For Richard Corum
“Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe,” Prince Troilus of Troy says at the end of the play (5.10.31-32). There a war sparked by wounded pride; a cuckold and his comrades lay siege to Troy. Helen is Menelaus’s queen, and she, absconded, succumbs to Paris. A grand love affair and a greater war, but Shakespeare finds his way to condemn them. Troilus and Cressida is an anti-war story, and Shakespeare sets up Homer’s classical account as folly, as driven by wanton lust, concern for reputation, hope for fame, and revenge. The so-called love story between Troilus and Cressida follows a similar weave. We are not convinced that Troilus is truly in love with Cressida when he admits to Pandarus that he stalks “about her door” like an animal primed for conquest. The pacing anticipates the quenching of his lust, and “the imaginary relish is so sweet” (3.2.9, 20). The two can hardly breathe. Troilus considers “the capacity” of his “ruder powers,” and Pandarus allows that his niece “fetches her wind so short” (3.2.26, 33-34). The two lovers both exclaim that they will be true and faithful. Very quickly they spend the night together, and she wants him to linger. She calls herself foolish, and says “I might have still held off, and then you would have tarried” (4.2.17-18). When Troilus finds out that Cressida is going to be given away, he asks merely “Is it concluded so?” and he adds, “How my achievements mock me,” referring to the evening’s sexual victory(4.2.68, 71). Troilus indicates his lack of truth when he leans over to Aeneas and states “you did not find me here.” He gives her up easily with exclamations of devotion. He promises to visit her nightly, which he does only to spy on her. He sees her relinquish his token of love, his sleeve. His pride wounded, he vows revenge on Diomedes. He is blinded by his physical passions. Thersites, one of Shakespeare’s finest creations, condemns the entire lot of them, Greeks and Trojans, for allowing their physical excesses to outweigh intelligence, the point of the play. “Now they are clapper-clawing one another,” Thersites says, as he watches the battles rage (5.4.1).
Before Troilus and Cressida sleep together, she foreshadows what will happen when she is traded for Antenor and eventually gives herself to Diomedes. She says “I have a kind of self resides with you/But an unkind self, that itself will leave/To be another’s fool” (3.2.156-158). Indeed, as easily as Troilus seems to give her up, she yields to the Greek commander. When Shakespeare was thirty, he worked out his thoughts on Troy in “The Rape of Lucrece.” Gazing at the painted scene of destruction, Lucrece says of Helen “show me the strumpet that began this stir.” The eyes see the physical and the lustful, both Cressida and Lucrece concur, and corrupt the mind. Lucrece says about Paris, “Thy eye kindled the fire that burneth here,” and all must die because of this “trespass of thine eye” (Lucrece, 1470-1477). Almost ten years later in Troilus and Cressida, when Cressida has symbolically given herself to Diomedes, she says “The error of our eye directs our mind,” and she supplements that with “Minds sway’d by eyes are full of turpitude” (5.2.110-112). The depravity she refers to is her own, and it has evolved from her earlier physical acquiescence to Troilus’s lust. Now she begs for Diomedes: “I prithee, come” (5.2.106). Cressida is here untrue, and she has given herself to the other side completely, just as Helen had done. Later, when she sends a love letter to Troilus, he says “My love with words and errors still she feeds, but edifies another with her deeds” (5.3.11-112). She yet dissembles, and speaks of love, but she is with another. Here exists the flimsy foundation upon which the war is based, and upon which the supposed love between Troilus and Cressida eventually dissolves.