Shakespeare and Tragedy by Bayley John;

Author:Bayley, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 1981-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Also, and much more realistically, by the dislocation of moods and circumstances which hurries the play along. In using her, Shakespeare often contrives things both ways. The dawn scene suggests her lover’s readiness to be gone, and the ensuing separation scene her own corresponding readiness to leave Troy, which, in the proper conventions of love and parting, she protests against too much. With Diomedes in the Greek camp she has little choice: she is trapped by the persona which is easiest for a girl like her to wear when she goes into a society like this. The scene in which Troilus watches her in an anguish of jealousy is no more a conventional betrayal scene than their parting that morning had been a conventional alba. Cressida is exasperated by her situation (Ό Jove! do come. I shall be plagued’), but she cannot afford to antagonise Diomedes. This is no more a betrayal of love than love itself, as we see it in the play, corresponds to any ideal of it.

There is a suggestion here of Timon, and of his nameless longing. The inexhaustible vulnerability of Timon gives us some moving speeches, as when he sees his steward weeping:

What, dost thou weep? Come nearer. Then I love thee

Because thou art a woman, and disclaim’st

Flinty mankind, whose eyes do never give

But thorough lust and laughter. Pity’s sleeping.

Strange times that weep with laughter, not with weeping.

IV. in. 82–6

Both Troilus and Cressida give us hints of the same longing. They see in each other something ideal, which life, as the play presents it, hurries into a bewilderment of expectation, lust and laughter. For Timon it is easy to treat the two Athenian courtesans as he does, bidding them hold up their ‘aprons mountant’, which he fills with his unwanted gold. He despises them, as he does the poet who writes for him and the gold that might work for him; but his speech to his steward shows a different idea. The extreme realism of Troilus is similarly transformed with longings for the ideal, which the presentness of life devours and leaves as left-over scraps, ‘the bits and greasy relics’. Troilus and Cressida disappear into limbo like that, but the ideal remains and has been there for both of them: in Cressida’s ‘Prince Troilus I have loved thee night and day’; in Troilus’

O that I thought it could be in a woman -

As, if it can, I will presume in you -

To feed for aye her lamp and flame of love;

To keep her constancy in plight and youth,

Outliving beauty’s outward, with a mind

That doth renew swifter than blood decays.

III. ii. 154–9

This is a vision of the time that in Troilus is never available, the time that Desdemona on her arrival in Cyprus looks forward to with Othello. But there is no way in which sensation and ideal – the raw experience and the dream that brings responsibility and fruition – can come together in Troilus. Love needs poetry and deception, the ideal and the chivalric, and so does war.

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