The Text of Cressida and Every Ticklish Reader: Troilus and Cressida, The Greek Camp Scene

Summary

It is perhaps because Troilus and Cressida raises the question of women’s sexual identity that it was scarcely performed for three hundred years. I am going to discuss ways in which Shakespeare’s Cressida has been construed by recent critics, producers, and actresses, and how these interpretations might affect the understanding of the play by an audience in the 1980s. Until the 1970s most interpretations manifested precisely that coercive dominance of a particular set of cultural values which is the theme of the play. This was especially marked with respect to what G. Wilson Knight called ‘the pivot incident of the play’: Cressida’s arrival at the Greek army camp. My discussion will centre on this scene, to show how it is a key to the significance of one of the main questions posed by the play: whether a person’s nature or identity is determined by the valuation set on that person by others. This question forms part of the general platonic scepticism which the play develops with regard to the possibility of anything’s having absolute value or identity in a world subject to the digestive effects of time and human judgement. Within the world of the play Cressida is unable to maintain a sense of her own integrity. Similarly, in the course of changes in Western society, the character of Cressida in the text of the play has been subject to changing readings and widely divergent performances. This has inevitably affected the comprehension of the whole play.