Theatre for a New Audience: Troilus and Cressida, Act V Scene 11

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“To end a tale at length":
Pandarus’ Epilogue, Act V, scene 11

Shakespeare closes ten of his plays with spoken epilogues, usually by one of the supporting cast (an obvious exception is The Tempest, where Prospero delivers the epilogue). Though the convention is clearly established, the epilogue of Troilus and Cressida is as enigmatic as is most everything else in this puzzling play Whether the lines that end the play in most editions and performances were originally intended as an epilogue, or were even a part of the original play, has provoked prolonged debate among textual scholars.

The three lines that lead into Pandarus' epilogue, with Troilus' angry dismissal of the old bawd, have appeared before, in slightly altered form at the end of the third scene of the final act, after Troilus has torn up Cressida's letter. In 5.3, it appears like this in the Folio (these lines do not appear here in the 1609 quarto):

Pand. Why, but heare you?
Troy. Hence brother lackie; ignomie and shame
Pursue thy life, and liue aye with thy name.

At the end of the play, in the Folio text, the lines essentially appear again, as Pandarus is left alone on stage to deliver the epilogue (that also appears in the quarto):

Pand. But heare you? heare you?
Troy. Hence broker, lackie, ignomy, and shame
Pursue thy life, and liue aye with they name.

Some, including George Bernard Shaw, have taken this repetition to mean that the original version of the play has Pandarus speak his final lines, not as an epilogue, but as he leaves the play before the alarums and excursions of the fifth act's rapid battle scenes. Shaw posits a typically inventive narrative to explain why the speech was shifted from his "proper" place. Citing the evidence of a prior play on the subject by Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker, he suggests that Shakespeare's work was a rewrite of their earlier effort, in which he retained the character of Pandarus merely to humor the unsophisticated crowd. Pandarus, he theorizes, had spoken an epilogue in Chettle's and Day's play that had gotten a good response.

Shakespear (sic) of course did not want to spoil the artistic form of his last act by retaining this claptrap, and he ended the play with Troilus's speech at the line "Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe." But the representative of Pandarus, after the manner of actors, protests against being deprived of his "bit of fat," and, to satisfy him, Shakespear transferred the three lines which follow from Scene 3, where they originally stood, and where, in the Folio, by an oversight, they still bear witness to the incident.

Shaw may have been influenced by an earlier nineteenth-century "acting edition" of the play that was apparently prepared for Kemble. It transferred an abbreviated version of the speech to the location Shaw suggests. This acting edition ends, however, not with Troilus' lines, but with Agamemnon's triumphant "Great Troy is ours, and our sharp wars are ended." Few subsequent scholars or directors took Shaw's theory seriously. Pandarus' speech ends the play in virtually all editions, and no record survives of productions which transferred the speech to the interior of the play; the Victorian acting edition was apparently never produced on stage.

But recent editors, if unimpressed with Shaw’s explanation for the textual anomaly, have again considered whether Pandarus final lines were intended as an epilogue or whether they were originally written to dismiss him from the play before it ended with the military action. If Pandarus speaks the epilogue, the play ends with a corrosive judgment on all we have seen. Pandarus addresses the audience as "Good traders in the flesh," implicating us in his obscene vision of a world of "traitors and bawds," as he bequeaths us his "diseases" (5.11.45, 37, 56). Without it, the play is still dispiriting but clearly less bitter. Thus some critics have argued that what we have are two endings, perhaps designed for two different theatrical venues: the more astringent ending designed for the sophisticated audiences at the Inns of Court (the London law schools); the merely debunking ending, for public performance at the Globe or other amphitheater.

Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, editors of the widely respected Oxford edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works, revived doubts about the "Epilogue" and its right to a place in the text. They end the play's text with Troilus' martial cry and relegate Pandarus' speech to an appendix of "Additional Passages. The Oxford editors make a number of controversial textual decisions in their edition and whether this one will influence future productions, only time will tell.

Whatever Shakespeare’s original intentions, the speech displays a thematic kinship with the play, and, in the TFANA production, director Hall and his Pandarus, Tony Church, make good use of it. Church also played Pandarus in Terry Hands' 1981 Royal Shakespeare Company production; in that production he delivered his bitter farewell while entangled in barbed wire that bordered the stage's battlefield. The Pandarus who closes this production has suffered a steep slide from the genially lecherous voyeur we met at the top of the play. Now his brightly colored robe and cap are gone, and he is huddled in a gray, mutely-patterned wrap. He seems grayer and much, much older.

His pale head sports discomforting marks that were not there before: two purplish spots of Kaposi's sarkoma. This once-rare skin cancer used to be considered an infirmity of old men of Jewish or Mediterranean extraction. Now it is one of the signal symptoms of advanced AIDS and its appearance among young men in the late nineteen seventies was one of the first harbingers of the developing epidemic. Hall, when interviewed, was frank about the connection between the pernicious venereal diseases of the two eras. The play, he said, is, among other things, "about spreading disease in an AIDS society - for Shakespeare it was syphilis, but it was a similar kind of plague."

Pandarus opens in prose. He bitterly reflects on the uncertain rewards of those who serve as traitors and bawds. His first verse is a song in which he likens his fate to that of the bee:

Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing, Till he hath lost his honey and his sting; And being once subdued in armed tail, Sweet honey and sweet notes together fail. (5.11.41-4)

He then addresses the audience, confident in his assumption that at least most of them share his membership in "Pandars’ hall." The audience has become his fellow tradesmen and women, "Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade" (51). Aware that his own diseases will soon kill him, he announces that "[s]ome two months hence my will shall here be made" (52). This line has aroused the interest of scholars who suspect an Inns of Court staging for the epilogue and interpret it to mean that he will be back to compose his will with the audience's legal advice. Others, though, suggest that he is promising a sequel to the play, though what its subject would have been is hard to guess.

His next lines, "It should be now, but that my fear is this, / Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss," refers to the prostitutes or their clients "galled" with disease in the brothels of Southwark under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester. But the district of Southwark housed not only brothels, but also theaters, including Shakespeare's Globe and the feared hissing may only be from the theatre audiences uncomfortabe with his sardonic commentary. Once he has finished his promise to "bequeath [us his] diseases," Church’s Pandarus topples over, apparently dead, into the sand.

The last stage direction before the Epilogue in the quarto text, says "Exeunt all but Pandarus," but Hall has not left him entirely alone on stage. Having wandered out to the battlefield to confront Troilus, he is spied upon by Thersites [Andrew Weems], crouching off the edge of the sandpit downstage left. Thersites rises cautiously and watches for a moment to be sure the old man is no longer moving. He then enters the sandy arena, looks at the body for a moment, and tosses over it the rotten rag of a blanket which originally lay on the stage in the preset. Thersites looks up, not at the heavens, but at the lighting instruments overhead. He signals them out with a flick of his right hand, as he had ordered out the house lights at the top of the show. Thersites gets, if not the last word, at least the last gesture, appropriately, in this puzzling and disturbing play, leaving us in the dark.