A Post-Modern House of Fame: Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’
My word, this play. So, few really know this one, am I right? Like, I’m a few months away from the end of a literature degree and only just read it. Some people might know the story from the Iliad, and then fewer still might be familiar with Chaucer’s version, but has anyone really seen or read the Shakes rendition?
HOW TO PUT IT INTO WORDS?! A total conundrum. Because this play… is GENIUS. This is Shakes at the top of his most devious existentially fraught game.
The grand illusion is that nothing actually happens, it revolves around this great howling absence, and the gravity RELIES on the absence. Troilus and Cressida get the title but it’s not really about them. We see Cressida traded off like property to the Greeks and give Diomedes the token Troilus gave to her, and then we see Achilles coldly direct the slaughter of the defenceless Hector on the battlefield, and as Troilus wanders back towards the gates of Troy, Pandarus is left on the stage, alone, a farcical perversion of the poignant charge Hamlet gives Horatio. Here, our immortalising storyteller is the venereal old pimp riddled and racked with disease. AND THAT’S IT. All the massive climaxes we know from Homer are rendered empty and inherently meaningless.
It’s irresistibly Anglo-Saxon. You could do a sumptuous comparison with ‘The Wanderer’ or Beowulf or ‘The Seafarer’, obsessed as it is with ruin and decay. Both the Greeks and Trojans are tendering themselves out on the marketplace of identity, a word that etymologically means both to stretch out, ‘tendare’, like Miranda projecting herself onto the ship at the beginning of The Tempest in this great feat of empathy, and to recoil, from ‘tenderum’, to be made tender, like bashing a steak, the instinct being to flinch back in fear of vulnerability. Your tendons literally tend – receiving nerves make you nervous. And this is what the listless warrior does in ‘The Wanderer’, sending his senses out across the seas, desperately trying to receive something, anything, like feelers on some massive bug – passive, static, waiting. Whereas, in ‘The Seafarer’, the speaker literally exits his mind, his soul taking off from within his imprisoning body to fly out over the waves as disembodied thought, like Huginn, his conscience given impetus and motion and agency.
This is what Cressida does, she renders and receives, completely clued in to what will happen to her if she exposes herself to this sensory vulnerability. She is arguably the wisest character in the play – right at the end of the second scene of Act 1 she’s over here calling out Pandarus’s words words words as a glass of praise, a refracting, diluting prism of nothing, an interim of substanceless transmission, “broken air” as Chaucer would call it. She completely recognises this zero sum economy where nothing has any worth or value any more, regardless of whether it was ever intrinsic it is now extrinsic, a system of credit, investment on investment, bond on bond.
Shakes penned with this play a post-modern masterpiece which utterly exposes the trauma of a nihilistic epiphany. It’s basically the 2008 financial crash, where everything implodes on itself. The great infected sinuous organism of Troy collapses in on its rotten absent core, a star converting itself into a black hole, sucking all around it into delicious oblivion like a mighty acid belly digesting every atom of matter zeroing in on it into flux and miasma and the final nothing.
If Troilus is the protagonist then this play is about the disillusion of a fool – and it is bloody spectacular.
Pitch yourself into an existential crisis, why don’t you, because nothing is the point.
What’s past and what’s to come is strewed with husks
And formless ruin of oblivion…So, Ilium, fall thou; now, Troy, sink down!
Here lies thy heart, thy sinews, and thy bone.
