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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2016
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is a notoriously bleak and problematic play: a dark comedy, a witty tragedy, an X-rated romance. A love story set during the Trojan War, the play appears to treat both love and war with utter cynicism. Ulysses drives the plot, craftily luring a despondent Achilles back onto the battlefield, and exposing Troilus to the betrayal of his beloved Cressida. A world-class manipulator and debunker of love and honor, Ulysses casts a shadow over this sour play, though he seems curiously unaffected by his skeptical outlook. A few critics have argued that Ulysses is the hero of Troilus and Cressida, a clear-sighted philosopher who may well speak for Shakespeare himself. I will argue against that view. I will also suggest that Troilus, if not the hero of this play, is perhaps its only sympathetic character.
1 I first started thinking about this topic when responding to a fine paper by the late Larry Nee, “The War ‘Within’ and ‘Without’: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida” (Northeastern Political Science Association conference, 2012), which ends by questioning the appeal of Ulysses's life.
2 Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 327 Google Scholar; Bloom, Allan, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 347 Google Scholar; Ranasinghe, Nalin, “Trojan Horse or Troilus’ Whore? Pandering Statecraft and Political Stagecraft in Troilus and Cressida ,” in Shakespeare and the Body Politic, ed. Dobski, Bernard J. and Gish, Dustin (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 139 Google Scholar.
3 While Shakespeare pokes fun at both war and love in Troilus and Cressida, Harold Bloom thinks his criticism of war is more serious and pointed, which seems to me right: “the derision provoked by battle is wholehearted” while “the rancor and anguish of the erotic life is represented with a far more equivocal response” (328–29).
4 Falstaff makes the same point in his famous speech on honor in 1 Henry IV—“What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead” (5.1)—but critics don't, as a consequence, call the play bitter and nihilistic, or lament its bleakness. Of course, Falstaff is funny and Ulysses is not.
5 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 368.
6 All quotations from Troilus and Cressida follow the Signet Classic edition, ed. Seltzer, Daniel (New York: Signet Classic, 2002)Google Scholar.
7 White, Richard Grant, Studies in Shakespeare (Boston, 1886)Google Scholar, quoted in the New Variorum edition of Shakespeare's, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Hillenbrand, Harold N. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), 568 Google Scholar; see also Bloom, Love and Friendship, 372.
8 White, Studies in Shakespeare, 568.
9 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 373
10 Ibid.
11 White, Studies in Shakespeare, 568.
12 The slavish clown Thersites is an exception. Obviously intelligent, like Ulysses he is a character who sees and exposes the (supposed) truth about things. Unlike Ulysses, he is proud of his gifts and envious of his targets. He is also powerless, while Ulysses moves the action in the play.
13 “Ulysses is wise,” Julius Bab remarks, “but his wisdom … is guided by a mean, calculating intelligence … . He is above all malicious” ( Bab, Julius, Shakespeare: Wesen und Werke [Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1925]Google Scholar, quoted in the New Variorum edition of Troilus and Cressida, 569). Harold Bloom call Ulysses a “scurvy politician” who “says nothing that he believes, and believes nothing that he says” (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 331, 340). This strikes me as going too far, though the following line is interesting: “Who is the true nihilist, Ulysses or Thersites?” (340). Earlier, Bloom describes Thersites as a truth-telling moralist, which is answer enough (332). I will return to this below.
14 In a gloss on Achilles's line, “What, are my deeds forgot?” (3.3.144), Harold Bloom observes that “it is ironic that Shakespeare has composed the definitive formulation of the sadness to which his own work has been least subject” (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 342). In denying the possibility of fame, Ulysses turns out to be wrong about both Achilles and Shakespeare. Ulysses also seems to deny the endurance of all things humans value: “For beauty, wit, / High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service, / Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all / To envious and calumniating time” (3.3.170–73). More about this, especially with respect to love, below.
15 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 365; de Alvarez, Leo Paul S., “What Is Man?: A Reading of Troilus and Cressida ,” in Perspectives on Politics in Shakespeare, ed. Murley, John A. and Sutton, Sean D. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 181 Google Scholar.
16 Alvarez contends that Ulysses's policy is ultimately vindicated, for “it was Ulysses who caused Achilles to send Patroclus into battle” (188). While this is true in Homer's account—Patroclus begs to fight and Achilles lends him his armor—I don't see much evidence for it in Shakespeare's. It's not clear how acquainted Shakespeare was with Homer's Iliad. George Chapman published a translation of books 1, 2, 7–11, and part of 18 (Achilles's shield) in 1598, a few years before Troilus and Cressida is thought to have been written (1601–1602). He published the rest in 1609. It's possible, though not likely, that Shakespeare read the Iliad in Greek, or in a French translation. “The Troilus and Cressida story,” as Alvarez points out, “is not a Homeric story.” See his discussion of sources (192n1). See also the New Variorum edition of Troilus and Cressida, 419–49.
17 “No man is the lord of anything … till he communicate his parts to others” (3.3.115–17); Bloom, Love and Friendship, 366.
18 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 368, 371.
19 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 349. Harold Bloom makes a related connection: “War and lust,” he says, are “variations upon the one madness” (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 328).
20 In Boccaccio's story (Il Filostrato), which was one of Shakespeare's likely sources for Troilus and Cressida, Troilus kills one thousand Greeks.
21 Nalin Ranasinghe argues that Ulysses wants “Troilus to lead the Trojans outside their thick walls and be exposed to the Greek advantage in numbers” and so tries to create in him “an explosion of pride that will instigate the Trojans to all-out warfare” (148). I'm not sure how exposing Cressida's infidelity would result in pride, though the point about the getting Troilus away from the city seems plausible. Shakespeare, however, provides us with no details about relative force strength and Thucydides suggests that due to supply problems, the Greeks could never fight at full force (Peloponnesian War 1.11). According to McNamara, Carol, “Ulysses dangerously calculates that the disillusioning of Troilus will save more Greek lives by ending the war sooner than his jealous wrath will cost” (Carol McNamara, “Private Goods and Public Neglect in Shakespeare's Troy,” in Souls with Longing: Representations of Honor and Love in Shakespeare, ed. Dobski, Bernard J. and Gish, Dustin A. [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011], 128)Google Scholar. I owe McNamara for the reference to Thucydides above (see 139n14).
22 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 369.
23 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 370–71.
24 Bab, quoted in the New Variorum edition of Troilus and Cressida, 569.
25 Troilus's speeches get the same treatment. Both are understandable, as Ulysses and Troilus speak in abstract and high-minded ways about the practical issues they face, like whether to continue the war (Troilus), or how to get Achilles back on the battlefield (Ulysses). Troilus can sound like Nietzsche (“what's aught but as ’tis valued?”: 2.2.52) and Ulysses references Platonic dialogues (Alcibiades, at 3.3.95–102). I think this is partly intended to be funny, as we certainly don't expect Homeric heroes to speak this way, but the issues they raise are serious. G. Wilson Knight's influential interpretation stresses the tension between faith (Troilus) and reason (Ulysses) in the play (“The Philosophy of Troilus and Cressida ,” in The Wheel of Fire [London: Methuen, 1930, repr. with additions 1947]Google Scholar). This theme is taken up by many other Shakespeare scholars ( Knights, L. C., “‘Troilus and Cressida’ Again,” Scrutiny 18, no. 2 [1951]: 144–57Google Scholar; West, Thomas G., “The Two Truths of Troilus and Cressida ,” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, ed. Alvis, John E. and West, Thomas G. [Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000]Google Scholar; Allan Bloom and Leo Alvarez). I will discuss the value, as well as the limitations, of such an approach below.
26 This is just what happens in book 9 of Homer's Iliad. In response to Odysseus's efforts to get Achilles back on the battlefield—“they will honor you, honor you like a god. Think of the glory you will gather in their eyes”—Achilles questions the possibility of “lasting thanks”: “The same honor waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death, the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion” (9.366–67, 386–88, trans. Robert Fagles). Achilles doesn't rejoin the war until Patroclus is killed, seven books later.
27 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 332.
28 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 370.
29 Ulysses, White observes, is not “scornful of his kind, not misanthropic, hardly cynical except in passing moods” (quoted in the New Variorum edition of Troilus and Cressida, 568).
30 Thomas G. West identifies this view with Troy itself: “The Trojans, at their most distinctive, identify truth with faith in something whose value is established by an act of the will. This faith becomes their foundation for living” (“Two Truths of Troilus and Cressida,” 143–44).
31 Knight, “Philosophy of Troilus and Cressida,” 54, 72.
32 Ibid., 70–71.
33 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 348.
34 “Troilus is a very moral man, and one can make no headway in getting him to doubt the desirability of being so. This why he trusts Cressida. Ulysses is going to fix that for him, and thus destroy Troilus’ dangerous idealism. This play treats reasonableness as being a bleak thing, while casting in its lot with it” (Bloom, Love and Friendship, 359).
35 Knight, “Philosophy of Troilus and Cressida,” 59.
36 Knight, “Philosophy of Troilus and Cressida,” 62.
37 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 373.
38 “In the case of Troilus and Cressida ugliness is a concomitant of truthfulness … . The overtly philosophical language and manner of many of the play's speeches have been noticed by critics. They have generally not noticed the connection between its philosophicality and its deliberate repulsiveness” (West, “Two Truths of Troilus and Cressida,“160).”
39 When Patroclus is rankled by Thersites's insults, Achilles comes to his defense: “He is a privileged man. Proceed, Thersites” (2.3.59).
40 Knight, “Philosophy of Troilus and Cressida,” 57–58; Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 332.
41 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 332.
42 Ibid.
43 Bloom, Love and Friendship, 348.
44 Troilus and Cressida, ed. Palmer, Kenneth (London: Methuen, 1982; repr. Routledge, 1989), 297 Google Scholar.
45 “Bandy-legged he was, with one foot clubbed, both shoulders humped together, curving over his caved-in chest, and bobbing above them his skull warped to a point, sprouting clumps of scraggly, woolly hair” (Iliad 2.251–55, trans. Fagles).