The play seems to reply that young men will be young men: they will squabble and sulk, they will argue for the sake of it and swear till the air is blue, they thrive on anger and violence. And old men are no better: they are petulant and manipulative, prurient and self-interested. As for women, Andromache makes but a fleeting appearance, Cassandra is no more than the voice of doom, Helen is not so much the most beautiful woman in the world as one half of a comic double act with Pandarus, and Cressida knows that her only means of survival is to use her sexuality.

Moral philosophy is not a fixed point of reference. It is itself interrogated and found wanting. Hector attempts to distinguish between the dangers of actions based on emotion (“the hot passion of distempered blood”) and the propriety of those based on reason (“a free determination / ’Twixt right and wrong”). But in the case of the Trojan War, right and wrong cannot be judged objectively: “What’s aught but as ’tis valued?” asks Troilus. Hector tries to maintain the case that value exists above “particular will,” but the play as a whole—with its constant counterpointing of Trojan and Greek, battlefield and bedroom, high rhetoric and low bawdyness—proposes that all moral judgments are relative. It is Ulysses who makes this point most eloquently: a man or an action can only be judged “by reflection, / As when his virtues shining upon others / Heat them and they retort that heat again / To the first giver.” This argument is articulated as part of a cunning scheme to persuade Achilles to switch back from the role of Patroclus’ effeminate lover to the Greek army’s most masculine warrior: the image of the bullish Ajax being presented as top soldier will retort on Achilles and make him strive to regain his military preeminence.

Ulysses’ speech about the need for society to maintain a strict hierarchical order or “degree” is part of the same strategy. He argues that one of the causes of the untuning of degree in the Greek camp is that their exemplary warrior Achilles is sulking in his tent when he should be in the appropriate place for an exemplary warrior, namely on the battlefield. But the method he proposes by which Achilles is to be restored to his proper place is itself a disruption of degree. Hector has issued a challenge to single combat. Degree should dictate that Hector’s equal on the Greek side, Achilles, is put forward, but Ulysses proposes Ajax instead, thus snubbing Achilles and provoking him into rejoining the army. Ulysses then achieves his end by rigging an election. Even in the midst of a rhetorically powerful vision of the chaos that ensues when the moral and social order are not upheld, Ulysses lets slip his knowledge of the relativity of value. “Take but degree away,”

And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right, or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.…

In the very act of warning that “right and wrong” will “lose their names” if “degree” is not observed, Ulysses adds parenthetically that justice resides not inherently on the side of right, as one would expect it to, but rather in the “endless jar” between right and wrong. The play as a whole is a demonstration that order, moral and social, is not a predetermined value system answerable to a harmonious cosmic design, but rather a process, an endless debate and negotiation of terms, in which reason and judgment cannot be separated from appetite and will.

So it is that two kinds of absolute statement are juxtaposed against each other. On the one hand, aspirations to truth and fixity: “True swains in love shall in the world to come / Approve their truths by Troilus … As truth’s authentic author to be cited, / ‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse.” And on the other, cynical reductions to the lowest common denominator of the body: “Here is such patchery, such juggling and such knavery! All the argument is a cuckold and a whore, a good quarrel to draw emulations, factions and bleed to death upon. Now, the dry serpigo on the subject, and war and lechery confound all!”

“Hector is dead, there is no more to say”: that is how a tragedy ought to end. But having said that line, Troilus says “Stay yet.” Shakespeare just won’t stop arguing with himself. If there is a victor in these endless jars, it is the voice of the cynical commentators, Thersites and Pandarus. The latter gets the last word, addressing the theater audience in a broken sonnet that is a symptom of this play’s fragmented world.

Troilus disintegrates because of the incompatibility between his mental image of Cressida and what he sees of her in the Greek camp when she has become Diomedes’ mistress: “This is and is not Cressid.” The sight causes him to believe that the whole rationality of the world has collapsed and “The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed.” He has not, however, seen Cressida brutally manhandled and kissed, treated like a piece of meat, on her arrival in the camp. Shakespeare’s point in bringing Troilus to “madness of discourse” is not to make a moral judgment about Cressida—you can’t help feeling that he admires her improvisational skills and the way in which she maintains linguistic dignity even as her body is taken by another man—but rather to strip away the illusion that bodily beauty and strength are signs of inner grace and greatness. The symbolic figure that comes closest to the rotten core of the play is that knight in sumptuous armor who is pursued by Hector. He is so fair without, but what does Hector find within? A “Most putrefied core,” a decaying human body.

THE CRITICS DEBATE

A play of debate, Troilus and Cressida has stimulated exceptionally lively literary critical debate in the age of professionalized Shakespeare studies.

The sense of a collapsed moral order, a world in ruins, gave the play special force in the wake of the First World War, which was when it first truly established its place in the theatrical repertoire, and again in the Second World War. In a book called The Frontiers of Drama, its preface dated January 1945, the critic Una Ellis-Fermor wrote apropos of Troilus that “our actual experience of disintegration and disruption, so unlike that of any age between, has thrown fresh light upon the nature and foundations of what we call civilization; prospects once mercifully rare are now common and familiar, and much that has not, in the interval, been generally forced upon the imagination, now lies upon the common road.”

It was also during the Second World War that E. M. W. Tillyard published his influential The Elizabethan World Picture (1942), in which Ulysses’ oration on “degree” was held up as the epitome of the “order” that Shakespeare advocated or at least craved. It is obvious from the perspective of historical distance that Tillyard’s belief in the Elizabethans’ nostalgia for a more settled medieval world order was his own yearning for the stability that had been destroyed by Nazi ideology and the war. Modern critics are accordingly brusque in their dismissal of Tillyard’s reading of Ulysses’ speech as a Shakespearean prescription for society:

Ulysses’ great oration on order is no better than Agamemnon’s and Nestor’s pompous, bumbling efforts to speak as kings … the topoi in Troilus and Cressida call attention to the fundamental commonplaceness of Ulysses’ mind—this is the wily Ulysses, who spent ten years outwitting his enemies, human, divine, monstrous, and natural, here reduced to a version of Gloucester or Polonius, mouthing the unexamined platitudes of a doctrine of order which the play itself constantly subverts.3

The word “subversion” is everywhere in modern criticism of the play.