The military plot concerning Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax, Hector, and the rest is derived primarily from Homer and his descendants, most notably George Chapman’s 1598 translation of seven books of The Iliad into elevated English verse. The love plot concerning Troilus and Cressida, the efforts of Pandarus to bring them together, and the infidelity of Cressida in the Greek camp, is derived primarily from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The handling of each plot is equally cynical. In its love plot the play is an anti-romance, while in its martial plot it is an anti-epic. In his anti-heroic representation of the exemplary heroes of the Trojan War, Shakespeare undermines both the style and the attitudes of Chapman’s recent translation of Homer. The prologue speaks in high Chapmanesque style of “princes orgulous,” “crownets regal,” “strong immures,” and “warlike freightage,” but the action begins with Troilus saying “I’ll unarm again” and going on to describe himself as “weaker than a woman’s tear … Less valiant than the virgin in the night.” The admission of a “feminine” language strips all glamour from the male code of war. But then the code of love is submitted to a similar pummeling: Pandarus compares the art of love to breadmaking, with its progression from grinding to bolting to kneading to leavening to cooling. Troilus idealizes his love in courtly language, but at the same time compares his desire to a wound, speaking of “the open ulcer of my heart.”

Scabs, pus, and running sores ooze through the play, while the foul-mouthed Thersites proves to be the truest commentator on the war. In the second scene we are given a first account of Hector, traditionally the most noble of heroes. Here, however, he is reported to be wrathful, chiding his devoted wife Andromache and striking his armorer. An honorable man should respect his wife and servants: the honor of Hector is thus questioned from the start. There is a clear progression from the reported striking of the armorer to Hector’s ignominious end, in which he is killed because of an act of vanity: he has unarmed himself in order to put on the alluring golden armor of a slain warrior. Our first image of Ajax, another magnificent hero in Homer, is yet one more debunking. “They say he is a very man per se, / And stands alone,” says Alexander: this sounds like the glorious self-sufficiency of the epic hero. “So do all men / Unless they are drunk, sick, or have no legs,” replies Cressida: “stands alone” is taken literally and thus reduced to ignobility. And, sure enough, Ajax does prove to be a singularly unheroic blockhead. As for the great Achilles, he has withdrawn from the battle and is camping around in his tent with his gay lover, Patroclus, acting out parodies of the inflated mannerisms of the other Greek generals.

“WHAT’S AUGHT BUT AS ’TIS VALUED?”

Again and again, Troilus and Cressida reveals the discrepancy between the polished surface that is projected by a value system, whether the heroic code of war or the idea of courtly love, and the tawdry reality beneath. At a philosophical level, the effect of this is deeply troubling: it is to question whether there can be such a thing as an absolute moral value.

In a purposeful anachronism during the debate about whether or not the war is worth fighting, Trojan man of action Hector appeals to the Greek thinker who was regarded in Shakespeare’s time as the father of moral philosophy: having begun by commending the argumentative powers of his brothers Troilus and Paris, Hector adds that they have reasoned “superficially, not much / Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy.” To the modern ear, the language is typically dense and frustrating. Why can’t Hector say “like young men,” we wonder, instead of “not much” / brief pause for the end of the verse line / “Unlike young men”? Trust Shakespeare to prefer “not unlike” to mere “like.” The flow of argument through the play is like a serpentine river, twisting and turning with double negatives, retractions, qualifications, hypothetical cases, generalizations exploded by particular instances. The modern equivalent is the tortured language of legal opinions and government regulations, which is perhaps why the play is sometimes considered to have been a showpiece for lawyers. But we need to remember that rhetoric—the construction of elaborate edifices of argument that are expounded pro and contra with both words and sentence structures arranged in highly complex ways—was the absolute staple of each long day’s work in the Elizabethan grammar school classroom. Anyone in Shakespeare’s original audience with a few years’ formal education would have had their ears tuned to the mode of speaking that characterizes the formal debates in the respective council scenes of the Trojans and Greeks. And for some in the audience who lacked a formal education—women among them—the theater was an alternative classroom, a place to learn the art of manipulating words without the burden of having to do so in Latin.

Motivating the expansion of the grammar school network in sixteenth-century England was the educational revolution known to scholars as “humanism.” The purpose of study was not only to achieve a command of the linguistic arts, but also to be inspired to virtue by the example of the ancient heroes: to learn integrity from Hector, fortitude from Andromache, courage from Achilles, leadership from Agamemnon, strength from Ajax, wisdom from Ulysses, and so forth. It is this moral dimension that the play systematically strips away. The mythic heroes are resolutely anti-heroic. The idea that manliness can be proved in battle is subverted by the voice of Thersites. Thus when Menelaus and Paris, great rivals in Helen’s love, meet in single combat: “The cuckold and the cuckold-maker are at it. / Now, bull! Now, dog!” Here, “at it” suggests sexual congress as well as fighting, while “bull” and “dog” reduce the grandeur of the plain of Troy to the baying confines of the baiting ring (on London’s Bankside, theater and bearbaiting shared the same arenas). As Thersites lances martial values, so the leering Pandarus reduces love to sex: coming to Troilus and Cressida after they have spent the night together for the first time, he addresses his niece as if she were synonymous with her sexual parts, battered and chafed by the repeated assaults of Troilus’ member (“How go maidenheads? … Ah, poor chipochia! Hast not slept tonight? Would he not—a naughty man—let it sleep?”). Hector quotes Aristotle as saying that “young men” are shallow in the art of moral philosophy.