Hamlet was probably followed in the same year by Troilus and Cressida. As for most of the Shakespeare canon the play cannot be precisely dated, but modern scholarly opinion is all but united in placing it as the next play after Hamlet. There are no clear echoes of the earlier play of the kind we find of Julius Caesar in Hamlet and of Troilus and Cressida in All’s Well that Ends Well, though the Trojan war was running in Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote Hamlet’s first scene with the players (II, ii). The lack of clear echoes is not surprising, for Troilus shows a radical departure in dramaturgy that marks a distinct break between it and its predecessor. Nor is Shakespeare’s choice of subject surprising for his purpose. There had been a small flurry of plays on the matter of Troy by the turn of the century. Henslowe’s Diary records a new play of Troy in 1596 and then payment in April 1599 to Dekker and Chettle for the quaint-sounding Troyeles and Creasse daye and in May the same prolific authors were paid for a play entitled Agamemnon1 (probably a sequel to the former). These plays do not survive, but Dekker’s probably reflect a renewed interest in the story of the Trojan wars sparked off by the publication of George Chapman’s Seven Bookes of the Iliades in 1598. This is certainly true of the only other Trojan play of the period to survive, Thomas Heywood’s two-part play the Iron Age, which uses Chapman’s translation as a source. The date of Heywood’s play is a matter of some controversy, but its most recent editor, Arlene Weiner, gives cogent reasons for dating the first part of the Iron Age around 16002 and comes to the firm opinion that it was written before Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:
I cannot say how much time elapsed between the writing of Iron Age and The Second Part of the Iron Age, but I believe in that time Heywood came to know Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.3
Weiner goes further in showing that several scenes of Troilus reveal the influence of Heywood’s play.4 Certainly the case for regarding the first part as of the same period as the Age plays with which it shares part of a title (The Golden Age, The Silver Age, The Bronze Age) looks very weak. Iron Age, Part 1 is a chronicle history play, a genre characteristic of the 1590s and very popular through that decade, and its relationship to the early play The Four Apprentices of London is considerably closer than to those later mythological dramas. Even if it were as late as 1610 (that is, after the publication of Shakespeare’s play, as is sometimes maintained) it would serve as a good example of the style of epic chronicle play Shakespeare himself wrote in the 1590s and can usefully illustrate the immense gap there is between Heywood’s sober treatment of his material as history (Heywood asserts the ‘gravity of the subject’ in his address to Mr Thomas Hammon) and the quasi-parodic, satirical treatment we find in Troilus and Cressida. An earlier date for Part 1 of Iron Age would appear much more likely. Heywood’s two plays would seem to fit into the pattern of reply and counterreply so characteristic of the Elizabethan theatre. Both parts look like a reply to the Dekker and Chettle play for the Admiral’s Men in 1600. The Rose, on the South Bank, had been going since 1587, and the somewhat old-fashioned epic, chronicle play might have been felt an appropriate reply to Dekker’s presumably more sentimental play on Troilus and Cressida for the Admiral’s Men a little earlier.5 As Part 2 of Heywood’s play shows not only the influence of Troilus and Cressida,6 but even more clearly of Hamlet in a ‘closet’ scene between Clitemnestra and Orestes (V, iii) which reveals unmistakable echoes of Hamlet III, iv, it would seem reasonable to suppose that Part 2 followed soon after Troilus, but when Hamlet was still very much in playgoers’ minds.
A further piece of evidence which Weiner adduces to support her view may be found in Shakespeare’s own prologue to Troilus. It has often been remarked that the Prologue seems to be alluding to the ‘war of the theatres’ and in particular to the armed prologue of Jonson’s Poetaster.7 The topicality of the Prologue might explain why it does not appear in the 1609 quarto, by which time the allusions would be forgotten (the folio presumably resurrects it from the playhouse manuscript in preserving all the Shakespearean material). The reference to Poetaster is not the only topical allusion, for Shakespeare goes on to explain his own treatment of his material in terms that seem to imply a contrast with what his audience might expect. His prologue comes, he says:
To tell you, fair beholders, that our play
Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils,
Beginning in the middle, starting thence away
To what may be digested in a play.
This concern for classical structural decorum (the idea derives from Horace’s De Arte Poetica)8 is in marked contrast to the gothic freedom of the Prologue to Henry V written only three or four years before. Shakespeare is now allying himself with the neo-classical sentiments of the kind found (a little later) in the new Prologue Jonson wrote for Everyman in his Humour and touched on in the Prologue to Volpone, the address to the readers of Sejanus and elsewhere. Shakespeare’s lines also imply a contrast with others’ treatment of similar material, for he is not primarily concerned to draw attention to a change in his own dramaturgical allegiances. The only play that fits the bill is Heywood’s. The Dekker and Chettle play on Troilus and Cressida and its sequel Agamemnon seem to be (from their titles) plays centring on particular episodes of the Trojan war, and this impression is confirmed if the plot summary that survives in manuscript is of the first part of Dekker’s play.9 Heywood’s play, on the other hand, exactly fits Shakespeare’s anti-type. It is a chronicle play that covers the whole history of the fall of Troy from the initial capture of Hesione by the Greeks to the deaths of Hector, Troilus and Achilles in the first part, promising in the epilogue a second part which, in the event, sweeps on to depict the fall of Troy, the return to Greece, the assassination of Agamemnon, the revenge of Orestes and the deaths of almost everyone.
Shakespeare’s prologue, then, makes a break, not only with his own former practice, but with the erstwhile practice of the public theatres. This impression is equally justified in terms of the style and tone of the new play, which mark a considerable change from the humanistic realism of Hamlet. For there is a marked difference between the affective methods of the popular revenge tragedy and the ‘alienating’ techniques of Troilus. But before we seek to explain and account for this difference, we need to look at Heywood’s Iron Age more closely to see there an example of the kind of play we might have expected a popular playwright to make out of the matter of Troy round about 1600. This is all the more interesting because Heywood’s drama seems to have been outstandingly popular. Heywood is not usually given to boasting of his successes, but he is unequivocal in the address to the reader he wrote for the publication of the two parts in 1632, in claiming exceptional popularity for his plays:
these were the Playes often (and not with the least applause,) Publickely Acted by two Companies, uppon one Stage at once, and have at sundry times thronged three severall Theaters, with numerous and mighty Auditories…10
This suggests not only popularity over a considerable number of years, but in both the large public and the ‘private’ theatres.11 Such popularity makes Shakespeare’s use of and reference to the play all the more plausible.
It is not difficult to appreciate why Heywood’s two plays should have been so roaring a success. Both parts concentrate above all on action; plot dominates over both character and language, and that this was the intention is made clear in the Epilogue to Part 2 where Heywood makes Ulysses his spokesman:
Accept me for the Authors Epilogue.
If hee have beene too bloody, ’tis the Story;
Truth claimes excuse, and seekes no further glory,
Or if you thinke he hath done your patience wrong (In teadious Sceanes) by keeping you so long,
Much matter in few words, hee bad me say
Are hard to expresse—that lengthned out his Play.12
Certainly Heywood does not exaggerate in claiming to be including ‘much matter’ in this second part, for it would be difficult to imagine cramming more action into the two hours’ traffic of the stage. Equally justified is the claim to be conveying unvarnished truth for, as Weiner points out,13 Heywood shows greater fidelity to his ‘historical’ sources than Shakespeare, as well as a greater preference for the classical versions of the events.
Part 1 of the Iron Age is a considerably better play than Part 2, though I do not agree that the two parts differ as markedly in kind as Weiner argues.14 Both are essentially ‘epic’ theatre in their concentration on action above all else; but in Part 1 the handling of the plot is better paced and Heywood gives greater rhythmic variety to the plotting by inserting scenes where issues are debated. Heywood is less concerned than Shakespeare to debate the philosophical issues prompted by the action, and more concerned that what is debated should relate directly and immediately to the action. The play indeed opens with a scene in which the Trojans debate whether to resume hostilities with the Greeks, who have carried off Priam’s sister, Hesione, as their captive. As in the Trojan debate scene in Troilus and Cressida (II, ii), Hector is against continuing a war for so slender a reason; but whereas Shakespeare has Hector arbitrarily change his mind in the middle of the debate (T & C, II, ii, 190–2)—an example of the dislocational moments that characterize the play—Heywood is careful to motivate Hector’s change of heart in terms of the action. In the middle of the Trojan debate in Iron Age Antenor arrives from Greece to report further insults and Hector is understandably swayed into agreeing to an expedition to bring Hesione back. It is surely likely that Heywood’s logical handling of the action should have preceded Shakespeare’s illogicality, because the unexpectedness of Shakespeare’s treatment gets part of its effect from an expectation of consequentiality: it is Heywood who asserts the convention that gives Shakespeare’s unconventional treatment point. There is nothing equivalent to Shakespeare’s subtleties and complexities of language in Heywood’s play, where language is generally pared down to allow the action to be presented with the maximum of clarity. There are, however, moments where (as Weiner notes)15 Heywood adopts a quasi-Marlovian grandeur for such special occasions as when Ajax declares his determination to see Troy destroyed (II, iii, 42ff).
There are many scenes of the Iron Age where the plot dictates the action, as for instance in the splendid scene where Ajax and Hector meet in single combat (II, v), a scene that seems to have been particularly successful with its audiences to judge from its being used to illustrate the title-page of the 1632 edition. Here, however, Heywood’s concern to motivate his characters adequately is again in contrast with Shakespeare’s treatment of the same incident. Ajax, in Heywood’s play, has won the right to appear for the Greeks after they have all drawn lots. It is Achilles’ failure to draw the right lot that accounts for his chagrin and consequent sulky withdrawal into his tent. In Troilus and Cressida on the other hand Achilles’ behaviour is far less rationally accounted for, so that Thersites’ railing seems to find justification in the irrationality of his target. We hear from Ulysses that Achilles is moping in his tent before Ulysses hits on the idea of rigging the ballot to ensure that Ajax becomes the Greek champion:
with him Patroclus
Upon a lazy bed the livelong day Breaks scurril jests,
And with ridiculous and awkward action,
Which, slanderer, he imitation calls,
He pageants us.
(T & C I, iii, 146–51)
Not only is the emphasis on arbitrariness and irrationality (the hint of an illicit relationship with Patroclus, gloated on by Thersites, is neither confirmed nor denied here), but Ulysses’ own proposals for shaming Achilles out of his sulkiness smack equally of the squalid and illicit. We are in a world of uncertain and shifting values in which grown men behave like spoilt children, but with unchildlike capacities for doing mischief.
Heywood, on the other hand, accounts for the identical behaviour of Achilles in terms that keep his dignity essentially intact. We merely hear from Ajax, as he explains to Hector, why he, rather than Achilles, is representing the Greeks:
Hee keepes his Tent
In mournful passion that he mist the combate…
(II, v, 37–8)
As Achilles and Ajax have quarrelled for the privilege of fighting Hector, Achilles’ deep disappointment is perfectly understandable. In the next scene Achilles reappears to take his part in the festivities between the Greeks and Trojans after a truce has been agreed, Heywood, with admirable economy, giving Achilles one sour aside (III, i, 45–8) before he joins in the spirit of the festive occasion. In such circumstances the bitter comments of Thersites seem much more like the ravings of a knave than the expression of a general malaise, as those of Shakespeare’s Thersites appear to be. Heywood is much readier to allow his characters to speak for themselves in their actions as well as in their words. Shakespeare manipulates his sources so that the events are presented through a distorting medium.
The feast that follows the encounter of Ajax and Hector in Heywood’s play is a splendid example of how brilliantly Heywood achieves variety of pace and mood in his plays. Here words take over from the violent action of the combat. In place of the field of battle, in which all eyes (on stage as well as in the audience) are focused on the two combatants, we move to a scene of music and relaxation where the attention constantly shifts from one group to another. There is subtlety in the contrast too: on the field of battle, through all the violence of the physical action, Hector and Ajax have behaved with courtesy to one another—the heroic nature of their civilization vindicated. Now in the atmosphere of enjoyment and relaxation intrigues and rivalries blossom. Agamemnon grandly accepts Priam’s welcome at the start of the feast as Hector arranges that Greek and Trojan shall alternate round the table, but the feeling of well-being is soon undercut. Achilles, struck by Hector’s character, but still smarting from his unsuccessful drawing of lots, cannot forbear an aside: ‘till hee set/Wee cannot rise’. Allusions are made to past controversies which Menelaus has difficulty in resisting:
but that these our tongues
Should be as well truce bound as our sharpe weapons,
We could be bitter Paris: but have done.
(III, i, 51–2)
In this way Heywood keeps before us the tensions that underlie the festivities. Achilles is suddenly drawn by the attractions of Priam’s daughter, Polixina—an infatuation mentioned but not dramatically presented in Troilus and Cressida, but which in Heywood’s play further helps to explain Achilles’ reluctance to engage in battle later. Immediately Heywood switches our attention to a quite different matter: we hear Calchas, convinced by the prophecies of Troy’s destruction, successfully attempting to persuade his daughter, Cressida, to leave Troy and Troilus, whose love affair has been briefly presented in a single earlier scene. Each of these sub-scenes is handled with both admirable clarity and admirable brevity and the juxtaposition can often produce brilliant dramatic effects. No sooner (for instance) has Cressida agreed to abandon Troilus, than we are taken into the middle of an argument in which Troilus’ voice is heard quarrelling with Diomed, though ironically on a subject other than their real cause for rivalry in their relationship with Cressida. The quarrelling spreads from this centre until the whole table erupts in recrimination and anger, only quietened by the introduction of ‘a lofty dance of sixteene Princes, halfe Troians, halfe Grecians’ (III, i, 145, s.d.). The scene ends with a quarrel between the husband and lover of Helen, which is brought to a hostile end and a declaration of further enmity when Helen is asked to declare her preference and chooses Paris. There is little in the language of this scene to excite the reader, but its dramatic quality could hardly be bettered and makes the play’s popularity on stage fully understandable. Nor does Heywood seem especially concerned to direct us towards a judgement of these events. Neither the outstanding and unfailing courtesy of Hector, nor Thersites’ scurrility provides a springboard for a general interpretation of events; instead ‘truth claims excuse’. Behind the drama we sense the professional reporter giving us as close a reflection of what might be supposed to have happened as his sources will allow.
Shakespeare’s play is less concerned with what happened than with what to make of what happened. Against Shakespeare’s habitual practice the author is intrusive in insisting, in the manner of Marston, on presenting his material with a jaundiced slant. Shakespeare adds to Heywood’s epic material a detailed account of the love affair between Troilus and Cressida which he probably obtained from a source unused by Heywood, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The equal attention to be paid to the two great subjects of Renaissance poetry, love and war, has of itself dramaturgical implications: the boudoir is to be given equal importance to the battlefield. Oddly, the prologue to the play, found only in the folio version, does not mention Troilus and Cressida at all: it rehearses the subject of the play in epic terms, though brief mention is made of Paris’ adulterous affair with Helen as the cause of the martial dispute between Greek and Trojan. This again suggests (as I argued earlier) that Shakespeare is inviting specific comparison with Heywood’s play as covering similar material. The quarto version of the play, on the other hand (published in 1609), not only drops the prologue, but is given a title-page that (in its second version) highlights the love story: ‘Excellently expressing the beginning of their loves, with the conceited wooing of Pandarus Prince of Licia’—as if the printer is concerned now to emphasize the differences between Shakespeare’s play and its more popular rival. This version of the quarto also adds an epistle to the reader which is particularly concerned to emphasize the appeal of the play to a select audience:
It deserves such a labour, as well as the best Commedy in Terence or Plautus…nor like this the lesse, for not being sullied, with the smoaky breath of the multitude.
This epistle is often interpreted as evidence that the play was never presented on the ‘public’ stage (i.e. at the Globe) at all. The writer of the epistle begins by telling us that we are being presented with ‘a new play, never stal’d with the Stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar, and yet passing full of the palme comicall’. These statements, however, are highly ambiguous. The expression ‘breath of the multitude’ might mean ‘approval of the multitude’ as it does elsewhere in Shakespeare.16 Equally the highly obscure phrase ‘never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar’, which is often taken to mean ‘that the play had never been performed publicly’17 could as well mean: never approved by public applause (where a pun on ‘clapper-clawd’ to suggest the play was never clapped on stage18 would make more sense of the use of ‘palmes’ than can be made of the literal meaning of clapper-claw as ‘to exchange blows, thrash, maul’).19 Again the assertion of the epistle that the play was ‘never stal’d with the Stage’ could as readily mean it was never on the stage long enough to become stale, as that it never appeared there. If (as I believe) the epistle is telling us that the play was unsuccessful when it was presented to the public (hence the epistle’s stress on the play as caviare to the general) this would accord with other important evidence that the play was intended initially as a Globe play. First, the Stationers’ Registry entry of February 1603 tells us that the play ‘is acted by my lord Chamberlens Men’, which strongly suggests a more-or-less current public presentation; second, the first version of the quarto title page of 1609 presents the play ‘As it was acted by the Kings Majesties Servants at the Globe’. Finally, the play itself shows unmistakable signs of two different endings, which strongly suggest two different audiences. In the folio version Pandarus is given what looks like his curtain line at the end of Act V, scene iii, where Troilus sends him packing with the words ‘Hence brother lackie; ignomie and shame/Pursue thy life, and live aye with thy name.’ These words are then repeated at the end of Act V, scene x just before Pandarus speaks his epilogue. In the quarto version the lines appear only once, in the final scene. Almost all commentators are agreed that in one version the play was presented without the epilogue and that Troilus’ lines in that version appeared only at the end of V, iii. This suggests a version in which Pandarus was less prominent and would therefore be closer to the prologue’s ‘argument’ than to the quarto second title-page.
One explanation of the two versions of the ending is that they represent the difference between a ‘public’ and a ‘private’ showing of the play. Pandarus’ epilogue, as was originally pointed out by Peter Alexander, would be peculiarly appropriate if addressed to a law-school audience. In particular Pandarus’ reference to making his will ‘some two months hence…here’ is taken by Kenneth Palmer to suggest Pandarus is addressing a law-school audience at the Christmas festivities, when plays were often performed.20 The unlikelihood of any Inns of Court being able to afford to commission the wealthy Chamberlain’s Men and London’s wealthiest playwright has been pointed out both by Alfred Harbage and T.W.Baldwin and strongly supported by Robert Kimbrough.21 It is much more likely, on the evidence we have, that the play was written for the Globe in the normal run of events to add a Troy play to their repertoire, shrewdly combining Dekker’s romantic with Heywood’s martial interest, in answer to the rival companies the Admiral’s Men and Worcester’s, the latter of which had achieved an outstanding success with Iron Age. The adaptation of Shakespeare’s play for a ‘private’ audience would make more sense as a salvaging operation after a ‘public’ flop. The most likely venue for this revival, in view of Shakespeare’s relationship with Marston at this time, would be Paul’s playhouse, which seems always to have had a sizeable number of law students in its audience, and whose plays (especially Middleton’s) are often characterized by their legal allusions. One might, however, have expected some reference to a Paul’s performance on the second title-page of the quarto, as the epistle claims highbrow status for the play and this omission may imply that it was transferred in its alternative form to a genuinely private stage such as that of a law school. The first title-page of the quarto would imply a further attempt to put the play on at the Globe after Shakespeare’s company had become the King’s Men in May 1603. The reason usually conjectured for the change of the quarto title-page is that the printer was correcting an error, but it is just as likely that it was thought wise, at the last minute and with parts of a sheet to spare,22 not to remind the reader too conspicuously of the Globe failure.
Gary Taylor has recently argued that the ‘private’ version preceded the ‘public’ with the implication that the adaptation was for the Globe, not the other way round.23 He bases his argument on a highly plausible claim that while the quarto derives from Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’, the folio text shows clear evidence of deriving from the quarto ‘corrected’ by reference to a prompt-book version. One can accept Taylor’s general bibliographical argument without accepting all his conclusions. The dismissal of Pandarus at the end of V, iii, when Troilus is preoccupied with the battle, is far more in keeping with the action than having Pandarus appear without cause on the battlefield at the end and remain after Troilus has dismissed him—Troilus’ ‘hence’, after all, suggests he’s sending Pandarus away, not making his own final exit. It looks therefore as if the ‘private’ version, containing the epilogue, is an adaptation. There is no reason, however, why that revision should not have been made to the ‘foul papers’ that were used in setting up type for the quarto, indeed Shakespeare is more likely to have made his adaptations for another theatre from his own papers rather than from the Globe copy. Further, if the play had first been acted in 1602 at the Globe, there would by then have been a prompt-book version that reflected Shakespeare’s original intention and that came to be used as copy for the folio text. Taylor argues that the epistle found in the quarto version must have been written soon after the first (‘private’) performance of the play because it refers to the play as ‘new’, but as we know from Henslowe’s Diary24 ‘new’ can mean revised, or it may mean simply (as Palmer hints)25 newly ‘escaped’ (as the epistle has it) into print. Palmer provides some evidence for supposing that the epistle was added at the last minute by the printer to use up (with the new title page) a half sheet (sheet M) left over from a miscalculation in casting off.26
Perhaps we could conjecture an early history of the play something like this: Shakespeare wrote the play for his own company, the Chamberlain’s Men, to be played at the Globe in 1602, in a manner in part deriving from the satirical comedies of Marston at Paul’s. As in Hamlet, Shakespeare attempts to combine popular and more sophisticated elements to attract as wide an audience as possible. The Globe audience, not being attuned to satire, reject the play and it is transferred after a while and with modifications made by Shakespeare to his original draft, to Paul’s, or alternatively for a private performance of some kind. The modifications increase the satirical content. They include the abandoning of the Globe prologue that challenges comparison with Heywood’s popular Iron Age at the Rose, both because it is beginning to lose its topical interest and because it is no longer an account of the revised play appropriate for an audience (and a boy cast) more attracted to the satire than to the heroics. The modifications also include a new, comic ending in which Pandarus speaks his mocking epilogue aimed directly at the strong lawyer contingent in the audience. The play was probably successful with this small, elite audience, because a further attempt, again unsuccessful, is made to revive the play at the Globe after March 1604 when the theatre is allowed to reopen under the new style of its company as ‘the King’s Men’. The revised version becomes the basis of the quarto edition of 1609, which contains an epistle to the reader describing the play as a comedy, appealing to a sophisticated readership and boasting of its failure to attract the vulgar. The initial title-page of the quarto, which describes the play as history, is changed in a second title page to emphasize the unheroic element of Pandarus’ ‘conceited wooing’ to bring it into line with the epistle, also newly added, and to avoid too obvious a reference to the play’s failure with the Globe audience. The epistle explicitly refers to the play as a comedy, and that is how it would have been presented to the Paul’s audience by Paul’s Boys’ company, who specialized in comedy. When, in 1623, the folio version is published, the original Globe prompt-book is used as copy, but including the quarto revisions, and the play is placed among the tragedies, a reflection of how it was played at the Globe. In the folio version the original prologue is restored, as are the lines of the original ending at V, iii in spite of the retention of the comic epilogue. Presumably the folio editors, Heminges and Condell, were concerned, like most modern editors, to preserve all the Shakespearean material.
We know that during the squabble between Marston and Jonson that has now come to be dignified with the title ‘war of the theatres’, Shakespeare came to be associated with Marston’s side of the argument, because in the university play the Return from Parnassus, Part 2, we are told that Shakespeare has become involved in the controversy over Poetaster:
O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.27
As these lines are spoken by ‘Will Kemp’ we can assume the comment is intended to be highly partial, but it makes it clear that Shakespeare joined in, or was thought to have joined in, the controversy. I have already mentioned the reference to Poetaster in the Prologue to Troilus and Cressida, but there is nothing in the play itself that explains the reference to a Shakespearean purge of Jonson. It seems more likely that ‘Kemp’ here is referring to Shakespeare not as playwright, but as player (unless the anti-Puritan Sir Toby Belch is an affectionate take-off of the rare Ben Jonson), for around this time the Chamberlain’s Men were staging Dekker’s contribution to the quarrel, Satiromastix. Presumably Shakespeare was in the cast of this play and might well either have impersonated Jonson in the part of Horace or played the part of Tucca, who is the chief ‘purger’ of Horace in the play. Satiromastix, as we are told on the 1602 title-page, was ‘presented publikely, by the Right Honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants; and privately, by the Children of Paules’. This suggests the two companies were working closely together at this time. If Dekker’s play could make the transition one way, there is no reason why Shakespeare’s could not have followed the same route in reverse. We actually have the two versions of Marston’s Malcontent that similarly switched between Blackfriars and the Globe a year or two later. Paul’s theatre was run by Marston in 1602. He was not only its chief playwright, but seems to have been responsible for its productions. The plays staged at Paul’s were mostly comic satires, at which the boys were particularly adept and the satiric tone of Troilus and Cressida, especially with the addition of its epilogue, would make the play suitable for the Paul’s repertoire. Troilus is the one play of Shakespeare that shows the unmistakable influence of Marston. Both playwrights, at the time of its writing, were under attack from Ben Jonson as comedians who do not ‘put the snaffle in their mouths who crie we never punish vice in our interludes’ (as Jonson was later to put it) and therefore had considerable identity of purpose, but no doubt Shakespeare also felt that to hold at least the fashionable part of his audience he needed to take account of Marston’s current popularity.
Shakespeare’s choice of subject is not in itself remarkable, not only because other public companies had staged plays about Troy, but because Troilus and Cressida reflects concerns that are central to Shakespeare’s interest in history. The epic trilogy of the Henry VI plays has as its central theme the breakdown of order in a society where individualism is rife. The central theme of Troilus and Cressida both looks back at the social disintegration recorded in the Henry VI plays, and forward to King Lear in depicting a society in terminal decline. The general feeling that the world was in its dotage and would shortly be ended is common among Shakespeare’s contemporaries. That the King himself shared the view is evident from the concluding lines of his dialogue Daemonologie of 1597:
The robust Ben Jonson can be equally lugubrious when he contemplates the world in its dotage:
…and no wonder if the world, growing old, begin to be infirme: Old age it selfe is a disease. It is long since the sick world began to doate, and talke idly: Would she had but doated still; but her dotage is now broke forth into a madnesse, and become a meere phrency.
(Discoveries, lines 301–5)
Even Heywood, in spite of the greater respect for the heroic in his play, still describes the world of Homer as an age of iron, the last, degenerate age before the final dissolution of the world. It is characteristic of Shakespeare’s humanism, however, that he associates such a collapse into disorder more readily with the pagan worlds of Troilus and Lear than with Christendom. The War of the Roses is brought to an end by ‘God, and Saint George, Richmond, and Victory’ (in that order) when the providential reign of the Tudors is established. Both Lear and Troilus in contrast end on notes of desolate uncertainty (whichever ending of either play we accept).
Shakespeare had plenty of justification in his source material for seeing the ancient world in this light. Discussions of the sources nearly always concentrate on the narrative material that Shakespeare found and used, but Shakespeare must have been at least as interested in his authors’ interpretations of the stories. Chaucer’s great palinode, which has Troilus looking down from heaven and meditating on the vanity of the world, would not have gone unremarked:
And down from thennes faste he gan avyse
This litel spot of erthe, that with the se
Embraced is, and fully gan despise
This wrecched world, and held al vanite
To respect of the pleyn felicite
That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
Ther he was slayn, his lokying down he caste.
And in hymself he lough right at the wo
Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste;
And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so
The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste,
And sholden al oure herte on heven caste.28
Shakespeare leaves these Christian assumptions implicit in the play, but surely much of Troilus’ divine laughter permeates the play’s demonstration not only of the vanity of worldly hopes, but of the pettiness with which such hopes are pursued.
Similarly in Lydgate, Shakespeare would be encouraged to see these pagan events from a Christian perspective. Book two of Lydgate’s Troy Book opens with a meditation on the instability of this life:
The envious ordre of Fortunas meving,
In worldly þing, fals and flekeryng,
Ne will not suffre us in þis present lyf
To lyve in reste with-oute werre or striffe;
For sche is blinde, fikel, and unstable,
And of her cours, fals and ful mutable.
Who sit hi?est, sche can down hym enclyne
Whan he leest weneþ bring hym to ruyne,
With awaites that gladly ben sodeyne,
And with hir face þat partid is on tweyne
Schewen most hool, when sche is leste to triste…29
This passage provides a prologue to the main account of the Trojan war which (like Chaucer’s poem) is written essentially as an illustration of the vanitas theme. Lydgate reverts, even more explicitly than Chaucer, at the end of his long poem, to the Christian implications of his story:
In þis boke he may ful wel beholde
Chaunge of Fortune, in hir cours mutable…
How al passeth and halt here no soiour,
Wastyng a-way as doth a somer flour,
Riche and pore, of every maner age:
For oure lyf here is but a pilgrymage,
Meynt with labour and with moche wo,
þat ?if men wolde taken hede þer-to
And to-forn prudently adverte,
Litel Ioie þei shuld han in her herte
To sette her trust in any worldly þing;
For þer is nouþer prince, lord, nor kyng,
Be exaumple of Troye, like as ?e may se,
þat in þis lif may have ful surete.
þerfore, to hym þat starf uppon þe rode,
Suffringe deth for oure alder goode,
Lyfte up ?oure hertis and þinke on him among:
For be ?e nevere so my?ti nor so strong,
Withoute hym al may nat availle…30
It was one of Marston’s major innovations to revive the tradition in which this theme is seen as essentially comic. Troilus, looking down on his tragedy in Chaucer’s poem, comes to see that it was not a tragedy at all, but a farce. Marston’s Paul’s plays, Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600) and What You Will (1601) are comic treatments of the vanitas theme. He had given quasi-tragic treatment to the same theme in Antonio and Mellida and its sequel Antonio’s Revenge. Traditionally the foolishness of trusting in the things of this world had been the subject of scorn and ridicule; Marston, with the conservatism of the new generation, restored that mood in both his formal satires and in his plays. He also—and this was his most radical innovation—evolved a dislocatory stage technique that was the formal expression of the theme of man’s absurd delight in the inconsequential. He had been prompted to this by the very nature of the company he managed, for the acting of Paul’s choirboys lent itself much more readily to parody and comic disruption than to the solemnities of either tragedy or romance. We have already seen, in the previous chapter, how this technique works in Antonio’s Revenge, but a glance at one of the comedies that London playgoers would have seen at Paul’s around the time of Troilus’s first performance will help to reinforce the point.
Marston’s What You Will shares its title, curiously, with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (January 1601), which has as its subtitle Or What You Will. Shakespeare uses his title casually to reflect the light-hearted nature of his play. If, as seems likely, it was a performance commanded by Queen Elizabeth31 the ‘you’ may be addressed to the Queen herself. Marston’s title is used in a rather more studied way—the title is repeated several times within the play—to reflect the central theme of ‘opinion’, the relativity of values in a fallen world. Not that Marston’s play is markedly solemn, indeed he goes out of his way in the Induction to characterize the play as ‘a slight toy’ (88–9) while Quadratus refers to it in the epilogue as ‘a slight-writ play’ (2093).
Marston’s play is noticeably less concerned with plot and narrative sequence not merely than Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (the last of Shakespeare’s old-style romantic comedies) but than the dramaturgical methods evolved for the popular stage. There is a plot (derived indirectly from Plautus’ Amphitryo) but this occupies only about half the play’s stage time, which is otherwise concerned with a number of lightly satiric sketches, mostly built around the ‘humours’ characters of Lampatho Doria, in whom Marston deliberately parodies himself, and Quadratus, who has sometimes, on rather slender evidence, been thought to be a skit on Jonson. Some scenes, such as III, iii, where a group of page-boys compare their varying roles, and an earlier classroom scene, II, ii, bear no relation to the main action, though both these scenes contribute to the play’s main theme. The theme that runs through the play, though lightly treated, none the less gives unity to the work and justifies its apparently casual method. In the ‘Amphitryo’ plot the theme centres on the character of Albano, a merchant supposedly lost at sea, who returns to find his identity assumed by the perfumer Francisco. Francisco has assumed Albano’s personality as a ruse to prevent Celia, the merchant’s wife, from marrying again against the wishes of her brothers and he does so by the simple expedient of dressing up. A scene (III, i) where the assumption that the clothes make the man bears directly on the theme that the world constantly mistakes appearance for reality:
I warrant you, give him but fair rich clothes,
He can be ta’en, reputed anything.
Apparel’s grown a god, and goes more neat;
Makes men of rags, which straight he bears aloft,
Like patch’d-up scarecrows to affright the rout
Of the idolatrous vulgar, that worship images,
Stand aw’d and bare-scalp’d at the gloss of silks…
(III, i, 937–43)32
That it is not just the ‘idolatrous vulgar’ that mistake appearance for reality becomes clear when the returned Albano tries to re-establish his identity. Albano fails to convince anybody (including his wife) that he is not the disguised Francisco. Ironically enough, one of the reasons Francisco has been persuaded to impersonate Albano is that Albano was readily defined by his clothes, as one of Celia’s suitors recalls:
O I shall ne’er forget how he went cloth’d,
He would maintain’t a base ill-used fashion
To bind a merchant to the sullen habit
Of precise black.
(I, i, 281–4)
In this world of animated clothes, Albano comes to believe that identity consists in ‘opinion’, literally the view that others have of us:
Doth not opinion stamp the current pass
Of each man’s value, virtue, quality?
Had I engross’d the choice commodities
Of Heaven’s traffic, yet reputed vile,
I am a rascal…
(III, iii, 1247–51)
If this has a familiar ring we have only to turn to Troilus to see why:
What’s aught but as ’tis valued?…
I take today a wife, and my election
Is led on in the conduct of my will:
My will enkindled by my eyes and ears,
Two traded pilots ’twixt the dangerous shores
Of will and judgement…
(T & C II, ii, 53, 62–6)
For Troilus the world about us is constituted by what you will. Neither Troilus nor the disorientated Albano have the last word in their respective plays, but the problem of shifting values in an unstable world is a central preoccupation of both of them. Troilus and Cressida too has as a central image the dominance of clothes as an image of man’s mutability, as when Troilus continues his argument that we must stick to the opinions we are committed to by an analogy with buying soiled silks (II, ii, 70) and Thersites sums up ‘opinion’ as a leather jerkin that may be worn on both sides (III, ii, 264–5). In Shakespeare’s play the imagery of clothes becomes part of the action when Hector takes off his armour during battle to contemplate the rich trappings of the soldier he has just slain:
Most putrefied core, so fair without,
Thy goodly armour thus hath cost thy life.
(V, viii, 1–2)
Palmer rightly invokes the gospels here (Matthew 23:27), but the ultimate irony is that Hector himself loses his life at this very moment. Like Spenser’s Red Cross Knight, he has been distracted by earthly shows into taking off the armour of his righteousness.33
Marston broadens his theme of the confusion between appearance and reality by having his surrogate ‘Don Kinsayder’ Lampatho Doria meditate on the theme of the vanity of human knowledge. ‘Kinsayder’ (i.e. gelder, ‘mar-stone’) had been Marston’s adopted pseudonym in the formal satires that he had published earlier and he has this deliberately recalled in having Quadratus address Lampatho with the name (II, i, 531). Lampatho, however, is no firm authorial guide (unlike earlier surrogate figures like Chrisogonus in Histriomastix). As he himself explains, he has abandoned all trust in human ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. In a delightful account of his studies he tells us that at the end of it all he knew no more than his spaniel:
philosophers
Stood banding factions all so strongly propp’d,
I stagger’d, knew not which was firmer part,
But thought, quoted, read, observ’d and pried,
Stuff’d noting-books; and still my spaniel slept.
At length he wak’d and yawn’d, and by yon sky,
For aught I know he knew as much as I.
(II, ii, 866–72)
and he concludes:
but now soft and slow,
I know I know naught but I naught do know.
(II, ii, 883–4)
The play’s dramaturgical method is devised as a formal expression of this pyrrhonism. That Lampatho’s (and Marston’s) scepticism derives from Christian traditions of the vanity of earthly aspirations is made clear by Lampatho’s earlier assertion of man’s innate vileness:
In Heaven’s handiwork there’s naught,
None more vile, accursed, reprobate to bliss
Than man, and ’mong men a scholar most.
(II, ii, 821–3)
The phrase ‘reprobate to bliss’ has the ring of Calvinistic pessimism, while the attack on scholars sounds like a continuation of the infighting with the scholarly Jonson.
The relevance of Marston’s exploration of Christian scepticism to Troilus and Cressida has already been suggested, but whereas Marston’s play is designed as an expression of scepticism Shakespeare’s play resists it. True the general picture we get of the world of Troilus and Cressida suggests a society vainly preoccupied with self-interest, with the ephemeral, but it also provides us with a critique of this relativism. Not only does the search for self-interest and self-gratification lead to disaster, most obviously in Troilus’ loss of Cressida, but equally in the deaths of Patroclus and Hector and the prophesies of gloom that foresee the dissolution of Troy:
The end crowns all;
And that old common arbitrator, Time,
Will one day end it.
(IV, v, 223–5)
If time must have a stop it is because eternity succeeds it and the glimpse of the order that will then reign is given within the play, both in the Greek and Trojan camps. Among the Trojans the presence of order is felt above all in Hector’s realism and his valiant courtesy, though like everything else in the fallen world of the play, it is a flawed virtue. Among the Greeks, Ulysses’ noble appeal for order in society as an expression of a universal order, goes largely ignored and has been thought to be undercut by Ulysses’ own behaviour, but it is a dull auditor who does not hear in it the cosmic harmony on which the Elizabethan rested his faith in a meaningful universe:
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order.
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d
Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the influence of evil planets,
And posts like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad.
(I, iii, 85–94)
In this spotty world such orderliness is only glimpsed at and striven for—so not surprisingly Ulysses himself fails to embody his own aspiration—but the power of the vision itself is unmistakable:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows. Each thing melts
In mere oppugnancy; the bounded waters
Should lift their bossoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right—or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
(I, iii, 109–24)
This is the play’s principal riposte to Troilus’ wilfulness. There is no fundamental disagreement in the two plays about the ultimate triumph of order, but the emphasis is very different: in the world of Marston’s play, the eternal world only makes itself felt by its absence: it is the measure by which the chaotic, and so comic, world of appearances is silently to be judged. In Shakespeare’s play the presence of this harmony is felt within the play itself. Compared to Heywood’s play we are in a slippery world indeed, but compared to What You Will Shakespeare’s older, more catholic faith in mankind’s ability to reflect the divine orderliness shines out (if fleetingly) through the chaos.
As in the treatment of his theme, so in his dramatic methods Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida reflects something of a compromise between old and new. The adoption of Marstonian methods, however, is more remarkable than the reflection of Marston’s themes, because it signals a radical departure from Shakespeare’s previous usages. We saw in the discussion of Antonio’s Revenge in the previous chapter how Marston’s dramatic technique emphasizes the artificiality of the stage. In contrast to Shakespeare’s customary method of stimulating the audience’s imagination into creating a sense of reality from the stage’s creaky machinery, using the stage as a symbol of life, Marston goes out of his way to remind us we are in a theatre being entertained for a couple hours or so by a troupe of boys. Two of the scenes of What You Will, the conference of page boys where the roles of the different kinds of page-boys are discussed (III, iii) and the school scene (II, ii), give the boy actors boy roles to remind the audience at strategic intervals that all the characters are boys playing at being men and women. The ‘theatrical’ quality of the boy actors is also exploited by the inclusion of song and dance. Another function of these scenes is to break up the narrative so that we never settle long into a sense of sequential relationships—much, indeed, of the dialogue concerned with the two most prominent characters of the play, Lampatho Doria and Quadratus, is irrelevant to the main plot narrative of Albanus’ return from being ‘drowned’.
The dialogue within scenes, too, is often designed to suggest discontinuity. Half of Act IV, for instance, is taken up with a game of shuttlecock between Albano’s wife Celia and her sister Meletza (neither of whom have appeared in the play up to this point). The game is (inevitably) lightly allegorized by Meletza as an image of her attitude to her suitors:
Purr! just thus do I use my servants: I strive to catch them in my racket, and no sooner caught but I toss them away. If he fly well and have good feathers I play with them till he be down, and then my maid serves him to me again; if a slug and weak-wing’d, if he be down there let him lie.
(IV, i, 1461–6)
Marston had clearly learnt much from Shakespearean comedy, but such inconsequentiality is nearly always in Shakespeare related sooner or later to consistency of character or narrative or usually both. In What You Will the inconsequentiality is more fundamental, more disruptive. Meletza’s wooing is neither developed from or into anything else in the play. While her catalogue of suitors recalls similar moments in Shakespeare (Two Gentlemen, I, ii, 1–33; Merchant of Venice, I, ii, 35–115) the use made out of these similar scenes highlights the fundamental difference in dramatic method. In Two Gentlemen Julia’s relation to her preferred suitor, Proteus, is to be central to the play’s concerns, as is Portia’s preference for Bassanio in Merchant of Venice; both scenes contribute to creating consistent character portraits and to the development of plot. In What You Will Meletza appears only in this scene and at the end of the play and there shows mild interest in Lampatho Doria, whom she had not mentioned in her roll-call of suitors. The game of shuttlecock too is introduced as much as a way of breaking up dialogue as of providing an emblematic reading. The opening of the scene illustrates the way in which Marston’s dialogue suggests discontinuity—characters going their own way regardless—rather than any meeting of minds:
| Celia | Faith sister, I long to play with a feather. Prithee Lucea, bring the shuttle-cock. |
| Meletza | Out upon him, light-pated fantastic, he’s like one of our gallants at— |
| Lyzabetta | I wonder who thou speakst well of? |
| Meletza | Why of myself, for by my troth I know none else will. |
(IV, i, 1395–1400)
Meletza’s self-absorption reflects the attitude of a world where what you will is given prior importance (a little later she tells Celia that her true husband is ‘her will’, 1448). Each character is essentially in a world of her own, without any but the most superficial contact with others. It is characteristic of the play that we never learn to whom Meletza is referring here.
Such a treatment of dialogue and plot is also inevitably reflected in Marston’s attitude to character. It is no accident that Marston is attracted in his choice of main plot by a story of mistaken identities. Francisco, the perfumer, ‘becomes’ Albano, the missing husband, so that Albano, the play’s hero, ceases to exist in his own right; at the centre of the action there is a non-person:
If Albano’s name
Were liable to sense, that I could taste or touch
Or see, or feel it, it might ’tice belief;
But since ’tis voice and air, come to the musk-cat, boy:
Francisco, that’s my name, ’tis right, ay, ay.
What do you lack? what is’t you lack? Right, that’s my cry.
(III, ii, 1259–64)
Here we are truly in a world of Derridean deconstruction. As everyone insists that Albano is really Francisco in disguise as Albano, he might as well become Francisco, seeing that there seems to be no way in which he can communicate his true state to others. Appearance has become everything, identity is a matter of dressing up, so that becoming Francisco (as those he meets tell him he is) is simply a question of assuming a role created for him by other people. The outside view and the inside view of personality are completely discontinuous. Suitably enough, one of the requirements of the particular role that Francisco has to play to become Albano is to assume a speech impediment by which the dialogue is yet further dislocated. It is interesting to contrast Albano’s acceptance, albeit reluctant, of his loss of identity with that of Antipholus of Ephesus in a similar situation in Act IV, scene iv of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Certain of his own identity, Antipholus staunchly maintains it against a world which, in the person of Pinch the schoolmaster, assumes he’s possessed by the devil and has him bound and carried off. In this earlier Shakespearean drama individual identity is a basic premise, in Marston it is seen as a continuum of uncoordinated moments. You make what you will of them:
I’ll f-f-follow, though I st-st-st-stut, I’ll stumble to the Duke in p-p-plain language. I pray you use my wife well: good faith she was a kind soul and an honest woman once, I was her husband and was call’d Albano before I was drown’d, but now after my resurrection I am I know not what. Indeed brothers, and indeed sisters, and indeed wife I am what you will.
(IV, i, 1715–20)
Albano is not exactly passive in this situation, but yet he, conveniently for Marston’s purposes, loses sight of the fact that finally emerges in the last act: he has a distinctive mark on his breast. It is this that makes his identity readily demonstrable to his wife (V, i, 2025–30). Contrast Albano’s ironic use of the resurrection metaphor with Shakespeare’s imagery of rebirth in Comedy of Errors where the establishing of the truth is made to seem the point of entry into a new and more stable world of reality (C of E V, i, 400–6). To Marston the final establishment of the truth is merely a necessary end-game of the comedy, an accident that happens to relieve Albano of the more absurd consequences of his isolation.
Lampatho Doria, ironically enough Marston’s spokesman in the play, is given similar disjunctive treatment. He is the chief fool in a world of fools; in a land where the governing Duke ‘scorns all plaints, makes jest of serious suit’ (I, i, 369) and uses the petition presented to him by Celia’s brothers to light his tobacco pipe. Lampatho’s relation to Quadratus is that of licensed fool, as Quadratus explains:
he dogs me and I give him scraps and pay for his ordinary, feed him; he liquors himself in the juice of my bounty, and when he hath suck’d up strength of spirit he squeezeth it in my own face: when I have refin’d and sharp’d his wits with good food, he cuts my fingers, and breaks jests upon me. I bear them, and bate him…
(IV, i, 1507–13)
When he first appears he is presented, like his author, as a railing satirist, a ‘Don Kinsayder’, but that this is merely one of several roles becomes clear later. At one point he stops in mid-harangue to attack the very role of railer he’s just assumed:
This is your humour only in request,
Forsooth to rail…
Who cannot rail? My humour’s chang’d ’tis clear.
(III, ii. 1144–5, 1149)
Such sudden and unpredictable changes of attitude destroy any sense of coherent characterization, as they are intended to, for we are in a world of essential incoherence. We need not be surprised later, therefore, when we find Lampatho assuming the role of infatuated lover in a sudden conversion (IV, i, 1639–41). All this does not prevent Lampatho from uttering words of wisdom, for indeed it is only through fragmentary glimpses of the truth that we receive guidance. We have already heard Lampatho expressing his author’s scepticism concerning human knowledge, but that does not stop him from standing ‘as confident as Hercules’ in pronouncing on man’s foolishness in thinking himself able to ‘disturb the sway of providence’:
As if we had free will in supernatural
Effects, and that our love or hate
Depended not on causes ’bove the reach
Of human stature.
(III. ii. 1116–19)
to which Quadratus replies: ‘I think I shall not lend you forty shillings now’ (III, ii, 1120). In this way pertinency and impertinency are incongruously juxtaposed. The effect is essentially comic, but it is a comedy that expresses a radically pessimistic view of this world coupled with hopes for the hereafter.
Troilus and Cressida, too, opens in comedy, with Pandarus teasing the love-sick Troilus by pretending that he is no longer willing to act as go-between. The contrast between the passionate, earnest lover and the (apparently) disillusioned, weary helper provides a classic example of that clash of viewpoints that is at the heart of the comic. The comedy is sustained on and off throughout the play, the comic tone varying across the whole range from sardonic satire to benevolent fellow-feeling. Both the surviving versions of the play end with a comic epilogue spoken by Pandarus, though the comedy now has a bitter flavour that was absent at the beginning. The structure of the play has the diffuseness of comedy, allowing none of that sustained concentration on feeling that is characteristic of Shakespearean tragedy. There are, it is true, moments of intense emotion, as there are often in Shakespeare’s comedies, but these are always undercut by alternative perspectives. The opening scene provides just such a double viewpoint, undercutting the seriousness of Troilus’ love-sickness as Pandarus mutters, as much to himself as to Troilus, of the ingratitude of lovers and his determination not to meddle any longer. This comic double focus is achieved in several scenes by the structural device of representing a double action simultaneously on stage. The most notable example of this is at the moment of Cressida’s betrayal of her lover (V, ii). Here the audience is required to watch Cressida’s flirtation with Diomedes as Troilus, brought to the spot by Ulysses, observes and comments on his own betrayal. This double action is further complicated by the presence of Thersites, who, detached from both groups, provides a cynical commentary. The effect of so complex a structural device is to make it impossible for the audience to identify themselves emotionally with any one level of the action. The sympathy felt for Troilus is tempered by the inevitable absurdity of his concealment and by the presence of Thersites interposing his reductive comments throughout the scene. The audience is not likely to approve entirely of Thersites’ point of view; he is the licensed fool of the play, not the choric voice, but his intervention not only breaks into the rhetoric of Troilus’ emotion, but inevitably reminds us of the seamy side of Troilus’ relationship with Cressida. ‘How the devil Luxury, with his fat rump and potato finger, tickles these together! Fry, lechery, fry’ (V, ii, 55–7) might be applied as much to the intoxicated sensuality of Troilus’ love for Cressida as to her current affair with Diomedes. This, then, is a kind of comedy, for it presents a multiplicity of interpretations of a single event, but it is a perplexing, disturbing use of the comic. True comedy demands that the perspectives have similar validity, that one version of the events is as good (or bad) as another; here however, sympathy must principally lie with Troilus. The effect of the other perspectives is rather to prevent our fully engaging with Troilus’ viewpoint; the comic element succeeds in frustrating the emotional impact of the scene without, however, releasing the laughter that would allow us to stand off from the emotion altogether. Is this design or accident? Is Shakespeare here attempting to explore some curious dramatic territory between tragedy and comedy or has the method adopted led to the blurring of the intended effect?
Certainly the pattern repeats itself in the play. In an earlier encounter between Troilus and Cressida (III, ii) which one would expect, on the models of Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, to present the lovers in the full flower of their emotional involvement, Shakespeare oddly intrudes the voyeuristic silliness of Pandarus to debase the emotional exchange. The scene starts with Troilus in full emotional flight:
No, Pandarus. I stalk about her door
Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks
Staying for waftage. O be thou my Charon,
And give me swift transportance to those fields
Where I may wallow in the lily beds
Propos’d for the deserver! O gentle Pandar,
From Cupid’s shoulder pluck his painted wings
And fly with me to Cressid.
(III, ii, 7–14)
It is true that the imagery of the underworld here already carries some ambiguity, but this seems to be momentarily dispelled as Troilus flings himself unashamedly into the prospect of unalloyed sexual fulfilment:
I am giddy: expectation whirls me round.
Th’imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense: what will it be
When that the wat’ry palate tastes indeed
Love’s thrice-repured nectar? Death, I fear me,
Sounding destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle-potent, tun’d too sharp in sweetness
For the capacity of my ruder powers.
(III, ii, 17–24)
The ecstacy carries the seeds of its own destruction; there is a feeling of hysteria about the lines that are making it all too plain that Troilus is heading for his proverbial disaster. The psychological subtlety of the portrait cannot be overstressed. Shakespeare not only manages to convey in these lines the excitement of sexual anticipation, but equally the fragility and volatility of the psychological state that generates it. Here the Hamlet-master is clearly at work, creating a real psychological presence for his actor to play with. As so often in the love plot we seem to be back among the personal entities of the Hamlet world. Troilus, Cressida, Pandarus are each individual characters with a life overflowing the plot in which they function. Pandarus especially, brilliantly developed from Chaucer’s own splendid creation, has something (but not everything) of the stage presence of that earlier ‘historical’ figure Sir John Falstaff. Yet Shakespeare uses Pandarus in this scene for a primarily negative purpose: to destroy any chance of the love scene taking on the lyrical magic that only Shakespeare could achieve, when he wanted, with total conviction. The sheer absurdity of Pandarus’ prosings on Cressida’s coyness derives as much from Pandarus’ manner as from our memory of the brazen Cressida we saw in the second scene of Act I. This mocking, frivolous tone is again resumed, after a brief interval of under forty lines, in which the lovers are allowed to express an unconventional conventional exchange on the inability of lovers to realize love’s potential (which Cressida characteristically interprets in terms of sexual competence). The dialogue of the lovers is itself rich in ambiguities, but Pandarus reduces these to the crudest mechanical level:
if my lord get a boy of you, you’ll give him me. Be true to my lord: if he flinch, chide me for it.
(III, ii, 103–5)
For the rest of the scene Pandarus remains looking on—with the occasional voyeuristic comment—as the lovers manoeuvre each other towards the bed chamber. Yet here again the effect is not primarily that of comic detachment, but rather a feeling of a thwarted love relationship meeting impenetrable barriers to its development.
Such constant deflationary interventions, which require the audience to stand back from emotional involvement at moments of emotional crisis, are certainly not accidental to the play. The interweaving of the love affair of Troilus and Cressida with the heroic matter of the Trojan war has a similar deflationary effect on the main action, for unlike Falstaff, who remains largely intrusive to the serious action and therefore must ultimately be repudiated, Pandarus is the tutelary genius of the whole play, as the revised ending, with Pandarus speaking the epilogue, clearly acknowledges. Like the love plot, however, the heroic plot is given considerable emotional substance. Once again Shakesepeare creates a perfectly credible substantial world of personalities in conflict. Hector on the Trojan side and Ulysses on the Greek in particular are both impressive figures, for all the reservations the play requires us to make about them. Hector, in spite of his chivalric magnanimity and intellectual clarity, ends by being deceived by what the Bible describes as ‘lust of the eyes’, while Ulysses, the defender of order in the state, stoops to rig the ballot that chooses Ajax as the Greek champion. For it is not just the juxtaposition of the two plots that undermines our confidence in the values of the heroic world. Again in the main plot (if it is the main plot) the deflationary techniques are at work and again with similar effect: not totally destroying the heroic world in mockery and parody, but blocking the full emotional impact it would otherwise have.
Even without the presence of Thersites, whose primary function is to throw doubt on the values of the heroic world, Shakespeare’s presentation of both Greek and Trojan remains highly ambiguous. There are moments when, as with the love plot, we are called on to admire these epic figures. Both the grand debates of the Greeks (I, iii) and of the Trojans (II, ii) are marked by high seriousness and impressive rhetoric, while such chivalric encounters as that between Hector and Ajax (IV, v) or Troilus’ final dedication of himself to avenge the murdered Hector are impressively presented. Certainly these are not scenes that inspire laughter and derision. Thersites’ constant reductive comments simply will not do as a sane commentary on the action, though they inevitably leave their traces on our response. And yet in the centre of the play Shakespeare presents us with a scene whose main purpose is to suggest the hollowness at the heart of the action. In the one scene in which the direct cause of the war—Paris’ infatuation with Helen—is directly represented, Pandarus is brought in to the main plot to emphasize the void over which the whole action is constructed.
Unlike Heywood’s serious treatment of Helen, Shakespeare presents her as a minor comic character. In the little we see of her she is presented as a feather-headed woman who would seem totally incapable of inspiring anything but tedium, except possibly in bed. The one scene in which she appears (III, i) illustrates Shakespeare’s newly found dislocatory method. It is placed almost exactly in the centre of the play (in terms of lines) and central to the scene itself is a song sung by Pandarus on the pleasures of sexual intercourse. This placing is not accidental, for it reinforces Thersites’ earlier assertion that ‘all the argument is a whore and a cuckold’ (II, iii, 74–5)—where ‘argument’ would apply as well to the play’s plot as to the historical quarrel between Greeks and Trojans. Nothing could be more reductive than the lyric Shakespeare provides for Pandarus in response to Helen’s request for a song: ‘let thy song be of love’. Paris prompts Pandarus by providing the title: ‘love, love, nothing but love’ and the lyric centres on that Elizabethan ‘nothing’, the female genitalia, describing, blow by blow, the ‘shaft’ tickling the ‘sore’ and the ecstacy of the lovers in their act of dying together.34 The last lines of the song reduce language to little more than the ejaculatory sounds of sexual orgasm:
These lovers cry O ho, they die!
Yet that which seems the wound to kill
Doth turn O ho, to Ha, ha, he!
So dying love lives still.
O ho, a while, but Ha, ha, ha!
O ho, groans out for Ha, ha, ha!—Heigh ho!
(III, i, 116–21)
As both Paris and Troilus at this point have exchanged the wounds of the battlefield for the ‘wound’ of the bedchamber, such a reductive view of the heroic would seem not inappropriate. Love-making has not only taken the place of warfare, but love-making itself is reduced to copulation.
Emptying the language of intellectual content is the most extreme form of the breakdown of communication that is illustrated in other ways throughout the scene, which opens with some comic patter between Pandarus and a serving man, in which the servant deliberately misinterprets Pandarus’ intended meanings:
(III, i, 9–19)
This kind of misunderstanding is, of course, characteristic of clownish patter, but it is typical of this play that the religious terms the servant plays with are without serious religious content, mere counters in verbal play, and the fact that they are Christian terms adds a level of incongruity that again contributes towards destroying any sense of ultimate coherence. In earlier Shakespearean comedy such a passage would go unremarked. Here it adds to the feeling of unsettlement that meets us at every turn.
The entry of Helen and Paris introduces another kind of verbal hiatus as Helen insists on one subject while Paris is pursuing another. Helen wants Pandarus to sing for her amusement, while Pandarus is anxious to convey to Paris a message from Troilus:
| Pandarus | I have business to my lord, dear queen. My lord, will you vouchsafe me a word? |
| Helen | Nay, this shall not hedge us out: we’ll hear you sing, certainly. |
| Pandarus | Well, sweet queen, you are pleasant with me.—But marry, thus, my lord: my dear lord and most esteemed friend, your brother Troilus— |
| Helen | My Lord Pandarus, honey-sweet lord— |
| Pandarus | Go to, sweet queen, go to—commends himself most affectionately to you— |
| Helen | You shall not bob us out of our melody; if you do, our melancholy upon your head… |
(III, i, 57–68)
Pandarus’ constant reiteration of meaningless adjectives adds a sense of vacuity to the disrupted dialogue, so that the whole encounter seems to be designed to avoid communication rather than further it. Not only does Helen fail to find out what Pandarus and Paris are discussing, but the audience has only a hazy impression of the purport of Pandarus’ message, the manner of which seems as urgent as the content is trivial—a request that Paris will excuse Troilus’ absence from the King’s table at supper, a request, incidentally, that has no significance for the later action. The song itself is, of course, a further dislocatory device.
Here again, however, the effect is not primarily comic, but once again of the failure of feeling to communicate itself. The love of Helen and Paris for one another is not seriously in question, in spite of Helen’s only half-serious suspicion of a flirtation between Paris and Cressida (III, i, 99). Paris’ defence of keeping Helen in the Trojan council chamber is both serious and impressive, as Hector acknowledges (II, ii, 164). It is not surprising that, faced with such tonal ambiguities, the early editors were uncertain how to characterize the play. The uncertainty accurately reflects the tonal ambiguity, that the play has something both of the emotional dignity and commitment of tragedy and the multiplicity of focus and detachment of comedy. Is this tonal ambiguity, which clearly exercised Shakespeare’s contemporaries, part of Shakespeare’s intention then, another appeal to the ‘wiser sort’, or is it accidental?
We can answer this question best, I think, by looking more closely at the way Shakespeare uses ‘Marstonian’ effects in the play. I have already suggested that the theme of the play that Shakespeare picks up from his sources in Chaucer and Lydgate is peculiarly Marstonian: the vanity of a world dedicated to worldly glory and worldly lusts. In taking up this Marstonian theme it is not surprising that Shakespeare also experiments with Marstonian techniques in presenting it, whether out of a sense of cooperation or competition with the younger dramatist. The most striking of these techniques is the use of deliberate inconsistencies in character—as we have seen in such examples as Lampatho Doria’s volte-faces in What You Will. The purpose of these dislocations in Marston is to illustrate the essential incoherence of human nature and undermine our trust in our own impressions of things—both fundamental elements of the Marstonian viewpoint. Shakespeare contrives a series of similar character lacunae in Troilus, the most notable being Hector’s sudden change of mind at the end of his argument in favour of sending Helen back to the Greeks. He ignores the consequences of his own logic and capitulates to the viewpoint of Paris and Troilus, which he’d earlier described as superficial and immature, worthy only of young men ‘whom Aristotle thought/Unfit to hear moral philosophy’ (II, ii, 167–8):
thus to persist
In doing wrong extenuates not wrong,
But makes it much more heavy. Hector’s opinion
Is this in way of truth: yet ne’ertheless,
My spritely brethren, I propend to you
In resolution to keep Helen still
For ’tis a cause that hath no mean dependence
Upon our joint and several dignities.
(II, ii, 187–94)
It is not simply as Palmer explains it in his note,35 that Hector distinguishes between an absolute moral standard and the practical code of ‘honour’ (it is in any case a strange concept of honour that defines it in terms of untruth), more important is the manner in which Shakespeare highlights the inconsistency, drawing attention to it by presenting it so starkly. If it were an isolated case we might dismiss it as some kind of error in textual transmission, but this is merely one example of several such striking inconsistencies. Troilus, for example, announces in Act I that he is not prepared to fight for so inadequate a cause as the possession of Helen: ‘I cannot fight upon this argument’ (I, i, 92), yet by the end of the scene he goes off with Aeneas to battle and later he makes it a central plank in his argument during the Trojan debate that honour requires us (as with Fortinbras) ‘greatly to find quarrel in a straw’. Hector’s inconsistencies too, do not consist only in the strange volte-face during the Trojan debate. The very first time we hear about him we hear of behaviour that is inconsistent with the Hector we actually meet and indeed has no bearing on the later development of the action:
He chid Andromache and struck his armourer,
And like as there were husbandry in war,
Before the sun rose he was harness’d light
And to the field goes he, where every flower
Did as a prophet weep what it foresaw
In Hector’s wrath.
(I, ii, 6–10)
The speaker (Alexander) explains this behaviour in terms of Hector’s rivalry with Ajax, but when Hector and Ajax meet eventually in single combat (IV, v) the encounter is marked by Hector’s outstanding courtesy and forbearance, as Ajax acknowledges: ‘Thou art too gentle and too free a man’ (IV, v, 138). It is odd too that if Ajax’s renown on the battlefield is such as to stir Hector’s wrath in Act I, Ulysses can use as his main argument in trying to stir Achilles to action, that Ajax is unknown as a soldier and will be given the chance to make himself famous if Achilles fails to respond to Hector’s challenge (III, iii, 123–32). The description given of Ajax in the earlier scene, whose ‘folly [is] sauced with discretion’ (I, ii, 19–31), is also considerably at variance with the ‘dull brainless Ajax’ Ulysses describes during the Greek debate (I, iii, 381). This initial description of Ajax, indeed, is so at variance with the character we later see that it has been argued that the portrait of the first scene is intended as an ad hoc description of Ben Jonson put in the play as the ‘purge’ Shakespeare was thought, by the author of the second Return from Parnassus, to have administered his rival.
These are merely some of the contradictions in the presentation of character throughout the play, and there are others. Cressida, for instance, tells us in her soliloquy at the end of I, ii that wise women delay granting their favours to raise their price:
That she belov’d knows naught that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.
(I, ii 293–4)
but of all Shakespeare’s heroines she is the least ready to wait until the bride price is right. Cressida becomes a byword (as we are reminded in the play) for duplicity. Here she seems to be deceiving herself rather than her lover. The point in all these inconsistencies is surely the same: human nature knows no constancy, we are an incoherent mass of desires, failing to know ourselves in the process of trying to manipulate others, ‘Cressida is and is not Cressida’. In this world we are defined by opinion, ‘what’s aught but as ’tis valued’. In Marston the logic of these hiatuses is clear enough; in Shakespeare’s play, however, they appear rather as lapses in an essentially mimetic realism. Shakespeare has not been able or willing to follow the full logic of Marston’s Christian pessimism because he does not share it. It is not only Ulysses who articulates a vision of an hierarchical order that can be aspired to, if it cannot be reached; the play itself, in the dignity it affords (if fleetingly) to the participants in the midst of the world’s confusion and in its refusal to dissolve into sardonic laughter, resists the devaluing of human endeavour. Shakespeare is here caught between his habitual affirmation of ‘this goodly frame the earth’ and the Marstonian formal experiments born of his need—at this moment—to keep up with the Jonsons and the Marstons. For there are other Marstonian intrusions: the play abounds in neologisms and difficult words of the kind Marston (in the person of Crispinus) is forced to eructate in Poetaster (V, iii, 463ff). A selection of unusual words in Troilus might include: ‘unplausive’, ‘assubjugate’, ‘propugnation’, ‘violenteth’, ‘rejoindure’, ‘embrasures’, ‘maculation’, ‘mirable’, ‘multipotent’, ‘impressure’, ‘recordation’. Shakespeare always has a liking for the rich and strange in words as part of his rhetoric of wonder, but in Troilus and Cressida they function unusually. As in Marston’s earlier plays (What You Will is not conspicuous for their use) Shakespeare here uses them to draw attention to the medium itself, to effect a gap between thought and meaning that is a verbal analogy to the thematic exploration of the gap between appearance and a transcendent reality. Like the other Marstonian devices they serve to distance the audience from the stage events; they are a specifically theatrical device for reminding the audience it is watching a play. Other characteristic Marstonian devices that we’ve already noticed include the tendency for dialogue to aspire to the condition of concurrent monologue, and also the sharp contrasts in stylistic levels between speakers that we can see in the contrast between Pandarus’ prose and Troilus’ poetry in the opening scene, or the contrast between Troilus’ fondness for abstraction and Cressida’s sensual practicality in the love dialogue of III, ii. The general tendency of the play to engage in abstract debate, most noticeable in the two council scenes, is in itself a device of dramatic alienation related to Marston’s predilection for intellectual debate in his plays.
Troilus and Cressida’s apparent failure on the popular stage, then, and the evidence that Shakespeare’s contemporaries were uncertain about the play’s generic status are a legitimate audience-response to a play of uncertain intention. Courageously, at the height of his career as a professional dramatist that had given him an unparalleled reputation and earned him a considerable fortune, in response to new rivalries he decides to experiment in his rivals’ manner on a fashionable theme to which the new techniques could readily be accommodated, the ultimate vanity of the world. But after more than a decade of evolving a drama of the most brilliant character realism he cannot sufficiently jettison the experience of half a working lifetime. Tempted by one of his few rivals in the creation of character to translate Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pandar on to the stage—as earlier he was led to create Juliet’s Nurse from the brilliant sketch in Arthur Brooke’s poem—he cannot resist depicting Pandarus as a rounded personality, nor of breathing mimetic life into the lovers. He cannot resist the temptation because at a deeper level he cannot accept the Calvinistic grimness of the Marstonian world. For all the silliness depicted in the world of Troilus, for all its contradictoriness, its betrayals, the play keeps catching glimpses of that brave new world that reflects the glory of God’s handiwork. The play ends as an uneasy compromise between Shakespeare’s deepest convictions and the new dramaturgical techniques he has the courage to explore.