Adam Kissel
February 1998

Wesley Wildman, a theologian in the vanguard of religion-and-science studies, describes "a kind of schizophrenic anxiety within the contemporary West . . . between critical and spiritual impulses within human life."^[1] Historians of religion-and-science recognize that this schizophrenia constantly recurs as people try to separate reason, objectivity, facts, empiricism, and the knowable, on one side, from emotion, subjectivity, values, idealism, and the ambiguous, on the other.^[2] The most common counsel and cure, of course, is to reintegrate these supposedly warring sides into an undivided pluralistic self. In a "healed" society, to use Wildman's terms, "spiritual" reasons and "critical" reasons, emotional and rational reasoning alike, figure into formulations both of identity and of plans for action.

In this paper I shall argue that Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida presents just such a "schizophrenic" world (whether or not the technical psychological senses of the term apply here) that begins to heal even as the actual war continues.^[3] The "critical-spiritual" progress in the play consists primarily in a growing recognition that reason and emotion, broadly interpreted in the aggregation of terms above, must be united for success:

The infinite will, in love, in war, and in other kinds of desires, must accept the boundaries of reason and constraint. This perception develops in Troilus and Cressida not just collectively, in group counsel and in physical group activities such as war, but also individually.^[4]

In particular I shall examine the progression of the character of Cressida. Within the play, Cressida, false to herself, rives herself in two by relying on wit in one moment and succumbing to witless love in another. In the Greek camp, she begins to pull herself together in the careful diction of the kissing scene, but in being seduced by Diomedes she learns just how terribly difficult it is to balance emotional and critical reasoning.

Yet Cressida is false to herself in still another way. Intertextually, Cressida already possesses the stereotyped, formalized character that was developed through Chaucer and other medieval writers.^[5] Cressida's free but ambiguous self, the only one she can know in the play, confronts her historically-determined unfaithful self which the play's audience already knows. But the formalized Cressida of the preceding literature is not simply a flat, unfaithful woman;^[6] her stereotype is itself of a more or less complex and more or less blameworthy woman, depending on the tale.^[7] Cressida may become at least partially successful in breaking out of her stereotype by gaining self-knowledge as she acknowledges the problem of her deeply pluralistic self. [One reader challenged this last assertion with a straight "no." But this situation is at least possible, acc. to Robert Alter, p. 58.]

John Channing Briggs' study, Renaissance Troy, provides an excellent and clear analysis of "spiritual" and "critical" reasoning among the two camps in Troilus and Cressida.^[8] Briggs couches the distinction using the terms of the play, characterizing much of the play as a struggle to come to terms with the disjunction between man's "mental and his active parts" (2.3.173; cf. 1.3.200). "This disjunction between mental and active parts," he writes, makes "physical action . . . expressible only in excess" (Briggs 182-83). Briggs also describes this fracture as an illness:

Briggs continues:

One might also add Troilus' increase in patience (cf. 1.1.27 with 5.2.30 ff.) as evidence of his increased ability to keep his "active" parts in check. See also 1.1.4, on man's need to be "master of his heart"; 3.3.192-93, 308-09, on the conflict in Achilles; 4.5.96, where Troilus and Hector are compared on this scale; 5.1.47-49, 52, Thersites' analysis; 5.2.165, using Mars and Venus imagery; and 5.3.16, 19, 23-24, where Hector's wife and sister counsel the persuasions of reason over blind adherence to vows.

Finally, looking at the war in the last act, we see a better conjunction of emotional and critical reasons for going into battle. The "game" between Hector and Ajax in the fourth act becomes serious war in the final act. A battle cannot be won without action, as Thersites often notes. The councils of warriors, figuring out rationally why to fight over Helen for glory, could only go so far. When it comes time for the battle, the men cleave no longer just to words but also to their emotional reactions to past events. This fact is most evident in Troilus and Diomedes, who fight each other over Cressida and over Troilus' horse. In battle, particularly for Hector and Achilles, boldness and cowardice carry far more weight than intellectual rigor.

It is fair to say that the warriors are working through the disjunction of "mental" and "active" parts, or reason and emotion, throughout the play, and that through counsels and through war they do find some opportunities to heal the fracture. It is in this context that we can perform a similar examination of Cressida. But just as we do for the warriors, we should remember that while Cressida expresses a deepening understanding of the difficulty of bringing "spiritual" and "critical" reasons together, she will not necessarily, perhaps until the end, carry a clear understanding of exactly what she is trying to do.

Who is Cressida? We first meet her through Troilus and Pandarus. If we believe them, she is not only "fair," perhaps the fairest of all women (1.1.30, 32-33, 52), but also witty (1.1.47). Troilus formalizes both her beauty and her wit almost from the beginning with banal formulas of praise:

Although Troilus speaks these words, he claims that the formulas belong to Pandarus, formalizing her to an even greater degree.^[9] According to these men, Cressida is to be known as a lovely, witty woman. But should we believe them? Troilus does not want to know the truth about her; he only wants to know that he loves her. He nervously eschews Pandarus's attempt to compare Cressida to Helen's beauty and Cassandra's wit. Although Pandarus claims, "I speak no more than truth," Troilus contradicts him (1.1.64-65).

Finally Pandarus also contradicts himself on both points. He decides that, since she is his kin, he cannot properly comment on Cressida's beauty. Furthermore, though she might be witty, she also is "a fool to stay behind her father."^[10] So how beautiful, how witty, really, is Cressida? Pandarus's answer, to Troilus as well as to the audience, is: "Let her be as she is: if she be fair, 'tis the better for her; an she be not, she has the mends in her own hands. . . . I will leave all as I found it, and there an end" (1.1.66-68, 88-89). Let us take this advice and let Cressida "be as she is." In the course of examining Cressida, we shall learn what it means that "she has the mends in her own hands."

Cressida appears in person in the following scene. She introduces herself shrewdly with three questions.^[11] The first question is about identity: "Who were those went by?" (1.2.1). It is hard to believe that Cressida recognizes neither Helen nor the Queen, the two most important women in the city, yet she does ask about them and then about their progress: "And whither go they?" (2). For this reason we are alerted, again, to the prospect that Cressida's own identity and progress shall weigh heavily in the play.^[12] More telling is her third question, regarding Hector: "What was his cause of anger?" (11). When Pandarus asks her what she has been talking about, she makes sure to note that she has been interested in Hector's anger (52). Here Cressida shows that she is keen to understand not just an emotion, but the rational cause of that emotion.

Cressida's interest in the reason behind Hector's emotion is highlighted by the fact that everyone else already seems to have determined the reason. To answer her question, Alexander begins by saying, "The noise goes, this: . . ." (12), as though Cressida is the last one to hear the rumor. Pandarus sports a similar response when Cressida reminds him of Hector's anger: "I know the cause too" (55). At this point Cressida and all of Troy, with the exception of Troilus in his refusal to consider Cressida's attributes rationally, seem interested in the same question: what reasons lie behind an emotion?

In the subsequent exchange between Cressida and Pandarus, she tenaciously insists on the separate identities of Hector and Troilus, following the line of Pandarus ("let her be as she is," 1.1.66) in the first scene. While Pandarus tries to claim only that "Hector is not Troilus in some degrees" (1.2.69), Cressida counters, "he is himself. . . . He shall not need [Troilus' wit], if he have his own."^[13] Likewise Troilus "is not Hector"; each man has his own beauty (1.2.74, 90). Cressida's repartee is surely enough to establish her wittiness (which substantiates Troilus' and Pandarus's assertions about her). But more important, in the introduction of the words "wit" and "beauty," we again recognize the seeds of coming investigation of what it means to have an identity including both wit and beauty, both reason and sentiment.^[14]

This give-and-take about the identities of Troilus and Hector is easier for Cressida in theory than in practice. When Pandarus asserts various positive qualities of the Trojans returning from battle, for the most part Cressida seems unengaged in knowing their distinguishing characteristics, and uninterested in Pandarus's brazen adjectives. Pandarus is speaking almost to the wind. But at two points Cressida is embarrassed at Pandarus's words, and in both cases Pandarus has been referring to Troilus. This anxiety, when Pandarus refers to the one she loves, parallels Troilus' anxiety in the previous scene. Troilus did not want to be reminded of Cressida's virtues, shying away from too much consideration of her identity. Cressida may be having the same reaction, but, wanting to keep her love for Troilus a secret, she couches her reaction in terms of embarrassment at Pandarus's shouting of praises. It is one thing to talk and reason about the one she loves from afar, another thing to try to do so as her emotions swell in his presence. Yet out of his presence, Cressida regains her wits. She challenges Pandarus's wild assertion that Troilus is better "than Agamemnon and all Greece" (247-48), and her sharp tongue returns (259 ff.). At this early point in the play, Cressida is still avoiding the problem of integrating these two contrasting modes.

Cressida's concluding soliloquy,^[15] as we would expect, reveals the most about Cressida's own understanding of herself at this early stage. Out of the presence of Troilus, Cressida can make a critical assessment of her position. First she coolly notes that Pandarus has been doing Troilus' work of wooing (285-86), and then realizes that she has done her own wooing (287-88). If "things won are done" (290) and Cressida is already won, she is already done; in other words her love is "firm" (297) and needs no more wooing. Cressida realizes that her heart has all the emotional gear that it needs, but that her critical faculties are not able to keep pace when Troilus is near. The danger of succumbing to immoderate passion, when that succumbing is acknowledged, is that the balance of power shifts away from the one successfully wooed: "Achievement is command; ungain'd, beseech" (296).^[16] Until Cressida can moderate her passions, she vows to hold off; only Cressida can know that she is won and done.

Likewise, Troilus, in his own two-part soliloquy two acts later (3.2.17-28, 35-39), fears that in love he will lose the critical faculty of discernment: "I shall lose distinction in my joys" (26). But even though Cressida is present only in his imagination, Troilus is nearly all emotion (17-18); he does not choose to hide his giddiness. Troilus is won and done, powerless and "at unawares" before his idealized conception of Cressida (3.2.35-39). We next meet Cressida just after this soliloquy. In this scene she continues trying to incorporate critical reasoning into her love story with Troilus. Let us follow the scene.

Cressida asks Troilus to enter her room, upon which Troilus says, "how often have I wisht me thus!" (62). Great ambiguity lies in the word thus. Troilus probably means that his wish was not only to enter her room but to consummate his love for her, and possibly also to get married. When Cressida responds that the gods have granted his wish (63), she is agreeing to far more than what has been made explicit. Catching herself in this mistake, she cuts off abruptly in mid-sentence. The next time she speaks, she returns to her usual wit. In answer to Troilus' inquiry about her sudden change of tone (her "abruption," 65), she returns with a cryptic "More dregs than water, if my fears have eyes" (67). Cressida has given eyes to her fears; in other words she has been able to start to bring critical thoughts into her conversation with Troilus. Troilus does not understand how a person can "see truly" (that is, use the critical faculties of the mind) in the midst of fear (68-69), but Cressida knows what the solution can be: "Blind fear, that seeing reason leads, [can find] safer footing" (70-71). In this early part of their conversation, Cressida shows her awakening understanding of the need for critical reasoning about her emotions.

A person who does not moderate emotions with reason can only become a monster. Troilus says:

"Monstruosity" describes the character of a "monster," that is, a being made up of incongruent parts. In Troilus' idealism, he suggests that the lover strains for infinite satisfaction of desire, but that only hard reality prevents the lover from realizing his desire to "live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers" (77). Troilus characterizes that lover as a monster whose heart lives in ideals and whose body lives in the world. For Troilus, the impossible solution is for reality to give way. Cressida, in contrast, seeks that very ability to bound her desires within limits. To her the monster is the lover who speaks of taming tigers but who does not even accomplish his own potential. Such a one has "the voice of lions and the act of hares" (88-89).^[17] In Cressida's view, the solution is to use critical reasoning to know and then achieve one's full potential, no more and no less. A person must tame the tiger of emotions not with idealistic hopes but with the whip of reason. The goal of integration is to become a unified creation, not monster, lion, or hare, but human.

Although Cressida may recognize such a solution here, she has yet to act on it. She may not yet be capable of doing so. While she was caught in banter and wordplay with Troilus, she seemed able enough to moderate her emotions and keep the upper hand in their conversation. But just as they are about to enter the room, Pandarus arrives, and while Pandarus and Troilus are talking about wooing and love, Cressida's passions are building. Finally she bursts forth with boldness: "I have loved you night and day/For many weary months. . . . I was won, my lord,/With the first glance that ever--" (115-16, 118-19).^[18] Again, once she has started to blab, she catches herself and, nearly thinking aloud, explains how she needs to keep mastering her overflowing love. As Troilus remains sweetly silent, Cressida finds that she cannot, from one sentence to the next, keep herself in control: "your silence . . . from my weakness draws/My very soul of counsel!" (133-34). Without such counsel, Cressida is "unsecret" to herself and too quickly tells Troilus of her deep infatuation with him. Cressida knows that she is divided from herself; her emotions run ahead of what reason would counsel.

Her first attempt at refuge is to seek physical escape: "I am ashamed;--O heavens! What have I done?/For this time will I take my leave" (139-40). But this recourse would be of no use, for as Troilus says, "You cannot shun/Yourself" (144-45). She then does try to separate from herself: "Let me go and try" (145). She casts her personality as double, partly the self who passionately loves Troilus, partly the self who would leave him rather than lose her wits. But in this scene it is too late; she admits that she has already lost her wit in this encounter. Here she is nearly ready to give up, for "to be wise and love/Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above" (154-55).

Accepting defeat for the moment, Cressida is all the more willing to cast judgment to the wind and promise full and everlasting faithfulness. At exactly the same time she vows not to be false to Troilus, she accepts her falseness to herself. For the moment, for the night with Troilus, she becomes the untamed monster who pledges all but does not meet even her own potential for harmonizing her emotions with reason.^[19]

The practical implication of this failure, as Cressida recognizes throughout, is that in sacrificing her wit she loses her power over Troilus. In the morning after their night together, Cressida realizes that she has no way to keep Troilus in bed. But if she had "held off . . . then [Troilus] would have tarried" (4.2.17-18). Even worse for Cressida, Troilus has gained a kind of power over her. Once wooed and won, Cressida is in a sense at the command of Troilus (cf. "achievement is command," 1.2.296).^[20] Troilus gains some degree of responsibility for her. This responsibility is recognized by, for example, Aeneas, who thinks it appropriate to tell him (though Troilus has virtually no say in the matter) that Cressida is to be given to the Greeks, and Paris, who gives Troilus the responsibility of telling her and preparing her to leave (4.3).

When Cressida is told about this part of her fate by Pandarus, in advance of Troilus' message, she again responds in emotion rather than with wit. She undoes her ties to her father; she calls out to the gods and the forces of time and death; she says that she would prefer extremes of bodily harm to the pain of leaving Troilus and Troy (4.2.96-111). Pandarus exhorts her to "be moderate, be moderate" (4.4.1), but her reason is scarcely to be found:

Cressida uses her capacity to think only in order to compare her degree of grief to her degree of love. In both grief and love, she has let her emotions eclipse her reason:

Cressida is suggesting that her love and her grief are so great that any attempt of hers to reason with herself would be an injustice to the depth of her emotion.

Cressida's privileging of "spiritual" reasons over "critical" reasons for her actions in part brings Troilus to emphasize that Cressida ought to be true to him while she is in Greece. If Cressida could be counted on to act rationally and only out of love for him--and, correctly or not, Troilus does not doubt her love--she easily could remain true to him. But if she lets herself be seduced by the "Grecian youths [who] are full of quality" (4.4.76) and who are more subtle than Troilus (85-88), she will have presumed falsely on her power to resist (96-97). It is clear that Troilus suspects how easily Cressida can lose her intellectual resistance when her emotions blossom.

By the end of the fourth scene of the act, Cressida has reconciled herself to being lost to the Greeks. By the time she reaches them, she is likely to have developed several concurrent motivations. Practically she needs to protect herself in her new situation as a beautiful young woman alone among many men. She may need the help of some of the men to protect her from the others. Emotionally, she has a need to make up for the loss of her lover and her homeland. Romantically, she may be intrigued by Troilus' assertions about the Greeks' virtues and good qualities, but she also firmly remembers her vow to be true. She probably is still wearing Troilus' sleeve, which she agreed to wear as a token of her faithfulness. Finally, she is meeting the nobility of Greece, the king and his retinue, a group of smart and witty, if also sometimes impulsive, great men. If Cressida is going to hold her own among them, she must quickly learn how to be witty, alluring, and coy to exactly the right degrees, at the same time that she must overcome her sadness over her losses. She must use every faculty she possesses, intellectual and emotional.

This is a very difficult task. Furthermore, from the Greeks' point of view, Cressida is in some sense owned by the Greeks; they received her in a fair trade on behalf of her father. To them she is a "sweet lady" (4.5.18) who has lost a homeland but who will be reunited with her father. She enters the scene silently, which in itself can be endearing (as we saw when Troilus was silent in Cressida's presence, 3.2.133). Cressida's first encounter with the Greeks must be interpreted in light of her complex situation and her competing needs.

If Achilles is correct in identifying Cressida's lips as especially pale (4.5.24), it is likely, especially given Cressida's situation, that Cressida is afraid of the men who have begun to kiss her. They are in control, having decided that "'Twere better she were kist in general" (21). But once Patroclus lightens the scene with his jokes about Paris, Cressida evidently recognizes that wit counts as good currency in the Greek camp. Knowing the situation among Helen, Paris, and Menelaus, she can identify with the Greeks' humor, which emboldens her to try some wit of her own. Since Menelaus has been the butt of the jokes so far, she can presume that she is safe to continue them. Her banter with Menelaus, then, serves her purposes very well: she gains some respect among the Greeks, and she keeps their interest up while at the same time avoiding another kiss.

When she applies her wit to Ulysses' suit for a kiss, she is equally successful in avoiding a kiss, and Nestor correctly identifies her as "A woman of quick sense" (54). But Ulysses reads her, perhaps more shrewdly, as opportunistic. Since Ulysses has just been rejected by Cressida, we must discount his meaner words,^[21] but Ulysses has identified a new quality in Cressida:

Even though Ulysses reads her actions as merely wanton, in our most positive analysis we could declare that Cressida indeed has utilized every part of her body and mind, using both critical thinking and spiritual finesse, to form her "language" and her plans for action. While Ulysses paints Cressida simply as a false woman, using a formalized interpretation of her character, it is clear that Cressida has begun to move beyond this formalization as she has come to know the difficulty of making choices in complex situations.

Both before and after the kissing scene, Diomedes has had ample opportunity to remain alone with Cressida. He had been made her guardian (see 4.4.110 ff.); at the outset of their nighttime rendezvous, they both mention this part of their relationship (5.2.7-8). Even so, it is unclear why Calchas so easily lets Cressida slip off into the night with a man she has only recently met. Probably he continues to be the kind of father who abandons his daughter, as he had done when he had abandoned Troy. But perhaps Cressida has explained her complex situation to him; perhaps he agrees that she may need a Greek protector; perhaps she has told him how deeply she desires a replacement for Troilus. From her ensuing conversation with Diomedes, Cressida seems to have been having doubts about furthering a relationship with Diomedes; perhaps she told Calchas that she would be meeting Diomedes in order to break her ties to him. In any case, let us follow the scene as Cressida and Diomedes continue whispering in the dark.

Cressida evidently had pledged love for Diomedes (cf. 5.2.84), but will not show it openly. In light of Cressida's difficult situation in the Greek camp, her desire for secrecy may arise because she does not want to lose Diomedes' support even while she tries to remain true to Troilus. In other words, she loves Troilus; at best she can be infatuated with Diomedes; but more likely, her attraction to Diomedes is mingled with her needs to find an emotional replacement for Troilus and possibly to find sexual protection in the camp. In Diomedes' view, though, he sees a Cressida wavering between overtures of love and halting rejections. He senses this disjunction and warns her, "let your mind be coupled with your words" (5.2.16), encouraging Cressida to better match her "active parts" to her "mental parts."

Diomedes has spoken all too well, for Cressida is becoming aware of just how difficult her decision-making has become. Can she keep Diomedes without losing Troilus once and for all? Diomedes seems to be angry with her limitation of their actions, and time after time he threatens to leave her. Can she say just the right things to him in order to protect all of her interests? When she asks Diomedes to "tempt me no more to folly" (19), she expresses a realization that her mind no longer ought to be controlled by her emotions when she is in an emotionally rich situation. Cressida must make rational decisions that regard or purposefully disregard her deepest emotions.

Diomedes makes the difficulty of Cressida's situation more stark when he insists that she fortify her expressions of love, first with a token of surety and then with a promise to let him see her the next night. Up to this point in their conversation, Cressida has been able to reason fairly well; when she strokes Diomedes' cheek at exactly the right time in order to keep encouraging him to stay, her action is likely to be not passionate but calculating. Symbolically, too, her ability to reason with delicate finesse comes because she is out of the presence of Troilus--she is not wearing Troilus' sleeve. Once she does bring the sleeve into their conversation, though, her emotions and her memory of her love for Troilus begin to overtake her:

The sleeve's physical presence in Diomedes' hand gives Cressida direct evidence that she is being false to Troilus and false to her own love for Troilus. When she grabs back the sleeve, she impulsively tries to undo her error. Her reason tells her that she cannot be true to Diomedes without being false to Troilus, yet her emotion will not yield.

From this point forward, now that Cressida has let her emotions run more freely, she must filter them through critical reason in order to salvage what she can of her two relationships. She accomplishes this task with a mixture of success and failure. When she considers the emotional import of the sleeve, she imagines Troilus sighing, kissing her glove, thinking of his beloved Cressida, which angers Diomedes. But three times, when Diomedes asks questions about the sleeve, opening a chance for Cressida to use her wit, she "sharpens" (76); for example:

In these brief moments, Cressida has sublimated her sad feelings for Troilus into witty rejoinder in order to make clear her emotional resistance to Diomedes' attentions.

Probably because Cressida has become clear about her resistance, Diomedes does not take her protestations well, so Cressida then finally relents and lets Diomedes take the sleeve. In doing so she yields to the exigencies of her situation. She seems to be implicitly acquiescing to the fact that she cannot be true to both men, and in the Greek camp, her situation dictates that she must remain true to Diomedes. But she maintains a caveat:

Despite her continually expressed need to stay in the good graces of Diomedes, she cannot help asserting that her emotions for Troilus have not abated and that she may prove false to Diomedes after all. Cressida sees ever more clearly that she must keep her emotions for Troilus in check if she is not also to lose Diomedes.

Therefore when Diomedes tries to claim the remainder of his objective, that is, gaining Cressida's agreement that they will see each other the next night, Cressida finds her emotional resistance weakened. Despite her love for Troilus, emotions which argue to the contrary, she puts up no fight. She accepts her doom at the same time that she emotionally decries her critical response, speaking partly to Diomedes and partly to herself: "Ay, come:--O Jove!--do come:--I shall be plagued" (106). Cressida moves back and forth in her complex response, with one eye fixed in love on Troilus, while her heart's eye sees the practical necessities of the matter (108-09).^[22]

In being false to Troilus, as she complains in her final soliloquy, Cressida knows full well that she is taking an action that she has the resources to dread but not rationally to prevent. As Thersites puts it, Cressida is saying, "My mind is now turn'd whore" (115). In other words, just as the whore is not concerned with beauty but with calculation in order to achieve a nasty purpose, Cressida's reasoning has chosen falseness to Troilus, whom she loves, in order to remain true to Diomedes. In these words, Cressida is bitterly accepting the difficult choice she has made. She could have been true to her eyes, which had sought beauty and which idealistically had encouraged Cressida to remain true to Troilus. But her heart's eye had dictated that critical reasoning must keep Cressida from her previously common error of being overcome by her feelings for Troilus. In this reading of her final words, then, we need not determine whether Cressida was also physically attracted to Diomedes. It is enough to recognize that she has learned the hard method of filtering emotional reasoning through tough-minded critical thinking.

Cressida has made a hard, if ugly, decision, perhaps correctly, to cleave to Diomedes. But this tragic resolution leaves a sour taste in one's mouth. Cressida, in horror, watched herself betray her lover. Cressida has tried to tame herself; like the false lover, she has tried to tame a tiger, but the process has consumed her. The advance that Shakespeare's Cressid has made over her previous instantiations in literature is that, horrible as her decision is, she likely knows that she would make the same decision again. She now knows how the emotions can deceive the mind. She now knows how very hard it is to balance complex motivations in a complex situation. She knows her own deeply pluralistic self, a self which needs to make good use of both emotional reasons and critical reasons. In this sense she is less particularly false than any previous Cressid, for she expresses knowledge of an internal falseness that is inherent not just in herself but in the Greeks and Trojans and, as Wesley Wildman notes, a majority of our Western consciousness.