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Sex, Lies, and the Hazards of War:
Seduction and Betrayal,
Act II, scene 2 and Act IV, scene 2

Shakespeare's mastery of the developing language of the Elizabethan stage to which he contributed as richly as he did to the modern English language he was helping to shape, often shows in his brilliant thematic juxtaposition of adjacent scenes.  The scene in which Troilus and Cressida's growing love achieves its fruition is preceded by a scene in the nearby royal palace that helps to situate the character of the lovers and of their love in the bitter landscape of the play.

Pandarus, before his rendezvous with the two anxious lovers, pays a visit to Troilus' brother Paris, to request his cooperation in covering for Troilus' absence from home.  There the audience gets its sole glimpse of the provocation for the Trojan War, the beautiful Helen, as she gambols with her "abductor," Paris.

Peter Hall normally keeps his stage uncluttered with supernumeraries, seldom adding non-speaking players uncalled for by the stage directions to fill out the scenic pictures.  In this scene he departs from this pattern.  A trio of revelers sit in the sand down right to tell us that Pandarus is not interrupting a private tryst, as the text suggests, but a party, albeit a fairly exclusive one.  He has also dressed the stage with what, for him, are an abundance of set props.  The impudent servant, as he plays word games with Pandarus, sets out a bright blanket and a few large pillows on which Paris and Helen sensuously loll while giving  Pandarus, who remains standing, his audience.

Helen, as an offstage presence, exerts a tremendous pull on the play. Her one appearance in the flesh is crucial to embody for the audience all of the ambivalent values that the kidnapped Queen represents, in Greek legend and in the Elizabethan text.  In Helen, as in Eve, all womanhood seemingly stands indicted.  Ultimately, Cressida's virtue is measured in light of the example of Helen and Shakespeare deliberately prefaces the relatively innocent lovers' union with this picture of experienced dalliance.  The director takes maximum advantage of the juxtaposition.

Hall clearly stated, in his radio interview, his take on "the face that launched a thousand ships":  "Helen is quite clearly not someone worth fighting over.  She's a bit of a bag, and a bit of a boozer, and a bit of a party baby."  Cindy Katz, Hall's Helen, embodies these images with relish. She leaves the traditional picture of the cool, ethereal beauty of legend far behind.  Katz, unlike the willowy blondes of the Trojan court, is raven haired and voluptuous.   Her low cut golden bodice lifts her breasts invitingly.  Her sisters-in-law in Ilium prefer flowing ankle-length dresses.  Helen's knee length chiffon skirt, in a deep aqua that clashes sharply with Troy's warm color palette, reveals her shapely legs. Yet as lovely and desirable as she once must have been, the wear and tear of the years show on her heavily painted face.  Her mascara is a little too thick and not too neatly applied.  The color in her cheeks does not seem quite as natural as that of her sisters-in-law.  Hall shows us her "bit of a boozer" side by making her clearly tipsy, in the way of an habitual drunk who thinks she knows how to hide it.

Helen's teasing insistence on knowing what Troilus is up to, when she and everyone at court knows where his love interests lie, serves to entangle her and Paris in the younger lovers' fortunes and sharpen the parallel Shakespeare is drawing between the play’s two consummated romances, a parallel heightened by Pandarus’ presence. As he facilitates the young lovers' desire, he is recruited here to entertain the older lovers at their play.  Pandarus has his turn at song, acceding to Helen's insistence, though he does not seem to know the song she suggests: "This love will undo us all" (3.1.104). The song he does sing rehearses the common conceit of love as an armed hunter, whose shaft "tickles" rather than ‘wounds", and if it seems "to kill/ Doth turn ‘O! O!’ to ‘Ha, ha, he!"/ So dying Love lives still" (3.1.116-9).

Pandarus asks Paris, "Sweet lord, who's afield today?" and Paris names the Trojans who have gone to battle, but admits: "I would fain have armed today, but my Nell would not have it so."  (Nell is not only a familiar diminutive for Helen but also was a common name for a whore in Elizabethan slang.)   Lust achieved, like Paris', turns out to be as destructive of martial will as Troilus' frustrated longings in the opening scene, when he too decides to "unarm" (1.1.1), his love similarly keeping him from the field.  The weariness and boredom that these decadent lovers exude make the viewer wonder if this is the future for the young lovers to whom Pandarus returns in the next scene.  "Commend me to your niece," Helen calls after as the old man leaves.

Pandarus, having covered Troilus' tracks at home, returns to his young quarry, whom he finds dancing attendance impatiently at the door of Calchas' house.  The determination that Joey Kern displayed as Troilus in the Trojan court debate in Hall’s production has evaporated, and here he is nervous, jumpy and seems much younger in this unfamiliar field of battle.

Tricia Paoluccio enters as Cressida veiled, not because of any explicit stage direction, but because Pandarus' line, "Come, draw this curtain, and let's see your picture" (3.2.45), implies a veil, in this case a piece of filmy lace over her head and shoulders.  Though her face has been covered, the rest of her body is much more available to the eye than it was in the opening scenes. Her orange chiffon skirt and solid bodice have been replaced by matching diaphanous pants and loose poncho revealing minimal red undergarments. Her relative "nakedness" serves here as metaphor for the vulnerability she is about to reveal to her young suitor, and which will become the determining factor of all that follows.

Hall points up Cressida's innocent sexuality and fear of the step she is about to take.  Shakespeare has departed from his major source for the love story in making Cressida the young virgin she appears in this scene, an appearance Hall and Paoluccio highlight in this staging. Chaucer's Cressida was a widow with the obvious implication of sexual experience.  This is plainly the first time for both of these young and hesitant adventurers.  The contrast with the love making of the previous scene, so much a matter of indolent habit that the nervous energy has long since drained away, could not be clearer.

Having brought the two together, Pandarus goes off to prepare a bed and a fire for them in a chamber off stage right.  The lover's are finally alone.  Having each nourished a fascination with the other they are finally free to let their mutual feelings be expressed, first in words. "Will you walk in, my lord?" (3.2.59), Cressida asks the young man, a line critics have often over-read as the confident offering of an experienced lover, but which was here both eager and apprehensive.

Pandarus soon returns, surprised to find that things have not proceeded further: "What, blushing still? Have you not done talking yet?" he asks (3.2.96-7)..  He holds his position at the sand pit's walkway in the up-right corner.  There he watches excitedly, clearer enjoying a palpable, if voyeuristic, delight in the young passion that is blossoming center stage.  Spurred on, Cressida finally blurts out the words that clearly surprise Troilus, "Boldness comes to me now, and brings me heart. / Prince Troilus, I have loved you night and day / For many months" (109-11).

Walter Kerr, reviewing Alvin Epstein's 1976 Yale Rep staging remarked on the "positively virginal quality that goes directly counter to our expectations."  If any moment in Hall's production reaches for this same quality, it is this one; but it is created only to contrast with the other scenes in which the youthful innocence this scene releases is soiled or crushed.

As the young lovers finally admit their feelings for one another, Pandarus rejoins them center stage.  However, just as the passion of the scene rises to the final pitch and the lover's exchange their first kiss, Cressida pulls back:  "For this time will I take my leave, my lord." Troilus is dismayed:  "Your leave, sweet Cressid?"; but Pandarus is shocked: "Leave? An you take leave till tomorrow morning - " (3.2.135-138)  Both men make clear to her what is expected.  During the subsequent dialogue Pandarus remains at his post, aquiver with excitement as much as the lovers.  When Cressida finally swears her constancy,  Pandarus rushes forward and takes up a post between them, shouting, "Go to, a bargain made.  Seal it, seal it; I'll be the witness." (3.2.192-193) He revives again the play's repeated imagery of commerce and trade in matters of the heart and, like a merchant affirms the quality of the goods he has delivered to Troilus.  He performs a quasi-marriage, ending with the prophetic oath that if these lovers do not prove true, "let all pitiful go-betweens be called to the world's end after my name" (3.2. 195-6). The lovers embrace and fall to kissing in the sand.  The old man hustles them off to the chamber he has equipped for their first night together.

The play's act and scene divisions have no basis in the original printed texts, having been added, as they were for most of Shakespeare’s plays, only in the eighteenth century.  The modern convention of a relatively lengthy intermission similarly is a later innovation.  Modern audiences demand a break, and Hall, quite reasonably, allows them one after the lover's retire to the chamber Pandarus has prepared for them.  The break, however, marks more than just the length of the audience’s attention span.

Hall's second act shifts the action back to the Greek camp where the lovers' idyll is in the process of being destroyed by their loveless elders.  Cressida’s father is humbly petitioning for a partial re-payment of what the Greeks owe him for his defection from his native city.  Hall's Calchas, Frank Raiter, plays the priest as a fawning flatterer who never fully rises from an obsequious bow before his masters.  His forehead is adorned with a blue stripe from his nose to his hairline, clearly of some religious significance. He is in a simple dark robe.

The Greeks have captured Antenor, Priam's brother-in-law, and, Calchas, who knows the Trojan pecking order assures them that "Troy holds him very dear." Antenor is not missed as a soldier, but as a valued elder of the clan:  "but this Antenor, / I know, is such a wrest in their affairs / That their negotiations all must slack, / Wanting his manage" (3.3.23-25).  Ulysses must wish that clever "negotiators" were so highly valued among the Greeks. Calchas may be deceiving the Greeks by concealing the whole truth, which should surprise no one in this play. As a seer, privileged by Apollo himself, he, no doubt, knows what many of Shakespeare's contemporaries did:  that Antenor, in some classic tellings that had been picked up by later medieval and renaissance authors, is destined to betray Troy to the invaders and bring on its final destruction.

When the lovers next appear, it is clearly morning.  Troilus enters from stage right, where they had earlier retired.  He is pulling on his shirt and preparing to leave.  Cressida, by contrast, has shed the light chiffon trousers she wore to welcome her lover.  Her body and underclothes are now covered by nothing but the diaphanous upper shawl she had on in the earlier scene. Aeneas' knocking on the door ends their discussion.  Pandarus greets Aeneas and tries to deceive him about Troilus’ presence at the house , but apparently everyone at the palace knows where Troilus is to be found this morning.  Aeneas has come to warn him that Cressida is to be sent to the Greek camp, but at the news, Troilus seems more worried about his reputation than Cressida’s fate. "We met by chance;  you did not find me here" (4.2.73), he instructs Aeneas, and he leaves to meet the emissaries without once looking back toward Cressida's chamber, much less returning to comfort her or explain what is happening.

Cressida is informed of her fate not by her lover, but by her uncle, who, surprisingly, seems more less concerned with how she will take than news than how it will affect Troilus: "The young prince will go mad" (4.2.77), he grieves.  He has seated himself on the stage left edge of the arena and makes no effort to comfort her as Cressida rages, helplessly, against her fate.  Her relative nakedness has nothing prurient about it; rather, it highlights her terrible vulnerability, as she, suddenly and thoroughly, is abandoned by the two men who seemed most to care for her.

Joseph Papp, in his radical re-examination of the play’s ethical dynamics, points to these scenes, in which Cressida is returned to her father with little more than token resistance from her formerly passionate lover, as the true "betrayal" of the love that the two had sworn for each other. Shakespeare has again departed from Chaucer with telling effect. Chaucer's hero suggested that they try to escape together and at least considered going to his father to plead on her behalf.  Shakespeare’s Troilus, though he has a moment of impotent confrontation with Diomedes, never entertains the idea of trying to rescue his love from her fate. "Is it concluded so?" he impotently asks (4.2.68), and she is sent to the Greek camp with only her wiles to protect her. Her innocent desire has been betrayed by the male world in which she, no less than Helen, is little more than a prize of war. If she finally accepts the suit of Diomedes, it is not evidence that she "will sing any man at first sight" (5.2.10-11), as the misogynistic Ulysses assumes, but, rather, that such attachment offers the only safety she might find. Her earlier joking commitment to lie "upon my back to defend my belly" (1.2.251) turns out to be depressingly true: her sexuality is the only weapon she has to defend herself in the rough, masculine, war-torn world in which she must survive.

 

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