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"Taxing Our Policy" -
The Greek Council, Act I, Scene 3
After the two opening scenes within the walls of Troy, in which the bustling Pandarus trots between the young prince Troilus and his own niece Cressida, the lights in Peter Hall’s production cool from warm pink to icy blue as the Greek Commanders enter, carrying rustic camp stools. Ulysses also bears the central tripod and the scepter that will designate who has the floor in the grim conference that follows. He sets it center stage. The rough hewn legs of the folding chairs creak dangerously and sink into the sand as the aging Greek generals perch upon them.
The quarto's and the folio's stage directions at the top of this scene list "others," suggesting that Shakespeare and his company, if they did put on the play, would include a representative group of Greek warriors in the proceedings. This would have more accurately recreated the scene reported in Book Two of The Iliad, in which the commanders call the entire army to discuss the crisis of Achilles' refusal to fight and the dismaying fact "That after seven years’ siege yet Troy walls stand" (1.3.12). Hall limits the council scene to the principal Greek commanders, each of them a king in his own right. Agamemnon takes his place at the head, up-stage center, with Nestor, Menelaus, Diomedes and Ulysses clockwise around the perimeter of the sand pit.
Agamemnon
[Terence Rigby], his huge black leather greatcoat draped over his wide shoulders,
exercises his prerogative and rises first from his commanding stage position.
Cradling the large scepter in his right arm, he launches into a wordy attack on
the fallen spirits of the generals, claiming that their military failures are
"but the protractive trials of great Jove" (1.3.20), tests for them to prove their
virtue. As the chairman of the board resumes his seat, his fellow generals applaud
enthusiastically -- all, that is, except Diomedes [Michael Rogers], who sits still,
hunched forward on his perch downstage right, warily eyeing the others.
The aged Nestor
speaks next. As played by Nicholas Kepros, he is a compact man, white-haired
and moving slowly but deliberately, like a man whose joints have stiffened from
decades of hard use. He is certainly not the frail doddering buffoon that some
directors have made him. His gray-on-black camouflage combat trousers bespeak
his martial career. He takes up the scepter Agamemnon has left on the central
tripod and delivers his long-winded advice to his fellow commanders also to see
their trials as an opportunity for them to demonstrate their heroic excellence:
"The sea being smooth,/ How many shallow bauble boats dare sail/ Upon her patient
breast, making their way/ With those of nobler bulk!" (1.3.34-7).
In a subtle but telling directorial maneuver, Hall decides that Nestor has not yet had his say when Philip Goodwin, as Ulysses, interrupts him, seemingly mid-sentence. The old man reacts with a moment of clear resentment at the younger man's effrontery, but Ulysses soothes him with well-chosen words of flattery. His ruffled feelings smoothed, Nestor relinquishes the scepter to the wily Ulysses.
Ulysses is not content with the account of military failure as a test from the gods. He sees with his characteristic pragmatic clarity that the problem is that a lack of unity in the Greek camp has weakened their position. "Degree," Ulysses’ word for hierarchical order, has been violated; the Greek leaders are not respected: "The general’s disdained/ By him one step below, he by the next,/ The next by him beneath . . . And ‘tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot" (1.3.129-35). And it is the sulking Achilles, refusing to fight, that is his prime example
As
Ulysses talks, he carries a prop that distinguishes him from the others, a battered
leather folder from which he pulls his evidence, "these instances," to illustrate
his case against the mocking Achilles and Patroclus. Like a skilled court-room
lawyer he presents his case. As in his near-contemporaneous masterpiece, Hamlet,
Shakespeare here employs to telling effect the power of a play-within-a-play.
Ulysses' second-hand portrayal of Patroclus mocking the chief commanders in Achilles'
tent cleverly goads and maddens Agamemnon and Nestor when, by proxy, he holds
them up to public ridicule that would otherwise have remained secret. If,
as seems likely, his busy intelligence agents have informed him how Patroclus
also parodies him, he keeps it to himself. He dons his spectacles to better see
the details of his brief, pulls the pictorial evidence from his file, and hands
around copies of the inflammatory pictures, presumably of Patroclus's indecent
posings in his private satirical charades. Goodwin's Ulysses seems informed by
the speculations that the play may have originated in an entertainment for legal
scholars at one of the Inns of Court. The performance is that of a skillful
barrister, moving his jury with close reason augmented by well chosen and inflammatory
emotional appeals.
Though much of the
play depends on medieval accounts of the Trojan War, for the Greek council scene,
Shakespeare returned to Homer, not probably in the original Greek but as it was
rendered into English by his rival playwright, George Chapman. Director
Peter Hall has also drawn on the Homeric text, adding The Iliad's scepter,
which does not appear in Shakespeare's stage directions but figured importantly
in Homer's story. It is when he is armed with Agamemnon's scepter that Homer's,
and Chapman's, Ulysses confronts those soldiers who would abandon the Greek cause
and roughly instructs them on the subject of "degree":
He cudgeld with his scepter, chid, and said: 'Stay, wretch, be still
And heare thy betters. Thou art base, and both in powre and skill
Poore and unworthie, without name in counsell or in warre.
We must not all be kings. The rule is most irregularre
Where many rule. One Lord, one king propose to thee; and he
To whom wise Saturn's sonne hath given both law
Empreie To rule the publicke is that king.' Thus, ruling, he restrain'd
The hoast from flight, and then againe the Councell was maintain'd. . .
(The Iliad, trans. Chapman: Book I, ll. 169-176)
Aeneas's sudden arrival from Troy prevents a fuller exposition of Ulysses'
plans, which he has not yet fleshed 
out
with practical details, but it is that which allows them to be put in motion.
The Trojan enters through the audience, establishing a convention that will stand
for the rest of Hall’s production -- when the scene is the Greek camp Troy lies
out in the direction of the house. Aeneas brings a challenge from the Troy; Hector
claims that he has "a lady, wiser, fairer, truer,/ Than ever did Greek compass
in his arms" (1.3.275-6) and offers to fight any Greek who would contest his claim.
The Greeks accept Aeneas's challenge, but not before its chivalric trappings are subjected to some of the play's characteristic absurdities. Nestor promises that if the Greek camp can produce no young men to meet the Trojan champion, he, "that was a man / When Hector’s grand-sire sucked," will "prove this truth with my three drops of blood" (1.3.291-301). Ulysses, however, knows at whom this challenge is aimed and promises that "Achilles shall have word of this intent" (306).
The Greek council breaks up, but its work continues, as such work so often does, in an informal private subcommittee of two, Ulysses and Nestor. As the others leave to provide Aeneas the hospitality Ulysses has offered on their behalf, Ulysses himself draws the elderly soldier down-stage. Philip Goodwin's Ulysses now shifts effortlessly from the courtroom pleader to the back room dealer. Here we see him in his proper element, scheming with a less quick-witted conspirator, deploying all the tactics of subterfuge to achieve his ends. Achilles' pride must not be further inflated by a victory over Hector. Ulysses urges that the Greeks use a lottery to choose their champion to answer Hector, "and by devise let blockish Ajax draw / The sort to fight with Hector" (1.3.376-7). Ajax’s prominence will check Achilles’ pride and, Ulysses hopes, bring him back to the battlefield. Even so open and noble a gesture as Hector's challenge can be turned to pragmatic advantage by the shrewd Ulysses, whose earlier speech on the dangers of individual ambition is here belied by his eagerness to use exactly that to achieve his political ends. But for Ulysses the noble sentiments of his speech on "Degree," so often echoed by political leaders, are revealed, as they may also be for those that invoke them, to be shallow and self-serving. They may articulate a view of civic order and commitment, idealizing hierarchy as a principle of nature, but they are exposed as a rationalization of his own pragmatic politics and even these cannot much effect the course of the war.
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