[In the following essay, Bayley links the absence of value and meaning in Troilus and Cressida to the omission in the play of any sense of past or future in the lives of the characters.]

The weight and density of time is an impression generated by the nature of Shakespearean dramatic action. It is of course illusory, because a play consists of a number of words, which take a given period of time to recite in the theatre, or to read in the study. But the Shakespearean character appears to bring to the action in which the play involves him the invisible lifetime which, as a represented human being he theoretically possesses, but which the artist who has to deal with the exigencies of form and convention usually keeps out of sight, unless a specific dramatic need requires it. The apparent freedom of the Shakespearean character implies the presence of all the hours and years his consciousness has accumulated.

The consequence produces the whole paradox of Shakespearean drama, and the division in it between enactment of a play and experience of a whole world of art. It is a division much more remarkable, and more far-reaching in its consequences, than Shakespeareans who have grown accustomed to the plays, as to a second nature, are usually given to assume. In fact it is the most singular thing, it would not be too much to say, about the whole nature of Shakespeare's achievement, and one that cannot be ignored or explained away by those who—like Wilson Knight—seek to demonstrate a coherent and harmonious metaphysic within the world of each play.

It would be truer to say that there is always a gap between our image of the play—what Morgann would have called our sustained impression of it—and the actual experience we receive when we hear the words on the stage or pick up the book and read them. Everyone must have experienced the feeling of surprise, perhaps disconcertment, involved, which may quickly wear off as our minds refocus and bring the two images of the play together, the immediate impact with the whole sum of our previous conception. None-the-less the momentary gap makes for something important to our aesthetic freedom. We may have briefly seen Hamlet as a clever show-off, Macbeth as a go-getter who inspires nothing but repulsion and tedium, Coriolanus as an âme damnée for whom excess alone has any flavour. Such impressions are too involuntary to be very subtle, and we are probably glad to subsume them in our more considered awareness of the play as a whole. But they have done their work: they have prevented our continuing to think about the play in the same way. In certain cases—Othello is the most striking instance—the contrast between the immediate emotion and the backlog of our considered view can be very marked indeed, so that we might almost think that it is an intention of the form. For what has become known, since Bradley took the hint from a student, as the ‘double time scheme’ in Othello is not just a question of comments in the dialogue which imply a much longer duration than the apparent brief and continuous dramatic action. It must represent our sense of the massive scope and ambiguity of the situation—the provenance and status of Othello, the culture of Venice, the history and fortunes of Iago. And over against this the brutal immediacy of the emotional explosion, and the manipulation of coincidence into fatality.

In other plays—Hamlet and Troilus are the most striking examples—we may feel that behind the brilliance of the action, and its power to absorb us, there is nothing really there at all. ‘The play's the thing’, in every way, and Hamlet distracts us from his total extemporaneousness, his lack of any prolongation into the personal, with his ‘had I but time …’. Here the process might be said to work in reverse. Our considered impression is of the complete impermanence of the dramatic action: but our immediate feeling when seeing or reading—perhaps at some such words as those of Hamlet to Gertrude: ‘I must to England. You know that?’—may suggest a sudden, solid, and uncovenanted actuality, a free space for appraisal of one in whom we are still interested, about whom the ways into knowledge still might exist.

In this way characters grow in our minds, and diminish again into the mere necessity of dramatic appearance or vice versa, by this constant cycle they remain alive, with the potential of all living things. Shakespeare's masterpieces wax and wane between what must be termed novel and play, between Henry James's ‘relations that stop nowhere’ and the circle of performance in which they must be arbitrarily resolved. But there is one play in which this creation by separation seems to have no part. Troilus and Cressida has no novel in it to fill our minds between performances and, conversely, no ‘novel moments’ to startle us when we have formed our impression of it as a play. It remains purely and simply a play, confined to the time it takes to act. The other plays possess the dimension it lacks, but it has an atmosphere and spirit unique to itself and lacking in them. An enquiry into its two-dimensional unity may reveal something about the ways in which division works in the being of the other plays, and in our response to them.

Troilus exhibits a time element that produces persons and situations not elsewhere found in the plays. It has often been pointed out how frequently it invokes time and its powers. Time is of course one of the most frequent topics of the commonplace not only in Shakespeare but in all Elizabethan literature; the most notorious and by its very familiarity the most reassuring of topoi. It is merciless, devouring, all-conquering. Or it can conquer everything except love, everything except art. Or it is both judge and redeemer, serving ‘to unmask falsehood and bring truth to life’. We are lulled by these commonplaces, which seem not only familiar to us but doubly familiar from their frequent and regular recurrence in the miniatures of lyric and in the discursive poetry of high sentence. Moreover, as Kenneth Muir for one has pointed out, there are actually even more references to time in Macbeth than there are in Troilus. It is evidently not the emphasis on time that counts here but the dramatic use made of it. In all Shakespeare's other plays we feel that the present time as enacted on the stage, not only depends upon the past but is in the service of the future. Lear has made his plans: the action will reveal their consequences; the unseen future will underwrite a return to normality of a kind, be guarantor, as Edgar says, of ‘we that are young’. But in the formal impact of Troilus there is neither past nor future: everything takes place in and ends in, the present.

We need not look far for the formal justification for the device. We all know (even today) how the matter of Troy began, and how it ended. Our action, as the Prologue tells us, will take place in ‘the middle’. What follows from this? That the playwright can abolish past and future if he wants to, and see what the consequences are if he does. Novelist's time—and in general Shakespearean time—accumulates character and perspective, and almost any playwright borrows enough of the novelist's time to produce the appearance of these two things. His actors are in the midst of their lives, and his action will admit—if only tacitly—that it cannot tell the whole of their tale, and that other things are in progress outside it. But what if the playwright turns the other way and instead of borrowing time from the novelist deliberately renounces it, and all the space and coherence it assumes? Suppose he implies that if novelist's time does not exist for him he is left with the headless and senseless trunk of an action, devoid of the reality which can only come from knowledge of what went before and must come after? This is where such a playwright as Beckett begins, starting from the metaphysical premise that life can have no sequential sense or meaning, that all is an ever-repeated mumble of the present. Shakespeare could begin from a more formalized hypothesis: you know the beginning and end of this business, so they need have no meaning in terms of what I am about to show you of the middle. The only surprise here must be a perpetual present.

A characteristic paradox is made of this. It is because we know how the siege began and ended that Agamemnon can say,

What's past and what's to come is strewn with husks
And formless ruin of oblivion.

Agamemnon, like all the other figures in the play, cares nothing for the logic of past and future, and if neither exists the present itself can have no coherent meaning—he himself no coherent personality. That is the logic in the dramatic world of Troilus and Cressida, the more terrible for being implicit and uninsistent. And it is a world that makes us, by contrast, sharply aware of how the sense of character in a Shakespeare play normally comes into being, between an accumulation of impressions that depends on novel time, and quick, often contradictory, response to the dramatic moment.

Let us consider the first scene of Act III, in which Pandarus, Paris and Helen chatter together and sing a song about love. It is like a glimpse in a nightclub, but whereas in real life the spectator might be sufficiently intrigued—enough of a novelist as it were—to wonder about their relationship and about the rest of their lives, Shakespeare inhibits even so small an attempt at coherence, by depriving the characters of the slightest historical and personal significance. The scene makes us feel as confused and unresponsive as if we ourselves were in the same state as the other guests in that nightclub, immersed in the same experience of the contingent and the banal. No novelist can do this, because in drawing our attention to the contingent and the banal he puts us on the outside of it, and manipulates it so that it is fully under our control. This difference is crucial. In novel time the absurdity of the contingent becomes a positive pleasure to be entertained by; but in Troilus we are too be-nightmared by the world of the moment to contemplate it with this enjoyment. Like the actors themselves, we are borne passively on the moment by moment tide of the drama, and we find when it is over that we still cannot get it into shape.

The sense in which Shakespeare here denies and dissolves history might be compared with the drinking scene on board Pompey's galley in Antony and Cleopatra, where he deftly and dynamically confirms it. In Troilus the game seems to be to deny that the famous and the legendary ever existed as time has reported them, or that we would ever find anything at any moment in history beyond scraps of idiotic dialogue and meaningless event.

And this because the convention of play time is reduced virtually to an ad absurdum. The realisation makes clear the play's unique status in the Shakespearean canon and explains things about it which on any other interpretation seem wilful and puzzling at the best and at the worst downright unsatisfactory. The point to recognize is that we are puzzled because there is nothing to be puzzled about, because behind the glitter and coruscation of the language and the rapid charade of the language there is nothing that adds up. We do not know what the characters are like because there is neither time nor occasion to find out, and for the same reason they have no idea of themselves. Neither we, nor they, can be aware here of the other world, of the novelist's world, in which time stretches into past and future, supplying the reality of persons, creating space and leisure, value and meaning. Ulysses is concerned to impress upon Achilles that such a world can only be maintained by constant action and endeavour. The irony of his advice is that it is intended merely for the moment, and that Achilles is in fact spurred to action by the random eruption of another moment—the death of Patroclus. Ulysses is a charade of policy as Nestor is one of age, Troilus of fidelity, Cressida of faithlessness. ‘He must, he is, he cannot but be wise’ is the ironic comment on Nestor. But all of them must, are, and cannot but be voices imprisoned in role and argument, figures condemned to tread the mill of time without ever being made free of it. Compared to their undifferentiated and claustrophobic world the predicament of Macbeth seems like freedom itself—‘as bread and general as the casing air’. For it is in Macbeth's own consciousness that coherency and purpose have become extinguished, have become a tale told by an idiot. In the world outside him the logic of time proceeds with its serene, restorative, but for him terrible assurance. He cannot but contemplate the shape and consequence of his action stretching before and after, and thus becomes himself, the real Macbeth, situated in the real and unforgiving dimension of history.

Everywhere in his work, not just in the history plays, Shakespeare's sense of the past is of ‘time's jewel’, giving meaning to human destiny. It is so assured, so comprehensive and so inevitable that we take it for granted. He is our supreme creator of history, as he is also in one sense our supreme religious writer, in whose providence all things have their place, as for Yeats's crazy Jane ‘all things remain in God’. It takes a Scott or a Pushkin to revive this authority; and it is no accident that in Boris Godunov, the best of the many plays that have tried to recreate a specifically Shakespearean sense of history, the old scribe Pimen is made to soliloquize about the past ‘Is it long since it swept by, teeming with event and turbulent like the ocean? Now it is silent and tranquil.’

The fate of Macbeth, as of Godunov, is ‘silent and tranquil’. With Timon they have their everlasting mansion, and their reality is assured. ‘What's done can't be undone.’ Whatever the contrast between them Lady Macbeth is united at last with her husband—an ironic second marriage—when she admits the law of responsibility and causality. Very different is Cressida's comment on her relation with Troilus: ‘Well, well 'tis done, 'tis past, and yet it is not.’ She has no sense of, and does not want to know, what has taken place: pleasure, boredom and infidelity are alike unsorted phenomena of the moment for her, and she is denied past and future awareness to the point where she is no more than a voice speaking lines in the theatre. Someone said of Marilyn Monroe that she was ‘discontinuous with any idea of personality’. It is the same with Cressida. She becomes her words; our ‘present eye praises the present object’ as Ulysses says, and looks no further.

Shakespeare's technique here deliberately abandons his usual sure mode of creating a complete human being, complete not only in terms of history but in relation to a family and a social situation. Such creation may be only a hint or a touch—as in the personality of a Paulina in The Winter's Tale, or an Aumerle in Richard II—but the sense of character as logically and soundly related to environment is something of the greatest importance to his art that we can usually take for granted. In the Troilus legend all is arbitrary, and again we may feel that the playwright sardonically emphasises this aspect of legend into a corner stone of theatrical technique. We know nothing about these people but this is the story of how they behaved: it is thus as accurate as it is paradoxical to see the legend as a moment in life, left hanging on a note of mockery that is very far from being the ‘monumental mockery’ which Ulysses sees as the fate of bygone reputation, and action left behind in the past.

Handled in this way the Shakespeare tale becomes virtually a parody of representation and action, the Aristotelian concept of the play. Parodied, too, is the concept of time that goes with this. The critics who a few generations later were to misunderstand Aristotle and make a fetish of the Unity of Time, held that the duration of a dramatic fiction should ideally be the time taken to act it. Dryden praised Ben Jonson's The Silent Woman for this reason, and when he decided to rewrite Shakespeare's Troilus he must have approved of it on the same grounds. It may also be significant that he subtitled his adaptation ‘Truth found too late’, thus suggesting that all the appearances of the Troilus situation are misleading, and that his play discovers and presents its reality. That reality turns out to be that Cressida was faithful after all; that she only flirted with Diomedes to please her father; and that the only way she can prove this is by self-immolation on the battlefield where Troilus, after slaying Diomedes, himself meets death. Dryden's version may be preposterous, but its mockery is indeed ‘monumental’; its artifice creates dramatic certainty and—to a limited extent—dramatic satisfaction.

Dryden's Cressida reveals herself in her actions and in the time of the play, and that is good enough, however devoid of interest or plausibility that self might be if we could consider it in novel time. In one sense at least, therefore, she is a kind of degraded sister of the great heroines of classical tragedy, like Antigone herself. All that is relevant in Antigone is concentrated in her action, into what she does, and it is this and nothing else which constitutes her tragedy. The role of Antigone is completely identified with the action—there is no time for the two to be separated—and there is no room for different kinds of or conceptions of Antigone. Equally there should be none for Shakespeare's Cressida. She was false, and in play time there is an end of it. She does what she does because there is no syllable of time

                              no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne's broken woof to enter

in which she could do otherwise. And yet we may have the uneasy but challenging impression that this is because she is a kind of parody of the heroine whose time is only in the play; that her nature is divided, not ‘in itself’ but in terms of the usual Shakespearean form; that she is a dweller potentially in the land of the novel who is here compelled to exist solely in the swift time of the play.

If Hamlet does not always speak like a man of this world it is because he lives in different worlds, as both playgoer and victim of its plot: his drama is that of a young man acting who becomes a young man acted upon. Troilus's self-absorption is not so unlike Hamlet's, but it is concerned entirely with the sensations of the moment. The attitude to time is again the key.

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time—

Hamlet invokes novel time, the spacious dimension which the play will not let him have. For him it is a matter of infinite concern that his wounded name shall be restored, to live behind him in the love and knowledge of his friend Horatio, who will speak

                              to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about.

But absence of novel time, and what goes with it, seems the very point of Troilus. ‘Hector is dead, there is no more to say’. To live in reputation and in friendship can have no place in Troilus, where all such things are dissolved in the expediency of the moment. We must contrast with this not only Hamlet but the powerful ties and dignities of friendship which triumph over politics in Julius Caesar. But these things are nothing in Troilus, as the tone even of the Prologue makes quite clear.

                                                                                                                        our play
Leaps o'er the vaunt and firstlings of these broils,
Beginning in the middle; starting thence away
To what may be digested in a play.

The absence of value is contained and revealed in the absence of time, its most effective correlative in terms of art, for it is most unlikely that Shakespeare is simply giving direct expression here to a mood of disgust with society. Time is here the formal instrument for his habitual artifice and self-exclusion; and the instrument also, it may well be, to set the tone for a play specially commissioned by the young intellectuals at the Inns of Court. For this of course there is no direct evidence. Although a tradition exists that Troilus was never acted in the public theatre, Coghill and others have plausibly argued that it takes a conventional place among the tragedies of the time; and against this one can only urge a more or less personal sense of its peculiarities. If Troilus was not aimed at an Inns of Court audience who was it aimed at?

A logical result of the play's time technique is the domination of Thersites, who seems at times virtually to ‘speak for’ the play in a Brechtian sense, a sense unique in Shakespeare. And yet play-time consumes him too. His rebuttal is not to triumph outside the play, not to increase and live on in our minds as ‘the hatch and brood’ of novel-time. But he is unique in receiving no real setback or corrective at the hands of his fellows, as do all Shakespeare's other cynics and railers. Parolles, Apemantus, Jaques, Enobarbus, Falstaff, Iago above all—they are in their various ways placed and diminished by the positive mass and movement of the plays they are in. But Thersites is disconcertingly on top in his. Most obviously and smartly he scores off Patroclus, the false railer and tame cynic of Achilles, who likes to hear him pageant the Greek generals and provide what Ulysses calls ‘the stuff for these two to make paradoxes’. Patroclus attempts to claim Thersites as a fellow clear-sighted man, who like himself sees through the farce of greatness and of life in general, but Thersites treats him with all the disdain of the independent shop steward for the chief of the bosses' union.

No one can stand up against Thersites because all unknowingly share the same conviction with him, the conviction that everything is meaningless except the present moment. Thersites is top dog because he alone draws the logical conclusion that there is nothing to life but disputation and conquest, wars and lechery—‘nothing else holds fashion’. The others who follow the fashion without being aware of it, are men of action in the most damning sense.

Thersites concludes that there is nothing but wars and lechery because he cannot see that the legend and the beauty, the art and the meaning of the past and the future proceed precisely from the art and the lechery of the moment. The present moment reveals the legendary Helen sprawled untidily in the arms of a Paris who calls her ‘Nell’, and the death of Hector the Great as a few seconds of sordid butchery brought about by chance. At any given moment Thersites is right. The play pushes his logic to an extreme which becomes almost an implicit parody of those who despise art, and time as its matrix. So far from being in opposition to his fellows Thersites here is their representative and spokesman.

Another kind of satire may underlie the glitter of the play. The point about metaphysical argument of the kind the young intellectuals of the Inns delighted in, was its expedience, its pointscoring, its omission by the rules of the game of imponderable values and permanencies. Shakespeare might perhaps be quietly amusing himself at the expense of his clients, the young men who would not only be applauding but (like Donne) learning from his ingenious arguments and what Milton in Comus makes his Lady scornfully call

                                                                                          gay rhetoric
That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence.

For Agamemnon and Nestor have dazzling arguments to prove that the failure of a communal design is really a good thing, because it will show who is trying hardest. Ulysses outdoes them both in ingenuity and animation to prove that things would go better if they all pulled together; but what unites them with their opposite numbers in Troy, and subordinates them to Thersites's view of things, is the blind immediacy of their intentions.

Every Elizabethan used rhetoric in this way, and for effects as graphic and artistic as possible, but Shakespeare is alone in drawing a particular sort of dramatic conclusion from the logic of its use. Translate the intentionalism of rhetoric into terms of action and you have mere appetite, careless of everything but its object.

Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.

Action, like lechery, eats itself in terms of this drama and leaves nothing over. The irony of these grim words is that they describe raison d'état, the specialty of rule and ‘the mystery in the soul of state’ that Ulysses relishes; and though his ‘need to take the instant way’ and ‘let not virtue seek renumeration for the thing it was’ blinds him to the implication of what he says, there is a kind of dawning horror of his own words as he speaks them. Eating is the very image of absorption in the present, and both Helen and Cressida are compared by Troilus to the leftovers of appetite; there is a meaningful irony in the argument offered by Troilus for keeping Helen:

                                                            the remainder viands
We do not throw in unrespective sieve
Because we now are full.

The play's logic presents the girls in this light, as it presents even Hector. He too is the victim of the moment and its impulses, even though he alone in the play can see time as the end rather than as the moment.

                              The end crowns all
And that old common arbitrator, time,
Will one day end it …

But even he is a dire example of the truth in this play of his brother Troilus's exclamation—‘What's ought but as 'tis valued?’—for he is valued as a status symbol of invincibility, to be eliminated by the Greeks and preserved by the Trojans. He dies without words, with no blaze of self-illumination like Hotspur, who affirms with his last breath his survival in the idea of eternity.

For thought's the slave of life, and life's time's fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world
Must have a stop.

Hector's sudden reversal of his wise decision to return Helen to the Greeks shows him as much the victim of immediacy as the others in the play. And though Troilus assures himself that ‘never did young man fancy with so eternal and so fixed a soul’, the truth of his love is that it consists only in moments: the moment when he is giddy with desire and ‘expectation whirls him round’; the moment when he sees Cressida together with Diomedes. ‘This, and is not, Cressida’. ‘I cannot conjure, Trojan’ says Ulysses, sardonically disclaiming any power upon the appearance of things. His brother's death becomes for Troilus another such moment. ‘Hector is dead, there is no more to say’. He cannot say like Brutus:

                              I owe more tears
To this dead man than you shall see me pay.
I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.

But the most conscious contemners of permanency and value are Agamemnon and Ulysses.

What's past and what's to come is strewn with husks
And formless ruin of oblivion;
But in this extant moment, faith and troth,
Strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing,
Bids thee, with most divine integrity,
From heart of very heart, great Hector, welcome.

The divine integrity of the extant moment determines the exercise of Agamemnon's nobility. Faith and truth are alone there. The irony of the phrase consummates the spirit of the play, as does Ulysses's dismissal of the scraps of good deeds past as ‘alms for oblivion’.

There is an odd sense, none the less, in which Cressida herself does strike us as a real person, in spite of her role as a commonplace in the play's externalized and intellectual scheme. It is partly a negative impression, based on our intuitive response to the attitudes the characters take towards her. When Ulysses calls her a daughter of the game we may feel obscurely that he is wrong, and if we feel so it is at this moment that she gives some sort of impression of personality. Ulysses's view of her is determined by his own role—indeed we might say that he himself acquires a measure of extension as a character by his refusal to interest himself in that of Cressida. The other actors are partly realized by the same indirect method. If we wonder how far Thersites is justified in claiming that Diomedes is totally unreliable (‘The sun borrows of the moon when Diomed keeps his word’) or that Patroclus is a womanizer as well as the boy-friend of Achilles (‘the parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab’) then we are beginning to take some interest in the psychology of both Thersites and his victims, though the play will not of course satisfy it.

For the senilely chivalric old Nestor Cressida is ‘a woman of quick spirit’, which for Ulysses means being a ‘sluttish spoil of opportunity’. So she may be, or become, but Ulysses is not interested in why it should be so. Chaucer, on the other hand, was deeply interested in her motivation. I used to suppose, which I take to be the fairly general reaction, that Chaucer's and Shakespeare's Cressidas had very little in common; but now I wonder whether they are not in fact based on the same kind of interest and understanding on the part of the two writers; and even whether Shakespeare, with that sureness of instinct which makes it irrelevant to ask whether or not he was ‘interested’ in such a character, may not have formed his Cressida from Chaucer's.

The thing they chiefly have in common is that neither of them know what they want, and so they become the victims of what other people want. Social exigencies compel them to act in ways which society then condemns. This fate, which with some women might be sacrificial, is with them merely distracted. Both Cressidas distrust men and yet depend on them, and both are in a continual state of inadvertency and division.

TROILUS:
What offends you, Lady?
CRESSIDA:
Sir, my 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.

These are the most revealing words Cressida utters. They show, for one thing, that her existence is indeed a matter of what other people think of her; that she is as she is valued: but they also show an exasperated consciousness of the fact. She is a mess and she knows it; she would rather, as Chaucer's Criseyde thinks she would, be ‘my owene woman, wel at ease’, but where is the hope of that? She has not a moment to try: forces inside her and out will prevent it. It is of course in keeping with the spirit of the play that Shakespeare does not make the great parade of sympathy for his heroine that Chaucer does: her predicament is not focused on (‘men seyn, I nat …’) as a matter for excuse. None the less Cressida, like Criseyde, is in a predicament, which the play's action exhibits but does not explain. Neither's doings are acts of the will. If Troilus is ‘a young man's play’, perhaps even a parody of a young man's play, it explains much about Cressida's negated role. Shakespearean obligingness, and perhaps amusement and satire, would be focused at and on the young ‘whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy’. Troilus's remarks on love, like all the metaphysics in the play, are brilliantly self-curious and self-defining. Some of Cressida's (‘You shall not have it, Diomed, faith you shall not’) are, for want of a better word, from the heart, but the predicament of the heart has no place in this man's world. Cressida's negation in such a world, like Ophelia's in hers, emphasizes more than anything the difference from later tragedy where women's feelings and motives have so much importance. It also, naturally enough, negates and diminishes the meaning of infidelity, a young man's idea in the play like every other; for these young men are certainly not fit to hear a moral philosophy of love which would give it real meaning.

Certainly Cressida is very different from Shakespeare's other heroines. Even his loose or his evil women are, as it were robustly and whole-heartedly so—they have confidence and single-minded assurance. They have in abundance that quality which Tolstoy so unerringly detects and so sympathetically displays in Natasha Rostov of War and Peace—the entire rightness of being themselves. And in his most admired women Shakespeare presents the most sublime qualities of love—faith, confidence, serene self-assurance, unalterable even when it ‘alteration finds’. In their faith ‘Time is the nurse and breeder of all good’. Desdemona serenely rejoins to Othello's exclamation that his happiness is too great for anything except death to succeed it:

                                                                      The heavens forbid
But that our loves and comforts should increase
Even as our days do grow!

Juliet, Rosalind, Portia (both of them), Hermione in The Winter's Tale (‘The Emperor of Russia was my father’) above all Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Lady Macbeth, in whom confidence and self-satisfaction assume respectively their most ambiguous and their most terrible form. There is such striking unanimity that one can hardly doubt that their author himself profoundly admired—revered even—the qualities he portrayed. Nor is he alone here. I suppose it is a traditional ideal of western culture, found at its greatest in the beauty and assurance of the great portraits of the Mother of God. Troilus's cry—

Let it not be believed for womanhood!
Think, we had mothers …

shows that it has also its deep root in interior psychology.

No wonder then that the play in which this attitude is absent should be so drastically and jarringly different. Instead of creating and organizing the assurances of self-hood Shakespeare divides and dissolves them. Sexual infidelity and military expedience are the cracks which gape open to ruin all distinction. Troilus's stunned horror at the division in Cressida

Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the earth and sky

is a recognition not so much of falsity as of the fact that she is not a single coherent person, in herself or in time. The modern spirit may learn to accept and even to exploit this incoherence—the dissolution of what Lawrence called ‘the old stable ego’ of character—and to relish the flavour it finds in Toilus. And it is certainly true that the confidence and assurance of Shakespeare's women, however timeless its mastery in terms of the individual, seems to belong to the past rather than to the present. The chorus of masculine praise in the nineteenth century for what Brandes called Shakespeare's ‘noble and adorable womanly figures’ now strikes us as suspiciously nostalgic. Sheltered men are trying to get behind Shakespeare in admiration for dream figures who project the reassurance but none of the tiresomeness of wife or mother. Cressida is no help here; division has gone so far indeed that she is not even in their sense a woman; she shares with Troilus and the play's other characters the male emptiness of experience, indecision, helplessness—divisions of the kind the play touches on again and again in unexpected contexts.

This Ajax is half made of Hector's blood;
In love whereof, half Hector stays at home.

All the characters in the play are both victims and intriguers, betrayers and betrayed, but it is in the heroine that this loss of stability appears most emphatically. The ‘truth’ of Troilus goes by default in such a play; it is on the division of Cressida that Shakespeare concentrates. Where Chaucer traced Criseyde's hesitations with meticulous leisure, and placed them in the context of all human uncertainty about life and love—over which the fidelity of God presides—Shakespeare shows division through a formalization of time. It seems just possible that the germ of such a treatment came to him from literature; not from Chaucer but from Henryson's poem The Testament of Cresseid, which we know he had read, and the famous moment towards its ending when Cressida, who has become a leper, happens to come face to face with Troilus, who is still defending Troy. Each fails to recognize the other, though Troilus cannot help thinking he has seen that face before somewhere. Shakespeare presents something oddly similar with far greater subtlety and with none of the poet's rather unctuous relish in the transformation. Instead of the poem's elaborately postponed tableau, he shows how the same kind of impression can be made only hours after the lovers have parted. ‘Was Cressid here?’ The moment is indeed a nightmare one. For the last lesion in the mind is not to recognize the person we have just seen and may see again. And the play images for us the madness of such a moment.

Wilson Knight has remarked that in this play ‘the mind of Shakespeare is engaged with purely philosophic issues’. It is quite true that the analytic processes of the play, however ambivalent their course and purpose, are so unlike anything else in Shakespeare that they do appear almost as a deliberate metaphysical query. But we should beware of supposing that Shakespeare himself is thus ‘engaged’; the impression may come from the method he has used, the form and style that he has given to the play. One would suppose that once that form and atmosphere have been established, all else may flow naturally and logically from it. The exchanges of Ulysses and Achilles, as of Hector and Troilus, give a brilliant if brittle impression of philosophic discussion, the sort of effect that such a piece can give of it, to titillate an intelligent audience and create an air of intellectual immediacy which will make them sit up. But in a sense the method brings its own nemesis, and ‘eats up itself’ by its own success. The play is ‘intellectual’ in a potentially damaging sense, dealing so much in arresting and stimulating moments that we shall find no deeply imagined and presented differentiation of values inside the world it offers. It contains none of the characters who do not represent, but are—in some wholly pragmatic sense—good and evil, nor those opposed worlds of order and of unregeneracy which we find even in the comedies. So that when Wilson Knight goes on to suggest—and he is by no means the only critic to do so—that the decisive element in the play is a contrast between Greek rationality and Trojan chivalry, a deliberate demonstration of the triumph of ruthless Greek methods over a Trojan culture which retains in however unexamined a form some decency and honour, he seems to me to mislead us. And, incidentally, to embarrass the play. For if Shakespeare did indeed intend some such confrontation, the method on which he constructed the play has backfired on him. In Antony and Cleopatra there can be no question of the gulf between Rome and Egypt, and of its significance in terms of the play's dimension and imagination. But the gap between Greek and Trojan is merely notional, and is deflected by the impact of ‘philosophic issues’ arising out of the urgency, the tyranny in fact, of the moment, which affects both sides equally. In English, and especially in Tudor literary tradition, Trojans were the good guys and Greeks the bad ones, a fugitive Trojan prince, Brytto, being supposedly the eponymous founder of the British kingdom. This tradition Shakespeare goes along with, but surely no more than that. It is an irrelevance, and hence perhaps a weakness, in a play that is full of oddity. But it is wholly logical, for in working inside the medium of the moment the dramatist forgoes any vantage-point outside it. He cannot tell us what he thinks, or what to think, in terms of the values that lie outside immediacy.

What he can do is, like Pandarus, in the play's parting line, to ‘bequeath you my diseases’. We recoil from such a world without being invited to do so, because it makes us reflect on the way we act and live. Were some such theme as that ‘evil arises from the betrayal of loyalties’ to be offered to us, we should have no trouble in getting on terms with the play, and putting ourselves outside the nightmare unease of its presentness, as our feelings traditionally lead us to do with tragedy. Certainly the ‘young men’, in the play, and watching it, would not have been in the least impressed by such a moral, any more than by the traditional trappings and emotions of tragedy. And it is they, in whatever spirit, who remain the arbiters of Troilus. If we are to take what the play offers, and understand the unexpected world it creates, we must assume that Shakespeare here is doing something quite different, rather than that he is attempting—in a discordant, blurred, unsatisfactory way—the same sort of effects he achieves so well elsewhere.