Troilus and Cressida

Summary

Troilus and Cressida takes place in the seventh year of the Trojan War, a war that an armed Prologue reduces to a single cause: Helen, Menelaus's queen, sleeping with Paris in Troy. Within the city, the young prince Troilus, Priam's son, is too lovesick to fight for Cressida, daughter of the priest Calchas, who has defected to the Greeks. Her uncle Pandarus acts as go-between, praising Troilus to Cressida and Cressida to Troilus; Cressida privately admits she loves Troilus but holds back because, as she says, men prize the thing they have not yet won. In the Greek camp the commanders confer over the failure of the siege. Ulysses diagnoses the cause in his long speech on degree: when rank and order are neglected, every subordinate copies the contempt of the one above, and the army sickens. The proud Achilles sulks in his tent with Patroclus, mocking the generals in private theatricals. When Hector sends a challenge to single combat, Ulysses rigs the lottery so that the dull Ajax is chosen, hoping to shame Achilles back into the field. In Troy, Priam's council debates whether to return Helen: Hector argues by reason and the law of nations that she should go back, Troilus argues that honour has fixed her value, and Hector yields while Cassandra prophesies the city's burning. Pandarus brings the lovers together for one night in his house. The next morning they learn that Cressida must be exchanged for the captured Trojan Antenor at her father's request. Troilus and Cressida swear fidelity, exchange a sleeve and a glove, and Diomedes escorts her to the Greeks, where the commanders greet her with kisses. Hector and Ajax fight inconclusively, since they are cousins, and Hector feasts in the Greek camp. That night Troilus, guided by Ulysses and watched by the railing Thersites, sees Cressida give Diomedes his own love-token. Troilus can barely accept what he sees: this is, and is not, Cressid. In the final battle, the death of Patroclus brings Achilles back to the fight. He finds Hector resting unarmed after stripping a fine suit of armour from a Greek, and has his Myrmidons kill him and drag the body behind his horse. Troilus announces Hector's death to the Trojans and vows revenge; Cressida's fate is left unresolved, and Pandarus, rejected by Troilus, closes the play with a diseased epilogue bequeathing his ailments to the audience. The play refuses the consolations of epic and romance alike, and it has been classed by turns as history, comedy, tragedy and satire.

Plot or Argument

• Prologue and Act I: Beginning in the middle

  The armed Prologue begins the story in the middle. Troilus pines for Cressida; Pandarus shows Cressida the Trojan warriors returning from the field. In the Greek council, Ulysses delivers the degree speech and describes Achilles and Patroclus parodying their commanders; Aeneas brings Hector's challenge.

• Act II: Two councils

  Thersites rails at Ajax and Achilles. In Troy, Priam's sons debate returning Helen; Cassandra raves of fire; Hector concedes to Troilus and Paris for honour's sake and reveals he has already sent his challenge. The Greeks select Ajax to fight Hector and flatter him to provoke Achilles.

• Act III: The orchard and the snub

  Pandarus sings for Helen and Paris and then brings Troilus and Cressida together in his orchard, where all three swear by their names (true Troilus, false Cressid, Pandar). Calchas asks that his daughter be exchanged for Antenor. The Greek leaders pass Achilles by with disdain, and Ulysses lectures him on Time's wallet of forgotten deeds.

• Act IV: The exchange

  After their night together the lovers learn Cressida must go. They exchange tokens, and Diomedes takes her to the Greek camp, where she is kissed in turn by the generals. Hector and Ajax fight and embrace as kinsmen; Achilles studies Hector and threatens him.

• Act V: The sleeve, and Hector's death

  Troilus watches from hiding as Cressida gives Diomedes his sleeve. Andromache, Cassandra and Priam beg Hector not to fight. In the battle Patroclus dies, Achilles returns, and his Myrmidons kill the unarmed Hector. Troilus vows revenge, spurns Pandarus, and Pandarus speaks the epilogue.

Characters

• Troilus, Trojan prince, Priam's son

  Ardent, idealistic young lover and warrior who holds that value is conferred by desire and honour, and whose faith in Cressida breaks when he watches her with Diomedes.

• Cressida, daughter of Calchas

  Witty and guarded Trojan who loves Troilus, fears her own changeableness, and, once handed over to the Greeks, yields to Diomedes.

• Pandarus, Cressida's uncle

  Garrulous, voyeuristic go-between whose name became a common noun; ends the play aching and diseased.

• Ulysses, Greek commander

  Shrewd political strategist whose speeches on degree and on Time are the play's most famous; he manipulates Ajax and Achilles and guides Troilus to witness Cressida's betrayal.

• Thersites, deformed Greek railer

  Scurrilous commentator who reduces the war to 'wars and lechery' and curses everyone with diseases.

• Hector, Trojan prince, Priam's eldest son

  Chivalrous warrior who argues by reason for Helen's return but chooses honour, spares fallen enemies, and is killed unarmed.

• Achilles, Greek champion

  Proud and idle, he refuses to fight until Patroclus is killed, then has Hector murdered by his Myrmidons.

• Ajax, Greek warrior

  Brawny and vain, flattered into fighting Hector, who turns out to be his cousin.

• Agamemnon, Greek general

  Commander of the Greek army, given to stately speeches about the trials of fortune.

• Nestor, aged Greek counsellor

  Venerable elder whose age and infirmity Patroclus mocks in Achilles' tent.

• Diomedes, Greek commander

  Cool, cynical escort of Cressida who wins her in the Greek camp.

• Cassandra, Priam's daughter, prophetess

  Raving prophet of Troy's burning and of Hector's death, whom the Trojans dismiss as mad.

• Patroclus, Achilles' companion

  Entertains Achilles with parodies of the generals; his death brings Achilles back to battle.

• Helen and Paris, lovers whose affair caused the war

  Shown idle and playful in Act III, the cause of the war treated as a drawing-room entertainment.

• Priam and Andromache, King of Troy; Hector's wife

  Plead with Hector on the morning of the last battle not to fight.

Lessons

• Is value in the thing or in the valuer?

  In the Trojan council Troilus asks what anything is worth except as it is valued; Hector answers that value does not dwell in particular will but in the thing's own merit, and that it is idolatry to make the service greater than the god. The play then tests Troilus's view against Cressida and Helen. It gives students a precise argument to weigh about whether worth is conferred or discovered.

  • Which side of the Hector-Troilus debate does the rest of the play support?
  • Why does Hector, having won the argument, give in to Troilus and Paris?
  • How does Troilus's theory of value prepare for his response to Cressida's betrayal?

• Order, rank and the sick body politic

  Ulysses argues that degree holds together the heavens, schools, cities and armies, and that without it power becomes will, will becomes appetite, and appetite eats itself. The speech is the most famous Elizabethan statement of hierarchical order, but Shakespeare gives it to the camp's chief manipulator in a play where no one behaves well. Students can study the speech as argument and as a move in a political game.

  • Summarize Ulysses' argument in your own words: what follows when degree is taken away?
  • Does Ulysses act according to the order he praises? Look at the rigged lottery for Ajax.
  • Is the problem in the Greek camp a lack of order, a lack of virtue, or both?

• Time's wallet and the hunger for praise

  Ulysses tells Achilles that Time carries a wallet of alms for oblivion and that past deeds are forgotten as fast as they are done. The speech is designed to shame Achilles into action by playing on his vanity. The play asks whether honour that depends on the continual applause of others is honour at all.

  • Why is Ulysses' argument effective on Achilles?
  • How does Achilles finally return to battle, and what does his conduct with Hector show about the honour he sought?
  • Compare Ulysses' 'One touch of nature' line in context with its common use as a proverb about human kinship.

• Vows and the witness of the eye

  In Pandarus's orchard the lovers swear oaths that turn their names into proverbs of truth, falsehood and pandering. In Act V Troilus sees Cressida break faith and cannot reconcile what his eyes report with what his vows required. The scene is watched by three spectators at once, and Cressida's own couplet blames the eye that sways the mind. The play invites discussion of constancy, temptation, and the circumstances that press on a promise.

  • Is Cressida simply faithless, or does the play show forces working on her? Cite IV.ii and IV.v.
  • What does Troilus mean by 'this is, and is not, Cressid'?
  • How do Ulysses' and Thersites' comments during V.ii change the way we see the scene?

• The death of chivalry

  Hector spares fallen enemies and fights by rules of honour; Achilles has him killed while unarmed by a band of Myrmidons and claims the deed. Shakespeare departs from Homer, where Achilles kills Hector in single combat, to show heroism collapsing into murder. Students can ask what the play suggests about war once honour is reduced to reputation.

  • Why does Hector ignore Cassandra, Andromache and Priam on the last morning?
  • How does Shakespeare's account of Hector's death differ from Homer's, and why might he have changed it?
  • Does any character in the play keep faith with an ideal to the end?

Context

The play draws on the medieval Troy tradition rather than on Homer alone: Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and Lydgate's Troy Book, together with George Chapman's translation of seven books of the Iliad (1598). By 1600 'Cressid' was a byword for female inconstancy (Henryson's Testament of Cresseid had shown her ending as a leper) and 'Pandar' for a go-between, as the lovers' oath in III.ii acknowledges. The play was written in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, after the fall of the Earl of Essex, a patron of Chapman's Homer, and amid the 'war of the theatres' among satirical playwrights; some critics connect its sour view of heroism with that atmosphere.

Composition

Usually dated 1601-1602. It was entered in the Stationers' Register in February 1603 'as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens Men'. The 1609 Quarto exists in two states: one title page says it was acted by the King's Majesty's servants at the Globe, while a reissue adds an epistle claiming the play was 'never staled with the stage'. In the First Folio (1623) it was placed between the histories and the tragedies, apparently after a late decision, and is missing from the Folio's catalogue.

Reception

Dryden adapted it (1679) to give it a more conventional tragic shape, with Cressida faithful. The original was rarely staged before the twentieth century. Modern productions, especially after the First and Second World Wars, found in its disillusion with war a contemporary voice, and critics such as F. S. Boas grouped it with the 'problem plays'. The Ulysses speech on degree became central to E. M. W. Tillyard's account of an Elizabethan world picture, though later critics stress its dramatic context.

Comparisons

• The Iliad

  Homer supplies the Greek camp, Achilles' wrath, Thersites' railing (Iliad II) and Hector's death, but Shakespeare deflates nearly all of it: Achilles sulks over wounded pride and a love intrigue rather than the loss of Briseis, and Hector dies unarmed at the hands of the Myrmidons instead of in single combat.

• Troilus and Criseyde

  Chaucer's poem gives Shakespeare the love story, Pandarus and the exchange for Antenor, but Chaucer's narrator pities Criseyde and lingers over the lovers' happiness; Shakespeare compresses the courtship to one night, makes Pandarus coarse, and lets Thersites comment on the betrayal.

• Hamlet

  Written at almost the same time, Hamlet shares Troilus's disgust at female inconstancy and its sense of a diseased state; both plays contain long set speeches on the Trojan war (the Player's Pyrrhus speech in Hamlet, the councils here), and both look at heroic action through a sceptical eye.

• Timon of Athens

  Thersites and Apemantus are Shakespeare's two great railing cynics; both curse with catalogues of disease, but Thersites comments on a war while Apemantus watches a society of flatterers, and Timon himself becomes the railer by the end.

• The Aeneid

  Virgil tells the fall of Troy from the Trojan side as the prelude to Rome's founding; Shakespeare's Troy has no providential future, and Cassandra's prophecy points only to fire.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Disease is the play's dominant metaphor and a running joke. Ulysses diagnoses the Greek army with an 'envious fever' and Agamemnon asks for the remedy; Ajax and the generals debate whether Achilles is ill, melancholic or simply proud, a contrast drawn from humoral thinking. Thersites' curses list the ailments of the age, including the 'Neapolitan bone-ache' (a common Elizabethan name for the French or Neapolitan disease, syphilis) and the 'rotten diseases of the south'. Pandarus complains of a 'tisick' (cough), rheum and aching bones, and ends the play promising to bequeath his diseases to the audience; the 'galled goose of Winchester' alludes to the prostitutes of the Bishop of Winchester's Southwark liberty and to venereal sores, and 'sweat' to the sweating treatment. Cassandra's prophetic raving is treated by her brothers as madness. Retrospective identifications of Pandarus's ailments are readings of period slang, not diagnoses.

• Act I, Scene III

  Ulysses' degree speech describes the army's insubordination as a sickness and an envious fever; Nestor and Agamemnon take up the medical language of diagnosis and remedy.

  Fever Infection
• Act I, Scene III

  Ulysses reports Patroclus mimicking the aged Nestor coughing and fumbling with a palsy, to Achilles' amusement.

  Aging Senescence
• Act II, Scene II

  Cassandra enters raving and prophesying Troy's burning; Troilus dismisses her brain-sick raptures.

  Madness Psychosis
• Act II, Scene III

  Thersites invokes the Neapolitan bone-ache on the camp; the generals debate whether Achilles is sick, melancholy or proud.

  Syphilis Venereal Melancholia Depression Humoral Medicine
• Act V, Scene I

  Thersites' long catalogue of diseases (ruptures, catarrhs, gravel, palsies, imposthumes, sciatica, bone-ache, tetter) hurled at Patroclus.

  Syphilis Venereal
• Act V, Scene III

  Pandarus complains of a tisick, rheum in his eyes and an ache in his bones.

  Aging Senescence Syphilis Venereal
• Act V, Scene X (epilogue)

  Pandarus addresses the 'traders in the flesh' in the audience and promises to bequeath them his diseases, with allusions to Winchester geese and sweating.

  Syphilis Venereal

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the scene the play omits: Cressida's first conversation with her father Calchas after she arrives in the Greek camp.

• Essay

  Ulysses praises order while rigging the lottery for Ajax. Write an essay on whether his degree speech is sincere philosophy, strategy, or both.

• Classroom

  Stage Act V, Scene II with three groups of watchers (Troilus and Ulysses, Thersites, and the class) and discuss how each frame changes the meaning of Cressida's actions.

• Poetry

  Write a sonnet in Hector's voice on the morning of his death, answering Andromache and Cassandra.

Further Reading

• Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer

  The main source for the love plot.

• The Iliad, Homer, trans. George Chapman

  Chapman's Seven Books (1598) were among Shakespeare's sources for the Greek camp.

• The Testament of Cresseid, Robert Henryson

  Fifteenth-century Scottish sequel in which Cresseid becomes a leper.

• The Elizabethan World Picture, E. M. W. Tillyard

  Classic study that made Ulysses' degree speech central to its account of Elizabethan order.

• Troilus and Cressida (Arden Shakespeare, Third Series), David Bevington (ed.)

  Edition with full discussion of date, the 1609 Quarto states and the Folio placement.