“Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair
when with your blood you daily paint her thus.”
So speaks Troilus, youngest son of Priam King of Troy, at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. His words, expressing his disgust at the meaninglessness of the Trojan War (at least, before he changes his mind) cut like a sword through the conventions of heroic epic.
Written in the early 1600s, at roughly the same time as Hamlet and King Lear, Troilus and Cressida is one of Shakespeare’s most challenging plays. It is not tragedy—neither of the title characters dies. Nor is it comedy—there is no happy ending. Even the title derives not from the main story but from the subplot: the love of Troilus and Cressida, their romance brokered by Cressida’s gossipy uncle Pandarus. Their story takes place against the backdrop of the Trojan War, the epic struggle of Greeks and Trojans for Helen, wife of Menelaus, after her abduction by Paris, brother of Troilus.
Shakespeare chose the greatest legend of Western literature to write what amounts to a recantation of themes of heroism and love he brought to the stage only a few years before. Anyone attending a performance of Henry V sees a glorious hero fighting for a righteous cause. Romeo and Juliet fills the viewer with the splendor of love. These are plays that affirm ideals. But theatergoers leave a performance of Troilus and Cressida unsure what they have seen, how they are supposed to react—their expectations from the conventions of heroism and love are thwarted in almost every scene.
The action begins in media res at year seven of the Trojan War. Greeks and Trojans are deadlocked with no victory in sight. From the moment they appear, the Greek heroes are portrayed as buffoonish figures unfit to conduct a war. Agamemnon is an indecisive leader with “not so much brain as ear wax.” Menelaus is a cuckold. Achilles, petulant and vainglorious, lolls in his tent with his “male varlet” Patroclus. Ajax is a blockhead, Nestor a garrulous old “mouse-eaten dry cheese,” Ulysses a sly “dog-fox” not to be trusted.
The Trojans are mired in indecision—after seven years of bloody war they still cannot decide if they want to keep Helen or return her to the Greeks. The hothead brothers Paris and Troilus dominate the war council. Hector, their best warrior, is high-minded and courageous, but flawed by his inability to compromise his nobility in an unprincipled war. As a result, his honor and sense of fair play ultimately cost him his life.
The only unvarnished truth-teller on either side of the conflict is Thersites, the acid-tongued Greek soldier and self-styled “knower” of everyone’s motives. He hurls his “spiteful execrations” impartially at both Greeks and Trojans, exposing like a Greek Chorus what is really going on behind the bombast and pretense.
The troubled romance of the title characters mirrors the shortcomings of the heroes. The lovely Cressida is watchful, cunning, intent on survival. Troilus, brave with sword in hand, is a timorous and vacillating lover. Their brokered romance, plagued by misgivings and dogged by the bawdy remarks of Pandarus, eventually falls victim to raw politics, culminating in Cressida’s calculated decision to abandon her love for Troilus.
Troilus and Cressida replaces the epic vigor of Homer with a murky drama of decay, deceit, and disillusionment. (Fittingly, the play is the source of our phrase “good riddance”). Misguided, self-serving actions on both sides cause the collapse of the moral order, the macrocosm of heroism and the microcosm of love, making the events of the play, as Ulysses observes, a “monumental mockery.” This world centers around the ambivalent character of Troilus.
Troilus: Hero and Lover
Troilus, perhaps the most conflicted, headstrong, irresolute, idealistic, lovestruck character Shakespeare created, has a long lineage. Homer mentions him briefly in the last book of The Iliad when Priam laments his death, but without describing how he died. No complete account of the original Troilus myth survives, but an ancient textual commentary states that the story was told in the lost epic poem Cypria. It was the subject of a lost play by Sophocles and a common motif in Greek pottery paintings, so the legend was apparently widely known. Enough fragmentary evidence remains for us to piece together the outline of the story.
In the earliest version of the myth, Troilus (whose name combines Trois and Ilus, the legendary founders of Troy) was a handsome youth whose fate was intertwined with the fate of Troy. A prophecy foretold that Troy would not fall if Troilus lived to the age of twenty. To prevent this, Achilles at the urging of Athena ambushed Troilus while he watered his horse at a spring near Troy. Troilus managed to flee to a nearby temple of Apollo. Achilles, violating the privilege of sanctuary, dragged Troilus from the altar and murdered him. Enraged by this sacrilege, Apollo set in motion the events that led to the death of Achilles.
Our only complete source for the Troilus legend from antiquity is a modified version found in a late Roman account of the Trojan War attributed to Dares the Phrygian. Dares expanded the simple tale of a boy’s murder by making Troilus the main warrior fighting for Troy after the death of Hector. During the Middle Ages, Western knowledge of the Troilus legend derived almost entirely from the version of the story told by Dares.
Medieval poets further transformed the legend into a tale of romance and intrigue. As reimagined by these poets, Troilus was in love with Cressida, daughter of the Trojan seer Calchas. Cressida was left behind in Troy when Calchas foresaw the fall of Troy and defected to the Greeks. Troilus’ pity for the abandoned Cressida developed into love. He confessed his love to his friend Pandarus, who agreed to aid his courtship as go-between. When Cressida finally reciprocated Troilus’ love, Pandarus arranged for the pair to enjoy a single night together. Their happiness ended when Calchas proposed that the captured Trojan hero Antenor be exchanged for Cressida. Soon after Cressida arrived in the Greek camp, she fell in love with the Greek hero Diomedes. Tormented by her betrayal, Troilus rushed into battle and was slain by Achilles.
This medieval elaboration of the legend began in the 12th century, when Benoit de Sainte-Maure, a poet at the French court of Henry II of England, made the Troilus story into a chivalric romance as part of his poem on the Trojan War titled Roman de Troie. The medieval chivalric tradition, then at its height, required each hero to have a lady love as the object of his devotion. Accordingly, Benoit created the character of “Briseis” to be Troilus’ idealized romantic love.
Less than a century later, the Italian poet Boccaccio embellished the tale further in Il Filostrate (“The Man Prostrated by Love”). As the title suggests, Boccaccio’s poem made the romance of Troilus and Cressida (as she is now named) a story in its own right, not a subsidiary episode of the Trojan War. Boccaccio created the character of Pandarus as go-between and added nuance to Cressida’s character by making her inconstant and coquettish. For the first time, we find details of Cressida’s betrayal later used by Shakespeare: her insincere letter to Troilus after she was sent to the Greek camp, and the love-token from Troilus which she gives to Diomedes.
The Troilus story migrated into Middle English literature in Geoffrey Chaucer’s verse tale Troilus and Criseyde, written a few decades after Boccaccio. Chaucer refined the tale of tragic romance by adding touches of humor and subtleties of characterization. He partially redeemed Cressida’s character by describing her as sincerely loving Troilus but manipulated by the wily Pandarus, who now begins to resemble the lewd matchmaker of Shakespeare. Chaucer’s version of the story also began the portrayal of Troilus as the fool of love, the sincere but naïve character we will find in Shakespeare’s play. Chaucer’s poem ends with a twinkle of humor: after the death of Troilus, he looks down from heaven and laughs at the futility of earthly love.
Shakespeare Takes Up the Tale
The Troilus story could have come to Shakespeare directly from Chaucer’s poem, or from the numerous English reworkings of the medieval legend, such as Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, or the works of John Lydgate and William Caxton. The background story of the Trojan War was widely known in his day from the epics of Homer and Vergil and the many English poems and plays based on them.
We do not know whether Shakespeare read Homer’s Iliad. But Troilus and Cressida contains much detailed information on the Trojan War, such as the names of Troy’s gates, the names of allied kings, and the personalities of the heroes—wily Ulysses, noble Hector, proud Achilles, garrulous Nestor, vulgar Thersites—that goes beyond the medieval accounts. As Ben Jonson famously stated, the grammar-school educated Shakespeare probably knew little if any Greek. His familiarity with Homer would more likely have come from George Chapman’s English translation of The Iliad, published a few years before Troilus and Cressida was written.
Though likely untrained in Greek, Shakespeare undoubtedly had Latin drilled into him in the Stratford Grammar School (as he later humorously described in the Latin Lesson scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor). Latin appears often enough in his works to suggest he had good working knowledge if not full proficiency in the language. The literary style of Troilus and Cressida has an unusually strong Latin influence that gives the play a more Roman than Greek feel. Shakespeare uses the Roman and not the Greek names for gods (Jupiter, not Zeus) and heroes (Ulysses, not Odysseus). In addition, the long speeches are sprinkled with many Latinate English words which do not appear in any other Shakespeare play, including propension, tortive, propugnation, oppugnacy, protractive, assubjugate.
The play’s Latin influence bears unmistakable traces of Vergil’s Aeneid. Shakespeare even borrows Vergilian phraseology verbatim: when Nestor describes huge sea waves as “liquid mountains,” the metaphor is a translation of Vergil’s phrase “aquae mons” in Book One of The Aeneid. Interestingly, Shakespeare seems to show deference to Vergil in his partiality toward Aeneas, hero of Vergil’s Aeneid. Other than Troilus, Aeneas is the first and last hero to appear in Troilus and Cressida. Aeneas leads the delegation when Cressida is handed over to the Greeks and shows up periodically throughout the play, though he played no significant role in earlier versions of the legend. Also, in a work that undermines the legendary reputation of practically every epic hero, Aeneas is spared any stain on his heroic status. He is the one hero not subjected to irony or satire—Thersites never mentions him—and he is always portrayed as brave and wise. It is as if Shakespeare were repaying a literary debt.
But apart from his classical sources and literary approach remains the question of Shakespeare’s motives. Why did he transform Homer’s epic tale of heroism into its opposite?—an anti-epic peopled by heroic caricatures, a morally ambiguous work whose ending leaves the viewer unsettled and confused? Running through the play, too, is a profound distrust of all openly-professed virtue in heroism and love. Why did he write such a work?
Approaching this difficult question should begin by considering the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida. The Bard’s plays were always sensitive to the mood of their time: the exuberant patriotism and love we find in Henry V and Romeo and Juliet mirror the optimistic era in England following the defeat of the Spanish Armada. These plays were written by a youthful Shakespeare in the sunset glow of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, “Gloriana,” whose brilliant court briefly revived ideals of courtly love and chivalric gallantry.
By the early 1600s, when Troilus and Cressida would have been forming in Shakespeare’s mind, the grandeur and optimism of Elizabeth’s reign had darkened. Gloriana was nearing death heirless, destined to be succeeded by the dour James, King of Scotland. England was gripped by political and social uncertainty. Politicians jockeyed for influence, transferring their allegiances freely. No one could be trusted. An era of optimism was ending, and no one knew what would come. This was the troubled time when a middle-aged Shakespeare wrote his so-called “problem plays,” uncategorizable dramas that mingle tragedy and comedy, where few characters are wholly good or bad, and that often end on a dissonant note.
Inverted Heroism
The dispirited mood of those times greets us at the beginning of Troilus and Cressida. We feel a sense of torpor. The militant Prologue, delivered by an armed warrior, sets the stage for an epic struggle, yet the first scene is comically antiheroic: Troilus, dressed for battle, is pulling off his armor, distraught over his stalled courtship of the indifferent Cressida:
Why should I war without the walls of Troy
That find such cruel battle here within?
The dejected hero moans that love makes him “weaker than a woman’s tear.” He is helpless to woo Cressida without the aid of his matchmaker, her old uncle Pandarus, a busybody who fills Troilus’ ears with court gossip but does little to further the courtship.
Stagnancy also grips the Trojan War. The legendary Greek warriors of Homer are a grumpy, indolent, factious crew, floundering in inaction. Achilles, their best warrior, refuses to fight. Everyone is bored. Disorder is breaking out through the camp. Agamemnon assembles his commanders to debate how to end the quagmire the war has become. Only the canny Ulysses is able to identify the problem: the Greeks have abandoned the principle of hierarchical authority that underlies the order of the universe:
The specialty of rule hath been neglected:
And, look, how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions.…
The heavens themselves, the planets and this center
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order…
…O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick!
Though his oratory soars, the practical solution Ulysses proposes is a double deception. Hector has challenged Greeks to pick their best warrior to meet him in single combat. Instead of Achilles, Ulysses proposes sending the dull-witted Ajax, hoping this will make Achilles jealous enough to reenter the war. Ajax, too gullible to realize he is being manipulated, is flattered into believing he will be the savior of the Greek cause. Ulysses thereupon plays on Achilles’ ego by warning him privately that he is endangering his reputation by inaction:
Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,
That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye
Than what not stirs. The cry went once on thee,
And still it might, and yet it may again,
If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive
And case thy reputation in thy tent…
The stratagem backfires: when Ajax and Hector meet, their scuffle quickly ends in embraces—they are relatives. Ajax becomes as unmanageably proud as Achilles, who only reenters the war at the end of the play to avenge the killing of Patroclus. The legendary cleverness of Ulysses, Thersites gleefully tells us, “is proved not worth a blackberry.”
Likewise, the Trojans: after squandering blood and treasure for seven years, Priam has convened the Trojan leaders to consider if they should simply return Helen and end the war. Their heated debate quickly becomes a cost-benefit analysis. Even noble Hector avoids questions of honor in favor of a businesslike approach. Trojans should give Helen back, he says, because “she is not worth what she doth cost the holding.” Troilus, courageous now that war is the theme, vigorously objects: how undignified that heroes must provide reasons for combat! Pressed for better logic, he compares Helen to a commodity: Trojans have paid a high price for her, so they must continue fighting to hold her in order to avoid dishonor. Her value, he adds (paraphrasing Marlowe’s famous line), justifies the war:
…she is a pearl
Whose worth hath launched above a thousand ships
And turned crowned kings to merchants.
Hector’s counterargument raises—for the first time—a moral issue resembling the hierarchical argument of Ulysses, though retaining a mercantile flavor: Menelaus “owns” Helen. Holding another man’s wife violates not only the legality of marriage but nature’s moral order:
…Nature craves
all dues be rendered to their owners: now
What dearer debt in all humanity
Than wife to husband?
…If Helen then be wife to Sparta’s king
(As it is known she is) these Moral Laws
Of Nature, and of Nations, speak aloud
To have her back returned.
But Hector, fearless in battle, proves irresolute in matters of principle. After arguing at enormous length in favor of giving Helen back, suddenly, inexplicably, he reverses himself and accepts Troilus’ argument with two curt lines. Keep Helen, he says:
For ‘tis a cause that hath no mean dependence
Upon our joint and several dignities.
Midway through the debate, Cassandra raves prophetically that Helen will kill them all, but everyone ignores her.
The ludicrous war deliberations underscore the pointlessness of the war. Yet, for a war play, war itself is hard to find. Despite the heroic braggadocio, actual combat only occurs at the end of the play, and even that is a confused melee where more warriors try to avoid being slain than seek glorious battle. Why risk their lives when the values of heroism are missing? Homeric heroes fought fearlessly because they were convinced their cause was right, that the gods were on their side. In Troilus and Cressida, both sides realize the conflict is over an adulterous wife. Looking on, Thersites mocks the stupidity of two mighty armies decimating each other for possession of “a placket.” The war is only “lechery,” he fumes, as he curses both their houses:
Here is such patchery, such juggling and such knavery! all the argument is a cuckold and a
whore; a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon. Now, the dry serpigo on the subject! and war and lechery confound all!
In the middle of the play, however, the satire pauses, and the sad irony of the Trojan War becomes painfully clear. When the Hector-Ajax sparring match ends in a draw, the Greeks invite Hector to feast with them before he returns to Troy. Amicably as old friends, the Greeks and Hector hold a great banquet together, toasting and embracing each other while laughing how they must kill each other tomorrow. The interminable, senseless war “for a cuckold and a whore” is briefly forgotten, and deadly enemies recall the natural friendship men feel for each other as human beings. This wholly Shakespearean scene—which has no parallel in Homer—is a poignant moment of humanity in a play dominated by brutal, unthinking inhumanity. The next day, Hector dies.
Just as Shakespeare’s un-Homeric heroes invert and negate the heroic ideals he earlier presented in Henry V, the opportunism and hypocrisy underlying the romance of Troilus and Cressida make it a subversion of the unwavering love he portrayed in Romeo and Juliet.
Unlike the star-crossed lovers, Troilus and Cressida do not discover a love that looks on tempests and is never shaken. They do not even have a courtship. Pandarus—their “pander”—takes care of all the preliminaries like a brothel madam. When the nervous pair finally meet face-to-face, their hurried, awkward conversation is as much about their doubts of the other’s sincerity as their emotions for each other. Pandarus mutters smutty jokes behind them as they chat, then ushers them into the bedroom—it all has the air of an assignation.
Similarly, their aubade scene the next morning is a parody of the corresponding moment in Romeo and Juliet. As soon as the pair awake and begin rhapsodizing, they hear banging on the door: Aeneas has come to hand Cressida over to Diomedes, who will escort her to the Greek camp. But Cressida’s tears at being torn from her lover dry quickly. When she is introduced to the Greek commanders, she flirtatiously greets them one by one, teasing for kisses like a practiced courtesan. Only Ulysses observes the Cressida the others fail to see—she is a “daughter of the game” who knows well how to swim in shark-infested waters.
Cressida’s survival tools are her eyes. Her eyes teach her what to say and how to behave in the treacherous world she inhabits. But they are one-way mirrors that never disclose her heart. In her first soliloquy, she uses “eye” imagery to explain why she conceals her love for Troilus:
Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing…
Then though my heart’s content firm love doth bear,
Nothing of that shall from my eyes appear.
Surveying the dangerous, unfamiliar environment of the Greek camp, Cressida’s eyes soon teach her to transfer her favors to Diomedes, now her protector. They negotiate a time for their liaison, then Cressida gives him surety of her affections: Troilus’ sleeve, the love-token he gave her as a remembrance. Diomedes departs promising to wear the token in battle for Troilus to see. When she is alone, Cressida’s last words of the play blame her “eyes” for her betrayal of Troilus:
Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah, poor our sex! this fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind:
What error leads must err; O, then conclude
Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude.
While Cressida’s affections are shamelessly pragmatic, Troilus suffers love of excruciating sincerity. His expressions of its pangs are the finest poetry in the play. When Cressida disingenuously asks him, “Will you be true?” he describes his truthfulness in an untrue world in lines worthy of Romeo:
Who, I? Alas, it is my vice, my fault:
Whiles others fish with craft for great opinion,
I with great truth catch mere simplicity;
While some with cunning gild their copper crowns,
With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare.
Fear not my truth: the moral of my wit
Is ‘plain and true;’ there’s all the reach of it.
He will be the standard for true lovers: all will be “as true as Troilus.” But, like Hector’s nobility, Troilus’ sincerity is no match for unprincipled actors; his sincerity does not come with the backbone needed for action. Instead, he whirls between self-doubt and bravado until he becomes a comic figure—and ultimately a coward. He can only make empty threats as he helplessly hands Cressida over to the waiting Diomedes. Though willing to sacrifice his life for Troy, the hero Troilus does not feel a love worth fighting for.
Unlike Cressida, Troilus sees with blind eyes. He accompanies Hector to the fighting match in hopes of glimpsing Cressida. After the banquet, he secretly goes to her tent accompanied by those hardened realists, Ulysses and Thersites. Troilus watches astonished as Cressida whispers affectionately in Diomedes’ ear, then hands him the love-token he had given her. Confronting undeniable proof of her infidelity, his reaction is fascinating: in a delirium of grief he exclaims his eyes are liars. The woman he saw flirting with Diomedes is not his Cressida; the faithful Cressida he loves still exists in his heart’s imagined world. Shakespeare’s description of this surreal moment shows his skill at depicting abstract mental states—he describes Troilus undergoing a sort of psychosis, a double vision, as he witnesses Cressida in two dimensions:
This she? No, this is Diomed’s Cressida:
If beauty have a soul, this is not she;
If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,
If sanctimony be the gods’ delight,
If there be rule in unity itself,
This is not she…this is, and is not, Cressid.
Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth,
And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne’s broken woof to enter.
Only as a doppelganger can he renounce her. Beside him, Ulysses coolly reminds him that he saw no phantom: “Cressid was here but now.” Further back in darkness, Thersites laughs, “Will he swagger himself out on ’s own eyes?” At the end of his romance, Troilus remains as sincerely blind as he was when it began.
A Diseased Legacy?
The death of Troilus’ love is cruelly paralleled by the murder of Hector. In a disturbing departure from Homer, where Hector is slain by Achilles in honorable combat, Shakespeare makes Hector die treacherously—ambushed unarmed and stabbed to death by Achilles’ Myrmidon soldiers while Achilles looks on, ignoring Hector’s demand that he forego this unfair advantage. For a Homeric hero, no victory more dishonorable is imaginable. Adding to the outrage, Hector dies after he had spared the life of the unarmed Achilles in an earlier encounter. Trusting in the honor of his adversaries, Hector proves as blinded by nobility as Troilus is by love.
Following Hector’s murder—the end of the play from a dramatic standpoint—what becomes of Troilus? He wildly embraces the forces of destruction swirling around him. He shouts the news of Hector’s death to Trojans in a disoriented tirade, calling on the gods to destroy Troy quickly. He ends his rant by proclaiming he will avenge Hector’s death by rushing out to seek personal combat with Achilles—a suicide mission. Troilus entered the play in a frenzy of love and departs in a frenzy of hatred. His imminent death by Achilles’ sword will bring the Troilus story full-circle to its mythic origins.
Thus, Troilus and Cressida concludes in the collapse of all epic and romantic conventions. Nothing is left but the rotten fruit of power and appetite—“the Neapolitan bone-ache” as Thersites crudely puts it—a moral disintegration inevitably accompanied by physical decay, as Ulysees foretold in describing a world where hierarchy has broken down:
…Then every thing 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.
In the Epilogue, this physical and moral degradation is hauntingly embodied by Pandarus. Dying of disease, rambling in self-pity, he hobbles before the audience, sings a little, then suddenly grows serious. He announces he is preparing his will—to be published when he dies, so he will not hear the complaints of certain streetwalkers still owed their money. His heirs will be us, the audience. We are like him, so his fate will be our fate, too:
As many as be here of Pander’s hall,
Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall;
Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,
Some two months hence my will shall here be made:
It should be now, but that my fear is this:
Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.
Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeath you my diseases.
The grimmest ending of any Shakespeare play drops with a thud, leaving us with a sense of meaningless desolation we will again encounter three centuries later in the last lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men: “This is how the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Troilus and Cressida has always been one of Shakespeare’s least performed plays. The work is among the handful of Shakespearean plays we cannot say for certain was performed in his lifetime, and it seems it almost did not appear in the First Folio. The Folio’s compilers, oddly, inserted it between the Histories and Comedies, its pages unnumbered and not listed in the Table of Contents, as if adding it was a last-minute decision.
Less than a century after Shakespeare’s death, John Dryden deemed the play a “heap of rubbish” and rewrote the ending to make Cressida loyal. Until the late nineteenth century, the play was almost never performed as written. Only in the twentieth century did Troilus and Cressida begin to resonate with audiences who had witnessed the unfiltered brutality of modern war.
Such neglect overlooks the play’s undeniable virtues. Written contemporaneously with his greatest dramas, Troilus and Cressida shows Shakespeare at the height of his literary powers. The dialogue and speeches brim with vivid metaphors and memorable phrases. Each personality is individualized as finely as the faces in a Bruegel painting. The characters come alive as they speak, their voices spanning a spectrum of humanity from the earthy curses of Thersites to the grand war council debates to love poetry worthy of Romeo and Juliet.
As with his plays generally, Shakespeare offers few clues to help us grasp his motivations for writing such a perplexing work. Whatever those motives were, they must have arisen from some similarity he perceived between the legendary figures of Homer and the people of his own day. Somehow the unprincipled, duplicitous, self-serving but also noble and good politicians, generals, rulers, and beauties who inhabited his world transformed in his imagination into Greeks and Trojans hopelessly trapped in an endless, unjustifiable war.
Shakespeare’s play dramatizes a legendary story, the downfall of Troy, that was prelude to a documented historical event: the downfall of Mycenean culture which marked the beginning of the Greek Dark Age, an era of ignorance and stagnation that after many centuries gave rise to the Classical Age of Greece. Broadly considered, the destruction of Troy foretold at the end of Troilus and Cressida describes a regenerative process that repeats throughout history: the societal and institutional disintegration and collapse of a sophisticated, cultured civilization, followed by a prolonged night that culminates in rebirth built on a renewal of fundamental principles.
As we search for relevance in this indefinable work, perhaps Troilus and Cressida deserves to be considered a cautionary tale for us, Pandarus’ heirs, that darkness threatens any society that forgets the virtues underlying its received mythologies, here the ideals of heroism and love. The play depicts the consequences of such moral dissolution, but we are not urged toward cynicism or despair—genuine heroism and sincere love do exist, vital elements for a future revival. We are simply asked to scrutinize, with the keen eye of a Thersites, all those who cloak themselves in our mythologies in an effort to lead or persuade us, so that we may know the false hero or fatal beauty while time remains to act. When we choose to look on a tottering world with blind eyes, trusting like Troilus in our own single truth, Troy will inevitably fall.
Because our world will always be tempted to worship false heroes and fatal beauties, the times and characters Shakespeare shows us will continually recur, ensuring that Troilus and Cressida will remain one of the most contemporary—and cautionary—of Shakespearean plays.