Shakespeare
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon
A hero is a person we don’t know much about. He or she seems to embody an era, usually one from the past, and, as Fénelon said, the past is a strange thing, the further away from it you stand, the bigger it looks. A proof by contraries of this truth about cult figures is the celebrated lack of hero-worship among valets. Troilus was ripe for apotheosis when his story was invented in the twelfth century by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, because all we knew of the prince from Homer was that Priam fathered him and that he died before his elder brother, Hector. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, that death comes to him as a relief and a clarification, like those moments when it seems a particularly bad hangover is at last about to lift, but Shakespeare leaves him stomping about in a survivor’s anguish after his brother’s corpse has been dragged round Troy, still fuddled and vengeful, shouting about goblins. (Though not in Peter Stein’s production of Troilus and Cressida, which flinches from the thought of that bleary afterlife and has him run, a clean-cut stage picture at the end as throughout, on to a spear.) Such pretty uplift was not to be expected for or from Shakespeare’s Troilus, whom we first encounter in a sulk, calling for his varlet (it is the same word as “valet”).
Homer “beautified the heroes”, as the Certamen Homeri says, because he, too, was not close to them. He wrote some 500 years after Troy fell or was pushed, and composed his poem from what had been retrieved and patched together through that interim. It had been a dark time, and not only for the Trojans. All round the Aegean, populations shrank, skills decayed, trade links broke and the art of writing was mislaid. There may also have been a degree of global cooling. Careful students of ancient material remains now sigh correctly that “greater attention to Homer’s actual words” would have saved “Greek and Roman antiquaries from . . . making him an exact contemporary of the Trojan War” (Anthony Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece). Yet over-excited response to vividness in the Iliad has had its benefits even among archaeologists, benefits such as Schliemann’s rediscovery of ruined Troy: he rejected the site preferred by most scholars in his day because it didn’t fit exactly enough the poet’s eye-witness-like account of Achilles’ chase after Hector past a wild fig tree and a warm spring. Schliemann believed, sheerly on grounds of enthusiasm for the poem, that Homer was “always so precise in his topography”, dug elsewhere and struck gold, though it was probably not, as he at first claimed, Priam’s gold.
Whether or not you trust Homer in detail can change your sense of where the group you belong to came from, and people are world-historically keen on belonging to groups and shoving others out of them. On the basis of Iliad, Book Twenty, lines 307–8, Virgil erected the Aeneid and its story of how Augustus’s Rome had been translated from out the ashes of Troy by pious Aeneas (this is slightly less textual foundation than provided by Scriptures for the dogma of the Trinity). So the imperial poem spins the Roman takeover of power from Greece as the fated persistence of a plucky, defeated few. One element of Troy’s enduring appeal fell into place, for this story had the comfortable moral “loser takes all”. Various European tribal dynasties, having been drilled into admiration of Roman ways, sought to pick up from their conquerors the imaginary baton of ethnic self-assurance and seamless cultural relay: the Franks attached themselves to Hector via his son, Astyanax (which is why that child is still pivotal in 1667 for Racine’s Andromaque), and the Britons made out in the tales known as “the matter of Britain” that they stemmed from Brutus, Aeneas’ grandson, who, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, for many years sought a promised isle of unusual fairness until one day a favourable wind brought him on shore at Totnes.
These fictions of descent from Troy are unlikely to have been motors of historical change, but they provided a model for understandings of change and continuity. If you are inclined to discount them as antiquarian fribbles, you might ask yourself why the Greek government for years refused to let the “death-mask of Agamemnon”, which Schliemann allegedly unearthed at Mycenae, be examined for dating and authentication by current scientific methods. It is the Turin Shroud of Hellenism, and more jealously defended from scrutiny than that venerable rag. Or consider whether it would be a good ice-breaker in an Athenian taverna to point out that if Homer was born in Smyrna (Izmir), as seems most likely if he was born anywhere, he is, by modern standards, a Turk.
About a generation before Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida, the antiquity was wearing off the legend of Brutus and Britain. The Tudors had exploited it for a century or so to bolster their new establishment with an aura of long-standing, but it was still believed with fervour perhaps only by time-servers, eccentrics and Welshmen, who were particularly taken with the idea that “Cymraeg” (Welsh) came from “cam graec” (“twisted Greek”). The erudite historical topographer, William Camden, rubbished the notion that a line could be traced back nearly 3,000 years to Troy, though he made respectful noises about those who tried to draw it because “even falsely to claim . . . descents from famous personages implieth in some sort a love of virtue”. When Nashe in the 1590s calls London “this great grandmother of corporations, Madame Troy-novant”, his allusion to the pretence that the original name of London had been New Troy comes with a broad hint that this is an old wives’ tale. Even a clapped-out tradition is something of a loss when it departs; equally, it’s stimulating to see the back of it. So Nashe’s hint is perky, jeering and yet a shade bereft, as is the end of Shakespeare’s play, when the old Trojan gossip Pandarus leans out of the past towards the audience in the theatre now, coming on chummy, claiming to be kin both ethically (“Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade”) and genetically (“bequeathe you my diseases”), as if he were a long-lost father who finally turns up to demonstrate his paternity by showing that he’s where we got our defining sickness from.
One reason it was good to be rid of the Trojan genealogy in the “matter of Britain” was that the legend required and fostered a distorted ethnography. It presented to the imaginations of states ever ready for a fight a sanctifying incitement to think of the debacle at Ilium as a war between two races, whereas the truth, as excavation has now brought it to light, is “in paradoxical form, that the Trojans were Greeks; more accurately, the founders of Troy VI were people of similar cultural background to the Greek-speaking invaders and occupiers of Hellas” (Denys L. Page, History and the Homeric Epic). Greater attention to Homer’s actual words could have taught people this ages ago, for the Iliad presents the combatant groups as culturally identical, and so does Shakespeare. The poets do this not because they swamp real diversities with an all-purpose, monological “high style” but because they know this strife was internecine, between sides who share gods and technologies – the horses and the bronze which are the ultimate constituents of exalted self-assertion as of abject rivalry in Homer – and who are the more entrapped in lacerating symmetry the more each struggles to be matchless. The design of Peter Stein’s version is, then, not only inane but bitterly mistaken. Inane, because his Trojans, who sport radiant tans and wear Day-Glo short shorts, and his pasty Greeks in their drab great-coats, seem to be living in different climates, one about twenty degrees warmer than the other, though they have all been under the same relentless skies for the past seven years. Bitterly mistaken, because the trite schematism feeds a slack allegorical habit (the Trojans are “eastern”, the Greeks “western”) more apt to geopolitical propaganda and its low purposes than to the decent subtleties of Shakespeare’s theatre. When Stein’s Greeks take their tops off for battle, as they do in defiance of military common sense, and we see they are pot-bellied whereas the Trojans are enviably washboard, it seems their war was a contest of the Flabs versus the Abs. This is the delicious, cartoon world of Romance, where the goodies can reliably be spotted by their evident loveliness, not the haggard arena of fratricide to which the play conveys us.
Troilus and Cressida is a difficult work; any director might reasonably worry whether the audience will “get it”, and feel he must try hard to make sure they do. Unfortunately, Stein is a victim of the foolish reasoning about how to achieve this that is widespread among directors of Shakespeare, and runs roughly as follows: “The speeches were once clear to their original audience. After all, they spoke the same language as Shakespeare wrote. But history has got in the way of intelligibility, especially with regard to all those pesky metaphors and word-play. We must therefore supplement the lines with illustrative vocal colouring and diagrammatic gesture”. When Stein’s Paris refers to Helen and “the pleasures such a beauty brings with it”, he wallows in the opening syllable of “pleasures”, tonguing the “l”, as if demonstrating to slow children, but this vivacity will not help the unhappy few in the theatre who don’t know the word or the thing it means; it simply throws up a further, distracting puzzle as to why the lucky prince has suddenly adopted the tones of a presenter for kids’ TV.
The “show and tell” technique is even worse. Calchas is a seer and congratulates himself on “the sight I bear in things to come”. The gift he means is exercised in an invisible realm and is itself invisible; pointing to his actual eyes at the word “sight” is a category mistake and a delusion, not a gloss. His daughter, Cressida, learns she must leave Troy the morning after her much-expected one-night stand with Troilus. Shakespeare gives her strong lines in which she refuses to let him go; Stein has her declare “Time, force and death, / Do to this” – and there she pauses, looks herself up and down to see what exactly it is she has below her neck, then, reassured on that subject, goes on – “body what extremes you can”. Troilus, shivering with anticipation of what contact with Cressida will be like (he has worn himself out imagining it), wonders :
What will it be
When that the wat’ry palates taste indeed
Love’s thrice-repured nectar? Death, I fear me,
Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in
sweetness,
For the capacity of my ruder powers.
He means he’s afraid he may shame himself by fainting when he comes. And, more than that, he fears his self is too cloddish to experience the refined quintessences of sex, like someone on whom the best Gewürztraminer would be wasted. On the cue “my ruder powers”, this Troilus cupped his groin, which introduced an irrelevant, seaside-postcard sense of “rude” and made him look worried about erectile function. But he is a very rich young man in a world of institutional concubinage, where women are swapped like business cards; he is unlikely to be a virgin though he has heard from his admired, deep-thinking brother, Hector, that sex is something Altogether Higher when you respect the girl as a person and he’s not sure if he’s up to that. Such illustrations turn the world to which the words refer into one of those supportive homes where a child is learning to read and the table is labelled “table”, the fridge “fridge”, or, in the case of Troilus’s crotch, the residents walk round with “penis” stuck wherever they suppose their minds to be.
A director needs first to worry about whether his actors understand what they are saying; the audience (whose powers, rude or otherwise, he has few means to judge) should be left to get by as best it can. Dramatic meaning is a function of utterances, not of isolated, lexical items. If spectators get the drift of a speech, the sense of a transaction, they will not fuss about the odd cryptic glitch, they probably won’t even notice it. The actor, in Shakespeare as in Charades, should try to do “the whole thing” and only in desperation resort to “first word sounds like”. By far the best acting in this production came from David Yelland, splendidly dry and vexed as Ulysses, who shaped a lucid trajectory of attitude across the sixty-two-line arc of “Troy, yet upon his basis, had been down” without ever feeling the need of sawing the air with his hand to mime a ladder when he said “degree”. The worst moment was Achilles, assembling his thuggish Myrmidons for the kill; he rolled and distended his words, mouthing like a town-crier, and addressed them as “mermaid-dons”, a charming thought but sadly misleading. Directors, assuming that they do want to transmit a script, should also cut back on shouting because this makes it hard to hear what is being said. Stein badly lets down his juvenile lead in this respect. Henry Pettigrew is a luscious Troilus, but his idea of emotional intensity is bending at the waist and screeching till the tendons in his neck stand out; this is probably faithful to the private lives of many young actors but is very wearing to behold and not apt to Shakespeare’s silver-tongued prince.
The basic premiss of directorial anxiety, that Shakespeare’s original audience was clued up to every word spoken from his stage, is, anyway, not true, as it is not true that Homer’s early readers knew what he was on about down to the last particle. Shakespeare and Homer have become semantic heroes to us because we view them through the dark, magnifying glass of our ignorance; we supply them with a golden age of smooth, communicative accessibility which they did not live in though they may themselves have been prone, like us, to dream of it. The dialect of Homer’s epic, as of Shakespeare’s stage, does not transcribe the speech of an actual community. In the Iliad, there are many words of which scholars note “the sense is uncertain . . . but it creates a leisurely and impressive phrase”. At least some of these words have probably not grown obscure but were born so, because the diction of the poem resembles its political system, which Snodgrass describes as “an artificial amalgam of widely separated historical stages”, like the superimposed cities on the mound of Troy. Simon Pulleyn comments on the Iliad, Book One, that “linguistic archaisms coexist beside newer forms, and Bronze Age artefacts are mentioned alongside things which appear to date only from the eighth century”; some Greek vases similarly display two styles of warfare on the one surface, though they invert the stratification of time which builds up in earth, for on the ceramic the more ancient is uppermost, the contemporary below. This “music of rare and obsolete words” which a philologist can hear, in Troilus and Cressida as in its remote, Homeric source, informs the works’ dazzling, historical vertigo, the heady air of an heroic world. “Assubjugate”, “tortive”, “plantage”, “abruption” and many such bizarreries had, so far as the OED can tell, never been heard before they were spoken in Shakespeare’s play and have not been much heard since; each of them is perhaps, as Dr Johnson sternly said about another of the play’s inventions, “subduments”, “a word not used, nor worthy to be used”. Because we can figure out how they were put together, we can piece back their meaning, as a pot can be assembled from its shards, but we may not have the time or the glue in the theatre as they flit by. We sense an outline of meaning which can’t be seized, which is already past before we have secured it, as if meaning were a spasm of pleasure. A written epic can’t have quite this effect, though Homer’s poem when it was sung might have done so. He too has many hapax legomena and, like Shakespeare’s, they may arise under intense stress, as when Achilles throws the corpse of Asteropaeus into the River Scamander and strides berserkly off in search of further victims. But the poem waits by the dead warrior for two lines to observe what happens to him: “eels and fishes ministered unto him, safely grazing on the perinephritic fat, cropping it clean” (Iliad, Book Twenty-One, 203–4). The word I translate as “perinephritic” is, according to one editor, “an absolute hapax”, and its uniqueness creates a dense pause for thought, the narrative at an extreme of magniloquent, unfathomable distance from what it luxuriantly contemplates.
Troilus and Cressida has a reputation for bitterness. Editors such as David Bevington (Arden, 1998) or Anthony B. Dawson (New Cambridge, 2003) now introduce it to students as specially in tune with their times because it breathes an absolutely unspecific “disillusionment”, is “controversial, even avant-garde”, has “the uncertainties, ironies, and open-endedness of modernist novels or absurdist drama”, practises a “mordant” “strategy of estrangement” and, best of all, is “disturbing”. Publicity departments have long known that theatregoers find the world they live in not disturbing enough for their tastes and can be relied on to form queues outside any box office with “disturbing” above it in lights. I’d guess that Shakespeare, had he heard such canting praise, would have echoed T. S. Eliot’s reply when he was congratulated for having caught “the disillusionment of a generation” in The Waste Land: “perhaps it expressed their illusion of being disillusioned”. Clever-clever snarkiness is certainly on offer from some figures in the play, but that was widely available then as now. Troilus and Cressida’s bleak opulence does not think itself smart and the past thick, nor is the play, any more than The Waste Land, a paean to grand old days from which we have dwindled. Like all true mock-heroic imaginings, it calibrates two phases of culture against each other, sets them both on edge, and espouses neither. It is a trans-temporal (not a “timeless”) work; you could also call it “mock-historic” because it aches with a sense of how little we learn from the mistakes which have made us what we are. Its motto might be taken from Flaubert: “our ignorance of the past makes us unfair to the present. Things have always been like this”. Which is not to say that nothing has changed, just that not everything has changed.
People, for example, still eat. It is sometimes thought beneath a grand manner to mention this, and, because Troilus and Cressida is crammed with “food imagery”, some commentators urge us to infer that the play brings down to sarcastic earth all highfalutin aspirations to be dignified. But the Iliad, the very spring of Western grandeur, reeks with eating from its fourth line, where heroes’ bodies are dog food, on through such piercing phrases as Book Eleven’s reference to “charioteers, lying on the ground, more beloved of vultures than by their wives”. It features not only ceremonious, sacrificial oxen but a humble onion, goat’s cheese grated with a bronze grater, and lentils. Even at its most poignant, when Achilles has told Priam he will after all give him back Hector’s body, the godlike son of Peleus goes on to say “but now let’s turn our minds to supper, for even fair-haired Niobe took thought of solid food”. Prissy, neoclassicizing notions of decorum find this kind of thing hard to stomach, but Shakespeare was not Sir Philip Sidney and easily withstood such Homeric shocks to a prim system. Indeed, he embraced them throughout his oeuvre. Cressida is first referred to as a “cake”, she pretends to think Troilus a “minced man”, their love has “dregs”, a kiss can leave them “famished”. This is not snook-cocking but a pained clarity about the entanglement of love with appetite. In the Iliad, people say “I hate you, I want to eat you raw”; in Troilus and Cressida, there’s the more familiar tune of “I love you, I could eat you”. The ground bass of endless consumption runs steadily under both ways of talking.
I am as disenchanted as the next postmodernist man and therefore not easily shocked. But I was shocked by Stein’s decision to bring Cressida on at the end of the play and to write for her a few words which Shakespeare neglected to provide. She appears in a new purple dress, bought special for the occasion, sobbing and begging Troilus “Forgive me”. How right feminists are about the punitive, reflex sentimentality of some men, so tender towards their own distresses, so oblivious of what others suffer, as Pandarus is when his pity goes all to Troilus in the moment of the lovers’ enforced parting. To Cressida, he says only “Would thou hadst ne’er been born! I knew thou wouldst be his death. O, poor gentleman!”
But we could learn, if we were inclined to learn, even from Stein’s cheap solution of what Shakespeare bravely left irresolute, Stein’s dreary partisanship in the old blame game from which the play abstains. We could learn the error inherent in our concept of “era”, our fond segmentation of time and mentalities – “classical”, “Renaissance”, “Romanticism”, “modernity” and the other short cuts we take for real, the non-existent tectonic plates between which seismic “shifts” unaccountably occur. Of all Shakespeare’s works, Troilus and Cressida is set furthest back in time, while it simultaneously bristles with idioms jazzy in their day. The magnificent span of the play’s once and future pastiche throws into tragicomic relief the unconsoling aspect of permanence, which is not merely a comfort, as a shallow discarding of tradition would make out, but involves also a costly recognition of how incorrigible we are, and gives a reason to doubt whether even the heroes were clearer to each other than we are to ourselves.
