Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

proclaiming them to be true. A later era would call this “magical thinking”—a term coined by anthropologists to describe the nonscientific causal reasoning they encountered in other cultures.

for the theater, such magical thinking becomes a highly effective way of externalizing and dramatizing thought.

But what effect does disguise, or change of costume, have upon Malvolio? It confirms him, emblematically, in his own repression.

Malvolio's costume visibly confirms him in what he is—obstructed, repressed, blocked.

Feste, the fool, who is not part of society, or in this play part of the world of sexuality, marriage, or governance. He is a spirit not only of feasting but also of realism and good sense, and, preeminently, of language and language-play

Something of the discomfort an audience feels at the comeuppance of Shylock may well also affect our response to the “baffled” Malvolio.

in Illyria it seems as if they are all mad, all obsessed with self—which is one definition of madness in this play.

Dream and madness are closely related, but the former, at least in Shakespearean comedy, is allied to wish fulfillment, imagination, and creative possibility, while the latter is associated with mental disorder, repression, and imprisonment.

final line, his despairing, humiliated exit—”I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you”—sums up the degree to which he has failed to learn from the experience of the play. Viola

Malvolio, the product of self-love in Illyria, can only stalk away, gathering the tattered remnants of his pride around him.

for Feste, it is impossible to imagine him, like Touchstone, married. He seems less like a person than like a sprite or a spirit of music, as much akin to Puck as he is to Touchstone—and yet he is painfully human. His haunting

songs both fill and frame the play. Feste's isolation, the fool's isolation, is finally the real isolation in this play of comedy, wonder, and epiphany.

And the growth of exclusion in these plays, the strength of the excluded characters, the disappearance of those marriage dances in which Renaissance poets imitated the harmony of the spheres, indeed, the remanding of the contracted marriages to a time and space outside or after the play, the emergence of the clear, plaintive voice of the fool— all these point toward a new phase in Shakespeare's dramatic development, a broader, more painful, but often a staggeringly beautiful and profound vision of humankind in the midst of a tragic universe.

Troilus and Cressida

roilus and Cressida occupies a curious and slightly anomalous place within the Shakespearean

canon. On the title pages of the Quarto of 1609 it is described as a “Historie.” But in the First Folio of 1623 it is called The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida. In the Folio the play is not listed in the table of contents (the “Catalogue of the Several Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies contained in this Volume”), and it is placed after the last of the history plays and before the first of the tragedies.

The question of how the play might be best classified, and therefore of how to assess—and perform—it, has preoccupied readers over the years.

Nineteenth-century scholars invented a category they called the “problem play,” a term borrowed

from the works of dramatists of the time (Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, and others) whose plays were thought to engage with ongoing social problems (environmental issues, wo...

Another popular designation was “dark comedy,” which, like “problem play,” drew attention to the difference between plays like Troilus and Cressida and Shakespeare's earlier comic works.

the genre of satire and the tone of cynical disillusionment, about everything from sex to war, detected in Troilus and Cressida has led not only scholars but also actors, directors, and readers to think of this

play as surprisingly “modern” in its outlook, at the same time that it grounds itself in the action of Western civilization's founding event, the Trojan War.

The commodities traded by Ulysses are heroes, Ajax chosen over the more highly valued Achilles; a comparable trade in women measures the relative market value of a Helen against that of a Cressida.

The audience is confronted with a tremendous loss of idealism, with a debased ideal.

There are in fact two courtships dramatized in the plot of Troilus and Cressida: The Greeks woo Achilles, trying to get him out of his bed and onto the battlefield;

Troilus woos Cressida, trying to get ...

The Trojan heroes are depicted as romantic idealists, putting their faith in the imagination and in outmoded codes like chivalry—codes

The Trojans are emotional, excessive, ruled by passion, dominated by the fact that they have seized Helen and must defend her.

The Greeks, on the other hand, appear to be rationalists, or to think of themselves, at least, in that light. Half of them are “brains,” like Ulysses, who believes in policy and pragmatism, in high-sounding words, and in tricking people for political gain. The other half are brawn, like the “beef-witted” Ajax, and even Achilles, sullen, sulking gladiators—fighters who refuse to fight out of misplaced pride.

scurrilous and foul-mouthed Thersites, who functions like an allowed fool in the Greek camp, giving voice to what the Greeks already think and fear. What has happened to heroic civilization?

Troy was regarded as the birthplace of the English nation. The early inhabitants of Britain traced their heritage to Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas, who had fled the burning city of Troy

Brutus, whose followers were called Britons, landed in Alban (Albion, the “white island”) in about 1074 b.c.e., and the island became known as Britain. Its principal city was initially named New Troy

and only became Londinium (from “Lud's Town,” or “Caer-Ludd”) in the first century B.C.E. The story of the Trojan War, and of the Greeks and the Trojans, was thus of considerable interest for its perceived value as part of the longer history of

England, as well as because of the humanist recovery o...

In choosing the story of the Trojan War for his subject, Shakespeare was turning his attention to the great model of heroism in We...

And, equally important, he was writing about the land that was the mythic birthplace of England.

Shakespeare's Trojan War, like the war between the academics and scholars of his day, is concerned with language and representation, and with the construction of selves and the idea of the self.

But we should note that Troilus makes only a cameo appearance in the Iliad, and Cressida is never mentioned. Their story was transmitted, instead, through medieval poetry and chivalric romance.

In As You Like It, Rosalind ridicules Troilus as a hopeless romantic idealist, exactly his character in the play that bears his name:

Troilus and Cressida were for Shakespeare's audience as much a cliché as Romeo and Juliet are for the present day.

This language of arming and unarming, artfully established from the very beginning of the play, will continue throughout, and will provide the underlying design of a plot that mingles love and war with tragic results

act 5, scene 9, Achilles, enraged at the slaying of his beloved Patroclus, comes upon Hector, disarmed from a day of battle, and—rather than fighting him one-on-one— surrounds him with his mercenary Myrmidons.

we will hear the same word in the voice of the cynical Greek Thersites, who sums up the stakes of the conflict, unforgettably, in a single line: “All the argument is a whore and a cuckold” (2.3.65). To him this is the true, unvarnished story of the Trojan War. Helen is the whore; Menelaus the cuckold. But if this is the “argument” of the war, what is the “argument” of the play?

The play is well designed both to provide a set of ideals and worldviews in conflict, and to show the way they are undercut by their own excess.

Great point

Not surprisingly, this play of resounding speeches and epic heroes has generated a quest for Shakespeare's own “philosophy.” Such quests are always doomed to failure, because dramatic structure allows for many characters to express diametrically opposed opinions without a conducting authorial voice.

Old Nestor has a different view. The issue is not one of suffering patiently, but of action: “In the reproof of chance / Lies the true proof of men” (1.3.32–33).

Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength. 1.3.129—137

The celebrated speech on “degree,” in other words, is not Shakespeare's philosophy, nor even really Ulysses' philosophy, but rather a convincing piece of rhetoric that is presented as a truism until, almost immediately

in this play, particular events begin to qualify or undermine it.

But Ulysses, were he