Troilus & Cressida

David Hillman has an article in the latest issue of Philosophy and Literature on Cavell’s writings on tragedy and Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida that is, I think, a good explanation of the play’s significance. His best point is probably that “Shakespeare found himself for once ‘irretrievably outside’ these characters—the position in which the skeptic places himself in relation to the other…it is a marker of Shakespeare’s greatness that he was not only able to make superb theatre of the position he faced here, but that he was then able to move beyond it and diagnose it as tragedy.”

I think what Hillman is noting here—though not in so many words—is that the movement from classical tragedy to psychological drama changes the location of the problem of agency. Characters driven by fate are internally unknowable; they move according to a logic that they instantiate, but do not control. If we ask why Agamemnon behaves as he does, our answer will probably not involve a detailed account of his individual psychology, but rather an elaboration of a tragic framework. The innovation from classical tragedy in a play like Othello (or, of course, Hamlet) lies in taking the basic structural condition of the genre—its fatal conception of the universe, the foregone nature of the ending—and making it an internal, psychological problem for the characters.

Troilus & Cressida does not quite do this—the fatal mechanism is clearly visible to the dramatis personae, but only partially incorporated in their characters. It is, as Hillman says, a transitional play, and it’s appropriate that this transition should be worked out through the story that lies at the center of a good deal of classical tragedy, the Trojan War. But what is not, I think, generally remarked upon, is that Troilus & Cressida gives us two distinct versions of tragedy as a psychological problem, the Trojan and the Greek.

The difficulty for both sides is the event that happens after the play’s close: not, that is, the fall of Troy, but the writing of the Iliad and the accompanying dramas, the betrayal of truth by myth. The men on both sides are nearly equally ardent in helping literature make them into archetypes, but the Trojans are desperate to deceive themselves, while the Greeks, too cynical for self-delusion, only hope to become heroes in the estimation of others. The contrast is between Hector and Achilles, Troilus and, say, Ulysses. There is not, here, the seed of one type of tragedy, but two—the former exemplified by Hamlet, the latter by Othello (and, perhaps, by Richard III, who has all the contempt of an English Tiberius for the credulity of his contemporaries) though problems of self-knowledge, of the terrible difficulty of self-deceit, and of radical otherness do have a way of overlapping.

It would be facile to trace a trend into the novel (though I am half-hoping that one of you will try it) in general, but there are certainly individual novelists who just retain enough of the lineaments of tragedy to show how formal problems of fate and determinism have been replaced by problems of either self-knowledge or the knowledge of others. I am thinking, here, of the instructive difference between Balzac and his great disciple, Henry James—in the former, but not the latter, tragedy is just barely still possible; one can die of love, though one is always dying in the deepest, most self-willed of delusions about the nature of the beloved. And Balzac is well aware of taking one branch of the Shakespearean lineage to a distant extreme. There is marvelous line in the novel Beatrix, regarding a young man who is persistently blind to the true nature of his mistress (please excuse the paraphrase from memory) to the effect that ‘if Iago had dropped a thousand handkerchiefs, they all would have been wasted on Calyste.’ But the illusions of Balzac’s characters, are, like Othello’s, destined to be lost; unlike Othello, many of them survive the disillusionment.