The great play of Troilus and Cressida, one of the most weighty in the Jacobean period, has had a strange fate. Its readers have been variously affected by it, and our reflections, when we have not taken refuge in silence, have ranged from dismissing it as a piece of hasty work to defending it as a failure on a grand scale. Commentators1 describe, in the one case, the ill-digested scenes mixed with graver, sometimes noble, matter, and in the other point out that, though Sakespeare had undoubtedly something which he wished to say (and to say in specifically dramatic terms), he for once mistook ‘what may be digested in a play’, and, by sheer pressure of content, broke the mould he tried to use.
By repeated readings of the play, helped greatly by seeing it upon the stage, by trying to relate it to the criticism of life offered by some of Shakespeare's Jacobean contemporaries (to say nothing of the criticism of life implicit in some of our own contemporaries), I am driven to believe that this is not enough; that the play of Troilus and Cressida is not a great failure to record a phase of experience beyond the scope of dramatic form, but a great achievement, perhaps one of the greatest, in the expression of that phase, transcending those limitations to produce a living work of art.2 That the actual experience which is thus expressed is of deep significance to our generation I no more doubt than that it is essential to our understanding of Shakespeare's later tragic and constructive plays; but for the generations between Shakespeare's and our own it has been generally avoidable, and therefore rare. It is no light matter to suggest that something in any way important to our understanding of the play should have escaped a long succession of commentators. Nor would anyone venture upon doing so today, were it not that our actual experience of disintegration and disruption, so unlike that of any age between, has thrown fresh light upon the nature and foundations of what we call civilization; prospects once mercifully rare are now common and familiar, and much that has not, in the interval, been generally forced upon the imagination, now lies upon the common road for every man's necessary consideration.
The great plays that follow this one in psychological sequence,3 Timon of Athens and King Lear, are expressions of a further phase of the same experience; disintegration is accomplished, ‘Nature's germens tumble all together, Even till destruction sicken’ and the judgement surrenders. In the moment of surrender the mind perceives another dimension of reality, and this perception leads in the end to the positive, spiritual revaluation in the last plays. But Troilus and Cressida stands at a lower point of negation in this sequence than Lear or even Timon. For, while its material is still that of the actual world, the mood is that of a man who has come to the end of that world's resources; emotional, intellectual, and moral values resolve alike into futility; even the imagination, the high constructive power, looking ahead into a dark night of the soul, sees no further ideal form, no ‘unbodied figure of the thought’ waiting upon creation. This last experience is an area of suffering peculiar to the artist's mind, but it can derive from an experience potentially common to all men, the vision of the disjunction and disintegration of civilization — the ideals it rests upon and the achievements it bequeaths — while these are still co-extensive for him with the universe of thought. It is, in fact, in this very image that Shakespeare chooses to embody his experience in this play. What is recorded in Troilus and Cressida is thus the acutest point of suffering in this sequence, before the understanding has surrendered its moral, intellectual, or imaginative synthesis and accepted disintegration; the fullest possible realization of imminent dissolution before its accomplishment brings anaesthesia.
Readers of drama often receive piecemeal the experience of which a play is the record, looking first at individual parts or aspects of it; indeed, it requires either the highest imaginative capacity or prolonged knowledge to receive so complex and so vast an artistic experience as is communicated by a great play. Let us concede to this habit for the moment, if only because it will take us by the shortest road to some essential truths about Troilus and Cressida, the consideration of various single aspects being a kind of preliminary exercise before we attempt to receive the communication of the artistic experience.
In Troilus and Cressida the aspect we are first aware of is, as in many plays, the material of which it is made. For the artist this has meant the choosing, from the infinite and unselected mass of life, of those groups of characters and events to which his mind turns for the purposes of its as yet undefined interpretation; it is the first step in the substitution of the form of art for the chaos of life. For the reader it means the subject-matter of the play and his general impression derived from it; the series of characters, the chronological sequence of events, the impinging of character and event upon each other. And in Troilus and Cressida this take the form of a succession of violently contrasted characters, events, and sentiments. Characters as discordant as Thersites and Troilus, Nestor and Pandarus, Hector and Cressida, Agamemnon and Achilles are forced into continual and jarring contrast, with no attempt to resolve the contradictions in an enveloping mood of humour or pity. Instead, the nucleus of the character-grouping, upon which our attention is continually focussed as in a well-composed picture, is that of Troilus and Cressida; a serious man, by nature heroic and an honest if confused idealist, and a light woman, equally by nature a
sluttish spoil of opportunity
And daughter of the game.
The same pitiless enforcing of contrasts is seen in the relation of character and event, the incompatibility of men's endeavours and their destinies; the ideal love of Troilus and the betrayal it meets at the height of its glory; the honourable, heroic code of Aeneas and Diomede, Hector and Agamemnon, and the collapse of that code in Achilles’ murder of Hector; the clear, sustained thought of the debates upon principles and policy in the Greek and Trojan council chambers, and the relapse into petty feuds and ambushes, which serves to show how far that noble sanity can work upon event. And as we watch these passions, ideas, and achievements annihilate each other with no promise of compensation or solution, we fall more and more into agreement with Thersites, the showman who is ever at hand to point the futility, the progressive cancelling out to negation.
The materials of Troilus and Cressida are thus more obviously at war than those of any other play of Shakespeare's, and their discord has been a main factor in persuading its readers of the unevenness of the play, of the inconsistency in quality and treatment of the different parts, attributable, it might be, to indifference or weariness in the writer or to alternating and unreconciled moods of admiration on the one hand and expostulation, disgust, or disillusionment upon the other.
But what if this effect be itself art? What if disharmony be, not the result of a photographic reproduction of materials that the artist's mind has registered without full comprehension, but a deliberate commentary? For, significant and familiar as is the bitterness, the loathing of life which brought together the elements of Troilus and Cressida, the opposing of these is even more notable than the choosing. That aspect of a play which its readers think of as its form is itself a mode of interpretation of the material, having been for the artist the next step in the freeing of ‘that unbodied figure of the thought, That gave it surmised shape’. The elements fall into such positions or relations within the scheme of his play as not only emphasize and disengage the nature and quality of each, but indicate the underlying values by which his interpretation of the material was determined.
This is revealed first and most obviously in the sequence of the scenes, and here the effect is best appreciated in a rapid production which preserves the Elizabethan tempo and forces us to see one scene running as it were into the next; by insisting upon their almost merging in presentation, it makes clear to us that they must be merged also in our interpretation; that they are, in fact, inseparable. Thersites or Pandarus (the explicit or the implicit statement of the mood of disillusionment) breaks in upon every scene in which nobility of conception, passion, or conduct is emphasized, following it up, almost before the echoes of the last words have died away. The induction and the conclusion are in the hands of Pandarus. Pandarus' talk precedes the great council-chamber scene in the Greek camp, where Ulysses builds his lofty image of the state; and Nestor and Ulysses (two of the wisest figures of the play) are hardly off the stage before the scurrilous venom of Thersites is poured upon them in the next scene. Straight upon this comes the corresponding council debate in Troy, with its penetrating analysis of one of the fundamentals of the play, the nature of value; and straight upon that again, Thersites calling up vengeance, ‘or, rather, the Neapolitan bone-ache’, ‘upon both armies. Into this meeting of Thersites and Patroclus come again the Greek leaders, their lofty statesmanship tinged now perforce with politic cunning, and upon that again the scene (III. i) between Pandarus, Paris, and Helen; the feverish frivolity of the background of the war jars bitterly with the scenes of camp and battle and yet is inextricably interwoven with them. Straight upon their urbane and matter-of-fact jesting upon the habit of love, come Troilus's ideal, tremulous anticipations, and into this very scene again, Pandarus, that ‘wondrous necessary man’. This handling continues all through the play, but the sifting together of the elements becomes closer and closer as it goes on; Pandarus is nearly always present with Troilus and Cressida in Troy, and Thersites takes his place in the scene of Troilus's disillusionment in the Greek camp. The highest altitudes of chivalry are touched in the scene of Hector's visit to Agamemnon, where a noble code makes possible this courteous friendship between honourable enemies. The scene is set between that which sees Cressida ‘wide unclasp the table of her thoughts To every ticklish reader’ and that in which Thersites denounces Patroclus's relations with Achilles. This does not seem like accident.
There is something, then, in the form of this play which leads us to believe in its unity of intention. Moreover, the belief that it is not inconsequent and contradictory but intent and purposeful, is confirmed by our first experience of the imagery and the prosody. The tough resilience of the verbal music, the explosive illumination of the imagery are the marks of a causal, not a casual, direction. The speeches of Ulysses, Agamemnon, Hector, and Nestor are distinguished by close-woven, intricate, and virile imagery, and the ring of the verse throughout these scenes is superb. When Ulysses persuades the Greek councillors, he gives a noble smoothness and simplicity of line to his doctrine of hierarchical ‘degree’. When Nestor is alone with Ulysses, a mind thewed like his own, he speaks with cryptic cogency a language of brief hints weighted with implications that he need not elucidate, so that, by the interlocking of imagery, the work of argument itself is done by the images. In neither of these quite different uses of imagery and musical units is there any suggestion of faltering power or purpose:
Yet in the trial much opinion dwells.
For here the Trojans taste our dear'st repute
With their fin'st palate. And trust to me, Ulysses
Our imputation shall be oddly pois'd
In this wild action. For the success
(Although particular) shall give a scantling
Of good or bad unto the general.
And in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large. It is suppos'd
He that meets Hector issues from our choice;
And choice, being mutual act of all our souls,
Makes merit her election, and doth boil,
As ’twere from forth us all, a man distill'd
Out of our virtues; who miscarrying,
What heart receives from hence the conquering part,
To steel a strong opinion to themselves?
Which entertain'd, limbs are his instruments,
In no less working than are swords and bows
Directive by the limbs.
It is this virility, the basis of the style, running beneath the froth and fantasy of the Pandarus — Helen scenes, emerging suddenly in a different tempo in Thersites' ecstasies of abuse, which binds the whole together, showing one mind at work, and that an undivided mind, beneath the seeming variations. Moreover, the apposition (in such a speech as this of Nestor) of images that, while leading in the reader's mind to a process equivalent to arguing, do indeed fly off from each other ‘with impetuous recoile and jarring sound’, plays its own part in furthering that impression of disjunction which the art of the play, in major or in minor form, is ceaselessly at work to enforce upon us. The persistence, in fact, of such verse and imagery, right through to Troilus's last speech on the death of Hector, indicates, in a very different way but no less surely than the ruthless choice and the sure handling of material, that this is no plaything for Shakespeare. Here is a task upon which his whole mind was bent in intense and terrific concentration. Metre and imagery alike wrestle with their subject-matter. Every faculty works at its full height; the last resources of intellect and imagination are in action.
The conclusion, then, from even this brief consideration of the subject and form of the play, is that they collaborate, not fortuitously, but intentionally, that the form illuminates and interprets the theme, is itself ordered by it, each being in some degree an aspect of the other, precisely as we expect in a play which is a major work of dramatic art. And so there is confirmed the impression that here is no failure, nor even partial success. For, given discord as the central theme, it is hard to imagine how else it should be formally reflected but in a deliberately intended discord of form also. Rare this may be — perhaps unique in dramatic art — but, as I have suggested, the experience which the play exists to communicate is rare also. As readers, we, in effect, testify, by the conviction that our impression has been conveyed by the whole, and nothing less than the whole play, that the work of art we are contemplating is a living organism, a single form of perceived reality, however vast, complex, or difficult of communication it may be.
With this conviction in mind, then, we can turn to the underlying ideas of the play, no longer expecting to find inconsistency in Shakespeare's treatment of the various parts.
It cannot escape our notice that, in Troilus and Cressida, the revelation of the writer's values4 is not, as in most of Shakespeare's work, implicit only, and so dependent upon our ability to receive the artistic experience of the dramatist;5 there is also much explicit discussion of the abstract question, ‘What is value?’ This is both easier to distinguish and a direct road to Shakespeare's implicit comment, and for both reasons it is well to consider it first.
Many of the characters — Troilus, Paris, Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Thersites — are either involved in a bitter fight to harmonize the conflicting evidence of their universe, or are gradually relaxing their efforts and subsiding into a no less bitter equilibrium of disillusionment or loathing. As they make their different interpretations of the meaning or nonmeaning of that universe, it begins to be clear that many of the main issues depend for them upon the question of whether value is absolute or relative; inherent in the object or superimposed upon it; objective or subjective to the valuer.
Troilus, at the beginning of the play, represents one extreme; he believes that the object of faith or worship (a woman, an ideal, a code, an institution) is invested with value precisely to the degree to which it is valued. ‘What is aught’, he exclaims, ‘but as' tis valued’, and though it never occurs to him to consider the relation of this belief to his estimate of Cressida, there are signs of underlying misgiving in his constant questioning of her. The course of the play brings him out of his belief, through a process of disintegration in which the operation of reasoning is set against the faculty itself (V. ii. 139–43), to a state of equilibrium in which he repudiates the two great ideals of his life, love and soldiership, betrayed in the one by Cressida's perfidy, in the other by the murder of Hector. In their romantic defence of the war at the beginning, he and Paris behave like book collectors who pay £100 for a rare example containing certain typographical peculiarities, not because of its intrinsic beauty or interest, but because that market price has been fixed by other men's willingness to rise to it. For all its romantic dressing, this is at bottom the most purely commercial aspect of value presented in the play, equating merit with the price that can be got for a thing, Helen with so much warfare. When this is advanced in its turn as a reason for continuing to value her, it involves a bland petitio principii that neither of the hot-headed young men has time to observe:
Paris,. There's not the meanest spirit in our party
Without a heart to dare, or sword to draw,
When Helen is defended … Then (I say)
Well may we fight for her, whom we know well
The world's large spaces cannot parallel.
If the fallacy of their arguments escapes their own notice, it does not escape that of Hector, the clearest exponent of the other view of value, value as something that must be primarily inherent in the object valued:
But value dwells not in particular will;
It holds his estimate and dignity
As well wherein ’tis precious of itself,
As in the prizer: ’Tis mad idolatry
To make the service greater than the God;
And the will dotes that is inclinable
To what infectiously itself affects,
Without some image of th' affected merit.
It is, as he implies later, for lack of this ‘image of the affected merit’ that the arguments of Paris and Troilus are ‘glozed but superficially’ and are indeed no reasons. He dismisses the strongest argument on their side, namely that its effect on its worshipper itself invests the idol with value (indeed, with all the value we need to seek), temperately making it clear that the sense of value depends for its stability upon something outside itself, objective and absolute, inherent in the object — in short, upon the ‘image of the affected merit’.
But many other characters in the play are seeking, by different methods and with different incidental experience, for just such an ‘image’ — an absolute value by which to test the evidence of their experience. And they all either come to the same destructive conclusion or themselves furnish notable confirmation by their fates of the destructive philosophies of the rest.
Achilles, lazy in mind and body, is, when roused, no more defective in intelligence than he is in professional skill. The sting of Agamemnon's insults drives him to some effortless and quite lucid self-examination on the nature of reputation and, as he falls in with Ulysses at the peak of his exasperation, the discussion slides naturally into the major question of the play, ‘Is there or is there not in anything an absolute value?’ Achilles makes for himself the discovery that reputation (which he, being of the school of Troilus and Paris, equates with value) determines a man's own view of himself. Ulysses clinches it for him: a man ‘feels not what he owes [= owns], but by reflection’, but he carries the investigation a step further, and sees in reputation (the value other men put upon a man) the necessary completion of a process without which a quality does not fully exist. He equates it with the function of communication as we understand it in art or in love, without some form of which the process has not been consummated. Indeed, Shakespeare lets him use that very term:
No man is the lord of any thing,
(Though in and of him there is much consisting)
Till he communicate his parts to others:
Nor doth he of himself know them for ought,
Till he behold them formed in th' applause,
Where they are extended.
The essential relation between ‘communication’ and ‘form’ here is highly significant, as is the distinction between Ulysses' position and that of Troilus, Paris, and Achilles. Ulysses, who could speak later of the ‘mystery, wherein relation Durst never meddle, in the soul of state’, does not deny the possibility of the absolute value that Hector insists on. He merely points out the inseparable relationship between the two aspects, intrinsic value and assessed value, in man's experience, and declares that without the second the first is unfulfilled. ‘Else a great prince in prison lies.’
When we remember how unusual are discussions of abstract themes in Shakespeare's plays as compared, for instance, with Chapman's, Tourneur's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's among his contemporaries, we may well pause to ask what it means in Troilus and Cressida. In all the plays in which something similar occurs (and never, not even in Measure for Measure, is it so full and so penetrating) it is also strictly integral to the main matter and so inwoven with the action as to be a natural commentary upon it. This is no less true of the discussions on the nature of kingship and government in the sequence of history plays, especially the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V, than of the reflections on the art of conduct in Hamlet. Arguing from this, we may wonder whether this continual talk of values, this debating to and fro not only of their nature, but of the question of their existence, is not equally essential in some way to the fundamental theme of Troilus and Cressida, whether, in short, Shakespeare ever suffered his characters to be deeply concerned with a question which was not the core of the play. Is Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, himself revealing, through their conscious analyses as through their experience, a state in which such questions met just such answers in his own mind? I think he is, and I think this brings us to the root of the matter. The writer of this play is a man to whom values have become suspect.
Were the wisdom of Hector and Ulysses allowed to survive, in contrast with the rest of the play but without further comment, this might be less clearly implied. But actually it suffers defeat in both cases; in Hector's by the implications of his betrayal at the hands of a code in whose stability he had trusted; in Ulysses', first by the course of the action, which denies the truth of his idea by the contradiction of event, and, secondly and more specifically, by a later admission of his own, when, arguing that virtue must not seek ‘remuneration for the thing it is’, he goes on to dismiss the possibility of intrinsic value having, in practice and in the affairs of men, any effective alliance with assessed value:
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and caluminating time
so that the indispensable condition, without which intrinsic value cannot be liberated into reality, is never there. The reason for this is at once simple and irremediable, it lies in the nature of man's mind:
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin:
That all with one consent praise new born gauds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted.
That is, man's judgement (his capacity for valuing) is incapable of its task, and absolute value, whether or not it exists, is never discernible.
Even the acute intelligence of Ulysses then, having done its best upon the problem, has met with implicit and explicit defeat, and it is not surprising that the same fate befalls the other characters.
The last position, in descending order of negation, is that of Thersites. He has long taken for granted the conclusion that Ulysses has implied; mankind in his eyes is as incapable of worthy judgement as of worthy conduct; Ulysses, Nestor, Agamemnon, Hector and Troilus are reduced to their lowest terms, no less than Achilles, Ajax, Patroclus, Paris, Helen and Cressida. But he has travelled further. He does not waste time debating the existence of absolute value, or whether or not man can perceive and live by it; he assumes no criterion beyond that fallible human judgement of which he is so eloquent a satirist. Nor does the obscene casualty of fate and circumstance stagger him; for here the paradoxes of circumstances have long ago taken the wind of satire: ‘To what form but that he is, should wit larded with malice, and malice forced with wit turn him to? To an ass were nothing; he is both ass and ox; to an ox, were nothing; he is both ox and ass.’ In the world he offers us there is no stability in character, ideals, institutions, judgement, nor in imagination itself. The whole is a shifting, heaving morass where all is relative and nothing absolute, where pullulating worm and insect forms, seething upon the surface, are seen suddenly, as at the dissipating of some soft, concealing cloud, intent upon their task of disintegration and erosion, reducing all things to their own terms and substance.
And yet Thersites is an integral part of the play's form and matter, and that play is a living organism. It is upon the whole fabric that his mind is at work, driven by the passion of his disgust to break down the forms of things into lifeless elements that can never again be human flesh and blood nor even wholesome earth, but must remain barren and negative like deflowered soil. As we read his comment and relate it with the debates in these other minds, his is seen to be dominant of their scale. For he, to whom all the argument is a cuckold and a whore, who sees the common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance, as deserving only the dry serpigo and war and lechery to confound them, has arrived at his conclusion by the very road that they are travelling — Ulysses by his own reasoning, Troilus by the conversion wrought in him by event, and the rest by their betrayal of or at the hands of their codes. The starting-point of his interpretation is the conclusion to which they too are proceeding: there is no absolute value inherent in the universe imaged in the loves and wars of Greeks and Trojans. There is no ‘image of the affected merit’.
Once we have isolated this central question (What is the nature of value and has it or has it not an absolute existence?), once we have traced the series of positions, from positive to negative, of Hector, Troilus, Ulysses, and Thersites and the relation of each of those positions to the general evidence of the play, matter and form alike are seen to derive from this conclusion, which makes of the whole a vast, complex but organic artistic experience. The conflict between conduct, ideals, and event which the choice of material lays so clearly before us and the idea of disjunction inescapably enforced by the structure of the play serve now to drive home the conclusion that in this play disjunction was a fundamental principle, if not the most fundamental, in Shakespeare's view of the universe of event.
But we are uneasily aware, at the same time, that this judgement is not limited to the universe of event. Were that so, we should probably find in this play a mood of partial negation only, as in the balanced conflicts of the tragedies, where the positive element contends on equal terms with the negative and the duality is essential in the artistic experience. But in Troilus and Cressida our sense of the artistic unity has derived, as we have realized, not from an impression of balance, but from an impression of evil enveloping apparent good; not from a picture of the accidental prevalence of mischance and injustice over wisdom and rectitude, but from the implication of a causal relation between disjunction in event and the absence of absolute criteria in the universe of thought. To make this clear we may look again at some of the noblest thought in the play and see how it is related to the enveloping and prevailing evil and how its destruction carries the principle of disjunction into the domain of the mind itself.
Let us take again Ulysses’ defence of ‘degree’, the foundation upon which civilization and its achievement rests. The hierarchy of his state stands, in its nobility of conception, linked with the hierarchy of the heavens, a microcosm of the great universe:
The Heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
and ‘all in line of order’. The heavens maintain their courses and the world of man reflects their ordered process in ‘The unity and married calm of states’. But if the planets ‘in evil mixture to disorder wander’, then ‘Degree is shak'd’, both in the cosmos and in society, the image of the cosmos created by man's mind. Then, in the two universes alike, in that of the material cosmos and that of man's creating ‘each thing meets in mere oppugnancy’, and chaos is come again. To this ‘mere oppugnancy’ the play leads us inescapably, by the matter and texture of the concluding acts. The towering thoughts and ideals topple down before a destiny as implacable as that foreseen by Ulysses for the doomed towers of Troy; and if we look immediately from these ideals to the last phases of the action, the ambush and murder of Hector, we have no choice but to measure the chaos and the discord by the gracious assurance, the magnanimity, and the seeming stability that they destroy. Just as we feel the value of the Oedipus or the Oresteia to be in one way commensurate with the depth and the power of evil which Sophocles and Aeschylus meet and transmute, so in Troilus the nobility of that order which in the end proved perishable gives us the measure of the destructive forces which triumph over it. The existence of the principle of cause and order (in the cosmos and in the affairs of men) is therein questioned; it vanishes, revealing destruction as the principle underlying all life.
The supreme reach, moreover, of Shakespeare's imagery and prosody in this play, with all that they imply of sustained imaginative thought, serve also by their association with the prevailing evil, to affirm the magnitude and universality of that evil when it does prevail:
But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth,
Drawing all things to it.
It is Cressida speaking; and when the base of the world, the centre of stability itself, is equated with Cressida's love, we have not much farther to seek for Shakespeare's comment upon that stability.
Moreover, the downfall of the principles of order and value in the world of man's creation, with the substitution of the negative principles of disjunction and chaos, is traced directly to that inability in man to imagine absolute value which we have already recognized; in Ulysses's words, to the ‘touch of nature’ that ‘makes the whole world kin’. It is, indeed, man's ‘nature’. Not only is the objective universe, then, the cosmos and society, found subject to this curse of disjunction; the universe of the imagination also is proved incapable of conceiving a stable value. Disjunction, chaos, discord in the spheres, this is the only irreducible and continuing thing. The denial of absolute value, of any real ‘image of the affected merit’, is, then, carried beyond the world of event within the play; casualty has replaced causality in the world of the imagination also.
It would seem, then, that this play is an attempt, upon a scale whose vastness is measured by the intensity with which every faculty of the poet's mind is engaged, to find that image (of absolute value) in the evidence of man's achievement, in the sum or parts of his experience or, if nowhere else, in the processes of creative imagination. Troilus' love, Agamemnon's chivalry, Ulysses's vision of the hierarchy of state are all, thus, experimental images, in which are tested the absolute value of man's passion, intellect, and imagination. In face of this test, this ‘Quid hoc ad aeternitatem?’, all fail. There is no absolute quality the evidence for which does not resolve itself into a mere subjective illusion of blood or fancy, a
mad idolatry,
To make the service greater than the God.
The creations of man's spirit, hitherto exalted, are now seen to have survived only by chance, at the mercy all the time of a stronger, natural law of destruction; what in another mood might have appeared tragic accidents, the counterpoint in a fuller harmony, are now seen, instead, to reveal an underlying law to which all is recurrently and inescapably subject. This is the ultimate, indeed the only surviving absolute in Troilus and Cressida. The faculty that could perceive degree and the ordered form of a universe, the imagination itself, has been touched and the images of form no longer rise at its command. ‘There is no more to say.’ The dark night of the soul comes down upon the unilluminated wreckage of the universe of vision. The play of Troilus and Cressida remains as one of the few living and unified expressions of this experience.
The grand scale of this catastrophe blinds us. We do not willingly imagine this overthrow; some at least of us never to the end comprehend it, for it is like a note too deep for our hearing, or a landscape too vast for our experiencing. We probably come nearer to understanding the tragedies than this play which is no tragedy and is yet perhaps the record of the profoundest catastrophe in man's experience.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
If we turn from this attempt to understand the nature of the underlying ideas in Troilus and Cressida and consider the form through which these ideas are revealed, we see that what has been achieved is in fact what we suggested at the outset. The idea of chaos, of disjunction, of ultimate formlessness and negation, has by a supreme act of artistic mastery been given form. It has not been described in more or less abstract terms; it has been imaged. What seemed to be an absolute limitation of drama has been transcended and shown, in this rare achievement, to be but relative.
And in this case, even more than in either of those which we have just considered, the subduing of content to form is no mere act of virtuosity; it has a further significance as an instance of one of the ultimate functions of art.
That the experience on which this play rests is of profound significance at any time, and of peculiar significance to our own, needs no discussion. Whenever actual experience threatens to pass endurance, there is a measure of alleviation in discovering that it has already been met and recorded. The facts are not softened, but the sense of isolation which gives the facts a main part of their horror is mitigated; the desert is not less to be reckoned with, but something is gone if it is no longer ‘terra incognita’ nor utterly unmapped. When we find, as we certainly do in this play, not merely a record of actual experience, but a communication of an artistic experience, the alleviation becomes more positive; the actual experience, in that case, has not only been met, but resolved into form by the grandest of all human faculties, the artistic imagination. Once it has been encompassed by this imagination, at whatever cost, the bounds of human comprehension have been set forward in proportion as it had appeared incomprehensible. The value that we finally attach in this way, to Aeschylus, to Sophocles, and to Shakespeare rests upon the extent of their comprehension of evil, and upon the extent to which that vision of evil has been brought under the governance of those artistic laws which are themselves the image of the ultimate law of an ordered universe. Thus, in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida we meet a paradoxical dualism. The content of his thought is an implacable assertion of chaos as the ultimate fact of being; the presence of artistic form is a deeper, unconscious testimony to an order which is actually ultimate and against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.
This is made clearer still by the direction his thought takes in the plays that follow Troilus and Cressida and lead on in direct succession to the final group. This subduing of matter to form in the earlier play is then seen to be prophetic of a resolution not only of the technical problem of relating content to form, but of the dualism of thought implied in their conflict. The victory of form is no mere technical achievement; it has, as has form in all great art, a spiritual aspect and significance.
It is the development from Troilus and Cressida to the latest group of plays that gives to both their profoundest meaning. Our understanding of the latest plays bears strict equivalence with our understanding of this one; only so far as we imagine the abomination of desolation can we imagine beatitude. For the tragedies that follow represent a recovery of the balance between the perception of evil and a positive interpretation of it, whereas in Troilus and Cressida the writer looks upon the implacable fact of orderless evil in the mind and in the objective universe alike. In this play the judgement is unshaken, and there is no escape from the torment of the perception of evil, but in the later plays judgement is superseded. The conclusions from all its experiments meet in the tense yet motionless equilibrium of Troilus's last speech, but the revelations perceived by the mode of thought that supersedes it flash out in sudden phrases on the lips of Edgar, Gloucester, and Lear:
Sit gods upon your thrones, and smile at Troy.
I say at once, let your brief plagues be mercy,
And linger not our sure destruction on…
I do not speak of flight, of fear, of death,
But dare all imminence that gods and men,
Address their dangers in … But march away:
Hector is dead: there is no more to say.
‘Let your brief plagues be mercy’; Edgar in Lear learns at length that ‘the worst is not, So long as we can say this is the worst’, and his discovery rests upon the knowledge, carried over from Troilus and Cressida, that when we are at the worst ‘there is no more to say’.
In the next phase of this experience, then, there is no longer this vigilant judgement presiding over implacable fact, for a break up has set in and disintegration has overpowered judgement. In the picture offered by Timon, the play which appears to reveal the next phase in this progression, the universe of thought and imagination is riven almost beyond recognition and the matter and form of the play derive from the experience, not of imminent disjunction, but of chaos itself. This brings its own anaesthesia and, though the powers of the mind seem to have surrendered to disintegration, something that was invisible at the stage of Troilus and Cressida is beginning to appear. The ‘strong base of the world’, has indeed now broken up, but through the rift is revealed, at depths almost below man's vision, a new base not dreamed of, where the ‘perpetual-sober gods’ remain, untouched even by the ‘trepidation of the spheres’. The emergence from destructive to constructive experience has begun again, though it may be revealed in Timon only in this one phrase. Our experience of each play is, I venture to think, incomplete without the other.
In Lear the indications of this are more frequent and the conversions that flow in rising and cumulative waves through the last two acts of the play all set towards a positive, though undefined, interpretation, resting upon this foundation. The tragic balance is readjusted. The perception of evil is as full as in the Oedipus or the Oresteia, but there is an undefined, but no less positive, perception of order emerging again from casualty.
Gloucester. O you mighty Gods!
This world I do renounce, and, in your sights,
Shake patiently my great affliction off;
If I could bear it longer, and not fall
To quarrel with your great opposeless wills,
My snuff and loathed part of nature should
Burn itself out.
*
You ever gentle Gods, take my breath from me,
Let not my worser spirit tempt me again
To die before you please.
… What are you?
Edgar. A most poor man, made tame to fortune's blows
Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows,
Am pregnant to good pity.
There is, of course, no actual refutation of the conclusions of Troilus. The commentary of Lear is rather a series of flashes out into a seemingly limitless universe of positive ideas and the later plays extend and stabilize these. But this kind of commentary does, by its very non-logical process, indicate in part how the universe of Troilus was superseded. The brief visions of circumambient reality, the ‘perpetual-sober Gods’, the ’great opposeless wills’, the ‘ever-gentle Gods’, suggest that the imagination may in this way perceive what, in the earlier play, operating in a field of actuality delimited by the judgement, it could not; Edgar could, if he chose, refute Ulysses’ argument, that the intrinsic value can never become effective because man's judgement is preoccupied with assessed value, by pointing out that it contains an undistributed middle on the grand scale.
Simultaneously there comes into sight that earlier mood again in which,
There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls.
and that, slightly later, in which Pericles, in face of the opening vision of a universe of fundamental order and reconciliation, finds again the image in which Shakespeare has clothed this idea, whether negative or positive, throughout:
Pericles. …But what music?
Helicanus. My Lord I hear none.
Pericles. None? The music of the spheres.
Already we are in sight of the harmony of the latest plays, and the seeming finality of the vision of Troilus and Cressida is seen to be, after all, not an end, but the birth of a new, infinitely extended and positive vision. At the phase at which Lear completes and resolves the experience of Troilus and Cressida, only the anticipation of this is indicated. Plus ultra. ‘It is enough that there is a beyond.’
1 These, ranging from Coleridge in the early nineteenth century to Professor F.S. Boas in our own time, with the addition of the quite recent work of Professor Wilson Knight and W.W. Lawrence, however widely they differ otherwise, agree in remarking in some way upon the contradictions in mood and assessments of values to be found in the play.
2 I was for many years satisfied to see in this play a momentary failure of Shakespeare's artistic power. The failure was, on the contrary, in my understanding. It would be well, no doubt, if every critic were to hang upon the wall of his workroom the timely admonition: ‘ ’Tis not Homer nods but we that sleep.’
3 It is the psychological sequence rather than the chronological that mainly concerns us here. It is undoubtedly possible for a mature artist to produce works in an order which does not precisely represent the order of the phases through which his mind is progressing at that time. This is made clear in the cases of some later artists who have left, in letters and journals, a complementary record of their thought and experience. The letters of Ibsen, taken in conjunction with his plays, are, of course, one of the most familiar examples of this kind of record, showing this kind of variation, in modern dramatic art. With the Jacobean playwrights many factors, even including professional demands, would be at work, but more important than these would still be those revivals and recrudescences of earlier moods which often characterize the apparent irregularities of spiritual growth. It is for this reason that we may discover some of the relations between Shakespeare's plays more clearly by considering them in what we believe to be their psychological sequence rather than in what we conjecture to be their chronological.
4 There is some difficulty in finding a term for this. Were the results of Shakespeare's implications positive, the term ‘values’ would be satisfactory. But the modern connotation is, rather, the categories under which a man apprehends the good (see, for example, Inge, Philosophy of Plotinus, Vol. II, pp. 74 seq.), and, since Shakespeare's conclusion is negative, there is an undesirable element of paradox in applying it here. The position is complicated by the fact that, while his absolutes become evil, he has reached his conclusion by the process of eliminating values. We should perhaps be technically accurate if we said that his metaphysical ultimate is evil manifested in the form of chaos — a negative form perhaps of Nietsche's ‘Umwertung aller Werte’.
5 I think that it is still mainly so in Troilus and Cressida, and that it is our doubt or inability at this point that has led to the misinterpretation of some of the values indicated in the play.