[In the following essay, Jago contends that Troilus and Cressida is unique because it stands outside “the popular traditions Shakespeare normally followed”; Jago demonstrates this point by contrasting the play with Romeo and Juliet.]

One of the distinguishing features of Shakespeare's work is the dramatist's ability to create plays out of very different kinds of source-material and to define in each play an entirely independent moral atmosphere, closely connected with the source. It is this variety of moral outlooks that makes it so difficult to give critical consideration to more than one of Shakespeare's plays at a time. Troilus and Cressida, however, is remarkable for the degree to which its dissimilarity from other plays can be located in the author's treatment of source material, rather than in the material itself. There is no single and coherent background source for Troilus and Cressida which explains its marked atmosphere in the way, for instance, the pastoral tradition underlying the play defines the atmosphere of As You Like It.

Troilus and Cressida is also remarkable in being outside—indeed, directly opposed to—the popular traditions Shakespeare normally followed. The foreword to the 1609 quarto, itself unparalleled in the extant texts, emphasizes this: instead of its ability to please every level of the audience simultaneously by means appropriate to their different tastes, the feature held up for admiration is the play's lack of stage success and its suitability for appreciation by the connoisseur in the retirement of his study. Although the contorted nature of its prose, as well as its ascription to “a never writer,” separates it entirely from Shakespeare himself, the foreword is nevertheless perfectly just in its definition of the play as “never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar, and yet passing full of the palm comical.” For the play is equally calculated to irritate a theatre audience and to interest a reflective reader.

These two points—the independence of the moral universe created by Shakespeare in each of his plays, and the deliberately unsatisfying effect of Troilus and Cressida on the stage—are closely linked, as may be demonstrated most clearly by contrasting Troilus with Romeo and Juliet. The superficial similarity of the two plays—each has a pair of lovers at its center—does not alter the fact that the two plays are opposite in their impact. It is tempting, but unrewarding, to explain this in terms of temperament: to say that Troilus is weaker than Romeo, or that he becomes fixated in the Rosaline-stage of development; or to say that Cressida is simply a prostitute by temperament and thus unable to carry out the role of an ingénue. Such an argument is unfair to the later pair of lovers and distorts our reading of Troilus and Cressida. For what gives Romeo and Juliet its unending romantic appeal is the very unrealistic way in which the health of the state is made dependent upon the fortunes of a single youthful pair of lovers, whereas Troilus and Cressida presents the much more familiar picture of young people having to take their sexual pleasures only in ways that do not conflict with society's concerns.

There is this further difference between the plays: Romeo and Juliet is dominated by the concept of marriage, a concept wholly absent from Troilus and Cressida. In the earlier play, Juliet's marriage is of urgent importance, both from the lovers' point of view and from the point of view of Juliet's parents. From the moment of their first meeting, the lovers see their relationship as eternal. And one function of Friar Lawrence within the play—sanctioning their love and giving it the controlling definition of the Christian form of marriage—is to prevent the audience from seeing the lovers' sense of eternity as merely the pleasing but insubstantial idealism of adolescence. Similarly, the man the Capulets choose as a husband for their daughter has no disqualification except that Juliet is not romantically in love with him. There are no villains in Romeo and Juliet (with perhaps the partial exception of Tybalt). Although Romeo finally kills Paris, it is in an honorable fight, as Romeo acknowledges when he lays Paris to rest within the monument alongside Juliet:

                                                                                          O give me thy hand,
One writ with me in sour misfortune's book!
I'll bury thee in a triumphant grave.

(V. iii. 81-83)¹

The central feature of Romeo and Juliet is the fact that the union of the lovers comes to symbolize the political harmony essential to the well-being of the state. This feature remains unaltered even if one concedes the criticism² that Shakespeare tried, and failed, to involve the audience as strongly in the fortunes of Verona as in the fortunes of the lovers. Prince Escalus, the representative of civil order, is a remote and abstract figure; but without his presence, the play would seem trivial to a spectator unwilling to allow himself to be overwhelmed by the language of the lovers. The play is extraordinarily skillful in presenting desirable impossibilities as though they were daily occurrences. One instance is the way in which Romeo transforms the state without consciously seeking to do so, thereby becoming entangled in the inevitable deviousness of politics. Public life is placed firmly in subordination to the private moral world of the individual. The play thus sidesteps a problem that constantly exercised Renaissance thinkers: the difficulty of defining the relationship between public and private morality. Look after private morality, the play states with unconvincing optimism, and public morality will look after itself.

Troilus and Cressida inverts this pattern. In this play, the lovers are not the sole focus of interest; the political and military maneuvers of the warring armies occupy a statistically greater portion of the action. Such an imbalance was inevitable if Shakespeare was to express the way the relationship of the lovers is first distorted and then swept away by external events. The fact that every other character in Romeo and Juliet is directly relevant to the fortunes of the lovers is one means of representing the supreme moral value of their love.³ If Troilus and Cressida were given so prominent a role, the ultimate effect of the play would be quite different. The point of Troilus and Cressida is not that men are dominated by corrupt love, but that sexual emotion is cast aside by men in their roles as social beings as soon as it threatens to hinder society's main preoccupation: honor, either personal or national. Just as the presence of Escalus, however little he himself involves us, is an essential element in the emotional impact of the lovers in Romeo and Juliet, so Ulysses' machinations to draw Achilles once more onto the battlefield have deadly implications for the lovers in Troilus and Cressida—not in a direct narrative relationship, but in Ulysses' instinctive assumptions about priorities. The sheer demand upon our attention by the Greek and Trojan leaders distracts us from the plight of the lovers and thereby influences our response to them.

The arguments of Troilus and of Paris at the Trojan Council have been said⁴ to show that the Trojans, in contrast to the intellectual Greeks, depend upon instinct and passion. An important aspect of Troilus' argument, however, is his implicit admission that a man's private judgment is valid only within his own personal frame of reference. His challenge, “What's aught, but as 'tis valued?” (II. ii. 52), implies a solipsistic world; it is part of Troilus' argument that any objective, and therefore public, valuation is impossible. Similarly, Paris' arguments are dismissed by Priam on the grounds that they are based solely upon self-interest: “You have the honey still, but these the gall” (II. ii. 144). Even at their best, then, the Trojans are but a jangle of warring individualities. The general social pattern, whereby each man desperately tries to keep his own affairs secret while being covertly watched with prurient curiosity by the rest, is clearly conveyed in III. i, where Pandarus asks Paris to cover up for Troilus' absence from dinner. It is an open secret where Troilus will be, but it is part of the social game that the proprieties—just—be maintained.

Troilus lacks conviction in his passion. In the opening scene it is clear that he cannot win Cressida for himself; he does not possess the courage to ask for what, as it soon transpires, she is very ready to give him. Pandarus' role may thus be contrasted with that of Friar Lawrence. The function of the elderly priest is to supply those qualities traditionally lacking in youth: rationality and prudence. When Romeo collapses in despair upon hearing his sentence of banishment, Friar Lawrence severely rebukes him and at once contrives a plot which may save the lovers and which, in their immaturity, they are incapable of contriving for themselves. Friar Lawrence has played no part in bringing the lovers together; since passion and courage are the prerogatives of youth, Romeo has been able to supply those qualities. By contrast, Pandarus has to encourage Troilus' sexual ardor and must himself supply qualities that normally accompany youthful impetuosity rather than aged counsel. Verona is a world in which physical courage between males is the quality that events most consistently demand; there sexuality, existing within clear boundaries, is a force that takes a definite direction. In Troy, on the other hand, sexuality pervades everything and yet lacks anything like Verona's healthy directness.

Even in seeking his love, then, Troilus betrays inadequacy. And when, after gaining Cressida for his mistress, he comes under pressure to abandon her for reasons of state, he does so without hesitation. At this point in the play, IV. i-iv, the system of the open secret is shown in full operation. Paris sends Aeneas ahead to ensure that all is respectable in Cressida's household when he arrives with the Grecian envoy, Diomedes. When Troilus receives Aeneas' warning, his immediate reaction is to beg for society's complicity:

How my achievements mock me!
I will go meet them; and, my lord Aeneas,
We met by chance: you did not find me here.

(IV. ii. 69-71)

Troilus accompanies Aeneas without thought of how the news is to be broken to Cressida. Throughout, his attitude is one quite opposed to that expressed in his arguments in the Council Scene. In an illuminating recent essay, R. A. Yoder notes the unexpected way in which Troilus receives the news, commenting: “Surprisingly, perhaps, but with psychological precision, Shakespeare shows that Troilus is calmed, even relieved in returning to his public role—he belongs to ‘the general state of Troy.’”⁵ It is in this context that we must read Troilus' genuinely magnificent speech of farewell upon his return to Cressida (it being part of the curious technique of the play to place major poetry in dramatically uncongenial situations): Time “scants us with a single famished kiss, / Distasted with the salt of broken tears” (IV. iv. 47-48).

Diomedes brutally and effortlessly crushes Troilus' belated attempt to present himself as having some kind of claim to Cressida. We are never allowed to ask why Troilus should not simply make a public avowal of Cressida as his mistress, or even his wife. In adapting Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet, Shakespeare condensed the period during which the lovers come together following their marriage from “a month or twayne”⁶ to a single occasion. The possibility of a formal public relationship is excluded from Troilus and Cressida just as carefully as are the unpleasant implications of a lengthy clandestine sexual relationship from Romeo and Juliet.

In the society depicted in Troilus, then, love cannot but be debased. Cressida is a woman surrounded by men, all of whom see her as a sexual object, whether relevant to their own needs or not. Consequently, she shapes her every action in sexual terms; like Helen, she is a high-class courtesan. One may contrast her first appearance with that of Juliet. Juliet protests to her mother that she has no thought of marriage, and her words must be taken at face-value. Romeo and Juliet depicts a traditional distinction between the physical maturing of the sexes, namely that a man's sexual appetite comes spontaneously and demands satisfaction (hence the tolerance accorded in many societies to promiscuity in young men), whereas a woman's desires awaken only when aroused by a particular man. But whereas Juliet's society demands that she marry, Cressida's insists only that she take a lover. The Capulets' ball in its function as a marriage-market may be compared with the scrutiny of the returning Trojan heroes by Cressida and Pandarus (a scrutiny comparable to Cressida's later welcome in the Greek camp, when, however, the roles of observed and observer are reversed), where the question to be decided is which of the heroes Cressida fancies most, and where Pandarus watches eagerly for the least sign of sexual weakening. Cressida has enough skill and strength of character to evade her uncle's searching, but this does not in the slightest degree affect her general predicament, which she sees with bleak clarity. Her society demands that she take a lover, but it also demands that she keep the fact secret. The same agency that forces her into a compromising situation will condemn her if she is discovered in that situation.

The lecherous Pandarus is Cressida's one link with the outside world, but there is no implication that she is particularly unfortunate in this, for the courtesan is almost the only type of woman we see in this play. The sole exceptions are Cassandra, whose function as the disregarded prophet makes her sex irrelevant, and Andromache. The latter appears in a single scene (V. iii), unsuccessfully attempting to dissuade Hector from going, as it proves, to his death. The depiction of husband and wife forms a strong contrast to the lover-and-mistress situation we have witnessed earlier between Paris and Helen: Helen's only means of working upon Paris had been titillation and coquetry. Yet Helen had been successful in her persuasion (Paris remarks offhandedly, “I would fain have armed today, but my Nell would not have it so” [III. i. 137-38]), whereas Andromache, urging much better reasons, fails.

Andromache's appearance is, in any case, fleeting, and her part in the play's total impact negligible. There is no suggestion that Cressida has any option but to make a career as a mistress and depend solely upon her sexual attractiveness to gain and hold a lover of high rank for as long as possible. The demoralizing effect of Cressida's environment is illustrated by an otherwise purposeless exchange when Diomedes comes to her tent in the Greek camp to arrange an assignation. The first person to whom Diomedes speaks is not Cressida but her father Calchas:

DIOMEDES.
What, are you up here, ho? speak.
CALCHAS.
Who calls?
DIOMEDES.
Diomed. Calchas, I think. Where's your daughter?
CALCHAS.
She comes to you.

(V. ii. 1-5)

Narratively superfluous, the incident has the effect of placing the ensuing scene within the sphere of social knowledge; Calchas' role here is a faint shadow of that of Pandarus, and the abdication of paternal responsibility emphasizes that Cressida has every inducement to gain for herself a protector on a sexual basis as soon as she can.

The pathos of Cressida's situation in this scene is partly obscured by the more vocal agony of the watching Troilus. Yet, for all his pain, Troilus has his other vocation of soldier to which he can turn for refuge. Cressida can only move inexorably toward the fate she foresaw from the start. She attempts to establish power over Diomedes by tantalizing him with a token from another lover and by suddenly refusing an assignation at all—a tactic she had earlier employed on Troilus, to his uncomprehending astonishment and to the intense irritation of Pandarus (III. ii. 138-41). But such ploys are brutally thrust aside: “I do not like this fooling. … What, shall I come? the hour?” (V. ii. 102, 104). Her initial fears of a rapidly declining advantage—

Yet hold I off: women are angels, wooing;
Things won are done—joy's soul lies in the doing

(I. ii. 287-88)

—though hardly inspiriting, now prove insufficiently pessimistic. In dealing with Diomedes, she holds no advantage even in the preliminaries. On her final exit, she shows an awareness of the hopelessness of her position. Her last moralizing remark, “O, then conclude / Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude” (V. ii. 111-12), refers not so much to an inordinate sexual desire in herself as to the effect of living in a society that is obsessed with sexuality and yet denies it a place among its sanctities. In Troilus and Cressida sexuality gains social significance only when it impinges on that typical consequence of male self-esteem, a matter of honor.

The conduct of life on the Greek side shows no greater order or patterning. Though Ulysses aspires to a cunning manipulation of others, in contrast to the Trojan tendency toward uncontrolled individualism, his elaborate efforts are a failure. After all the lengthy maneuverings of pushing Ajax to the fore so that Achilles will return to active service out of jealousy, Ulysses suddenly abandons the whole complicated strategy for no particular reason and instead makes a direct attack upon Achilles' pose of aloofness by disclosing a trivial sexual secret:

'Tis known, Achilles, that you are in love
With one of Priam's daughters.

(III. iii. 193-94)

If Ulysses had this means of bringing pressure to bear on Achilles, why the charade requiring the cooperation of the entire Greek leadership, a charade with such undesirable side-effects as the inordinate vanity of Ajax? And in the event, not even this tactic succeeds; it is the quite unforeseen death of Patroclus that rouses Achilles into action once more. Thersites' comment upon the failure of devious diplomacy is irrefutable:

… the policy of those crafty-swearing rascals, that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese, Nestor, and that same dog-fox, Ulysses, is proven not worth a blackberry. They set me up in policy that mongrel cur, Ajax, against that dog of as bad a kind, Achilles; and now is the cur Ajax prouder than the cur Achilles, and will not arm today; whereupon the Grecians begin to proclaim barbarism, and policy grows into an ill opinion.

(V. iv. 9-16)

The disciplined objectivity of Ulysses proves as useless as the inconsistent subjectivity of Troilus.

The sexual situation among the Greeks continues this theme of formlessness. Diomedes is a womanizer of the most brutal and threatening kind, so that, from her point of view as a courtesan, Cressida's position deteriorates in her involuntary move from one side to the other. Troilus' romantic shortcomings were readily manageable in comparison with Diomedes' overplus of decisiveness. The situation of Achilles and Patroclus, however, takes the concept of decay a step further. Achilles' self-conscious and sheepish passion for a Trojan princess (who is not mentioned elsewhere in the play) is sprung upon the audience in the context of his sullen withdrawal from public action in the company of Patroclus. It is always with Patroclus that we see him, and it is the death of Patroclus that provokes him to return to battle. This sequence of events had already existed in Homer, of course; but its transference to a less heroic and more sensual context inevitably implies a homosexual relationship. Resenting the way Patroclus breaks in upon a conversation between himself and Achilles, Thersites retorts with an accusation:

THERSITES.
Prithee, be silent, boy; I profit not by thy talk; thou art thought to be Achilles' male varlet.
PATROCLUS.
Male varlet, you rogue! what's that?
THERSITES.
Why, his masculine whore.

(V. i. 14-17)

The text takes the accusation no further, and indeed confronts the producer with the problem of how the actors should respond, whether with guilt and embarrassment, or haughty aloofness, or even plain astonishment. With a little ingenuity, it is possible to interpret the play in such a way as to avoid attributing bisexuality to Achilles, either by denying the accuracy of Thersites' remark, or, on the other side, by arguing that Achilles' coy and covert attitude toward his Trojan love proves his sentiment to be merely a homosexual's romance-in-the-head. The latter view is given some support, after Ulysses' disclosure of the secret attachment, by Patroclus' show of resentment at Achilles' public withdrawal:

                                                                      I stand condemned for this:
They think my little stomach to the war
And your great love to me restrains you thus.
Sweet, rouse yourself, and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold
And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,
Be shook to air.

(III. iii. 219-25)

Until the final simile, with its poetry that is so incongruously magnificent in this context, the speech could easily be rendered in the ripe tones of an injured queen. If we accept the implication that Patroclus is Achilles' lover, however, it is important to note that Patroclus is also described as heterosexually promiscuous. After watching Cressida's flirtation with Diomedes, Thersites exclaims: “Patroclus will give me anything for the intelligence of this whore; the parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab” (V. ii. 192-94). On Cressida's arrival in the Greek camp, Patroclus is shown engineering a second kiss by kissing her on Menelaus' behalf as well as his own.

The most effective interpretation of this, I suggest, is to take all the references as positive and to view Achilles and Patroclus as embodying a total lack of direction in sexual appetite. For them, sexual appetite is constantly awake, indiscriminately in quest of alleviation. The two men thus form a backdrop of moral degeneracy that helps to condition our attitude toward the liaison of Troilus and Cressida in the foreground.

Troilus and Cressida is highly adaptable to analysis and discussion, a fact that bears out the claim of the quarto foreword that it is a play to be relished by the connoisseur. Equally credible, however, is the foreword's assertion that the play is free from contamination by the practicalities of stage performance, whether we read the assertion as meaning that the play had never been performed or (more probably) as meaning that it had been performed without popular success. The way the play ignores the practical usages of the stage, with the consequence that the same man can find endless interest in working through the text in his study and yet find himself thwarted and irritated when watching the play in the theatre, has been exhaustively analyzed by Bertrand Evans in Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960).

There is a strong connection in literature and drama between traditional forms and traditional values: a great triumph or a great catastrophe can both be successfully depicted in narrative or drama, but it is difficult to depict the shabby continuance of life through compromises and omissions. Troilus and Cressida's realism is plainly revealed in both the love-plot and the political interest of the play, but it is a realism inimical to dramatic form. For instance, the way Troilus' resentment at his betrayal in matters of love goes underground and emerges in the form of a military fury, and, what is more, a fury he never succeeds in translating into significant action, is psychologically, but not dramatically, convincing. Similarly, the undeniable fact that politicians are capable of producing a logically unanswerable argument for following one line of action and then of following a conflicting line under pressure of circumstances does nothing to make less irritating in theatrical and literary terms Hector's unprepared volte-face in the Trojan Council scene. Aristotle's dictum, “A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility,”⁷ is relevant here. Romeo and Juliet consists of a series of “likely impossibilities,” and its very divergence from realism only increases its congeniality to dramatic form. Troilus and Cressida, on the other hand, comprises a sequence of “unconvincing possibilities.”

Troilus and Cressida has no successors in the Shakespearean corpus. If it leaves behind the rather jejune patterning of the early tragedy, it is also the exact opposite of the late romances, which consciously defy probability in order to depict states of great spiritual significance. The fact that Troilus should encounter Diomedes in battle, but that the ensuing combat should be indecisive, is credible but unsatisfying; the fact that the son of Polyxenes should meet and fall in love with the daughter of Leontes is precisely the opposite, incredible but satisfying.

This temporary abandonment of traditional forms with their optimistic metaphysical implications is one of the several reasons for the unprecedented popularity of Troilus and Cressida in the present century. It confronts us with one of the fundamental problems of the modern writer: how to present content in a form that will not of itself falsify that content. In most of his plays, Shakespeare was close enough to traditional modes of feeling and moral judgment for traditional forms to be adequate. Troilus and Cressida is thus a rarity in the corpus. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is a failure, a play strangely uncharacteristic of Shakespeare. Yet, for all its unsuitability in purely theatrical terms, we are at any rate becoming more fully aware of why it is as it is.

Notes

1. All Shakespeare quotations are from the New Cambridge editions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press): Romeo and Juliet, eds. J. Dover Wilson and George Ian Duthie, 1955; Troilus and Cressida, ed. Alice Walker, 1957.

2. Made, for instance, by H. S. Wilson in On the Design of Shakespearian Tragedy (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1957), p. 30.

3. To this extent, the traditional view that Shakespeare killed off Mercutio for fear that he might otherwise overshadow Romeo is based upon a sound instinct. Mercutio's surface attitude toward Romeo is derisive, though it is possible to argue that this attitude is merely the cover for an underlying protectiveness. Either reading implies a patronizing attitude on Mercutio's part, viewing Romeo within the confining context of adolescence, whereas, if the play is to work, Romeo must be seen in absolute terms.

4. For instance, by G. Wilson Knight in The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen, 1949).

5. “Sons and Daughters of the Game,” Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), 21.

6. Op. cit., l. 949, in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London: Routledge, 1957), 310.

7. Ingram Bywater, trans., On the Art of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920), p. 84.