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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• Act I, Scene III

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

• Act II, Scene II

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

• Act II, Scene III

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

• Act V, Scene I

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

• Act V, Scene III

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

• 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.