Rashly,
(And praised be rashness for it) let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will. (5.2.6–11)
So the idea of Hamlet’s playing a role, or roles, in this play is also mixed in with the idea that he is directed by Providence. God the carpenter is shaping the ends that we can only rough-hew. I don’t mean to imply that this is a God-directed play, but Hamlet’s acting is pervasive throughout, although it cannot manage to outwit the king and Laertes’s nefarious and many-headed plot against his life.
Chapter 20
Sex Nausea in
Troilus and Cressida
There is an attempt in Troilus and Cressida to make the Trojan War seem anti-heroic and anti-romantic. Shakespeare is intent on undermining the heroic tradition of Homer’s Iliad. The heroic figures of the Trojan War are meant to seem slightly foolish, and the lovers, like Troilus, are so excessive in their ardor as to appear remote from the world. The genre of Troilus and Cressida is also puzzling. Because of the death of Hector, it seems more of a tragedy than anything else, in the mode of the history plays. But it also has a great deal of satire, especially by such a scurrilous character as Thersites. Some critics would like to think of it as a comical satire, like the plays Marston, Jonson, and others were writing.
Paris’s abduction of Helen from her husband Menelaus is at the root of the Trojan War. In the middle of the play (3.1), we see Helen and Paris in a domestic scene, visited by Pandarus, the uncle of Cressida. We are struck by how comfortable everybody is. Pandarus greets Helen and Paris with overly elaborate courtesy, much in the manner of Polonius in Hamlet: “Fair be to you, my lord, and to all this fair company. Fair desires in all fair measure fairly guide them. Especially to you, fair queen, fair thoughts be your fair pillow” (3.1.44–47). This is courtly discourse in the parodic vein, which Helen continues: “Dear lord, you are full of fair words” (3.1.48). But Pandarus is not to be outdone: “You speak your fair pleasure, sweet queen” (3.1.49–50). This is all fairly ridiculous, but we are drawn into the homely scene by the fact that everyone is so much at ease—Paris even addresses Helen by her nickname, Nell. They insist that Pandarus sing a song about love.
The characters in this scene are all sophisticated, and their discourse is full of sexual double-entendres. Pandarus says: “My niece is horribly in love with a thing you have, sweet queen” (3.1.97–98). “Thing” is ambiguously sexual, but it probably refers to Paris as Helen’s lover. In reply to Pandarus’s insistence that Troilus and Cressida are “twain” (3.1.102), or at odds, Helen delivers a bawdy joke: “Falling in, after falling out, may make them three” (3.1.103–4). So we are amply prepared for Pandarus’s love song. Helen says: “Let thy song be love. This love will undo us all. O Cupid, Cupid, Cupid!” (3.1.110–11), and Paris announces the title: “Love, love, nothing but love” (3.1.113).
Pandarus’s song turns on the sexual pun on “die,” meaning to have an orgasm, and cries connected with sexual climax:
These lovers cry, O ho! They die!
Yet that which seems the wound to kill
Doth turn O ho! to Ha, ha, he!
So dying love lives still.
O ho! a while, but Ha, ha, ha!
O ho! groans out for Ha, ha, ha!—Heigh ho! (3.1.119–24)
Pandarus’s bawdy song fits well with the scene of Helen in Paris’s household.
In answer to Paris’s “hot deeds is love” (3.1.128), Pandarus elaborates on what strikes us as a central theme of the play: “Is this the generation of love—hot blood, hot thoughts, and hot deeds? Why, they are vipers. Is love a generation of vipers?” (3.1.129–31). The passage strongly echoes Matthew in the New Testament and is meant to ground the anti-romantic bias of the play. Pandarus’s song may be “Love, love, nothing but love,” but love is ultimately bitter and tormenting.
Let us go back to the beginning of the play, to Troilus’s mooning desire to make love with Cressida. The passion is excessive, as if love were a fever. Cressida’s uncle, Pandarus, the go-between, tries to bring Troilus to patience in his furious suit by imagery drawn from making a cake: “He that will have a cake out of the wheat must tarry the grinding” (1.1.14–16). The abundant food and animal imagery to express sexual themes runs counter to Troilus’s elevated expressions, but these sometimes go astray, as if Troilus cannot restrain his stylistic copiousness, as in the following grotesque passage:
I tell thee I am mad
In Cressid’s love; thou answer’st she is fair.
Pour’st in the open ulcer of my heart
Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice. (1.1.53–56)
The open ulcer of Troilus’s heart is hardly a romantic image, and the idea of Pandarus pouring in all of Cressida’s admirable qualities is equally inappropriate, as is Troilus’s concluding lines: “Thou lay’st in every gash that love hath given me / The knife that made it” (1.1.64–65).
In act 3, scene 2, where Troilus and Cressida consummate their love, Troilus, at the beginning of the scene, is still the hopelessly lovesick youth he is in the first scene of the play. His language and imagery, however, are still strangely inappropriate to their context. Why does he ask Pandarus, the go-between, to be his ferryman over the river Styx to Hades or hell? Why does he already have forebodings that his love affair will have an infernal side to it? His first speech to Pandarus is already dire:
O, be thou my Charon,
And give me swift transportance to those fields
Where I may wallow in the lily beds
Proposed for the deserver. (3.2.9–12)
Why “wallow,” which is an oddly negative word for a true lover?
In his soliloquy after Pandarus leaves, Troilus expresses his fears of sexual consummation. Admittedly, “Th imaginary relish is so sweet / That it enchants my sense” (3.2.17–18), but orgasmic fulfillment scares Troilus:
What will it be
When that the wat’ry [watering] palates taste indeed
Love’s thrice-repurèd nectar? Death, I fear me,
Sounding [swooning] destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle, potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness
For the capacity of my ruder powers.
I fear it much. (3.2.18–24)
Troilus’s apprehensions are like those in Sonnet 129, “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” The sonnet speaks frankly about lust, a word never used by Troilus, but the mood is the same: “A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe, / Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.” It is possible that this sonnet and Troilus and Cressida were written around the same time. Troilus continues to develop negative imagery for the act of love, which is almost certain to be disappointing: “This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (3.2.80–82). So we are prepared, in a way, for the bad outcome of this love affair.
Cressida in love is represented differently from Troilus. In her early soliloquy in act 1, scene 2, her mannered couplets express her calculation and cunning: “Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing; / Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing” (1.2.293–94). Her plan is to manipulate Troilus’s ardor. I think we are surprised at how moralistic Cressida’s couplets sound. This kind of practical thinking about amorous conduct certainly doesn’t make Cressida seem like a woman in love. Her advice to herself is abundantly didactic: “That she beloved knows nought that knows not this: / Men prize the thing ungained more than it is” (1.2.295–96). She teaches a maxim out of love doctrine: “Achievement is command; ungained, beseech” (1.2.300). It is important that we have these bald assertions from Cressida early in the play.
In the scene leading up to the consummation of their affair, Cressida is similarly coy and flirtatious, although there is no do
ubt about the outcome of Pandarus’s endeavors. He makes no effort to conceal the fact that he is a pimp, or pander. Cressida’s bantering conversation with Troilus mocks male bravado:
They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform, vowing more than the perfection of ten and discharging less than the tenth part of one. They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares—are they not monsters? (3.2.86–91)
This kind of sophisticated discourse does not seem promising in wooing the already inflamed Troilus, who defends the male gender.
Cressida’s confession of love for Troilus, a love that she claims was long in preparation, rings hollow because she sticks to the kind of feminine wiles that were already apparent in her soliloquy in act 1, scene 2. She was
Hard to seem won; but I was won, my lord,
With the first glance that ever—pardon me;
If I confess much you will play the tyrant.
I love you now, but, till now, not so much
But I might master it. (3.2.116–20)
The elaboration of Cressida’s reasoning seems unconvincing:
In faith, I lie;
My thoughts were like unbridled children grown
Too headstrong for their mother. See, we fools!
Why have I blabbed? Who shall be true to us
When we are so unsecret to ourselves? (3.2.120–24)
We tend to be shocked by Cressida’s explicit, self-regarding comments that seem to tease Troilus’s unmitigated passion: “Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love, / And fell so roundly to a large confession / To angle for your thoughts” (3.2.151–53). But Troilus makes no attempt to match his lover’s reasoning, or even to understand it fully. If we think about Cressida’s words in this scene, it all bodes badly for the future.
We should not be surprised that Cressida is so flirtatious when she comes to the Greek camp and meets the principal officers. She offers kisses all around. Ulysses banters with her: “Why, then, for Venus’ sake, give me a kiss, / When Helen is a maid again, and his [Menelaus’s]” (4.5.49–50). Ulysses is the only one who refuses to kiss Cressida. He elaborates on Nestor’s observation that she is “A woman of quick sense” (4.5.54)—in other words of a lively sexuality: “There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip; / Nay, her foot speaks. Her wanton spirits look out / At every joint and motive [movement] of her body” (4.5.55–57). “Her foot speaks” is an extreme metaphor for Cressida’s wantonness, or her provocative sexuality. Ulysses’s long speech gets even more specific about Cressida’s whorishness:
O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give a coasting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader, set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity
And daughters of the game. (4.5.58–63)
A daughter of the game is a prostitute, but Cressida is represented as particularly appealing to “ticklish,” or prurient, customers. She is a glib encounterer, who knows how to stimulate sexual appetite. There is a clever pun in the cry “The Troyans’ trumpet” to announce the entrance of “all of Troy” (4.5.63 s.d.) after Ulysses’s speech. “Trumpet” and “strumpet” make an easy phonetic pun.
Act 5, scene 2, the seduction of Cressida by Diomedes, is one of the most memorable big scenes in Shakespeare because it has not only Cressida wooed by Diomedes but also Troilus accompanied by Ulysses as observers, as well as the debasing sexual commentary of Thersites. The scene seems to proceed, therefore, on three different levels. When Cressida enters and whispers with Diomedes, we have Troilus’s bitter “Yea, so familiar!” (5.2.8), followed by Ulysses’s grosser observation, “She will sing any man at first sight” (5.2.9), concluded by Thersites’s blatantly sexual remark, “And any man may sing her, if he can take her cliff; she’s noted” (5.2.10–11). “Cliff” is an obvious sexual pun on “cleft,” or pudendum, and “noted” continues the musical pun: she is a woman of ill repute. This kind of triple interplay continues throughout the scene.
Troilus cannot deal with the obviously false romantic image he has conjured up for Cressida. When she exits after Diomedes, Troilus grapples with the new reality to a sympathetic Ulysses: “This she? No, this is Diomed’s Cressida” (5.2.134). Troilus’s long and heartfelt reasonings try to understand what has happened to him, as if the reality he assumed has disappeared:
Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven.
Instance, O instance, strong as heaven itself;
The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed,
And with another knot, five-finger-tied,
The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,
The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics
Of her o’ereaten faith, are given to Diomed. (5.2.152–58)
Troilus’s imagination follows that of Thersites in using disgusting images of food, especially the scraps left over after the meal is finished. This is a far cry from his earlier sense of Cressida’s lyric perfection.
Thersites, the scurrilous commentator, like Apemantus in Timon of Athens, does a great deal to develop the anti-heroic, anti-romantic tone of Troilus and Cressida. In this climactic scene (5.2), he echoes and further debases Troilus’s comments. For example, he invokes one of the seven deadly sins to establish what is happening between Cressida and Diomedes: “How the devil Luxury, with his fat rump and potato finger, tickles these together. Fry, lechery, fry!” (5.2.54–56). This is the same greasy food imagery that Troilus has been using—potatoes were thought to be an aphrodisiac. At the very end of the scene, Thersites concludes with a reflection on the Trojan War: “Lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion. A burning devil take them!” (5.2192–94). “Burning devil” refers to the venereal disease that follows from lechery.
Thersites’s reference to venereal disease is taken up by Pandarus in what seems to be his epilogue at the end of the play. He addresses the panders and bawds in the audience:
Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths:
“As many as be here of Pandar’s hall,
Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall;
Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.” (5.10.44–49)
The bone ache and the sweating tub are all connected with venereal disease and its treatment. Pandarus is addressing panders and members of the “hold-door trade” (5.10.50), or prostitutes. The “painted cloths,” probably with erotic scenes, were used to ornament brothels.
Chapter 21
Parolles the Braggart in
All’s Well That Ends Well
Like Falstaff in the Henry IV plays, Parolles, the man of words, is a “miles gloriosus” (a military braggart), a fluent speaker but an errant coward. He is also identified in this play as wearing a flamboyant costume that is meant purely for show. Everyone in the play except for Bertram recognizes him as a liar and a rogue, which tells us something important about the credulousness and immaturity of Bertram. Near the beginning of the play, Helena apologizes for him because of her love for Bertram: “I love him [Parolles] for his [Bertram’s] sake, / And yet I know him a notorious liar, / Think him a great way fool, solely a coward” (1.1.102–4). From the start, there is no ambiguity about Parolles; there is nothing to discover about him that we don’t begin with. Helena says that he has “some stain of soldier” (1.1.117), and, in the curious dialogue about virginity that follows, Parolles speaks fluently in traditional military images.
All of his advice to Bertram is misguided, especially his counsel to leave the court—against the king’s specific command—and go to the wars in Italy. Like Osric in Hamlet, he affects a courtly and elaborate style that much impresses Bertram (but no one else). Before Bertram leaves, Parolles addresses members of the court in his best grandiloquent style:
Noble
heroes, my sword and yours are kin. Good sparks and lustrous, a word, good metals. You shall find in the regiment of the Spinii one Captain Spurio, with his cicatrice, an emblem of war, here on his sinister cheek; it was this very sword entrenched it. Say to him I live, and observe his reports for me. (2.1.42–48)
Of course, Captain Spurio is spurious, a figment of Parolles’s vivid imagination.
Parolles’s style is high-flown, at times almost parodic, and he imitates what he takes to be the language of the court. He uses a number of Italian (or italianate) expressions that have little to do with the context. For example, after he has advised Bertram to go to the wars and leave his new wife, he asks: “Will this capriccio hold in thee?” (2.3.296). This is the only example of the word in Shakespeare. At the end of act 2, scene 5, Parolles encourages Bertram with a parting exclamation: “Bravely, coragio!” (2.5.93). Bertram may be impressed, but does he even understand what his mentor is saying? There is a similar extravagant (but meaningless) oath when Parolles first sees Helena in 2.3: “Mor du vinager! Is not this Helen?” (2.3.45). The “death of vinegar” is pseudo-French and ridiculous in itself as a resounding oath.
We may note one other Parollesism toward the end of this same scene:
To th’ wars, my boy, to th’ wars!
He wears his honor in a box unseen,
That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home,
Spending his manly marrow in her arms,
Which should sustain the bound and high curvet
Of Mars’s fiery steed. (2.3.281–86)
“Kicky-wicky” may be a bawdy word derived from the French “quelquechose.”
Shakespeare's Style Page 13