Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida
Secondary Sources | Reading Notes

Notes taken on paper:
Vivian Thomas, The Moral Universe of Shakespeare's Problem Plays, has some good ideas;
Piero Boitani, ed., The European Tragedy of Troilus (ETT) (NY: OUP, 1989) has several excellent papers setting out the story over time.

Charnes, Linda, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge: HUP, 1993), uses all the trendy words, and deviates playfully but also unmercifully from the text, but has some very important points nevertheless:

"The various divisions in the play (the "this is and is not" paradigm) symptomatize the figures' simultaneous resistance to and realization of their infamous roles" (12). "The notorious subject is produced as that which will not, yet must be made to conform to 'the program.' I wish to stress that this is not to reiterate the theoretically stalled trope of 'subversion yet containment'" (17). "And yet, it is precisely these legendary figures who are at great pains to secure their own and each other's identities as they try to lay to rest a haunting sense that they are, and are not, 'themselves.' Triolus' exclamation in the face of Cressida's 'betrayal' is paradigmatic not merely of this moment but of the play as a whole. 'This is and is not' is a phenomenon that haunts Troilus and Cressida, endlessly repeating and forming the knot to which the play again and again returns" (70-71).

"In Troilus and Cressida, the figures' legendary status threatens to crush their representational viability as 'subjects.' Subjectivitity in this play is posited as the disruptive effect of simultaneous resistance, and subjection, to the determining force of famous names. The characters' names instantly convey the roles they are required to play--by Shakespeare, by the audience, and, as we shall see, by each other. Their very existence is authorized by these roles. Consequently, to attempt to avoid or subvert their 'official' functions is to deconstruct [but Charnes later says that S. created something indeconstructible] their own origins, to somehow 'undo' their own conditions of existence and of meaning. It is to engage in a politics of rebellion against a culturally mandated 'self.' If, as I claim, subjectivity is the experience of one's relationship to one's own identity, then in this play the subjectivity of the characters materializes in and through their 'neuroses': through the return, in various forms, of what they attempt to repress" (74-75).

"Our sense of Cressida's 'subjectivity' is produced by the disjunction we perceive in her efforts to inhabit the present through a language that relentlessly thrusts her into the future. But this awareness of the future paradoxically casts every present moment as a past moment. Her life is not only already overt, but already written about, and repeatedly at that. Consequently, her 'subjectivity' can only be ghostly, insofar as it haunts a life felt to be 'done.' Her ghostly subjectivity is her 'neurosis': that which symptomatizes a wish to resist reification while helping to reinforce the conditions that bring it about. This leads Cressida at once to resist ... , and to abandon any sense of control over, her fate. Of course, on one level this is the only sensible thing to do, since as a 'legend' she cannot control the outcome of her story. But on another level such an abandonment is deeply self-defeating, for it constitutes the present moment of love as the certain experience of loss. What she feels for Troilus is always contaminated by her knowledge of the future moment of betrayal. Cressida leaves Troilus not because his suspicions of her make her feel 'unknown,' but for precisely the opposite reason: they make her feel too known--they confirm what she knows must be true (hence false) about herself" (79).

"What is for Troilus a 'betrayal' is for the audience not betrayal at all but rather the meeting of a textual obligation, the paying of a legendary debt. The multiplication of the 'original' scene in the repetitions of the story here intersects with the multiplication of eyes watching this scene, in what becomes an ingenious staging of the theatrical equivalent of intertextual identity" (100).

"The brilliance of this play resides in the way it at once pays its legendary 'debt' and prods us to anticipate that this time, maybe, Troilus will 'stand up' for Cressida and that she will 'hold out' for him. And it takes up the audience's double expectation--at once of seeing what it expects to see and seeing something 'different'--and builds it into the experience of the figures within the world of the play. So that the process of going to the theater to see this famous story reenacted produces the same affective disjunction in the audience [universally?] that it imposes on the characters, who are subjected yet again to their notorious 'fates' (101).

Stiller, Nikki, The Figure of Cressida in British and American Literature: Transformation of a Literary Type (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).

"Troilus and Cressida is a play of disillusionment in which each character is shown to be false to his or her legendary and heroic type" (57).

"Cressida is a complex type, as the characteristics which attend her consistently demonstrate" (4), though as Henryson's Cresseid "finds its way into Shakespeare . . .she loses many of the traits which distinguished her, and becomes, in essence, a second, unsuccessful Helen" (4). Her archetypal characteristics are: "physically attractive, of a fragile or delicate appearance; socially vulnerable, a lone woman in wartime, suspect in her society; erotically inclined; unwilling to betray, but betraying; and, increasingly, self-destructive" (4). S's Cressida is more aggressive than others' Cressida (7). Stiller argues that Cressida "evokes and embodies ambivalence" (16) except in Shakespeare, where he makes her "an unqualified slut" (13) [it would be uncharacteristic, though, of Shakespeare to make her so flat, so I remain unconvinced].

Cressida is torn because of the Oedipal dilemma: she wants to remain faithful to Troilus, but a deeper, more mysterious connection to her father causes her to have to leave him, says Stiller (22, e.g.)--but this does not take Diomedes into account [AK]. Also, this dilemma is much more prominent in non-Shakespearean versions.

"The foreignness of the courtly love code may have intensified the reaction of Shakespeare to its doctrines . . . Troilus and Cressida seems at times an attempt to debunk all the tropes, aims, and attitudes of courtly love at once" (52-53).

"Shakespeare's use of the imagery of disguise [and, I would say, falseness etc. in T/C] points to an underlying conviction that the nature of the world is itself illusory and deceptive; for what is false-seeming if it is not a kind of cuckoldry of the senses, a transgression of the marriage between reality and perception?" (57).

Stiller reads Cressida's recognition of her doubleness, on the surface, as calculated when she speaks to Troilus in III.ii.119 ff.--this is an excellent observation (61-62)--but she may also genuinely recognize doubleness in acting weak while she is strongly manipulative (this holds well with her images of power). Stiller finds her supposed faithfulness as always weak--despite her wit, in these passages she "speaks in stock ideas" (62).

Stiller finds Shakespeare's Cressida rather flat, and claims that once Shakespeare had hollowed her character out, she disappeared from literature (in a society that was ready to have her disappear). So Stiller should have ended her book at page 94, instead of stretching a very vague characterization of the Cressida type to Chopin's Edna and Wharton's Lily (too obviously chosen simply because the literature itself is good). The feminist and Freudian jargon throughout is too heavy, but the first part of the book is admirably helpful even under this weight.

Sacharoff, Mark, "The Traditions of the Troy-Story Heroes and the Problem of Satire in Troilus and Cressida," Shakespeare Studies, VI, ed. J. L. Barrell (Memphis: Vanderbilt, 1970), pp. 125-35.

Many writers claim that Troilus and Cressida is merely a satire in which Shakespeare has burlesqued the Iliad via other interpreters of the Troy story. But the characters appear complex and not hollowed out, in other Renaissance literature--contradicting a "theory of a derogatory tradition" (125). Also the characters are more comically than satirically portrayed by Shakespeare; mere satire attacks the characters with a moralizing intent quite unlike Shakespeare, says Sacharoff. Seeing romantic comedy rather than satire, permits us to see better the nobility of, especially, the Greeks, but also Troilus and Cressida.

Garber, Marjorie, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (NY: Methuen, 1981).

"The Shakespearean novice ... must be separated from a former self before he or she can be [transformed and then] integrated into a new social role" (26). By examining these processes we can understand something about the Shakespearean sense of maturity and adulthood.

If the choice (assuming she has one) is between the father and the lover (cf. p. 39) in Troilus and Cressida, that Cressida literally chooses the father would be more evidence of the so-called Oedipal situation (see Stiller) than of the separation and reintegration. Rather, Troy must symbolize the father, and Greece the lover (even though Calchas is on the Greek side) [AK].

Garber sees Cressida as a child in her "limited capacity for moral understanding and choice--weak, rather than wicked" (46). But she seems pretty self-aware to me.

"The audience's familiarity with 'Troilus,' 'Cressida,' and 'Pandar' as archetypes or literary cliches gives these lines a curious doubleness in time, as if the play we are watching is or might be different from the story so often told before: against all reason we hold to the wish that for once Cressida will be faithful, and Troilus at las8t rewarded in his love. ... But ... the play's characters are locked into their names and roles. ... Neither of them [T or C], of course suspects that their destinies are fixed by history, and doubly sealed by their very names. The spectacle thus presented, of archetypes struggling blindly against their own defined identities, is--like the play itself--at once ironic and tragic" (68-69).

On comparisons, remember "comparisons are odious" and esp. in Shakespeare and Troilus and Cressida.

ETT 199-217 - Agostino Lombardo, "Fragments and scraps: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida": the general point is that Elizabethan reality is too complex (see quote below) for medieval language and classical characters and that Shakespeare shows the inadequacy of both in Troilus and Cressida.

"Reality ... is as Thersites sees it, and as Shakespeare suggests it to be through the language and action of the whole play: brutal, material, and imprisoned by the present. Man must aim at the concrete and the utilitarian and can survive and exert some control over reality only by resisting emotion and the cult of ideals" (210. Cf. Grene's book).

Cressida is "not the traditional symbol of 'frailty,' but a woman whose female condition of subordination and humiliation has created a robust sense of the real, and who will rip away any veil of illusion obstructing her vision. In this sense her gift to Diomedes of Troilus' love-token is not a theatrical sign of fickleness and inconstancy, but represents the painful awareness that the 'sleeve' is an illusory token of an impossible love, and that survival requires a rational and more clear-sighted acceptance of reality" (214-15. Ditto the kissing scene--AK). Ulysses and Troilus and Cressida "know, if nothing else, that survival in the new world means shedding illusions, myths, and false certainties, and trusting ... in truth, experience, and reason" (215).

Briggs, John Channing, Renaissance Troy: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and the Matter of Troy (University of Chicago: Ph.D. dissertation, 1977).

Good treatment of the Troy-story through history, chs. 1-2. Ch. 3 is specifically on Troilus and Cressida.

Brief characterization of Cressida doesn't add much to what we already suspect, 161-62.
Deeds as the test of words, 174 ff., testing virtue, 175.

Mental and active parts--1.3.200--"This disjunction between mental and active parts is accompanied by their mutual deterioriation; the harmful /(182)/ predominance of 'blood' in the will of Ajax and Achilles, and the atrophy of wit in Agamemnon (V.i.51) is the theme of Thersites' outbursts. [...] how physical action is now expressible only in excess. In their 'ignorance' Ajax and Achilles can achieve nothing at Troy (2.3.7-9), while in another sense their mental incapacity leads them to unreasoning violence. [...] The divorce of the "mental" and "active" parts entails excesses of violence and paralysis among the Trojans too. Their conference opening [2.2] ... loss of control and oscillation between opposite excesses" (183).

"It should be noted how much time both of Shakespeare's councils spend diagnosing /(184)/ the malaise at Troy as an internal problem, assuming that men at Troy might cure themselves [via endurance, e.g., Agamemnon]. Likewise, the Trojans earnestly debate questions of conduct with little reference to the [prophecies of doom]. ...
Shakespeare forces his Greeks and Trojans to focus on what they might do themselves to cure the disease of their 'mental' and 'active' parts. The Greek council moves toward isolating the source of that disease in conflict between the faculties, and the Trojans carry further that diagnosis of an inner sickness. Their elaboration is not of course a conscious comment on the ideas of the Greeks, but the pattern of their argument expands the implications of the internal conflict the Greeks have begun to describe.
The Trojans are initially divided into defenders of reason ('the still and mental parts') and advocates of will /(185)/ ('the act of hand'). Whereas the Greeks suffer from these divisions in matters of political authority and unity, the Trojans analyze them in a more specialized context: the problem of determining the value of Helen. Both conflicts are relation in their concern for the proper recognition of 'degree,' whether it be in political life or chivalrous love, and both arise from a sense of division and wayward action because 'degree' is now somehow obscured.
Extreme positions [use] either will or reason in determining whether Helen should be defended. [Troilus vs. Hector.] ... both positions are clearly insufficient, and each one exposes the excesses of the other" (186).

"In its later stages, however, the exchange of views is more complementary and penetrating. Just as Ulysses offers a third position with deeper analysis of the Greek problem, Hector and Troilus develop more complicated and thoughtful statements about the nature of Helen's value, and extend the play's probe into the general statement of character and action at Troy ... by taking both the 'active' and 'mental' parts into account rather than defending only one. [this spills into definitions of value]" (187) [and virtue, 238].

Will might be closer to judgment than to imagination.

"language proves a barrier to passion" 197.

Beware lest a limited will turn idealism into cynicism, 227, 244.

Chivalry needs moderation, 240-41 etc., but moderation has been abandoned by the soldiers. They need "contexts by which heroic chivalry might be nurtured and yet restrained from self-annihilation. [Ulysses's answer] is his conception of an organic harmony and order more fundamental than the conflict between infinite will and material limit" (247) [though Briggs doesn't explain this point very well]. Ulysses points to an overall harmony rather than a conflict.

Degree: kingly authority versus the appetitive will, 243.