Chapter 3 - Not Knowing Thyself in Troilus and Cressida

Summary

A poet exhibiting people who are irascible and indolent should show them as they are, and yet portray them as good men – in the way that Homer made Achilles both a good man and a paradigm of stubbornness.

Aristotle, Poetics, XV

The sacred writ pronounceth them to be miserable in this world, that esteeme themselves. Dust and ashes (saith he) what is there in thee, thou shouldest so much glory of?

Michel de Montaigne, ‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, Essayes

Not without cause hath the knowledge of himself beene in the old Prouerbe so much commended to man.

Jean Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, 2.1.1

Self-knowledge and morality are inseparable in, and central to, Troilus and Cressida – Shakespeare's caustic, ironic, genre-bending take on both the Trojan legend and the famous, ill-fated love affair of his titular characters. Via its less than savoury characters (to follow the play's frequent metaphorical allusions to taste), Troilus offers viewers and readers a sceptical, at times contemptuous, perspective on humans as ‘self-interpreting animals’, as Charles Taylor describes us. The play exudes moral suspicion as its characters’ self-regarding misreadings of themselves contort their being towards both the other characters and the exigent moral questions within the hermeneutical situations they inhabit. Shakespeare certainly does not follow Aristotle's injunction that poets should represent classical heroes as ‘good men’, even as they expose their faults. Shakespeare's Achilles, Homer's hero, comes across as anything but ‘good’ and the same can be said for nearly all the mythological figures now relocated onto the late Elizabethan stage. Troilus's audience could well take up Montaigne's words to ask of Homer's warriors and Chaucer's sympathetic protagonists: ‘what is there in thee, thou shouldest so much glory of?’

Ironically, there is nothing to glory of in Troilus's legendary characters. Shakespeare, it seems, draws upon the theologically informed, dominant and pessimistic anthropology of his day to engender doubt about these characters, and what they might represent about the interpreting self. He had done so in Hamlet. Hamlet, one could say, takes its audience to the edge of elegy as early modern Protestant accounts of the Fall's impact on human subjectivity inform Shakespeare's figuring of hermeneutical tragedy.