A subtle point: Sleeves, tents and ‘Ariachne’s broken woof’ (again)

Summary

To observe that Troilus and Cressida is a play full of puns is hardly news: nearly two centuries ago, William Hazlitt described the whole play as ‘a kind of double entendre’, and at times it is a play which could well be summarized by that now passé bowdlerizing editorial shorthand, ‘with a bawdy quibble’. As Patricia Parker comments in the opening paragraph of Shakespeare from the Margins (1996), ‘Wordplay itself has frequently been reduced to the purely decorative “quibble”. . . [yet] both comic wordplay and what Kenneth Muir called the “uncomic pun” lead us to linkages operating not only within but between Shakespeare’s plays.’ Troilus and Cressida provides rich material for such an approach: its puns are dense and both uncomic and revoltingly (or even painfully) funny, and its quibbles are frequently not at all ‘quibbling’, but rather substantive, far-reaching and unsettling, a crucial part of the play’s thick verbal texture and unstable moral universe. They cannot be dismissed. Here I offer a close reading of one passage from the play, which pays attention not simply to quibbles, puns and other forms of linguistic play, but also to the material context of the passage, in terms of both performance issues and early modern material culture. We are getting better at attending to the material circumstances of performance, at considering what impact such awareness might have upon the more purely linguistically oriented close reading of texts, and, indeed, at breaking down the distinctions between ‘text’ and ‘performance’. But the degree of slippage between the categories of the verbal, the visual and the material in Troilus and Cressida can still take us by surprise by showing that there could be a pun on a thing, or a quibble that is in part material. Such fluidity and expansiveness of interpretation seem to have been second nature to Shakespeare and his audience.