THE STORY
During the Trojan War, Troilus, younger son of Priam, King of Troy, fell in love with the lovely and unapproachable Cressida, daughter of Calchas, a Trojan priest who had gone over to the side of the Greeks. Troilus, frustrated by his unrequited love, declared to Pandarus, a Trojan lord and uncle of Cressida, that he would refrain from fighting the Greeks as long as there was such turmoil in his heart. Pandarus added to Troilus’s misery by praising the incomparable beauty of Cressida; Troilus impatiently chided Pandarus, who answered that for all it mattered to him Cressida could join her father in the Greek camp.
Later, Pandarus overheard Cressida and her servant discussing Hector’s anger at having received a blow in battle from Ajax, a mighty Greek warrior of Trojan blood. Pandarus extolled Troilus’s virtues to Cressida, who was all but indifferent. As the two conversed, the Trojan forces returned from the field. Pandarus praised the several Trojan warriors—Aeneas, Antenor, Hector, Paris, Helenus—as they passed by Cressida’s window, all the while anticipating, for Cressida’s benefit, the passing of young Troilus. When the prince passed, Pandarus was lavish in his praise, but Cressida appeared to be bored. As Pandarus left her to join Troilus, Cressida soliloquized that she was charmed, indeed, by Troilus, but that she was in no haste to reveal the state of her affections.
In the Greek camp, meanwhile, Agamemnon, commander of the Greek forces in Ilium, tried to put heart into his demoralized leaders. Old Nestor declared that the seven difficult years of the siege of Troy had been a real test of Greek stamina. It was the belief of Ulysses that the difficulties of the Greeks lay in a lack of order and discipline, not in Trojan strength. He reminded his fellow Greek leaders that the disaffection of mighty Achilles and the scurrilous clowning of Patroclus, a Greek leader, had provoked disorder in the Greek ranks. Even Ajax, usually dependable, had become fractious, and his follower, the deformed Thersites, embarrassed the Greeks with his taunts.
As the Greek leaders conferred, Aeneas delivered to them a challenge from Hector, who in single combat would defend the beauty and the virtue of his lady against a Greek champion. When the leaders went their several ways to announce the challenge to Achilles and to other Greeks, Ulysses and Nestor decided that the only politic action to take, the pride of Achilles being what it was, was to arrange somehow that Ajax be chosen to fight Hector. Ajax, Achilles, and Patroclus heard of the proclamation, but tended to disregard it. Their levity caused the railing Thersites to break with them.
In Troy, meanwhile, Hector was tempted to concede to a Greek offer to end hostilities if the Trojans returned Helen to her husband, King Menelaus. Troilus chided his brother and Helenus for their momentary want of resolution. As the brothers and their father, Priam, discussed the reasons for and against continuing the war, Cassandra, prophetess and daughter of Priam, predicted that Troy would be burned to the ground by the Greeks. Hector heeded her warning, but Troilus, joined by Paris, persisted in the belief that the war, for the sake of honor, must be continued. Hector, although aware of the evil the Trojans were committing in defending Paris’s indefensible theft of Helen from her husband, conceded that for reasons of honor the fighting must continue.
The Greek leaders approached Achilles, who had kept to himself since his quarrel with Agamemnon. Refusing to confer with them, Achilles retired into his tent and sent his companion, Patroclus, to make his apologies. Achilles persisted in refusing to deal with the Greek commanders, who sought in him their champion against Hector. Ulysses played on the pride of Ajax with subtle flattery and convinced this Greek of Trojan blood that he should present himself as the Greek champion in place of Achilles.
In the meantime, Pandarus had prepared the way for a tryst between Troilus and Cressida by securing the promise of Paris and Helen to make excuses for Troilus’s absence. He brought the two young people together in his orchard, where the pair confessed to each other their undying love. Cressida declared that if she were ever false, then all falsehood could forever afterward be associated with her name. Pandarus witnessed these sincere avowals of faith and himself declared that if Troilus and Cressida did not remain faithful to each other, then all go-betweens would be associated with his name. These declarations having been made, Pandarus led the young people to a bedchamber in his house.
In the Greek camp, Calchas, Cressida’s father, persuaded Agamemnon to exchange Antenor, a Trojan prisoner, for Cressida, whose presence he desired. Diomedes, a Greek commander, was appointed to effect the exchange. Planning to ignore Achilles, the Greek leaders passed the warrior with only the briefest recognition. When he demanded an explanation of that treatment, Ulysses told him that fame was ephemeral and that great deeds were soon forgotten. Fearful for his reputation now that Ajax had been appointed Greek champion, Achilles arranged to play host to the unarmed Hector after the contest.
Diomedes returned Antenor to Troy, and, at dawn, he was taken to Pandarus’s house to escort Cressida to the Greek camp. When Troilus and Cressida learned of Diomedes’s mission, Troilus appealed unsuccessfully to the Trojan leaders to allow Cressida to remain in Troy. Heartbroken, he returned to Cressida and the young couple repeated their vows in their farewells. Troilus then escorted Cressida and Diomedes, who commented on Cressida’s beauty, as far as the city gates. When Diomedes and Cressida encountered the Greek leaders outside the walls, Cressida was kissed by Agamemnon, Menelaus, Nestor, Patroclus, and others. Ulysses observed that she appeared wanton.
Warriors on both sides assembled to watch Hector and Ajax fight. The two companions clashed for only a moment before Hector desisted, declaring that he could not harm Ajax, his cousin. Ajax accepted Hector’s magnanimity and invited the Trojan to join, unarmed, the Greek commanders at dinner. Hector, accompanied by Troilus, was welcomed among the Greeks with many warm compliments, but Achilles, meeting Hector, rudely mentioned that part of Hector’s person in which he would one day inflict a mortal wound. Stung by Achilles’s pride and lack of manners, Hector declared hotly that he would destroy all of Achilles at one stroke. The result was an agreement to meet in combat the next day. Ajax managed to calm heated tempers, however, and the feasting began.
Troilus, anxious to see his beloved Cressida, asked Ulysses where he might find Calchas, and Ulysses promised to be his guide. After the banquet, they followed Diomedes to Calchas’s tent, where Cressida met him and, in affectionate overtures toward Diomedes, revealed to the hidden Troilus that she had already all but forgotten him. As she gave Diomedes, as a token of her love, a sleeve that had belonged to Troilus, compunction seized her for a moment. She quickly succumbed, however, to Diomedes’s charms and promised to be his at their next meeting. Diomedes left, vowing to kill in combat the Trojan whose sleeve he would be wearing on his helmet. Troilus, unable to believe that Cressida was the woman whom he loved so passionately, returned to Troy. He vowed to take the life of Diomedes.
As the new day approached, Hector was warned by Andromache, his wife, and by his sister Cassandra not to do battle that day; all portents foretold disaster. When their words proved ineffectual, King Priam tried vainly to persuade Hector to remain within the walls. During the battle, Diomedes unhorsed Troilus and sent the horse as a gift to Cressida. Despite his overthrow, Troilus continued to fight heroically. Hector appeared to be, for his part, invincible. When Patroclus was severely wounded in the action, Achilles, enraged, ordered his followers, the Myrmidons, to stand ready. As the action subsided, and Hector was unarming himself at the end of the day, the Myrmidons, at Achilles’s command, closed in on brave Hector and felled him with their spears.
Troilus announced to the retiring Trojan forces that Hector had been killed by treachery and that his body, tied to the tail of Achilles’s horse, was being dragged around the Phrygian plain. As he made his way to the gates, he predicted general mourning in Troy and expressed his undying hatred for the Greeks. He encountered Pandarus, whom he abruptly dismissed as a cheap panderer, a man whose name would be infamous forever.
CRITICAL EVALUATION
In the Folio of 1623 Troilus and Cressida is described as a tragedy; in the Quarto it is called a history; in most structural respects it seems to be a comedy, though a very grim and bitter one. Critics have frequently classified it, with Measure for Measure (1604–5) and All’s Well That Ends Well (16024), as a “problem play,” because the play poses a problem in literary taxonomy as well as it sets out to examine a problematic thesis. Written approximately between Hamlet (1600–1601) and Othello (1604), during the period of the great tragedies, the play is so full of gloom and venom, so lacking in the playfulness and idealism of the earlier comedies, that critics have attributed its tone and manner either to a period of personal disillusionment in William Shakespeare’s life or to his preoccupation at that time with tragic themes.
There is no external and little internal evidence for the biographical conclusion. It may be, however, that, in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare has been affected by the surrounding tragedies. It is as if he took the moral ambiguities and potential chaos of the worlds of the tragedies but ruled out the possibility of redemption and transcendence through heroic suffering. Instead, he peoples this tenuous world with blowhards, cynics, and cowards and ruthlessly lets them muddle through for themselves. The world of King Lear (1605), for example, is on the brink of chaos, but at least there is the sublimity of Lear to salvage it. The world of Troilus and Cressida has no one to shore up its structure and challenge disintegration.
Although there were many contemporary versions of the relevant Homeric materials available to Shakespeare, it is clear that he was also familiar with the story as told by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1382). Chaucer’s world, however, was full of innocence, brilliance, and hope. If the medieval Criseyde behaves shabbily, it is only the result of feminine weakness and long importuning. If Chaucer’s Troilus is naïve and a victim of courtly idealism, at least he can finally sort things out from an Olympian perspective. Shakespeare does not give his lovers, or the rest of the Greek heroes, this sympathy or opportunity but drags them through a drab and seamy degradation.
Shakespeare begins with characters traditionally honored for their nobility, but he does nothing to develop them even for a fall. He simply proceeds to betray them, to show them up, and thereby to represent the extreme precariousness of their world. The bloom of courtly love is gone as is the Christian optimism of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare seems to be reflecting not a personal situation but a late Renaissance malaise as he has his characters impotently preside at the dissolution of the revered old order.
In Chaucer, Troilus’s love and woe had been instrumental in his maturation and, ultimately, in his salvation. Shakespeare’s Troilus is more frankly sensual and his liaison is correspondingly sordid. He does not benefit from an ennobling passion, nor is he allowed to transcend his folly. He is not even accorded the dignity of a significant death. He fights on in pointless, imperceptive frenzy.
Cressida is also debased. She has fallen from courtly heroine to common whore. Perhaps Shakespeare borrowed her degradation from Robert Henryson’s highly moralistic The Testament of Cresseid (1532), in which the heroine sinks to prostitution. In any case, she does not have the initial austerity and later reserve that dignifies the passion and fall of Chaucer’s Criseyde. Her language, her every movement, suggests that she is more wanton than a courtly heroine. Even as she enters the Greek camp, her promiscuous behavior betrays her, and her quick submission to Diomedes confirms what has been suspected all along. As if the lovers could not behave foully enough by themselves, Shakespeare provides them with Pandarus, as go-between and commentator, to further sully the relationship.
In Chaucer, the Trojan War had provided a fatalistic backdrop that enhanced the progress of the tragic love. In Shakespeare, the Homeric heroes serve only to discredit themselves and to amplify the chaos. Mark Van Doren has pointed out that, if Pandarus’s role is to degrade the lovers, “the role of Thersites is to cheapen the heroes.” They, however, do not need much help from their interlocutor. For example, when Ulysses gives his famous speech on order, one is more struck by the pointless bombast and strangulated rhetoric than by erudition. One is led to suspect that this world is out of touch with its ordering principles and that it is vainly trying to recapture them or to preserve their appearance with tortured language.
Similarly, when Achilles delivers his set speech in Act III, it has all of the bitterness but none of the grace of Lear’s corresponding speech. This Achilles is a petulant sybarite and the world is in trouble if he is its hero. The bombast, the irritability, and the inconsequentiality are all-pervasive. Agamemnon and Nestor are nothing more than windbags. When the Greeks meet to discuss plans, or the Trojans meet to discuss returning Helen, the conferences both quickly degenerate into pompous vacuity.
The moral and political disintegration is reflected in the shrill and strident language of the play. The diction, which is jawbreakingly full of inkhornisms (or Latinate pretentious language), and the rhetorical excesses reinforce the notion that the characters are spinning out of control, no longer able to gain control of their language, no longer able to give even verbal order to their frustrations. The result is a play that can easily seem tedious. Consequently, Troilus and Cressida is rarely performed. It has, however, fascinated the critics. What all of this suggests is that the play is more interesting than appealing, more intriguing than satisfying, as it chronicles the demise of a world in which no one is left with the moral stature to make a last stand.
—Edward E. Foster
FILM ADAPTATIONS
1981–82 BBC Shakespeare Production
Directed by Jonathan Miller, this production featured Anton Lesser as Troilus; Suzanne Burden as Cressida; Charles Gray as Pandarus; Anthony Pedley as Ajax; Kenneth Haigh as Achilles; Benjamin Whitrow as Ulysses; and Jack Birkett as Thersites.
Henry Fenwick, in his essay on “The Production” for the booklet the BBC issued to accompany the first broadcast of this play, noted that Jonathan Miller, this play’s director and producer, found support in Renaissance artwork for his decision to avoid an authentic Greek classical look for the production: Renaissance artists often dressed classical figures in Renaissance clothes. Miller’s decision was bolstered by the medieval origins of the story (18). Set designer Colin Lowrey helped design sets that would emphasize the play’s focus on moral arguments and that would also be more artificial than realistic in appearance, with an emphasis on plain wood (19–20) as well as collages and resemblances to a painting of a World War I landscape and other modern references to war (20). Lowrey and costume designer Alun Hughes were eclectic in their approach, especially in their creation of dirty tents (20–21). This production’s Greek costumes tended to be plainer than the Trojan clothes—dirtier and less colorful, with the rundown costumes appropriate to the tired, war-weary soldiers, who were bored and disappointed in themselves and in others. Miller seemed sympathetic to Ulysses’s praise of hierarchy and order (22). John Shrapnel, the actor playing Hector, was appealing partly because of his love of family, which made the character’s argument in favor of keeping Helen puzzling to Shrapnel (23). Kenneth Haigh, as Achilles, said he tried to portray the character as sinfully bored, disdainful, nihilistic, and remote (23–24). Miller wanted Thersites, played by Jack Birkett, to seem rather a campy, vitriolic provocateur (24). Miller’s ideas about the Greeks were influenced by the writings of sociologist Erving Goffman concerning social interactions and competitive conversations (24–25). Miller and Suzanne Burden, playing Cressida, saw this character as more complex, less merely flawed, than she is often perceived and presented as being—more initially innocent than is often assumed. Burden sympathized with Cressida and saw her partly as victimized by men but also as someone unwise in the ways of the world (25–26). Miller compared Pandarus (played by Charles Gray) to the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet—worldly, manipulative, unreliable, ultimately crazed, and finally repudiated by Troilus (played by Anton Lesser). Lesser at first found the part frightening until he decided to play Troilus as a legalistic absolutist whose personality results in tragedy (27–28). Miller rejected the notion that the play is cynical, finding it instead ironic and bittersweet (28).
J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their 1988 critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, quoted from several of the earliest reviews. Thus a commentator for the London Times found this production “sadly lacking on … good casting, clarity of argument and a single, dazzling visual key” but considered “both love scenes … first rate, and the farewell very moving.” In the New York Times, a reviewer found it difficult to distinguish the Greeks from the Trojans, while writer for an academic journal thought “Gray as Pandarus ‘overwhelmed’ Anton Lesser as Troilus”; said the broadcast was “stronger in scenes of war than of love” but added that “confusion was often allowed to reign.” Writing for London’s Times Literary Supplement, Stanley Wells found the production mostly lacking in passion; said it seemed more interested in seeming real than in interpreting the play; called the Greeks improbably “well dressed, barbered and fed” after ten years of war; but admired the unintrusive photography and “some beautifully lit close-ups” but regretted that the camera was often static. He reported that most of Shakespeare’s text was uncut and said he watched the production “with interest and respect” but found it lacking much emotional or intellectual resonance (282).
Barbara Hodgdon, in a 1982 essay titled “The Shakespeare Plays on TV: Troilus and Cressida,” for the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, said she “much admire[d] the clarity and generosity of this production. Rather than ”imposing an “‘aboutness’ on the play, Miller’s version works from the inside out, seeming to convey the points of view of the characters themselves.” She continued that the “major fascination, for me, was Suzanne Burden’s wary, chameleon-like Cressida. At first, with Pandarus, we see a witty, slightly bored young woman; alone, she flips to a thoughtful, hesitant cloak of deep privacy in a second, suggesting that she may redeem the already shaky values of this world. But,” Hodgdon continues, “her self-understanding dissolves into awkwardness at Troilus’ high naivete and heaven-sent glances” and eventually “she enters haltingly, pulled on by Pandarus, and is embarrassed when he pulls off her veil and amazed when Troilus treats her as a holy image, brushing a first clumsy kiss at her fingers” (5).
Susan Willis, in her 1991 book on the BBC series (229–59), commented on a variety of matters, noting, for instance, that Renaissance paintings and architecture influence the set for Troy; that the Greek Camp was inspired by tents inhabited by “indigent travelers” in London (230); that the Greeks are “weary, bored, almost distracted or forgetful of purpose, except Ulysses” (235); and that Miller “purposefully excluded most of” the “final fighting” (236), a comment that is part of Willis’s general focus on how Miller himself conceived and directed the production. Observing that the Trojans function mainly as a family (238), as in the council scene, which received much of Miller’s attention (241), she also discussed Miller’s interest in ensemble casting (243), with his ideas influenced by those of Erving Goffman and with a strong emphasis on body language (243–44). She described the production’s rehearsal, taping, set, use of extras, etc. (246–47) as well as the “glitches” that arose during filming (247–48), especially when filming “single camera” scenes (248–50). Recounting some actors’ objections to Miller’s plans (251–52) and “changes [made] between rehearsal and studio” (253–54), she remarked that the “contest in the Greek Camp was the most complicated Greek scene to tape” (254); noted the time pressure involved in taping (255–56); and described the process of editing (256–59).
Peter Cochran, in his 2013 volume Small-Screen Shakespeare (246–49), accused Miller of generally foolishly and irrelevantly learned productions and mocked his inept direction here (246). Cochran did admire this production’s Pandarus and Troilus but not its unsexy Cressida and found Ajax and Achilles equally unimpressive and unintimidating (247). He considered the debate scene especially inept (247–49) and enumerated many other alleged flaws that he attributed to Miller’s poor direction (248–49).
Bibliography
Bulman, J. C., and H. R. Coursen, editors. Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews. UP of New England, 1988.
Cochran, Peter. Small-Screen Shakespeare. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
Fenwick, Henry. “The Production.” The Shakespeare Plays: Troilus and Cressida, edited by John Wilders, et al., BBC, 1981, pp. 18–28.
Hodgdon, Barbara. “The Shakespeare Plays on TV: Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, vol. 7, no. 1, Dec. 1982, p. 5.
Willis, Susan. The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon. U of North Carolina P, 1991.