Themes in Troilus and Cressida

Ulysses has a theory about time that he explains to Achilles in Act 3 Scene 3, and it is one of the most uncomfortable speeches in Shakespeare. "Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, / Wherein he puts alms for oblivion" — time carries a beggar's bag on its back and stuffs forgotten things into it. Reputation, glory, honour: all of these are constantly being used up, constantly needing renewal. Stop performing them for even a moment and time will take them.

He delivers this speech specifically to get Achilles back into the war. Achilles has been sulking in his tent, refusing to fight, while Ajax is being groomed as the Greek champion. Ulysses is not sharing wisdom; he is deploying it. The philosophical content of the speech is real enough — the argument that achievement is not permanent, that you are only as respected as your last act, is a genuine insight about reputation in competitive social environments. But the context is manipulation. Ulysses is using philosophy as a tool.

This is characteristic of the play. Ideas are real and argued well, but they are always in the service of someone's immediate interest. The famous "degree" speech in Act 1 — "Take but degree away, untune that string, / And, hark, what discord follows!" — is Ulysses arguing for strict military hierarchy as the solution to Greek ineffectiveness in the war. It is a compelling argument for social order. It is also an argument for why Ulysses, as the brains of the Greek operation, should be more influential than he currently is.

For the Trojans, time is the enemy of the debate in Act 2 Scene 2 about whether to return Helen. Hector argues that Helen is not worth the continuing cost of the war; Troilus argues that value is created by commitment — you cannot return something you have chosen to value without destroying the self that made the choice. Hector accepts this argument and immediately abandons his own position. Then he is killed in Act 5, not in honourable combat but ambushed by Achilles's soldiers while he is unarmed.

Hector's line in Act 4 Scene 5 — "The end crowns all, / And that old common arbitrator, Time, / Will one day end it" — carries the play's most balanced view of time. Everything is deferred to some future reckoning that the play never shows. The war does not end. Cressida is not judged. Achilles has Hector killed and drags his body around the city walls. What time actually delivers is not justice — it is Thersites providing cynical commentary while everyone ignores him, and eventually, everyone dying.

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The Trojan War is being fought over Helen, a woman who has almost no presence in this play. She appears briefly in Act 3 Scene 1 with Paris, and the scene is deliberately deflating: Paris and Helen flirt vacuously while Pandarus sings a song about love. These are the people ten years of war have been about. They are trivial, comfortable, and entirely unaware of the suffering around them.

The irony is a mirror. Troilus and Cressida's love story runs parallel to the war, and Shakespeare builds both to the same conclusion: what was desired, won, and claimed immediately starts to decay. Troilus spends Acts 1 and 2 longing for Cressida from a distance. Pandarus — Cressida's uncle, from whose name the English word "pander" (meaning someone who arranges things between people for their own benefit) comes — negotiates their meeting in Act 3 Scene 2. The night together is almost their only time together. Then Cressida is traded to the Greeks.

The trade itself is straightforward political logic. The Greeks have a Trojan prisoner; the Trojans have Cressida; Calchas (Cressida's father, who defected to the Greeks) requests the exchange. Cressida is traded like a piece of military equipment. Nobody asks her. She says goodbye to Troilus in Act 4 Scene 4 with a speech that is extraordinary for its self-awareness: "I have a kind of self resides with you; / But an unkind self, that itself will leave, / To be another's fool." She is predicting her own betrayal before it happens — or at least, acknowledging that the self she is taking to the Greek camp is not the one that wanted to stay.

In the Greek camp, she accepts Diomedes as a lover within hours. Troilus watches from hiding in Act 5 Scene 2 and cannot process what he is seeing. "O madness of discourse, / That cause sets up with and against itself!" he says — meaning his own mind is splitting: he believes what he sees, and he believes it cannot be what it is, and both beliefs are simultaneously held. This is not simply jealousy. It is a man watching his entire model of the world come apart.

The war and the love story are meant to look the same from a distance. Both involve men competing for something that turns out to be unworthy of the cost. Helen is not worth the war. Cressida, as Troilus wanted her to be, does not exist. What exists is a woman who made a calculation in difficult circumstances and acted on it. The play refuses to condemn her for this — and refuses to excuse the loss Troilus suffers. Both things are true, and neither resolves the other.

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"Degree" in Shakespeare's sense means hierarchy — the arrangement of people in ranked order, from king to servant, from general to soldier. Ulysses argues in Act 1 that degree is the force holding civilisation together. Without it, the planets would wander from their orbits, the seas would drown the land, strength would be the only law, and the son would beat the father. It is a vivid speech with a conservative argument: rank exists because without it, everything collapses into violence.

The problem the speech is trying to address is that the Greek army in front of him has already collapsed into something close to violence — not between Greeks and Trojans, but among the Greeks themselves. Achilles sulks in his tent. Achilles's companion Patroclus performs satirical impressions of the Greek generals. Ajax has been made to think he is the best fighter in the Greek camp and has become insufferable. The army that should be besieging Troy is busy negotiating its own internal politics.

Ulysses is not describing order as something that currently exists. He is describing it as something that has been lost. "The speciality of rule hath been neglected," he says — speciality here meaning the particular claim of authority, the specific right to command. Nobody is following their proper place. And the degree speech, for all its cosmic grandeur, is delivered by a man who is himself about to run a fairly underhanded scheme (managing Achilles's rival Ajax) to restore the hierarchy he says is indispensable.

The Trojan war council in Act 2 Scene 2 is the play's parallel scene on the Trojan side. Hector makes the rational case for returning Helen and ending the war. Troilus argues that value is not intrinsic but created by commitment — abandoning Helen now would retroactively dishonour everything done in her name. Paris sides with Troilus. Hector concedes and decides to fight on, despite believing his own argument was correct. This is degree working in reverse: the rational argument yields to the emotional one because the emotional one is more Roman, more Trojan, more about honour. The hierarchy of reasons has been inverted.

What the play cannot find, in either camp, is a working order that produces good outcomes. The Greeks are disorganised and cunning. The Trojans are organised and foolish. Ulysses's degree speech is the most eloquent argument for hierarchy in Shakespeare, and it is offered in a context where hierarchy is already broken and all the efforts to restore it lead, by Act 5, to Hector killed while unarmed and the war still unresolved. The order Ulysses promises never arrives.

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"Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart." Troilus says this in Act 5 Scene 3, tearing up a letter from Cressida. He has just watched her with Diomedes from hiding. Her letter, arriving the next morning with affectionate language, is now meaningless to him — words without a corresponding reality. The letter is beautiful and it is nothing. He throws it away.

This opposition between words and deeds runs through the whole play. The Greeks talk at enormous length about strategy, honour, hierarchy, and the need to fight effectively — and they do not fight effectively. The Trojans debate whether to return Helen in terms of philosophy and principle — and then decide on the basis of pride. Every council scene in Troilus and Cressida is a demonstration of people reasoning well and acting badly.

Thersites is the play's running commentary on this gap. He is a character with no social standing who is kept around by Ajax and Achilles as a fool — someone to insult and to provide satirical observations. His observations are usually accurate. In Act 2 Scene 3, he summarises the whole situation: "Here is such patchery, such juggling and such knavery!" Patchery means patched-together nonsense; juggling means deception. He is describing the Greek camp's entire management structure.

Pandarus, as a go-between, turns words into his professional instrument. He flatters, smoothes, facilitates, hints, implies. He is efficient at producing meetings and extremely bad at producing anything that lasts. His name became a word in English for a particular kind of facilitating selfishness — pander. His final speech in the play, addressed directly to the audience, is a strange thing: he is dying of disease, he says, and he leaves his diseases to the audience. The metaphor of venereal disease connects love and war as twin forms of infection that Pandarus has spent the play spreading.

Hector is the character for whom the word-deed gap is most fatal. He says the right things at the war council and does the wrong thing anyway. He accepts every challenge from the Greeks on the grounds of honour, including the challenge in Act 5 that leads to his death. His code of honour is expressed entirely through speech and ritual, and it leaves him defenceless when Achilles's soldiers attack without warning. Hector brought words to a sword fight.

The play ends mid-action, without resolution or closure. Pandarus has his diseased farewell speech. Troilus has a brief speech promising more grief. The war continues. Nothing has been resolved because nothing in this play can be resolved by speech, and nobody has quite managed to act decisively enough to end it.

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Thersites exists in this play to say what nobody else will say out loud. "All the argument is a cuckold and a whore," he announces in Act 2 — meaning the entire war is being fought over an adulterous woman and the king who ran away with her. He is not wrong. He is also not the play's voice of wisdom. He is vile, self-preserving, cowardly, and delighted by other people's suffering. His cynicism is accurate and useless in equal measure.

Troilus is Thersites's opposite. He loves idealistically and completely. In Act 1 he compares himself to "a strange soul upon the Stygian banks / Staying for waftage" — a soul waiting by the river of the underworld to be carried to paradise, meaning Cressida. Every metaphor he uses for love is extreme. He cannot moderate it because to moderate it would be to admit uncertainty, and uncertainty is not something Troilus can live with comfortably.

Cressida is more complicated than either. She begins the play with a clear-eyed soliloquy in Act 1 Scene 2 about how desire works: "Women are angels, wooing; / Things won are done." She knows the dynamic. She has watched men pursue and women be pursued and she has an analysis of what happens after the winning. When she tells Troilus in Act 3 Scene 2 that she has "a kind of self" that will leave him "to be another's fool," she is not predicting cynically. She is describing a real internal division — the self she wants to be and the self she is afraid she will become under pressure.

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin" — Ulysses says this in Act 3 Scene 3 as part of an argument about how easily people abandon old heroes for new ones. The touch of nature he means is the tendency to prefer novelty over loyalty, the new prize over the old one. He uses it as a tool to shame Achilles. But read differently, the line makes something darker: the one thing that connects all human beings is a kind of weakness, a preference for the immediate and the shiny over what is actually valuable.

The play offers no resolution between Thersites's cynicism and Troilus's idealism because neither position survives the play intact. Troilus watches his idealism destroyed by what he sees in Act 5, but he does not become a cynic — he becomes a man in agony, which is a different thing. Thersites survives everything by being too worthless for anyone to bother killing, which is not wisdom but survival. The play ends without having judged either one, in a world that has not changed because neither cynicism nor idealism is capable of changing anything.

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