Abstract
This article argues that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida demonstrates how the (historical or geographical) Other is performatively created—and, simultaneously, subverted—in the way the two opposing parties are drawn. While Troy represents a medieval world of chivalry, honesty, and humility, the Greek camp, set in binary opposition, appears as a Renaissance world of cynicism, dissimulation, and arrogance. They are also attached to different literary modes of expressions: poetry and drama. Especially the two archetypal heroes of their parties, Hector and Achilles, form a complementary unit up to the point where they become indistinguishable: in the scene of Hector and Achilles’ final encounter on the battlefield, the dichotomy that had been established throughout the play collapses when, in a sonnet-like sequence that aligns the two with the loving couple of Romeo and Juliet and a corresponding scene in that play, the lines of demarcation collapse and the two opposites, paradoxically, become one.
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Notes
“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’”, as Benjamin writes in Theses V and VI On the Concept of History, “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” or, more metaphorical, in Thesis IV: “As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations” (Benjamin 2007). As to the past as such being unaccessible: “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.” Thesis XIV, ibid., 261.
The author of anti-theatrical tracts including Plays Confuted in Five Actions from 1582, Stephen Gosson, uses the same metaphor of sickness for the public theatre’s effects as Ulysses in his analysis of what is amiss in the Greek army: “In Stage Playes for a boy to put one the attyre, the gesture, the passions of a woman; for a meane person to take upon him the title of a Prince with counterfeit porte, and traine, is by outwarde signes to shewe them selves otherwise then they are, and so within the compasse of a lye […] If privat men be suffered to forsake theire calling because they desire to walke gentleman like in sattine & velvet, with a buckler at theire heeles, proportion is so broken, unitie dissolved, harmony confounded, that the whole body must be dismembred and the prince or the heade cannot chuse but sicken” (Gosson 1582).
The Golden Age is past and gone already in Hesiod’s Work’s and Days (as are the Silver, Bronze and Heroic Age; Hesiod’s present is described as the Iron Age; Hesiod 2018). The idea of a lost Golden Age of peace and justice has since then been adapted by Ovid, Virgil and many others.
In the revised Quarto edition of 1609, the play is advertised by the publisher as never having been “staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar.” A Never Writer to an Ever Reader. News, ll. 1-3 (Bevington (ed.) 2015).
Eric S. Mallin sees the anonymous knight that is killed by Hector as the “figure of the Unknown Knight, who entered the lists anonymously, […] an integral part of the tilts from medieval times” (Mallin 1995). “The inconnu hunted down and butchered represents a once glorious chivalry, now encumbered and made vulnerable by its own dazzling image. Hector, central chivalric force in Troy, kills the most recognizable Elizabethan image of chivalric privilege […]. In so doing, he destroys the courtly ideal as it almost existed in the play.” If for Shakespeare’s contemporaries the figure of the anonymous Greek who is killed for the sake of his beautiful armour was indeed recognizable as the Unknown Knight, a remnant of medieval times, it is even clearer that Hector’s death and Troy’s demise are not just Achilles’ (or the Greeks’) doing, but Hector himself has a part in it too, killing himself almost (at least symbolically), and certainly betraying (and thus, in a sense, destroying) the ideal of chivalric warfare here.
Confer also how Achilles afterwards discusses how pleased he is with this “dainty bait” for his “sword”: “My half-supped sword, that frankly would have fed,/Pleased with this dainty bait, thus goes to bed” (5.9.19–20). There are numerous instances in Shakespeare’s plays where “sword” also means “penis,” see Partridge (1968).
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Baumann, K.J. “Much to Do with Hate, but More with Love”: Temporal Relations in Troilus and Cressida. Neophilologus 104, 427–437 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09640-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09640-y