SOURCE: “‘This Is and Is Not Cressid’: The Characterization of Cressida,” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether, Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 119-41.

[In the essay that follows, Adelman studies the portrayal of Cressida in Troilus and Cressida, arguing that the play encourages the fantasy that Cressida somehow becomes “radically unknowable” when she is separated from Troilus, and that when this shift occurs the audience is forced to view Cressida in the same way the other characters do.]

When Troilus responds to the sight of Diomed's Cressida with the words that I have taken for the title of this essay, we feel, as so often in this play of divisions, a divided duty. On the one hand, we are bound to respond responsibly to Troilus' attempt to preserve his illusions at any cost as mad, a near-psychotic denial of an obvious reality. On the other hand, Troilus' words trouble us partly because they respond to something that we have found troubling about Cressida; and insofar as they echo our dim sense that this is not Cressida, we find ourselves caught up in his psychosis.¹ I shall argue that we are at this moment divided against ourselves because, at the deepest level, Troilus and Cressida enacts Troilus' fantasies, hence ensnaring us in them even as it encourages our distance from him: as Cressida becomes Diomed's, in an important sense she ceases to be her own creature; as she becomes Diomed's, she becomes oddly the creature of Troilus' needs. In fact, the shift in her status that Troilus articulates here is earlier registered in a change not so much in her character as in the means by which she is characterized and hence in the relationship that we as well as Troilus have toward her. For Cressida's inconstancy is accompanied by a radical inconsistency of characterization; and both occur at once because both are reflections of the same fantasy.

Critics frequently dismiss Cressida as “the wanton of tradition,”² but when we first meet her, we feel her presence not as a stereotype but as a whole character. Throughout 1.2 we are encouraged to speculate about her motives; and by the end of the scene we seem to have established a privileged relationship with her. After our discomfort with Troilus' self-indulgent romanticizing and poeticizing (1.1.57-61, 102-8) we are likely to find Cressida's literalizing and deflating wit refreshing; she at least is not wallowing in imaginary lily beds.³ And in the process of engaging us by her wit, Cressida calls attention to its psychic function and hence to her status as a whole character whose psychic processes may legitimately concern us: she relies, she tells Pandarus, on her wit to defend her wiles (1.2.273). In taking up Pandarus' metaphor of defense, she suggests the defensive function of her wit as a means of warding off serious emotion with all its threats, perhaps especially the threat of sexual vulnerability implicit in her image of pregnancy (1.2.270-82). On the other hand, we may notice that she seems to regard sexuality itself as a defense when she tells us that she will lie on her back to defend her belly; given our knowledge of the story, we may even begin to speculate that her view of sexuality as a defense will play a role in her defection to Diomed. Even while she keeps Pandarus at bay, that is, she teases us to question her. And just as we are speculating about her motives, she suddenly reveals herself, and to us alone. Her soliloquy confirms our sense that her chief concern is with her vulnerability and her means of defense against it: her entire strategy is directed toward gaining control over Troilus, her entire assumption that he will no longer love her once he has possessed her. In a declaration of passion filled with calculation, a statement of love from which Troilus himself is notably absent, replaced by abstract dicta about the typical behavior of men, in couplets so constricted that they suggest a fundamental niggardliness of the self, Cressida reveals the way in which her awareness of the crippling malaise of this world, the gap between expectation and performance, colors her own expectations about Troilus and hence her behavior:⁴ she is coy because “men prize the thing ungained more than it is” (1.2.301). It is an understatement to say that she has no sense of her own intrinsic worth. She seems to have internalized the principle of valuation that rules this society, the principle implied by Troilus' question “What’s aught but as ’tis valued?” (2.2.52). Echoing the commercial language that so infects human relationships throughout the play, she identifies herself as a thing, in fact seems to identify herself with her “thing,” and tells us that this thing gains its value not through any intrinsic merit but through its market value, determined by its scarcity. Beneath the deflating tendencies of her wit, then, the soliloquy reveals her vulnerability, her dependence on the love of men to establish her value even for herself, and her sense that her best defense lies in holding off, concealing her own desires.⁵ And whatever we may feel about the self thus revealed, we feel that it is a self: the very structure of the scene establishes in us a keen sense both of Cressida's inwardness and of our own privileged position as the recipient of her revelations.

By the end of this scene, then, we have established not only some sense of Cressida but also the expectation that we will be allowed to know her as a full character, that she will maintain her relationship with us. And the scenes in Troy do not, for the most part, disappoint us. Although they contain no private revelations like that which concluded 1.2, they continually focus our attention on Cressida's inwardness by making us question her motives, even by making Cressida herself question her motives. When next we see her in 3.2 she amplifies our sense that fear, especially fear of betrayal, defines her relationship not only to Troilus but to herself (ll. 68-74); throughout 3.2 she seems terribly divided between impulses toward a self-protective and manipulative coyness and impulses toward a self-revelation that she feels as dangerous, even as self-betrayal. Given her vision of a world in which “things won are done” (1.2.299), in which her coy refusal seems the necessary basis for Troilus' faith (and indeed for Troilus' vision of himself as suffering lover), she cannot simply make herself known. She can be true to herself only by hiding herself; in revealing herself, she fears that she has committed a self-betrayal that will be the model for Troilus' betrayal of her: “Why have I blabbed? Who shall be true to us / When we are so unsecret to ourselves?” (3.2.126-27). But even as she chides herself for her apparent loss of self-control, she ends with a plea (“Stop my mouth”) that both Troilus and Pandarus seem to take as the coquette's coy request for a kiss. As though in response to Troilus' suspicion, her reply to his kiss stresses the authenticity of her loss of control: “’Twas not my purpose thus to beg a kiss. / I am ashamed. O heavens, what have I done? / For this time will I take my leave, my lord” (3.2.139-41). In her fear of self-betrayal, Cressida tries to leave Troilus in order to leave her unreliable, “unkind” self, the self that has betrayed her to become Troilus' fool:

Troilus.                                                                       What offends you, lady?
Cressida. Sir, mine own company.
Troilus. You cannot shun yourself.
Cressida. Let me go and try.
                    I have a kind of self resides with you;
                    But an unkind self, that itself will leave
                    To be another's fool. I would be gone.
                    Where is my wit? I know not what I speak.

[3.2.145-52]

She can see love only as foolish self-abandonment; and the loss of her defensive wit seems to leave her utterly vulnerable.⁶ Troilus' reply to this extraordinary revelation of her fear is devastating: “Well know they what they speak that speak so wisely” (l. 153). He cannot believe in—almost cannot hear—Cressida's perilous revelation of self. And in the face of his continued assumption that she is in control, that her self-revelation, like her request that her mouth be stopped, is part of the coquette's craft, she herself is brought to challenge the authenticity of her loss of control, hence of her unkind, loving self: “Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love, / And fell so roundly to a large confession / To angle for your thoughts” (ll. 154-56). For Cressida at this moment, as for Troilus, there are only two choices: she is either a loving fool or a crafty coquette. And in the context created both by her own fears and by Troilus' expectations, there is no true choice. She reestablishes her dignity both for herself and for Troilus by retreating from self-revelation and from love: regaining her wit, she suggests that even her loss of self may be self-controlled, simultaneously fulfilling Troilus' expectation that she will be a stereotypical coquette and defending herself against her own fears of self-betrayal. Her retreat from her unkind self here may strike us as oddly prophetic of her later defection from Troilus; in the vow at the end of the scene, Cressida strikingly imagines herself as stereotypically false rather than true. Cressida's unkind self does not emerge again in 3.2.⁷ In fact, the whole scene moves toward the increasing distance and contrivance reflected in the final vows, in which each of the triad threatens to become no more than his or her name: threatens, that is, to lose depth of character, to become merely stereotypical. That is, if we see Cressida as a stereotypical coquette in 3.2, we also see her taking on this role in response to specific psychological pressures; we are never allowed to see her merely as an uncomplicated type character.

Whether or not we feel that we understand Cressida in 3.2, and whatever the terms of our understanding, the scene clearly focuses on her inner state. Our most intense engagement is with her: throughout the scene, Troilus does indeed seem “simpler than the infancy of truth” (l. 171) compared to her. Her next appearance, in 4.2, continues this intense engagement. In abandoning the caution of her 1.2 soliloquy, Cressida has shown more love than craft; and with the consummation of their union, she feels herself defenseless, as though her betrayal of herself threatens to turn at any moment into Troilus' betrayal of her. As Troilus attempts to leave her to preserve the secrecy of their union, she asks poignantly, “Are you aweary of me?” (4.2.7). Then, as though she wishes magically to prolong their sexual relationship by undoing it, she adds, “O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off, / And then you would have tarried” (ll. 17-18). This scene is in the normal pattern of Shakespearean morning-after scenes, in which the woman typically wishes to hold the man with her while the man asserts the necessities of the outside world. But both Romeo and Antony seem to have more pressing reasons for leaving than Troilus; and neither Juliet nor Cleopatra responds to the parting with the sense of betrayal, and of the reasons for betrayal, that Cressida expresses here.⁸ Immediately after the consummation, that is, the lovers seem already separate. And the rest of the scene—indeed, the rest of the plot—in some sense constitutes an objective correlative to that separateness.⁹ The entrance of Pandarus underscores the separation. Cressida knows that her “naughty mocking uncle” (l. 25) will mock her. But by the end of their exchange, she feels Troilus' smile as mockery too: “You smile and mock me, as if I meant naughtily” (l. 37). The repetition of “mock” and “naughty” suggests a fusion of the two men in her mind; and Troilus' laugh (l. 38) may imply that the fusion is not simply in Cressida's mind. As the lovers leave the stage, Troilus indeed seems more allied with Pandarus than with Cressida.¹⁰ And at this point the plot makes the separation between them literal. Aeneas brings the news of the political trade-off that will shape their final separation, and that separation is reflected immediately in dramatic terms: the lovers respond to this news not as a united pair but separately; we do not see them together again in this scene. Moreover, as each of the lovers responds to the news of separation, the tensions of the opening of the scene are clarified. Troilus responds rather easily to the news of the exchange. He accepts it as a fait accompli (“Is it so concluded?” [l. 66]), philosophizes upon it as though Cressida were merely one of his “achievements” (“How my achievements mock me!” [l. 69]), and makes arrangements to meet this new necessity and preserve his honor (ll. 70-71), all without any show of overwhelming emotion.¹¹ In the context of Troilus' ready acceptance of the news, Cressida's response to it is doubly impressive: the extremity of her grief, her assertion that nothing but Troilus matters to her, and her refusal to accept the separation (“I will not go from Troy” [l. 111]) make her response not only the most powerful assertion of her love for Troilus but also one of the most emotionally charged moments in the play.

When the lovers are reunited after this brief separation, the tone of passionate expostulation has passed from Cressida to Troilus: he makes the speeches, while she replies with a numb repeated questioning of the necessity of separation (4.4.28, 30, 31, 32, 54), concluding finally by asking, “When shall we see again?” (l. 57). During the opening movement of the scene, that is, she seems painfully resistant to the bare fact of separation, while he embellishes it rhetorically, acquiescing. The emotional focus of the scene then moves from the acknowledgment of separation to Troilus' fears about Cressida's fidelity and her pained and puzzled responses to those fears. She responds first with surprise and indignation (ll. 59, 74), then with the fear that he does not love her (l. 82), and finally with a question that reflects not only her shaken faith in Troilus but also her shaken faith in herself: “Do you think I will?” (l. 92). The last words that we hear her speak to Troilus recall her own fear of being betrayed: “My lord, will you be true?” (l. 101). And these two questions—“Do you think I will?”; “My lord, will you be true?”—are the last we hear from Troilus' Cressida. We have been engaged throughout with Cressida's fears and her defenses against them; but suddenly, at the moment she is about to part from Troilus, she recedes from us. As Troilus and Diomed quarrel over her, she stands silent, as though she has become merely the object of their desire (and their competition), as though she has no voice of her own.

This sudden move into opacity remains constant for the rest of the play. In the next scene (4.5), when she kisses the Greek camp generally, she speaks her first words only after she has been kissed by Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles, and Patroclus; her banter then seems both a response to Greek expectations about her and a return to the earlier mode of 1.2, that is, to a sexual wit that serves an essentially defensive function. But we are given no reassuring soliloquy to enable us to support this understanding; she simply exits, distressingly, with Diomed. She seems suddenly to have passed beyond us as she has passed from Troilus to Diomed. Ulysses assessment of her as merely a daughter of the game (4.5.63) is disquieting partly because it offers us an explanation for her behavior just when we are feeling the need for one, in the absence of one by Cressida herself. Ulysses' commentary asks us to see someone that we have seen as a whole character, someone whose inwardness we alone have been privy to, as a mere character type, a person with no conflict or inwardness at all; and Shakespeare does nothing to qualify Ulysses' appraisal. The Cressida with whom we have been engaged simply does not allow us to understand her, here or later in the play. We may speculate that she leaves Troilus because his suspicion of her and his relatively easy acquiescence in the separation make her feel unknown and unloved. We may speculate that she leaves him because she fears that he will leave her, in order to ensure that she will be actively in control of her fate rather than the passive victim of his will. We may note her entire vulnerability in this society and her reliance on the opinion of men to determine her value even for herself and hence speculate that she adopts Troilus' view of her capacity for fidelity to prove his expectations right. We may locate the basis for her actions in her own pleasure in the excitement of the chase, her use of sexuality as a defense, even her genetic predisposition to treason, inherited from her father—and probably an actress will have to attempt some such construction in order to play the part at all. But after 4.4, the play gives us no place to ground our speculation: at exactly the moment at which we most need to understand what Cressida is doing, we not only are given no enlightenment but are forced to acknowledge our distance from Cressida by the structure of the scene itself. In 5.3 we are allowed to see Cressida only through the intervening commentary of Troilus, Ulysses, and Thersites. Instead of being especially privy to her thoughts, we become merely one more spectator to her new status as devalued object; indeed, we take our places as the furthest removed of the spectators as we watch Thersites watching Ulysses watching Troilus watching Cressida. That is, Cressida seems to betray us at the same time that she betrays Troilus; our relationship with her is broken off as sharply as hers with Troilus.

This abrupt shift in the mode of characterization, and hence in the distance between character and audience, seems to me to override any argument about Cressida's consistency or inconsistency as her allegiance shifts from Troilus to Diomedes: we know so little about her at this moment that we can no longer judge her as a whole character. But the timing of the shift may give us a way of understanding it, even if we can’t understand her. The play seems to enact the fantasy that Cressida becomes radically unknowable, irreducibly other, at the moment of her separation from Troilus. And since Troilus can make no sense of the Cressida he sees in the Greek camp except by assuming that she is somehow split in two, the shift in the mode of characterization forces us to participate in his fantasy about her; even Cressida seems to participate in this fantasy when she offers as her only explanation for her actions her own helpless sense that she is split (“Troilus, farewell. One eye yet looks on thee, / But with my heart the other eye doth see” [5.2.104-5]). In order to begin to understand the change in the characterization of Cressida, then, I think we have to explore the bases for Troilus' fantasy of her as split.

Troilus is forced to imagine the existence of two Cressidas, his and Diomed's, in order to maintain his sense of Cressida's identity and hence to preserve his union with her:

This she? No, this is Diomed's Cressida.
If beauty have a soul, this is not she;
If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,
If sanctimony be the gods' delight,
If there be rule in unity itself,
This was not she.

[5.2.134-39]

The movement of this speech makes it clear that wholeness of every kind depends for Troilus on the maintenance of his union with Cressida. So essential is that union that he will sacrifice even the “rule in unity”—the rule that guarantees that a thing must be itself and not something else—to it: to preserve his union with Cressida, he divides “a thing inseparate … more wider than the sky and earth” (5.2.145-46), splitting Cressida in two, separating his own Cressida from Diomed's. As reason revolts against itself to proclaim her not herself (5.2.141), Troilus' language becomes dense in its struggle to affirm and deny separation simultaneously:

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

[5.2.143-49]

There is division in a thing inseparate, but it is a division that is no division, in which there is no orifex. Both Cressida herself and his union with her are this separated thing inseparable. The assertion and denial of separation are fused here because Troilus asserts one separation to deny another: only by insisting on the division of Cressida in two can he preserve the wholeness of her identity for him and hence preserve their union.

For Troilus, the idea of union must override any sense of Cressida as a person separate from himself; Cressida becomes simply that with whom one is united and hence ceases to be herself at the moment the union dissolves.¹² We can begin to understand the force of this union for Troilus and hence the pressures behind his act of splitting as we watch his initial response to Cressida's betrayal:

Troilus.                                         Was
Cressid here?
Ulysses. I cannot conjure, Troyan.
Troilus. She was not, sure.
Ulysses.                                         Most
sure she was.
Troilus. Why, my negation hath no
taste of madness.
Ulysses. Nor mine, my lord. Cressid
was here but now.
Troilus. Let it not be believed for
womanhood!
Think we had mothers; do not give advantage
To stubborn critics, apt, without a theme,
For depravation, to square the general sex
By Cressid's rule. Rather think this not Cressid.
Ulysses. What hath she done, prince,
that can soil our mothers?
Troilus. Nothing at all, unless that
this were she.

[5.2.122-32]

The preservation of the union with Cressida is bound up with the preservation of Troilus' ideal image of his mother; like Posthumus (Cymbeline, 2.5), Troilus associates the infidelity of his beloved with the infidelity of his mother. Ulysses' puzzled question emphasizes this association and clarifies the fantasy that shapes it: for Troilus, Cressida has the power to soil a mother figure so universal that she becomes “the general sex,” all “our mothers.” For from the first, Troilus' desire for Cressida is invested with the power of a nostalgic longing for union with an overpoweringly maternal figure; from the first, he associates his love with his own infantilization. When we first meet Troilus, he seems to be luxuriating in the sense of his own weakness, a weakness described in terms that suggest the loss of his adult masculinity through love:

… I am weaker than a woman's tear,
Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance,
Less valiant than the virgin in the night,
And skilless as unpracticed infancy.

[1.1.9-12]

For Troilus, love is associated with the powerlessness and the innocent—or ignorant—trust of the infant; even in the act of telling Cressida that he does not believe that women can be constant, he claims that he is naive, “as true as truth's simplicity, / And simpler than the infancy of truth” (3.2.170-71).¹³ And his imagination of the sexual act is given shape by images that suggest a return to the blissful and dangerous fusion of infancy. The sexual act is imagined as feeding on an exquisitely purified nectar; its consummation simultaneously promises and threatens a delicious death in which distinction itself—both the capacity to distinguish and the separate identity distinguished—will be lost, and boundaries will dissolve:

I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
Th’imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense. What will it be
When that the wat’ry palates taste indeed
Love's thrice-repurèd nectar? Death, I fear me,
Sounding destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle, potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness
For the capacity of my ruder powers.
I fear it much; and I do fear besides
That I shall lose distinction in my joys,
As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps
The enemy flying.

[3.2.17-28]

Troilus' speech suggests both the desire for and the fear of a fusion in which individual identity will be lost with an intensity unequaled in Shakespeare's works: here love is death, a joy too sharp in sweetness, a battle, a swooning destruction in which one's powers are lost. That this fusion is imagined as the consequence of tasting love's nectar suggests the extent to which it is desired as a recapturing of the infant's first union with a nurturing maternal figure, the union out of which the adult self must be painfully differentiated, distinguished.¹⁴

Insofar as his union with Cressida is an attempt to recapture the infantile fusion with a maternal figure, the rupture of the union threatens to soil the idea of the mother herself. And insofar as the mother is the source both of wholeness and of nourishment, her soilure threatens to dissolve a universe felt as coherent into fragmented bits of spoiled food.

Instance, O instance, strong as Pluto's gates;
Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven.
Instance, O instance, strong as heaven itself;
The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed,
And with another knot, five-finger-tied,
The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,
The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics
Of her o’ereaten faith, are given to Diomed.

[5.2.150-57]

“Fractions,” “orts,” “fragments,” “scraps,” and “bits”: all diagnostically proclaim the breaking of wholeness into pieces as they proclaim the spoiling of food. That is, the failure of Cressida to live out Troilus' fantasy of union with an ideally nurturing figure simultaneously turns her to a greasy relic and shatters the sense of wholeness for Troilus because the sense of wholeness itself derives from fantasies of union with such an ideally nurturing figure.¹⁵ These are the transformations that the splitting of Cressida is designed to undo; by its means, Troilus will attempt to “repure” the nectar and regain the shattered unity, denying that the betraying Cressida and the Cressida with whom he is united are one.¹⁶

Ulysses asks what Cressida has done that can soil our mothers. We might answer that she has betrayed the fantasies that were the basis of Troilus' desire for union with her. Her betrayal becomes in effect the assertion of her status as a separate person, not simply the creature of Troilus' fantasy.¹⁷ But we might also answer that Cressida has done nothing—that the agent of soilure is in fact Troilus himself. For ultimately, I think, it is not the rupture of the union but the consummation of the union that soils the idea of the mother for Troilus. Troilus begins to reveal the ways in which he finds sexuality itself soiling as he argues that the Trojans must keep Helen to maintain their honor:

I take today a wife, and my election
Is led on in the conduct of my will—
My will enkindled by mine eyes and ears,
Two traded pilots ’twixt the dangerous shores
Of will and judgment. How may I avoid,
Although my will distaste what it elected,
The wife I chose? There can be no evasion
To blench from this and to stand firm by honor.
We turn not back the silks upon the merchant
When we have soiled them, nor the remainder viands
We do not throw in unrespective sieve
Because we are now full.

[2.2.61-72]

This is an extraordinary analogy, not least because Troilus himself seems unaware of its relevance to his approaching union with Cressida.¹⁸ On the verge of that union, he imagines a marriage from which he will wish to “blench” or retreat; he expects to “distaste” his choice. In this fantasy, sexual satiety leads to indifference or even disgust very much as Cressida has predicted; and the terms of the disgust are precisely those in which Troilus will later respond to Cressida's betrayal of him: the distasted wife is associated with soiled silks and leftover food no longer desirable because we are now full. The imagery here insists that it is not Cressida's betrayal but Troilus' own appetite—his feeding on Cressida—that has made her into “remainder viands”: she is the leftovers from his great feast.

At the same time as this analogy reveals the extent to which Troilus himself is the soiling agent, it also expresses the same fear of sexuality that we have seen as Troilus waits outside Cressida's bedroom for their first encounter. Given the insistence on the possibility of male impotence throughout the play,¹⁹ Troilus' concern that he cannot stand firm by honor if he blenches from his wife reiterates the language of impotence; the imagined wife herself becomes suggestively associated not now with India (1.1.104) but with the “dangerous shores / Of will and judgment.”²⁰ For ultimately Troilus himself is the fearful virgin in the night (1.1.11);²¹ the union with Cressida which he so desires is simultaneously felt as fearfully dangerous to him. Both the fear with which he anticipates the union and his ready acceptance of the separation point toward the deep ambivalence of his desires. Throughout, his portrayal of himself as true in love insists on the dangerously infantile vulnerability of both truth (“the infancy of truth” [3.2.171]) and love (“skilless as unpracticed infancy” [1.1.12]). For in Troilus' fantasy of sexuality as union with a maternal figure, the fear of impotence or castration becomes the fear of maternal engulfment. If union with Cressida as the all-powerful mother promises new wholeness, it also threatens to dissolve the self; if it promises to be a tasting of repured nectar, it also threatens a feast in which one will be eaten, not eater. Immediately after their night of love together, Troilus imagines night as a witch (4.2.12), the dark side of the maternal figure with whom he desires union; and the busy day of their aubade awakens ribald crows (4.2.9), sexualized devourers.²² And in the face of his own infantile vulnerability, Troilus seems to want to rob Cressida of her frightening power; in extraordinarily ambivalent lines, he wishes his own vulnerability on her:²³

                                                            Sleep kill those pretty eyes,
And give as soft attachment to thy senses
As infants' empty of all thought!

[4.2.4-6]

Insofar as these lines suggest Troilus' desire to transfer his own felt weakness from himself to Cressida, they are prophetic of the structure of the play as a whole. For ultimately the necessities of Troilus' character, rather than of Cressida's, require her betrayal of him. Cressida's betrayal in effect allows Troilus to blench and still stand firm by honor; it serves to free him from a union ambivalently desired while allowing him to continue to think of himself as the embodiment of truth. Moreover, if Troilus' splitting of Cressida is designed to preserve his fantasy of union with an ideal maternal figure in the face of her betrayal, her betrayal itself seems ultimately to serve the same end—to be shaped, that is, by the same underlying fantasy. For the fantasized mother threatens her infant-lover with oral engulfment in the consummation partly because the very fact of her sexuality makes her into the witch mother rather than the ideal mother with whom Troilus had sought to unite, transforming her into a soiled whore, a type of Helen.²⁴ That is, insofar as sexuality itself is soiling, it is incompatible with the union Troilus desires; Troilus' own sexuality transforms Cressida into a betraying whore. Cressida's betrayal then becomes in effect a rationalization, allowing Troilus to perform the act of splitting that is essential to the preservation of his union with an idealized maternal figure, a union no longer possible with Cressida herself once she has been contaminated by sexuality: by locating Cressida's sexual self in the contaminated relationship with Diomed, Troilus is free to retain an idealized, nonsexual union with the Cressida of his desires, nurtured by absence. The very sexuality that promises union with the mother is thus in fact the agent of separation; as Troilus half-knows even before the consummation, the sexual act achieves not boundlessness but a sense of limit: “This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (3.2.82-85).²⁵

Through the sexual act, then, the pure—or repured—mother with whom Troilus wished to unite is soiled and becomes a whore; and Cressida is made to enact this transformation. That Cressida acts in response to Troilus' need to separate her sexual from her ideal maternal self accounts, I think, for the opacity of her motives as she leaves Troilus: she acts less from the necessities of her own character than from the necessities of his. Moreover, in enacting Troilus' fantasies, she protects Troilus from responsibility for them. Troilus' response to Cressida's infidelity in 5.2 is strikingly close to his fantasy about marriage in 2.2, but with the onus shifted from him to her: the soil is the result of her action, not of his fantasy; she is distasted, felt as leftover food, not because he is now full but because she has betrayed her faith. Because she obligingly enacts his fantasy, he can rest assured that it is her infidelity, not his sexuality, that soils our mothers. But the play does not in fact invite us to speculate about Troilus' character in noting the transfer of guilt from Troilus to Cressida, for the transfer is of course enshrined in the plot: not only Troilus but the play itself insists on Cressida's guilt. After the moment that Cressida leaves Troy, the play everywhere exonerates Troilus at the expense of Cressida: she becomes a whore to keep him pure. Ulysses' parallel speeches on Cressida and Troilus at that moment suggest some such exchange: as he directs us to see Cressida as no more than a daughter of the game (4.5.55-63), he directs us to see Troilus as a matchless hero in praise that nearly exceeds Pandarus' puffery and does not tally with our experience of Troilus (4.5.96-112); as Cressida is debased, Troilus is idealized.

The transfer of guilt from Troilus to Cressida is enshrined in the plot, but not without some traces of anxiety. Cressida's insistent worry that Troilus will betray her—in a story everyone knows is about her betrayal of him—may be one such trace: in a very real sense, she is right to be worried. For Cressida herself is an odd fusion of betrayer and betrayed. The fusion that composes her character may be recorded in Troilus' amalgam of Ariadne and Arachne in the “Ariachne” of his response to Cressida's betrayal (5.2.149): the poisonous woman-as-spider, associated with infidelity in The Winter's Tale,²⁶ is fused with the archetypal woman betrayed, as though the two betrayals were at bottom one.²⁷ We may thus begin to understand a habitual oddity in critical responses to the play. When Cressida tells us that “things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing,” many of us respond as though she is speaking for the world of the play in general and for Troilus in particular.²⁸ And yet the manifest love plot seems to prove her wrong: Troilus seems more than ever her devoted servant after the consummation of their union;²⁹ it is Cressida for whom things won are done. We respond, despite the evidence of the plot, as though Cressida is somehow obscurely right because the plot in some respects runs counter to the fantasy that shapes the play; in fact the plot serves precisely to defend against acknowledgment of the fantasy. For the effort to keep Troilus pure seems to me finally evidence of Shakespeare's failure to dissociate himself from the fantasies explored in the creation of Troilus; and insofar as the play consequently embodies Troilus' fantasies, Cressida as a whole character must be sacrificed. But Shakespeare does not rest with Troilus and Cressida; and when he reworks this material in Othello, where Desdemona is subject to very similar fantasies, he dissociates himself from these fantasies by localizing them in the minds of Iago and Othello. As a result, Desdemona remains a vigorous and independent character, larger than Othello's fantasies of her, while Cressida fades from us.

I have argued elsewhere for the need to respond to Shakespeare's characters as whole psychological entities.³⁰ But characters may not always permit us to respond to them in this way, or the presentation of character may shift in a way that disengages us from concern with their inwardness. At such moments the characters may be shaped by psychological pressures not their own. The psychological fantasies embedded in the creation of another character or in the play as a whole may require the sacrifice of the internal psychological consistency of any single character. I suspect that female characters are particularly prone to being so sacrificed, partly because of their status as others, partly because of the (related) intensity of the fantasies that are attached to the idea of the mother. To speak of character as shaped in this way is by no means to speak of artistic failure: characters so shaped may become the embodiments of our dearest shared fantasies and hence carry enormous force. Cordelia, for example, seems to me to suffer the same fate as Cressida, but the sacrifice of her character points in the opposite direction, toward idealization rather than debasement: during the play we witness her separation from the sexual self that she had defended so proudly in Act 1 at the same time as we lose touch with her inwardness; and yet she is the guarantor of many of our best dreams. But in King Lear, splitting is embodied not only in the change in the characterization of Cordelia but in the creation of complementary characters as well: even as the play begins, Cordelia has already been partially split from her sexual self, now located in Goneril and Regan. Troilus' splitting of Cressida from herself thus allows us to see, reproduced in the mind of a single character, the process of one of Shakespeare's major modes of generating his dramatic characters; hence our vertigo as we watch Troilus creating two characters out of one: “This is and is not Cressid.”

Notes

1. See, for example, Henri Fluchère in response to Troilus' words: “Tortured love here presents a problem of identity which the play fails to solve” (Shakespeare, trans. Guy Hamilton [London: Longmans, 1953], 216). Other critics are also troubled by Cressida's failure to achieve a stable identity. Derek Traversi argues that not only Cressida but others in the play fail to have “consistent status as persons” because all are subject to time, that is, are ultimately victims not only of a world in which all constancy and value is destroyed by time but also of Shakespeare's uncertainty about how to generate meaningful characters in such a world (An Approach to Shakespeare [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956], 328-29). Traversi's view is extended in John Bayley's brilliant essay “Time and the Trojans” (Essays in Criticism, 25 [1975], 55-73). Bayley sees Troilus' horror at the two Cressidas as “a recognition not so much of falsity as of the fact that she is not a single coherent person” in a play in which Shakespeare dissolves the “assurances of selfhood” (70). But at the same time he is always uneasily aware of her potential as a full or novelistic character (63, 67); he locates this potential in such moments as our discomfort with Ulysses' characterization of her as simply a “daughter of the game” (67). This uneasiness is, I think, characteristic of the best critical commentary on Cressida. See, for example, L. C. Knights's comments both on Cressida's position as a stereotypical wanton and on the note of sincerity we sometimes hear in her exchanges with Troilus (“The Theme of Appearance and Reality in Troilus and Cressida,” in Some Shakespearean Themes [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959], 69) and Arnold Stein's analysis of Cressida both as a full character who believes that “what is precious is what the masculine ‘particular will,’ unsatisfied, imagines” and as a character whose dramatized reserve “prevents her from ever saying or doing what might register the feeling of her full presence” (“Troilus and Cressida: The Disjunctive Imagination,” ELH, 36 [1969], 157-58). Gayle Greene's excellent account of Cressida acknowledges that her “sudden and complete violation of declared intentions damages her coherence in ‘realistic’ terms” (“Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A Kind of Self,’” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980], 135). But Greene ultimately derives this violation from Cressida's character understood realistically rather than from Shakespeare's characterization of her: she has only “a kind of self”—not an authentic self—because she is so much the creature of the values others set on her. William W. Main eliminates the problem pyrrhically by claiming that Cressida is not properly speaking a character at all but rather an unconvincing amalgam of four character types usually represented separately (“Character Amalgams in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in Philology, 58 [1961], 172-73).

2. The phrase is L. C. Knights's (Some Shakespearean Themes, 69), yet he himself notes the inadequacy of this characterization and comments tantalizingly that “she exists mainly in the imagination of Troilus.” See Carolyn Asp, “In Defense of Cressida,” Studies in Philology, 74 (1977), 406-17; Grant I. Voth and Oliver H. Evans, “Cressida and the World of the Play,” Shakespeare Studies, 8 (1975), 231-39; and Gayle Greene, “Shakespeare's Cressida,” for partial accounts of Cressida's critical history. These critics all attempt to rehabilitate Cressida after the injuries done her by her former (mainly male) commentators; they stress her subjection to Troilus' idealism (Voth and Evans) or to a society in which there is no intrinsic value (Asp and Greene). See also R. A. Yoder's argument that Cressida is helplessly subject to the war machine (“‘Sons and Daughters of the Game’: An Essay on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Survey, 25 [1972], 11-25). These efforts at rehabilitation have taught us to see Cressida as the victim of her world, but, valuable as they are, they all seem to me to founder because at the crucial moment of betrayal the text does not give us sufficient grounds for understanding Cressida fully in their terms.

3. References throughout are to the Signet edition of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Daniel Seltzer (New York, 1963).

4. The gap between expectation and performance becomes definitive of sexual experience when Troilus defines the “monstruosity in love” (3.2.82) and of war when Agamemnon speaks to his demoralized commanders of the “protractive trials of great Jove” (1.3.20); it governs our aesthetic experience as the play refuses to meet our expectations, to present its heroes as heroic or to behave as a proper play with a coherent plot in which, for example, combat advertised as important will be important and endings will be conclusive.

5. These are generally the terms in which critics sympathetic to Cressida see her; insofar as I see Cressida as a realistic character, my arguments are frequently close to theirs. See, for example, Asp, “In Defense of Cressida,” 409-10, 412-13. Robert Ornstein comments forcefully on the masculine ego that makes Cressida what she is: “She is a daughter of the game which men would have her play and for which they despise her” (The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960], 245). Gayle Greene persuasively associates Cressida's valuation of herself both with capitalism and with woman's tendency to see herself as an object (“Shakespeare's Cressida,” 135-39, 142).

6. Gayle Greene comments on Cressida's “uncustomary loss of self-control”; she sees Cressida throughout 3.2 as “struggling both to maintain and to relinquish the defenses she has so carefully constructed” (“Shakespeare's Cressida,” 140). Voth and Evans argue that the failure of Cressida's realistic and defensive wit leaves her ruinously subject to Troilus' idealism (“Cressida and the World of the Play,” 234); their account seems to me to ignore the effects both of Cressida's own “idealistic” impulse to believe in love and of Troilus' “realistic” expectation that she will be a coquette. Emil Roy comments more broadly on Cressida's defensive use of language to acquire phallic power and to deny her vulnerable situation (“War and Manliness in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Comparative Drama, 7 [1973], 112).

7. Both Asp (“In Defense of Cressida,” 411) and Voth and Evans (“Cressida and the World of the Play,” 234) see Cressida as accepting Troilus' idealized view of herself at the end of the scene, despite her fears of vulnerability. If she does, the terms of her acceptance are very uneasy: although she ends by vowing fidelity, she does so only by imagining herself as the emblem of infidelity.

8. In the course of a discussion of the inadequacy of all love objects in Troilus and Cressida (and out of it), Stephen A. Reid comments that Troilus “does not regret that the day has come” (“A Psychoanalytic Reading of Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure,” Psychoanalytic Review, 57 [1970], 267).

9. Derek Traversi's wonderful intuition that sexuality seeks union but always entails a sense of separateness seems to me very near the center of the play; he, too, sees the plot as in effect a rationalization for this inevitable movement (Approach to Shakespeare, 325-27). See also L. C. Knights: “The actual separation of the lovers … only emphasizes what is in fact intrinsic to their relationship” (“Theme of Appearance and Reality,” 67). For Traversi, Troilus' sensuality dooms his passion insofar as he seeks “to extract from the refinement of the sensual a substitute for spiritual experience” (331); for Knights, it is Troilus' “subjectivism” that commits him to time and appearance, hence to separation (67). I will argue below for the close association of sexuality with separation in psychoanalytic terms. In any case, Shakespeare manipulates the plot to make us feel the separateness inherent in sexuality: 3.3, the scene in which the lovers' separation is arranged, substitutes in our imaginations for the moment of consummation, placed as it is between the scene in which the lovers move toward the bed-chamber under the guidance of Pandarus (3.2) and the morning-after scene (4.2). See Norman Rabkin, who notes that arrangements for the separation are being made while the lovers are enjoying their night together (Shakespeare and the Common Understanding [New York: Free Press, 1967], 50). But in fact this simultaneity is an illusion that Shakespeare achieves at some cost to ordinary temporal continuity. The second scenes of acts 3 and 4 clearly represent the beginning and end of one night; 4.2 takes place in the early morning (l. 46) of the day of the battle between Hector and Ajax. But 3.3 seems to be an outdoor daytime scene, and throughout it, the day of the battle is clearly “tomorrow’ (ll. 34, 130, 247, 296). That is, 3.3 must take place before 3.2, not in the interval between 3.2 and 4.1; the simultaneity of sexual consummation and separation occurs only in our imaginations, not in the linear plot.

10. Several critics blame Pandarus for the failure of Troilus' love without noting the implicit alliance between them here and elsewhere; see, for example, Richard D. Fly (“‘I Cannot Come to Cressid but by Pandar’: Mediation in the Theme and Structure of Troilus and Cressida,” English Literary Renaissance, 3 [1973], 153-56) and R. J. Kaufmann (“Ceremonies for Chaos: The Status of Troilus and Cressida,” ELH 32 [1965], 149).

11. Yoder comments shrewdly on Troilus' relatively easy acceptance of the separation: he is “calmed, even relieved in returning to his public role—he belongs to ‘the general state of Troy’” (“Sons and Daughters of the Game,” 21).

12. Terence Eagleton says, more charitably: “Cressida to him is the Cressida of their relationship; she has no meaning or existence for him outside this context,” because reality and identity are social, shared creations. (Shakespeare and Society [London: Chatto & Windus, 1967], 17).

13. That Troilus imagines himself an infant as he imagines the possibility of betrayal suggests not only the extent to which that possibility makes him feel utterly vulnerable but also the extent to which his image of himself as an overtrusting infant requires the confirmation of the mother's betrayal.

14. Joel Fineman writes powerfully about the consequences of the loss of distinction, or Difference, in Troilus and Cressida, expanding on René Girard's brief commentary on Ulysses' speech (Fineman, “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles,” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980], 94-100; Girard, Violence and the Sacred [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977], 50-51). In locating the terror at the loss of Difference in the possibility of self-obliterating fusion with the mother, Fineman moves beyond the Girardian myth by denying its explanatory force; he does not, however, discuss this possibility specifically in relation to Troilus and Cressida (102-4).

15. In his desire for wholeness and fear of fragmentation, Troilus is the repository for fears and desires felt intensely throughout the play. For the whole of Troilus and Cressida is invested with a nostalgia for order, wholeness, what Ulysses calls “the unity and married calm of states” (1.3.100). This unity is everywhere subject to fracture, figured most dramatically in Hector's myriad wounds and in Achilles' substitution of his myrmidons for his own single heroic action. Hence, for example, the predominance in character descriptions of disconnected lists of qualities, mere “attributes” (3.1.37) without a center (see, for example, the descriptions of Troilus as “minced man” [1.2.263-67] or of Ajax as “gouty Briareus” [1.2.19-30]). And hence the force of Achilles' insult to Thersites: “fragment” (5.1.8). As in Troilus' response to Cressida's betrayal, to be a piece rather than a whole here is to be a piece of spoiled food; in a world lacking wholeness, everything becomes a fragment (as the predominance of lists of nouns in Ulysses' speech and elsewhere suggests) subject to appetite, the universal wolf (1.3.121), subject finally to utter negation as appetite, like lechery (5.4.36), eats up itself. See J. Hillis Miller's discussion of stylistic fragmentation in “Ariachne's Broken Woof,” Georgia Review, 31 (1977), 54. For Charles Lyons, the play concerns the gap “between the pure and constant identity of desire and the despoiled and complex fragmentation of identity in reality” (“Cressida, Achilles, and the Finite Deed,” Etudes anglaises, 20 [1967], 233). R. J. Kaufmann identifies “self-consumption” as the deep theme of Troilus and Cressida and notes the presence of eating and cookery images, “subversive of ideals of wholeness and permanence,” in connection with this theme (“Ceremonies for Chaos,” 142, 155).

16. Emil Roy similarly suggests that strategies of splitting in the play derive from failed attempts to regain the nurturing mother, whose loss threatens the “loss of separate, fixed identities. To preserve their individual autonomies, the Trojans adopt strategies of splitting and projection … isolating Cressida's loving from her betraying selves” (“War and Manliness,” 118-19). Roy does not elaborate fully on this comment and treats Troilus and Cressida only sporadically in his maddeningly chaotic and wonderfully suggestive essay on the framing of oedipal issues in preoedipal terms in the play. The extent to which the mother is initially idealized is implicit not only in the concern with keeping her pure and unsoiled but also in the association of her with nectar, the food of the gods. Many critics, following G. Wilson Knight, see Troilus' love as in some sense idealizing, an attempt to achieve the infinite and spiritual by finite sensual means (The Wheel of Fire [New York: Meridian, 1957], 63-65; see also Traversi, Approach to Shakespeare, 331, 335). Troilus' passion is, I think, doubly idealized, shaped by desire not only for an ideal maternal object but also for a total fusion, infinite insofar as it removes the boundaries of the self, spiritual perhaps insofar as it is appropriate only to Milton's angels (“If Spirits embrace, / Total they mix” [Paradise Lost, 8.626-27]): ideal, that is, in both object and aim. Such idealization produces a corresponding debasement when, inevitably, the object loses its ideality by participating in sexuality and the aim turns out to be unattainable. Traversi hints at the connection between Troilus' “sense of soilure” and his “abstract idealism” (Approach to Shakespeare, 337) without exploring it. Greene comments persuasively on the idealization and debasement inherent in Troilus' passion from the start: “Exalting woman as a goddess, reducing her to object, what he omits is the person” (“Shakespeare's Cressida,” 138). Freud traces this bifold impulse, familiar now to feminist critics, to the desire to protect one's original incestuous object from the current of one's sexual feeling (“On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” in Standard Edition, XI, 179-90).

17. Her sexual betrayal is of course the ultimate sign of her status as opaque other: when she gives herself to Diomed, she demonstrates to Troilus that she is both unknowable and unpossessable. But even before the lovers have parted, Troilus suggests a magical connection between Cressida's infidelity and their separation: “Be thou true, / And I will see thee” (4.4.66-67), he says, as though her fidelity could magically ward off separation. At issue here is, I suspect, a primitive fantasy in which separation is infidelity: for the infant, the mother's separateness constitutes the first betrayal; insofar as she is not merely his, she is promiscuously other. I suspect that this sense of otherness itself as promiscuous betrayal antedates the more specific oedipal jealousies and is retrospectively sexualized by them. The whole process is condensed in the play's demonstration, in the character of Cressida, that separation, opaque otherness, and sexual betrayal are one.

18. In teaching this play, I have often found myself “correcting” students who assume that Troilus is announcing his impending union with Cressida; see Daniel Seltzer's footnote to this passage for a similar correction (Signet ed., 85). We all know that Troilus is simply inventing an analogy. But I think that the naive students are, as so often happens, at least partly right: they can teach us to notice Troilus' breathtaking capacity to compartmentalize, so that he can use this analogy apparently without feeling its relevance. Critical responses to this passage suggest that Troilus' capacity is catching.

19. See, for example, Pandarus' threat that Cressida will “bereave” Troilus of deeds as well as words (3.2.57), Cressida's comments on the inadequacy of male performance (3.2.86-91), Troilus' own fears that the act is a slave to limit (3.2.84-5), and Pandarus' final song about the bee's loss of its sting when it is “subdued in armèd tail” (5.10.42-45).

20. The deep fantasy associates intercourse with the boat trapped between menacing shores, but the language here is characteristically double: on the one hand, he cannot stand firm if he retreats from these dangerous shores; on the other, it is not the retreat but the wife felt as dangerous that poses the threat to standing firm.

21. Troilus' “expectation” in approaching Cressida—“what will it be / When that the wat’ry palates taste indeed / Love's thrice-repured nectar?” (3.2.17, 19-21)—suggests his lack of sexual experience. Like Othello, Troilus and Cressida thus becomes an exploration of the consequences of the man's first sexual experience. It is part of the play's implicit identification with Troilus' fantasy that the extent of Cressida's experience never becomes clear. In Troilus' imagination, at least in 1.1, she is an unapproachable virgin; and Shakespeare allows us to participate at least partly in this fantasy insofar as his Cressida—unlike Chaucer's—is not a widow. The aphorisms of her soliloquy in 1.2 may reveal that she is “already an experienced coquette” (Fluchère, Shakespare, 214) or they may be merely secondhand schoolgirl wisdom. Her morning-after response to Troilus—“You men will never tarry” (4.2.16)—is, however, chilling in its implication that Troilus is only one of many. These moments serve, I think, to make us uncomfortable with our lack of knowledge.

22. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “crow” is “in England commonly applied to the Carrion Crow (Corvus Corone), ‘a large black bird that feeds upon the carcasses of beasts’ (Johnson).”

23. Troilus' wish to infantilize Cressida is curiously echoed in Pandarus' teasing her after the consummation by using babytalk (“Hast not slept tonight? Would he not, a naughty man, let it sleep? A bugbear take him!” [4.2.32-37].

24. In the course of the play, Cressida merges with Helen, not only insofar as she becomes sexually soiled but insofar as she becomes the foreign woman, a center of sexual desire. Both Troilus and Cressida's first meeting (3.2) and their morning-after scene (4.2) are symbolically mediated by Helen, literally present in 3.1 and figuratively present in Diomed's description of her “soilure” in 4.1; variants of “soil” are insistently used in reference to Helen (2.2.148, 2.2.70, 4.1.56) in preparation for Ulysses' use of the word to question Troilus' response to Cressida's betrayal (5.2.131). We might expect Helen to be at the center of the play, insofar as she is the cause of the war; curiously she appears only near its literal center, in 3.1, and then only vacuously, as though Shakespeare wanted to suggest an absence at the center. Emil Roy sees both Helen and Cressida as contested mother figures (“War and Manliness,” 109, 110). Given the longing for maternal presence manifest in the play, the relative absence of the great mother Hecuba is particularly striking. One might speculate that the missing Hecuba is replaced by Helen and that the substitution of whore for idealized mother initiates the disease that is the play, here as in Hamlet. In a war seen as an extended sexual disease (2.3.18-21), Helen herself is the hollow center of disease, almost anatomically the “putrefied core, so fair without” (5.8.1), that “disarm[s] great Hector” (3.1.153).

25. This line seems to me to locate precisely the source of the psychic equivalence of sexuality and separation that shapes the love plot (see nn. 9 and 17). Sexuality entails separation not only because it soils the pure mother of desire but also because the act itself can never achieve the total union desired. The “monstruosity” is the necessary discrepancy not only between boundless desire and limited performance but also between the desire for boundlessness and the act that serves finally to remind us of our limits, our boundaries; insofar as we invest the sexual act with the promise of boundlessness, it will serve as the emblem of our separateness. Underlying the love plot is, I think, a dreamlike necessity: in place of merger, sexuality reveals the absolute otherness of the other, reveals what I have earlier called Cressida's promiscuous betrayal of the fantasy of merger; and that promiscuous betrayal itself becomes sexualized when Cressida becomes a whore. Sexuality thus entails the separation in the plot, and that separation entails sexual betrayal. Stephen Reid notes Troilus' worry that the sexual act will be disappointing as a result of “the gap between the sense of boundlessness in his desire and the limitation of the sexual act” (“Psychoanalytic Reading,” 264). Although his essay locates the source of sexual dissatisfaction where Freud does, in the deflection of desire from its original incestuous objects and in the repression of pregenital components of sexuality, he curiously attributes this gap to the temporal limitations of the sexual act, noting neither Troilus' desire for oral fusion nor his association of Cressida with his mother.

26. The Winter's Tale, 2.1.45. See Murray M. Schwartz's discussion of the maternal significance of the spider (“Leontes' Jealousy in The Winter's Tale,” American Imago, 30 [1973], 270-72); his suggestion that the spider signifies the sexually threatening mother and the fear of maternal engulfment is very germane to Troilus and Cressida. My general indebtedness to Murray Schwartz, Richard Wheeler, and especially C. L. Barber will, I hope, be evident to everyone familiar with their work. A more private debt is owed to Jann Gurvich, who shocked me years ago in a class by suggesting that Troilus wanted Cressida to be his mother. This paper is dedicated to C. L. Barber, whose living presence continues to inspire us all.

27. J. Hillis Miller prefers to see “Ariachne” as a symptom of the general challenge to Western civilization posed by the play, or at least by the deconstructionist critic's reading of the play, insofar as it asks us to hold two incongruent myths in our head at once, an impossibility in Western logocentric monological metaphysics (“Ariachne's Broken Woof,” 47). As I have labored to suggest, I don’t think that the myths are at the deepest level incongruent. Furthermore, I find his implicit endorsement of Troilus' response to Cressida curious. The extremity of Troilus' response surely tells us not that the story of cosmic order, “as it is told by the reasonable discourse of Western metaphysics, is itself a lie” (48) but that Troilus has impossibly located that order in the idea of his union with Cressida. As Ornstein says, Troilus “projects his inner confusion into a law of universal chaos and would have us believe that because his vanity is stricken the bonds of heaven are slipped” (Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, 249). Miller's argument has a powerful—and characteristically unassuming—antecedent in Knights's discussion of the same passage (Some Shakespearean Themes, p. 71).

28. See, for example, Stein, “Troilus and Cressida,” 158; Kaufmann, “Ceremonies for Chaos,” 155; and Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, 44.

29. This fact presents problems for Charles Lyons, who argues persuasively that the self-consuming sexual act, in which “the very consummation which appetite demands destroys the appetite and so disintegrates the source of value,” is the model for all action and all valuation in the play (“Cressida, Achilles, and the Finite Deed,” 233). His argument founders only when he turns to Troilus specifically, as his uneasiness about the point at which Troilus revalues Cressida indicates: “he conceives of her as a sexual object, uses her, and—when he suffers knowledge of her common behavior—he discards her” (241). My entire argument might be read as an attempt to untangle this uneasiness.

30. See Introduction to Twentieth-Century Interpretations of “King Lear” (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 1-21.