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Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

T. McAlindon
T. McAlindon*
Affiliation:
University of Hull, Hull, England
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Extract

For those who regard Troilus and Cressida as a play marred by incongruous elements and an uncertain purpose, Act iv, Scene v, will always constitute an obvious source of dissatisfaction. Here, a long-awaited andloudly heralded climax—the duel between Ajax and Hector—rapidly subsides into anticlimax: before Ajax is even warm with action, Hector calls an end to the combat on the ground that he and his opponent are cousins. Moreover, Hector explains his motive for withdrawal, and comments on Ajax's reply, in speeches whose diction and style merely add to the discordant effect of his behavior:

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , January 1969 , pp. 29 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 Ed. Alice Walker and J. Dover Wilson, New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge, Eng., 1957.

2 Some support for this view can be found by referring to the bathetic climax of the subplot in Love's Labour's Lost. Here, Don Armado, in the presence of all the royalty and nobility of the drama, withdraws at the last moment from his stage duel with Pompey the Great (alias Nathaniel) because he finds himself improperly clad: “The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt; I go woolward for penance” (ed. R. David, Arden Shakespeare, London, 1951, v.ii. 699–700). Not only is Don Armado an old-fashioned knight whose “fire-new words” are the chief symptom of his divorce from reality, but in this scene he is also playing the part of Hector, and the pompous-sounding epithet which he applies to Mars in his bombastic quatrain on Hector's spear—“armipotent” (1. 641)—is oddly like that applied to Jove by Hector in his withdrawal speech—“multipotent.” Moreover, his speech here (like that of each of the other Worthies) is a “brag.” Shakespeare must have been consciously repeating one of his own dramatic stratagems and remembering Don Armado when he used inkhorn terms to underline the discrepancy between words and deeds, words and character, words and situation in the climax of the military plot of Troilus and Cressida.

3 A roughly similar conception of the play has been put forward by Una EIlis-Fermor in The Frontiers of the Drama, 2nd ed. (London, 1946), pp. 56–76 (“ ‘Discord in the Spheres’ : The Universe of Troilus and Cressida”). My interpretation also agrees in essentials with Theodore Spencer's view of the play as one in which Shakespeare elaborately sets up a code of behavior which the action violates: “A Commentary on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in English Literature, Tokyo, xvi (1936), 1 ff.; Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, 1949), pp. 109–121.

4 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, Eng., 1936), pp. 263–264.

5 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, viii (Oxford, 1947), 628 and 593. The first quotation occurs in a passage transcribed directly from John Hoskyn's Directions for Speech and Style, a work indebted to Quintilian and Lipsius. The second is a translation from Seneca, Epist. cxiv.3, 11. See Herford and Simpson, ix (Oxford, 1952), 244, 274–275.

6 Puttenham, pp. 261–262, 291–298. Gladys Willcock has stressed the influence of the concept of “degree” on language in her essay, “Shakespeare and Elizabethan English,” Shakespeare Survey, vii (1954), 13.

7 For the above points see i.i.94-95; ii.i.8 (cf. i.iii.71); ii.ii.81-82, 153, 160, 199; ii.iii.93; iv.v.26, 29–30, 181; v.ii. 131–132.

8 Puttenham, p. 263.

9 See Alice Walker's elucidation of 11. 64–65, New Cambridge ed., pp. 151–152. For the traditional association of silver with music and musical voices, see Romeo and Juliet ii.ii.165-166, iv.v.127-140.

10 Puttenham, pp. 259–260.

11 The trumpet is blown rather too often in the play and has, of course, a symbolic significance. For further instances see i.i.91; i.iii.213, 256–259, 263, 277; iv.iv.140; iv.v.64, 112–113, 274–275; v.iii.13, 94–95; v.viii.15, 23; v.ix.2.—It should perhaps be recorded that “windy,” “puffy,” and “swollen” (stifflatus) are the terms usually applied in rhetorical tradi-tion to an inappropriate or exaggerated “high” style. See Rhetorica ad Berennium iv.x.15 and Puttenham, p. 153.

12 Puttenham, p. 257.

13 Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. G. Watson, Everyman's Library (London, 1962), i, 257. The criticism is delivered in a curiously indirect fashion. Dryden says he will not accuse Shakespeare of the blown puffy style, but then goes on to quote from the Pyrrhus speech in Hamlet and to exclaim: “What a pudder is here kept in raising the expression of trifling thoughts.”

14 Puttenham, p. 258.

15 Puttenham, pp. 272–273.

16 Puttenham, pp. 279–280.

17 Puttenham, p. 251.

18 ii.iii.125, 235; iii.ii.9; iii.iii.8-12, 39, 46, 50–51.

19 Puttenham, p. 259.

20 The Faerie Queene iii.ix.33-36 (Paridell praises Helen and his ancestor Paris); Doctor Faustus, ed. J. D. Jump (London, 1962), xviii.99-118 (Faustus praises Helen and cries, “I will be Paris”).

21 The Faerie Queene ii.xii.73; Doctor Faustus xviii. 101–104.

22 It would not be the only ironically inept allusion in the play: see Cressida's echo of Matt, xix.5 in iv.ii.96-99. Marlowe was fond of this device.

23 For homiologia, not noted by Puttenham, see Sr. Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York, 1947), pp. 69,302.

24 Noted by Alice Walker, ed., Troilus and Cressida, p. 200.

25 For the use of the word “rude” in the play see i.i.94; i.iii.115; m.ii.25; iv.iv.35, 41.

26 Ed. J. D. Wilson, The New Shakespeare (Cambridge, Eng., 1957).

27 In the time which has intervened between the writing and printing of this paper, I have come to the conclusion that the concept of decorum and indecorum (in speech, gesture, conduct) is central to the dramatic design of most of Shakespeare's plays. I hope to write a full study of the subject and will shortly be publishing an article on Eamlet from this point of view.