“Monsters in Love’s Train”: Euripides and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

“Monsters in Love’s Train”: Euripides and Shakespeare’s T roilu s an d C ressida Margaret J. Arnold The Trojan War, fought for a trivial cause, setting “kindred” speakers of the same language and worshippers of the same gods against each other, has provided a dramatic image of bitter, needless suffering to authors as widely separate in time as Euripides, Shakespeare, and Giraudoux. In the sixteenth century, further, another conflict of kindred, the mutual slaughter of Oedipus’ surviving sons Eteocles and Polyneices in Aeschylus’ Septem and Euripides’ Phoenissae made the same point.1 Of the Greek tragedians Euripides turned most frequently to these con­ flicts, illustrating the effects of suffering on the central characters and representing the complete annihilation of families and cities; both Renaissance and modem commentators have seen him as the dramatist who showed the price that war exacts from con­ quered and conquerors alike.2 Because of his realistic portrayal of the pagan world, his depiction of human emotion, and his useful sententiae, Euripides was the most popular Greek drama­ tist in Shakespeare’s time.3 This study takes up the implications of F. L. Lucas’ observation that “the most truly Euripidean thing in Shakespeare is the biting realism of Troilus and Cressida, where the fabled splendour of the heroes of Romance turns in hard daylight to lechery, as fairy gold to withered leaves.”4 Lucas did not claim direct influence of Euripides on Shake­ speare. One need not do so, because so many translations and commentaries contemporary with Shakespeare illustrate the terms in which Euripidean drama was taught and discussed.5 MARGARET J. ARNOLD is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kansas. This essay was first presented in different form at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Minneapolis, 1982. 38 Margaret J. Arnold 39 This paper explores Shakespeare’s debt to these Renaissance conceptions of Euripides. Of course Shakespeare used much classical and post-classical material in Troilus, but the extent of his Euripidean echoes has been largely ignored.^ Reading Troilus as a Euripidean drama helps to illuminate its chaotic milieu, its deflated, often contradictory characters, its episodic structure, and its uncertain genre. Audiences exposed to Renaissance commentaries on Euri­ pides’ Trojan War plays were prepared to find Shakespeare’s characters living in a mutable, chaotic world, because the war was doomed from its inception. Gasparus Stiblinus, for example, states the initial hamartia quite simply: “Out of the private madness and lust of Paris arose destruction for the whole Trojan kingdom.”7 From the initial error other wrong choices follow. When the issue for Trojans and Greeks alike is “bad success in a bad cause” (2.2.117),8 neither Greek nor Trojan rhetoric is persuasive to us. Ulysses eloquently advocates “degree” and turns to contradict it by putting his “foul wares,” Ajax, highest among the warriors; Hector sends a challenge to enliven the war, advocates moral principles opposing the war, and reconfirms the Trojans’ initial moral blunders by yielding to Troilus in the question of keeping Helen. Diomedes and Cressida eventually mirror Paris’ choice.9 The war goes on, “And that old common arbitrator, Time,/ Will one day end it” (4.5.224-25). Euripides’ commentators considered the fall of Troy and the suffering of the survivors the final steps in a series of flawed decisions. In such a context Troilus makes sense as a play which begins and ends in medias res. This is not to say that the characters have no free will; they make their choices, simply, in a chaotic, already flawed situation. Euripides’ plays and Renaissance commentaries also prepare the reader for anti-heroic Greeks. Agamemnon, Ulysses, and Achilles are all portrayed, at various times, as men who value pleasing the army above moral principle. Commenting on Odysseus’ argument that political necessity justifies sacrificing Hecuba’s last daughter, Polyxena, for the morale of future soldiers, Matthaeus Heuslerus speaks of Odysseus and Aga­ memnon as military men eager to seize the favor of the crowd with their deeds and words.10 Stiblinus further castigates political figures who please the multitude, among whom Ulysses’ “inconstantiae , versutiae, ac dolosae calliditatis” is particularly noteworthy.il Shakespeare’s Agamemnon and...