Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels

W.R. Elton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351900676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

'No one of Shakespeare's plays is harder to characterize', said Coleridge of Troilus and Cressida. Over the centuries, generations of critics have faced the challenge of determining exactly what sort of play Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is. Described by Victorian commentators as 'dark', 'decadent' and 'bitter', the work has, until now, retained its designation as a 'problem play'. In this ground-breaking study, leading Shakespeare scholar, W R Elton attempts to dismantle this presumption. His research places the play in the historical context of the Inns of Court law-revels tradition. By close analysis of the text, Elton demonstrates his belief that Troilus and Cressida was written specifically for an audience of law students and lawyers and that the play manifests many elements of a law-revel, including misrule, inversion, mock rhetoric and logic, and mock trials. In so doing, he provides explanations for many of the puzzling and mysterious elements that have previously baffled critics.

Part I Folly

1. Burlesque, mock-epic and folly

Prologue	'What's past is prologue'
Act I	scene i	Lovesick Troilus: gradus amoris
	scene ii	Caveat Hector: Ajax
		Cressid's mockery
Act II	scene i	Thersites versus Ajax
	scene ii	Language upside down: parodied terms
	scene iii	Mock-encomia: eminence of Ajax
		Grecian embassy to Achilles
		'Privileged' folly: Thersites
Act III	scene iii	Potent reasons
Act IV	scenes ii and iv	Troilus, Cressid and Ulysses
	scene v	Burlesque postures
		Nestor
		Burlesque building imagery
		Hector's 'way': Hector and Achilles
		Mock-agon: Hector versus Ajax
Act V	scene i	Thersites versus Achilles and Patroclus
	scene vi	Ajax, Diomedes and Troilus
		Parodic 'Hamlet'
	scene x	Double note: seria-ludicra
		Poetic injustice

Although the folie of men is greate ... yet ... so greate folie to take roote in their hartes, that the wisedom of the Grecians, should not rather caste of as naught, the beautie of Helena: rather then the whole multitude ... to stande in perill for the beautie of one...

Richard Rainolde, The Foundation of Rhetorike (1563)

This chapter examines the play's burlesque, mock-epic and folly elements, recalling aspects of the law-revels tradition.¹

'What's past is prologue'

After the Prologue's epic opening, the periods suddenly stop: this grand expedition's purpose is but to retrieve the slumbering queen. Abruptly, four words arrest the forward action: 'and that's the quarrel' (I. 10).

Anticlimactically, as the play deflates the epic-heroic, the Hellenic resonance of 'Dardan, and Timbria, Helias, Chetas, Troien,/And Antenorides' (11. 16-17) becomes brusquely the local-team trimeter of 'Sperr up the sons of Troy' (1. 19). Grandeur descends further in 'tickling skittish spirits' (1. 20). From polysyllabic epic description, the Prologue flattens to its final ten monosyllables (1. 32): 'Now good or bad, 'tis but the chance of war'.

Act I scene i

Lovesick Troilus: 'gradus amoris'

Bee thou the Lady Cresset-light to mee,
Sir Trollelollie I will prooue to thee.

Samuel Rowlands, The Letting of Humors Blood in the Head-Vaine ... with ... Seuen Satyres (1611), sig. [C8]

As the Armed Prologue exits on the shout of 'war', Troilus unmilitarily enters. Following the Armed Prologue's 'suited/In like condition as our argument' (11. 24-5) emerges a disarming warrior-lover, himself unsuited and 'not in confidence' (1. 23 ). Countering the epic-opening 'Arma virumque cano' is thus Troilus' opening military indecorum. His unheroic aim is to 'unarm again' (I.i.l)- this is to be followed by Cressid's mockery (I.ii.11, 31-2, 51) of heroic anger. From the first, the protagonist's negative selfcomparison to the weakness of a woman's tear, sleep's tameness, ignorance's folly, a virgin's lack of nocturnal valour, and an infant's skillessness (I.i.8-12), suggests a questionably heroic posture. As confessedly 'Less valiant than the virgin in the night', Troilus could have provoked derision among his youthful male spectators. Initially, Troilus' encomia of the Greeks in auxesis (or mounting degree) are matched (cf. III.iii.l1-12) by progressive self-deprecation. Hardly here a vir fortis, Troilus seems not like a hero, nor demi-divine. 'What ho! Where's my spaniel, Troilus?' Petruchio summons his dog of the same name (TS, IV.i.149-50). As the dominating Petruchio is the antithesis of the lovesick Troilus, Petruchio's spaniel named 'Troilus' marks a submissive and devoted creature.

Indeed, Troilus' recurrent self-derogation and simplicity-avowal, with his later unavenged public love-dishonour, are, for a hero, uncommon. If 'there is no love-broker in the world can more prevail in man's commendation with woman than report of valor' (TN, III.ii.36-8), Troilus' contrary confession (to a love-broker, I.i.7-12), and disavowal of wooing skills (to his beloved, IV.iv.84-8), anticipate loss of such commendation. What may, from the Trojan War setting, foreshadow an epic-heroic conflict, leads anticlimactically to a lover's wooing a procurer to woo for him. Disarming from the siege of war, Troilus solicits Pandar's intervention for the siege of love.

Pandar in his instruction to Troilus that he 'must tarry the bolting' repeats, 'Ay, the bolting' (I.i.19, 21), recalling the Prologue's 'bolts' (1. 18). Since bolts (cf. Chapter 8, and Appendix II) were, like moots, a required legal debate exercise, members of a law-student audience would (like Troilus) themselves have had to 'tarry the bolting'.

Pandar's 'culinary' stages (I.i.14-28) towards gaining the lady contribute a low parodic tone. Such kitchen allusions were a stock-in-trade of Renaissance and later burlesque renditions of Homer, Virgil, Horace and Ovid.

In addition, Pandar's love-recipe recalls the five (sometimes four or six) steps of the medieval and Renaissance 'ladder of lechery', or gradus amoris: visus (sight), alloquium (talk), contactus (touch), osculum (kiss), factum (deed)- 'Cinq Points en amour'.²

Troilus in I.i exhibits the passio of love deriving from 'sight' (visus), the first of the gradus amoris. As the lovers' visus is implied in Act I, alloquium, contactus and osculum occur in III.ii, with factum to follow. Separated from Troilus, Cressid among the Greeks (IV.v.18-52) dispenses oscula. Eventually, in Troilus' and others' witness (V.ii), Cressid rehearses the gradus amoris with Diomede, the lover's rival, including the first four stages and promising the last. Guide in his pupil's 'maiden battle' (IV.v.87), Pandar here outlines the curriculum: love advances couched in kitchen metaphors.

Struck by Cupid's arrow, Troilus is sick with desire and fastened to a 'tetchy' counsellor (I.i.98). His maladroit invocation of the unsuccessful Apollo 'for thy Daphne's love' (I.i.100) is ironical, as is his appeal (at Diomede's removal of Cressid) by the name of the abductor Pluto (IV.iv.127-9). Such appeals suggest the infelicity of Troilus' supernatural petitions.³ Incidentally, of Shakespearean 'Troilus' allusions which occur outside this play (RL, TS, MV, MAAN, AYLI, TN), most provide a consensus of weakness or ineptitude.⁴ Indeed, Troilus, As You Like It reminds us, 'had his brains dash'd out with a Grecian club' (IV.i.97).⁵

Citing the mad Cassandra as mind-exemplar - 'I will not dispraise your sister Cassandra's wit, but -' (I.i.48-9), Pandar is interrupted by Troilus' complaint concerning Cressid's traits. These features Pandar pours into the lover's heart (I.i.55-7): 'Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice / Handiest in thy discourse'.⁶

Pretending to allay youthful fires, Pandar drives Troilus into further loveexcitation. To his confusion is added another comic element: the lover's supposition that he requires, for a lady already predisposed, the intervention of her procuring uncle. Committing his fortunes to his parodic Palinurus, the 'tutor and the feeder' of his license, Troilus sails with Pandar and his 'bark' (I.i.105-6). Troilus reveals himself from the first as an incontinent passenger, with Pandar his licentious 'convoy' (I.i.106).⁷

While Pandar is committed to his coupling, Troilus is a dedicated knight-enfant in quest of the beauteous pucelle. Indeed, Troilus shares with Quixote hyperbolic delusions regarding a beloved, and like Quixote with his Amadis, Troilus yearns through idealized, romantic forms - if not through Pandar's mediating 'glass' (I.ii.286). A youthful lover spouting academic or philosophical learning and lacking sophisticated courtly skills, Troilus suggests a recurrent butt of satirists: one of the academically crammed students 'skilless' (I.i.12) in social or practical affairs.

Act I scene ii

'Caveat' Hector: Ajax

Recurrently, the name 'Ajax' summons up a familiar Elizabethan pun on a jakes, or privy, a jest popularized in John Harington of Lincoln's Inn's Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596). This burlesque work was printed by Richard Field, Shakespeare's Stratford townsman, who had also printed his Venus and Adonis and his Rape of Lucrece, and was to print Chapman's translation of Homer's Iliad (1611). According to Harington, Ajax ('a very man per se', I.ii.15) could have been heard by Elizabethans in terms of latrina lingua, as a familiar household instrument pour faire les nécessités, a chaise percée or commode.⁸

Antithetical to Jonson's self-styled unified 'Horace' persona,⁹ Ajax brings to mind the disordered creature described at the start of Horace's Ars Poetica (II. 1-5). To have Cressid react to such confusion as ridiculous, as causing her laughter, is also Horatian. Suggesting his own Horace-persona, Jonson may be ironically glanced at in Ajax's I.ii 'character' as it recalls Horace's Ars Poetica.¹⁰ Like Ajax, Horace's familiar opening there conjures up a monstrous creature that (I.ii.19-20) 'hath robbed many beasts of their particular additions'.^ll (So the Prologue's 'Beginning in the middle' (1. 28) suggests the Horatian in medias res: cf. Horace's Ars Poetica, I. 147.) Further, Horace ends with a question echoed by Cressid, at hearing such a monstrously confused description: 'spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici'? (Could you, my friends, if allowed a view, refrain from laughter?) Thus, Cressid seems Horatian, as well, regarding 'this man, that makes me smile ... ' (I.ii.31-2).¹²

Cressid's mockery

Surveying the Trojan warriors in a mock-Heldenschau, or heroes' parade, Cressid brings to mind heroic anger: Wrath, the Iliad's initial menis, includes Homer's invocation on the deadly wrath that brought the Greeks innumerable woes. With belittling sarcasm, Cressid sustains the 'angry' joke: 'What, is he [Troilus] angry too?' (I.ii.58). Near the start, Troilus is thus implicitly contrasted with the Achillean epic hero, and witnessed in a mock-epic mode.¹³

If Ajax elicits Cressid's smile, and Ajax is the conqueror of Hector, Hector is, from this view, ridiculous to a girl, and no greater than Ajax...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Texts cited
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Folly
• Part II Academic
• Part III Law revels
• Conclusion
• I Troilus and law-revels' language
• II Troilus and legal terms
• III Troilus and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
• References
• Index