Structure, Inversion, and Game in Shakespeare’s Classical World

Summary

Troilus and Cressida exemplifies the palimpsest of conflicting and incompatible texts possible to Shakespeare through remembrance, allusion, and revision of earlier sources. On every level, the play undercuts itself. As contemporary history, it recalls the endless, brutal war in the Netherlands pursued by England even as the Greeks waged for a decade their ‘just’ crusade against Troy. Shakespeare assumes the audience’s knowledge of traditional authorities on that ancient war – Homer, Euripides, Caxton, Chaucer – even as he takes for granted acquaintance with Tudor policies of support for Continental allies. But when Hector proves less valorous than naive, and Achilles a thug; when Pandarus inverts the stately Greek chorus into a provoker of Winchester geese; when Ulysses’s banalities on ‘degree, priority, and place’ (mimicking the principles of Elizabethan hierarchy that social change was already reducing to nostalgia) demonstrate how any sophistry will do if it can move a listener; and when a betrayed lover cannot even (like conventional Romeo) die of his passion, but abandons soft Venus for bellowing Mars – then it is a struggle of simultaneous texts (some held in the spectator’s memory, another being enacted on stage) that is occurring before the audience and which establishes the drama’s singular effect, the clash of literary conventions with their ironic reversals.