One—
Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry
Troilus and Cressida
In The State of England Anno Dom. 1600 , Thomas Wilson describes a country besieged. Despite its renowned military force and well-fortified capital city, England suffered a pervasive fear of attack. Frequent skirmishes with Ireland and rumors of imminent Spanish invasion fostered a national preoccupation with war. Indeed, Wilson's description of private arsenals portrays an entire country armed and at the ready for battle:
For the provisions of armour every howseholder is charged to have in his howse, in a readiness, such armes as is appointed by the Commisioners, and there is no howseholder so poore that is not charged with some thing, at least a bill, sword, or dagger, who soever he is, unless he be a beggar.[1]
This late Elizabethan obsession was born of vigilance against a foreign menace, but it also had an ideological component. It manifested the monarch's personal symbology: invasion was a metaphoric threat to the inviolate Virgin Queen and her realm. Policy and ideology converged in England's national energies, which were directed largely to defensive as opposed to aggressive or interventionist ends.[2] Wilson notes, for instance, that the "comon souldiers that are sent out of the realme be of the basest and most unexperienced, the best being reserved to defend from invasion" (State of England , 34). Rarely conciliatory, the country neither escalated hostilities (profiteering missions excepted) nor sought peace.
England's concomitant state of siege was, oddly, a marker of success.
As long as the country (like its queen) could repel attack, it would maintain power. In her famed speech to the troops at Tilbury in 1588, anticipating an incursion by the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth provocatively declaimed her credo:
I am come amongst you . . . to lay down for my God and for my Kingdom and for my people my honor and my blood even in the dust.
I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms.[3]
The first sentence syntactically implies and withdraws eroticism ("I am come . . . to lay down . . . my honor and my blood") in its expression of Elizabeth's military intentions. Taking up arms here is a wholly selfprotective measure. The queen means to defend against an invasion that could, like a sexual violation, engender ignominy. Elizabeth at Tilbury disclosed the psychological effect of her policy: the edgy passivity of waiting for an attack. Invasion anxiety produced a military strategy and a national condition of nervousness, inspiring such elaborate preparations as were seen at Tilbury and other points of entry.[4] Like Cressida in Troilus and Cressida , the country lay on its back to defend its belly, "at all these wards," "at a thousand watches" (Troilus and Cressida , 1.2.250).[5]
Cressida's words to Pandarus describe both a sexual and a martial strategy, one that befits a play about a war that began as a rape. Her paradoxical description of defense—she will lie upon her back to defend her belly, "upon my secrecy, to defend mine honesty; my mask, to defend my beauty" (1.2.248–49)—can also be taken as a peculiarly Elizabethan mode of behavior. The queen maintained her symbolic and literal inviolability through vigilant wards and watches, but she admitted feminine vulnerability as a defense of her (masculine) authority. With the heart and stomach of a king but the body of a weak and feeble woman, Elizabeth made substantial ideological gains from a seemingly susceptible posture. Cressida's policy (unsuccessful though it is) articulates, on a minute scale, a version of Elizabeth's; the play world of Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) comprises far more comprehensive and complicated stagings of late Elizabethan ideology, policy, and events. The neurosis of invasion made England something of a Troy, a nation ten years at war without strong hope of either victory or truce. Troy, be-
sieged and paralyzed, imaginatively refigures the troubled last years of Tudor rule.
I
England's disengaged, perpetual militancy in the 1590s was replicated in a hostile atmosphere at court. Protracted struggles with Spain and Ireland magnified tensions within the upper levels of government. The nobles divided along anti- and pro-war lines. The Cecil family—William Cecil, Lord Burleigh (treasurer of the realm) and his son Robert (secretary to the queen)—led the faction that promoted peace with Spain and Ireland. The opposing, militant faction followed Robert Devereux, the second earl of Essex.
The conflict between Essex and the Cecils was no mere set-to between common political opponents; it was in fact a central social drama in the last years of the reign. Even though, as Thomas Wilson suggestively notes, there were "some good Lawes made to avoid emulacion amongst noblemen and gentlemen and also factions,"[6] those laws must have functioned to entice by seeming to prohibit. For as is generally recognized, the proliferation of emulation and factions was a crucial characteristic of Elizabeth's method of rule. From the beginning of her reign the queen had employed factionalism as a kind of ecosystem.[7] To prevent challenges to the monarchy, the nobles were encouraged to conceive of one another as the sole obstacles to positions of greater and greater strength. Factionalism, like the national military posture and Cressida's misunderstood sexuality, was essentially defensive, a strategy to control and redirect hostility. The French ambassador extraordinaire to England in 1597, André Hurault, sieur de Maisse, noticed that
The court is ordinarily full of discontent and factions, and the Queen is well pleased to maintain it so, and then the Lord Treasurer, old as he is, is exceedingly ambitious and finds nothing but amusement in these court broils, and his son is altogether immersed in them.[8]
In their brisk campaign for force and place, Elizabeth's nobles did much of her work for her.
Robert Naunton later wrote of the queen that "the principall note of her raigne will be that she ruled much by faction and parties, which she herself both made, upheld, and weakened as her own great judgement advised."[9] Certainly, early in her rule, Elizabeth circumscribed most of the factional conflict she created. But if aristocratic hostility was the
product of an imposed plan, there were indications at the end of the sixteenth century that the design could not contain its materials. The courtiers who came to the fore in the 1590s had an ambitious slyness about them that Burleigh and Leicester dared not display when Elizabeth was in her prime.[10] The usually perspicacious queen was late to acknowledge the new climate; in 1601 she lamented, "Now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found."[11] The overreaching peers produced more intense struggles than Elizabeth had anticipated, and these struggles disrupted the delicate balance she had sustained for so long. When Essex finally led an armed contingent against Whitehall in 1601, the coup was directed against the earl's rivals, not against the queen. The faction system was curiously effective in deflecting hostility from Elizabeth; nevertheless, the struggle for prominence at court precipitated the abortive rebellion.[12] "A good quarrel to draw emulous factions, and bleed to death upon" (2.3.75) overwhelmed the structure of rule that Elizabeth had used for some forty years. Designed to restrain disorder, factionalism actually fueled it. The system, as Essex's career ultimately suggests, backfired violently.[13]
It was apparent even before the rebellion that factions extended far beyond Elizabeth's intentional influence. Administrative divisiveness became the widespread norm. Even Wilson, who was only a tangent to the circle of the court, could observe:
In all great offices and places of charge they doe allwayse place z persons of contrary factions and that are bredd of such causes, or growne to such greatness, as they are ever irreconcilable, to the end, each having his enemyes eye to overlooke him, it may make him looke the warilier to the charge, and that if any body should incline to any unfaithfulnesse in such charges of importance as concern the publicque safety, it might be spied before it be brought to any dangerous head. . . . This is seene alwayse in ye Towre, the place of most trust, where the Lieftenant and Stuard, master of the Ordnance and Lieftenant of the same, have been ever in my remembrance vowed enemyes, and this is too apparent in the Deputyes of Ireland & Govnor of Munster att this time and heretofore. (State of England , 42–43)
The drift of Wilson's political science is clear. The faction system was necessarily unstable, for it deployed mighty opposites in critical and adjacent posts; the nation balanced uneasily in conflict. From the court to the Tower to the proxy government in Ireland, hostility prevailed as internal policy grew precarious and public. Court battles at the end of the reign had their stormy center in the Essex and Cecil conflict, yet they
surpassed policy or even personality and entered a different category, that of inescapable governmental rift. Proliferating factions seemed to manifest a pathological disunity of political structure and spirit, a contagious emulation of disorder. The most prominent feature of the reign in its last years was this spreading agon inside it; internal strife prolonged external problems and diseased the realm.
In Troilus and Cressida , Shakespeare transforms a de facto Elizabethan policy and its unforeseen consequences into a central plot complication of the Trojan War story. Or we might say that he inscribes and augments the resemblance between a major crisis of that story and a crucial political problem of his time. The Iliad begins with a civil war for supremacy between Achilles and Agamemnon. Achilles soon withdraws from the fighting to protest Agamemnon's appropriation of his "prize," Briseis; his absence hamstrings the Grecian forces, which remain ineffective until his return. But rather than portray the Greek dilemma in Homeric terms as an offended hero's protest against rapacious authority, Shakespeare frames the crisis as a plague of personal interest groups. Vexing factionalism underlies the failure of the Greek army and compels Ulysses to expound on the loss of "degree." He attributes the prolongation of the Trojan War to administrative neglect and a consequent divisiveness in the camp:
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Ulysses' speech inaugurates a topical representation of internecine political strife and its effects. Just as irreconcilable enemies seemed to infect every limb of English government, so hollow factions spread among the Greeks and fragment the militia.
Inattentive, ineffectual authority and an entirely self-centered nobility generate this turmoil. Agamemnon, allegedly the leader of Greece, is incapable of diagnosing or even noticing the problem besetting his command. Indeed, Ulysses' declamation on degree undercuts (and thus comments sharply on) the general's clumsy attempts to rationalize the army's protracted failure (1.3.1–30). The aristocracy, indifferent to disorder, constantly engages in purposeless (nonteleological) acts of sub-
version, and these acts prove irresistible. Explicating the Greeks' woes, Ulysses cannot help but perform the disruptive thing he decries: first by taking center stage from Agamemnon and indicting "the specialty of rule"; next by openly confessing his scorn for his superior ("The general's disdained / By him one step beneath" [1.3.129–30]); and finally by enviously locating the blame for the army's failures in a fellow warrior, thus reflexively proving his point and perpetuating the problem of divisiveness. According to Ulysses, the Grecian problem is nearly featureless, emptied out, unreadable—hollow factions in hollow tents upon a plain—yet there is one clear signifier: "The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns / The sinew and the forehand of our host" (1.3.142–43), disturbs the order of things.
Achilles derives his muscular sovereignty from "opinion," an essential feature of any court dynamic. He becomes the only consensus agent of force in the world of Troy; the entire war, it seems, is his prerogative. Power is situated, negotiated, burlesqued in his tent in a great parody of Elizabethan peer affairs. The Achilles faction engages in councils, political intrigue, satire, the gossip of the pampered, and even court entertainments: Thersites "is a privileged man" (2.3.60) such as monarchs had. When Ulysses admits that "opinion crowns" his colleague-out-of-arms the "sinew and the forehand" of Greece, he inadvertently grants to Achilles the figurative body of governance. Significantly however, such ad hoc, unsolicited power makes him an engine of disruption. His tentkeeping is all the rage—a fashion trend that sparks contagious anger. Achilles's withdrawal generates furious, single-wing factions such as Ajax, a poor emulator of casual autonomy. Ajax, "grown self-will'd," mimics Achilles, "keeps his tent like him; / Makes factious feasts" (1.3.190–91). This unconscientious objector has begun to damage the Grecian cause through imitative inaction and editorialization; he rails "on our state of war / Bold as an oracle" (1.3.191–92). Thus Achilles's preference for his private "faction of fools" (2.1.121) amounts to an insurrection; his absence from the wars is a power that mimeographic emulation makes perilous. No army, no administration, can afford such a trend of departures. Achilles's power in subversive absence ironically figures the decentering of force relations in Troy. The most potent warrior, the former glorious image of heroism, undoes hierarchy simply through his seclusion.
In 1598, some three or four years prior to Troilus and Cressida , George Chapman published an unfinished translation of the Iliad with a dedication to the earl of Essex. To Chapman, Robert Devereux had
a nearly mythic stature; he represented demidivinity, an even more heroic "type" than that of the courtier-soldier-scholar. The work is therefore inscribed "To the Most Honored now living Instance of the Achilleian vertues eternized by divine Homere, the Earl of Essex."[14] This address enacts the requisite fawning over a potential patron, but it also represents a personal and a cultural perception. For Essex was an exemplar of Achillean attributes in England (whether these were virtues or not is at question). The Venetian ambassador Francisco Contarini, writing in 1599, unequivocally calls him "the greatest personage in England, the man who has enjoyed more of the Queen's favor than anyone else."[15] Essex's dashing demeanor and restless self-promotion contributed to his aura of glory, but his most visible attribute was his aggressive militarism. De Maisse reports that "Among the courtiers the Earl of Essex is the chief person in the Realm. . . . He is entirely given over to arms and the war, and is the only man in England who has won any renown thereby" (Journal , 33). Devereux took enthusiastic part in the most conspicuous state military operations; his heroism at Rouen (1591) and Cadiz (1596) was already the stuff of national legend. But when he fell from favor at court, when the factional turmoil there grew oppressive, or when his proposed war policies met with royal indecision or disapproval, the earl also frequently indulged in a disruptive, Achillean reclusiveness. De Maisse repeatedly describes Devereux as an absence more than a presence: "The Earl of Essex, for his part, is very independent; on the least pre-text given him he withdraws and would go to his own house" (18). The friendly and sympathetic ambassador arrived in England after Essex's return from the failed campaign to the Azores; although de Maisse often sought an audience with the sequestered earl, he met again and again with only rumors: "According to report [Essex] was feigning illness, and had been in disgrace with the Queen since returning from his voyage" (33).
Essex's surly withdrawals were well known to Chapman; as a result, "the 1598 Iliads discloses Chapman's studied, eccentric attempt to apologize for Achilles's isolation,"[16] Chapman's promotion of the earl as Achilles is a sustained justification of an individualist whose separation from society is intended to indict corrupt social practice. The dedication to Essex continues:
Most true Achilles (whom by sacred prophecie Homere did but prefigure in his admirable object and in whose unmatched vertues shyne the dignities of
the soule and the whole excellence of royall humanitie), let not the Pessantcommon polities of the world . . . stirre your divine temper from perseverance in godlike pursute of Eternitie. (Chapman's Homer , 504)
The Homeric Achilles is the perfect figure for an Essex apologia because, as Cedric Whitman has said, "integrity in Achilles achieves the form and authority of immanent divinity, with its inviolable, lonely singleness, half repellent because of its almost inhuman austerity, but irresistible in its passion and perfected selfhood."[17] Like his Homeric archetype, Chapman's Achilles is a sensitive, wronged warrior who righteously withdraws from the battle to confound Agamemnon's overweening authority. But any extensive pursuit of the parallel produces a more complicated reading. Essex's withdrawals, unquestionably a challenge to power, were neither so simply virtuous nor so clearly motivated as Chapman implies: indeed, they were transparently a form of insubordination. What was more troubling, particularly regarding the implications of factionalism for the order of the reign, was that the earl attracted in his absences a following of "desperate and disreputable professional soldiers" who, according to de Maisse, had been "illrecompensed" by court rivals (Journal , 49). This entourage formed a countercourt to which Essex retreated in times of extreme stress. As his fortunes waned, the earl became progressively difficult to appease, and his independence was seen as a palpable threat.[18] The "greatest personage in England" was a constant locus of political instability.
In referring to Essex as Achilles, George Chapman accidentally creates an obtrusive irony. For Achilles, the greatest of the Greeks, is also, like Essex, a terrific nuisance. In the late 1590s, Devereux had indeed become the "now living instance" of Achillean attributes: an honored fighter who sulked, surrounded by his thuggish Myrmidons (his malcontent soldiers and courtiers) when honor was out of reach. He came to embody the dark side of martial individualism. After the earl's unsanctioned, rash return from the Irish wars and immediate confinement for disobedience in 1599, Chapman's ideal of a nearly unblemished heroism no longer seemed plausible. Interestingly, it was an ideal in which Shakespeare had participated, though with characteristic caution. The following passage from Henry V , while rejoicing in Essex's anticipated triumph, seems aware of him as a rival force and nervously subordinates praise for the general to plaudits for the monarch. After imagining Henry being swept into London like some conquering Caesar, the
chorus compares the reception Essex will probably receive, if all goes well:
As by a lower but by loving likelihood,
Were now the general of our gracious Empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit,
To welcome him! Much more, and much more cause,
Did they this Harry.
(Act 5, Chorus, 29–35)[19]
But following the earl's rebellion and fall in 1601, the epic, heroic ideal no longer even seemed possible . With the subversively sequestered Achilles, Shakespeare erases and rewrites Chapman's portrait of independent heroism. Of course, the parameters of the heroic had already been erased and redefined. For Essex inscribes as much as he is inscribed; he is part of the cultural pen and ink, the material conditions of conceptual possibility for Troilus and Cressida .[20]
Shakespeare's Achilles, in turn, figures the motivational complexity and problematic centrality that were, in another context, Essex's own. As Chapman would prefer to forget, context is inescapable. No matter how far Achilles removes himself from the wars, he inevitably affects and is implicated in "the Pessant-common polities of the world." He is pulled back to the battle, even as Devereux was inexorably drawn to court and is drawn by the play world: a subject pressured by representational politics in which he participates fully and in which character and selfhood are always being read and written.[21] In his period of disgrace Essex complained that "they print me and make me speak to the world, and shortly they will play me upon the stage."[22] He was correct. The revisionist portrait of fugitive power in Troilus and Cressida evokes an historical moment in which "Pessant-common polities" and their representation are not only unavoidable, but contagious.
Thus does the rhetoric of contagion, essentially a language of context , cling suggestively to Achilles in the play. Ulysses describes him as suffering from a terminal disease: "He is so plaguy proud that the deathtokens of it / Cry 'No recovery'" (2.3.178–79). But plagues spread. Achilles is the premier victim and carrier of epidemics, for while his arrogance quarantines him, his eager imitators disseminate the politics of avoidance. His withdrawal makes him ever more the focus of war and the plague of factions.
The contagious centrality of Achilles has a dramaturgic element about it. Determined to prove insubordination, Ulysses hilariously recites the send-up of Nestor and Agamemnon that Patroclus performs for the Achilles faction (1.3.151–84). What Ulysses actually demonstrates, however, is the subversive communicability of Achilles' local theater. The indignity to which Patroclus and Achilles subject the Greek council in their coterie playhouse becomes an irresistible script for Ulysses' outrageous performance; rebelliousness infectiously, dramatically reproduces itself. Troilus and Cressida encrypts the theater's assault on authority, and in the process introduces another Devereux-Achilles overlay. For the most probable historical context of an encounter between Essex and Shakespeare involves just this issue of contestatory theater. By commissioning Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, to play Richard II on the eve of his uprising in 1601, the earl meant to incite some form of revolt through the mimetic enactment of a deposition.[23] He hoped, that is, to use the theater as a contagiously subversive force. Achilles, irresistibly imitable, analogously spreads subversion both factional and theatrical. Both Essex and Achilles suffer and transmit a plague which, as the hegemony sees it, weakens the bones of state: "And in the imitation of these twain . . . / . . . many are infect" (1.3.185–87). The pathogenic figures spread "an envious fever" that makes everyone "sick / Of his superior" (1.3.132–33), corrupted by the contagious desire for a degree of autonomy denied by the very notion of "degree."[24]
The play defines with precision the social and historical mechanism of this illness: "pale and bloodless emulation" (1.3.134). In trying to goad Achilles back into the wars, Ulysses flatters him with a tableau of his former greatness. He says even the gods suffer from jealousy of the hero: Achilles' "glorious deeds but in these fields of late / Made emulous missions 'mongst the gods themselves,/And drave great Mars to faction" (3.3.188–90). Emulation and its product, factionalism, always flourish together through the collapsing of difference, even presumably the ontological difference between men and gods. Because court factionalism was an equilibrating structure, it spurred the nobles to augment the distinctions that it dissolved. Their circular solution was emulation, which Joel Fineman (drawing on René Girard's work) defines as "that paradoxical labor of envy that seeks to find difference in imitation"; it is "the emotional modality appropriate to the scheme of differentiating violence between equals."[25] Emulation at Elizabeth's court was a method of advancement: imitate your fellow courtier so completely as to
make him obsolete.[26] In a system that promoted nullifying balance, that calibrated power relations to the disadvantage of those most actively engaged in it, every self-creative gesture produced only imitation. The "hollow factions" to which Ulysses refers exactly configure this business of copying what one seeks to destroy. Fineman pertinently notices that emulation is "a desire divided against itself . . . best illuminated by Freud's ambiguous account of an ego whose identifications are simultaneously subjective and objective, narcissistic and anaclitic" ("Fratricide and Cuckoldry," 107). Such desirous hostility, "the noblest hateful love" (4.1.34), is always an impulse in those who seek to demolish rivals they depend upon, rivals who are the very impetus for self-formation.[27] Despite its psychological complexity, the emulative impulse is not an individual or personal but rather a viral, systemic phenomenon. Those who occupy a grid of social roles on the same level in a given organizational structure (courtiers, assistant professors, executives) tend to be rendered competitively indistinct.
In Troilus and Cressida , the problem of emulation is particularly keen for the Greeks, whose statesmen and soldiers are of nearly identical lofty rank. The Grecian forces include "sixty and nine that wore / Their crownets regal" (Prologue, 5–6)—independent princes, interchangeable members of an aggregate, disunified aristocracy that lacks a compelling account of intrinsic value or difference. When Ulysses says "emulation hath a thousand sons/That one by one pursue" (3.3.156–57), he conjures the assembly-line nightmare of patriarchal violence that produces indistinguishable persons.[28] Society fosters contagious imitations that frustrate the distinctions it pretends to treasure.
What is mesmerizing about the idea of emulation in the drama is its metacultural conflation of two historical coordinates: the obsessive competition between the aptly named "peers" of the realm; and the conditions of Shakespearean representation.[29] For as a mimetic act, emulation is always to some extent an aesthetic one as well. It is a poetics of success through imitative conduct. Political behavior and aesthetic form appropriate and infiltrate one another; as the nobility enacts an increasingly hostile drama of imitative gesture and strategem, the Shakespearean theater implicates itself in this historical context by emulating it—simultaneously articulating and debasing the cultural referent. Portrayed within but also enacted by the play, emulation escapes containment; it is always an ailment, an infection coursing within and without. Just as violent emulation in the Elizabethan court wrought havoc on cultural templates such as honor, nobility, and distinction, Troilus and
Cressida , too, contaminates what it copies. The emulous drama treats the overtold tale of Troy but displaces its predecessor and competitor texts through its escalating, sarcastic violence and its radical obliteration of the ideologies that no longer validate that tale. This drama is an enterprise sick with its own knowledge of contemporary dramatic, political, and erotic practice. The Shakespearean emulation of the Troy story is a profoundly deforming project of literature reading history.
II
"Dame," fait il, "j'ai bien oï parler
de vostre pris, mais che n'est ore mie;
et de Troie rai jou oï conter
k'ele fu ja de mout grant seignorie;
or n'i puet on fors les plaches trover . . ."
"Lady," says he, "I have indeed heard talk
of your greatness, but there is nothing left of it.
I have also heard talk of Troy,
how it was once a great power;
nowadays they can just barely find the site."
Conon de Béthune[30]
The Trojan War is a battle between two sets of courtiers for possession of a queen. The story thus frames the essential social and political dynamic of the Elizabethan court, where the Cecil and Essex factions sought, in Lawrence Stone's words, "control of the Queen's purse and person."[31] But if Shakespeare replicates some parallels between English court affairs and the tale of Troy, he also skews others, setting the picture of contemporary politics curiously awry. The most obvious and important breach between the play and its cultural context is that neither the Trojan nor the Greek side has a figure much like Elizabeth. Political force in Ilion resides solely in the doddering patriarch Priam and his boisterous boys; the Greek camp, too, is as far from a gynocracy as imaginable. The Trojans and Greeks, as combatants for a totemic sexual and material site—the body of Helen—emulate the crises of the Elizabethan aristocracy through fragmented outline and indirection.
The relationship of a literary work to a culture that sponsored, coerced, or prohibited it has been nicely defined by Edward Said as "the eccentric , dialectical intermingling of history with form in texts."[32] But if Shakespeare's interminglings are eccentric, they are also for the most part symbolic, purposeful, motivated. The example of court parties sug-
gests just such a production of meaning. Factionalism for many years bore Elizabeth's imprimatur and signature, yet the author of strife in the Grecian camp is not a ruler but a courtier. (Or two courtiers, inasmuch as Ulysses diagnoses and so recreates the problem that Achilles has caused.) However, this canted parallel, far from signifying the text's distance from its historical moment, actually reproduces the major topical problem. Courtier control over the factions in Greece configures an impotence in royal or monarchical authority with respect to such structures. Agamemnon's estrangement from his own authority and from his fellow kings enables factious insubordination. Likewise, the presentation of factional rivalry as first a plague and then an ex post facto policy—"Their fraction is more our wish than their faction" (2.3.101), Nestor says of a potential Achilles-Ajax alliance—underscores a current governmental failure. Elizabeth's regulatory mechanism takes dramatic form as a hierarchical and organizational nemesis. Dissimilar arrangements in the play and culture highlight analogical similarities: they are differences encoded to show sameness and ultimately to insinuate deficiencies of contemporary rule. But some disjunctions are less easily decoded than others.
In associating the Grecian camp with Elizabeth's court, the play deflects the single expected correspondence between text and world. For Geoffrey of Monmouth's mythographic account of Britain's origins had long since established an identity between England and Troy. Aeneas's great grandson Brute or Brutus was said to have founded Britain after the fall of the ancient city. In Spenser's formulation, "noble Britons sprong from Trojans bold, / And Troynovant was built of old Troy's ashes cold" (Faerie Queene , 3.9.38). If London (Troynovant) is regarded as a phoenix sprung from the ashes of a great civilization, then the recognizable English problem of factionalism in Troilus and Cressida symbolically afflicts the wrong side.
What can we make of this alteration? It seems at first to confute the cherished Tudor myth of Trojan origins, a myth that was becoming increasingly unconvincing toward the end of the queen's reign. As Frances Yates explains, Elizabeth's ancestors "were of Welsh or ancient British descent. When the Tudors ascended the throne of England, so runs the myth, the ancient Trojan-British race of monarchs once more resumed the imperial power and brought in a golden age of peace and plenty."[33] Or so it might have appeared for much of the queen's rule. But by the end of her monarchy, this story was assailed convincingly; the historicity of "Brutus" was in considerable doubt. The figure was skeptically dis-
mantled by no less an authority than Elizabeth's historian, William Camden:
Geffrey Ap Arthur Monmouth, route hundred yeares ago, was the first . . . that to gratifie our Britains produced unto them this Brutus, descended from the gods, by birth also a Trojane, to bee the author of the British Nation. . . .
Furthermore . . . very many out of the grave Senate of great Clerks, by name, Boccace, Vives, Hadr. Junius, Polydore . . . and other men of deepe judgement, agree joyntly in one verdict, and denie, that ever there was any such in the world as this Brutus: also, that learned men of our owne country, as many, acknowledge him not, but reject him as a meere counterfet. . . . [34]
The unreliability of mythification is variously portrayed in Troilus and Cressida , most memorably in Achilles' assertion that he has killed Hector after the Myrmidons have in fact done the deed. Yet the debunking of myth cannot by itself explain specific transmogrifications such as the assignment of a characteristic English problem to the Greeks instead of the Trojans.
What can better account for the Shakespearean alteration is the text's formal "dialectical intermingling" with its historical contexts. The play's plot formation schematizes its proximate relation to late Tudor conditions. For history is not reproduced eccentrically in Troilus and Cressida ; it is disposed bilaterally. Both Greek and Trojan camps recollect contemporary political acts and structures; both sides, and their transactions, establish compelling circuits of text and world. The Trojans in the play are coextensive with the Greeks in their referentiality; they simply evoke other aspects of a specifically Elizabethan dissolution. Troy differs in the heavier ideological freight of its representations.
Throughout the drama, the sons of Priam identify themselves with the forms and conventions of chivalry. They cleave to a traditional ideal of knighthood and "honor": courage, loyalty, dedication to cause and ruler and lady. (The Trojans suffer occasional lapses when it occurs to them that cause, ruler, and lady are irremediably separate; for much of Elizabeth's reign, these were three in one.) The Trojan chivalric ideal derives its literary impetus from the romance epics of the Middle Ages; in Troilus and Cressida the medieval heritage of the story seems to belong almost exclusively to the Trojans.[35] The Greek lords are situated stylistically in the late Renaissance, surprisingly contemporary in the weary cynicism of their political maneuvers. The Trojan men, by contrast, emerge through attitude and language as vaguely antiquated. But only vaguely: their courtly behavior in love and battle, musty-seeming
enough by 1600, nonetheless recreates a crucial facet of the Elizabethan cult.
The chivalric premise lay behind virtually every late Tudor court formality: progresses, pageant entertainments, anniversary celebrations, diplomatic embassies, conferrals of dignities. The enactment of the ideal in the period was, on its surface, an expression of monarchical glory and the nobles' undying fealty. But chivalry, enthusiastically resuscitated for Elizabeth's reign, survived (like the story of England) with something of a false genealogy. Chivalry barely managed to contain its hereditary discord and contradictions. In its medieval form, chivalry masked savage and unregenerate self-interest; deadly sins were meliorated only by their veneer of martial glory. In some cases the line between chivalry and criminality was frighteningly thin. The European Middle Ages suffered a scourge of condottieri , mercenaries who sought the honor of wars "by birth and vocation" but whose greedy ravages were comparable to the effect of an epidemic.[36] Knighthood glorified bravery and martial prowess, but in so doing, it legitimated and rewarded rapacity. Yet this ambivalence was, it could be argued, always part of the courtly appeal. To William Caxton (in the preface to Malory's Morte D'Arthur ), the Arthurian tales contain
many joyous and playsaunt hystoryes and noble and renomed actes of humanyte, gentylnesse, and chyvalryes. For herein may be seen noble chyvalrye, curtosye, humanyte, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frendshyp, cowardyse, murdre, hate, vertue, and synne. Doo after the good and leve the evyl.[37]
The apposition of "humanyte, gentylnesse, and chyvalryes" with "cowardyse, murdre, hate, vertue, and synne" suggests that exemplars of good and evil intertwine in the literary courtesy tradition. Moral ambivalence lends it force as an expression of human history and motivations. The chivalric sanctioning of greed, violence, and adultery (service to a woman was typically service and love of an already married woman) led Tudor humanists such as Roger Ascham to decry the "bold bawdry and open manslaughter" of the knightly ethos.[38]
So chivalry came to the Elizabethans as a problematic, even tainted form. In the later Middle Ages, a strategic manipulation had helped salvage it as a code of honor. Malcolm Vale has written that in order to "secure the allegiance of the nobility and the knightly classes, princes and monarchs found it expedient to graft the powerful concept of personal honour on to that of loyalty to the sovereign."[39] That is, the
knights and nobles negotiated a new relationship to monarchy in which they sacrificed some of their autonomous power. What did they gain? The theatrical pleasures of distinction, recognition, even safety—a life, as Francis Bacon once recommended to Essex, in the light, not in the heat. Elizabethan chivalry at its apex successfully replayed this contractual relation. The chivalric mode was an agreement and commodity as much as a style of service; it had incalculable exchange value as a means to favor, priority, and place. In turn, bestowing honor and honors for opulent, ostentatious service, the queen deployed chivalric conventions to maintain the order of the court. Chivalry became a tough container of vastly different contents and discontents: it managed the gelid, bookish formalities of aristocratic homage as well as the boiling rivalries of the most ambitious nobles. It provided a stage upon which factionalism was performed. The queen's Accession Day tilts and progress entertainments used the chivalric mode to help enclose potentially disruptive bids for glory in a stabilizing theater of service.[40]
This ambition/containment dialectic was pressured late in the reign by the problems, as Louis Montrose notes, of "gender and generation."[41] In the Elizabethan version of chivalry, "the essence of knighthood was service to a lady";[42] faithfulness to an unattainable erotic object became a condition of courtier success. The neochivalric cult combined medieval, military thematics of honor and loyalty with amorous overtones to ensure the queen's utter centrality. But these thematic threads could not be woven without entanglements. The Elizabethan redaction of courtly practice was jeopardized in the 1590s by the ruler's increasing generational distance from her courtiers. The problem operated on the literal and figurative levels: neither Elizabeth's age nor her long-employed maternal symbology could comfortably accommodate erotic aspects of her image. The erotic-maternal juxtaposition can never be, past a certain point, entirely comfortable.[43]
The queen's image was "comprehensive, diffuse, and ambiguous," but her self-fashionings became contradictory; in their contradictions, unbelievable.[44] The object of erotic obeisance who took no lovers was somehow the mother of her country who had no children. Despite such disjunctions, the aging queen remained a potentially bounteous maternal figure in economic terms, dispensing the milk of patents and monopolies to her youthful, needy nobility. Elizabeth's motherly persona was by far the most psychologically and chronologically forceful of her self-constructions in the last decade of her reign. The young courtiers, unruly sons more than lovers (and never spouses), found
and placed themselves in a conflictual relationship with this female power.[45] The symbolic and physical signs of Elizabeth's advanced age sorted ill with her Tilbury persona—defensive, inviolable, but enticing—and with the chivalric premise of her eternal desirability. I do not mean to say that advanced years and sexuality are incompatible, nor that attractiveness vanishes at any particular point in life; simply that the image of eternal freshness and youth, upon which the chivalric fiction to some extent depends, is impossible to sustain once bodily corruption becomes unarguable. And in Elizabeth's case, the disintegration of the courtly mode, or at least of its efficacy, coincides with that corruption. Late Tudor chivalric performances and the poetry that recreates them tried mightily to circumvent the harsh fact of decline, but the effort fell short and sometimes backfired. For instance, George Peele's Anglorum Feriae records the Accession Day tilt of 1595 and celebrates Elizabeth's recent escape from the Lopez assassination plot. The work describes the queen in glowing, reverential language, but the poet's account concludes with a curious prayer: "May she shine in beautie fresh and sheene/Hundreds of yeares our thrice renowned queen."[46] Surely Peele means that the mental image of Elizabeth's present beauty should endure forever? But his words summon instead the specter of the anile monarch, in the thirty-seventh year of her reign, counternaturally living on and on, enthroned, embalmed, for centuries. The chivalric gesture toward her physical beauty, in denying the fact of mortality, turns back on itself.
Other disruptions of the chivalric were more clearly intentional. In 1598, while deliberating about whom to appoint to the lord deputyship in Ireland, Elizabeth fell into a bitter dispute with the earl of Essex. During one particularly heated argument, the earl—erstwhile flower of latter-day Tudor chivalry—was reported to have turned his back scornfully on his sovereign as he added a vicious insult: he said "her conditions were as crooked as her carcase."[47] To comment on the queen's aged and deformed body constituted an attack upon it, and Elizabeth promptly struck her former favorite. Not one to back down, Essex laid his hand on his sword hilt. The death knell of chivalry sounded by this episode reverberates until the end of the reign. Essex repeated his disobedience on a larger scale in Ireland and yet again in his rebellion. Elizabeth's inevitable physical deterioration was not just the subject but the enabling fact of Essex's effrontery; her physical vulnerability liberated transgressive impulses and removed a fulcrum on which the nobility once safely balanced its powers and desires. For all the strength of Eliza-
bethan chivalry, it ran a great risk in locating ideology in the queen's body natural.
Underlying the problem of the declining chivalric image was the basic issue of gender difference: Elizabeth's political potency was a thorough cultural anomaly. Montrose reflects with admirable understatement that "the political nation—which was wholly a nation of men—sometimes found it annoying or perturbing to serve a prince who was also a woman, a woman who was unsubjected to a man."[48] This chafing was worsened by abiding resentment of Elizabeth's manipulative intrusions in courtiers' personal lives. It was not enough to plight political troth: the queen's men were expected to maintain the appearance of sexual fidelity to her, or ever so cautiously to submit their alternate desires for her approval.[49] The Virgin Queen, insistent cynosure of male attention, directed the court complex of romance and sexuality—an arrangement that defines delayed gratification. Many of Elizabeth's sharp political maneuvers were conducted within this complex but were frequently misread as solely gender-related phenomena. When Ambassador de Maisse sought to learn from Elizabeth whether England would actively pursue the Spanish wars, he could obtain only equivocal answers: "They labored under two things at this Court," he concluded, "delay and inconstancy, which proceeded chiefly from the sex of the Queen" (de Maisse, Journal , 115).[50] The ambassador meant, in his exasperated, androcentric way, that delay and inconstancy are female traits, but they also characterized the monarch's politic sexuality. Delay and inconstancy were precision tools for social maintenance, as integral to maintaining stability in a male-pressured court as were the emulous rivals themselves. Through "delay" the queen wisely employed the erotic understanding that avails Cressida—until the Trojan woman is trapped in the Grecian world of men, and "inconstancy" becomes the only option:
Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she belov'd knows naught that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is.
(1.2.291–94)
The fact that men prize the thing ungained, or desire what they do not have, was the motivational and regulatory foundation of Elizabethan factionalism and chivalry.
Yet constant striving for inadequate emolument (political, fiscal, or psychosexual) may eventually have undermined loyalties. About Eliza-
beth, de Maisse believed that "if by chance she should die, it is certain that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman" (Journal , 11–12). Frustrated by the queen's cagey responses to his overtures for information, he can hardly be taken for a disinterested reporter of prevailing opinion. But the ambassador's irritable comment activates the possibility that deferred gratification fueled some men's hostility for female rule.
The problem with maintaining the chivalric ideal was thus not solely in upholding the fiction of Elizabeth's infinite desirability but more generally in sublimating the multiple, intensely strenuous conditions of that desirability. The court was dissilient, generationally fractured, manned (as it were) by an increasingly impatient and acquisitive nobility. The unworkability of the courtly mode in the late 1590s was in some sense its deep, gender-related insincerity : dedicated masculine self-interest took precedence over obligatory chivalric service to a woman. However, the precarious genius of Elizabethan chivalry was that it offered the courtier pleasures and rewards precisely compensatory for tensions in gender relations. Late Tudor chivalry was a forum for the visibility of masculine courtier power.
Elizabeth's Accession Day tilts provided the most public site of this power. Styled after medieval chivalric antecedents, the tilts were annual celebrations of the queen's ascendance to the throne.[51] They featured displays of martial prowess in which gentlemen and nobles jousted across a barrier; the man who splintered the most lances won a prize from the queen. Like Troilus and Cressida , bear baiting, and public executions, the tilts translated violence into theater. Tonally at deep odds with the persistent, encroaching reality of war, such chivalric exhibitions achieved a golden world of amusing and sanitized discord. But while the tournament served as an ideological state apparatus, cementing the symbolic association between the defense of the country and the chivalric defense of the monarch, it also publicized a critical difference between the queen and her men. The act of war—Elizabeth's Amazonian symbology notwithstanding—was the indisputable area of male superiority, of male control , in this reign. Both warfare and the artificial chivalric theater of the tilts offered the courtier an outlet for aggression that was not controlled by the queen. The tournaments' kinetic dispersal of masculine energy may have alleviated some tensions, but it generated others. For public mock-warfare afforded irresistible and inspiring self-exposure. The courtier's physical strength, horsemanship, and glory became the subjects of the tournaments; Elizabeth be-
came an honored object, a motionless spectator and recipient of sincere or disingenuous attentions. The young nobility, glory-seeking and militant, flushed with its own greatness, upstaged the monarch. In reanimating the dormant, genetic dangers of medieval chivalry, the tilts delimited a male arena that necessarily excluded the female except as observer. Such an exclusion achieved, if only momentarily, the dream of masculine power at court, but this dream was not easily shaken.[52]
The functions and dysfunctions of Elizabethan chivalry take us back to Troilus and Cressida , where the Trojans manifest in single-combat challenges and tournament activity a comparable employment and diminution of the courtly enterprise. In Troy, the failure of the chivalric mode is related to profound resentment of the woman for whom the nobles fight; yet that resentment is implicated not in the age or dominance of the erotic object but in its redefinition. For in Shakespeare's Troy, emulous, furious male desire is its own and only object. The realignment of the erotic impulse underlies the vexed state of Elizabethan and Trojan courtliness.
III
The first staged meeting of the Greeks and Trojans sets the divisive, conflicting tones of chivalry in Troilus and Cressida at a high pitch. Aeneas visits the Greek camp in act 1, scene 3, to deliver Hector's singlecombat challenge, thus initiating the Trojans' mock-heroic discourse. But Aeneas's failure to recognize his interlocutor, coupled with the parodic, stylistic excesses of his attempts to do so, threaten to cause all conversational middle ground to cave in:
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An actor might deliver Aeneas's speech with either foppish sincerity or snooty contempt. It contains both these elements as well as a seemingly gratuitous homoerotic overtone of a blushing bride in an aubade. Agamemnon responds to the speech with a marvelous aporia: "This Trojan scorns us, or the men of Troy / Are ceremonious courtiers." He knows that either he is being insulted or that the peculiar Trojans always speak this way. Agamemnon's perplexed gloss exposes the two poles of Elizabethan chivalric meaning: ceremony as courtesy, ceremony as subversion. Once Aeneas delivers Hector's challenge, the sincerity of the courtly mode becomes no less suspect.
The challenge itself is a protest against prevailing conditions. Although it is peacetime in Troy (a truce is on), Hector is "resty grown" (1.3.262) and seeks disruption. Out of the boredom and anxiety that settle on soldiers prevented from creating their performative fame, the greatest Trojan tries, through Aeneas, to pick a chivalric fight with the Greeks. He does so in terms of a defense of his lady's excellence and honor:
If there be one among the fair'st of Greece
That holds his honour higher than his ease,
That feeds his praise more than he fears his peril,
That knows his valour and knows not his fear,
That loves his mistress more than in confession
With truant vows to her own lips he loves,
And dare avow her beauty and her worth
In other arms than hers—to him this challenge:
Hector, in view of Trojans and of Greeks,
Shall make it good, or do his best to do it,
He hath a lady wiser, fairer, truer,
Than ever Greek did couple in his arms;
And will tomorrow with his trumpet call
Midway between your tents and walls of Troy
To rouse a Grecian that is true in love.
If any come, Hector shall honour him:
If none, he'll say in Troy, when he retires,
The Grecian dames are sunburnt and not worth
The splinter of a lance. Even so much.
(1.3.264–82)
Hector's invitation to the "sportful" combat is not motivated by either a need or desire to defend his wife, Andromache, who remains unnamed in the speech. Indeed, the woman in the challenge functions as a deeply ambivalent rhetorical construct. This pandering, mediated invitation
reads Elizabethan courtly behavior and draws its substance from the fount of contemporary cultural practice.[53] Hector's challenge employs a language of courtly love as a pretext for military activity, but the primary impulses of the speech are antifeminist and, correlatively, homoerotic.
The Trojan challenge is a calling-out—the colloquialism neatly implies the open, theatrical nature of such invitations—with no named adversary. Hector plays the role of champion against all comers that Sir Henry Lee, and later the earls of Cumberland and Essex, performed at the tilts.[54] Queen's champion was a coveted role in the tournaments; it publicly denoted a serious honor, establishing a link between romantic and military elements at the ideological core of the Elizabethan cult.[55] There is a critical difference in the case of the proposed Trojan tournament, however. The fact that conferred order and sense on the mockjousts in Elizabeth's time, their raison d'être, was the presence of the queen. But at Hector's challenge, and more significantly at the chivalric duel itself in act 4, no woman can validate the terms of the fight because no woman is there. The duel both excludes women and removes authority figures as well, for neither Agamemnon nor Priam sets the battle conditions: at the duel of Hector and Ajax, Aeneas and Diomedes play the marshals of the lists to determine the extremity of the combat. The chivalric challenge and the following tousle produce a male arena of courtier rule , an Accession Day tilt for nobles only, with no queen invited. Hector's tournament-style love challenge, phrased in honor of his mistress, is like a game for schoolboys only—no girls allowed.
In the absence of women, real and representational, Hector generates a homoerotic discourse. He calls on "the fair'st of Greece," but he means the men. After an insinuation that vows between warriors and women are always "truant," he appeals to any Greek who can avow his lady's "beauty and her worth / In other arms than hers." The wordplay depends of course on the two meanings of arms , but the "other arms" are not merely weaponry: they are, pointedly, Hector's limbs as well. His invitation is designed to make the Greek lovers unfaithful to their women. The Trojan hero in this speech becomes a surrogate object of desire.
Aeneas plainly announces that the enterprise is homoerotic: Hector will call "to rouse a Grecian that is true in love." If any should "come" after Hector arouses him, the Trojan will do him honor.[56] Now erotic bonding between warriors is common enough in literature, although it is generally directed toward a beloved companion, not an enemy.[57] What
makes this speech particularly interesting is that it does not posit an enemy. Instead, the language deflects the expected hostility from the chivalric rival to the traditional putative chivalric love objects. The speech denigrates women in the guise of their defense; it exculpates the men from and implicates the women in any negative outcome of the duel.[58] Should the Greek warriors fail to meet Hector, he will not blame them; rather, he'll slander the Grecian dames, who, he will say, are "sunburnt and not worth / The splinter of a lance." "Sunburnt" connotes "infected with venereal disease"; the splintered lance suggests an impaired penis: the Grecian dames, Hector will say, are not worth the risk of syphilis.[59] Chivalric style cloaks the most uncourtly, hostile sentiments in gleaming armor. At the same time, such meanings are probably not in the range of Hector's intentions. The fissures in the Trojan monument to chivalry are plastered over by habit of force.
Hector's challenge pricks dramatic tension because the Greeks conspicuously lack any women in their camp at this point. What they do have, however, is the only openly conducted homosexual relationship in the Shakespearean canon. Achilles and Patroclus are lovers, and their private bond is substantial: it is the only loyalty that manages to survive the depredations of the war.[60] Granted, their relationship is seen as an unholy alliance by the Greek council, but not for sexual reasons; the politicos are angry only that Achilles, and "with him Patroclus / Upon a lazy bed the livelong day/Breaks scurril jests" (1.3.146–48), mocking what is left of Grecian authority. (Thersites views the lovers as "preposterous," but he is scarcely a touchstone for acceptable social activity.) The male-enfolded desire of the Greeks is especially compelling contextually because, as Ulysses notes, Hector's love call does have an intended object: "This challenge that the gallant Hector sends . . . / Relates in purpose only to Achilles" (1.3.321–23). The arms that Hector finally uses to rouse Achilles from his drowsy tent are battle arms that destroy Patroclus, his obstacle for Achilles' attentions. Achilles seeks horrible gratification for the loss, catching Hector "unarm'd": "this is the man I seek" (5.8.10).
Given the noncourtly, masculine-oriented, disgruntled Grecian soldiers, it is odd how quickly, albeit awkwardly, Agamemnon and Nestor respond to Hector's challenge, as if chivalry were a transcultural value. Although the chivalric style is more appropriate to the Trojans' situation, it speaks to the concerns of both camps by performing a slick, ceremonious devaluation of women and by claiming the worth of a lousy fight. Sure enough, the Greek response to Hector implicitly contin-
ues chivalric misogyny in—and beyond—the play world. Responding to Aeneas, Nestor boasts that if no young champion can be found, he will meet Hector to defend the honor of his own lady—a very old lady, who, as Nestor says, "Was fairer than his grandam, and as chaste / As may be in the world" (1.3-298–99). Along with the doubts about female chastity that infiltrate the subjunctive last line, Nestor's words conjure a dicey contemporary tableau: the uncomfortable, possibly ridiculous defense of an ancient woman's virtue. Aeneas, courtier extraordinaire, snidely answers, "Now heavens forfend such scarcity of youth" (301). Like Nestor's lady, and like the image of the aged Elizabeth buried beneath his language, chivalry itself is creaky, out of date. Nearly all the Trojans speak the language of chivalric romance as an ideological safety hatch for their criminal wife-stealing and their latent misogyny. But of the Greeks, only the faintly daffy Nestor can respond in the courtly way to Hector's challenge. The idiom of knightly sincerity is nearly obsolescent slang to the Greeks, because only their older generation can apprehend what has clearly become unintelligible to the rest of them: the concept of defending a woman's honor.
The repressive misogyny in the ranks may be ascribed in part to fears of inadequacy and doubts about female constancy, both arising from the circumstances of this particular war. In Troy, when the heterosexual premise holds, the knight fights for a lady on whom "thousands of rival desires converge";[61] the female chivalric beloved therefore becomes not (like Elizabeth) a source of joy and sustenance but (like Elizabeth) the fount of doubt and paranoia. After the woman's inevitable rejection of most of those desires, she is transformed by the rejected suitors into something hateful, while the men are strangely exonerated for any hint of misconduct in the courtship game. Diomedes illuminates this process in the most violent verbal attack on a woman in the drama. In an interview with Paris (4.1.69–75), he aims such vitriol at Helen ("For every false drop in her bawdy veins / A Grecian's life hath sunk") that an audience may briefly forget that the war is a product of Paris's, not Helen's lusts; and, more tellingly, that Diomedes had earlier expressed his consensual desire for the Grecian queen:
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But Paris remembers the exchange and ironically undercuts Diomedes' vituperation with his own brand of misogyny: "Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do, / Dispraise the thing that they desire to buy" (4.1.76–77). Denigration of the female erotic object spreads through the armies—a subtextual twin of emulous factionalism. Following the transfer of Cressida to the Greeks, Ulysses proposes the "general kissing" reception ceremony, a mock-chivalric ritual strongly evocative of a group rape. When it is Ulysses' turn to claim a kiss, Cressida cleverly denies him. He then savagely denounces her as one of the "sluttish spoils of opportunity / And daughters of the game" (4.5.62–63). This outburst is patently retributive for her neat humiliation of him before his fellows; but Hector's sennet sounds immediately after Ulysses' angry speech, and the entire Greek presence on stage cries: "The Trojan's trumpet." So despite evidence to the contrary, Cressida's wantonness is made to seem contagiously irrefutable through unanimous aural contamination—"The Trojan (s)trumpet."[62] Cressida's trumpeted transformation by group accord reveals the armies' conspiracy to honor their own unlovely psychic arrangements.
If the courtiers' misogyny arises from rejected or frustrated heterosexual desire, as it seems to do in the case of Diomedes and Ulysses, that desire is nonetheless always ratified in the company of men. The general kissing scene has a powerfully homoerotic, locker-room edge; Cressida becomes a means by which the men measure their masculinity against one another. Worth noting is that both Achilles and Patroclus participate in the kissing of Cressida; it is not so much that the lines of homoand hetero-eroticism blur in Troy as that one sexual form is the frame or container for the other. Just as Hector's jaunty genital challenge eliminates women as serious contenders for male attention, the kissing of Cressida replays on a small scale the larger occasion of the war: the use of a woman as pretext and pretense for the enthusiastic display of male desires to and before other men: "Hector, in view of Trojans and of Greeks, / Shall make it good, or do his best to do it." Helen is not the goal of the war: she is its local excuse. Women bring armies of men together. And like the adjective chivalrous itself, warfare definitively excludes women.
Even Troilus's one-shot affair with Cressida is a plot device to perpetuate and intensify the masculine engagement. Troilus raises no objection to her exchange for Antenor because he is conditioned to think of the trade of a woman for a man as a good swap. Certainly, the transaction energizes both sides. At the moment of her exchange, Troilus and
Diomedes indulge in a mutually arousing display of chivalric chest thumps and antichivalric taunts, all the while ignoring the silenced woman. The warriors now have an excuse to excite one another as Cressida vanishes against the backdrop of their reflective interests. The mechanism of the courtiers' conflict may seem to be, as René Girard would have it, mimetic desire, both men having been inspired by the other's interest in the woman; but that triangulation distorts the obvious vector of desire in this scene.[63] Everything here, and in the play as a whole, moves along the patent or submerged axis of homoeroticism, the dedication to male intercourse. The imaginative disappearance of women is a necessary consequence—possibly a goal—of the emulous, self-obsessed conflict.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has offered salutary warnings against seeing in male homosexuality a simple "epitome, a personification, an effect, or perhaps a primary cause of woman-hating."[64] She demonstrates with respect to Shakespeare's sonnets that textual misogyny "plays off against the range of male bonds" (33)—"homosocial," not necessarily sexual bonds—which can foster a heterosexuality that eclipses women and is "relatively unthreatened by the feminization of one man in relation to another" (36). But in Troilus and Cressida , male homosocial relations so thoroughly exclude and debase women that the unconscious misogynistic project is made to seem necessary and reasonable. In fact, the bond between men in both Troy and Elizabeth's court "plays off against" (causality being unrecoverable here) the need to achieve or dislocate, retrieve or dominate, the source of female power. Hector's challenge is an invitation to eliminate by homosocially replacing the woman's social value as an object of sexual activity. Men feminize themselves in other ways to appropriate other female prerogatives: Achilles and Essex both play Cressida's and Elizabeth's game of keep-away to secure their own desirability, positioning themselves homosocially to decenter the woman. The two genres of homosocial behavior in the text can be seen as chivalric or antichivalric, Hectoresque or Achillean: the first is active, specular, militant, conservative, apparently (not really) heterosexually inflected; the other is listless, covert, pacifistic, and passively subversive, clearly (not entirely) homosexually inclined. But no matter what the sexual direction of homophilia may be, all male relations in Troy work to the detriment of the females. This fact can be dramatically startling. For instance, Troilus and Pandarus enjoy their traffic in woman, the Cressida business, as a way of honing and fulfilling their mutual desires.[65] Cressida's tryst with her lover ends abruptly in
act 4, scene 2, when her uncle arrives to mock her. Bothered at his intrusion, she utters a half-knowing, haunting understatement: "I shall have such a life" (4.2.22). Troilus and Pandarus soon share a dirty joke at her expense; some thirty lines later, word comes of her exchange for Antenor.
The certain failure, the disaster of heterosexual relations that is the Trojan War story enforces a presumptive preference for homosocial configurations in this text. After Ulysses reveals a shameful (heterosexual) reason for Achilles' withdrawal from the fighting—"'Tis known, Achilles, that you are in love/With one of Priam's daughters" (3.3.193–94)—he tries to reenlist the hero with this rich apothegm: "And better would it fit Achilles much/To throw down Hector than Polyxena" (3.3.206–7). Ulysses' homoerotic goad to manly action, a replay of Hector's to the Greeks, is quickly seconded by Patroclus:
A woman impudent and mannish grown
Is not more loath'd than an effeminate man
In time of action. . . .
Sweet, rouse yourself.
(3.3.216–21)
Sedgwick's point about a male heterosexuality that eclipses women is especially relevant to Achilles, who conducts a secret affair with Priam's invisible daughter Polyxena but a fairly public dalliance with Patroclus "upon a lazy bed the livelong day" (1.3.147). Achilles' ambivalent sexuality (addressed with the required antifeminist injunction) completes and complements Hector's chivalric evacuation of heterosexuality in the love challenge. What is defined as "effeminate" here is passivity, but that is the very thing that marks Achilles' heterosexuality: for his female beloved, Polyxena, has made him pledge his withdrawal from the wars. Love for women prevents fighting; love for men demands it, as Patroclus here (and later, by his death) calls Achilles back to the battle. Whereas both Hector's and Achilles' heterosexual relationships end in separation, the two greatest warriors end with one another, in a kind of homosocial consummation.
The desire for communion with men in a military or sexual context may have an inward-turning, self-directed valence to it. As a result of his colleagues' entreaties, Achilles expresses a physical need to see his counterplayer, but the terms of his desire suggest something disturbing about its nature and perhaps its historical formation:
I have a woman's longing,
An appetite that I am sick withal,
To see great Hector in his weeds of peace,
To talk with him, and to behold his visage,
Even to my full of view.
(3.3.236–40)
Achilles conceives of his desire as feminine (and thus, of course, debilitating) but describes it suggestively in narcissistic terms. He hungers to see Hector in his own condition, unarmed, entented; it is an essentialist and emulous desire, bent to fit a narcissistic frame. Emulation, that conflictual loss of difference, is itself narcissistic—a social model of relations that turns outward only to feed inward, a self-obsessing, self-promoting, and self-destroying infinite regression or motivational loop. The emulous desire is for the self to resemble another which it already resembles by virtue of the very desire. And while both terms, emulation and narcissism, signify a destructive imitation, they also allude to a problematic structure of love. If there is a psychological point in this play on the continuum between homosocial and heterosexual desire, an interstice where Achilles resides, it is the vortex of emulous narcissism, in which the male can conceive of himself as female (via the male other) in order to respond completely to a self-directed need. Male narcissism in the text is a cognate of homophilia that parodically depends on a heterosexual view of relations.[66]
The exigencies of imitative narcissism also describe the chivalric project, which provides male participants with the kind of reflective self-gratification that females, by definition, cannot supply. When Hector and Ajax finally meet for their knightly duel, Aeneas explains to Achilles that "This Ajax is half made of Hector's blood; / In love whereof, half Hector stays at home" (4.5.83–84). Achilles instantly understands the fight in erotic terms: "A maiden battle, then? O, I perceive you" (4.5.87). These warriors will draw no blood from one another, and so will remain unpenetrated, maidenly. Narcissism too is maidenly, foreclosing consummation. Hector's reluctance to fight Ajax à l'outrance suggests not an incest taboo so much as a way of preserving and enclosing the image of the self in the enemy:
Let me embrace thee, Ajax.
By him that thunders, thou hast lusty arms;
Hector would have them fall upon him thus.
(4.5.134–36)
Hector's chivalric acts are fully emulous and homophilic; his meetings with Achilles, then, have the symbolic density of self-encounter about them. In Troilus and Cressida , the chivalric and the narcissistic merge when the armies come passionately together, pitched in their extremity toward a mutually glorifying violence. The warriors are mirror lovers in arms—rivals in love.
IV
To what extent do these conflicting sexual registers reproduce an Elizabethan court complex? In what ways can we recover the historical reality of such potentially undifferentiated terms as narcissism and homosocial bonding for a reading of Troilus and Cressida ? Certainly, the social fact of these categories is exceedingly hard to specify. Narcissism is a hugely inclusive, inchoate designation; male bonds have been ever present in patriarchal social and literary texts since (at least) the Iliad . To apply "narcissism" as a periodizing concept, I appeal only to the (nonclinical) notion of an ultimately self-destructive self-interest; for "homosocial bonds," those relations between men that exclude, degrade, or imaginatively obliterate women. That the conjunction of these terms can signify in any delimited, historical fashion is a hope I pin on the earl of Essex, the axial figure in Troilus and Cressida 's cultural referentiality. Essex again evokes relevant coordinates—in his unavailing obsession with his own image and influence and in his masculinist strategies for circumventing and subduing the queen's centrality.
The presence and absence of Queen Elizabeth within systems of male self-regard is crucial here. I have described factionalism and chivalry as specific productions and dispositions of her court's sexual politics. Only through the absent presence of Elizabeth, refracted in the dim light from Shakespeare's Troy, can "narcissism" and "homosocial relations" be seen as correlative descriptions of compensatory historical structures. The queen grants meaning to these taxonomies of selves at war.
War: it is a hypnotic object of male attention; for Essex, it was also a homosocial escape route from the power of his monarch. In the sphere of Mars, far more than in that of Venus, Essex could achieve unsubjected and purposely irritating freedom from female rule. His martial attitude was forged at the beginning of his court career in sympathy with a group of poor younger sons of the gentry who chose military instead of aristocratic service; the post-Armada skirmishes offered an outlet for their blocked social energies. In spite (or because) of the strong royal
suspicion of courtier entourages, Essex became spiritual and martial leader of several of these men: he wrote, "I love them for mine own sake, for I find sweetness in their conversation, strong assistance in their employment, and happiness in their friendship. I love them for their virtues' sake and for their greatness of mind. . . . If we may have peace, they have purchased it; if we must have war, they must manage it."[67] This male esprit de corps seems to have fueled, at a later point, the earl's radical misconduct. After he was installed as commander of the English forces in Ireland, repeated conflicts with Elizabeth about financing and strategy arose. The Irish campaign was a fiasco of disobedient self-determination and monarchical disapproval.[68] Essex went so far as to forge a symbolic alliance with men of war against the queen; but this bond was, significantly enough, with the enemy. After a particularly harsh disagreement with Elizabeth, Essex symbolically aligned himself with the rebel Tyrone by negotiating a truce with him in direct violation of the queen's orders. He found in the Irish adversaries a compelling image of his own impulses; he wrote pointedly to Elizabeth that "the people in general have able bodies by nature, and gotten by custom ready use of arms. . . . In their pride they value no man but themselves . . .; in their rebellion they have no other end but to shake off the yoke of obedience to your majesty."[69] This alarming report obviously functions as a self-description, uncovering the courtier's will to power; the Irish, like Essex, "value no man but themselves," and seek to shake off their obedience to a woman. When Essex returned to England unbidden, Elizabeth was all too aware of his trespass upon her power: "By God's son I am no Queen; that man is above me;—Who gave him command to come here so soon?"[70] Her fury seems as bound to the issue of sexuality as hierarchy: no man was above her, nor would ever be.
It was not only in international war games that Essex formed alliances with men as antidotes for servitude to a woman. He responded to the stormy faction fights of the late 1590s by repeatedly retreating to "his bed" at home, accompanied by his band of disaffected warriors and soldiers (de Maisse, Journal , 49). Thus, Devereux extended a homosocial sphere of male rule from the public and active to the private, passive life. But even when he seemed to be serving his monarch, Essex managed Hector's chivalric trick of undercutting and defying what he allegedly defended. Gestures of apparent homage to Elizabeth were in fact often transgressions against her commandments.[71] In 1589, Essex undertook a voyage with Sir Francis Drake to Portugal to escape perceived restraints at court. Letters he left behind infuriated the queen by asserting
that he "would return alive at no one's bidding" (DNB , 877). On arrival in Lisbon, the earl assumed a ceremonious demeanor in the exaggerated Trojan style; he boldly challenged any of the soldiers in the Spanish garrison to break a lance in the name of their mistresses and his queen.[72] Two years later, in the midst of the siege of Rouen, Essex wrote to the Marquis of Villars, asserting "that I am better than you, and that my Mistress is fairer than yours."[73] Predictably, his conduct again offended Elizabeth, whose fairness he was supposedly advertising; but the contemporary French chronicler was most impressed by "the knight-errantry of Englishmen" (DNB , 877).
Knight-errantry, subversive chivalry, was an enduring masculine appliance of self-promotion; it sometimes even literally wrote narcissism into its user's manual. In Francis Bacon's tilt device for Essex in 1595, the earl played Erophilus, love's lover; the goddess of self-love, Philautia, attempted to sway him from Love (Elizabeth) to narcissistic self-indulgence. The bad joke of the tilt is that Essex's elaborate conceit and flamboyant appearance shouted his narcissism louder than it could possibly proclaim his service. But the tilt speeches and some of Bacon's accompanying marginalia suggest that the provenance of the performance was anti-Elizabeth sentiment, narcissistic and homosocial. For two years prior to the tilt, Essex had sought the position of solicitor general for Bacon, his protégé and secretary. The fervent attempt was an act of deep friendship and also a bid for political leverage; the earl wanted to install his man in a lofty perch. But shortly before the Accession Day ceremonies, Elizabeth finally rejected the suit, and both friends were crushed. Essex's tilt device, supposedly all about the virtues of self-sacrifice, is tinged with bitterness. In one of the speeches, Philautia says that she has been told "the time makes for you"; in the margin beside these words Bacon wrote in Essex's private copy: "That your lordship knoweth, and I in part, in regard of the Queen's unkind dealing, which may persuade you to self-love."[74] The performance is so thoroughly narcissistic, so aggressively self-glorifying that Elizabeth felt no compulsion to suffer all of it: "The Queen said, that if she had thought there had bene so moch said of her, she would not have bene there that night; and soe went to bed."[75] On this evidence both Roy Strong and Richard McCoy suppose that the tilt failed spectacularly, but that notion assumes the queen was supposed to like it. On the contrary: the tilt angrily repaid her for her "unkind dealing." Essex and Bacon put their private bond to the service of an oppositional narcissism, with Essex at the center of his gaudy proclamation of homage. The departure of Elizabeth
from her own Accession Day party merely achieved in fact what had already been performed in chivalric discourse.
But this warped chivalry dislocates more than the monarch; it displaces the earlier, old-historicist, reflective identification of Essex with Achilles.[76] For there is no obvious sense in which the Greek partakes of the culture of chivalry as the earl so relentlessly did. Once we lose the certitude of the Essex-Achilles identification in Shakespeare's play, mustn't the historical reading be abandoned or severely qualified? Not really. Several years ago, James E. Savage suggested that Hector evokes the earl of Essex more consistently and convincingly than does Achilles. Savage argued that the Trojan Hector bears a fame for gentleness and courtly conduct that alludes to the renowned knightly side of Devereux.[77] It is Hector who has, in Troilus's words, a "vice of mercy," and Hector to whom Aeneas refers when he announces that "the glory of our Troy doth this day lie / On his fair worth and single chivalry" (4.4.145–46). And it is Hector, not Achilles, who suffers Essex's fate: death at the hands of a rival group. The Cecil contingent had long amplified through innuendo Essex's ambitions and desire for self-rule.[78] Apprised in Ireland of the Cecil faction's barbed insinuations, the earl felt like a man exposed to a mortal assault:
I am armed on the breast, but not on the back. . . . I am wounded in the back, not slightly, but to the heart. . . . I lay open to the malice and the practice of mine enemies in England, who first procured a cloud of disgrace to overshadow me, and now in the dark give me wound upon wound.[79]
His prophetic words fantastically shadow Hector's unarmed demise at the Myrmidons' hands in Troilus and Cressida : Essex and the Trojan both meet their ends as failed heroes against strategic conspiracy, the victims of a gang killing. Although Savage underestimates Hector's capacity for antiheroism, as does Hector himself, substantial parallels do recommend an Essex inscription in Hector.
We cannot easily purchase this identification without exchanging George Chapman's for it; but in disavowing the Achillean, faction-leading Essex to obtain the Trojan, chivalric version, the reader merely sacrifices one prescriptive referentiality for another. Robert Devereux's contradictory responses to his own heroic stature discourage a reading that nominates a single candidate as his theatrical representative. He personifies Jean Howard's apt comment about history: "not objective, transparent, unified, or easily knowable and consequently . . . extremely
problematic as a concept for grounding the meaning of a literary text."[80] It is therefore appropriate that neither Achilles nor Hector is a monochrome block of separable signification. In the two warriors' reflective, homosocial, and emulous relationship, the historical coordinates of Shakespeare's text may be recovered. To excavate the complex unity of the Essex inscription, let us look at the crisis point of Hector's courtly "character"—his heartless slaughter of the speechless Greek soldier.
In five lines near the end of the play, the entire chivalric premise with which Hector has been identified collapses:
Enter one in [sumptuous] armor .
| ||||||
The Renaissance audience must have had a weird, hallucinatory sense of déjà vu at this moment. A beautifully attired anonymous knight enters the field of battle; mute, he encounters a chivalric opponent. This scene uncannily resembles one particular tournament and Accession Day conceit. The figure of the Unknown Knight, who entered the lists anonymously, was an integral part of the tilts from medieval times.[81] In Elizabeth's tournaments, Essex himself likely appeared disguised as the melancholy Unknown in 1600, which might have represented a last-ditch effort to return to royal favor.[82] Appearance in the lists as an Unknown Knight, speechless and gorgeously clad, betokened a special status. Not just anyone could be the Unknown. The role signified a courtier's distinctive position at a given tilt: he would enter in exquisite disguise to plead a specific grievance or to announce extraordinary chivalric service to the queen.
But Hector kills him. The inconnu hunted down and butchered represents a once glorious chivalry, now encumbered and made vulnerable by its own dazzling image. The play's climactic commentary on chivalry remembers the fate of Narcissus and figures a symbolic suicide. Hector, central chivalric force in Troy, kills the most recognizable Elizabethan image of chivalric privilege, reducing it to a beast for
slaughter. In so doing, he destroys the courtly ideal as it almost existed in the play. He diminishes it to a coveted exterior, contaminating through his greed its life spirit. And in fact, on closer inspection, Hector discovers that the ideal has become entirely flesh, a corrupted thing. Beneath the armor he finds a "most putrefied core, so fair without," whose "goodly armor thus hath cost thy life" (5.8.1–2). The gaining of the armor, however, costs Hector his life as well. For he disarms, satisfied with the kill, and gives Achilles an opportunity to murder him most unchivalrously. Hector's appeal to fair play ("I am unarm'd: forego this vantage, Greek") resounds hollowly, for in viciously seeking and obtaining the merely external, he suicidally destroyed the image of what he was—an image that served, however deceptively, to protect him. Achilles is effective and brutal force in rhyming complement to Hector's own, absent the ideological trappings. His Myrmidons, speechless unchivalric Unknowns all, exact the necessary death of the rival, adjunct self.
A well-documented theatrical custom extends the interpretive borders of this scene. In a contemporary production of Troilus and Cressida the actor playing the Unknown Knight might have worn armor that once belonged to a member of the nobility. Elizabethan acting companies customarily purchased entire wardrobes from the estates of noblemen who wore such finery on formal occasions—such as the Accession Day tilts.[83] If Hector did murder an Unknown clad in a queen's man's armor, the audience would have witnessed an unmistakable tableau of the death of Elizabethan chivalry. But in the last years of the reign this death was visible enough, even without the Shakespearean scene.
In the conversation between decadent Trojan and English knighthood, in the suicidal encounter with the Unknown, the "pervasive cultural presence" of Essex is again palpable.[84] As the central actor on the buckling stage of late Elizabethan chivalry, and as the fractious noble who repeatedly sabotaged his own stature as heroic cultural representative, Essex dictates a necessary complication of literary inscriptions. A simple substitution of vehicles for the Essex tenor is inadequate practice because the earl's career at and away from court was always marked by the narrow oscillations of service and self-aggrandizement. It is thus not only possible but necessary to see the configuration of Hector-Essex in simultaneous, both/and relation to that of Achilles-Essex. The image of Robert Devereux, that is, bifurcates in the two central adversaries of Troilus and Cressida .
V
The characterological division of Essex's image responds to a clearly perceived duality in Devereux himself. He lived two interanimated but antagonistic lives, logical contradictions of power. The dark, sulking court player and homosocial warrior was also periodically the queen's loving favorite, serviceable and dutifully adept; but such contradictions were increasingly difficult to manage. The earl's aptitude for chivalry, itself a conflictual mode, brought him into the bright circle of fame, thrillingly close—but always subject—to the female power he sought to control. Essex, a product of the court relations which he so discomfited, reified the fissures in Elizabethan policy and ideology. His representational filiation into Achilles and Hector similarly anatomizes the endless divisiveness, the proliferating internecine violence, arising from social and ideological discord. The late Tudor overreliance on factionalism institutionalized an emulous chaos that chivalry (because of its own debilitations) could ultimately neither mask nor control.[85] The peculiarly Elizabethan dislocation defined by Troilus and Cressida is that gap between England's martial, chivalric glory, of which Essex was the final, desperately flawed representative, and the darker realities of the political present, circa 1600, to which he contributed in no small measure and which finally overwhelmed him. Through and around the Devereux crux, Troilus and Cressida dramatizes a world riven by its own implacable conflicts: "those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves" (3.3.228). And they are men's wounds.
Unlike English wars fought under the aegis and for the glory of the queen (against the Spanish Armada, for example), Shakespeare's Trojan War—like the interminable Irish guerrilla conflict—progressively loses the ideological, erotic focus it once had and thus its protective mantle of "cause." This Troy finally discards the inspirational fiction of a central female figure, an Elizabeth, a Helen, or a Cressida. The latter two caricatural antitypes of the queen are portrayed as deeply flawed and wholly contingent upon external (strictly male) valuation and control. If this portrait sketches a courtier wish, it also expresses an orientational shift in fin de siècle politics. Just as the Trojan men of chivalry are disinclined to protect or preserve Cressida, Elizabeth's best men—Essex and Cecil—were in the late 1590s already making secret overtures to the male monarch in Scotland. The queen was vanishing. Male bonds were forming that covertly circumvented the female monarch at the end of her reign.[86] The overcoming of feminine presence, will, and influence is a
prominent movement of the last act of Troilus and Cressida , and it is played on both sides. Cressida is abandoned by Troilus, who never once voices a desire to regain her; instead, he wants Diomedes to "pay the life thou ow'st me for my horse" (5.6.7).[87] Her strategy of delayed gratification fails miserably with brutish Diomedes, the new antichivalric courtier.[88] Polyxena, the absent feminine principle (the woman as cipher), cannot block Achilles from battle once Patroclus dies. The Greek hero plunges back into the fray and cancels the last vestige of female influence in Troy, thus articulating Essex's deepest desires in the Irish campaign: to be engaged in warfare without being subject to the dominion of a woman. Instead, every woman in the play is herself subjected—to the whims, lusts, negligence, or fury of courtiers. The retrieval of Menelaus's queen, the alleged goal of the war, enrages virtually every Greek who troubles to think about it. Helen, reduced by Troilus to a "theme of honour and renown, / A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds" (2.2.200–201), disappears from the play entirely in the third act. She emerges only as a reference after that, and a hated one: "Name her not now, sir," Menelaus warns Hector, "she's a deadly theme" (4.5.180).
The play registers the absence of female power, mediating between the fact and the fantasy of a profound, ongoing diminution of Elizabeth's potency; but Troilus and Cressida always blames the male aristocracy for the world's disasters. Courtiers' narcissism becomes endless, shared self-immolation: "No space of earth shall sunder our two hates," Troilus spits (5.10.27). The factionalized Greeks encode a critique of Elizabeth's failed political manipulations, but they more directly evoke the paralyzing self-interest of the Essex and Cecil groups. The Trojans manifest the self-deceptive vogue of revivified knighthood in the queen's reign, but the woman, the supposed object of their destructive exercises, cannot be faulted for the attention (such as it is). The text's insistence on the determining force of homosocial relations dismantles the potentially subversive contraption of its own historical referentiality.
But Troilus and Cressida always undoes its subversions. Its exiguous relation to contestation stems from the thorough redundancy of that act in a political landscape lacking a clear authority; there is nothing, or not enough, to subvert. If the play deforms and dismantles the myth of the Trojan War in the process of emulating its own historicity, it also implies that deformation is the only possible construction of a reality between history and fiction, one in which the failed present is overtaken by a darkling future; in which meaning is thoroughly engulfed by the endless procession of dissolving historical moments:
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes.
(3.3.145–47)
This grim reading of human significance is enabled by the widespread neutralization of ideology in Troy and England. Both worlds lie paralyzed in a chasm between ideologies, without effective symbolic organizations of political value.[89] If ideology has a perceptual, even heuristic function, it bestows but also requires a focal point, a way of assimilating (possibly mystifying or subsuming) the relevant data of cultural upheaval and social disorientation.[90] Not only is such a point of focus absent from the Trojan War, but it was also rapidly dematerializing in the last years of Queen Elizabeth's reign.
The fall of Ilion and the scattering of the Grecian lords occur sometime beyond Pandarus's infectious epilogue; those events are not far off, but neither are they staged. Troilus and Cressida holds the conclusion of this tale in abeyance because a substitute version of authority—the only hope against the epidemic of disintegration—was yet to arrive. When it did, in 1603, the worst outbreak of the bubonic plague in forty years came with it.