Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

an interview subject rather than a fictional character, would almost surely concede that his resounding speech is political rhetoric and ideology, not disinterested truth.

I stress this point because it has become so common to quote “Shakespeare” out of context, whether in political speeches, journalists' columns, or religious sermons, in supp...

Divert and crack, rend and deracinate. Troilus and Cressida is a good place to look for the unsettling of apparently settled certainties like rank and social class. It should not surprise us to find, only a few scenes after Ulysses' resounding speech on “degree,” that this speech, the exposition of a familiar and prominent worldview, is now being ruthlessly parodied by the even more cynical character Thersites,

Thersites Agamemnon is a fool to offer to command Achilles; Achilles is a fool to be commanded of Agamemnon; Thersites is a fool to serve such a fool; and Patroclus is a fool positive.

Patroclus Why am I a fool? Thersites Make that demand to the Creator. It suffices me thou art. 2.3.56– 61

Over the course of his career Shakespeare wrote three remarkable plays that linked the names of famous lovers in their titles.

One of these, Romeo and Juliet, was to become, over the ensuing centuries, the modern paradigm for romantic passion. The other two plays, Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra, put onstage the love stories of “mutual pair[s]”—to use a suggestive phrase from Antony and Cleopatra—who were already legendary in Shakespeare's time. The three love tragedies have much in common.

In general structural terms, these plays put the “private” and the “public” worlds in conflict (night/day, love/war, passion/realpolitik), with the lovers, separately and conjointly, caught in the midst of forces they cannot control.

“The grief is fine, full, perfect that I taste” (3).

But if Troilus and Cressida looks back toward Shakespeare's idealistic love tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, it also looks forward to Antony and Cleopatra.

Throughout the early scenes Troilus has expressed himself in romantic and Petrarchan clichés, like

the Romeo who dotes upon Rosaline. In fact, the lovers whose language Troilus's most resembles early in the play are the far more self-mocking Rosalind of As You Like It and the delightfully preening Berowne of Love's Labour's

But with the realization of his desires, the sexual encounter that follows act 3, scene 2, Troilus's idealism, troped on literature, collides calamitously with political expediency. In the next scene Calchas will demand the return of Cressida.

Her devolution onstage is rapid. In act 4, scene 6, the scene of her arrival at the Greek camp, she is kissed by a whole lineup of Greeks (Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles, and Patroclus), bandies cuckoldry jokes with Menelaus,

and promises the skeptical Ulysses a kiss “[w]hen Helen is a maid again.”

“Daughters of the game” are prostitutes. Cressida, like Helen, is both a “slut” and a “spoil,” a trophy of the war.

The stage is set for Troilus's disenchantment, which is as violent and excessive as his love. If Cressida is the anti-Juliet, so, in these latter scenes, is she the anti-Desdemona. As will happen in Othello, the jealous lover contrives to watch his beloved from afar, but in this case she is genuinely unfaithful. Troilus's love token is a sleeve rather than a handkerchief, and it is undeniable that she does, in fact, give it to her new lover, Diomedes.

Troilus's despairing declaration, “This is and is not Cressid,” tells the only real “truth” the play has to offer. It is a “truth” as metatheatrical as it is metaphysical; the actor who plays Cressida “is” and

“is not” the figure of consummate desire and legendary inconstancy.

Cry, Trojans, cry! Ah Helen, and ah woe! Cry, cry “Troy burns!” —or else let Helen go. 2.2.110—111

Helen is a “subject,” a “cause,” a “theme.” Cressida is merely a woman, first overidealized, then devalued, finally dismissed by

Ulysses as one of the “daughters of the game”—a typical whore—after she is greeted by the Greek generals and kisses them one by one (4.6.64). From the first, it seems, she is aware of the precariousness of her position,

it is not only Cassandra, but also Troilus, Cressida, and Pandarus, who “foresee” so clearly what literature will make of them—and still do not believe.

Thersites, contemptuous of both men, is especially derogatory toward Patroclus, whom he calls “Achilles' male varlet,” and his “masculine whore” (5.1.14, 16), as well as “boy,” an insult in this warrior context.

Dramatically speaking, it is Patroclus—not Helen, not any woman—for whom he will fight and kill Hector.

The last moments of the play are balanced, in a way that Shakespeare would make his signature, between a powerful public pronouncement of loss, Troilus's moving announcement to the Trojan host of the end of an era (“Hector is dead; there is no more to say” [5.11.22]), and Pandarus's epilogue,

By the time Shakespeare came to write Troilus and Cressida, the two lovers of his play's title had themselves become notorious bywords: Troilus for his fidelity, Cressida for her unfaithfulness.

In this play, with uncanny effect, characters in fact come right out and say their own myths, describing their own transformation into literary fame—and literary cliché. And not only Troilus and Cressida—Pandarus, too, announces his

own impending allegorical translation into a household word: if you prove false to one another, he says, let all go-betweens, all bawds, be called Pandars.

3.2.160–190

Measure for Measure

easure for Measure,” observed Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “is the single exception to the delightfulness of Shakespeare's plays. It is a hateful work, although Shakespearian throughout. Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape. Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable.”1 In fact, Measure for Measure has always been controversial, exciting a great deal of critical and directorial interest, and puzzlement.

On the hatefulness/delightfulness scale articulated by Coleridge it is surely “dark” rather than “festive,” but its dramatic patterns and psychological investigations fit superbly well both in the evolving sequence of Shakespearean “romantic” comedies and in the cluster of agonized and even phobic encounters represented by its chronological neighbors among the tragedies, like Othello and King Lear.

The play's all-seeing, all-knowing Duke of Vienna has often been compared to James, an absolutist ruler who believed strongly in the divine right of kings. James was a staunch Protestant, raising the stakes for a play like Measure, populated by nuns and friars, religious true believers, and self-deceiving hypocrites.

Above all, James came to be associated with the idea of power in absence, the keystone and cornerstone of absolutist power. James had strong views on morality; he described himself as the father of his country (and, as we will see in this play, as its mother, too), and he was deeply—a modern world would say, neurotically—involved in keeping track of activities going on in all corners of his kingdom.

The Duke in this play is not literally a figure “of” King James, any more than he is a figure “of” God or “of” Christ; his deployment of

what the play calls “power divine” is a delegation of power that devolves upon the good ruler as such a ruler was understood in the period. And the ideals for which such a ruler was to stand were those of reason and ethical judgment. “Judging” was the ruler's and the magistrate's duty; it was that obligation that made him, dangerously, like a god, if not like God.

Measure for Measure is a play about representation and about substitution, two concepts that are as foundational for the theater as they are for the state. Who represents God? Who represents the King, or the Duke?

The plot of Measure for Measure has also been of special interest to critics and audiences concerned with women's place,

The rich and problematic character Isabella, whose desire to enter the nunnery begins the play, receives not one but two sexual propositions: the first from Angelo, who wishes to seduce her; the second from the Duke,

The scene of the play is laid, as we have noted, in Vienna, a Catholic city in Shakespeare's time and the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by the Catholic Hapsburgs. England had been officially a Protestant country since the 1534 Act of Supremacy created the King, Henry VIII,

mortality and mercy are the two attributes Angelo conspicuously lacks. He is neither human nor merciful as the play opens and as it unfolds, and it is hard to believe that the Duke does not know this perfectly well. The Duke's absence is not precisely what he says it is, and for two reasons: first, because although officially absent he is actually present onstage in disguise, and second, because by deputizing Angelo he creates a structure

for testing him. Angelo is being tested, as Vienna is being tested, by the apparent removal of the Duke, who represents order and law.

the inner world is the world of Vienna without the Duke. The Duke leaves, and disorder is revealed, but it was always there. So instead of transformation there is confrontation and discovery.

What is law? What are its limits? On what should it be based?

a verse in the Gospel according to Matthew: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again”

(Matthew 7:1–2). At issue throughout the play is the question of retributive justice, and also th...

centers on the question of whether judging is possible at all. From what vantage point can one fallible human being judge another, mete out measure for measure?

to Angelo laws are not human-centered but absolute, inhuman, unchangeable. There is no such thing as mercy, as he makes clear at the beginning of act 2 in a conversation with Escalus.

Angelo—the allegorical name is quite uncommon in Shakespeare—defines himself as a man who is above temptation, as something more than a human being. In refusing to imagine himself as human, and thus “fallen,” he falls.