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:

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.