Shakespeare\u2019s Troilus and Cressida Commentary A. J. Drake<\/title><meta name= \"description\" content= \"Troilus and Cressida commentary addresses major themes, major characters such as Troilus, Cressida, Pandar, Thersites, Hector, literary analysis, drama theory.\"><\/head><\/p>\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\">Commentaries on Shakespeare’s Comedies<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-btn__default-btn uagb-btn-tablet__default-btn uagb-btn-mobile__default-btn uagb-block-4f6cdd05 uag-hide-mob\"><div class=\"uagb-buttons__wrap uagb-buttons-layout-wrap \">\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-dcba7b2a wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">HOME<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div 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target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">GUIDES<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-d5da63d7 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/shakespeare-links\/\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">LINKS<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-btn__default-btn uagb-btn-tablet__default-btn uagb-btn-mobile__default-btn uagb-block-19d28286\"><div class=\"uagb-buttons__wrap uagb-buttons-layout-wrap \">\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-69502be5 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act1\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 1<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-0ec42142 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act2\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 2<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-6ac70dcb wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act3\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 3<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-bfd6ecc9 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act4\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 4<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-55716ff6 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act5\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 5<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-0246bad9 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#endnotes\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ENDNOTES<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\nShakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida.<\/em> Folio. (The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. 812-89.)<\/p>\n\n\n\nOf Interest:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rsc.org.uk\/troilus-and-cressida\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">RSC Resources<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/internetshakespeare.uvic.ca\/Library\/Texts\/Tro\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ISE Resources<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shakespeare-online.com\/sources\/troilussources.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">O-S Sources<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.folger.edu\/explore\/shakespeare-in-print\/first-folio\/bookreader-68\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1623 Folio 589-617 (Folger)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/e\/eebo\/A03512.0001.001\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chapman\u2019s Seaven Bookes of Homer\u2019s Iliads<\/em> (1598\/1611)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/c\/cme\/Troilus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chaucer’s Troilus and Cresseide <\/em>(circa 1382-86)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.perseus.tufts.edu\/hopper\/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0074\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses,<\/em> trans. Golding (1567)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/e\/eebo\/A19168.0001.001\/1:6.6?rgn=div2;view=toc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lydgate’s Hystorye, Sege and dystruccyon of Troye<\/em> (1513)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/resources.warburg.sas.ac.uk\/pdf\/neh1740b2329729B.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Caxton\u2019s trans. of Lefevre\u2019s Recuyell of the historyes of Troye <\/em>(1471)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n*Chapman: Selections from Books I, II, VII *Ovid: Books XII.670-696, XIII.1-187, 437-432 *Lydgate: Selections from Books II, III, IV *Caxton: Selections from Book III.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act1\">ACT 1<\/h3>\n\n\n\nPrologue (812-13, a prologue-speaker sets the scene, and tells us that the story will\u2014like Homer\u2019s epics\u2014begin in medias res, <\/em>i.e. in the middle of the action.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Prologue reminds us of the play\u2019s heroic Homeric backdrop, but on the whole, this bitter comedy intensifies the disillusionment that besets both love and war\u2014activities that almost always begin with high ideals and unrealistic expectations, and all too often end in frustration, even when the object is attained. The Prologue is dressed in armor, and bears himself with admirable humility\u2014a quality notably lacking in characters such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax, among others\u2014admitting that the audience may find the play \u201cNow good or bad, \u2018tis but the chance of war\u201d (813, 1.0.31).<\/p>\n\n\n\nShakespeare probably did not have extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the Homeric epics or early Greek history, but he surely gained valuable insight into the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations from their mythic and historical narratives. These myths he received in part from Ovid, and the history from Plutarch and others. Shakespeare shares with Homer and the later Greek tragedians a keen sense that swirling beneath the most heroic ideals and quests is always a strong undercurrent of contrary passions, impulses, and objectives. Troilus and Cressida\u2019s <\/em>characters often show a painful awareness of such undercurrents, which is partly what gives the play its cynical edge. <a href=\"#_edn1\" id=\"_ednref1\">[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 1, Scene 1 (812-16, Troilus won\u2019t enter the fray as war rages between his own Trojan side and the Greeks because he is suffering the torments of his unreturned affection for Cressida; the girl\u2019s uncle, Pandarus, complains that Troilus is too precipitate and not sufficiently thankful for Pandarus\u2019s efforts in his service; finally, Troilus goes off with Aeneas to battle.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nShakespeare\u2019s play begins seven years into the Trojan War, not ten as does Homer\u2019s Iliad,<\/em> <a href=\"#_edn2\" id=\"_ednref2\">[2]<\/a> and at present, Troilus reveals in conversation with his crush\u2019s Uncle Pandarus that he is as far out of sync with the war\u2019s imperatives as the sulking hero Achilles, who is angry with King Agamemnon for taking away his prized concubine, Briseis. Troilus asks Pandarus, \u201cWhy should I war without the walls of Troy \/ That find such cruel battle here within?\u201d (813, 1.1.2-3) The young man sounds like a Petrarchan sonneteer with his sighing extremes, as in Petrarch\u2019s famous line, \u201cI find no peace, but have no arms for war.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn3\" id=\"_ednref3\">[3]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nBy the play\u2019s end, Troilus will be furious at both Pandarus and Diomedes, disillusionment over Cressida having given him his cause to fight, though that cause itself seems pervaded by the disillusionment that initially drives it. But by then, Achilles will have killed Hector and the Trojans will be doomed. But at this early point, Pandarus is eager to spur Troilus on as a lover, increasing his lovesickness with comparisons between the magnificent Helen and his own niece: he tells Troilus of Cressida, \u201cWell, she looked yesternight fairer than ever I saw \/ her look, or any woman else\u201d (814, 1.1.30-31).<\/p>\n\n\n\nPandarus is not above rubbing salt into Troilus\u2019s love wounds, but he also opines that if Cressida knew what was good for her, she would have followed her deceitful, mercenary Trojan father Calchas in joining the Greeks because he prophesied their victory over Troy: \u201clet her to the Greeks,\u201d says Pandarus, \u201cand so I\u2019ll tell \/ her the next time I see her\u201d (815, 1.1.76-77). <a href=\"#_edn4\" id=\"_ednref4\">[4]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nPandarus need not worry: Troilus is in no danger of being unsmitten by the fair Cressida, and he persists in his disdain for the grand cause of the long war, Helen, whose beautiful visage was famously described as \u201cthe face that launched a thousand ships.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn5\" id=\"_ednref5\">[5]<\/a> Troilus\u2019s gloss is, \u201cHelen must needs be fair \/ When with your blood you daily paint her thus. \/ I cannot fight upon this argument; \/ It is too starved a subject for my sword\u201d (815, 1.1.85-88).<\/p>\n\n\n\nWe soon hear that Paris has been slightly wounded by Menelaus (816, 1.1.105). Troilus\u2019s estimation of the event is, \u201cLet Paris bleed\u2014\u2018tis but a scar to scorn; \/ Paris is gored with Menelaus\u2019 horn\u201d (816, 1.1.106-07). As this reference to cuckoldry suggests, Shakespeare\u2019s play constantly undercuts the heroic version of the Trojan War\u2019s \u201cgreat cause.\u201d It seems as if the play sides with that thoroughly Homeric character Thersites, who puts the whole violent campaign down to stupidity, lechery, and contemptible male pride. Thersites sees from the outset that love and war are intertwined, to the honor of neither.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe scene ends with Aeneas and Troilus heading gamely for battle outside Troy\u2019s walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 1, Scene 2 (816-22, Cressida converses with her male servant, then with Pandarus, who promotes Troilus\u2019s qualities to her; Cressida and Pandarus observe the procession of Trojans return home from battle, and when Cressida is by herself, she must admit that she is much taken with Troilus.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nCressida\u2019s manservant tells her that Hector is both upset since Ajax has given him a good beating\u2014the servant says Ajax \u201ccoped Hector in the battle and \/ struck him down \u2026\u201d (817, 1.2.30-31). Cressida herself is only moved to smile at the absurdity of the picture that the servant creates to describe Ajax, and wonders how such an individual could so affect the great Trojan. She asks, \u201cBut how should this man that makes me smile \/ make Hector angry?\u201d (817, 1.2.28-29) All the same, Hector is spurred on by his shame to challenge any Greek to maintain that his lady is as good as Andromache.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDoes Hector\u2019s wounded pride make the Trojans seem more human, more worthy of respect? Throughout the play, Hector is most concerned to preserve from the ravages and fortunes of battle his sense of honor\u2014he lives by something very like the medieval honor code operative in the \u201cMatter of Troy\u201d texts that Shakespeare probably drew from in crafting his play. The Greeks, in comparison to Hector, seem wilier, more mercenary. Still, this difference appears most sharply when Hector himself is the object of comparison\u2014many of the Trojan warriors are in no essential way different from the \u201ctricky\u201d Greeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPandarus pursues his private interest of bringing Troilus and Cressida together, and his attempt consists mainly in playing up the virtues and valor of Troilus even over Hector: according to Pandarus, \u201cTroilus is the better man of the two\u201d (817, 1.2.56). He even insinuates that Helen herself is quite attracted to the young fellow, saying, \u201cShe praised his complexion above Paris\u201d (818, 1.2.90). As for Cressida, she finds her uncle\u2019s claims rather dubious, and the sexual nature of some of her banter with him makes her appear worldly enough in her answers, at least until she meets Troilus later on.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSoon, there follows a pageant of Trojans: Aeneas, Hector, and others file by (819-20, 1.2.164ff). Cressida opines that Troilus is a \u201csneaking fellow\u201d (820, 1.2.208). But what is her most pressing concern? As she explains to us after she is done bantering with Pandarus, she is determined to maintain her chastity. In soliloquy, she tells us that she fears she will be lightly prized once she is no longer chaste: \u201cAchievement is command; ungained, beseech\u201d (822, 1.2.271, see 260-73).<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat Cressida says rings true as a matter of sexual politics, so to speak, in a patriarchal society. It doesn\u2019t equate with wide-eyed innocence. Cressida does not \u201cspeak like a green girl,\u201d as Polonius says in Hamlet <\/em>when he accuses his daughter Ophelia of naivete about Prince Hamlet\u2019s intentions towards her. <a href=\"#_edn6\" id=\"_ednref6\">[6]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 1, Scene 3 (822-30, Agamemnon, Nestor, and Ulysses talk over Achilles and Ajax\u2019s present refusal to participate in the war; the Trojan prince Aeneas arrives and delivers Hector\u2019s challenge of single combat; thinking Achilles too high and mighty for anyone\u2019s good, Ulysses and Nestor plot to give the combat honors to Ajax instead.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn council with his chief warriors, Agamemnon gives a predictable speech telling them that what they have been undergoing are the \u201cprotractive trials of great Jove \/ To find persistive constancy in men \u2026\u201d (822, 1.3.19-20). That must be why, he implies, so many years have passed with no victory. Beyond that, the joint argument from the King and Nestor is (to paraphrase) \u201ctrust us\u2014this is wise policy beyond your devising.\u201d Nestor seems very careful not to omit fulsome praise for the prideful, sometimes petulant Chief of Chiefs, Agamemnon.<\/p>\n\n\n\nUlysses then tells everyone to listen to him, and Agamemnon says that given the source, they fully expect to hear wise counsel, and not the sort of nonsense that the camp clown Thersites spews. <a href=\"#_edn7\" id=\"_ednref7\">[7]<\/a> Ulysses\u2019 warning, it turns out, involves reformulating the key concept that medieval and Early Modern scholars call \u201cthe Great Chain of Being\u201d: everything has its place above or below someone or something else, and this order of persons and things must be regarded as rightly established and firm. <a href=\"#_edn8\" id=\"_ednref8\">[8]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAmong other things, Ulysses says the following, \u201cThe heavens themselves, the planets, and this center \/ Observe degree, priority, and place, \/ Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, \/ Office, and custom, in all line of order\u201d (824, 1.3.84-87). But that celestial order, he says, is by no means evident in the Greek camp, not even to the usual poor degree we find in the corrupted sublunary world. The consequences could be dire: using another common metaphor (the harmony of the spheres, celestial music, etc.), Ulysses admonishes the King and his chiefs, \u201cTake but degree away, untune that string, \/ And hark what discord follows \u2026\u201d (824, 1.3.109).<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf concern for rank is ignored, suggests Ulysses, the world will run to self-destruction: \u201cAnd appetite, an universal wolf, \/ So doubly seconded with will and power, \/ Must make perforce an universal prey, \/ And last eat up himself\u201d (825, 1.3.120-23). <a href=\"#_edn9\" id=\"_ednref9\">[9]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nBut why, exactly, is there a hierarchy problem among the Greeks? Ulysses explains that respect for rank is low thanks to Achilles\u2019s prideful refusal, at this critical point many years into the fight, to do his part for the Greeks. This great warrior, he says, \u201cGrows dainty of his worth and in his tent \/ Lies mocking our designs\u201d (825, 1.3.144-45) In The Iliad, <\/em>the reason given is that Agamemnon arrogantly asserted his supremacy by demanding as his share of the spoils Achilles\u2019s favorite concubine, Briseis. <a href=\"#_edn10\" id=\"_ednref10\">[10]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nBy Ulysses\u2019s logic, when Achilles and Patroclus mock Agamemnon, their clowning spurs the strong but doltish Ajax to mock the King, too, and to make Thersites his agent for this purpose. Ajax\u2019s posturing, in turn, appeals to those who value nothing but stupid, brute force rather than shrewd policy. Ajax, says Ulysses, \u201cis grown self-willed and bears his head \/ In such a rein, in full as proud a place \/ As broad Achilles, and keeps his tent like him \u2026\u201d (826, 1.3.187-89).<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt is clear that in Shakespeare\u2019s play as well as in Homer\u2019s Iliad,<\/em> there are serious rifts between the Greek commanders. In truth, it\u2019s hard to see how Agamemnon\u2019s \u201cpolicy\u201d amounts to anything but incompetence. He himself has shown what we may fairly call excessive pride in dealing with Achilles, even when we consider that he is a king and therefore accustomed to getting his way. <a href=\"#_edn11\" id=\"_ednref11\">[11]<\/a> In such conditions, Ulysses suggests, it\u2019s understandable that men should praise the battering ram above the ingenuity of the person who built it, or the one who expertly guides it home (826, 1.3.205-09).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd thus all things decline to stupidity, and there\u2019s an end of wisdom and strategy\u2014brute force takes the palm. That is the substance of what Ulysses says in his long holding-forth before Agamemnon and the assembled lords of the Achaeans.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSoon, the Trojan prince Aeneas <a href=\"#_edn12\" id=\"_ednref12\">[12]<\/a> arrives and asks rather elegantly where he might find Agamemnon. That latter does not take kindly to this gesture, and retorts, \u201cThis Trojan scorns us, or the men of Troy \/ Are ceremonious courtiers\u201d (827, 1.3.230-31). By this remark, the King insinuates the traditional portrayal of the Trojans as self-indulgent, over-civilized proponents of the \u201cluxurious state\u201d\u2014a portrait later found blameworthy by that Athenian lover of all things Spartan, Plato. <a href=\"#_edn13\" id=\"_ednref13\">[13]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAeneas answers chivalrously that to be sure, the Trojans are civil in time of peace, but deadly in war: \u201cwhen they would seem soldiers they have galls,\u201d he says, along with \u201cGood arms, strong joints, true swords, and, Jove\u2019s accord, \/ Nothing so full of heart\u201d (827, 1.3.234-36). <a href=\"#_edn14\" id=\"_ednref14\">[14]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nSoon thereafter, Aeneas delivers Hector\u2019s challenge to Agamemnon and his Greeks. In essence, Hector will fight any Greek who dares claim his woman is better than Hector\u2019s lovely, virtuous wife, Andromache. She is, says Hector, \u201cwiser, fairer, truer \/ Than ever Greek did compass in his arms \u2026\u201d (828, 1.3.272-73). Agamemnon\u2019s reply to Aeneas shows how inextricable love and war are in this play: all soldiers, he insists, are lovers, or plan to be such: \u201cAnd may that soldier a mere recreant prove \/ That means not, hath not, or is not in love\u201d (828, 1.3.284-85)<\/p>\n\n\n\nUlysses, however, has a scheme to take Achilles down a few pegs and thereby keep prideful love-matters from impeding a Greek victory. Hector\u2019s challenge, as Ulysses knows, is aimed straight at Achilles, but the wily King of Ithaca wants to arrange for Ajax to win a lottery for the honor of facing Hector in single combat, thereby upstaging his rival attention-seeker Achilles.<\/p>\n\n\n\nUlysses manages without much trouble to convince Nestor that this would be the wisest course. There is also the issue that Nestor himself identifies: if Achilles were to lose <\/em>such a duel, the Greeks would lose face: he is, after all, their most imposing warrior. \u201cFor here,\u201d says the old man, \u201cthe Trojans taste our dear\u2019st repute \/ With their fin\u2019st palate\u201d (829, 1.3.334-35). And if Achilles fights the duel and wins, adds Ulysses, just imagine how arrogant he\u2019ll be then! <\/em>(830, 1.3.365ff) So the aim will be to keep Achilles far from Hector and his challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act2\">ACT 2<\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 2, Scene 1 (830-33, Ajax strikes Thersites when the latter refuses to reveal the conditions for the challenge recently issued by Hector; Achilles and Patroclus come to his assistance and Achilles himself informs Ajax about Hector\u2019s challenge.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe first act went far towards undercutting the Greek heroes\u2019 claims to high honor. Throughout the play, Thersites will rail at the biggest targets among the captains for their lechery, double-dealing, stupidity, pride and enviousness, and he in turn will become the target for their sexually charged taunts of cowardice, effeminacy, and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn this scene, Thersites will sling some of the same taunts at Patroclus, the focus of Achilles\u2019s tender regard, but not before his nemesis Ajax strikes him, demanding that he read out Hector\u2019s \u201cproclamation\u201d (831, 2.1.22). Ajax is apparently unable to read it for himself. Thersites\u2019s contempt for this thick-headed warrior is never more apparent than when he says to him, \u201cThou art here but to \/ thresh Trojans, and thou art bought and sold among those of \/ any wit like a barbarian slave\u201d (831, 2.1.42-44).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThersites gets in one last jab at Ajax: \u201cI serve thee not\u201d (832, 2.1.88), and then the argument shifts over to Achilles and Patroclus. Achilles himself reads out the proclamation of Hector for Ajax\u2019s consideration, himself calling it \u201ctrash\u201d (833, 2.1.120). Achilles wants nothing to do with the sorry affair, and ends his conversation with Ajax by pointing out that if things weren\u2019t coming down to a lottery, Hector \u201cknew his man\u201d (833, 2.1.123).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThersites and Ajax relate to each other in an interesting way. Thersites, that is, sees Ajax as merely a blunt instrument for those who actually wield power. In a phrase, Ajax is \u201cMars his idiot\u201d (831, 2.1.50). Running all through Thersites\u2019s caustic attacks is a diatribe against the principle of rank: this semi-official railer at all things supposedly heroic doesn\u2019t believe those who stand upon their rank are ever worthy of it. \u201cI serve thee not\u201d (832, 2.1.88), he says to Ajax, who proceeds to beat him. <a href=\"#_edn15\" id=\"_ednref15\">[15]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAchilles is generally more \u201ccivilized\u201d than Ajax, but nonetheless Thersites lumps him together with Ajax, and prefers Hector over the famously moody Greek demigod. As he says to Achilles, \u201cThere\u2019s Ulysses and Nestor, whose wit was \/ moldy ere your grandsires had nails on their toes, yoke you \/ like draft-oxen and make you plow up the war\u201d (833, 2.1.99-101).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThersites has at least some regard for the wise counselors Ulysses and Nestor since he prefers intelligent men who are not so full of themselves as to become objects of ridicule. Agamemnon, however, he despises as a prideful, petulant fellow who covets a reputation for honor and good counsel but possesses neither. <a href=\"#_edn16\" id=\"_ednref16\">[16]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 2, Scene 2 (833-38, The leaders of Troy deliberate on keeping Helen with them and thereby prolonging the war. Cassandra utters a prophecy that Troy will suffer destruction, but her prediction does not sway the Trojan chiefs.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nPriam finds that his sons Helenus and Hector would gladly agree to return Helen to the Greeks, restoring her to her husband King Menelaus of Sparta and thereby saving a lot of bloodshed on both sides. Using an economic and clan-based metaphor, that of \u201ctithing\u201d as the loss of life Troy has already suffered, Hector says \u201cLet Helen go\u201d (833, 2.2.17).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAlong with Paris, however, Troilus insists that the Trojans should be willing to fight over trifles if occasion bids, asking in anguished tones, \u201cWeigh you the worth and honor of a king \/ So great as our dread father in a scale \/ Of common ounces?\u201d (834, 2.2.26-28) To Helenus\u2019s favoring of acting only on the basis of \u201creasons,\u201d Troilus responds scornfully, \u201cNay, if we talk of reason \/ Let\u2019s shut our gates and sleep. Manhood and honor \/ Should have hare hearts would they but fat their thoughts \/ With this crammed reason\u201d (834, 2.2.46-49).<\/p>\n\n\n\nHector, however, points out that determining Helen\u2019s value is not the province of lone individuals, for \u201cvalue dwells not in particular will\u201d (834, 2.2.53) alone\u2014it matters what something really is <\/em>worth, he insists. A further gloss yields the notion that due regard must be shown for the impact any determination may have on the entire Greek host. As Hector says, \u201cTis mad idolatry \/ To make the service greater than the god \u2026\u201d (834, 2.2.56-57). Is one lovely and aristocratic, even semi-divine, woman so intrinsically wonderful that she is worth the entire Greek host? Clearly, Hector does not think she is, and neither does Helenus.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt won\u2019t do, then, to fetishize honor in this lady\u2019s service, and war at the expense of practical consequences for thousands. Neither the Greeks nor the Trojans have any claim to absolute righteousness in their quest for honor and advantage. Paris, after all, went to Greece to make away with Helen at least in part because Hercules had absconded with Priam\u2019s sister Hesione and then given her to Ajax\u2019s father Telamon. As Troilus says, Paris \u201ctouched the ports desired, \/ And for an old aunt whom the Greeks held captive \/ He brought a Grecian queen\u201d (835, 2.2.66-68). <a href=\"#_edn17\" id=\"_ednref17\">[17]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\nWe can\u2019t really claim, therefore, that the Trojans alone started the trouble. As always with the Greeks, \u201cit\u2019s complicated.\u201d Whenever we hear about some outrage, we usually find that another one lay behind it, and another behind that.<\/em> <a href=\"#_edn18\" id=\"_ednref18\">[18]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nTroilus\u2019s disillusionment is yet to come, and so at this point, he upholds chivalric idealism, and his na\u00efve stance bids him recommend that the Trojans must hold on to Helen at all costs. He finds nothing but hypocrisy in this newfound \u201creasonableness,\u201d and argues passionately that when Paris came home with Helen, \u201cyou all clapped your hands \/ And cried \u2018Inestimable!\u2019\u2014why do you now \/ The issue of your proper wisdom rate \u2026\u201d (835, 2.2.87-89), meaning \u201cberate\u201d? Where is honor, or even sanity, Paris wants to know, in such self-contradictory behavior?<\/p>\n\n\n\nHector, who has been doing much of the fighting, thinks otherwise. Nonetheless, his current challenge against Achilles probably owes more to personal shame than statecraft. War, in Shakespeare\u2019s representation of it, is seldom a bringer of healthy truths; rather, it is a great distorter of people\u2019s motives and words, and it often sunders those words from deeds, or rather widens the gap extant between them to begin with.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe unlucky prophetess Cassandra soon breaks into the debate and aligns herself with those who want to return Helen, knowing as she does that Troy is doomed. It\u2019s worth recalling that Cassandra, Apollo\u2019s priestess, was cursed when she refused to sleep with him\u2014she sees the future clearly, but no one will believe her, so her gift is wasted, and we know that the Trojans will not heed her well-grounded advice. <a href=\"#_edn19\" id=\"_ednref19\">[19]<\/a> That advice is bone-chillingly simple, and Trojan history, in her telling, rhymes: \u201cCry, Trojans, cry\u2014a Helen and a woe! \/ Cry, cry! Troy burns, or else let Helen go (836, 2.2.111-12).<\/p>\n\n\n\nCassandra\u2019s fury and Hector\u2019s reasons notwithstanding, Troilus sticks to his contempt for those who think \u201cthe justice of each act \/ Such and no other than event doth form it \u2026\u201d (836, 2.2.118-20). Nearly every Trojan soldier, says Troilus, will defend the beautiful Helen, and will fight to the death for this icon and enabler of masculine valor and display. When honor\u2019s at stake, warriors and citizens, he is certain, cannot simply judge a deed by what they think the practical outcome will be.<\/p>\n\n\n\nParis agrees, mainly because he is unwilling to give up his lover, Helen, and Priam notes it, rebuking Paris, \u201cYou have the honey still, but these the gall, \/ So to be valiant is no praise at all\u201d (836, 2.2.145).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAfter hearing his brothers Troilus and Paris hold forth, Hector makes the strongest case he can\u2014even quoting from a very <\/em>advance copy of Aristotle\u2019s Nicomachean Ethics <\/em><a href=\"#_edn20\" id=\"_ednref20\">[20]<\/a>\u2014in favor of recognizing brute reality and simple moral uprightness, admitting that if the Trojans want to spare themselves further damage, Helen ought to be returned to Menelaus of Sparta since, after all, she is <\/em>his wife.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAstonishingly, Hector\u2019s next move is \u2026 to reverse his judgment and accede to brother Troilus\u2019s proposition! In Hector\u2019s words, the Trojans\u2019 \u201cjoint and several dignities\u201d (837, 2.2.193) demand that they hang on to this stolen woman. She is, as Troilus goes on to insist, a \u201ctheme of honor and renown, \/ A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds\u201d (837, 2.2.199-200).<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat should we take away from this turnabout? Perhaps it\u2019s that while Troilus holds his position as a na\u00efve, youthful romantic, the supreme warrior Hector takes the matter up differently. He has little personal regard for Helen, but public necessity dictates that the woman be defended and kept in Troy for her symbolic, unifying value: war needs symbols as rallying points, or the cause flounders. In the end, Hector is notwilling to lose a war once begun. He is too much the believer in the chivalric honor code to countenance such an outcome, even in the teeth of the strong reasons he himself has set before his fellow Trojans. <a href=\"#_edn21\" id=\"_ednref21\">[21]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nHector\u2019s quick-change is indeed surprising, but in casting the views of Troilus and Hector as he does, Shakespeare captures much of the Bronze-Age Trojan and Greek addiction to valor and deeds of renown. We know that by \u201cthe afterlife,\u201d they partly meant \u201cwhat people say about you when you\u2019re gone.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn22\" id=\"_ednref22\">[22]<\/a> This business of renown, <\/em>of glory in battle, <\/em>was not to be easily brushed aside. Here, where the fate of Troy hangs in the balance, even the realistic, experienced Hector can\u2019t let it go. Troy can still win <\/em>this war, he thinks, and if so, the city\u2019s long and terrible suffering can be folded into glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHector ends the scene with the claim that his chivalric challenge is strategic. As he puts it, \u201cI have a roisting challenge sent amongst \/ The dull and factious nobles of the Greeks \/ Will strike amazement to their drowsy spirits\u201d (838, 2.2.208-10). He knows that Achilles is sulking in his tent with Patroclus, and expresses the hope that this tactic will get the Greeks\u2019 preeminent warrior fighting again.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 2, Scene 3 (838-44, Thersites abuses Ajax with all his powers of invective; when Achilles and Patroclus show up, he mocks them in person; Agamemnon and his advisers approach Achilles, but he refuses to hold conference with them; the Greek chieftains laud Ajax to the skies to get him to accept Hector\u2019s challenge.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn The Iliad, <\/em>Thersites appears only in Book 2, though to great effect when he rebukes King Agamemnon and is beaten thoroughly by Ulysses for his insolence. <a href=\"#_edn23\" id=\"_ednref23\">[23]<\/a> But in Shakespeare\u2019s play, Thersites gets several opportunities to rail at his favorite heroic targets, which makes his aggressively anti-heroical stance far more central to the action than it is in Homer\u2019s epic. <a href=\"#_edn24\" id=\"_ednref24\">[24]<\/a> He and the leading Greek warriors are opponents, to be sure, but they need one another. Thersites\u2019s harsh egalitarian raillery waxes strong upon the celebrated warriors\u2019 stupidity and pretentiousness, and the warriors, in turn, partly define themselves by beating him and heaping insults upon his head.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThus Patroclus\u2019s entreaty, \u201cGood Thersites, come in \/ and rail\u201d (2.3.20-21) and Achilles\u2019s description of him as \u201cmy cheese, my \/ digestion\u201d (839, 2.3.35-36). Ajax, for his part, is upset at this juncture mainly because Achilles has lured this at once treasured and hated fool away from him.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo the cynical clown Thersites has found his proper object, and those \u201cobjects\u201d have found the object of their scorn, too. He wishes venereal disease on the lot of these prideful men, all of them guilty in their willingness to \u201cwar for a placket\u201d (838, 2.3.18) rather than for the high honor they claim to uphold. Such a satirical connection between war and promiscuous, unworthy sexual pursuits is common in literature and film. <a href=\"#_edn25\" id=\"_ednref25\">[25]<\/a> Thersites finds that the war between the Greeks and Trojans is no better than a self-perpetuating, bloody pageant of lunatics and fools, begun by an act of whoredom and driven on by lust for wicked women and illusory honor.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTo open the scene in soliloquy, Thersites suggests that the very walls of Troy will crumble to dust before the likes of Agamemnon or Ajax ever batter them down: \u201cIf Troy be not taken till these two \/ undermine it, the walls will stand till they fall of them- \/ selves\u201d (838, 2.3.7-9). In the grand scope of things, that turns out to be a false supposition, but it\u2019s easy to see why Thersites makes it at this mature stage of hostilities. We need not doubt his sincerity in wishing syphilis\u2014\u201cthe bone-ache\u201d (838, 2.3.16-17)\u2014on the entire Greek camp as the miserable war proceeds.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNext up for Thersites is a battle of wits with Achilles and Patroclus, both of whom we already know their opponent considers completely unarmed in that regard. The sum total of it is that while everyone else is a fool for some reason or other, Patroclus is \u201ca fool \/ positive\u201d (839, 2.3.57-58)\u2014so much so that there\u2019s no point in even bothering to explain why.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen Achilles spots Agamemnon and his party of lords coming his way, he slips back into his tent, and Thersites finishes his thought: \u201cAll the argument is a cuckold and a whore\u2014a good \/ quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon\u201d (839, 2.3.65-66). With his expression \u201cwar and lechery \/ confound all!\u201d (839, 2.3.67-68), we are near the sentiment underlying Edwin Starr\u2019s 1970 hit protest song \u201cWar,\u201d as in \u201cWar \u2026 what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn26\" id=\"_ednref26\">[26]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nThis isn\u2019t to say that Thersites is idealistic, but in his passionate \u201cproto-shock jock\u201d railing, we can hear genuine outrage at the terrors people visit on one another. Why else would he bother speaking out and enduring the blows that come his way? His railings suggest that he\u2019s aware of the intractable problem confronting anyone (especially men) who opposes a violent mass confrontation: charges of cowardice, effeminacy, carping, and treachery are bound to fly at their heads. Thersites\u2019s attitude towards this hypermasculine vitriol is \u201cbring it on\u201d: it\u2019s the stuff he feeds upon and turns to satirical account. It\u2019s his material<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nStill, for all Thersites\u2019s needling and undermining, the war will continue to bleed both sides. If foolish people ever learn (even temporarily), they do so not by reflecting in advance upon wise instruction but rather by bitter suffering, until they become, at least for a moment, people \u201cof sorrows, and acquainted with grief.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn27\" id=\"_ednref27\">[27]<\/a> This sad realization runs all through Troilus and Cressida, <\/em>and justifies its present status as a \u201cproblem play,\u201d one that is hard to place unambiguously as either comedy or tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFinally in this scene, Agamemnon and his subordinates try to draw Achilles back into the fray. Agamemnon puts his efforts into chiding his chief warrior, claiming in exasperation that the man\u2019s virtues \u201cDo in our eyes begin to lose their gloss \u2026\u201d (840, 2.3.112).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Great King\u2019s gambit fails greatly, and it\u2019s time to send in the wily Ulysses, polytropos Odysseus, <\/em>as Homer calls him\u2014the man of many tricks. But that fails, too, and all Ulysses can do is return and tell everyone how hubristic Achilles was during their short meeting: \u201cPossessed he is with greatness, \/ And speaks not to himself but with a pride \/ That quarrels at self-breath\u201d (841, 2.3.161-63).<\/p>\n\n\n\nNestor and Ulysses follow out their stratagem of buttering up Ajax, in part as a spur to Achilles\u2019s pride and of course because he\u2019s the powerful \u201csecond-stringer\u201d they mean to put up against Hector for the challenge. Ulysses tells Agamemnon that Trojan reinforcements are coming soon, and Agamemnon calls for a council of war to consider the matter. Achilles remains in his tent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act3\">ACT 3<\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 3, Scene 1 (844-47, Pandarus asks Paris to cover for Troilus\u2019s skipping dinner at court tonight with King Priam; Helen gets Pandarus to sing of love.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThis is a breezy, almost silly scene, but its impact accords with the general deflation of the heroic ideal that runs through the play. Pandarus, meeting a servant of Paris, struggles to work his way through a seemingly obtuse set of misunderstandings. The Norton editors point out that there is some anachronistic difference-making over the meaning of the terms \u201cLord\u201d and \u201cgrace,\u201d with the servant treating them as Christian terms and Pandarus interpreting them in his own pagan\/secular milieu. <a href=\"#_edn28\" id=\"_ednref28\">[28]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nSoon, Pandarus meets the chatty, pleasantry-diffusing power couple Helen and Paris. Pandarus wants to tell Paris that his brother Troilus won\u2019t be able to attend their father King Priam\u2019s dinner this evening, but he can hardly get a word in. He finally manages, though, to slip in the sentence to Paris, \u201c\u2014And, my lord, he desires you that, if the King call for him \/ at supper, you will make his excuse\u201d (845, 3.1.71-72).<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s easy to see that throughout their conversation with Pandarus, Paris and Helen betray a dilatory, brush-away attitude towards consequentiality. Poor Pandarus is constrained to sing a little song for them called \u201cLove, love, nothing but love,\u201d which amounts to another instance in which the play denigrates the supposedly grand cause of all the violent action undertaken, love. The scene as a whole is probably Shakespeare\u2019s way of making in comic mode the dark Sonnet 129\u2019s point about the truth of love\u2019s strong hold over humanity: something at first irresistible, then despised and trivialized, and yet again irresistible. <a href=\"#_edn29\" id=\"_ednref29\">[29]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\nHelen and Paris seem to live in a different world than the warriors who surround and defend them. In chivalric discourse, the erotic and the military dimensions should remain complementary and connected thanks to the conceptual glue of \u201chonor.\u201d Here, though, they split, and exist in isolation for the time being.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFinally, Helen may be lighthearted in this scene with Paris and Pandarus, but as in Homer\u2019s epics, she is no fragile flower; she is a wily, worldly survivor, and the courtly Prince Paris seems a good match for her. <a href=\"#_edn30\" id=\"_ednref30\">[30]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 3, Scene 2 (847-51, Pandarus puts Troilus and Cressida together, and Cressida, though appearing bashful and reluctant to speak with him, confesses her love.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nAt the beginning of the scene, Troilus is in a state of agonized expectation. He speaks of himself as a shade hoping to be transported to Elysian Fields, saying, \u201cI stalk about her door \/ Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks, \/ Staying for waftage\u201d (847, 3.2.7-9). He describes himself as near to swooning: \u201cI am giddy; expectation whirls me round. \/ Th\u2019imaginary relish is so sweet \/ That it enchants my sense\u201d (847, 3.2.16-18). He is intoxicated in proximity to his beloved.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTo this description Troilus adds an intimation of the confounding or loss of identity that comes with love, or at least with infatuation, comparing his feelings with that of a man who loses his sense of individual identity during the action of a great host in battle: \u201cI do fear besides \/ That I shall lose distinction in my joys, \/ As doth a battle when they charge on heaps \/ The enemy flying\u201d (847-48, 3.2.24-27). He senses that he may be overwhelmed, even annihilated, by the exquisite other he is about to meet.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen Cressida is brought in by Pandar, she seems genuinely shy at first, and Troilus declares to her, \u201cYou have bereft me of all words, lady (848, 3.2.51). But soon (after a few long kisses), the two will recover their eloquence, and Cressida even teases Troilus in a traditionally humorous way: \u201cThey say all lovers swear more performance than \/ they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never per- \/ form \u2026\u201d (849, 3.2.77-79). \u201cSuch are not we\u201d (849, 3.2.82), Troilus responds.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCressida is moved to declare her love boldly, saying to Troilus, \u201cI have loved you night and day \/ For many weary months\u201d (849, 3.2.104-05). But this forward proclamation leads her to think that she may have said too much, too soon: \u201cWhy have I blabbed? Who shall be true to us \/ When we are so unsecret to ourselves?\u201d (849, 3.2.114-15) Cressida has admitted to loving Troilus at first sight, and she goes on to offer a broad declaration of fidelity: \u201cI have a kind of self resides with you\u201d (850, 3.2.135). No worries\u2014Troilus considers her words wise.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNext comes the almost inevitable question as to why Cressida, and not Troilus, is the one who has to declare her love first? Troilus seems to insinuate that he is too \u201csimple,\u201d meaning too na\u00efve and inexperienced, fully to believe his own \u201cwinnowed purity in love\u201d (850, 3.2.154) reciprocated to the same degree. Is it too much to find in this a hint not so much of distrust as anxiety that words and deeds can never fall into such fundamental harmony as lovers wish they would? Experienced adults understand that love cannot annihilate time or the craving for variety that marks human appetites.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis anxiety leads Cressida to make an extraordinary claim about how her faith (or lack thereof) will someday prove a byword for all other maids. By her own invitation, if she should prove false, other men and women will one day say that some deceiver has proved to be \u201c\u2019As false as Cressid\u2019\u201d (851, 3.2.183). <a href=\"#_edn31\" id=\"_ednref31\">[31]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nPandarus, too, stakes his own good name on the outcome of the love match: if things don\u2019t go well for the couple whose match he is expediting, he says, let Troilus\u2019s name mark \u201call constant men\u201d (851, 3.2.189), and \u201clet all pitiful goers-between be called \/ to the world\u2019s end after my name: call them all panders\u201d (851, 3.2.187-88). Of course, \u201cpandering\u201d is now invariably twinned with \u201cpimping\u201d in our lexicon of sexual disrepute. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes\u2014Pandarus\u2019s pledge about himself is really the only one that still holds true.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBehind this whole dialogue\u2014especially Cressida\u2019s part of it\u2014is the understanding that love is a kind of game, a power exchange in which secrecy is to some extent necessary, but also fraught with peril: as Cressida has said, \u201cWho shall be true to us \/ When we are so secret to ourselves?\u201d (849, 3.2.114-15) Self-revelation establishes intimacy, but intimacy entails vulnerability, and perhaps for that very reason, it can also breed contempt and disloyalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 3, Scene 3 (851-58, Calchas requests that the Greek captains set up a prisoner swap: he will get his daughter Cressida back from the Trojans, and the Greeks will return the Trojan warrior Antenor; the Greek captains assent, and Diomedes is sent off to make it happen; the Greek captains give Achilles the cold shoulder; Ulysses and Achilles talk about the fleeting quality of fame, and the former attacks the latter for being enamored of Polyxena, daughter of Priam and Troilus\u2019s brother; Achilles observes Thersites and Patroclus act out a mini-drama needling Ajax.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nCalchas the priest calls in a favor for his defection from the Trojans, <a href=\"#_edn32\" id=\"_ednref32\">[32]<\/a> and it consists in the Trojans giving up his daughter Cressida to Diomedes in exchange for the captive Trojan Prince Antenor. Agamemnon readily agrees, and says he will send Diomedes to effect the swap.<\/p>\n\n\n\nUlysses then counsels Agamemnon to ignore Achilles and treat him with indifference, and the vain fellow is easily gulled by this routine, or \u201cderision medicinable\u201d (852, 3.3.44), as the wily Ithacan calls his stratagem. Achilles doesn\u2019t need much prompting to start worrying that Ajax is stealing his thunder with present deeds of valor.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn private conversation with Achilles, Ulysses points out to the younger man that \u201cemulation hath a thousand sons\u201d (855, 3.3.154), all of them ready to tread their father into the dust the moment he slows down or strays from heroic example. Heroic deeds do not last in the memories of the common people, and probably not in anyone else\u2019s memories, either. As Ulysses says, \u201cOh, let not virtue seek \/ Remuneration for the thing it was, \/ For beauty, wit, \/ \u2026 \/ Love, friendship, charity are subjects all \/ To envious and calumniating Time\u201d (855, 3.3.367-69, 371-72).<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn this key speech, the most famous line is without doubt \u201cOne touch of nature makes the whole world kin\u201d (3.3.173, see 143-88). What is the \u201ctouch of nature\u201d? It\u2019s a fault: humans share a universal desire for novelty and a strong propensity to forget the past so as to make way for thoughts of a bright future. At base, all Ulysses is saying here is that it\u2019s natural for people to ask even of the greatest heroes, \u201cWhat have you done for us lately?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen Achilles further pleads private reasons for his attitude, Ulysses points out that everybody <\/em>knows about his Trojan girlfriend Polyxena. Ulysses blurts out to the great warrior, \u201c\u2019Tis known \u2026 that you are in love \/ With one of Priam\u2019s daughters\u201d (855, 3.3.191-92). So much for privacy\u2014it wasn\u2019t much valued in ancient times, and it\u2019s clear that the likes of Agamemnon and Ulysses have no problem inquiring into the habits and tastes of VIPs such as Achilles. The surveillance state has always been with us. Ulysses himself extols \u201cThe providence that\u2019s in a watchful state \u2026\u201d (855, 3.3.195).<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen Ulysses departs, Patroclus blames his own lack of interest in the battle for Achilles\u2019s current predicament. Achilles himself is alarmed, saying, \u201cI see my reputation is at stake; \/ My fame is shrewdly gored\u201d (856, 3.3.227-28). His immediate thought is to invite the great Trojan over to his tent so that he can gaze upon him face-to-face, and make a proper comparison. He would \u201csee great Hector in his weeds of peace \u2026\u201d (856, 3.3.239).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThersites enters the scene and reports to Achilles and Patroclus on the ridiculous pride of Ajax, who has been peacocking around like Hercules in anticipation of his single combat with Hector, disdaining conversation and all manner of men who rank below his own godlike status. This issue of rank and reputation links the present scene with the previous one. As always, Thersites\u2019s view is \u201ca plague of opinion\u201d (857, 3.3.262), and he goes on to mock Achilles and Patroclus as viciously as he takes down Ajax. Even so, Thersites works well with Patroclus\u2014the two put on a fine comedy skit ridiculing the pretentions of Ajax (857-58, 3.3.275-93).<\/p>\n\n\n\nUlysses\u2019 advice has been that military renown is fickle, but also that it\u2019s never entirely lost. One can always create it from scratch by performing new actions in the public eye. Ever the wily operator, the Ithacan king sounds as if he could easily head up a modern public-relations firm or advise presidential candidates on how to wow the public with canny memes and boasting. To a centerless man like Achilles, that kind of counsel is appealing. Achilles stands in need of such shoring up: \u201cMy mind is troubled like a fountain stirred,\u201d he says, \u201cAnd I myself see not the bottom of it\u201d (302-03).<\/p>\n\n\n\nHow different Achilles\u2019s attitude is from Troilus\u2019s na\u00efve romanticism, which supposes that honor once lost is gone forever! In truth, while Achilles has successfully courted a reputation for honor, he doesn\u2019t seem to put much more stock in the deep-down value of it than Sir John Falstaff, whose famous \u201ccatechism\u201d in Henry IV, Part I <\/em>ends with the immortal line: \u201cHonor is a mere scutch- \/ eon.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn33\" id=\"_ednref33\">[33]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act4\">ACT 4<\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scene 1 (858-60, Priam having summoned Aeneas to the Trojan palace, the Trojan prince meets Paris and the Greek embassy conducting Antenor to the exchange for Cressida; Aeneas and Diomedes engage in martial banter; Paris sends Aeneas off to inform Troilus that the exchange will soon take place.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nOn their way to carry out the exchange of Cressida for Antenor (once Paris explains to Diomedes exactly what is going on, that is), Diomedes and Aeneas get into a military-style virtue-signaling match, with each man offering up statements like the following gem from Aeneas: \u201cHealth to you, valiant sir, \/ during all question of the gentle truce, \/ But when I meet you armed, as black defiance \/ As heart can think or courage execute\u201d (858, 4.1.11-14). Paris, in his droll way, sums this silliness up beautifully: \u201cThis is the most despiteful\u2019st gentle greeting, \/ The noblest hateful love, that e\u2019er I heard of\u201d (859, 4.1.32-33).<\/p>\n\n\n\nParis also captures the period in which all three men find themselves, calling it \u201cThe bitter disposition of the time\u201d (859, 4.1.49). There is a kind of fatalism in much of what Paris says\u2014a quality that accords well with the hedonistic element of his character as Shakespeare portrays it. When Paris asks Diomedes who \u201cmerits\u201d (859, 4.1.54) Helen more, him or Menelaus, Diomedes spends quite a bit of time putting Helen down for all the trouble she has caused. Finally, he says the real question is which man is \u201cheavier for a whore\u201d (859, 4.1.67). In other words, who more deeply deserves her as a punishment?<\/p>\n\n\n\nThat Paris takes such an insult with the degree of equanimity that he does is in itself revealing. These men are right in the middle of a huge war over Helen, the woman whose face has launched a thousand ships (in Marlowe\u2019s memorable phrase), and Diomedes blithely calls her a whore in the presence of the man who brought her to Troy. Paris jests that Diomedes is merely behaving like a merchant: \u201cFair Diomed, you do as chapmen do: Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy\u201d (860, 4.1.76-77). <a href=\"#_edn34\" id=\"_ednref34\">[34]<\/a> In fact, just about everyone except Paris says such things in bitter earnest, not in jest.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scenes 2a and 2b (860-62, in 4.2a, Troilus and Cressida spend the night together; Pandarus teases his niece about the loss of her virginity; Aeneas arrives and asks Pandarus to go get Troilus; Aeneas delivers to Troilus the unwelcome news that Cressida is soon to be exchanged for Antenor; in 4.2b, Pandarus breaks the bad news to Cressida, who swears she will refuse to leave Troy.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn the aftermath of her lovemaking with Troilus, Cressida re-experiences her prior fear of devaluation since Troilus and she must now part with the coming of day. Troilus has obtained his prize, she thinks, and now he\u2019s off to other things, which makes the \u201caubade\u201d or dawn-song quality of the lovers\u2019 exchange more anxious than such expressions usually are.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTroilus says in traditional Troubadour fashion, \u201cBut that the busy day, \/ Waked by the lark, hath roused the ribald crows, \/ And dreaming night will hide our eyes no longer, \/ I would not from thee\u201d (860, 4.2a.9-12). Cressida, for her part, laments that \u201cNight hath been too brief\u201d and complains, \u201cyou men will never tarry\u201d (860, 4.2a.12, 17). <a href=\"#_edn35\" id=\"_ednref35\">[35]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nBoth lovers, however, soon find out that they are to be parted more permanently than this brief \u201ccursing of the dawn\u201d suggests. Aeneas breaks the matter in this way: \u201cWe must give up to Diomed\u2019s hand \/ The lady Cressida\u201d (861, 4.2a.65-66). We might have expected some real fire from the downright lover Troilus, but his reaction is strangely\u2014jarringly\u2014muted, even self-serving. He asks Aeneas, \u201cIs it concluded so?\u201d and when he hears that it certainly is, he tells Aeneas, \u201cyou did not find me here\u201d (861, 4.2a.66, 71).<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn scene 4.2a, Cressida (unlike Troilus in the previous part of the split scene) shows genuine fire of resistance when she finds out that she must be exchanged against her will, screaming \u201cO you immortal gods, I will not go!\u201d and vowing \u201cMake Cressid\u2019s name the very crown of falsehood \/ If ever she leave Troilus\u201d (862, 4.2b.20, 26-27). She has not forgotten the \u201cbyword\u201d pledge spoken in the not-so-distant past.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scene 3 (862-63, Paris tells Troilus to inform Cressida on how she will be delivered to the Greek warrior Diomedes; Troilus says he will think of the exchange as a sacrificial act; Paris is sympathetic, but can\u2019t change what must be.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nParis urges Troilus to let Cressida know the particulars of the hand-over to the Greek Diomedes, saying, \u201cTell you the lady what she is to do \/ And haste her to the purpose\u201d (862, 4.3.4-5). Troilus does not protest, but goes through the necessary motions to get the job of exchanging the love of his life overwith. He tells Paris, \u201cThink it [Diomedes\u2019s hand, which will receive Cressida] an altar, and thy brother Troilus \/ A priest there off\u2019ring to it his heart\u201d (863, 4.3.8-9). Paris is sympathetic, but powerless to change the event.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scene 4 (863-66, Upon their parting, Troilus asks Cressida to remain faithful to him, and promises that he will come to the Greek camp to see her; when he encounters Diomedes, Troilus tells him to treat Cressida respectfully; Diomedes dismisses the gesture as unnecessary, and when Troilus outright threatens him, Diomedes says he will do as he pleases, whatever Troilus may say. Aeneas and company make ready for Hector\u2019s challenge.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nCressida asks Troilus whether it\u2019s true that she must leave Troy, and his response is, yes, she must depart \u201cFrom Troy and Troilus\u201d (863, 4.4.31). Most likely Troilus means to distinguish his name from his city, but his words suggest that without much resistance, he all but identifies his name with \u201cTroy.\u201d When Cressida still questions, Troilus offers a seemingly passionate but also strangely fatalistic affirmation that \u201c[we] must poorly sell ourselves \/ With the rude brevity and discharge of one [sigh]\u201d instead of the thousands they have already bestowed upon each other in love (863, 4.4.39-40).<\/p>\n\n\n\nTroilus must calm the overwrought Pandarus, and then he says something that Cressida understandably takes ill: \u201cHear me, my love: Be thou but true of heart\u2014\u201d (864, 4.4.57). He doesn\u2019t finish the sentence before Cressida blurts out, \u201cHow now, what wicked deem is this?\u201d (864, 4.4.58) She has picked up on the conditional nature of Troilus\u2019s words, which could be respoken, \u201cIf you\u2019ll only be true to me \u2026.\u201d His language sounds like a reproach, as yet altogether unmerited by his hearer.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCressida\u2019s anger soon passes, and the two exchange tokens of love and fidelity: Troilus gives her his detachable (Elizabethan) sleeve, and she gives him her glove to wear. <a href=\"#_edn36\" id=\"_ednref36\">[36]<\/a> Troilus again repeats what was offensive just moments ago–\u201cBut yet be true,\u201d and is answered with more offended words: \u201cO heavens, \u2018Be true\u2019 again?\u201d (864, 4.4.73) This time, though, Troilus has the presence of mind to explain why <\/em>he keeps saying this: it\u2019s that \u201cThe Grecian youths are full of quality, \/ Their loving well composed with gifts of nature \u2026\u201d (864, 4.4.75-76). He is anxious that Cressida will forget all about him when she discovers how charming those hipster-Greeks can be. <a href=\"#_edn37\" id=\"_ednref37\">[37]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nThis love language notwithstanding, Troilus dutifully turns Cressida over to complete the exchange, demanding several times that she remain faithful and promising to make his way across the Greek lines to visit her. All through the informing-process and the exchange, there is a marked difference in the reactions of Troilus and Cressida to almost the worst possible news that a young couple could receive. And all the while, the young man continues to insist upon his absolute purity in love-matters. When Cressida implores him, \u201cwill you be true?\u201d he shoots right back, \u201cI with great truth catch mere simplicity\u201d (865, 4.4.99, 102).<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt is Troilus himself who hands over the lady to Diomedes. He first asks (although somewhat imperiously) and then insists that Diomedes treat Cressida with great respect, and finally threatens him: \u201cuse her well, even for my charge, \/ For, by the dreadful Pluto, if thou dost not, \/ Though the great bulk Achilles be thy guard, \/ I\u2019ll cut thy throat\u201d (865, 4.4.124-27).<\/p>\n\n\n\nStill, the Greek warrior makes no promises on the Trojan\u2019s account. Indeed, he treats the very notion of female honor with scorn. Diomedes will use Cressida, he says, as he sees fit, especially <\/em>since Troilus has tried to command him otherwise: he replies scornfully, \u201cwhen I am hence, \/ I\u2019ll answer to my lust\u201d (865, 4.4.129-30). Obviously, this exchange does not go well for Troilus.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWith the exchange completed, the Trojan lords look to reassert the chivalric honor that has just taken a bruising. All await the great event of Hector and Ajax\u2019s single combat.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scene 5a (866-69, when Cressida arrives in the camp, the Greek captains, with the exception of Ulysses and Menelaus, kiss her serially, and she exchanges witty remarks with them; Ulysses speaks scornfully of Cressida as a flirt; the terms of Hector\u2019s challenge are worked out, and at last Ajax and Hector begin their single combat.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nCressida is welcomed into the Greek camp with many kisses\u2014first Agamemnon kisses her, and then Nestor, Achilles, and Patroclus (twice, once for Menelaus). Menelaus tries to kiss her, but she sassily refuses and makes him the butt of what must by now be the 57th to the umpteenth power cuckold-joke he\u2019s had to endure since Paris made away with his queen, Helen.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCressida\u2019s words\u2014the King imagines her actually tapping him on the head where she imagines his \u201chorns\u201d should be\u2014are truly startling, given the becoming propriety (though not without salty wittiness that gives even Pandarus a run for his money) we have thus far heard from her lips throughout the play. Ulysses joins in the fun, cheekily reinforcing Menelaus\u2019s status as the butt of everyone\u2019s humor: \u201cIt were no match, your nail [i.e. fingernail] against his horn\u201d (867, 4.5a.45), he says to Cressida in response to Menelaus\u2019s laughing complaint.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThere is no doubt a forced quality to much of what Cressida says here\u2014she is surrounded by powerful warriors from the opposing Greek camp, and there is no Trojan champion available to defend her. Still, she rises to the occasion in a way that seems to surprise these men. As the Norton editors point out, it\u2019s up to the play\u2019s director and the actors to determine how to play this scene, <a href=\"#_edn38\" id=\"_ednref38\">[38]<\/a> but Cressida is by no means a shrinking violet in her attempts to parry wits with such opponents. It is not hard to imagine how Troilus would take the scene, if he saw it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nUlysses introduces a sour note into the bantering. He asks Cressida for a kiss in his turn, and just as quickly takes back his request. He would like that kiss, he says, \u201cwhen Helen is a maid again and his [Menelaus\u2019s]\u201d (867, 4.5a.49). In other words, on the 5th of never. Ulysses goes on to condemn Cressida as a flirt, an opportunist whose attitude is all too well suited to the times: \u201cFie, fie upon her! \/ There\u2019s a language in her eye, her cheek, her lip\u2014 \/ Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out \/ At every joint and motive of her body\u201d (867, 4.5a.53-56).<\/p>\n\n\n\nUlysses is doing such a great job of resisting Cressida\u2019s evident charms that it\u2019s hard to believe this is the same man whose future in The Odyssey <\/em>includes long stints as the lover of Circe and Calypso. Here he puts Cressida on a level, trust-wise, with the supposedly faithless Helen, grand cause of the Trojan War and its long-lasting miseries.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut now Hector and Ajax are about to begin the pre-Classical equivalent of the \u201cThrilla in Manila, <a href=\"#_edn39\" id=\"_ednref39\">[39]<\/a> so everyone looks to the event. The rules, however, are still getting worked out\u2014is it to be a fight to the death? Well, as it turns out, \u201cit\u2019s complicated.\u201d Ajax is the nephew of Priam, and\u2014wait, what? Yes, the prideful non-prideful one himself is the nephew of the king of Troy. <a href=\"#_edn40\" id=\"_ednref40\">[40]<\/a> That makes it inappropriate to set the match options as \u201cto the death\u201d: to an extent, we have a Trojan fighting another Trojan.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAgamemnon closes the scene out by noticing the \u201cheavy\u201d-looking Troilus, and Ulysses gives the sorrowful young man a good report based on what he has heard from Aeneas (868-69, 4.5a.95-112).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scene 5b (869-73, Hector and Ajax fight, but no wounds are inflicted and Hector decides one round is sufficient for honor\u2019s sake; both men compliment each other, and Ajax invites Hector to dine with the Greeks in Agamemnon\u2019s quarters; when Hector meets the Greek captains, Achilles vaunts that he will soon kill the brave Trojan, who returns the boast in kind; the Greeks invite Hector to a feast; speaking apart, Troilus asks Ulysses to conduct him secretly to Diomedes\u2019s tent, where he will find Cressida, and Ulysses agrees to do so.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nHector and Ajax fight, but Hector decides that since they are cousins\u2014he calls Ajax \u201cmy father\u2019s sister\u2019s son\u201d (869, 4.5b.4), the battle should end with an embrace. Ajax tells Hector that he is \u201ctoo gentle and too free a man\u201d (869, 4.5b.23) and admits that his own intentions were not so kind: \u201cI came to kill thee, cousin, and bear hence \/ A great addition earn\u00e8d in thy death\u201d (869, 4.5b.24-25).<\/p>\n\n\n\nEven that sour a note, however, isn\u2019t enough to spoil Hector\u2019s magnanimous mood, and he accepts an invitation to the Greek camp to visit Agamemnon and Achilles. During the brief truce, the men all, at first, treat one another with the greatest civility. There is the usual \u201cprotesting too much\u201d <a href=\"#_edn41\" id=\"_ednref41\">[41]<\/a> with abundance of courteous, chivalrous language to go around as Hector is welcomed by Agamemnon and Nestor. A critic might opine that this kind of talk exposes the play\u2019s undercurrent of cynical, destructive energy\u2014the very overuse of \u201chonor\u201d makes us sensible of the riptide of murderous and bloody hate and envy that fuel the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn any case, this pleasantry is soon shattered when Achilles gazes with strange, unsettling intentness upon Hector\u2019s body, and declares that he is trying to determine where, exactly, he might most efficaciously strike him a mortal blow. He even makes a point of telling him so, saying, \u201c\u2014Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee; \/ I have with exact view perused thee, Hector, \/ And quoted joint by joint\u201d (871, 4.5b.115-17).<\/p>\n\n\n\nHector is not amused with, or intimidated by, Achilles\u2019s gesture, and makes his contempt known: \u201cThink\u2019st thou to catch my life so pleasantly \/ As to prenominate in nice conjecture \/ Where thou wilt hit me dead?\u201d (872, 4.5b.133-35) He has a point. It\u2019s been said many times, and in many variations from German and British generals to American fighters like Joe Louis and Mike Tyson: \u201cNo plan survives first contact with the enemy,\u201d or, if you prefer, \u201cEveryone has a plan until they get hit.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn42\" id=\"_ednref42\">[42]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nStill, Hector gets drawn into this pre-fight boasting a little ways, and taunts Achilles with, \u201cI\u2019ll kill thee everywhere\u2014yea, o\u2019er and o\u2019er\u201d (872, 4.5b.140). But this seems inappropriate\u2014Hector is not a posturing Touchstone the Clown, and his opponent is not the timid rustic William, Phoebe\u2019s admirer. <a href=\"#_edn43\" id=\"_ednref43\">[43]<\/a> The play is already full of hyperbole and boasting, which are ways of \u201ctalking up\u201d meaning and purpose where there is little or none. <a href=\"#_edn44\" id=\"_ednref44\">[44]<\/a> But at least Hector invites Achilles back into the coming fray, telling him that there has been little to do since he withdrew.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTroilus has his own plans, and he gets Ulysses to promise that he will convey him to Menelaus\u2019s tent, where Calchas is staying and Diomedes is due to attend a dinner party. Cressida will be with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act5\">ACT 5<\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 1 (873-75, Achilles receives Queen Hecuba\u2019s communication reminding him to keep his oath to make peace with Troy; Achilles determines to keep this oath, his challenge to kill Hector in battle notwithstanding; the Greek captains and Hector make their way to Achilles\u2019s tent, but Diomedes departs to be with Cressida; Ulysses and Troilus set out after Diomedes, with Thersites following behind them.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt’s time for Achilles, Patroclus and Thersites to engage in a verbal battle again, and as usual the latter gets the best of his adversaries. His putdown of Achilles is classic: \u201cWhy, thou picture of what thou seem\u2019st and idol of idiot-worshippers, here\u2019s a letter for thee\u201d (873, 5.1.6-7). That\u2019s a succinct way of calling someone the ancient version of today\u2019s posturing influencer. Indeed, this play\u2019s Achilles is a veritable miles gloriosus, <\/em>or boastful soldier like the ones to be found in Roman comedies by Plautus and Terence. <a href=\"#_edn45\" id=\"_ednref45\">[45]<\/a> Patroclus, Thersites sets down as a \u201cmasculine whore\u201d (873, 5.1.16).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThersites gives Achilles a letter from Hecuba reminding him of his promise to her daughter Polyxena, for the sake of which vow he will yet again fail to take the field for the Greeks. Alone, Thersites offers what may be his most cutting analysis of the major Greek warriors: he mocks the absent Agamemnon as an idiot, and his royal brother as a cuckold. Thersites would rather be anything but the much-abused Menelaus: \u201cAsk me not what I would be if I were not Thersites, for I care not to be \/ the louse of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus\u201d (874, 5.1.56-58).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAs Thersites sees things, it all comes down to \u201cNothing but lechery \u2026\u201d (875, 5.1.90). It comes down to absence of self-restraint in martial and erotic affairs alike In a sense, sex itself isthe cause of the Trojan War, and Thersites in particular portrays this fundamental activity as inherently scurrilous, a cause first of all of ruinous diseases like syphilis, <a href=\"#_edn46\" id=\"_ednref46\">[46]<\/a> of ruined marriages like that of the contempt-drenched Menelaus, and thence of a descent into armed retribution thanks to the honor code that attaches to both pursuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 2 (875-80, Diomedes pesters Cressida for the sex she has promised him; the hidden Troilus is furious as he overhears this talk; Ulysses is not pleased to hear it, and Thersites reacts caustically, as one has come to expect from him; Cressida offers Diomedes Troilus\u2019s old love token, and Troilus feels deeply betrayed; he swears he\u2019ll have his revenge on Diomedes.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nTroilus, dogged by Thersites and accompanied by Ulysses, who is perhaps bent upon embittering Troilus, can barely restrain himself when he sees Cressida, without much of a struggle, surrender to Diomedes over the question of whether she will sleep with him soon, and, as a token of her promise, give him the sleeve Troilus had given her. Cressida temporarily takes the token back, but Troilus has witnessed the whole sordid affair, which ends with her sounding almost eager for Diomedes to \u201cvisit\u201d her, saying, \u201cGood night. I prithee, come\u201d (878, 5.2.106). Diomedes, for his part, is becoming impatient with Cressida for her previous delay.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPerhaps it\u2019s even worse for Troilus because he overhears Cressida plead to herself the tyranny of the eye, and broadly fault her own gender rather than herself individually: \u201cTroilus, farewell. One eye yet looks on thee, \/ But with my heart the other eye doth see. \/ Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find: The error of our eye directs our mind\u201d (878, 5.2.107-10). What Ulysses had said about the general public with regard to martial reputation applies equally well to the realm of love: only the present counts.<\/p>\n\n\n\nListening to all this, the embittered, incredulous Troilus says that \u201cthis is and is not Cressid\u201d (879, 5.2.146). He simply can\u2019t credit the change he believes has taken place in her. It may be, though, that it\u2019s only circumstances that have changed, not Cressida herself. As it turns out, despite her initial protests against her fate, her seemingly genuine affection for Troilus, and her assertion about being guided by \u201cthe eye\u201d instead of reason, Cressida is a realist, not a hopeless romantic.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhatever the case may be with Cressida, Troilus, towards the end of the scene, is straining not to sound like Hamlet at his most broad-brush misogynistic worst. <a href=\"#_edn47\" id=\"_ednref47\">[47]<\/a> He vows to fight Diomedes, and condemns Cressida as the byword for betrayal she herself agreed to be if found wanting in loyalty: \u201cO Cressid! Of false Cressid\u2014false, false, false! \/ Let all untruths stand by thy stain\u00e8d name, \/ And they\u2019ll seem glorious\u201d (880, 5.2.178-80).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThersites imagines gleefully how profitable it could be for him to give to Patroclus the inside information he has just gathered about Troilus. He is more confirmed than ever that the whole Trojan War affair is \u201cLechery, lechery, still wars and lechery \u2026\u201d (880, 5.2.193).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 3 (880-83, Andromache and Cassandra push Priam to assist them in keeping Hector from taking part in the upcoming battle; Priam also tries to dissuade Troilus, to no avail; Priam must give his blessing to Hector, and he and Troilus go off to fight the Greeks; Pandarus briefly stops Troilus, giving him a letter that he reads and tears to pieces\u2014it is from Cressida.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nHector, declaring that honor is more precious even than life, will not be persuaded to avoid fighting by Cassandra, Priam, or even Andromache. Troilus is determined to fight, too, in spite of his youth. He will have his revenge on Diomedes\u2014a private motive Hector doesn\u2019t seem to be aware of. Troilus, in his furious disillusionment, goes so far as to accuse Hector of being soft when it comes to slaying the defeated enemy, reproaching him over his compassion: \u201cWhen many times the captive Grecian falls, \/ Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword, \/ You bid them rise and live\u201d (881, 5.3.40-42).<\/p>\n\n\n\nTroilus considers this sort of gesture inappropriate, even foolish, and he says so bluntly to his famously martial elder brother, reproaching him for a softer, almost feminine, side that we may not have understood him to have. Hector, for his part, remains unapologetic about this quality\u2014evidently, he believes as Portia does in The Merchant of Venice: <\/em>\u201cThe quality of mercy is not strained,\u201d as she says to Antonio\u2019s harsh creditor Shylock in the Venetian court. <a href=\"#_edn48\" id=\"_ednref48\">[48]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nCassandra finishes off the complaints against Hector\u2019s insistence on taking part in the upcoming battle. Her final prophecy about him is, \u201cLook how thou diest, look how thy eye turns pale, \/ Look how thy wounds do bleed at many vents!\u201d (882, 5.3.80-82) \u201cBearing witness\u201d to dire events and to characters under stress is one of the most fundamental things that happens in Greek tragedy, and this is Cassandra\u2019s version of that act, doomed as she is to never being believed no matter how truly she sees and reveals the future. <a href=\"#_edn49\" id=\"_ednref49\">[49]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nPandarus has his final meeting of the play with Troilus, who is rapidly disappearing into his frenzy of disillusionment with Cressida and with love in general. Pandarus has a love letter from Cressida, and complains about his health\u2014most likely the symptoms of what was then an untreatable disease, syphilis. All he gets for his pains, though, is Troilus\u2019s curses. The young man rips up Cressida\u2019s letter, and musters only these words for Pandarus: \u201cHence, broker-lackey! Ignomy and shame \/ Pursue thy life, and live aye with thy name\u201d (883, 5.3.113-14).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 4 (883-84, Thersites, up to his usual mockery and curious to see how the battle turns out, observes Troilus fighting with Diomedes; when Hector surprises Thersites in the field, the latter man is spared by dint of his own cowardice and Hector\u2019s contempt.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nAs Troilus fights Diomedes, Thersites wants to watch the whole pageant of foolery, and hopes to see Diomedes stripped of his love token, Cressida\u2019s sleeve, egging on the fighters with, \u201cHold thy whore, Grecian! Now for thy whore, Tro- \/ jan! Now the sleeve! Now the sleeve!\u201d (883, 5.4.22-23) Ajax, we hear from Thersites, is refusing to fight, presumably in imitation of Achilles, and the Greek camp has been overtaken by an anarchic mood, in which \u201cpolicy grows into an ill opinion\u201d (883, 5.4.15). Thersites seems to find the repetition and the reductiveness of the whole affair delicious.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDiomedes and Troilus engage in close combat, and then a comic scene ensues in which Hector threatens Thersites, who escapes by dint of cowardice. The latter says abjectly, \u201cI am a rascal, a scurvy railing knave, a \/ very filthy rogue\u201d (884, 5.4.26-27), and his reward is Hector\u2019s, \u201cI do believe thee. Live\u201d (884, 5.4.28). Safe again, Thersites looks forward to what he hopes will be the Ouroboros-like fate of Diomedes and Troilus: \u201cI think they have swallowed one \/ another. I would laugh at that miracle\u2014yet, in a sort, lech- \/ ery eats itself\u201d (884, 5.4.31-33).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 5 (884-85, Diomedes has won a horse from Troilus, which he sends to Cressida; Agamemnon and Nestor tell of the Greeks losing soldiers and ground to the Trojans\u2014Patroclus is among the slain; Ulysses reports that an enraged Achilles and Ajax are readying themselves to enter the fray.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nDiomedes has won a horse from Troilus during the battle, and he sends the horse back to Cressida as a trophy. Patroclus (who in The Iliad <\/em>puts on Achilles\u2019 armor and is mistaken for him) <a href=\"#_edn50\" id=\"_ednref50\">[50]<\/a> is killed by Hector, and Agamemnon is alarmed at the state of affairs. Hector is fighting like Mars himself: Nestor says of him that \u201cHere, there, and everywhere he leaves and takes, \/ Dexterity so obeying appetite \/ That what he will he does, and does so much \/ That proof is called impossibility\u201d (884, 5.5.26-29). Troilus has infuriated Ajax by killing a friend of his, so off he goes to find the Trojan.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAchilles asks rhetorically, \u201cWhere is this Hector?\u201d (885, 5.5.44) and sets out to kill the slayer of his dearest friend, Patroclus.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 6 (885-86, Troilus fights Diomedes and Ajax; Hector outfights Achilles, who pleads rustiness as his reason for backing away from the match; Troilus vows to rescue Aeneas; Hector runs down a Greek warrior who flees from him, and takes his armor.)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nAs Troilus fights with Diomedes and Ajax, both of whom vie in advance for the sole right to defeat him, on comes the much-awaited match between Achilles and Hector. When Hector offers the winded Achilles a pause to gather his spirits, Achilles refuses this offer that would result in further action, saying, \u201cBe happy that my arms are out of use; \/ My rest and negligence befriends thee now, \/ But thou anon shalt hear of me again, \/ Till when, go seek thy fortune\u201d (885, 5.6.16-19). Thus the great Achilles withdraws from combat with chivalrous Hector.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTroilus has heard that Aeneas has been taken alive, and vows to rescue the prince from captivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRight after his fight with Achilles, Hector immediately pursues another Greek whose armor has caught his eye. He calls this Greek an animal, and seems to consider him beneath the honor code by which he, Hector, lives and dies: \u201cWilt thou not, beast, abide? \/ Why, then, fly on; I\u2019ll hunt thee for thy hide\u201d (886, 5.6.30-31).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 7 (886, Achilles rouses his Myrmidon fighters to help him find Hector\u2014they, and not their chief, will put an end to the great Trojan.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nAfter being treated chivalrously by Hector in their recent battle-engagement, Achilles now plans a dishonorable trick to cut the Trojan down: he gathers his Myrmidon soldier-subjects and orders them to follow him until he locates Hector, at which point they are to fence him in for the kill: \u201cEmpale him with your weapons round about\u201d and \u201cIn fellest manner execute your arms (886, 5.7.5-6). Achilles wants his troops to surround and then slaughter the man with whom he has invited comparison and whom he has so often planned to kill on his own. <a href=\"#_edn51\" id=\"_ednref51\">[51]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nIf there was any doubt about who Achilles really is, there\u2019s none now: he is a rogue who pits his own low cunning and other people\u2019s brute force against Hector\u2019s chivalric honor.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 8 (886, Thersites dishes on the fight between Menelaus and Paris; when Margarelon, Priam\u2019s \u201cnatural\u201d son, surprises him, he refuses to defend himself and escapes certain death.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThersites mocks Menelaus\u2019s battle with Paris, but when the bastard Margarelon challenges him, Thersites, reveling in his own similar status, once again escapes injury. His pledge is, \u201cI am a bastard too. I love bastards!\u201d (886, 5.8.8). It\u2019s a tribute to the play\u2019s thoroughgoing smackdown of the heroic ideal that by this point, most of us probably revel in the frank cowardice of Thersites: at least the man is honest, which is worth something. He has no intention of losing his life in a contest he finds contemptible.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scenes 9-10 (886-87, Hector has killed a Greek warrior for his excellent armor and, satisfied, disarms on the spot to rest; Achilles promptly surprises Hector, and orders his Myrmidons to kill the Trojan without even giving him a chance to fight back. The Greek soldiers hear the Myrmidons shouting out the news that Hector has been slain.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nHector has apparently slain the Greek warrior with the fine armor that caught his attention, and now disarms for the evening. Just then, in sweeps Achilles with his Myrmidons to ensure that the mighty Trojan will never arm himself again. The Greek\u2019s parting words to his nemesis are poetical in tone, but dishonorable in the ugliest way: \u201cLook, Hector, how the sun begins to set, \/ How ugly night comes breathing at his heels. \/ Even with the vail and dark\u2019ning of the sun \/ To close the day up, Hector\u2019s life is done\u201d (887, 5.9.5-8).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAchilles then orders his Myrmidons to hack to death the unarmed, protesting Hector, and for further insult, he bids them tie the corpse to the tail of his horse. He brags tastelessly, \u201cAlong the field I will the Trojan trail\u201d (887, 5.9.22). This is a direct insult to the honor code by which Hector has lived. Unable to defeat the Trojan in a fair fight, the Greek does not hesitate to claim new glory by a brazen act of cowardice: his troops are all to proclaim, \u201cAchilles hath the mighty Hector slain!\u201d (887, 5.9.14)<\/p>\n\n\n\nAlthough Hector was noble and therefore naively expected Achilles to honor the laws of war, his death seems more pointless than heroic. After all, the play has already explicitly rejected the notion that the Trojan War was about honorable exploits, pure ideals, or anything of the sort. <a href=\"#_edn52\" id=\"_ednref52\">[52]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAgamemnon thinks the long war is effectively over, saying, \u201cIf in his death the gods have us befriended, \/ Great Troy is ours, and our sharp wars are ended\u201d (887, 5.11.9-10). There\u2019s more fighting to be done to \u201cwind down the long coil of war,\u201d but Agamemnon is not far from the truth. As for Achilles, he will die by an arrow that Paris shoots into his heel\u2014the one part of his body that Thetis did not immerse into the River Styx, so he is not invulnerable after all. <a href=\"#_edn53\" id=\"_ednref53\">[53]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 11 (887-89, Troilus announces Hector\u2019s death and shameful treatment after death to Aeneas and his fellow Trojans; Troilus, thoroughly disillusioned and embittered by his experience with Cressida, swears the Trojans will take their revenge; he meets Pandarus and strikes him; Pandarus, sick with what is almost certainly syphilis, gets the last word, and complains that he has been unfairly treated.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nTroilus announces to the Trojan forces the death of Hector. Spoiling for a fight, he counsels a move back towards Troy and urges revenge: \u201cStrike a free march to Troy, with comfort go; \/ Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe\u201d (888, 5.11.30-31). The sick Pandarus, struck on the pate by Troilus, retreats, whining about the unfairness visited upon him and bequeathing to us his byword-name and his inveterate diseases. It seems that in this play at least, the legacy of the foundational and glorious Trojan War is no more than the perpetual plagues of venery and violent destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\nChivalry, the medieval ideational structure that Shakespeare has imposed upon the ancient Trojan War and its combatants, is thoroughly undone. The Trojans have lost Hector, their greatest champion, and Troilus, although he\u2019s found his personal cause to fight for, is deeply embittered and disillusioned. For the time being, the knavery of the image-obsessed warrior Achilles trumps all. While we might suppose Shakespeare\u2019s version of the Trojan War is the opposite of Homer\u2019s account in The Iliad, <\/em>that would be an exaggeration: Homer is by no means unwilling to present us with the pettiness and contrariness of men such as Agamemnon and Achilles.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe ancient author gave his listeners not so much propaganda as a complex presentation of a complex event (mythical or otherwise). That, and not militarist fluff, is what we get in The Iliad.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nShakespeare\u2019s account, by partial contrast, distinguishes itself in its thoroughgoing <\/em>and successful attempt to weld together the least attractive elements of both war and erotic experience, thereby undermining the heroic status of the great events underlying the story of Troilus and Cressida. He has invented nothing entirely new, we might say, but while working mainly with medieval sources for \u201cthe matter of Troy\u201d such as Chaucer, Lydgate, and Lefevre <a href=\"#_edn54\" id=\"_ednref54\">[54]<\/a> he has instead fixed his intent on spinning a counter-narrative whose threads were already embedded in his ancient original. <a href=\"#_edn55\" id=\"_ednref55\">[55]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nThose who say that Shakespeare knew next to nothing of the Greeks and Romans are mistaken: he intuited a great deal about them, and it shows in a play such as Troilus and Cressida.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy is Troilus and Cressida <\/em>a \u201cproblem\u201d comedy? <a href=\"#_edn56\" id=\"_ednref56\">[56]<\/a> Well, the grand distinction between comedy and tragedy is that while the former is about an essentially good person confronting and overcoming (or at least settling with) various limitations owing to human nature and the social order, tragedy deals with the realm of dire consequentiality that ensues when we have exhausted or squandered our best options. To borrow a Churchillian line, the main action of a tragedy takes place within \u201ca period of consequences,\u201d <a href=\"#_edn57\" id=\"_ednref57\">[57]<\/a> a time when, if your mistakes outweigh your ability to make them right, you will be trapped and destroyed by the circumstances you have partly or entirely created. <a href=\"#_edn58\" id=\"_ednref58\">[58]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nTroilus and Cressida <\/em>traces the disillusionment of an initially idealistic young man in the face of cynicism and betrayal. The play\u2019s action doesn\u2019t rise to the level of high tragedy\u2014it\u2019s just too shot through with \u201cdark sarcasm\u201d <a href=\"#_edn59\" id=\"_ednref59\">[59]<\/a> to allow such a definition, and there is no satisfying sense of finality at its conclusion. Although the First Folio of 1623 lists the play as a \u201ctragedie,\u201d Troilus and Cressida <\/em>undermines the heroic code that might have validated any sense that it really is that species of drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAs for Troilus, one of our two main protagonists, he has shifted his considerable energy into the activities of making war rather than love, but he has not regained the degree of idealism that has driven him towards his short-lived match with Cressida. Plain bitterness and a desire for revenge do not constitute tragic insight.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNeither is Troilus and Cressida <\/em>to be folded comfortably into the more robust versions of comedy that we find in Shakespeare. The Aristophanes-based \u201cOld Comedy\u201d topical scoffing of Thersites more closely captures the comic spirit of the play than anything connected to chivalric idealism or to the reconciliation, generosity, renewal, and transformation that prevail in Shakespeare\u2019s lighter farce or in his more robust, fully romantic comedies.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAll in all, Shakespeare borrows the sensibilities of Arthurian romance, of chivalry, for this play about ancient Trojan lovers and their Greek antagonists. But he is not about to build for us an aesthetic bulwark against the frailty of human nature that is so much a part of Arthurian lore. Shakespeare seems more interested in taking us back to an origin-story of faithlessness similar to Milton\u2019s explorations later on, in Paradise Lost.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nPandarus seems like a minor figure in Troilus and Cressida, <\/em>but Shakespeare deftly connects this character\u2019s plight as a sufferer for love with the often corrupt, diseased Elizabethan-Jacobeans themselves. Pulling down high ideals is not unique to the ancients, and here we see bright, shining chivalry brutally dragged through the mud of iniquity and betrayal. Raising hopes and formulating ideals, only to give them over, surrender them, under the pressure of a brutal reality, seems like a nearly universal pattern in human affairs. When Shakespeare is in the mood, all is matter for strife, all is compromised flesh on its way to carrion. Perhaps \u201crot\u201d is the real action <\/em>of Troilus and Cressida.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nEdition.<\/strong>\u00a0Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors.\u00a0The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies + Digital Edition. <\/em>3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13:\u00a0978-0-393-93861-6.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2012, revised 2025 Alfred J. Drake<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nDocument Timestamp: 8\/5\/2025 6:27 PM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"endnotes\">ENDNOTES<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n*To return to exact part of the text referenced by the endnotes below, left-click on the endnote’s numbered link. By contrast, the blue scroll-up button at the bottom right of the page returns to the top of the document.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref1\" id=\"_edn1\">[1]<\/a> As Geoffrey Bullough and others inform us, Shakespeare\u2019s source material for Troilus and Cressida <\/em>consists partly of Homer\u2019s Iliad<\/em> via George Chapman\u2019s translation, <\/em>and partly of the so-called \u201cMatter of Troy,\u201d as developed by Chaucer and other medieval authors. In the chivalric literature written during the Middle Ages, a strong sense of doom usually pervades the action. Arthurian longings after a second golden age are bound to fail, brought to grief by fallen humanity\u2019s internal flaws. As for Shakespeare\u2019s text\u2019s sympathy for Troy, Bullough says, \u201cThe legend that the British kings were of Trojan descent had much to do with the sympathy felt in medieval and Tudor times for the Trojans\u201d (91). See Bullough, Geoffrey, editor. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. <\/em>Vol. VI. Other \u2018Classical\u2019 Plays: Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Prince of Tyre.<\/em> London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia UP, 1966. Introduction to Troilus and Cressida, <\/em>83-111.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref2\" id=\"_edn2\">[2]<\/a> Homer\u2019s Iliad <\/em>itself begins in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War, while Shakespeare\u2019s play tells us that it starts seven years into the War and moves on through the death of Hector in the tenth year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref3\" id=\"_edn3\">[3]<\/a> On Petrarch and the Petrarchan sonnet, see <a href=\"https:\/\/poemanalysis.com\/poetic-form\/petrarchan-sonnet\/\">https:\/\/poemanalysis.com\/poetic-form\/petrarchan-sonnet\/<\/a>. Accessed 8\/3\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref4\" id=\"_edn4\">[4]<\/a> The Norton footnote 9 for 815 regarding Calchas\u2019s status as a Trojan defector doesn\u2019t mention that this is medieval lore such as may be found in Chaucer\u2019s retelling of the ancient story. In The Iliad, <\/em>Calchas is a Greek with a long history of prophecy in the service of fellow Greeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref5\" id=\"_edn5\">[5]<\/a> This description occurs in Christopher Marlowe\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/emed.folger.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/folger_encodings\/pdf\/EMED-DrFaust-reg-3.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>Folger Shakespeare Library. Faustus asks Mephistopheles, \u201cWas this the face that launched a thousand ships? \/ And burnt the topless Towers of Ilium?<\/em>\u201d Accessed 12\/19\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref6\" id=\"_edn6\">[6]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. <\/em>Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 371, 1.3.100.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref7\" id=\"_edn7\">[7]<\/a> Thersites has no doubt provided bitter inspiration to many an antiwar character in modern art. One such is probably Corporal Klinger from the 1970s television series MASH, which was about Americans fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War. Like Thersites, Klinger takes up a cynical perspective from a standpoint very near the action, or even within it\u2014the unit in MASH consists of busy Army medics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref8\" id=\"_edn8\">[8]<\/a> See E. M. W. Tillyard\u2019s standard study, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Elizabethan-World-Picture-Shakespeare-Milton\/dp\/0394701623\/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1LB4K6Q7ZDTL7&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dH4xAjpd9mx-zRZS_3aMPirhpbX3F7v6wkfawwZSBxHGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.QjxUhKB57DaalUUFQFQxF7DBhKXRDXEhbabIR5rExy8&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+elizabethan+world+picture+by+emw+tillyard&qid=1734675537&sprefix=Tillyard%2Caps%2C169&sr=8-1\">The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton<\/a> <\/em>(Vintage, 1959, first pub. 1943), on the most common among the cultural and other assumptions made by Shakespeare\u2019s fellow citizens during the Elizabethan Era. Arthur O. Lovejoy\u2019s book The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea<\/em> (Harvard UP, 1976. First published 1933) goes into considerable detail about the \u201cgreat chain\u201d figure by which so many people figured the boundaries and ultimate nature of the universe. See also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/guide_ren_great_chain_of_being.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Scala Naturae: Great Chain of Being<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Robert_Fludd,_Integra_naturae_speculum_artisque_imago.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Great Chain of Being, R. Fludd, 1619 (Wikimedia)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref9\" id=\"_edn9\">[9]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. King Lear.<\/em> Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840. Albany says to Goneril, \u201cHumanity must perforce prey on itself \/ Like monsters of the deep\u201d (816, 4.2.32.19-20 Folio segment).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref10\" id=\"_edn10\">[10]<\/a> Homer. The Iliad.<\/em> Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1998. ISBN-13: \u200e978-0140275360. See Book 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref11\" id=\"_edn11\">[11]<\/a> Here and in The Iliad, <\/em>Agamemnon\u2019s competitiveness and petulance in comparing his own treatment with the favor shown to Achilles probably seems excessive to modern readers, but perhaps in its ancient context, such concerns are not unreasonable on the part of a chieftain or warrior-king. In many ancient societies, the giving and receiving of gifts was a powerful part of the \u201csymbolic\u201d economy. See, for example, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, <\/em>by Marcel Mauss. Trans. W. D. Halls. W. W. Norton, 2000 (orig. Eng. pub 1954, French 1925). ISBN-13: 978-0393320435.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref12\" id=\"_edn12\">[12]<\/a> See Virgil. The Aeneid. <\/em>Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 2008 (repr. ed.) ISBN-13:\u200e<\/strong>978-0143105138. The Trojan hero Aeneas was the eventual founder of what would become Rome.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref13\" id=\"_edn13\">[13]<\/a> On Plato\u2019s affinity for Sparta, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.plato-dialogues.org\/tools\/loc\/sparta.htm#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20doubt%20that,one%2C%20that%20of%20the%20Laws.\">Sparta<\/a>\u201c at Plato-dialogues.org. Accessed 8\/3\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref14\" id=\"_edn14\">[14]<\/a> Shakespeare strikes a balance in the representation of Troy by allowing this insulting opinion of the Trojans some air time, so to speak, and yet not otherwise slighting their greatest warrior, Hector. The English, after all, considered themselves the heirs of Troy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref15\" id=\"_edn15\">[15]<\/a> Thersites is more than just a clever servant of the sort we might encounter in later Classical literature. He is so caustic that he might be said to call the conflict\u2019s very purpose into question, along with its operative honor code. To an extent, perhaps this military jester reinforces the status quo with his raw insults and his malice against key participants, but his wit and observational power are so keen that they begin to seem destabilizing to those around him. It\u2019s dangerous to have a witness so unsparing in his expressions regarding the existential absurdity that the Greeks and Trojans have created among themselves. This commentary writer remembers listening to an interview with one of the Monty Python players (probably John Cleese), and when the player was asked why <\/em>the comedy troupe developed their skits, he answered simply (to paraphrase), \u201cIf anybody stepped forward and said they knew anything or had any authority, we would make fun of them. It was that simple.\u201d Anybody who claims to be an authority, then, deserves to be mocked without pity. Thersites despises the \u201cmen in charge,\u201d too, though with an intensity that goes well beyond anything we would find in Monty Python.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref16\" id=\"_edn16\">[16]<\/a> Homer. The Iliad.<\/em> Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1998. ISBN-13: \u200e978-0140275360. See Book 2, 245-81, where Thersites rails freely at the mighty Agamemnon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref17\" id=\"_edn17\">[17]<\/a> See Norton footnote 8 for pg. 235, in which the editors reference Priam\u2019s sister Hesione.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref18\" id=\"_edn18\">[18]<\/a> See The Riverside Shakespeare. <\/em>2nd ed. Editor G. Blakemore Evans. Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ISBN-13: 978-0395754900. In her introduction to Troilus and Cressida <\/em>(477-81), <\/em>Anne Barton makes this point about the complexity of blame in Classical myth. One often finds that when certainty or simplicity is sought from Greek and Roman foundational legends, complicated \u201cback stories\u201d suggest serious ambivalence about the moral and historical claims and assumptions being addressed, thereby tending to undercut any notions of simplicity or innocence that we may try to derive from them. The historian Dares Phrygius details an earlier <\/em>(and fairly recent) Trojan War, in which the Trojan king Laomedon had been defeated. See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theoi.com\/Text\/DaresPhrygius.html\">Theoi.com on Dares of Phrygia\u2019s account<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref19\" id=\"_edn19\">[19]<\/a> Cassandra, daughter of the Trojan king Priam, is desired by the god Apollo, but she refuses him, whereupon he grants her the powers of a prophetess. The trouble is, he also decrees that no one will believe her even though she sees clearly and truly what is to come. See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/Cassandra-Greek-mythology\">Cassandra.<\/a> Britannica.com. Accessed 12\/20\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref20\" id=\"_edn20\">[20]<\/a> As the Norton editors point out in footnote 3 on pg. 837, Aristotle\u2019s Nichomachean Ethics<\/em> was composed around 350 BCE, which places it some eight or nine centuries later than the Trojan War supposedly occurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref21\" id=\"_edn21\">[21]<\/a> After so much talk to the contrary, it seems, Hector, like Hamlet, deems it the most glorious thing to go to one\u2019s death \u201cEven for an eggshell\u201d when honor is the matter. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. <\/em>Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 420, 4.2.52.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref22\" id=\"_edn22\">[22]<\/a> On Classical notions of the afterlife, see, for example, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.worldhistory.org\/article\/29\/the-after-life-in-ancient-greece\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Afterlife in Ancient Greece.<\/a>\u201d World History Encyclopedia. Worldhistory.org. Accessed 12\/20\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref23\" id=\"_edn23\">[23]<\/a> Homer, in Samuel Butler\u2019s translation of The Iliad, <\/em>says the following about Thersites: \u201cThersites still went on wagging his unbridled tongue\u2014a man of many words, and those unseemly; a monger of sedition, a railer against all who were in authority, who cared not what he said, so that he might set the Achaeans in a laugh.\u201d See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/2199\/2199-h\/2199-h.htm\">Homer, The Iliad. <\/em>Trans. Samuel Butler<\/a>. (Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12\/20\/2024.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref24\" id=\"_edn24\">[24]<\/a> In Shakespeare\u2019s Troilus and Cressida,<\/em> Thersites speaks in seven scenes: 2.1, 2.2, 3.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.4, and 5.8.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref25\" id=\"_edn25\">[25]<\/a> The theme is handled hilariously in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove:<\/em> Sterling Hayden\u2019s General Ripper of Burpleson Air Force Base launches World War III against the Soviets because he\u2019s been having a problem with erectile dysfunction, which he calls \u201closs of essence\u201d and believes to be a side effect of fluoridation. See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0057012\/\">IMDB\u2019s entry on Dr. Strangelove<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>Accessed 12\/20\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref26\" id=\"_edn26\">[26]<\/a> Seinfeld <\/em>fans will remember that this song figures hilariously in an episode of the sitcom. Elaine is working as an editor and, based on very bad information from Jerry, convinces a famous Russian author that the Edwin Starr song lyric \u201cWar \u2026 what is it good for? Absolutely nothing\u201d was Tolstoy\u2019s title for the working draft of War and Peace.<\/em> See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0697729\/\">Season 5, Episode 14<\/a>, \u201cThe Marine Biologist.\u201d IMDB. Accessed 12\/20\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref27\" id=\"_edn27\">[27]<\/a> This language from the King James Bible is part of the famous text of Isaiah <\/em>53\u2014<a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Isaiah%2053&version=KJV\">53.3 to be exact<\/a>. See biblegateway.com. Accessed 12\/13\/2024. Christians usually read it as referring to the future Messiah, while Jews usually interpret its \u201csuffering servant\u201d figure as referring to Israel itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref28\" id=\"_edn28\">[28]<\/a> See Norton footnote 1 for pg. 845.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref29\" id=\"_edn29\">[29]<\/a> Sonnet 129\u2019s concluding couplet is \u201cAll this the world well knows; yet none knows well \/ To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.\u201d Shakespeare. The Sonnets.<\/em> In The Norton Shakespeare: Romances and Poems,<\/em> 3rd ed. 656-709. 700, \u201cSonnet 129,\u201d lines 13-14.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref30\" id=\"_edn30\">[30]<\/a> See Homer. The Odyssey. <\/em>Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1996. ISBN-13: 978-0140268867. Or see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/1727\/1727-h\/1727-h.htm\">Samuel Butler\u2019s translation<\/a>. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12\/20\/2024. Homer represents Helen as a magical person, semi-divine, and a great politician in her ability to manage relations with Menelaus and the Greeks to whom she is eventually returned. There is some ambivalence in Homer\u2019s Odyssey <\/em>as to whose side Helen is on when she is still in Troy. See Book 4 in particular, wherein Telemachus visits King Menelaus and Queen Helen in Sparta. One of the most memorable portraits of Helen is as the ostensibly chastened \u201clady with the good drugs\u201d in The Odyssey: <\/em>when all assembled become too sad about the past, she drugs the wine and makes everyone forget their sorrows\u2014and, perhaps, her own complicity in the war\u2019s events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref31\" id=\"_edn31\">[31]<\/a> As John Donne\u2019s speaker says in \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poems\/44097\/the-canonization\">The Canonization<\/a>,\u201d \u201cCountries, towns, courts: beg from above \/ A pattern of your love!\u201d Poetryfoundation.org. Accessed 12\/20\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref32\" id=\"_edn32\">[32]<\/a> As mentioned in an earlier note, this defection happens only in later, medieval texts, not in The Iliad.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref33\" id=\"_edn33\">[33]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. <\/em>Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth.<\/em> In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories,<\/em> 3rd ed. 629-95. See 687, 5.1.138-39.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref34\" id=\"_edn34\">[34]<\/a> The Norton editors explain in footnote 7 to pg. 860 that what Paris says about Diomedes to conclude the scene is somewhat difficult to interpret logically. Perhaps we are to understand the term \u201cbuy\u201d in the sense of \u201cfighting for and winning, so that what Paris says about Diomedes\u2019s attitude makes sense, but Paris\u2019s description of the Trojans\u2019 comportment, \u201cWe\u2019ll not commend what we intend to sell\u201d (860, 4.1.79), remains murky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref35\" id=\"_edn35\">[35]<\/a> Milton, with his penchant for deriving all things back to their first instance, casts the yet-unfallen Adam and Eve in the role of chivalric lovers, spontaneously reciting an aubade (or \u201calba,\u201d if we want to be precise since both lovers are awake) or dawn poem that begins, \u201cSweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, \/ With charm of earliest birds.\u201d See <a href=\"https:\/\/milton.host.dartmouth.edu\/reading_room\/pl\/book_4\/text.shtml\">Paradise Lost 4.639-52<\/a><\/em>. The John Milton Reading Room. Accessed 12\/20\/2024. There is no sadness in Adam and Eve\u2019s prelapsarian song, as there is yet no need for such, but that is not the case with Troilus and Cressida. The aubade (Milton aside) is a medieval form of poetry, one we associate with the French Troubadors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref36\" id=\"_edn36\">[36]<\/a> In footnote 4 for pg. 864, the Norton editors point out that sleeves \u201cwere often detachable in Elizabethan dress.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref37\" id=\"_edn37\">[37]<\/a> Still, it\u2019s difficult to render Troilus\u2019s fears in a way more favorable than we find in the line by Oscar Wilde\u2019s character Lord Darlington, \u201cI can resist anything but temptation.\u201d See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/790\/790-h\/790-h.htm\">Lady Windermere\u2019s Fan<\/a>. <\/em>Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12\/20\/2024. Cressida surely supposes that\u2019s what her Trojan prince thinks of her.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref38\" id=\"_edn38\">[38]<\/a> See Norton footnote 3 for pg. 866.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref39\" id=\"_edn39\">[39]<\/a> That is, the epic October 1, 1975 third fight between boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali in Quezon City, Philippines. Ali won by TKO late in the match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref40\" id=\"_edn40\">[40]<\/a> See Norton footnote 9 for pg. 868. Telamonian or Greater Ajax is the son of Telamon and Periboea. Telamon was the son of Priam\u2019s sister Hesione, so Telamon\u2019s son, Ajax, would be Priam\u2019s grand-nephew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref41\" id=\"_edn41\">[41]<\/a> Gertrude\u2019s line at 404, 3.2.214 runs, \u201cThe lady doth protest too much, methinks.\u201d Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. <\/em>Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref42\" id=\"_edn42\">[42]<\/a> See Quora response, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.quora.com\/Did-Mike-Tyson-say-everybody-has-a-plan-until-they-get-punched-in-the-face\">Did Mike Tyson say everybody has a plan until \u2026?<\/a>\u201d Accessed 12\/20\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref43\" id=\"_edn43\">[43]<\/a> At 722, 5.1.51-52 of As You Like It, <\/em>Touchstone frightens William away from Phoebe by yelling at him, \u201cI will kill thee a hundred and fifty \/ ways. \/ Therefore tremble and depart!\u201d Shakespeare, William. As You Like It.<\/em> In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. 673-731.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref44\" id=\"_edn44\">[44]<\/a> Modern viewers may even see in Achilles\u2019s behavior something of the famous scene in Martin Scorsese\u2019s 1976 film Taxi Driver <\/em>in which Robert De Niro\u2019s Travis Bickle confronts himself in his apartment mirror, repeatedly asking his image \u201cYou talkin\u2019 to me?\u201d and answering, \u201cWell I\u2019m the only one here.\u201d The phrase \u201ctoxic masculinity\u201d comes to mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref45\" id=\"_edn45\">[45]<\/a> The term miles gloriosus<\/em> comes from the title of a comedy by the Roman author Plautus. It means \u201cbraggart soldier.\u201d See Plautus\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.perseus.tufts.edu\/hopper\/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0103%3Aact%3Dintro%3Ascene%3Dsubject\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Miles Gloriosus<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>Perseus Digital Library. The name of the original braggart is Pyrgopolinices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref46\" id=\"_edn46\">[46]<\/a> See \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/jmvh.org\/article\/syphilis-its-early-history-and-treatment-until-penicillin-and-the-debate-on-its-origins\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Syphilis \u2013 Its early history and Treatment until Penicillin and the Debate on its Origins<\/a>.\u201d JMVH <\/em>(Journal of Military and Veterans\u2019 Health<\/em>) Vol. 20 No. 4. Article by John Frith. Accessed 9\/18\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref47\" id=\"_edn47\">[47]<\/a> At 366, 1.2.146, Hamlet\u2019s \u201cFrailty, thy name is woman\u201d is hard to top. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. <\/em>Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref48\" id=\"_edn48\">[48]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. The Comical History of The Merchant of Venice.<\/em> In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. 467-521. Portia\u2019s line at 508, 4.1.182 runs, \u201cThe quality of mercy is not strained.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref49\" id=\"_edn49\">[49]<\/a> See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/Cassandra-Greek-mythology\">Cassandra.<\/a> Britannica.com. Accessed 12\/20\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref50\" id=\"_edn50\">[50]<\/a> Homer. The Iliad.<\/em> Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1998. ISBN-13: \u200e978-0140275360. See Book 16. Or see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/cache\/epub\/4928\/pg4928-images.html\">The Iliad<\/a>. <\/em>Trans. Samuel Butler. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12\/20\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref51\" id=\"_edn51\">[51]<\/a> Shakespeare is not following Homer closely with regard to this episode: Achilles does not kill Hector in the unchivalrous manner here alleged. In John Lydgate\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/e\/eebo\/A19168.0001.001\/1:8.3?rgn=div2;view=fulltext\">The hystorye, sege, and dystruccyon of Troye<\/em><\/a>, however, Achilles and his Myrmidons surround Troilus so that Achilles can slay him; then Hector, too, as here in Shakespeare, is caught off guard and killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref52\" id=\"_edn52\">[52]<\/a> The Trojan War was anything but \u201chonorable and pure\u201d in Homer. At the same time, it would be dubious to suppose that the current play represents Shakespeare\u2019s only view of military heroism\u2014Henry V<\/em> must be considered alongside Troilus and Cressida.<\/em> It is impossible to claim the status of catharsis-inducing hero when one is unceremoniously hacked to pieces at the instigation of a liar who has no more honor than Jack Falstaff, or Thersites. See Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. <\/em>Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth.<\/em> In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories,<\/em> 3rd ed. 629-95. The passage referenced is at 5.1.131-34: \u201cCan honor set to a leg? No. \/ Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? \/ No\u2026. What \/ is honour? A word\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref53\" id=\"_edn53\">[53]<\/a> The story about Achilles\u2019s weak spot, his heel, is not specifically mentioned in The Iliad. <\/em>Translator Samuel Butler writes of Achilles, \u201cFor Thetis his mother had dipped him when an infant in the river Styx, which made every part of him invulnerable except the heel by which she held him.\u201d See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/cache\/epub\/4928\/pg4928-images.html\">The Iliad<\/a>. <\/em>Trans. Samuel Butler. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 12\/20\/2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref54\" id=\"_edn54\">[54]<\/a> Medieval sources: see the \u201cOf Interest\u201d section towards the top of this commentary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref55\" id=\"_edn55\">[55]<\/a> This same demystificational motive seems to de-emphasize the more respectful Chaucerian version that Shakespeare also used as a source for his play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref56\" id=\"_edn56\">[56]<\/a> This kind of designation, \u201cproblem comedy,\u201d may also have to do partly with the propensity of critics to choose and redefine their objects to suit certain preferences and assumptions\u2014in this case, anti-genre sentiment, a predilection for seeing difficulty in works or genres, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref57\" id=\"_edn57\">[57]<\/a> The famous quote by Winston Churchill is, \u201cThe era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.\u201d Churchill made the remark on Nov. 12, 1936 in an attempt to get his colleagues in the British Parliament to recognize the imminent peril that Europe faced from Nazi Germany. See <a href=\"https:\/\/api.parliament.uk\/historic-hansard\/commons\/1936\/nov\/12\/debate-on-the-address#S5CV0317P0_19361112_HOC_331\">HC Deb 12 November 1936 vol 317 cc1081-155.<\/a> The Hansard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref58\" id=\"_edn58\">[58]<\/a> This is surely a Christian-erainflection of tragedy in which it\u2019s acknowledged that Providence is just. Greek tragedy thrives on the sense that the cosmos may well not <\/em>be just or even comprehensible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref59\" id=\"_edn59\">[59]<\/a> A phrase from the hit song in Pink Floyd\u2019s The Wall <\/em>(1979),<\/em> \u201cAnother Brick in the Wall, Part II.\u201d Roger Waters and David Gilmour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shakespeare\u2019s Troilus and Cressida Commentary A. J. Drake Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida. Folio. 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{"id":219,"date":"2024-04-13T21:30:58","date_gmt":"2024-04-14T04:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/?page_id=219"},"modified":"2025-08-05T18:28:35","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T01:28:35","slug":"troilus-and-cressida-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/troilus-and-cressida-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Troilus and Cressida"},"content":{"rendered":"