"War and Lechery": Thematic Unity of Troilus and Cressida

"WAR AND LECHERY": THEMATIC UNITY OF TROILUS AND CRESSIDA Edward L. Hart "And war and lechery confound all!" said Thersites, thereby stating the theme of Troilus and Cressida. It would seem inevitable that a dramatic genius with as fertile an imagination as Shakespeare's, experimenting with forms and ideas, would sooner or later ask himself the question: What would happen if one should write a play in which all values are reversed, a play in which the mirror held up to life reflects not a positive but a negative image? Regardless of whether Shakespeare ever asked himself such a question, Troilus and Cressida is such a play as the question would have invited. It is a play in which everything that was white in his other plays is confounded into black; everything that was black has become white. This does not mean that Shakespeare's values have changed; it means merely that the negative must be developed by exposure to the reversing light of irony to produce the correct and positive print. Love, in all Shakespeare's writings, reaches its highest fulfillment in marriage and procreation, with biological reproduction coming to symbolize all forms of creativity and productivity. As others have pointed out, the heavy curse of the uncreative life is projected symbolically in the childlessness of Macbeth and the sterility called by Lear upon his daughters. Shakespeare rejects both extremes of love, both celibacy and promiscuousness. The first line of the first sonnet puts aside as foolish the ideals of courtly or romantic love: "From fairest creatures we desire increase"; a later sonnet ( 129) rejects the way of the philanderer just as vehemently: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action." The Aristotelian golden mean is, for Shakespeare, marriage: marriage of two people equal in their love and without those impediments which would prevent their achievement of a happy union producing healthy children. It goes without saying that a life of sexual abstention would produce no offspring, that it would provide no means by which, through the power of an all-absorbing love, the female fertilized the imagination of the man as he released in her the power to reproduce. That a life of sexual excess would likewise preclude this land of inter-impregnation is demonstrated by Troilus and Cressida. Because the idea is a negative one, the thwarting of the creative powers of love and life, the image is thrown negatively upon the screen. In the two principal female characters of Troilus, Cressida and Helen, Shakespeare illustrates the violation of the golden mean of love on the side of promiscuousness. The two women are parallel in that the vice of each is to destroy love by reducing it to sex. Love, frustrated from becoming creative 181 182RMMLA BulletinSeptember 1973 and fulfilling, is turned into negative channels. Instead of leading to life, it leads to death and to that activity that leads quickest to death—war. The linkage of lechery and war by Thersites was not accidental; they are inevitably linked by cause and effect in Troilus. War is the backdrop against which the entire action is played, from the armed prologue to the closing scenes on the battlefield. Lechery and vice move across that field of black in inverted and grotesque splotches of light, from Troilus' ironic assessment of Cressida as "stubborn-chaste" in the first scene to the last word of the play, spoken by Pandaras, "diseases." In the first scene in which we meet Cressida (I.ii), the quality of her mind is revealed by the language she uses in bawdy talk with her uncle Pandaras, When he says that arguing with her is difficult because "One knows not at what ward you lie," she replies, "Upon my back to defend my belly" (11.282-284). Few virtues have been successfully defended in this position; it is the posture for receiving, not for warding off. But this is typical of the way the principle of negativity operates in the play, even in the figurative language and the imagery. That we have not misinterpreted the preceding passage is proved by the lines that follow: "If I cannot ward what I would not...