EN301: Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists
of his Time
Tragical-comical-historical?

See internetshakespeare.uvic.ca and
www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html for page scans of early printed
Shakespearean texts.
The 1623 Folio
contents page
 Troilus and Cressida is
not listed on the Folio
contents page,
suggesting it may have
been a late addition.
 In the Folio itself, the
text is positioned
squarely between the
last of the histories and
the first of the
tragedies…
The 1623 Folio text
The two 1609 Quarto title pages
The 1609 Epistle
 “Eternall reader, you have here a new
play […] passing full of the palme
comicall […] So much and such savored
salt of witte is in his [the author’s]
Commedies, that they seeme (for their
height of pleasure) to be borne in that
sea that brought forth Venus. Amongst
all there is none more witty than this.”
The play’s structure

 What does it resemble structurally? Comedy? Tragedy?
History? None of these?
 It starts – and ends – seven years into the ten-year siege of
Troy.
PROLOGUE. … our play
Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils,
Beginning in the middle, starting thence away
To what may be digested in a play.
Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are;
Now, good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war. (26-31)
Troilus and Cressida
the comedy?
 While the play is certainly not
a festive comedy, it is full of
satire and bawdy humour (not
unlike city comedy in this
respect?).
 Even a cursory glance at the
shape of the dialogue in 1.1
reveals something about the
scene’s structure…
 Note Pandarus’ constant
attempts here to bring Troilus’
lofty discourse down to the
level of the body…
Cressida the comic?

 On her first appearance, Cressida’s jesting responses to
Alexander and Pandarus’s descriptions of offstage men
recall Portia’s in The Merchant of Venice and Lucetta’s in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona:
ALEXANDER. They say he is a very man per se,
And stands alone.
CRESSIDA.
So do all men
Unless they are drunk, sick, or have no legs. (1.2.15-17)
PANDARUS. What, not [a comparison] between Troilus and
Hector? Do you know a man if you see him?
CRESSIDA. Ay, if I ever saw him before and knew him. (1.2.61-3)
Cressida the comic?

 As Bridget Escolme argues,
 “Cressida herself can be inscribed with clown-like
performance objectives, and accordingly, the Cressida
figure /actor’s first function is to reassure the
audience that the play has not abandoned the bathetic
wit of the Prologue, despite Troilus’ recent appearance
as perfect, and perfectly serious, chivalric lover. … Her
technique is in the best tradition of fools, taking a
figure of speech from its figurative context and
deliberately misunderstanding it.” (2005: 42-3)
Cressida the comic?

 Indeed, the lively banter between niece and uncle might
remind us of Much Ado About Nothing:
LEONATO. You will never run mad, niece.
BEATRICE. No, not till a hot January. (1.1.88-9)
PANDARUS. You are such another woman! One knows not at
what ward you lie.
CRESSIDA. Upon my back to defend my belly, upon my wit to
defend my wiles, upon my secrecy to defend mine honesty, my
mask to defend my beauty, and you to defend all these – and at
all these wards I lie at a thousand watches. (1.2.254-60)
Cressida the comic?

 This is very clever and witty, but it also hints at
Cressida’s awareness of her vulnerability in a world
that prizes her primarily for her sexual value:
CRESSIDA. That she beloved knows nought that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.
That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue. (1.2.284-7)
Cressida the comic?

 Cressida worries throughout about giving too much
of her inner life away, and upon losing her virginity
almost immediately regrets her loss of agency:
CRESSIDA. Prithee, tarry. You men will never tarry.
O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off,
And then you would have tarried. (4.2.18-20)
Satire and the grotesque body

 You will remember from last week that for Mikhail Bakhtin,
 “The people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque
realism from immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower
stratum. Laughter degrades and materializes.” (1965: 19)
 We see the “grotesque body” most explicitly in the “deformed
and scurrilous” Thersites:
THERSITES. Agamemnon – how if he had boils, full, all over, generally?
(2.1.2-3)
 Thersites is “a privileged man”, able to speak truth to power; his
proving of Agamemnon, Achilles, himself and Patroclus to be fools
is reminiscent of Feste in Twelfth Night (“Take the fool away”,
1.5.35-68).
Satire and the grotesque body

 Every romantic liaison in the play is quickly reduced by those who
speak about it to mere sex:
 Pandarus’ song to Helen and Paris is full of innuendo (“The shaft
confounds / Not that it wounds, / But tickles still the sore”; 3.1.114-16)
 Troilus and Cressida’s first scene ends not with the lovers, but with a
bawdy aside from Pandarus (“And Cupid grant all tongue-tied
maidens here / Bed, chamber, pander to provide this gear”; 3.2.206-7)
 Their aubade scene is interrupted by Pandarus, who bursts in with the
line “How now, how now, how go maidenheads?” (4.2.25)
PANDARUS. Is this the generation of love: hot blood, hot thoughts, and hot
deeds? Why, they are vipers. Is love a generation of vipers? (3.1.128-30)
The limits of comedy?

 Can we call a play a comedy or a satire when it asks
us to share so much of its characters’ emotional pain?
 Remember Bergson’s dictum: laughter is usually
accompanied by an “absence of feeling” (1900: 63).
 Indeed, does the play ask us to judge Cressida, or to
sympathise with her? Or both?
Troilus and Cressida the history play?

 Shakespeare’s audience knew this story: indeed, Shakespeare alludes to it
in numerous plays. The plot concerning the title characters alone is
mentioned in several earlier plays:
 The Merchant of Venice (“in such a night / Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan
walls / And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents, / Where Cressid lay that
night”; 5.1.3-6)
 The Merry Wives of Windsor (“Shall I Sir Pandarus of Troy become, / And by my
side wear steel?”; 1.3.65-6)
 Much Ado About Nothing (“Troilus, the first employer of panders, [was] never so
truly turned over and over as my poor self in love”; 5.2.25-9)
 Henry V (“to the spital go, / And from the powdering tub of infamy / Fetch
forth the lazar kite of Cressid’s kind, / Doll Tearsheet”; 2.1.69-72)
 As You Like It (“Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did
what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love”; 4.1.85-8)
 Twelfth Night (“I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir, to bring a Cressida
to this Troilus… Cressida was a beggar”; 3.1.49-53)
Troilus and Cressida the history play?

 Proleptic treatment of the characters’ posthumous reputations:
TROILUS. True swains in love shall in the world to come
Approve their truths by Troilus. When their rhymes,
Full of protest, of oath and big compare,
Wants similes, […]
‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse,
And sanctify the numbers.
CRESSIDA. […] If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself, […]
Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood,
‘As false as Cressid.’
PANDARUS. […] If ever you prove false one to another, since I have taken
such pain to bring you together, let all pitiful goers-between be called to
the world's end after my name: call them all panders. (3.2.169-98)
Troilus and Cressida the history play?

 Similarly proleptic treatment of the war leaders:
ULYSSES. Sir, I foretold you then what would ensue.
My prophecy is but half his journey yet;
For yonder walls, that pertly front your town,
Yond towers whose wanton tops do buss the clouds,
Must kiss their own feet. (4.7.100-4)
 Shakespeare’s source for this plot (though not the
Cressida plot) was Homer’s Iliad…
 This account of Hector and Achilles’ final battle from The Iliad (as
translated by George Chapman shortly after the publication of
Shakespeare’s play) gives a sense of how radical Shakespeare’s treatment
of his source was:
 “Thus forth his [Hector’s] sword flew, sharp and broad, and bore a deadly
weight,
With which he rushed in. And look how an eagle from her height
Stoops to the rapture of a Iamb, or cuffs a timorous hare:
So fell in Hector, and at him Achilles; his mind’s fare
Was fierce and mighty; his shield cast a sun-like radiance,
Helm nodded, and his four plumes shook; and, when he raised his lance,
Up Hesperus rose ’mongst th’ evening stars. His bright and sparkling eyes
Looked through the body of his foe, and sought through all that prise
The next way to his thirsted life. Of all ways, only one
Appeared to him; and that was where th’ unequal winding bone
That joins the shoulders and the neck had place, and where there lay
The speeding way to death; and there his quick eve could display
The place it sought, even through those arms his friend Patroclus wore
When Hector slew him. There he aimed, and there his javelin tore
Stern passage quite through Hector’s neck…” (Book 22, lines 269-83)
 The goddess Athena helps Achilles to defeat Hector in Homer; as in
Shakespeare, Achilles goes on to dishonour Hector’s corpse.
Troilus and Cressida the history play?

 Indeed, Shakespeare seems to present a radically cynical version of
a well-known story:
 Ajax and Achilles bragging and squabbling over status;
 Achilles lounging around watching Patroclus do impressions;
 Ulysses and Nestor manipulating their compatriots’ pride and
insulting them behind their backs;
 Ajax’s complete absence of self-awareness;
 Achilles’ dishonourable murder of the unarmed Hector.
 Consider this deliberate misquotation of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:
TROILUS. Is she worth keeping? Why, she is a pearl
Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships
And turned crowned kings to merchants. (2.2.80-2)
Troilus and Cressida the history play?

 Is Thersites a Falstaff-like character, hovering on the margins of
official history? He gets only the briefest of mentions in The Iliad:
 “A most disordered store
Of words he foolishly poured out, of which his mind held more
Than it could manage; anything with which he could procure
Laughter, he never could contain. He should have yet been sure
To touch no kings; t’ oppose their states becomes not jesters’ parts.
But he the filthiest fellow was of all that had deserts
In Troy’s brave siege. He was squint-eyed, and lame of either foot;
So crookbacked that he had no breast; sharp-headed, where did shoot
(Here and there ’spersed) thin, mossy hair.” (Book 2, 181-9)
Troilus and Cressida the history play?

 In Shakespeare, Thersites presents a subversively cynical view of
this traditionally heroic subject:
 He calls the “whole camp” of the Greeks “those that war for a placket”
[the slit at the top of a woman’s petticoat] (2.3.19) and accuses both
Ajax and Achilles of stupidity and brute force throughout the play;
 He tells Ajax and Achilles that Ulysses and Nestor “yoke you like
draught-oxen and make you plough up the war” (2.1.107-8);
 By the end, he is convinced that “the policy of those crafty swearing
rascals – that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese Nestor and that same
dog-fox Ulysses – is not proved worth a blackberry” (5.4.8-11);
 His frequent curses suggest not just cynicism, but seething anger at the
fact of this war over “a whore and a cuckold” (2.3.71).
Troilus and Cressida the history play?

 Diomedes (not an especially comic character) expresses a similarly
jaundiced view of the war, comparing Paris and Menelaus:
DIOMEDES. …Both merits poised, each weighs nor less nor more,
But he as he: the heavier for a whore.
PARIS. You are too bitter to your countrywoman.
DIOMEDES. She’s bitter to her country. Hear me, Paris.
For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian’s life hath sunk; for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Trojan hath been slain. Since she could speak
She hath not given so many good words breath
As, for her, Greeks and Trojans suffered death. (4.1.67-76)
Troilus and Cressida the tragedy?

 An Aristotelian tragedy sees a high-born, largely
good protagonist brought to adversity in a pattern of
hamartia, anagnorisis and peripeteia, bringing about
catharsis.
 It is easiest to see this pattern in Troilus and Cressida
through the figure of Hector.
 For the Greeks, Hector’s death at the end of the play
heralds the imminent fall of Troy (though at the
play’s conclusion the Trojans remain undefeated).
Hector’s hamartia?

 Hector starts the debate scene
with a position it’s hard to
disagree with:
 He maintains his position as
Troilus and Paris argue that
surrendering Helen would be
dishonourable, but concludes:
HECTOR. Let Helen go. […]
If we have lost so many tenths of
ours
To guard a thing not ours – nor
worth to us,
Had it our name, the value of one
ten –
What merit’s in that reason which
denies
The yielding of her up? (2.2.16-24)
HECTOR. … Hector’s opinion
Is this in way of truth – yet
ne’ertheless,
My spritely brethren, I propend to
you
In resolution to keep Helen still;
For ’tis a cause that hath no mean
dependence
Upon our joint and several dignities.
(2.2.187-92)
Hector’s hamartia?

 The scene’s discourse seems to recognise that there is nothing
inherently honourable about this course of action, but that it is
honourable because people think it is honourable:
TROILUS. What is aught, but as ’tis valued? (2.2.51)
TROILUS. She is a theme of honour and renown,
A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds… (2.2.198-9)
 The scene with Andromache and Cassandra just before the
climax (5.3) re-focuses our attention on Hector’s decisionmaking, in which he re-iterates his decision to fight on the
grounds of his honour, despite Cassandra’s predictions (failing
to heed Cassandra’s warnings is, of course, a trope of classical
tragedy).
Troilus and Cressida the tragedy?

 The Folio title, however, suggests that this is not Hector’s
tragedy but the lovers’.
 Shakespeare’s main source for this plot was Geoffrey Chaucer’s
poem ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (c. 1385).
 Chaucer presents the tale as one of star-crossed lovers, or “fatal
destiny”, and calls the book “little mine tragedy”.
 Chaucer’s poem finishes by noting that Troilus was slain in
battle by Achilles, concluding with a description of Troilus’s
ghost looking down at the earth from heaven, and an
exhortation to young people to eschew “worldly vanity” and
love Christ (Chaucer does not tell us what became of Cressida).
Troilus and Cressida the tragedy?

 The Scottish poet Robert Henryson (c.1425-c.1500) wrote a sequel
of sorts, ‘The Testament of Cresseid’:
 He also describes it as a “tragedy”. He describes reading Chaucer’s
‘Troilus and Criseyde’, and then “a second book where I found the
fatal destiny of Cresseid, who ended wretchedly”.
 Abandoned by Diomedes, Cressida “wandered aimlessly and, some
men say, she became a court whore”.
 Cressida is “oppressed with pain, torment, and incurable sickness”,
and compelled “to survive as a common beggar”.
 She becomes unrecognisable to Troilus, who passes her on his way
back to the city (Troilus is still alive in Henryson’s version), and dies in
poverty, broken-hearted.
 She begs the women of Troy and Greece to learn from her misery that
beauty and honour are transient.
Troilus and Cressida the tragedy?

 We know from the diary of Philip Henslowe that the
Admiral’s Men produced a play called Troilus and
Cressida by Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker in
1599; a plot outline for what is probably this play
survives at the British Library.
 It includes a scene with the stage direction “Enter
Cressida, with beggars”, suggesting that Shakespeare’s
audience may have been familiar with Henryson’s
version of the story.
Troilus and Cressida the tragedy?

 Central plot as a twist on Romeo and Juliet?






Both plays open with a lovesick hero confiding in a friend;
Both heroes soliloquise in an orchard as they anticipate meeting the heroine;
Both describe their love at this moment with metaphors of flight: “From Cupid’s
shoulder pluck his painted wings / And fly with me to Cressid” (T&C, 3.2.13-14);
“With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls, / For stony limits cannot hold
love out” (R&J, 2.1.108-9);
Both heroines blush during the scene that follows;
Both heroines are sceptical of the hero’s overblown romantic vows, and worry that
they are acting too quickly, but confess their love all the same;
Both plays have an aubade scene immediately after the couple’s first and only night
together, in which the parting lovers lament the shortness of the night and the singing
of the lark.
 But Shakespeare’s play does not depict the death of either of its title characters – even
though accounts of both deaths were available to him in his sources, and he refers to
Troilus’ death and Cressida’s beggary in other plays. Why?
References

 Bakhtin, Mikhail (1965) Rabelais and His World, trans.
H. Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
 Bergson, Henri (1900) ‘Laughter’, in Wylie Sypher
(1956) Comedy, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 59190.
 Escolme, Bridget (2005) Talking to the Audience:
Shakespeare, performance, self, London and New York:
Routledge.