Critical Comments. 1. Argument. I. In the eighth year of the siege of Troy by the Greeks, Troilus, son of King Priam of Troy, becomes enamoured of Cressida, a Trojan maiden, and induces her uncle Pandarus to intercede for him. At this time a truce has been declared between the two armies. While the Greeks are carping at the slowness of the siege, a challenge is sent them by Hector of Troy, directed against any one of their champions who dares meet him in single combat; his evident desire being to cope with Achilles, the Greek's chief warrior. II. During the truce the Greeks had proposed terms of peace, which included the return of the ravished Helen and the payment of a war indemnity. The terms are rejected and the besieging generals prepare to renew the struggle. They seek an interview with Achilles, who has for some time sulked within his tent. He denies them an interview; whereupon they select Ajax to fight with Hector. III. In the interim Pandarus prospers as go-between for Troilus with Cressida. He arranges a rendezvous where the lovers plight their troth and, according to custom, resolve to live together. But Cressida's father, who has been traitorously serving the Greeks, requests them to ask his daughter in exchange for a Trojan leader held captive by them. IV. The Greeks consent, and send Diomedes to effect the exchange. He bears away Cressida on the morning following her nuptial night. The lovers bewail this stern necessity of war, and part after many protestations of fidelity. Diomedes and Cressida reach the Grecian camp just as Ajax is starting forth to meet Hector. The two warriors fight; but after a passage at arms postpone further conflict on account of kinship. The various Grecian and Trojan leaders make use of this armistice for an interchange of amicable courtesies. V. Troilus asks the Greek Ulysses to lead him to the tent where Cressida has been confined, and there he is deeply mortified to become a secret witness of her faithlessness, for she has transferred her affections to Diomedes. In battle on the following day, Troilus engages in conflict with Diomedes, but without serious result for either. Meanwhile Hector also has gone forth to battle again, disregarding the ominous predictions of his sister Cassandra. He kills Patroclus, a close friend of Achilles, which deed so enrages that moody warrior, that he shakes off his lethargy, plunges into the fray, and slays Hector, whose dead body he drags at his horse's heels along the field before Troy. MCSPADDEN: Shakespearian Synopses. II. Troilus. Troilus is the youngest of Priam's numerous sons, and the passion of which he is the victim is the bare instinctive impulse of the teens, the form that first love takes when crossed by an unworthy object, which might have been that of Romeo had Rosalind not overstood her opportunity. It is his age that explains how, notwithstanding his high mental endowments, he is so infatuated as to mistake the planned provocation of Cressida's coyness for stubborn chastity, and to allow himself to be played with and inflamed by her concerted airs of surprise and confusion when at last they are brought together. He is quite as dull in apprehending the character of Pandarus, and complains of his techiness to be wooed to woo, when in fact he is but holding off in the very spirit of his niece and affecting reluctance in order to excite solicitation. Boccaccio furnished some of the lines of this characterization to Chaucer, but Chaucer gave them great development in handing them down to Shakespeare. Troilus is preserved from the ridiculousness that pursues the dupes of coquettes of so debased a stamp as Cressida, by the allowances that untried youth bespeaks, and by the spirit and gallantry that promises the coming selfrecovery, the first process of which appears in the control he imposes on his anger and impatience when he looks on at the scene of her falseness. . . . Still our sympathies are but moderately engaged for him, for what can we say of him but that he is young and a fool-though heroes have been so before and since, fit to be played with and played upon by a jade who only tantalizes him that he may cease to be shy. He is the subjected slave of an intoxication that makes him insensible to the debasement of admitting such a worm as Pandarus into the very presence of what should be the sanctities of love. The ungenuineness of the love that is in question is self-betrayed, when in the first declaration, as in the latest parting, he angles for and invites assurances of faithfulness which it is not in the nature of things should be either convincing or true. LLOYD: Critical Essays on the Plays of Shakespeare. III. There is nothing in these two poets [Chaucer and Boccaccio] that can compare with the passionate heat and hatred, the boundless bitterness with which Shakespeare delineates and pursues his Cressida. His mood is the more remarkable that he in no wise paints her as unlovable or corrupt; she is merely a shallow, frivolous, sensual, pleasure-loving coquette. She does little, on the whole, to call for such severity of judgement. She is a mere child and beginner in comparison with Cleopatra, for instance, who, for all that, is not so unmercifully condemned. But Shakespeare has aggravated and pointed every circumstance until Cressida becomes odious, and rouses only aversion. The change from love to treachery, from Troilus to Diomedes, is in no earlier poet effected with such rapidity. Whenever Shakespeare expresses by the mouth of one or another of his characters the estimate in which he intends his audience to hold her, one is astounded by the bitterness of the hatred he discloses. It is especially noticeable in the scene (IV. v.) in which Cressida comes to the Greek camp and is greeted by the kings with a kiss. At this point Cressida has as yet offended in nothing. She has, out of pure, vehement love for him, passed such a night with Troilus as Juliet did with Romeo, persuaded to it by Pandarus, as Juliet was by her nurse. Now she accepts and returns the kiss wherewith the Greek chieftains bid her welcome. We may remark, in parenthesis, that at that time there was no impropriety in such a greeting. In William Brenchley Rye's " England as seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First, are found, under the heading "England and Englishmen," the following notes by Samuel Riechel, a merchant from Ulm: "Item, when a foreigner or an inhabitant goes to a citizen's house on business, or is invited as a guest, and having entered therein, he is received by the master of the house, the lady, or the daughter, and by them welcomed; he has even the right to take them by the arm and kiss them, which is the custom of the country; and if any one does not do so, it is regarded and imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding on his part." For all that, Ulysses, who sees through her at the first glance, breaks out on occasion of this kiss which Cressida returns. [IV. v. 54-63: Fie, fie, etc.] So Shakespeare causes his heroine to be described, and doubtless it is his own last word about her. |