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"Th’ attest of eyes and ears":
Spying on Cressida and Diomedes,
Act V, scene 2

Troilus and Cressida is obviously a play about both love and war, but these two great concerns of literature are so thoroughly interwoven in Shakespeare’s play that it is hard to see one without considering the other. The war begins with Paris’ theft of Helen from her husband, Menelaus, so the war itself must be understood in the context of its motivations; and the titular lovers, who must conduct their relationship in the shadow of the great events swirling around them, find themselves caught up in the war’s conduct. The very night they are first able to be together is interrupted by the demand that Cressida be sent to the Greek camp (where her father has gone, after his abandonment of Troy) in exchange for Antenor, who is held captive by the Greeks.

Cressida goes, as she must; and is successfully wooed by the Greek Diomedes. In a play so much about infidelity in its various senses, from Helen’s theft to Calchas’s defection to Hector’s death, Cressida’s action is a crucial part of the pattern. Until recently, she has usually been judged severely -- as one of the war’s many "sluttish spoils of opportunity," as Ulysses says (4.5.63). Recent critics and directors have been more understanding of Cressida, recognizing her vulnerability in the situation and seeing her choice not as willful infidelity but as necessary self-protection. Troilus has usually gotten off more easily, escaping serious censure, as he is seen as an inexperienced but honorable young man, understandably angry at his betrayal.

The play stages a scene of judgment in Act 5 scene 2, when, in a complex pattern of spying, we watch Troilus watching Cressida. Critics, producers and audiences have so differently understood this part of the play that a review of its reception may be useful.

In 1679, Dryden felt the need to rewrite Cressida's actions in Act V in fundamental ways to fashion a heroine worthy of the unalloyed tragedy he aimed to craft out of Shakespeare's seeming jumble of genres.  In his revision, the audience knows that Cressida has plotted with her father an escape back to Troy and to Troilus, and that her seeming surrender to Diomedes is merely a ploy to enable that. Calchas, before Diomedes arrives, tells her to give him the ring she had from Troilus, to gain his confidence.  The Greek, confronted by the jealous lover, uses it instead, like Iachimo in Cymbeline, to convince Troilus that he has enjoyed Cressida; and Troilus reacts with rage. Unable to prove to Troilus her innocence, Cressida proves her virtue, Lucretia-like, by taking her own life.  Only then does Troilus appreciate her love and loyalty, justifying the sub-title of Dryden’s revision, "The Truth Found Too Late."

Samuel Johnson, in 1765, had no doubt about Cressida's character.  He lumped her with her lascivious uncle as nothing better than a useful bad example:  Shakespeare's "vicious characters sometimes disgust but cannot corrupt, for both Cressida and Pandarus are detested and contemned."   Few nineteenth- century critics questioned the Restoration and Enlightenment judgments and the play went unproduced until the eve of the twentieth century.

In 1884, George Bernard Shaw, never one to accept conventional wisdom, broke ranks with the critical consensus.  In a written lecture, delivered by proxy to the prestigious New Shakespeare Society, he stoutly defended the heroine: "Cressida is one of Shakespear's (sic) most captivating women. . . .  She has been blamed for inconstancy; but as we may forgive Romeo for jilting Rosaline, we may forgive Cressida for jilting Troilus.  She is certainly not noble, like the heroine of Measure for Measure, but very few men would find Isabella's company agreeable, or be disposed to share Ulysses' objection to Cressida."

Like so many of Shaw's controversial judgments on Shakespeare this one failed to attract wide critical support.  O. J. Campbell, writing almost thirty years later, was confident in his judgment:
 

Cressida is the villain of the piece.  From first to last she is presented as a woman without heart, without will, and without charm.  Some of her critics have tried to find loveliness in her: but she leaves no image of beauty in the mind, despite all the praises which Troilus and Pandarus shower upon her.  (New Variorum, p. 555)

As stage productions of the play proliferated, however, more and more theatergoers were able to see Cressida embodied by actresses, beginning with Edith Evans, who brought out colors in her portrait that may have been too faint to discern on the printed page or too at odds with the culture’s assumptions about women to be seen at all.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Cressida’s actions have received more sympathy. In 1965, Joe Papp, directing the play  for the New York Shakespeare Festival, mounted a head on assault on the conventional view, insisting that Cressida was a victim "of men, their wars, their desires, and their double standards." In the BBC television version in 1981, Suzanne Burden  playing Cressida resisted director Jonathan Miller's take on the character as a flighty young girl carried away by her newly discovered sexuality, imagining her, rather, as being far more canny about how she was being used by the men around her and what limited power she had to resist.  "Taught by Pandarus, she's just about learned the ropes and she's quite aware that to him she's a puppet, a plaything he enjoys, but as soon as he's through playing that game he'll forget her . . . . I felt she was a victim of states and men and rulers." When she appreciates the danger she is in from the Greek men, Burden imagined her character thinking: "There's got to be a way out of this and if I have to use my sex I will."

Actress Juliet Stevenson likewise refused to play the heroine as a willing wanton in the 1985 RSC production, but chose instead to stress Cressida’s need to maneuver carefully through the male-laid minefield of the play's action.  She imagined Cressida as suspicious from the start about her uncle's and her purported lover's real motives.  Cressida is visibly brutalized by the Trojans who give her up and by the Greeks who reduce her to an object.  To critic Claire Tylee, Stevenson’s Cressida seemed, by her final scene, resigned to "being a toy in a boys' game," too numb to resist.

Returning to the play after four decades of oft-times revisionist productions, Peter Hall was determined to find a middle route.  "You can view her as a rather loose girl who is putting it about," he observed, "or you can say what else is a girl to do in an arrogantly men's world?"
 

She finds herself in a Greek camp of soldiers who've been there for eight years outside the walls of Troy, she's not going to have an very easy time, is she? . . . My view would be that she has no choice, other people's might be that she has every choice and that she's a terrible minx. . . . She needs protection in that all male camp and I think what is always wonderful about Shakespeare is his ambiguity . . . . I don't think he tells us whether Cressida is good or bad  It's up to us to decide.  If a performer takes too strong a line and says, ‘I'm going to play her as a tart,’ the play is in fact insubstantial, but if she says ‘I'm going to whitewash her, because this is the day of women's lib,’ it's also insubstantial.   (WNYC interview).

The crucial scene (5.2), in which Troilus with Ulysses will watch Cressida and Diomedes, begins with Diomedes’ arrival at Calchas’s tent. Diomedes asks for his daughter, and Calchas, from within, replies, "She comes to you" (5.2.5). We hear Cressida's father only as this offstage voice, but he assumes much the same role as Pandarus did in Troy: he makes her available to a royal suitor.

While Diomedes waits Troilus and Ulysses appear.  In Hall’s production, they circle on the walkway that rings the sand pit, watching the developing action, but finally settle on the same position up-stage right that Pandarus staked out as he witnessed the lovers' poetic foreplay at the end of the first act.  Thersites follows and assumes his post, lounging on the sand downstage right in a pool of light from both of the house follow spots.  He will toss off his caustic commentary from the commanding position at the projecting lip of the stage that was a traditional perch for the Elizabethan stage clown.

When Cressida [Tricia Paoluccio] appears from her father's tent and hurries downstage to the sandy arena she is dramatically changed.  Gone are the soft, flowing, diaphanous chiffons in the warm colors of Troy, replaced by a Grecian black leather jacket, with Diomedes' dark cloak of tie-dyed navy and lighter blues as a skirt.  Her hair, which tumbled freely to her shoulders in Troy, has been tied back severely in the military camp.  She is no longer the vulnerable virgin who shyly and cautiously welcomed Troilus.  Her body is now closely walled and defended.  She will decide when to open the gates.

"Now, my sweet guardian," she greets him; "Hark, a word with you" (5.2.8).  Her choice of words clearly suggest that Diomedes serves a practical purpose in her new life in the Greek camp.  Nevertheless, Ulysses seizes the opportunity to goad Troilus: "She will sing any man at first sight" (10), despite the fact that Cressida has not been among the Greeks nearly long enough to have earned such a reputation.

Ulysses, like all the other men in Cressida's world, has his own agenda, and it appears to involve converting Troilus to his own low opinion of Cressida. Some critics have perceived a homosexual subtext to his seemingly paternal interest in Troilus, but Ulysses reveals no libidinal desires of any sort, and a more practical, and less passionate, motive seems more likely for this cunning schemer.  He is determined, we know, to encourage his Greeks to greater martial commitment. Provoking one of the Trojan princes to heat up the war, which seems to have cooled into aristocratic ceremony, would serve that larger interest.  But his outburst against Cressida on her arrival in the camp, after she spurned the kiss he offered her, also signals some strong dislike of the young woman, or of women in general.

The uneasy game of cat and mouse that ensues between Cressida and Diomedes leaves Cressida's behavior open to several interpretations; and Hall does not make it easy for the audience by pressing one over all others.  She is clearly reluctant, after her "betrayal" by Troilus, to commit herself to another man.  What is the fear that urges her to keep calling Diomedes back each time he turns to leave?  Michael Rogers' Diomedes exerts no charm to win this maiden's heart.  He is blunt and sullen, a stark contrast to the self-doubting Troilus we met at the beginning of the play.  Diomedes’ refusal to make the least tender gesture to win her suggests that he is relying more on her practical need for his protection than on his attractiveness to her in this nasty dance of desire.

Troilus, however, entertains no doubts about her true feelings.  He, and Thersites, see all her reluctance as a game.   "A juggling trick," the clown announces, "to be secretly open" (5.2.26). But the audience cannot be so sure. Cressida does seemingly give in to Diomedes, and she returns to the tent to get him a token to seal her promise to see him again.  When she returns with the sleeve that Troilus had given her as she was taken from Troy, Troilus is crushed: "O beauty, where is thy faith?" (69)  She gives it to Diomedes, snatches it back again, aware of what it was intended to secure, and says: "It is no matter, now I have't again. / I will not meet with you tomorrow night.  /  I prithee, Diomed, visit me no more" (75-7).  Diomedes finally gets the token by snatching it from her grasp. Even then, Cressida has promised him nothing.  He threatens again to leave her.  When he says "Thou never shalt mock Diomed again," she cries out, more in terror than desire: "You shall not go" (106-7). In response to his final demand for a promise, Paoluccio’s Cressida opens her leather bodice, revealing her naked breasts beneath, vulnerable again as she had been to Troilus.  They share one kiss, and he is gone.

Her next words are to Troilus, though she does not suspect that he is near enough to hear them.
 

Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee, But with my heart the other eye doth see. Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find: The error of our eye directs our mind. What error leads must err.  O, then conclude: Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude. (5.2.113-118)

Though the audience has seen her ambivalence, Troilus has only one interpretation of what has occurred:  "A proof of strength she could not publish more, / Unless she said, 'My mind is now turned whore'" (5.2.119-120).

Ulysses is Troilus' sounding board as the young man rails on the transformation he has seen and rationalizes what has happened. Cressida is no longer the woman he so recently knew so intimately, "No this is Diomed's Cressida." (5.2.143).  He has not been betrayed by Cressida; the woman he knew has ceased to exist and has been replaced by this whore of the Greek camp.   His passions continue to rise ? "O Cressid! O false Cressid! false, false, false! (185) -- until Ulysses worries that he may have succeeded too well at rousing Troilus’ passion: "O, contain yourself," he warns; "Your passion draws ears hither." (5.2.187-88)

Fortunately, the ears he draws are only those of his countryman Aeneas, who warns him that the truce is almost over and that "Ajax, your guard, stays to conduct you home" (5.2.191). Troilus’ passions will now be redirected:  "Diomed, / Stand fast, and wear a castle on thy head!" ("castle"= helmet; 193-4). Once again, as so often in this play, when sexual desire is frustrated and flipped over, on the other side we find martial rage.  The stage is left to Thersites, who addresses the audience with a brief bitter epitaph on this transformation:  "Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion.  A burning devil take them." (5.2.201-203)

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