespeare's underlines the political ambiguities produced by the breakdown of identities in Troilus and Cressida. In Heywood's version of the fall of Troy in The Iron Age, Hector reverses his position in a less disjunctive fashion, one consistent with the continuity of his personal identity. Like the Hectors of Shakespeare and Caxton, Heywood's Hector begins the scene as an advocate of prudence:

HECTOR
… my reuerent King and father,
If you pursue this expedition,
By the vntaunted honor of these armes
That liue imblazon'd on my burnish't shield,
It is without good cause, and I deuine
Of all your flourishing line, by which the Gods
Haue rectified your fame aboue all Kings,
Not one shal liue to meate your Sepulchre,
Or trace your funeral Heralds to the Tombes
Of your great Ancestours: oh for your honour
Take not vp vniust Armes.
AENEAS
                                                                                          Prince Hectors words
Will draw on him the imputation
Of feare and cowardesie.
TROILUS
                                                                                                                        Fie brother Hector,
If our Aunts rape, and Troyes destruction
Bee not reueng'd, their seuerall blemishes
The aged hand of Time can neuer wipe
From our succession.
PARIS
                                                                                          'Twill be registred
That all King Priams sonnes saue one were willing
And forward to reuenge them on the Greekes,
Onely that Hector durst not.

(1.1.50-69)

Heywood supplies a motive for Hector's change of heart: resenting the accusation of cowardice, Hector loses his temper.

HECTOR
Ha, durst not didst thou say? effeminate boy,
Go get you to your Sheepe-hooke and your Scrip,
Thou look'st not like a Souldier, there's no fire
Within thine eyes, nor quills vpon thy chinne,
Tell me I dare not? go, rise, get you gone:
Th'art fitter for young Oenons company
Than for a bench of souldiers. …

(1.1.70-76)

This inverts the sequence of Shakespeare's version, in which Hector begins his speech irritated with his brothers and ends by agreeing with them enthusiastically.

An examination of Dryden's post-Restoration revision of Troilus and Cressida throws the critical properties of Shakespeare's play into even sharper relief. After programmatically eliminating all of the discontinuities and fragmentations of character in Shakespeare's play, Dryden justified his extensive modifications with an essay on the rules governing the representation of character in tragedy. The essay implicitly chastises Shakespeare for failing to respect the unity of character:

The last property of manners is, that they be constant, and equal, that is, maintain'd the same through the whole design: thus when Virgil had once given the name of Pious to Aeneas, he was bound to show him such, in all his words and actions through the whole Poem … unless he [a poet] help himself by an acquir'd knowledge of the Passions, what they are in their own nature, and by what springs they are to be mov'd, he will be subject either to raise them where they ought not to be rais'd, or not to raise them by the just degrees of Nature, or to amplify them beyond the natural bounds, or not to observe the crisis and turns of them, in their cooling and decay: all which Errors proceed from want of Judgment in the Poet, and from being unskill'd in the Principles of Moral Philosophy.³⁶

Dryden altered the council scene to fit this theory of character: in his version Hector decides to send a challenge to the Greeks only after his little son, Astyanax, offers to send his own challenge. Dryden also pruned much of the lecture on moral philosophy, diminishing the impact of Hector's self-contradiction. Dryden regarded Shakespeare's council scene as flawed by its failure to represent Hector as a character whose identity is continuous; the later playwright attempted to supply the links and explanations lacking in Shakespeare's version.³⁷ In Dryden's account the gaps and fissures of Shakespeare's play reflect a primitive theory of the passions. Dryden discreetly suggests that his predecessor had an inadequate knowledge of moral philosophy—the same charge Shakespeare's Hector levels at his brothers. But the discontinuities of character in Shakespeare's play force his audiences to examine their beliefs about personal and national identity. While Dryden's play works to bolster the affective claims of the nation, Shakespeare's represents the nation as monstrous, diseased, impossible.

The preceding argument suggests that Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida should be added to the mini-canon of early modern English (and British) nationalism. As we are beginning to recognize, Shakespeare's examinations of national sentiment differ significantly from one play to the next. Shakespeare is always skeptical about the possibility of the nation, but we need to develop better accounts of the variety of his skepticisms.

Notes

1. See David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997); Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990); Peter Womack, “Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century” in Culture and History 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992), 91-145; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1992); Michael Neill, “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 1-32; Claire McEachern, The poetics of English nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1996), 83-137; and Jonathan Baldo, “Wars of Memory in Henry V,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 47 (1996): 132-59.

2. Critics have examined from several different angles the play's fragmentation of character. Linda Charnes suggests that the play's characters become alienated from their posthumous reputations but remain trapped by them (Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare [Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1993], 70-102). René Girard suggests that desire in the play passes from character to character, undermining the boundaries of individual subjectivities (“The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. [New York: Methuen, 1985], 188-209). Valerie Traub focuses on the flow of sexual disease as well as desire (Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of sexuality in Shakespearean drama [London and New York: Routledge, 1992], 71-87). Carol Cook argues that the play's characters experience a sort of schizophrenia resulting from their awareness of the conflicting literary versions of their stories (“Unbodied Figures of Desire,” Theater Journal 38 [1986]: 34-52). The most influential account of the way that patriarchy splinters gendered subjects is Gayle Greene's “Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A kind of self’” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds. (Urbana, Chicago, and London: U of Illinois P, 1980), 133-49. For recent discussions of the fragmentation of the subject in Troilus and Cressida, see Douglas Bruster, Drama and the market in the age of Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1992), 97-117; Eric Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995), 25-61; and Heather James, Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, politics, and the translation of empire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1997), 85-118.

3. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1994).

4. Along with Anderson, the most important theoretical works on nationalism include: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1983); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990); and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992).

5. Greenfeld, 1-88. The major theoreticians of nationalism before Greenfeld describe nationalism as an Enlightenment phenomenon stemming from the French Revolution. Greenfeld argues that nationalism developed much earlier in England. See also Anthony Fletcher, “The Origins of English Protestantism and the Growth of National Identity” in Religion and National Identity, Stuart Mews, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 309-18; Christopher Hill, “The Protestant Nation” in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 3 vols. (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1986), 2:21-36; and Patrick Collinson, “The Protestant Nation” in The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 1-27. The seminal work of literary criticism on this topic is Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1992). Helgerson scrupulously describes an emergent rather than a dominant idea. The disagreement among these theorists may have to do with the uneven development and diffusion of the national idea and with the oddness of its uneasy coexistence with the monarchy.

6. Greenfeld describes the evolution of all three terms (1-26 and 31-43), and Wallace T. MacCaffrey describes the evolution of the modern use of the word state in diplomatic correspondence of the second half of the sixteenth century (Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588-1603 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992], 467-68). Quentin Skinner constructs a similar chronology in The foundations of modern political thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, London, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1978), 2:349-58.

7. See Hobsbawm, 11-12.

8. I take the phrase “common space” from Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), 19.

9. For Bale's version of the Brut story, see sigs. B4^v-C1^r. My history of the myth of Brut is indebted to Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1982), 7-27.

10. Thomas Heywood, Thomas Heywood's “The Iron Age,” ed. Arlene W. Weiner (New York and London: Garland, 1979), ll. 17-23.

11. R. Duke, prefatory poem to Troilus and Cressida, ed. John Dryden (London, 1679), 31. The date of the composition of Heywood's play remains uncertain, and it is not clear which play influenced the other. For a discussion of the relation between the two plays, see the Variorum edition of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Harold N. Hillebrand and T. W. Baldwin (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1953), 462-63. Both playwrights drew heavily on Caxton's Recuyell.

12. George Peele, A Farewell To the most famous Generalles of our English forces by land and Sea, Sir John Norris and Sir Frauncis Drake Knightes in The Life and Works of George Peele, Charles Tyler Prouty, gen. ed., 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1952), 1:220. Elsewhere in his work Peele sometimes construed the Trojans more narrowly as the founders of the city of London or the ancestors of Queen Elizabeth and King James; see 1:211, 214, and 218.

13. John Hayward, A Treatise of Vnion of The Two Realmes of [England and Scotland] (London, 1604), sig. C2^r. For Coke's assertion of the antiquity of the common law, see the first volume of his reports, Les Reportes de Edvvard Coke (London, 1600), sig. A3^r-v. The exchange is briefly discussed in Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 81-82.

14. Edmund Bolton, Hypercritica: or a rule of Judgement, for Writing or Reading our History (1722), 205-6; quoted here from MacDougall, 23.

15. No one has located an unambiguous allusion. Whether Shakespeare borrowed material from Chaucer is a different question, but even this is unclear; see M. C. Bradbrook, “What Shakespeare did to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde” in The Artist and Society in Shakespeare's England: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, 2 vols. (Sussex, Harvester Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 1:133-43.

16. Douglas Cole is particularly cogent on this point: “[the play] seeks to move its audience through a series of shocks of recognition toward a skepticism about the process of myth-making itself” (“Myth and Anti-Myth: The Case of Troilus and Cressida,” SQ 31 [1980]: 76-84, esp. 78).

17. See Greenfeld, 1-26.

18. Criminals who do possess a capacity for moral choice, such as Bardolph in Henry V, pose a much smaller challenge to the imagined community: they can be held responsible for their misdeeds, punished, and deprived of the privileges of citizens.

19. Quotations from Troilus and Cressida follow Kenneth Muir's edition of the play for the Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

20. In Henry V the French characterize the English as half-Norman bastards and speculate as to whether this involves a dilution or weakening of their blood or whether hybridity gives them a special vigor. Neither of these possibilities is ever discussed by the English, and even the latter, more positive hypothesis would be damaging to English nationalism in any of its variants. Henry does imagine producing a hybrid child with Katherine that would combine the strengths of both nations, but this hybridity involves an assimilation of France by England—the inverse of the Norman invasion of England.

21. Steven Marx maps some of the humanist traditions behind this ethical commitment in “Shakespeare's Pacifism,” Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992): 49-95. Marx sees Troilus and Cressida as a turning point in Shakespeare's attitude toward militarism and suggests that Shakespeare's transition to irenic values reflects a change in state policy.

22. Literary critics have also generally failed to listen to Thersites carefully, to hear the political philosophy embedded in his railing. One honorable exception is Peter Hyland in “Legitimacy in Interpretation: The Bastard Voice in Troilus and Cressida,” Mosaic 26 (1993): 1-13. Emphasizing Thersites's illegitimacy, Hyland describes him as a spokesman for the dispossessed and the marginalized.

23. For the satirist's medical metaphor of tenting or lancing a wound, see 5.1.10-11; for disease imagery, 5.1.17-23.

24. In the terms outlined by Robert Weimann, Thersites has the ability to step out onto the platea. For Weimann's discussions of Thersites, see Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978), 227-32.

25. See Weimann, 235.

26. I take this account of the fool's independence from convention from David Wiles, Shakespeare's clown: Actor and text in the Elizabethan playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 99 and 143.

27. John Stubbes, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gvlf Wherinto England Is Like To be Swallovved by an other French mariage, if the Lord forbid not the banes, by letting her Maiestie see the sin and punishment thereof (London, 1579), sig. B8^v.

28. For a discussion of the play's puns on general, see William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), 39-42; and for a discussion of the figure of the diseased national community, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign bodies and the body politic: Discourses of social pathology in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).

29. Mihoko Suzuki devotes a paragraph to this question, suggesting that “the many crossings between the Trojan and Greek camps make the distinction between them increasingly difficult to maintain” (Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1989], 252).

30. Heather James argues that in this scene Achilles becomes aware of the multiple literary versions of his character (101-6). Gregory W. Bredbeck suggests that it is only our modern belief in the existence of fixed sexual orientations which makes this scene surprising, and that for early modern audiences Shakespeare's Achilles would register as sensually indulgent rather than as a man with two distinct identities; see Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1991), 33-48. Achilles, though, seems to have two different value systems as well as two different lovers.

31. Again, I here follow Gayle Greene's account of the conversion of Cressida into an erotic commodity.

32. The editors of the Variorum Troilus and Cressida find a source for this image in John Marston's Antonio's Revenge (3.1.161-65); see Hillebrand and Baldwin's note to 4.5.142.

33. William Fulbecke, comp. The PANDECTES of the law of Nations: CONTAYNING seuerall discourses of the questions, points, and matters of Law, wherein the Nations of the world doe consent and accord. Giuing great light to the vnderstanding and opening of the principall obiects, questions, rules, and cases of the Ciuill Law, and Common law of this Realme of England (London, 1602), sig. A2^r. For a helpful discussion of the doctrine of the law of nations and Shakespeare's use of it, see George W. Keeton, Shakespeare's Legal and Political Background (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1967), 67-93. Keeton focuses on Shakespeare's use in Hamlet and the history plays of the law of nations. Shakespeare's Henry V, in an ironic misapplication of the concept, makes his claim to France “by law of nature and of nations” (Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], 2.4.80).

34. In “Virgil's Camilla and the Death of Hector” (SQ 43 [1992]: 219-21), Michael Cameron Andrews discusses the episode's Virgilian source, in which the killer is Camilla rather than Hector. Andrews suggests that, in Troilus and Cressida, Hector's attraction to the armor implies a dangerous feminization of his values.

35. For Caxton this behavior appears to be morally neutral, but Lydgate describes it as “false covetise” (3.5.354). Kenneth Muir cites Lydgate in his notes and adds, “It is doubtful whether Shakespeare meant to imply the same moral” (186-87n). Muir resists seeing the ambiguities in Shakespeare's presentation of Hector; see also his introduction, 34.

36. John Dryden, “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy” in Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late, A Tragedy in Dryden: The Dramatic Works, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (London: Nonesuch Press, 1932), 5:19 and 22.

37. Another of Dryden's additions to the play is a scene in which Troilus and Hector argue violently over whether to send Cressida to the Greeks. Dryden found it implausible or unacceptable that Troilus should surrender Cressida with so little protest. Unlike Hector's volte-face, though, Troilus's willingness to let Cressida go can easily be fitted into a consistent, and consistently negative, idea of his character.

This article has been greatly improved by the suggestions of John Hollander, David Quint, Annabel Patterson, David Baker, Jeff Dolven, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Linda Gregerson, Jennifer Lewin, Lawrence Manley, Carla Mazzio, Shannon Miller, Steven Monte, Gail Kern Paster, Tanya Pollard, Kristen Poole, David Southward, and the anonymous readers at Shakespeare Quarterly. An early version was distributed to a seminar chaired by Claire McEachern at the 1994 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America.