The story of Troilus and Cressida is one of many tales within The Iliad, and it has been retold by Chaucer and by Shakespeare. Everyone is supposed to know what happens in those very old stories, but I came to this one fresh. I felt Shakespeare’s play would contain heartbreak, since the title sounded just like Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. I was prepared for the usual ingredients from an epic: war, heroes, abducted women, fine speeches and the tragic, probably self-inflicted, death of lovers.
But right from the prologue Shakespeare challenges our epic expectations and contracts them into a more modern evening at the theatre. I’m going to tell you as much of this story as will fit in a play, he tells his audience, and you can like it or lump it. He compares that outcome, the audience’s response, to the “chance of war”.
“Chance” suggests futility in that louder, bloodier performance, the war itself. Troilus, Achilles and other soldiers on both sides freely complain that they have no dog in this fight. Instead of engaging the enemy, they bicker among themselves. And the gods from the old epic are nowhere to be found. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is godless, and it contains as much moral principle as a teleserial. Cressida is the daughter of a prescient Trojan priest who defected to the Greek camp when he foresaw that Troy would be defeated. In her beauty she is often compared to Helen, the woman at the centre of the conflict. The Trojans trade Cressida to the Greeks in exchange for a valued prisoner of war. She must leave behind her beloved Troilus and go, unwillingly, to her father.
This particular love story is asymmetrical. Troilus stays true to his love (at least for the half day the play lets us see), while Cressida takes up with a Greek soon after she is traded. Women are treated as the spoils of war—Helen herself was abducted by Paris, who went to Greece in the first place to recover his own abducted aunt — but when they reconcile themselves to their new masters, every man is outraged. The way Shakespeare writes it, Cressida gives up the fight the minute she enters the Greek camp. Every prince in the reception line claims a kiss from her, and she plays along. Only Ulysses stands apart, judging her as a “daughter of the game”. “There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks,” he seethes. “Her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body.” Then he thinks to discover Cressida’s lover back in Troy, and to use that lover’s rage against the enemy.
So who’s immoral here? Isn’t Ulysses supposed to be an epic hero? In fact, where are the heroes? Where’s the fighting, even? The Greeks win through fraud and stealth. In moving on, Cressida is truer to the times than faithful Troilus. Hector’s is the one death that is bewailed by every Trojan as a loss rather than a chance of war, but it only signals that the trafficking we’ve seen so far will get much more sordid.
There is heartbreak in the play, but no tragedy. Troilus runs off stage alive in the last act, forgetting Cressida in his vengeful fury over Hector’s death. We are left with nothing sublime or ennobling or even Shakespearean. The last words are reserved for the despised bawd who first brought the lovers together, and his cynicism drives both heroics and love from our minds. This is how the play ends, not with a bang but a simper.
Latha is a writer and an editor. Read her work on lathaanantharaman. blogspot.com or write to her at anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com
